“He threw Pharaoh’s chariots and his army into the sea; the elite of his officers were drowned in the Red Sea. The floods covered them; they sank to the depths like a stone. Lord, your right hand is glorious in power. Lord, your right hand shattered the enemy. You overthrew your adversaries by your great majesty. You unleashed your burning wrath; it consumed them like stubble. The water heaped up at the blast from your nostrils; the currents stood firm like a dam. The watery depths congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy said: ‘I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil. My desire will be gratified at their expense. I will draw my sword; my hand will destroy them.’ But you blew with your breath, and the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever had an experience that was more profound or more exciting or even more terrible than you could adequately describe in words? Sometimes simply telling a story is just not enough to do it justice. On these occasions, poetry has the power to do what prose cannot. The second stanza of Israel’s song of praise after making it through the Red Sea is basically a recap of what happened. Have you ever wondered what it would have been like to have actually been there? Let’s take a look at this next part and find out together.

What this part of Israel’s song of praise offers is a couple of different perspectives on what happened. The first perspective is a God’s-eye-view of the whole thing. God was the one ultimately responsible for everything that happened. God did not make the Egyptian army chase Israel into the Red Sea, but He knew that they would. He knew their hearts. As He told Moses before any of the action unfolded, He was going to harden their hearts. That was what was so challenging about the whole episode. But as we talked about, all that meant was that God got out of the way of their own violent desires. He didn’t have to push them to do anything at all. He simply didn’t restrain their sinful impulses. He allowed them to pursue their heart’s desire. The effect was so successful, His plans were so on point, that it was like He just threw them into the sea. The whole lot of them drowned, from the lowly infantryman to the most elite officer. The waters were not discerning.

Speaking of their drowning, that’s what the next part focuses in on. Once again, the imagery here is not literal. Poetry like this rarely is. Verse 5 itself is internally contradictory. It first says rightly that the floods, or waters of the sea, simply covered the Egyptian forces. In the second part of the couplet, though, it says they “sank to the depths like a stone.” How could they sink if they were covered? As I said before, this is all just Israel trying to wrap their minds around what happened and give word to what they saw. This is just a poetic way of expressing the fact that they all drowned. In their shock and relief at the whole thing, they are repeating themselves.

And indeed, in vv. 6-7 they repeat the same idea a third and fourth time but with different images. When we see various songs in the Scriptures talking about God’s right arm, this is an image of His strength and power. God’s arm shattered the Egyptian army, which is of course nonsense literally speaking. But we aren’t speaking literally. They picture God here both as doing something active (shattering the enemy forces), and as simply showing up and the whole battle was over before it started (overthrowing them by His great majesty).

On this second image, when John describes the great final battle between Satan’s forces and the people of God on the back side of Christ’s millennial kingdom in Revelation 20, there’s all this build up about the epic conflict about to unfold…and then it never happens. Jesus shows up and the whole thing is over before it starts. We are often tempted to imagine that in the spiritual conflict between light and darkness that darkness actually has a chance, that it is going to be able to mount a meaningful resistance to the light. It won’t. It can’t. God’s power is unopposable. Egypt really didn’t understand who they were dealing with.

In v. 7, then, we switch to a fiery metaphor which is just silly. This whole thing took place in the context of water. But the destruction of Egypt’s army was so thorough that it was like an intense forest fire burning through the underbrush of a forest. The fire is so hot that the stubble on the ground is consumed before the flames even arrive. Egypt never stood a chance.

Verse 8 changes things up a bit. Israel shifts their focus around to the waters themselves. Even though they watched Moses raise his hands as the trigger for the waters to pile up and crash back down, there was never any question that God was responsible for what happened. The imagery here is hilarious. I remember playing in a little creek one time when I was growing up. We were doing our best to dam up the thing. We built as thick and sturdy a wall of rocks and dirt as we could, but no matter how hard we tried, we couldn’t keep all the water from seeping through. Now, something like the Hoover Dam on Lake Meade stops the water up, but it does so at the expense of one of the single largest building projects our nation ever produced. It took an enormous amount of effort.

When God stopped up the waters of the Red Sea, though, it wasn’t even hard for Him. He did it “at the blast from your nostrils.” Well, when do you get a blast from your nostrils? How about when you sneeze? God is so powerful that all it took for Him to dam up the ocean was a sneeze. He blew His nose and “the currents stood firm like a dam.”

In the next verse, the scene shifts from everything God was doing to how the Egyptian army was reacting to it. Their whole mindset was one of destruction and violence. They were focused entirely on their power and what they were going to accomplish. They were so focused on this that they lost all their senses of logic and reason. What on earth could carve a dry path through the sea wide enough for a nation of up to 6 million people to cross over the course of a single night? Nothing. There is no force on earth powerful enough for such a thing to happen. Yet when the clouds cleared in the early morning and Egypt saw the divided sea and the remnants of Israel’s people making their way across it, they rushed headlong in after them.

They never once stopped to think, “If this path opened up for Israel to escape, it is probably something that their God has done. And if this is something their God has done, what are the chances He is going to hold the doors open long enough for us to catch up to them to destroy them as we plan?” All they sought was destruction. And so they received it. Just not in the way they planned.

That is where this stanza ends. Just when they had gotten into the sea, when they were fully surrounded by the waters walled up on either side of them, God blew one more time and the whole thing collapsed. They were covered. They sank like lead (which, of course, they didn’t, but that’s the beauty of poetry).

Some experiences go beyond what words can really capture. Israel had been delivered in a way they were still having trouble imaging. All they could do was to do their best to describe it. That’s what we have here. Sometimes God acts on our behalf in ways we can’t explain. We can only do our best to describe it. This is hard for us because we are a kind of people who like to be able to put labels on our experiences. We like to be able to give names to things and by that take control of them. But God is beyond us. Sometimes He will leave us breathless in awe and wonder and that’s okay. When you are with Him, let Him set the tone and the pace. Things will always be better that way.