The apostle Paul once likened a Christian's baptism to the Israelites' crossing of the Red Sea, and Hosea spoke of their desert journeying as the time "when God taught Israel to walk." So the episodes in the book of Exodus to which we turn now correspond to the first steps in discipleship. From the shores of the Red Sea to the foothills of Mt. Sinai, the people were being taught what it means to walk with God. Here in these chapters 14-24 of Exodus is spelled out the ABC of the life of faith. The three episodes that will occupy us in this chapter are the Crossing of the Red Sea, and the experiences at Marah and at Elim.
But first, a few observations may be made by way of general introduction to this whole block of material in Exodus. We are moving on from a cycle of 'Deliverance' stories, set in Egypt, to a cycle of 'Discipleship' stories set in the desert. The crossing of the Red Sea is the transition episode between the two, and it serves as both a climax to the Deliverance theme and an introduction to the Discipleship theme. It introduces three regular features of the Wilderness Tradition (the Discipleship Cycle) for which we should always be watching. Those three features are:
i. the repeated murmuring of the people,
ii. the guidance God gave them at every stage of their journey, and
iii. the repeated actions of God Himself, which are the focus of faith in everyepisode.
All three features are introduced in the Red Sea story:
• the murmuring
at 14:12, "It would have been better for us to serve the Egyp-tians
than to die in the wilderness."
• the guidance of God at 13:21, "The Lord went before them by
day in a pillar of cloud to lead them along the way ..." and
• the action of God to vindicate their faith at 14:21, "Yahweh
drove back the sea by a strong east wind all night, and made the sea
dry land, and the waters were divided."
These three recurring features are all to do with faith - its value, its vigour, and its vindication.
The murmuring of the people is always presented as a foil to the faith of Moses. The people almost always show up in a bad light, as a spiritless company with very little heart for the enterprise who are all too ready, with every fresh set-back, to give up in despair. And this sorry attitude is always in contrast to the faith of Moses. Not that even he finds faith easy; he does not. But the one big difference between his and the people's response to every crisis is that where they see it as a reason to give up on God, he sees it as a reason to go to God. It is Moses who accepts the challenges of their new life, not the people. So in Moses' struggles we see a man growing in the life of faith. And the challenge these stories always present to us is whether we will identify with the people in their attitude or with Moses in his.
Life will never cease to present us with repeated crises. To ask that life should always be smooth and free of crisis is to ask that we be left alone so as never to have to grow. It is quite stupid to pray, "Lord, increase our faith" and then ask that life never provide us with anything for our faith to flex its muscles on. In the life of faith, as in the life of the body, strength comes from exercise. And it is Moses who 'exercises' in these stories; the people always want to just lie down and die.
So as we read these stories, it is "All eyes on Moses" - just as the first rule of faith for the Christian is "All eyes on Christ," not on His dismal bunch of followers! We should never look to the Church for faith, but to Christ. The church, even at its best, can only ever be a company of folk who are looking with you.
The second recurring feature of this Discipleship Cycle is the absolute need of guidance on the pilgrimage. The land through which these people passed was fearfully inhospitable. In the ordinary way, they ought never to have survived. The mountains that tower up along the Sinai peninsula are quite barren - stark and forbidding. My wife and I have travelled through them, and for miles and miles there is no trace of green growth anywhere to be seen. 'Pastures of the wilderness' there are here and there, where Arabs graze their scraggy flocks of goats, but these oases are isolated patches, hidden among the hills; a stranger might wander in that country for weeks, and never find one. Many indeed have perished there even in recent times. It is at least as unforgiving as our Australian deserts. To survive at all, the traveller there must have a guide who knows the country and who can be trusted absolutely. And to travellers unfamiliar with such terrain, it will be appreciated that for long periods, the guide's leading might appear to be getting them nowhere at all.
Now the Hebrew people were absolutely dependent on the guidance of God - even to survive, let alone make progress. They had to rely completely on the directions God gave to their leader Moses. To go back was to perish, and there was no way forward they could find for themselves.
The Christian in his discipleship is in the same situation. The rules by which the life of this world is managed are of no help to us in the life of faith. We are cast upon God, and we have to trust absolutely the directions He gives us through Christ alone for the living of our Christian life. It will sometimes seem to us that by following Him faithfully, we are getting nowhere at all. But to go back is to perish, and there is no way forward if, out of impatience or disappointment, we strike out on our own. If we are to tread the path of Christian discipleship at all, we must take Christ as seriously as the Israelites had to take Moses. We have to be as thoroughly in earnest in following His directions, even in those matters that belong to our day-to-day survival, like the ways in which we make a living and use our time. There is simply no room for half-heartedness about it. We go with Christ all the way, or there is no way forward. The life of faith is just as uncompromising for us in its demands as it was for the Hebrews, even though the setting of our life may be quite different. We have to trust Christ to be the Way ... and our faith has to be vigorous.
The third recurring feature of these stories is the action of God in every fresh crisis, whether the parting of the sea, the sweetening of water, the provision of manna, the supply of water from the rock, or the conquest of the Amalekites.
Up to the point at which God acts for them they have no assurance that all will be well save the bare word of promise given on the lips of His servant Moses, and time after time, that Word of Promise tests their faith. Either they fail to believe it - in which case God's faithfulness serves only to rebuke them for their unbelief, leaving them discomfited, guilty and weak still; or they believe to see the goodness of God in the land of the living as He promised - in which case, God's faithfulness vindicates their trust, leading them into joy and heightened confidence, the stronger to face the next venture.
All our Christian lives, the Word of God tests us in this way again and again and again. One might say that the goal of all our pilgrimage is to learn so to live before God that our faith is continually being vindicated, instead of our doubt continually being rebuked. God is faithful: He will act!
Now, after this general introduction to this cycle of stories, we turn to the central point of each of the first three, under the headings of the Commitment, the Challenge and the Comfort of Faith.
The apostle Paul summed up the whole episode of the crossing of the Red Sea in I Corinthians 10:2 when he said, "our fathers were all baptised into Moses in the cloud and in the sea."
The cloud he referred to was the pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, which later settled over the Tent Sanctuary, and was therefore a symbol of God's presence in their midst. On the night before the Israelites crossed the sea, that cloud "moved from before them and stood behind them, coming between the host of Egypt and the host of Israel." (Exodus 14:19, 20) Afterward, it went before them and guided them in all their journeying.
Like the crucified Christ, it stood between them and everything that might pursue them out of their past and overtake and destroy them. So Christ has interposed Himself between us and all our past sins, and we may say of them what Moses said of the Egyptians, "Fear not, stand firm and see the salvation of God: for the Egyptians (the sins) you see today you shall never see again." Our sins - like the Egyptians - are buried in the deep, deep sea. That is what we confess in our baptism.
In our baptism, too, we take Christ to be our guide for all the days to come. We are baptised into Christ as the Israelites were 'baptised into Moses' in the sea. Their passage through that sea had the same meaning for them in relation to Moses that our passage through the waters of baptism has for us in relation to Christ: it drew a line across their life. The moment those waters flowed back and closed the way behind them, there was no going back. From that day on their whole future was wrapped up in Moses. They had nothing to live for but what he had to offer them; their whole life was in his hands. When they crossed that sea, they 'died' to their life in Egypt, and lived henceforth only unto Moses. They were 'baptised into Moses' - immersed in Moses.
And that is what it means to be baptised into Christ. Once we set foot in the baptismal waters there is no going back. Our whole future is wrapped up in Christ. We have nothing to live for but what He has to offer us; our whole life is in His hands. When we receive baptism, we 'die' to our old life (whatever it was we lived for in the past) and we live henceforth only unto Christ.
We are baptised into Christ.
The moment the Israelites set foot in that sea, they were committed - committed in faith; the moment we set foot in the pool, we too are committed - committed in faith. That is where discipleship begins.
Moses led Israel onward from the Red Sea; and they went three days into the wilderness and found no water. What a promising beginning!
When they came to Marah, they could not drink the water because it was bitter. Another setback! Hardly had they got started than the whole journey looked like coming to an abrupt and disastrous end.
It is typical of Christian discipleship that there should be episodes in it like that: a 'Marah' - some experience of bitterness after the great joy of deliver-ance, some harsh setback. Why? Let Peter answer: "You are being guarded by the power of God operating through your faith ... and this means tremendous joy to you, I know, even though you are for the time being harassed by all kinds of trials. This is no accident. It happens to refine your faith, which, like gold (though much more precious) must be refined by fire." (I Peter 1:5 ff J. B. Phillips) ... it is no accident. It is God Who leads His people to Marah. There, like Moses, we learn to cry to God.
We should not be surprised when God brings us into some experience so bitter that we cry out in anguish to the living God, because there is for us no help else. It is by God's design that He brings us there; no discipleship has gone far that has not come to its Marah, where we discover that there is only one tree that can be flung into the waters of our bitterness to sweeten them - the bitter tree which only Christ can show us, the same tree on which He Himself became obedient even unto death. There we learn with Him to say, "Not my will but Thine be done." There He shut Himself in to the Will of God, and so "entered into the joy that was set before Him" - as we must do.
The Jewish rabbis have it that the wood of the tree Moses was given was itself bitter to the taste, yet its effect was to sweeten the waters.
Here is one of the very first lessons of our discipleship (this is for beginners): the Cross must be flung into our hearts. The spirit in which our Lord Jesus yielded Himself up to the Father on the Cross must be fashioned in our hearts, or all our future pilgrimage will be irksome to us, and even its joys will not yield their sweet-ness. He can only be our Saviour if we receive Him as our Lord.
There the Lord made for them a statute and an ordinance: "If you will diligently hearken to the voice of the Lord your God," (so you say, 'Not my will, but His be done') "then I will put upon you none of the sicknesses that afflict the spirits of the sons of this age. I am the Lord your Healer." (Exodus 15:26)
The means of healing is not magic, but obedience. Unless we learn to receive the Spirit of Christ, not in some ecstatic experience of 'second blessing,' but in the harsh realities of life - unless we there receive the Spirit of Christ, we shall never know the things - marvellous things - that are freely given to us of God. (I Corinthians 2:12)
Then they came to Elim where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees. They counted them! After Marah, lying in their shade through dreamy days, they counted them once, twice, three times ... and again, I promise you! It was a blessed place: a place of rest, a place of contentment, a place of shade from the heat of the sun, where the waters ran clear and cool, and fellowship was sweet, and it was good to be alive. And they camped there by the water.
Elim introduced them to the comfort of faith.
There are more Elims in the Christian pilgrimage than there are Marahs. We are not bidden to tarry long at Marah, but we may spend long, happy days at Elim.
We think, perhaps, that they will never come to us, that we are fixed, imprisoned, at some Marah in our life? The Lord will bring us to an Elim. He will. The Good Shepherd will not neglect to lead us by still waters, and to green pastures. He will restore our soul. He will anoint our head with oil, so our cup runneth over.
At Marah, healing is given; at Elim, rest is given. The God of grace is not deterred, even by our failures of faith, from surprising us by joy!
Then we must move on again, of course. For journey's end is better by far than any staging place, and our joy will only be full when He has brought us into His Father's 'banqueting house where His banner over us is love.' As C. S. Lewis once so finely observed: "Our Father is pleased to refresh us at many a pleasant inn on our journey, but He will not suffer us to mistake any of them for home." (I have tried but cannot trace tthis quote!)
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