The Red Sea
’ And the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward.” — Ex. XIV. 15.
Following their fiery-cloucly pillar, the Israelites set forth on their journey, and the first stage or two would be sufficiently exulting and sanguine. They had no conception of what lay before them, and they might very well imagine that from the house of bondage to the land of promise would be a short and pleasant promenade. As the crow flies it was little more than a hundred miles, and a week’s march might bring them thither. They might be excused if they already in imagination scented the milk and honey from its fragrant hills, and if, betwixt sport and earnest, they pictured their future homes and planned about their beehives and gardens, their dairies and their farms, and felt impatient to get a glimpse of the land which would be sure to look so goodly in this most pleasant month of all the year.
But here was a surprise. It was no goodly land but a watery gulf which stretched before them, and although by retracing their steps they might round the head of it — and this itself a sufficiently tiresome detour, — behold a new horror! A cloud of dust is rising in the rear, and it can no longer be disguised that the squadrons of Egypt are in pursuit, fierce and headlong. The sea before and that serried host behind, it was a miserable alternative to men who could neither fight nor swim, and in the panic of the moment a great wail went up to heaven, whilst burning taunts were hurled at the head of Moses. “Were there no graves in Egypt? Bondage had been better than this butchery.” And only knowing that God purposed to work a great deliverance, but still ignorant of the means, Moses could only answer, “Stand still and see God’s salvation. The Egyptians whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall see them again no more for ever.”
The wondrous sequel we have read. Whatsoever be the point of the Eed Sea which we select as the scene of the occurrence, and whatsoever incidental agencies of wind or tide we may call in as accessories, the substantial miracle remains; and amongst the marvellous things which Jehovah did in the land of Egypt and the field of Zoan, none stands forth more conspicuous than this dividing of the sea. As we have it in the vivid verse of Bishop Heber: —
“He coraes — their leader comes! the man of God O’er the wide waters lifts his mighty rod,
And onward treads; the circling waves retreat, In hoarse deep murnaurs, from his holy feet; And the chased surges, inly roaring, show The hard wet sand and coral hills below. With limbs that falter, and with hearts that swell, Down, down they pass, a steep and slippery dell; Around them rise, in pristine chaos hurl’d, The ancient rocks, the secrets of the world; And flowers that blush beneath the ocean green. And caves, the sea-calves’ low-roofed haunt, are seen. Down, safely down the narrow pass they tread; The beetling waters bulge above their head: While far behind retires the sinking day And fades on Edom’s hills its latest ray.”
The same gulf which opened a triumphal path to Israel closed over the Egyptians and whelmed them in a watery grave, fulfilling the word of the Lord by Moses,” The Egyptians whom ye have seen to-day, ye shall see them no more for ever.’’ And in the progress of our narrative we ourselves shall see Pharaoh no more — a character which, after the manner of Cain and Herod, stands up from the sacred page awful and ominous, a seared and blasted peak without any redeeming verdure, and visited by no shower of blessing. A hard man, God left him to himself, so that he grew harder still. Proud, imperious, selfish, like the second James of England, at once a bigot and a despot, he got gradually committed to the unequal strife, and, by a succession of steps as false as they were natural, was hurried forward to the fatal issue.
1 storm. — Heber.
We say that Pharaoh’s course was natural. A selfish man and supremely arrogant, it would have been surprising if he had listened a single moment to the demand, “Let Israel my people go.” As serfs and bondagers they were invaluable, and to let them go would be to annihilate the half of Egypt’s industry. ]N”or was his a mind with which considerations of equity or humanity had any weight. It would not be of the smallest use to urge how long Israel had already served for nothing, and how unkind it was to keep in odious captivity men who had done nothing to forfeit freedom. He looked simply at his own interest, and scouted the monstrous proposition to give up a million of his people, and rather than be so soft he would buckle on his panoply and defy the consequences. These consequences were terrible; but once involved in the contest, Pharaoh’s was not the nature to succumb; and although he could not hide it from himself that a mighty and mysterious power had risen up to rescue Israel, it became a point of honour to persist, and, assured by the magicians that the gods of Egypt were mightier than the God of Israel, he doubtless cherished the hope that they would yet arise to the succour of their champion.
But whilst all this was entirely natural, alongside of it and underneath it was a great deal which was immensely wicked. Pharaoh was a proud and heartless autocrat. Like another Lucifer, he set himself on high, in haughty self-sufficiency, looking on all beneath him and around as created for his own aggrandizement, and this made him at once defiant of a higher power and disdainful of his fellows. In all the distress which his obstinacy entailed, we never detect one spark of compassion for his people; no royal granaries thrown open, no grants from the privy purse to mitigate the tremendous misery; and in keeping with this sullen apathy towards his own Egyptians is his savage bearing towards the Israelites. He is told that they are fainting beneath their burdens, and he is entreated to grant a holiday. Instead of at once consenting, as a good-natured prince might have done, — “Well, a week’s play after four centuries’ work is no great matter;” instead of instituting some inquiry, as a temperate though cold-hearted ruler might have done, Pharaoh sends that very day for the taskmasters, and bids them lay more work upon the people, and as a punishment for complaining, they are after this to find the straw with which the bricks were toughened. And in keeping with the cruelty of the tyrant is the arrogance of the autocrat: “Who is the Lord, that I should obey his voice? I know not the Lord, neither will I let Israel go.” Pharaoh was a polytheist, and on his own principle of “gods many and lords many,” although he had had no reason to believe that Jehovah was pre-eminent or supreme, he had every reason to believe that Jehovah was divine. On his own principles as a Pagan, the Hebrews had a God as well as he, and there was gross impiety in his answer, its tone of supercilious irreverence plainly showing that if the demand had been made in the name of Thoth or Phrah it would hardly have prospered better. “Who is Jehovah, that I should obey his voice?” not obscurely intimating that in his own eyes Pharaoh was himself a deity, and throwing him open to the answers which came so awfully on behalf of the Powers Unseen, as well as on behalf of Israel’s omnipotent Protector, when the river rolling down in blood, when hail and locust-rain and darkness palpable, and at last the Eed Sea’s closing billows made reply to the self- idolater, “I am Jehovah.”
A course of conduct may be very wrong, and yet all its steps may seem quite natural. The man himself may see no alternative, and if we grant that he was right in the outset, it will be difficult to show that the particular act of robbery or bloodshed was so very far wrong. If Judas was right in his first principle, that money is the one thing needful, it was very natural that he should try to get it by selling his Master. And if Pharaoh was right in his first principle, that all things existed for the sake of the king of Egypt, and that no one in heaven or earth had any right to resist his will, it is not wonderful that he should have gone to war with Jehovah.
You say he was not right. You say that in his starting-point he was monstrously wrong; that in his first principle of proud self-idolatry he was diabolically wicked. But alas! ray friends, it does not need that a man should be a monarch in order to repeat the career of Pharaoh. “Who is Jehovah?” says the voluptuary when urged to give up his sinful pleasures; “who is the Lord, that I should let my enjoyments go?” “Who is the Lord, and who is Israel?” says the worldling hastening to be rich, and who in his all-absorbing avarice has no bowels for his bondmen, no consideration for their souls or bodies, who without straw are baking his bricks, and who without a Sabbath are building his pyramid. “Who is Jehovah, that I should obey his voice?” says the hardened gospel-hearer, who has long listened to the claims of God, and yet, entrenched in apathy, holds out, preferring to be his own allin-all, and somehow hoping that he shall be the exception to the rule, and if the worst comes to the worst, that he shall be the sinner saved who yet never had a Saviour. In every stout and resistfal spirit, in every proud, self-indulgent nature, there is a certain root of Pharaohism; and unless you humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, you will find, like Pharaoh when at last he sank like lead in the mighty waters, that it is “woe to the man who strives with his Maker.”
A great word is that word of God to Israel. There they were, a sea before them far wider than their familiar Nile, and with the wild tumult of its waters very terrible; a sea before them, and on their rear, with his jingling chargers and his sounding chariots, an angry, ruthless king. Unarmed and unused to conflict, to face round and fight was for a flock of sheep to charge a pack of wolves or lions, and across that gulf they had neither wings to fly nor boats to ferry; but although still invisible, it was across that gulf that the path of the ransomed stretched, and from God’s “Forward” the veiling waters fled away, and revealed the road which no created eye had seen till then.
And so whenever the fiery pillar conducts to the water’s edge, and God says, “Go forward,” the waves open and the weakest pilgrim passes through. Luther, you are a fine, genial fellow; you are made to enjoy this wonderful world; don’t leave it by a heroic suicide. You are a father, and the solace of a thousand friends. Not a rootless stick or a rigid palisade, like these heartless, homeless, dehumanized monks, you are a green tree with roots in all our hearts; by wilful self-destruction don’t dash to the earth so many nests and wound us all. But he is resolute. “Here I stand; I cannot retract, so help me God.” It is the edge of the Eed Sea, the very point to which the guiding pillar has brought him, and, like the pursuing Egyptians, the Romish myrmidons have closed upon him, and ramp and ravin for his blood. But just as they are about to clutch their prey the sea sunders, their host is troubled, and as the waters stand up a wall on either hand, with conscience clean, with honour saved, with the gospel uncompromised, the Reformer passes through.
The like does not happen to every one, yet something of the sort may chance to you. Following your guide, shut up by the events of Providence, and actmg under the dictates of religious principle, you have reached the edge of your Eed Sea. The compliance pressed upon you would hurt your conscience; the match which they wish you to make has every advantage, — wealth, position, prospects; the only drawback is, the man ’s a profligate. The situation you are about to lose is lucrative, and it would be entirely to your liking, but the condition affixed to your retaining it is immoral: you must act, or utter fraud and falsehood. The trial is very terrible, but right above the flood hangs the unchanging oracle, “What shall it profit? Be not unequally yoked,” and you must forward, for behind you hear a voice, which, pointing to that flood, says, “This is the way, walk ye in it.”
However, there is one crisis in every history when faith is tried, and when all the courage is needed which can be derived from God’s “Go forward.”
The sea I speak of we have all to cross. Some try to forget it, and to some, through grace, it has ceased to be formidable, whilst to others still it has a painful fascination. You cannot forget what lies before you, and you have not ceased to fear it; you cannot help going down to the water’s brink from time to time, and taking along the strand a pensive meditative stroll, and almost pitying yourself because you must some day pass over. “0 thou flood of sorrow! wherefore is it that thou still dost flow betwixt myself and Immanuel’s land? Dark waters! I do not like your look. I shudder at the thought that I must one day face round and turn my footsteps towards your tide. I wonder whether there will be a swell on your surface, or a great calm that day. I wonder what all I shall see in your mysterious unreported caverns; and, above all, I wonder if I shall make good my landing on the farther side. I sometimes fear that my faith shall fail.” But although it is appointed to all men once to die, we doubt if such rehearsals of a dying hour are needful. We are inclined to think that the best preparation for that Eed Sea passage is to follow, on these unflooded plains of life — on the terra firma of daily duty, the fiery- cloudy pillar. In order to lose the dread of death, do you learn to place confidence in Christ? learn to think of Him trustfully and affectionately now, for, as the Angel of God’s presence, as the very soul of the Bible, as the bright eye everbeaming from the cloud of witnesses, the expressed mind of Christ is ever with you in the volume of the Book; His power and love are around your path in His ubiquitous never-absent Godhead. Depend upon it, if thus in frequent recollection and daily prayer you press up into Christ’s friendship, these remoter anxieties will dwindle or disappear. That same Saviour of whose mediation you feel the need when you bend the knee to confess your sin and ask forgiveness, will not be more remote when you bow the head and give up the ghost, and with as little sense of effort then as now He will tell you, “I am the way: no man cometh to the Father but by me.” This is the way, walk in it. And although it is already the once- dreaded passage, you will hardly be aware, for to you it is as much dry land as ever, although on either side “the waters great do swell up to the brim;” and although from the verge tearful eyes follow you as you pass down into the dim and mysterious valley, these waters shall not overwhelm your soul, and you will only know that it is the Eed Sea you have crossed by seeing no more of your old enemies, temptations, infirmities, and strongly besetting sins. Those Egyptians whom you see to-day, take a good look of them, for after that you will see them no more for ever.
At which rate it is no tame application of the text, it is no degradation of the Divine watchword, if, on this thanksgiving Sabbath after the Communion, we pass it round as our motto, and say to one another, Go forward! Go forward in faith and holiness, in activity and zeal; go forward in brotherly kindness and charity, in devotion and self-denial; go forward in the self-knowledge which destroys confidence in the flesh; go forward in the courage which waxes strong in Christ Jesus; go forward in the humility which, conscious of unworthiness, still high -hearted and hopeful, seeks the things above; and forward in that seriousness which, taking truer views of life and its outgoings, has also joys and consolations unguessed by carnal levity. Go forward! for in the van are the bravest and the best; go forward, for the guiding pillar is far before, so far before that the Bible is sometimes like to get out of our sight altogether; go forward, for the Forerunner has passed ahead, and they are the happiest pilgrims who so far can overtake as to pursue their course “looking unto Jesus.” Go forward! for the best accommodations and refreshments await those who are farthest in advance; and “from strength still onward unto strength,” their burdens are the lightest and their difiiculties the fewest, who, “forgetting the things that are behind,” evermore “press forward,” — forward on the way where the guiding pillar precedes, “to the prize of our high calling,” even the place which Christ has prepared.