So we reach the Red Sea. We know this story well… What we may have forgotten is the surprising thing Paul says about it!
With the Bible there are always two issues: What did it mean for its first readers, and, what does it mean for us now? For its early readers the Red Sea was a huge encouragement: This – splitting the sea so Israel could cross, then publicly drowning the enslaving forces chasing them – was how God completed our deliverance from slavery, He’s still the same God, He can do this for us now! (Thus Isaiah 43:16,51:10, 63:12). This is the kind of thing God still does…
And for Paul, writing to us Christians, it’s still the kind of thing God does… and, what it foreshadowed, pictured, he says, is our own public sign of deliverance, the secure closing off of the past, in… baptism! (`They were all baptized to Moses in the cloud and in the sea`, 1 Corinthians 10:2.)
How is baptism a public deliverance? Well, Peter actually says it `saves us` (1 Peter 3:21). Not, obviously, in bringing us into redemption, forgiveness and new birth (all that was clearly paralleled rather earlier, in Passover, as we saw last time). Otherwise, baptism would be part of the actual gospel, and Paul makes very clear that it isn’t (1 Cor 1:17). But sometimes the new testament uses the word `salvation` differently, to speak of it spreading through our personalities into every part of life (eg Phil 2:12, 1 Tim 4:16). And in this sense, Peter’s saying, getting baptized matters, because the public confession involved in passing through the waters is a huge step forward into this deliverance; just like the Red Sea…
How? Well, in Exodus 14 deliverance comes through Israel living out the risky faith to march with God right `into death`, as it were. And for us too, true freedom starts as we advance into, identify totally with, Christ’s death. Which is what baptism is about: identifying ourselves with Christ’s death, dying to and burying all our old life, and coming out the other side into His radically new life. The classic explanation is Romans 6 (eg vv3-8,11); straight after Romans 1-5 on how we are forgiven, Paul tells us that baptism is about our being `united with` Christ in His death, so that we live an entirely new life (vv4-5). And that, says Paul, will lead (like in Exodus) to our deliverance. (V14: `Sin shall **not** be your master`; ie, there is absolutely no wrongful, negative or destructive behaviour that we will not be set free from by the power of God. Wow.) So the starting-point of deliverance is my grasping with all my being that I’m dead to my old life, drowning everything that doesn’t fit with Jesus, and heading out the other side into a radically new life. And I get baptized to declare and celebrate that! (As we grasp all this we realise again, Exodus is our story!)
By the way is it just me or are Ex 14:13-15 really funny? Moses waxes dramatic and prophetic: `Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the LORD will bring you today… The Egyptians… you will never see again. The LORD will fight for you; you need only to be still!’ Then the LORD says to Moses: ‘Why are you crying out to Me? Tell the Israelites to move on!` And not surprisingly the Bible’s first big praiseup follows (as it should after a baptism!), with thousands of tambourines, and the certainties of God’s deliverance as its joyful theme (ch15)! (`Fearing the Lord’, 14:31, taking God very seriously, leads directly to celebration!)
And so the Red Sea completes the Israelites’ liberation from Egypt, closes off the past forever; and, noisily and joyfully, Exodus ends. No it doesn’t! What’s the rest about then? Next week’s topic…
PS I found a very encouraging application of 14:20 in C H Mackintosh’s commentary (1860s Brethren): Just as earlier Jesus stood (as Passover Lamb) `between’ us and our sins’ penalty, and the pillar of fire stood protectively between Israel and their enemies (14:20), so now let’s visualize Him standing between us and absolutely anything that threatens us. A very practical picture to me anyway!
