Bible Commentaries

The Drowning of Pharaoh

Exodus 13:21-22).

What is the great doctrine of that expression?

This:—The consciousness of the Divine presence is in proportion to the circumstances in which we are placed. In other words, our circumstances determine our consciousness of the Divine nearness. Sometimes life is all day—almost a summer day with great spans of blue sky overhead, and where the clouds gather they gather in beautiful whiteness, as of purity akin to the holiness of the inner and upper cities of the universe. Then what do we want with fiery displays of God?—they would be out of keeping, out of reason and out of proportion. There are days that are themselves so bright, so hospitable, so long ending, and so poetic in all their breezes, and suggestions, and ministries that we seem not to want any dogmatic teaching about the personality and nearness of God. All beauty represents him. Any more emphatic demonstration would be out of harmony with the splendid serenity of the occasion. Then there are periods in life all night, all darkness, all storm or weariness. We cannot say where the door of liberty Exodus 14:11-12).

That is a miracle in very deed! That is the marvel that astounds the reason, the heart, the imagination, and the conscience. That is the miracle which grieves Heaven. "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me." That is the upsetting of the law of continuity. That is the violation of things permanent. That is an ugly and wicked twist in the movement of the law which you call "the persistence of force." After all they had seen,—after all the miracles of love, and grace, and deliverance, and comfort,—after all they had known of the government of God,—they turned round with so base a falseness and smote, as with darts seven times whetted, the heart of Moses their leader. That is the impossible miracle. How mean we are and paltry in our judgment and in thinking that the dividing of a sea or the breaking up of a firmament is the impossible thing, when every day we are working in our own degree and region moral miracles that make the breaking up and reconstruction of the universe mere child's fancy and child's play. Why do we not fix our attention upon moral incongruities,—violations of moral law, rebellion against natural instinct? He who smites his father or his mother violates every law of nature with a more forceful and violent hand than the God who interferes or intervenes in his own infinite machine—the universe—to do what pleaseth him for the good of his creatures. We like little intellectual puzzles;—we flee away because "conscience makes cowards of us all," from the violations of moral law of which we are guilty. We love to speak of "continuity,"—it costs us nothing; it does not wring the conscience, it does not set up a bar of judgment in the life; it has a bold resonance which we can utter without moral expense or agony; therefore we play upon it; it delights our intellectual vanity. When we come to ourselves we shall know that we have sinned against Heaven and against ourselves and are no more worthy to be called children. In the sublime agony we shall forget all physical miracles in the stupendous wonder that we have grieved the Father's heart.

"And the children of Israel went into the midst of the sea upon the dry ground: and the waters Were a wall unto them on their right hand, and on their left" ( Exodus 14:22).

Did they really do this? Why not? Suppose we set aside the miraculous incident for a moment and ask: What does the writer mean to convey by this high imagining? He means to convey this lesson, namely, that a way was found where a way was supposed to be impossible. Is that his meaning? Yes. If that is Exodus 14:10).

How soon we are driven into a panic! In the very midst of our prayers we are startled into atheism. A sudden fear shoots through the soul, sometimes in the very act of intercession, and petrifies the holy aspiration, so that we rise from the altar worse than when we bended down before its sacred stones. The incidents show us human nature in a spirit of rebellion and ingratitude. "And they said unto Moses, Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us away to die in the wilderness?" How we are like staves that break in the hands of those who use them! There is but a step between the truest friendship and the bitterest enmity. The brother who adores you to-day will hate you tomorrow, if you cross his will or stain his pride. Here is human life in a condition of utter helplessness.

"Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord" ( Exodus 14:13).

These are noble times—times when we have to be everything by being nothing; days when our poor arms have to fall down at our sides unable to do the very simplest thing in the way of self-deliverance or self-extrication from difficulty. This threefold condition was the state of the world prior to the birth of Christ. The world was in a state of panic and distress; the spirit of rebellion and ingratitude urged itself against the heavens, it had exhausted every possible means of self-deliverance and self- Exodus 14:10

Some resemblances between the condition of the children of Israel in Egypt, in their flight from the tyranny of Pharaoh, and the condition of man in sin and his escape from the tyranny of the devil are obviously suggested. The state of Israel in Egypt was one of the severest depression. At every point the Israelites were overborne; their manhood was insulted; they had no rights, privileges or claims. Their time was not their own. If ever they looked up complainingly into the face of the taskmaster, their answer was another stroke of the lash. The light of their best nature was put out, and they were treated simply as beasts of burden. The political condition of Israel in Egypt in these particulars very fitly resembles the spiritual condition of man in a state of sin. However loud may be his boasting, he is a slave; however much he may think he has liberty which he can enjoy as he pleases, he can only go the length of a chain. Sin is slavery; sin is continual oppression. No man who has tasted of the bitterness of sin will contradict the statement, that a state of sin is a state of exhausted manhood. All that is noble, true, pure, and beautiful has been expelled from the nature; and there is nothing left behind but great gaps, blanks and voids, which the world cannot fill, and what hopes remain are only turned to the bitterness of disappointment and mortification. The enemy of Israel was powerful. Pharaoh had everything at his command; a nod was law; the lifting of a finger was equal to the extension of a sceptre; whenever Israel threatened to become rebellious he could bring forces to bear upon the rising that could soon crush it. He was powerful, they were weak; he was on the throne, they were under his feet— and Pharaoh's feet were heavy! The spiritual condition of mankind in a state of sin is precisely the same. The enemy of man is powerful. When he is described by earthly figures, those figures themselves are terrible. He is a roaring lion going about seeking whom he may devour; he is a prince; he is the prince of the power of the air; he has all but unlimited resources; his hand is heavy and cruel, his arm is long, and we have no power to break it; he is subtle; he comes to us in a thousand ways we do not dream of; he comes to us along the streaming of music; he looks at us through the beauty of pictures; he meets us on the highway, smiles himself into our confidence, entangles us in many peculiar combinations. And when we say, "Now we shall be free," he says, "Will you?" No man who has lived deeply, who understands life, who has seen below the outside of things, but knows that sin gets a daily increasing power over him. The habit which to-day we can snap because it is but half-formed, will, in the course of a few weeks, become so strong as to mock all our strength. The young man says that he knows when to turn back. He may be perfectly sincere in saying that he has that good knowledge,—but is his power equal to his information? He says, "I will go down this way a certain distance; I will drink so much worldly pleasure; I shall sit so long at the devil's table; I shall just peep in behind the curtain which conceals hell; and then I will come back again after I have formed some idea of the reality of things in that direction." His purpose is very good; he fully intends to do what he says, but the footprints which he made on the road are rubbed out, and he has not gone down the road a mile before he loses all his bearings; he knows not which is east, west, north, south; going back and going forward are the same thing; he is locked up in the most terrible of jails—the prison of darkness! I point out these things with this care, not to wound or shock anyone's sensibilities or tastes, but to show who it is that has the sinner under his foot, and whose hand it is that strikes at everything good, and true, and beautiful in human nature. The enemy of man is powerful.

Israel escaped from the hand of Pharaoh. By a strong and mighty deliverance Israel was brought out from Egypt The Israelites had gone along the road of promise and liberty so far, but they turned round to look back, and behold, the Egyptians were after them! The Israelites had said, "Now we have escaped at last"; and behold the breath of the destroyer was breathed upon their necks! That is precisely the case with redeemed and liberated man in a spiritual sense. Upon this point I would speak with a good deal of remonstrance in one direction and hopefulness in another. With a good deal of remonstrance thus:

Here is a man who professes to have been redeemed from sin, and who has taken upon himself the Christian profession, and there is one who is watching him at a little distance who is expecting that the man will instantly step out of Egypt right into Canaan; and because the man is weak and worn, and less than half himself, some cruel word is used when he stumbles or falters a little! Is that right? Is that decent? Look at the man's condition, as typified by the circumstances. Israel in Egypt bowed down,—the hand of cruel tyranny upon his neck,—the lash of cruel oppression cutting his back to the bone. He has only been liberated a day. Do you expect him to stand erect, as if he had been a man for half a century? This is precisely what so many persons do in interpreting moral character and spiritual profession. Let me suppose that, at the age of forty, you have been saved from your sin; you have lifted up your face towards the light; you have taken the solemn pledge in the name and strength of God to be good and to do good. But your forty years" history is behind you,—forty years of moral exhaustion, forty years of spiritual tyranny; and because you cannot step right out of Egypt into Paradise you will find some persons who will mock you, and will say, "Ha, ha! Is this your piety? I thought you had become a Christian now. Is this your Christianity?" The mocker is never wanting in the good man's path. Those who have the cruel gift of taunting are never wanting to mock men who would live well, who would go in the right direction, and hold their worn faces and their streaming eyes towards the light of God.

I would speak hopefully. I would remind you that you cannot expect to escape from all your old associations in a moment. I would speak hopefully, because I know some of you have been distressed by the uprising of forces in your heart which you thought had been settled and quenched for ever. A man cannot throw off his old past as he can throw off an old garment; he cannot strip himself and throw the old slave into the fire, and say, "Now I will begin at this point, and never have any connection with the past." Old slaveries, old tyrannies, old recollections, and habits, and companionships, will assert themselves in one way or another. It is more than a step from hell to heaven. You are now a professor of Christianity. Let me suppose you are sincere in your profession. You are ardent in your pursuit of Christian knowledge, you omit no opportunity of improving your spiritual faculties, you pray, you search the Scriptures, you attend helpful ministries; and yet you say, just when you think you are becoming safe and can take a little rest, and enjoy somewhat of the beauty and prospect of the scene,—just then the old devil, that you had supposed to be dead, turns over in your heart! It is not unnatural, it is not some strange thing that has happened to you. It is a long way from evil to goodness, from darkness to light, from the depths of sin to the highest attainments of grace! There will be many a struggle, many a reappearance of your old self; your old self will become a thousand ghosts, and they will frighten you. It is so with us all. We think now, after this lesson or that prayer, or some well-accepted appointments of God, that at last we have attained, and are something like already perfect; and suddenly an unexpected event occurs, and, to our own surprise, we find that, notwithstanding our hope of rest, we are in some respects as weak and as bad as ever we we"re—I am. I am no separated priest; but a Exodus 14:31; Exodus 19:7; Exodus 36:5

In the book of Exodus we have an account of the character of the people delivered by the power of Jehovah and guided and directed by the statesmanship of Moses. Sometimes in reading the history we think there never were such rebellious and stiff-necked people in all human history. Moses is often angry with them; the Lord himself often burns with indignation against them; sometimes, as cool and impartial readers, we feel the spirit of anger rising within us as we contemplate the selfishness, the waywardness, and the impracticableness of the children of Israel. We feel that they were altogether undeserving the grace, the compassion, the patient love which marked the Divine administration of their affairs. The spirit of impatience rises within us and we say, "Why does not God bury this stiff-necked and hard-hearted race in the wilderness and trouble himself no longer about people who receive his mercies without gratitude, and who seeing his hand mistake it for a shadow or for some common figure? Why does the great heart weary itself with a race not worth saving?" Sometimes the Lord does come nigh to the act of utter destruction: and it seems as if justice were about to be consummated and every instinct within us to be satisfied by the vindication of a power always defied and a beneficence never understood.

Give yourselves a little time to discover if you can the redeeming points even in so ungracious and so unlovable a history. It will indeed be a religious exercise, full of the spirit of edification and comfort, to seek some little sparkles of gold in this infinite mass of worthlessness. It will be quite worth a Sabbath day's journey to find two little grains of wheat in all this wilderness of chaff. Surely this is the very spirit of compassion and love, this is the very poetry and music of God's administration, that he is always looking for the redeeming points in every human character. Allowing that the mass of the history is against the people: still there cannot be any escape from that conclusion. If it were a question of putting vice into one scale and virtue into the other, and a mere rough exercise in avoirdupois-weighing, the Israelites could not stand for one moment. To find out the secret of patience, to begin to see how it is that God spares any Exodus 19:7-8).

That was an outburst of religious emotion; that exclamation showed that the heart was not all dead through and through. That one sentence might be remembered amidst many a hurricane of opposition and many a tumult of ungrateful and irrational rebellion. We understand this emotion perfectly. There have been times in our most callous lives when we have caught ourselves singing some great psalm of adoration, some sweet hymn holding in it the spirit of testimony and pledge and holy oath. It would seem as if God set down one such moment as a great period in our lives—as if under the pressure of his infinite mercy he magnified the one declaration which took but a moment to utter into a testimony filling up the space of half a lifetime. It is long before God can forget some prayers. Does it not seem as if the Lord rather rested upon certain sweet words of love we spoke to him even long ago, than as if he had taken a reproach out of our mouth at the moment and fastened his judgment upon the severe and ungrateful word? Is it not within the Almighty love to beat out some little piece of gold into a covering for a long life? It is not his delight to remember sins or to speak about the iniquities which have grieved his heart, or to dig graves in the wilderness for the rebellious who have misunderstood his purpose and his government. "His mercy endureth for ever," and if we have ever spoken one true prayer to heaven, it rings, and resounds, and vibrates, and throbs again like music he will never willingly silence It would seem as if one little prayer might quench the memory of ten thousand blasphemies. "And all the people answered together, and said, All that the Lord hath spoken we will do." Here you find a religious responsiveness which ought to mark the history of the Church and the history of the individual as well.

"The people feared the Lord, and believed the Lord, and his servant Moses" ( Exodus 14:31).

Every good thing is set down. The Lord is not unrighteous to forget your work of faith. We wonder sometimes in our ignorance whether any little sign of good that has been in the heart is not written most legibly in heaven; and all things unlovely, undivine, so written that none but God can decipher the evil record. It would be like our Father to write our moral virtues in great lustrous characters and all the story of our sin and shame so that no angel could read a word of it. This is the way of love. How much we talk about the little deed of kindness when we want to save some character from fatal judgment, from social separation, and from all the penalties of evil behaviour! There is no monotony in the recital; love invents new phrases, new distributions of emphasis, wondrous variations of music, and so keeps on telling the little tale of the flower that was given, of the smile that was indicative of pleasure, of the hand that was put out in fellowship and pledge of amity. Again and again the story so short is made into quite a long narrative by the imagination of love, by the marvellous language which is committed to the custody of the heart. It is God's way. If we give him a cup of cold water, he will tell all the angels about it; if we lend him one poorest thing he seems to need, he will write it so that the record can be read from one end of the earth to the other; if we give him some testimony of love,—say one little box of spikenard,—he will have the story of the oblation told wheresoever his gospel is preached. Yes, he will tell about the gift when he will hide the sin; he will have all his preachers relate the story of the penitence in such glowing terms that the sin shall fall into invisible perspective. God is looking for good; God is looking for excellences, not for faults. Could we but show him one little point of excellence, it should go far to redeem from needful and righteous judgment and penalty a lifetime of evil-doing.

"The people bring much more than enough for the service of the work" ( Exodus 36:5)

There is a redeeming point. The spirit of willingness is in the people. They have a good season now; they are in their best moods at this time; they are most generous; they come forward in their very best force and look quite godly in their daily devotion and service to the tabernacle. Surely in the worst character there are some little faint lines of good! Why do we not imitate God and make the most of these? We are so prone to the other kind of criticism: it seems to be in our very heart of hearts to find fault; to point out defections; to write down a whole record and catalogue of infirmities and mishaps, and to hold up the writing as a proof of our own respectability. God never does so; he is righteous on the one side and on the other; he never connives at sin; he never compromises with evil; he never fails to discriminate between good and bad, light and darkness, the right hand and the left; but when he does come upon some little streak of excellence, some faint mark of a better life he seems to multiply it by his own holiness, and to be filled with a new joy because of pearls of virtue which he has found in a rebellious race. Character is not a simple line beginning at one point and ending at another, drawn by the pencil of a child and measurable by the eye of every observer. Character is a mystery; we must not attempt to judge character. "Judge not, that ye be not judged." "Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy." The Pharisees dragged up those whom they found doing wrong, but their doing so was never sanctioned by the Master; in all their attempts at judgment they were judged; whenever they displayed their virtue he burnt up the rag and left them to carry the cinders away. This should lead us to much seriousness in estimating character, and should keep us from uncharitableness; but at the same time it should encourage our own souls in the pursuit and quest of things heavenly. We do not know the meaning of all we feel and do. Let me suppose that some man is not regarded by others as religious and spiritual; let it be my business as a Christian shepherd to find out some point in that character upon which I can found an argument and base an appeal. I may find it sometimes in one great hot tear; the man would not have allowed me to see that tear on any account if he could have helped it, but I did see it, and having seen it I have hope of his soul. He is not damned yet. I may notice it in a half-intention to write to the wronged ones at home. The young man has taken up his pen and begun to address the old parents whose hearts he has withered. When I observe him in the act of dipping his pen, I say, "He was dead and is alive again"; and though he should lay down the pen without writing the letter of penitence, I have hope in him: he may yet write it and make the confession and seek the absolution of hearts that are dying to forgive him. Do not tell me of the spendthrift's course, do not heap up the accusation—any hireling can be bribed to make out the black catalogue; be it ours to see the first heavenward motion, to hear the first Godward sigh, and to make the most of these signs of return and submission. Good and bad do live together in every character. I never met a human creature that was all bad: I have been surprised rather to see in the most unexpected places beautiful little flowers never planted by the hand of man. All flowers are not found in gardens, hedged and walled in, and cultured at so much a day; many a flower we see was never planted by the human gardener. In every nation, he that feareth God and worketh righteousness is accepted of Heaven. At the risk of incurring the unkind judgment of some in that I may be ministering to your vanity—how they mistake the case who reason so!—I will venture to say that in every one, however unrecognised by the constables of the Church or by the priests of the altar, there are signs that they are not forsaken of God.

Now comes the thought for which I have no language adequate in copiousness or fit in delicateness. It would seem as if the little good outweighed the evil. God does not decide by majorities. There is not a more vulgar standard of right and wrong than so-called majorities; it is an evil form of judgment wholly—useful for temporary purposes, but of no use whatever in moral judgment. The majority in a man's own heart is overwhelming. If each action were a vote, and if hands were held up for evil, a forest of ten thousand might instantly spring up; and then if we called for the vote expressive of religious desire, there might be one trembling hand half extended. Who counts?—God. What says he? How rules he from his throne? It will be like him to say, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." If he could find out in our life that we once dropped on one knee, and began a prayer, there is no telling what may be done by his love in multiplying the act into an eternal obeisance and regarding the unfinished prayer as an eternal supplication. This is how the judgment will go. God has not forsaken us. To open his book with any desire to find in it reading for the soul is a proof that we are not abandoned of our Father; to go into the sanctuary even with some trouble of mind or reluctance of will—to be there is a sign that we are not yet cast out into the darkness infinite.

Yet even here the stern lesson stands straight up and demands to be heard—namely:—If any man can be satisfied with the little that he has, he has not the little on which he bases his satisfaction. It is not our business to magnify the little; we do well to fix our mind for long stretches of time upon the evil, and the wrong, and the foul, and the base. It is not for us to seek self-satisfaction; our place is in the dust; our cry should be "Unclean! unprofitable!"—a cry for mercy. It is God's place to find anything in us on which he can base hope for our future, or found a claim for the still further surrender of our hostile but still human hearts.