“Then the angel of God, who was going in front of the Israelite forces, moved and went behind them. The pillar of cloud moved from in front of them and stood behind them. It came between the Egyptian and Israelite forces. There was cloud and darkness, it lit up the night, and neither group came near the other all night long. Then Moses stretched out his hand over the Sea. The Lord drove the Sea back with a powerful east wind all that night and turned the Sea into dry land. So the waters were divided, and the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with the waters like a wall to them on their right and their left.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the things that can be so hard for someone who has been thoroughly trained in a secular worldview when considering the Scriptures are stories like this one. I remember watching a documentary years ago on the History Channel (which used to be a very consistent source of demythologizing-the-Bible specials, especially around Christmas and Easter) that was offering up all kinds of natural explanations for how this could have happened. It was entertaining, but not terribly informative. It wasn’t very information because its baseline assumption was a naturalistic worldview. In other words, it started from the position that what Moses wrote wasn’t true, and went from there. The trouble with a naturalistic worldview is that sometimes God simply does a miracle. Let’s talk about this one.

Now, if you were raised in the church or have otherwise been following Jesus for a long time, it is easy to fall into the rut of looking down on people who aren’t. You can start to look at unbelievers and skeptics with derision because how could they be so blind as to not be able to see that a miracle has happened? The Bible clearly says that God parted the Red Sea for the Israelites to walk across on dry ground. If you’re too dumb to accept that, then there’s really no hope for you. The trouble with this position is that it is deeply uncharitable and doesn’t reflect the compassionate love of Jesus. Therefore, it is always unacceptable to look at anyone this way, but especially folks who aren’t yet following Jesus.

The other real problem with that kind of a position toward unbelievers is that at the same time you are thinking that about them, they are looking at you thinking something along the lines of, “We live in a modern world in which science is capable of explaining how things work. We don’t need God as an explanation any longer. How can he be so dumb as to believe that a whole sea could be divided in two over the course of one night by the wind which just happens to cut off at precisely the right time to drown all of a nation’s enemies?” The derision here goes both ways, and is equally unattractive on both sides. The difference is, we have an example and a command to not participate in it. In other words, while it just looks bad on them, it is forbidden for us by our God.

If you spend much time reflecting on it, a person’s embracing a naturalistic worldview is understandable. While we don’t want to remove all the wonder from the world, we also want to live in a world we can understand and describe. We want to be able to get our minds around what we see as we examine the world around us. If something goes beyond our ability to explain it, then it goes beyond our ability to control it. And if we can’t control it at all, then we are totally at its mercy. That’s not a comfortable place to be, especially for a people who fancy themselves rulers of their own little worlds.

The trouble here is that the harder and deeper we look into the world around us, the more we keep running into this wall beyond which we simply don’t have an answer for how it could have come to be. We used to think that wall didn’t exist. Actually, we did, then we didn’t, and now we are again. When push comes to shove, absent God, we simply don’t have a good explanation for how the world came to be like it is. Oh there are lots of creative attempts to say that we do, but we don’t. The lingering fact of our inability is often cleverly hidden behind a whole bunch of technical jargon so it looks to the laymen that we either really do have it or else are just on the cusp of getting it, but we aren’t. And, somewhat ironically, the more creative and complex our explanations become, the more painfully obvious it is that we just don’t know. We’re just making up for our ignorance with complexity.

In light of this, there is something freeing and relieving about being about to acknowledge that we live in a world presided over by a good and powerful God who designed the world and everything in it with great specificity and care, and who presides over it in such a way that while He allows much of it to run like He designed it to run (although always at His specific direction), He also occasionally steps in a little more directly to give things a nudge in the direction He wants for them to go. And, because He is the designer and creator and owner of the whole thing, He always maintains that right.

Now, this doesn’t excuse our ignorance of His world. He made it to be discoverable for us and delights – not to mention expects – us to do the hard but good work of uncovering the exquisitely beautiful details He wove in to even the tiniest, most insignificant-seeming parts of it. That is, our pursuit of science in all of its various forms is to be encouraged with eagerness. All such efforts are to His glory. Or, at least, they can and should be when we turn to give Him praise for what we find. But we don’t always. Sometimes we have so convinced ourselves that He isn’t there that our reaction to yet another jaw-dropping discovery about our world and how it works prompts us to marvel at chance; we delight in creation but not its Creator.

For a long time, the assumption of a divine origin for creation has been branded as lazy and ignorant. Christians have been accused of taking a God-of-the-gaps approach to understanding the world. In other words, we just use “God” as a cover for our ignorance about some part of the world rather than doing the hard work of figuring it out for ourselves. The irony of that charge is that in most cases today, the equal but opposite error is more common. Among a scientific community in which unbelief is an assumed prerequisite for acceptance, as our knowledge grows deeper and deeper, we are regularly running into the problem of a Designer being the only rational explanation for how something works. Because of the naturalistic presumption so many bring with them into their explorations, though, they assume science will eventually give us the answer. They use a science-of-the-gaps approach. Yet for some of these things, science is decades behind on fessing up how it did it.

If all of this is really the case (and, as you might expect, I think there is a very good argument to be made in its favor), then we live in just the kind of world the Scriptures consistently describe. It is a good and wonderful world presided over by a good and wonderful God. He loves the world He made and acts to keep it on track in ways that sometimes go beyond our ability to explain or fully understand. In particular, for those people whom He has called and chosen as His own, He occasionally takes active steps to protect them from danger or harm intended to them. That’s what happens here.

When the Egyptian forces were bearing down on the Israelites, the cloud that usually went ahead of them moved around behind them, putting itself between the two peoples. Moses tells us that the angel of God which could either be an angel or a preincarnate Christ but either way a representative of God to fight for the people, stood in the gap to protect them. Through some kind of theophanic manifestation that Moses describes both as “cloud and darkness” and as something that “lit up the night,” which to me suggests a giant and wild storm that basically halted the Egyptian chariots in their tracks, the angel of God slowed their progress to a halt.

While this was going on, Moses raised up his hands over the waters of the Red Sea. God didn’t need him to do this, but it gave the people a way to wrap their minds around what was about to happen. It gave them something physical they could understand. When Moses raised his hands, God started to blow. He blew and He blew and He blew. He blew all night along a powerful east wind. The wind struck at just the right velocity and angle to cause a path to open up in the waters for the people to cross over to the other side of the Sea. The waters were stacked up “like a wall to them on their right and their left.” I wonder if they could see fish swimming along beside them as they crossed the dry seabed.

Moses was able to describe all of this because he saw it with his own eyes. He experienced it. He took part in it. But he didn’t understand it. He just accepted that God had done it. He had done it for them. That last part is important. God doesn’t step in to direct the flow of human history in supernatural ways just for fun. He does it for a purpose. He does it for the purpose of revealing Himself and His character to His people in ways that are inherently invitational. He does miracles for us, not as ends in themselves, but as means for us to know Him more. And when we are willing to see the world as it really is rather than merely as we can explain it to be, it gets a whole lot bigger. It gets a whole lot better. And all of it points consistently and insistently toward the God who made it out of His love for us, and who wants nothing more than to love us to His glory and our joy. Sometimes God simply does a miracle, and that’s a very good thing. May you know this God today.