A Few Stories About Water: Salvation

God’s covenant people, the people who were the promised descendants of Abraham, are stuck in Egypt. Enslaved in Egypt. Through a series of acts of warning, YHWH convinced Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go. So, taking everything they could get their hands on, Israel left. But Pharaoh had seller’s remorse, so he took his army and went after Israel. When he and his army caught up with the Hebrew men, women, and children, they were by the side of the Red Sea. Israel had two options, die or go back to Egypt as slaves.

There was no hope. There was no way humanly possible for Israel to cross the massive body of water. God we would have to intervene. Moses spread his arms over the sea and YHWH divided the waters. Land appeared. The water that would have brought them death was now their way into a new life. The overwhelming and deadly sea was rendered impotent because God did something he had done before. He gathered the waters together so there was dry land for humanity. By the hand of the Creator, through these divided waters Israel walked. From the deadness of a life in slavery, they walked to new life.

I don’t think we’re supposed to read the Red Sea story and think “hey, this is just like creation!” It’s not. But we are supposed to see the parallels. Israel surely did. There aren’t that many points in Scripture where we have this same imagery of the water dividing. The imagery of God’s manner of salvation is the same in the story of the Red Sea as it is in the story of Noah. Dry land appears where once there was only a world of water. The entire world isn’t being remade when Israel walks across dry land, but Israel is walking from slavery into a new life in a new world. It is a magnificent act of God that preserves his image in His creation. As we saw in the Noah story, a part of this preservation of God’s image is eliminating those things on earth that are distorting his image and destroying his image.

After Israel had crossed through the Red Sea on dry land, they still had a serious problem. Pharaoh and his armies were still pursuing them. Pharaoh was still set on taking them back to Egypt into slavery. While the Egyptians were between the waters, Moses spread his arms again and YHWH closed the waters over the Egyptian armies and they died in the water. God was saving His image from the distorters and enslavers of His image. And He used water to do it.

Flood anyone? It’s not the same. God isn’t flooding the whole world. He isn’t getting rid of everyone. But it’s very similar. In both stories God uses water to destroy those people who were ruining Creation. He got rid of those people who were messing up the world in order to make the world better. He eliminated those who were destroying the innocent. In both stories the people of God come out of the same water that God used to destroy others. In both stories, God’s image in humanity is being repressed, controlled, ruled over, ruined, and distorted and through Creator acts, God preserves what makes humanity human.

The tale of the Red Sea is about more than just its parallels with the previous stories. This story is about God’s final magnificent act of saving the Hebrew people and judging Pharaoh. The crossing of the Red Sea is about God keeping His covenant with Abraham, preserving the children of the promise and continuing the process of bringing them into the land YHWH promised to Abraham’s descendants a long time previous. The crossing of the Red Sea is an entering into freedom. Israel was now free from the evil that oppressed them so that now they are free to live as the covenant people of God. Israel’s freedom gives them the ability to reflect the image of God as a nation, proclaim His power through their story, and live in right relationship to YHWH, that they would be blessed and would be a blessing to all nations.

Calling, Crying, and Cleaving

I was reading through 2 Kings and something interesting struck me at 2 Kings 22:8.  The verse says, Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the secretary, ‘I have found the Book of the Law in the temple of the Lord.’ He gave it to Shaphan, who read it. This finding was during the reign of king Josiah, who began his reign at 8 years old.  He then repented for all the sins of his fathers because the way that they lived was so opposite of what the Word of YHWH said.

Although Josiah was not the one that had begun the moral, ethical, and spiritual decline of the Israelites, he tore his robes (2 Kings 22:11), humbled [himself], inquired of the Lord (verse 13), and wept in [YHWH's] presence (verse 19).  He recognized that God had been displeased.  The resurfacing of the Scriptures made it clear that the actions of the Israelites were disdainful and angering to God.  The very people God chose to worship Him and show the rest of the world who their marvelous and powerful God was were the people that were actively putting up temples and high places dedicated to new, more trendy, more physiologically pleasing gods.  The anger of YHWH and His actions of destruction is merely God being faithful to His side of the covenant – which is to bless obedience and punish disobedience, that Israel might not be ruined forever by her sin, but might repent and again live in the love of her Creator.  Josiah saw the promises of God in Scripture.  He heard and understood the covenantal relationship God chose to begin with the sons and daughters of Abraham.  It seems that it was clear to Josiah that the only natural response  of this good, just, loving, wonderful God to the sin of his sons was to remove his hand of blessing from Judah and allow destruction to come upon them.

Josiah’s response is telling of what he believes about reality and YHWH.  It shows us that he believes the Lord to be holy to the utmost degree, demonstrated by his unbridled humility and mourning.  He believes that God is keeping His covenant even when the Israelites.  He believes sin is damaging to both the generation of those that sinned and  to subsequent generations.  Most importantly, Josiah believed in a God that was forgiving and in a dynamic relationship with us.  Josiah believed that God might choose to stay his forthcoming wrath if Josiah made it clear that he was sorry for the sins of his forefathers and was repentant in both heart and action for his own continuing propagation of the sins of his father.  I think this belief in YHWH’s variability in responses toward us is key for any act of genuine repentance, pleading with sincerity, acts of humility.  I’ll probably have to write another blog post about that in the near future.

I think our hearts should break over the sins our fathers perpetrated and perpetuated through us.  I think our hearts should be broken over our own ignorance as we discover a new what living in obedience to God should look like and how our predecessors have handed down patterns of living that are oppositional to the way of Christ.   My soul aches over the ways the ancestors of our church have handed down theologies and ways of living that result in the formation of exclusivist groups that are about keeping people out instead of inviting people in.  I cry over the judgmentalism, hypocrisy, pride, consumeris, exclusivism, politicism, and selfishness that has been deeply rooted in the American church.  My familial predecessors have left a legacy of alcoholism, gossip, abuse, emotional ineptitude, arrogance, and soul concealment.  These sins that those before us have committed are worth weeping over because of the way they have dishonored our communal covenant with God.  The sin is worth repenting over because of the way it now manifests itself in us – in me.  As we come into more truth about who God is and how we are to respond, our ignorance of those that went before us begins to evaporate and we see their actions more clearly.  As we see our forefathers and mothers in a more clear light, our own souls are elucidated and we see that those things we might once have called personality traits or just the way we do things are actually sinful behaviors, attitudes, and mindsets passed onto us.

Let us repentantly correct the sinful legacy of those that went before us, careful to pass on to those that come after us a legacy of holy love.

Coming Up Next: A Review of Max Lucado’s Cast of Characters