Lent 24 post 5

 Exodus 15.1-18

Do you find it hard to read this Song of Moses and Miriam without a twinge of pity for the Egyptian charioteers? And what about those poor horses? Indeed, to get the sheer horror of it all, read 14.23-28.

So why am I inflicting this story, and this seemingly heartless triumphant song, on your blogpost today? Because the Bible will not allow us to underestimate the terrible weight of evil in the world, and its tragic consequences. For, let’s be clear, it was the defiant arrogance and incorrigible wickedness of their boss, the Pharaoh, that sent those elite troops and their horses to their watery destruction.

A classic case of evil

Before we stand in judgment on Exodus 15, we need to read Exodus 1 and 5, and see the reasons why the Pharaoh stood under God’s judgment. For a prolonged period, and with only a politically motivated and specious excuse, he had inflicted a reign of terror on an immigrant ethnic minority within his country. Doesn’t it all sound familiar and modern? The Hebrews were subjected to economic exploitation (slave labour), to social subversion and invasion of their family life, and eventually to state-sponsored genocide. And throughout the long chapters of the conflict between the Pharaoh and Israel’s God, he resists and rejects every effort and offer to change course, including from his own government advisors. He hardens his heart repeatedly, until God, as it were, accepts and accelerates his chosen path towards irreversible judgment. Feel sympathy if you like for doomed soldiers and horses, but the text shows none for the Pharaoh.

The Pharaoh is a kind of archetype of defiant human evil shaking its fist against God. And it is typical of such evil that, when God finally acts to defeat and destroy it, it drags down so much of human and creaturely life in its wake. The power and the cost of evil are frightening. So we can understand, then, why the defeat of murderous evil is such good news that it generates this exhilarating and grateful song? This is the relief and joy that evil has been defeated and those who were oppressed and threatened have been liberated. If you’d been an Israelite that morning after the terror and horror of the night before, would you have just quietly muttered, ‘Oh, that’s a bit of a relief'? (No, didn’t think so.)

Rejoicing but not gloating 

This song, then, is not gloating over the lives lost, but rejoicing in the lives saved. For as Ezekiel will later tell us, in the wake of God’s terrible judgment on his own people for their wickedness, ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from your evil ways! Why will you die, people of Israel?’ (Ezekiel 33.11). There is an ancient Jewish tradition that, as the sea returned and the Egyptian charioteers and horses drowned, the angels burst into song. But God rebuked them, saying, ‘The work of my hands is perishing, and do you sing?’ It was right for Moses and Miriam to celebrate deliverance, but God’s judgments bring tears, not joy, to God’s heart.

‘Deliver us from evil'

You could think of what happened in the sea in Exodus 14-15 as a ‘signal event', one of several actually in the Old Testament. That is, it is like a signpost pointing to something beyond and greater than itself, in which God acts both to defeat evil and to save people even in the midst of judgment What others could you put in that category? The flood (Noah's family), Sodom and Gomorrah (Lot’s family), the conquest of Canaan (Rahab's family), the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile (the remnant). All of these point forward, to show us that God will never allow evil to have the last word. He defeated it decisively at the cross, and will destroy it ultimately and totally from the new creation. The plotline of the whole Bible, really, is the defeat of evil by the living God, and the Pharaoh’s downfall is but one graphic episode in the story. 

‘For yours is the kingdom’

But the good news doesn’t stop with evil defeated. Moses and Miriam don’t only celebrate how wonderful it was to be liberated from past slavery. They look ahead to God’s future plans for his people (.13), and they recognise who really is king, and it isn’t the Pharaoh (.11, 18)! The mission of God and the reign of God. Those are the enduring messages of their song. And this is the first clear affirmation of the kingdom of God in the Bible.