“…and the Israelites saw the bodies of the Egyptians washed up on the seashore. When the people of Israel saw the mighty power that the Lord had unleashed against the Egyptians, they were filled with awe before him. They put their faith in the Lord and in his servant Moses.” Exodus 14: 30b-31.
The Israelites prove why people need to go to church every week. I’ve often said that the reason God made weeks is to ensure we have a day to focus on keeping our story straight. Our story refers to the puzzle that is life on Earth. It takes only a few hours a week for the puzzle to come apart and scatter in our heads. When we see the big picture on the puzzle lid—the complete story of God, creation, the fall, and our rescue—we are awestruck. It makes us giddy when we see the role we are to play, and how that connects with the fulfillment of a great life. It makes us want to dance, sing, and celebrate. We experience what the English language calls “awe,” [1] meaning fear, respect, or worship. Awe seems to produce positive actions.
You know you’re a winner when enemy bodies wash up on the seashore. The great kingdoms of the world, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, Alexander the Great, and the Romans gloried in their triumphs and sought to please their gods. History records celebrations with oaths, parades, parties, dance, and song. Soldiers strut, people rejoice, and generals polish their medals. Now, for it seems like a few fleeting hours, this Judean sect of nobodies has defeated the great Egyptian empire.
Celebrate
The Jews were so giddy that someone wrote a song of deliverance, deliverance that yesterday they didn’t want. Just yesterday, they were crying, cursing, complaining, and demanding to go back to Egypt. But now that they had seen God come through, they were dancing in the streets—if they had streets, which they didn’t, just more sand than anyone could want. Does it matter what is under your feet if your heart is full of gladness?
They didn’t hold back on the lyrics. They celebrated both the horse and rider in the sea, destroyed, and sprawled out dead on the shore. The words were proud and lusty. They had no history of winning victories, so their dance was awkward, but they could shake their tambourines. Some churches use tambourines as their musical accompaniment for two reasons: they are cheap and easy to play. That’s why Mick Jagger has one, and Don Henley doesn’t; the learning curve is five minutes. My favorite part of the song is when they start demeaning their soon-to-be neighbors. They sing ill of Philistia, and the ites—the Edomites, the Moabites, and of course, the Canaanites. Eventually, Israel will defeat them all.
Monday, Monday
All parties have to end. After Sunday, there is Monday—my condolences if your church isn’t like a party. The Mamas & The Papas sang, “Monday, Monday, can’t trust that day…but whenever Monday comes…You can find me cryin’ all of the time.” Yes, Monday, otherwise known as reality.[2]
Then Moses led the people of Israel away from the Red Sea, and they moved out into the Desert of Shur. Two million people can get very cranky after coming off a big party, walking three days without water in insufferable desert heat. Finally, when water was found, it was bitter. Those three days were just enough time to forget their story, to lose the plot, and to get angry at their God. However, they thought it was safer to attack Moses. The elders at least understood that if they complained to Moses, he would pass it on to God, and God would usually take action.
They were right. Moses went right to God, and God showed Moses a piece of wood. Moses already had his wooden staff, which would prove to be useful, but this time God used a stick. Moses threw the stick into the water, and the water became sweet. Isn’t it interesting how God uses people doing ordinary things to accomplish the supernatural? He wants us to know this is the norm when working with him. Once the people quieted down and settled back in, God made them a magnificent promise, because two million people wandering about the desert meant hunger, thirst, and disease. It was not going to be fun.
“If you will listen carefully to the voice of the lord your God and do what is right in his sight, obeying his commands and keeping all his decrees, then I will not make you suffer any of these diseases I sent on the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you.” [3]
God gets into quite a bit of detail. Many of us struggle with the idea that God has time to be concerned with our diets, sicknesses, aches and pains, and daily life. Even after He knows how fickle, weak, and whiny we are. I don’t know about you, but I’m a real crybaby.
The first part of this promise is that there will be no plagues, and these people are positioned to appreciate the promise. Several of the ten plagues touched their lives. They were spared some of them, and of course, the worst, which was the slaying of the firstborn males at the Passover. Take, for example, blood in the water, lice, flies buzzing, boils seeping, hail, locusts, darkness, and the stench of piles of dead frogs and livestock. The Israelites remembered it all.
None of these Diseases
In the ancient Egyptian world, medicine was barbaric; the cures were often worse than the disease. The 1984 classic, None of These Diseases [4] by Dr. S.I. McMillian, begins with an Egyptian prescription given by a medical doctor during the Israelites’ captivity. It is from the Ebers Papyrus, a medical book from 1500 BC. It is a prescription for pink eye: “To cure pink eye, apply the urine of a faithful wife.” Given the havoc that such advice created, no newly liberated Hebrew expected protection from the deadly dangers of desert life. Yet God made this promise to them; it seemed too good to be true. None of the diseases that plagued the Egyptians would be visited upon them. We only need to survey the voluminous instructions God gave Moses and the people on how to conduct everyday life to understand the details of God’s concern. The ancient world offered very little protection from disease. Pagan practices made death and disease sure and severe. The best-known example of God’s advice was requiring families to wait until the 8th day to perform circumcision. The medical community now knows that the chemical that creates blood clotting doesn’t develop in the young male until day 8 of their life. God was protecting the child from bleeding to death. The instructions of God to Moses have been proven to be right. But did the Israelites die in the wilderness of diseases? Yes, but it was for an entirely different reason.
The caveat
“If you will listen carefully to the voice of the Lord your God and do what is right in his sight, obeying his commands and keeping all his decrees, then I will not make you suffer any of the diseases I sent on the Egyptians; for I am the Lord who heals you.”
Contemporary Christians read this text and dismiss it as written to a different people at a more primitive time. And that would be, as a matter of history, true. Post-modernity Christians in the “West”[5] have been trained to think in abstract categories. For example, a person could say, “I am a reformed Christian in the Calvinist tradition, secure in Christ and sealed until the day of redemption.” This would not make the confessor necessarily wrong, but they would have missed the point. In an overarching way, every believer has the same relationship with the same God. The reformed Christian is in the same relationship with the same God as the Israelite wife or working-class husband standing in that desert; both have been told they have a daily responsibility to listen carefully to the voice of the Lord their God, to do what is right, and obey.
If they do, and only if they do, will they live the full and abundant life God has promised them. We contemporaries live in a different world because of modernity—industrialization, technology, and science have changed medicine for the good, but ignoring God’s advice is still bad medicine. Every moment of every day, we can choose to walk with and obey God. And if we don’t, there is a price to pay. That price was paid by the Israeli people again and again over the ages. Every society, however, that has attempted to destroy the Jews is no longer in existence. God has kept his promise, he has punished his people, but he has never forgotten them.
Proving his point, God took them to a better place:
“After leaving Marah, the Israelites traveled on to the oasis of Elim, where they found twelve springs and seventy palm trees. They camped there beside the water.”
I feel better already.
Bill Hull, Reporting from the Oasis of Los Angeles
[1] The Hebrew word translated as “awe” is yirah, meaning fear, respect, or worship.
[2] https://genius.com/The-mamas-and-the-papas-monday-monday-lyrics (I plucked out a few lines)
[3] Exodus 15:26
[4] S.I. McMillian, None of these Diseases, Revell Publishing, 1984. Page 9.
[5] “The West” The West is not about geography. It is an idea of liberty, and a set of values rooted in the Bible. Primarily composed of the English-speaking world, which includes Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Ireland and Israel. It also includes the mainland of Europe west of what once was called the Iron Curtain.
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