“The Egyptians set out in pursuit – all Pharaoh’s horses, his chariots, and his horsemen – and went into the sea after them. During the morning watch, the Lord looked down at the Egyptian forces from the pillar of fire and cloud, and threw the Egyptian forces into confusion. He caused their chariot wheels to swerve and made them drive with difficulty. ‘Let’s get away from Israel,’ the Egyptians said, ‘because the Lord is fighting for them against Egypt!’ Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand over the sea so that the water may come back on the Egyptians, on their chariots and horsemen.’ So Mose stretched out his hand over the sea, and at daybreak the sea returned to its normal depth. While the Egyptians were trying to escape from it, the Lord threw them into the sea. The water came back and covered the chariots and horsemen, plus the entire army of Pharaoh that had gone after them into the sea. Not even one of them survived.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I was on the Scholar’s Bowl team when I was in high school. Imagine little jeopardy competitions but without the answers needing to be in the form of a question. It was a ton of fun. (Yes, I know, I was a nerd.) But while I was pretty good at knowing or otherwise coming up with an answer in my areas of specialty (science, culture, and random, useless knowledge), what I struggled with was being fast enough on the buzzer. Knowing the answer was one thing. Knowing the answer and then buzzing in fast enough to beat the other team was another. You didn’t get any points if you buzzed in late. As the Egyptians chased after Israel into the dry seabed of the Red Sea, they realized they had made a mistake. Unfortunately, for them, they realized this too late. Let’s talk about what’s going on here.

We’ll come back to our culture’s thoughts on the Egyptian army in this story in just a second. Right now, try to imagine what the average Israelite was feeling as they walked across the dry seabed. Imagine the wonder and gratitude that I certainly hope they were feeling. Or maybe not. Maybe the terror of being overtaken and killed by the pursuing Egyptian forces was still overwhelming their senses. As far as they knew, they were running for their lives. If the Egyptian forces had caught up with them, the devastation they were going to unleash would have been catastrophic.

This is our great challenge when interacting with this story. We have to see it through the lens of the people who first experienced it and the generations after them who had it recited to them as part of their treasured history as a people. If we read it through a modern lens that is framed with an eye toward a general skepticism of everything, but especially the judgment of God on anyone, we are not going to be able to make positive sense out of what is going on here.

Through that lens, what happens here is that God bullies the poor, innocent Egyptian forces by tricking them into following the Israelites and then gleefully drowning the whole lot of them. If God was really the just and loving God we see more clearly revealed in the New Testament, He would have never done something like this. We can only conclude one of two things. Either the God described in the Old Testament is not the same as the God described in the New Testament as many critics have alleged over the centuries, or else God’s character isn’t actually what those Christians have been alleging all along. When we read this story through a cultural lens, we are left with the impression that it is a tragedy.

The truth, however, is that it’s not.

As we have already talked about both in this post and in previous posts on this chapter over the past couple of weeks, the Egyptians were the bad guys here. They were not merely innocent participants in an international dispute into which God unfairly and unjustly chose to insert Himself to tip the balance scales in the direction of one side at the expense of the other. They had been oppressing the Israelites for multiple generations in slavery. They had actively sought to commit an act of genocide against Israelite baby boys as a means of population control. The Israelites were the victims from start to finish.

What’s more, the Israelites hadn’t committed any acts of aggression against Egypt this whole time. It was God who was doing all the work. And, the Egyptians had the opportunity to freely choose other than this particular path at any point along this journey. Had Pharaoh simply complied with Moses’ original request, none of this would have happened in the first place. After the waters turned to blood, they could have said, “Nope, we’re out. We’re dealing with forces beyond what we can meaningfully oppose. We’re just going to let them go and figure it out from there.” After the vicious hailstorm finally cost Egyptian lives rather than just making their lives miserable, they could have stopped the whole thing by letting the people go. Even after the final plague that was so devastating, they could have stuck with their decision to see the Israelites to the door. But they didn’t. They chose to pursue with the intent to kill. They chose to follow them into the sea.

And again, just think about that one for another second here. Just as they were getting close enough to see the Israelites on the horizon, a gigantic cloud descended on them to effectively thwart their progress through the night. The cloud final clears in the first light of the next morning, when the dawn was still gray. When it does, they can see the Israelites have mostly crossed to the other side of the Red Sea in between two giant walls of water, on the dry seabed. Now, if you were an Egyptian commander, whose thinking was fully shaped by the thoroughly supernatural worldview of the time, what would your thought be?

Sure, a supernatural cloud dropped down on us from out of nowhere, and our going has been a lot harder than it should have been, and the people we are pursuing with the intent to decimate and enslave are crossing the sea on the dry ground between two giant walls of water, but surely these things all just happened, and it will be totally safe for us to chase after them through the walls of water. There’s no way those walls are going to drop down until we are safely on the other side where we can continue our pursuit and conquest.

In the third and fourth Thor movies, toward the beginning of each film and for comedic effect, there are a couple of scenes in which the Asgardians have produced plays to commemorate recent victories they have experienced. They are highly stylized and over-dramatized. They wildly overexaggerate both the heroism of the heroes and the villainy of the villains. They are intended not merely to celebrate, but to entertain and amuse the audiences. The reality of the two tales they tell was horrible to actually live. By these melodramatic retellings, they rejoice in the victories they have won without making those who lived through them relive the horrors they experienced then.

I can imagine that in the years after God parted the Red Sea and destroyed the Egyptian army, the people of Israel told and retold this tale along the same lines as the Asgardians. As they got to the part where the wheels of the chariots started to swerve, and the Egyptians finally realized that Israel’s God was fighting for them, the people started to laugh. And when the waters crashed back down, they all cheered and hooted and hollered with uproarious delight. They were thoroughly amused by the clueless Egyptians who thought they could tangle with the God of Israel. They couldn’t. And then He dropped the ocean on them.

Yet none of this made them somehow callous or bloodthirsty. They were the delighted victims of an intended slaughter from which they had no means of escape until their God acted on their behalf; something the Egyptians had already seen happen over and over again yet were somehow dumb enough to assume that this time would be different. The Israelites laughed at the insanity of their enemies; at the insanity of someone thinking they could defeat their God. It’s like the climax scenes of the various Home Alone movies. The things that happen to the bad guys are objectively horrible. But because they are villains who are receiving the just desserts of their intended villainy, we are freed to laugh at them with impunity.

When we go back and read this story all these years later, we should read it in the same terms. When the news broke several years ago that Osama bin Laden had been killed, there were spontaneous celebrations all over the country. As a nation we were delighting in his death. Did that make us bloodthirsty or unjust? Not at all. A man who had overseen the murder of several thousand of our citizens had been delivered over to justice. That was something worth being happy about.

It’s the same thing here. The Egyptians were the moral monsters who were delivered over to their just end. We can read this story and without a shred of guilt delight in the fact that we serve a God who acts on behalf of the persecuted and oppressed to bring justice to those who were opposing them. He has done it before; He will yet do it again. We can serve Him with humble fearlessness and loving boldness just like Jesus and the early disciples did because we know that He will act to avenge all wrongs committed against us for our efforts when the time is right. He is a God of justice and love. That makes Him worthy of our devotion.