A Road Where No Road Was

Hemmed in — that is Israel's trap on the shore of the Red Sea. The water ahead is too wide to cross; Pharaoh's chariots are closing behind; every road ends in the sea or back in Egypt. Israel would rather have the chains than a God it cannot manage: "Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians" (Exodus 14:12). Into that panic Moses says the one thing no trapped people expects: do nothing. "Fear not, stand firm, and see the salvation of the LORD, which he will work for you today … The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to be silent" (Exodus 14:13–14). A breath later: "Tell the people of Israel to go forward" (Exodus 14:15) — stand firm, go forward: two halves of one command. Stillness is what gets their feet moving.

They are on that shore because, generations earlier, God had "heard their groaning" and "remembered his covenant" (Exodus 2:24) — and that remembering is no passive thought but covenant faithfulness that moves to rescue. The rescue, when it comes, is strange: God hands them no weapons. He splits the sea.

Moses stretches out his hand, a wind blows all night, and the water stands up. "The people of Israel went into the midst of the sea on dry ground, the waters being a wall to them on their right hand and on their left" (Exodus 14:22). A dry road where no road was, the sea held back like a held breath. They walked across the floor of the thing meant to drown them and came up free, the waters closing behind them.

This is how Scripture teaches us to read salvation long before we reach a cross. The night before, blood had been brushed on the doorposts and the LORD had passed through Egypt; now the sea obeyed him too, and all Israel brought was their feet and their fear. The LORD saved Israel that day (Exodus 14:30) — saved, a verb done to them, not by them.

Centuries on, Moses came back — on a mountain with Jesus — to speak of "his departure, which he was about to accomplish at Jerusalem" (Luke 9:31). The word underneath departure is exodus — the first a pattern waiting to be filled. At the Red Sea the waters drew back; the greater exodus runs the other way. To cut a road home, the Deliverer did not command the sea from the shore — he went down into it. Not a wall of water but the full weight of the judgment our rescue required closed over him at the cross, and no wind came to hold it back; he came up three days later. A psalmist found language roomy enough for that crossing: "Your way was through the sea, your path through the great waters; yet your footprints were unseen" (Psalm 77:19).

Which leaves us where Israel stood — hemmed in, reaching for a weapon, sure that if we do not fix this no one will. We cannot bear to be saved by someone we do not control. Beneath the grip is the fear that whatever has us, if we let go, will not be kind. Only a cross answers that: the one asking us to let go went under the water in our place.

The deliverance is already worked; we have only to stop, trust God's promises and walk the road he opened. Less a stillness we perform than a rescue we see: Israel saw what the LORD had done, feared him and believed (Exodus 14:31), and the next sound out of them was a song (Exodus 15:1). What weapon is in our hand this morning, and what would standing still with it look like before noon?

Many of us have prayed all night at a sea that never opened. For those seas, the promise is not a dry road but a Deliverer who went down ahead of us and came up. We are not asked to part the waters, only to come to the edge and find him waiting where we were sure we would drown.