“But Moses said to the people, ‘Don’t be afraid. Stand firm and see the Lord’s salvation that he will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians you see today, you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you must be quiet.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

There are all kinds of stories about fighting against the forces of darkness and evil. Spiritual warfare is a common theme, especially in the horror genre. And in pretty much all of our stories about fighting spiritual forces that are opposed to God, the battle always goes about the same way. We do all the work. Yes, God may give us a little bit of help in the form of a powerful weapon or talisman or something like that, but the victory is always ours. We achieve it. We save ourselves. This makes for a fun story, but in terms of an approximation of reality, it really doesn’t come close. What we see here is a much better picture of how our biggest battles are really won. Let’s talk about what’s happening here as Moses tries to reassure the people in the face of what appears to them to be their impending doom.

You have to feel a bit for Moses as you read through the story of the Exodus. He didn’t want the job of being…well…himself…in the first place. He tried everything he could think of to get out of it, but God wouldn’t take no for an answer. And then, at every step along the way he encountered obstacles and pushback and resistance. It came first from Pharaoh who basically laughed him out of the room when he said God wanted him to let his source of slave labor go free for a three-day wilderness retreat. Then, when he retaliated against the people because of Moses’ request, the people themselves bawled him out, told him how terrible he was, and insisted that he just leave them alone in their slavery.

The whole sequence of the plagues went pretty well, but no sooner did the people walk away free from Egypt than they started griping and complaining to him about everything. Every time a challenge rose up to block their path, their first instinct was never to trust in God and have confidence in Moses leadership, it was consistently to throw up their hands in terrified resignation and to insist they would rather be back living as slaves in Egypt than face whatever was in front of them. They blamed Moses for all of their troubles. And Moses just kept reassuring them that their trust in God would pay off if they would just be patient and see what He had planned for them. He was like a parent of a nation’s worth of unruly, spoiled, insolent children. It’s no wonder he had a full head of gray hair in all the pictures we have of him. I’m surprised he had any left at all!

(Just so we’re clear: that’s a joke. We don’t actually have any pictures of Moses.)

Here, with the people standing before him absolutely terrified of what the Egyptians were going to do to them when they finally arrived, Moses had to do this reassuring work quickly and on the fly. He had to pour generously out of his own well of faith which, thankfully, God kept pretty full throughout this entire journey. He assured them God was going to act powerfully on their behalf. The Egyptian army was not going to pose any threat or danger to them. I love this line: “for the Egyptians you see today, you will never see again.” A decent preacher could probably whip up a great revival sermon out of that line. It would mean taking it out of context and applying it in a way that is pretty irresponsible, but you could get some people weeping in their seats and ready to walk the aisles with it if you were good.

What Moses ultimately tells the people is that all they are going to have to do is keep on trusting in the God who had already brought them out of Egypt. They needed to sit back, relax, and watch how He was going to deliver them. The only thing they were going to need to actually do was to be ready to move when God gave the command. God was going to do all the work…kind of like He had already been doing at every other point in this process. Thankfully, Moses was a good leader who managed to not say the quiet part out loud.

One of the principles I have stuck with for quite some time in my approach to the Old Testament is to constantly keep in mind that we are not Israel today. The Old Testament was not written for us directly. We can benefit from it, but the things God said to Israel and the ways He interacted with them are not necessarily normative for us. All of its events happened under the existence of a different covenant than we have with Him today through Christ. That being said, one of the things for which we can rely on the Old Testament stories is a better understanding of the character of God.

What we are seeing here is the fact that God is for us. And when it comes to our greatest battles, He will do the fighting for us. The power to overcome the various obstacles we face in this life does not come primarily from us. When we try to do things on our own power, we make a mess of them every single time. God’s ways are not our ways. His solutions to what seem to be intractable problems for us go beyond what we could even imagine. This episode is a perfect example of this. The Israelites were trapped between the Egyptian army and the Red Sea. The Egyptian forces were coming in hot, and there was no way they were going to be able to build enough rafts to get even a fraction of the nation safely across the Sea before they arrived. As far as they could tell, their only options were to fight or surrender. Neither of those were going to go well for them.

Then God parted the Sea.

Now, this does not mean we are supposed to go looking for ways that God is going to “part the Sea” for us when we face troubles of various kinds. But we can rely on Him to help us overcome what lies before us. When we are in the midst of a spiritual battle (and our battles are primarily spiritual far more often perhaps than we realize in the moment), if we try to fight with non-spiritual weapons, we are going to lose. And even if we should happen to gain a victory, we’ll still lose because “victories” we win tend to grow a spirit of pride in us that results in our gaining confidence in our ability to overcome obstacles on our own without God’s help which will just result in far greater defeats on down the road. I wonder how often Satan intentionally takes a “loss” in a small situation in order that he can score a much greater win later. But when we fight “on our knees,” as the saying goes, and use spiritual weapons like prayer, the Scriptures, and a church-fueled commitment to the character of Christ, the ultimate victory will always be God’s. And when we rely on Him, He always lets us share in the glory.

So, when you are facing the next battle in your journey after Jesus, make sure you fight with spiritual weapons. The Lord will fight for you, and you must be quiet. That doesn’t mean we do nothing. It means we trust in Him rather than what our eyes are telling us. We don’t turn to anxiety or fear. We remain faithful to the example of Christ. We give intentional attention to the Scriptures. We stay fervent in prayer. We engage constantly with the body of Christ. And when we do, we will see the victory our God has planned for us. It may not come in the way or at the time we expect, but it will come. We just keep playing the long game because the victory is already His. When we stick with Him, we’ll share in it.