“As for me, I am going to harden the hearts of the Egyptians so that they will go in after them, and I will receive glory by means of Pharaoh, all his army, and his chariots and horsemen. The Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I receive glory through Pharaoh, his chariots, and his horsemen.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Just when we thought we were finally through with the whole struggling over the idea of God’s hardening Pharaoh’s heart to continue to oppose Him, apparently in order to justify His actions against Egypt on behalf of Israel, we find ourselves facing it yet again. But this time, instead of hardening the heart of just one king and a few of his officials, He’s doing it to an entire army. And the results of this hardening will be their pursuit of the Israelites into the dry seabed of the Red Sea where they are all going to die, and He is going to receive glory because of it. What?!? Let’s talk about how to deal with this.

Let me start by taking just a second to set the scene for us. Back at the beginning of this chapter, God told Moses to lead the people in a circuitous path toward the Red Sea. This would convince Pharaoh and his officials that they had gotten lost in the wilderness and were running out of revolutionary steam. Pharaoh would respond by coming after them with his army. And, as God said to Moses then, before any of this started, “I will receive glory by means of Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord.” In other words, what is about to unfold was God’s plan all along. None of this surprised Him. As much as the Israelites themselves were all in a tizzy over the unfolding of events in realtime, God wasn’t phased by any of it. He never is.

This whole adventure has been about increasing His glory. As a matter of fact, everything He does is about increasing His glory. Well, God’s glory is already and always at its absolute maximal level, so perhaps a better way to say that is that everything God does is about revealing the full extent of His glory more fully. And how does He do that? By revealing the true nature of His character for us to see and worship. Wait, so gleefully drowning hundreds of people by taking away their free will in order to force them into a sea floor where He can literally drop part of an ocean on them helps us understand His character better? Well, today it certainly wouldn’t. It didn’t then either. Good thing that’s not actually what is happening here. When we take off the willfully skeptical lens the broader culture encourages us to use when we look at stories like this one, we can see a bit more clearly what God is doing and why.

Our understanding of God’s hardening the hearts of the Egyptian army is not any different from what our understanding of His hardening of Pharaoh’s heart needed to be in order to make positive sense out of that. This was not a vicious abrogation of free will in order to exact violent revenge on a bunch of unsuspecting, innocent souls. This was God’s stepping out of the way and declining to prevent them from pursuing their own heart’s desire. What Moses’ original audience as well as the subsequent several centuries’ worth of readers would have understood with absolutely zero moral qualms to be an active action on God’s part here, we can equally correctly understand through a more nuanced lens of God’s allowing the Egyptian forces to double down on their own plans and desires to attack His people by foolishly following them into the Sea.

Don’t miss that element here. The Egyptian forces, spurred on by their commanders and, ultimately, Pharaoh himself, were going to engage in a bold, but disastrously foolish military strategy that was entirely driven by their desire for vengeful destruction. Think about just how utterly irrational their plans were. The Egyptian army, chariots and all, chased the Israelites even as they were attempting to escape across the dry seabed of the Red Sea. How on earth did they imagine the huge walls of water standing on either side of the now dry seabed were staying there? Their natural (not to mention correct) assumption would have been that Israel’s God had done this for them. Well, if it was the God of israel who was the one holding back these two enormous walls of water (something, again, they would have accepted at face value), what made them think He was going to continue holding them back while the army in pursuit of His people with an intent to destroy them crossed the Sea behind them?

This was insane on their part. It revealed an absolute commitment to destruction that can only be described as evil. Did they imagine one of their gods was going to intervene to help them when Israel’s God quit what He was doing? He had already and decisively demonstrated His absolute power over all of their gods including the ones associated with the water. In fact, He demonstrated His power over their water gods first by turning the waters of the Nile to blood. The fact that they still somehow believed themselves capable of opposing Him or otherwise achieving some goal of which He was not supportive represented nothing less than a mark of sinful insanity on their part.

A skeptical world looking for reasons to doubt or disparage God’s character sees this as some kind of an aggressive and violent act on His part. But that’s simply not what is going on here. This was an army hellbent on going after a mostly defenseless group of people that included many women and children with apparent plans to kill enough to make them compliantly accept being forced back into slavery. It was a horribly unjust pursuit to commit and continue an unabashedly evil state of affairs. They unquestionably deserved judgment for this, and God in His justice planned to deliver it to them immediately. If only He would deliver this kind of immediate judgment to the equally evil members of Hamas who have launched an equally unprovoked and vicious attack on modern Israel. They are certainly deserving of it.

What’s more, God planned to use the occasion of His justly delivering this judgment to send a message to everyone who needed to hear it: I took out the powerful Egyptian army on my people’s behalf; mess with them at your own peril. This was the glory He is talking about here. The glory was not in the destruction of human life. It was in the delivering of just judgment to a people worthy of it. If the final plague that had unfolded only a handful of days before hadn’t convinced them to stop trying to oppose Him and His plans at the expense of His people, nothing would. Now, perhaps someone would argue that the Egyptians’ foolhardy commitment to Israel’s destruction was prompted in part by that final plague, but assuming on their own worldview, that didn’t make sense. No, this was all driven by pride and stubbornness. Pharaoh was leading this charge not because of his grief over losing his firstborn son, but because of his wounded pride at having been forced (duped perhaps in his view) to release his source of slave labor. He had not yet learned his lesson. This episode demonstrated that he never would. Judgment was the only thing left for him and all those who were still willing to follow him into it.

This same situation is played out again for us in John’s vision of the end of the world. As we talked about last week, we see this same thing happen on a much larger scale in Revelation 20. After Jesus returns, banishes Satan to the abyss, and rules over the earth for a thousand years, when the devil is released from his prison he is able to quickly assemble a huge force of people who are willing to attack to destroy Jesus and His people. For people who are so committed to opposing God’s rule and promoting their own as this, there is no end left for them but judgment. If a thousand years of having Jesus Himself ruling over them wasn’t enough to convince them that His rule is better than their own, an entire eternity won’t be enough either. They will not be satisfied unless and until they are eternally separated from God…which, of course, will provide them no means of satisfaction at all. It will be Hell. Literally. In the end, God will ultimately receive glory not only from the eternal life He joyfully delivers to the faithful, but also from the equally eternal destruction He delivers to the justly damned. And in the end, everyone will know who He is, that He is the Lord.

As a bit of an epilogue to this story, God was right when He said that His glory would be known far and wide because of what was about to happen. More than 40 years after this terrible episode, when the people who were now led by Joshua were preparing to begin their conquest of the Promised Land by taking the city of Jericho, Joshua sent two spies into the city to see what the mood there was like. They were met and aided by a woman named Rahab (who would later become a part of Jesus’ ancestral lineage). When she hid the spies for the night, she explained her actions to them by saying this: “I know that the Lord has given you this land and that the terror of you has fallen on us, and everyone who lives in the land is panicking because of you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two Amorite kings you completely destroyed across the Jordan. When we heard this, we lost heart, and everyone’s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on earth below.” God will be known for who He is. The only question is whether we receive that as a good thing or not.