All Night

Then Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and the LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night and made the sea dry land, and the waters were divided. And 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 14:21-22 ESV)

The children of Israel were in a bad spot. They were just a bunch of slaves who had been released by their captors, only to be accused of escaping and pursued by the mighty army of the nation of Egypt. Behind them was that army, camping out, presumably to either recapture or slaughter them in the morning. In front of them, sure, was the supernatural cloud from God which they had been following, but there was also an impassable expanse of water. The proverbial "rock and a hard place" scenario. The people were caving in with fear; the only thing holding them together was the reassuring voice of Moses saying that God was going to save them. Then God told Moses to do something. Moses was to hold up his arms over the water, and divide it so they could cross. God reassuringly and protectively moved his cloud between the Egyptians and the Israelites, and Moses held up his hands, and the wind began to blow.

The wind began to blow? What about parting the sea? All we get is a moving cloud and wind?

Look back at the Scripture passage I quoted above. The wind blew all night. It doesn't even say if Moses held up his hands all night; maybe he held up his hands, felt the wind, and then went to bed. But maybe not... it might have been quite a rough night for the Israelites. I found a news item about a researcher who, using computers, estimated that it would have taken something like a 63 mile-per-hour wind to do this. A gale-force wind, blowing all night. I wonder if that seemed like an improvement to the Israelites?

The wind is strong and the water's deep
But I'm not alone here in these open seas
Cause Your love never fails

The chasm is far too wide
I never thought I'd reach the other side
But Your love never fails

This year my family has been going through some difficult challenges... we've moved to a new town and have been trying to repair and sell our old house. Just moving from one place to another is a big job, but then contracting out the repairs and putting the house on the market brought another whole set of challenges and responsibilities. On top of that, last summer I had an unusually intense period of high-profile projects that needed completing at work. It's been difficult, and frankly, it's still difficult; although things have wound down a little bit, the house is still not sold, and some of those workplace projects are still ongoing. There's a lot to be anxious about, a lot to be stressed about. In the wake of all that, a few days ago I was running on the treadmill and listening to the new Newsboys CD, God's Not Dead, which contains the song I've quoted in this post (it's called "Your Love Never Fails"). And that particular morning something occurred to me.

Just because the seas don't part immediately doesn't mean that God isn't working a miracle.

Take yourself back to that story about Moses. Imagine you are a frightened ex-slave. A ferocious army is within attack distance; you can't see them because of a cloud, but you know they're there. If you don't get across the Red Sea, they're going to re-enslave or kill you. You can't swim it; you don't have a boat. You want God to create a bridge! You want him to send you dry land! And what does He send? A windstorm. All night you suffer through a steady 63 MPH wind. Is this what you asked for? Is this what Moses was crying out for? We need a boat, not a cloud and a hurricane!


What God was giving them became one of the most spectacular, famous miracles of God in history. But it must not have felt like a very good miracle at the time. It may have even felt like God had left them, or was actively punishing them. But God was working in their behalf, parting the sea so that the land they walked on would be nice and dry. God was rolling out the red carpet for His people, and when they had partaken of His salvation, He was going to use the same miracle to completely eliminate the threat to their safety by drowning the Egyptian army.

You stay the same through the ages
Your love never changes
There may be pain in the night but joy comes in the morning

And when the oceans rage
I don't have to be afraid
Because I know that You love me
Your love never fails

The next time it feels like you're trapped between an impassable see and an undefeatable army in a 63 MPH windstorm all night, remember: God may be parting the Red Sea for you!

Friend of God

Who am I that You are mindful of me,
That You hear me when I call?
Is it true that You are thinking of me,
How You love me... it's amazing!

I am a friend of God! He calls me friend!

Back several years ago when my wife and I were in the worship choir at church, this song was the new thing, and we sang it quite frequently. It's a joyful, upbeat song; it's a fun one to sing. We sang it this past weekend at a marriage conference I went to with my wife, and it brought back some fun memories of those days. I remember we used to joke that the actual lyric is "...He calls me Fred" ...but we never sang it that way in church (not intentionally, at least!)

I also remember once our worship leader saying that she had actually received flak for the lyric. "Friend," the objection goes, is apparently too familiar of a term to use for God. When I heard her say that I immediately recognized that as a ridiculous objection which stems from a lack of actual knowledge of what the Bible says. What? That was what you were thinking? Let me show you from the Bible that God actually does call human beings His friend. I can think of an example from each testament right off the top of my head.

Old Testament: Abraham

    But you, Israel, my servant,
        Jacob, whom I have chosen,
        the offspring of Abraham, my friend... -Isaiah 41:8 ESV

Did you not, our God, drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel, and give it forever to the descendants of Abraham your friend? 2 Chronicles 20:7 ESV

Obviously it was common knowledge back then that God said Abraham was His friend. It should be common knowledge to Christians now, because there is also a New Testament verse that says so (probably the inspiration, along with Psalm 8:4, for the song):

You see that faith was active along with his works, and faith was completed by his works; and the Scripture was fulfilled that says, “Abraham believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness”—and he was called a friend of God. -James 2:22-23 ESV

Bonus Old Testament friend of God's: Moses. "Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. When Moses turned again into the camp, his assistant Joshua the son of Nun, a young man, would not depart from the tent." -Exodus 33:11 ESV

But, weren't Abraham and Moses special cases? Surely not just ANYBODY can be a "friend of God," right? Just those special people. Is that what you think? Well, let me remind you of:

New Testament: Disciples

“This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you." -John 15:12-15 ESV

In His farewell speech to His disciples, Jesus very specifically told them that they were His friends. Not His "servants," He told them, but His "friends." The disciples were far from special; they were a bunch of miscellaneous fishermen and other laypeople that Jesus had gathered around Him. And it's pretty likely that you believe, as I do, that Jesus' discourse here was intended not only for those present, but for all of us disciples of Christ which were to come (apparently the Apostle John felt the same way, or else he probably wouldn't have recorded it in such length). If you read through the rest of the discourse, you will find things that Christians have applied to themselves throughout the centuries. The gift of the Holy Spirit. The promise of Heaven. Being branches of the True Vine. Hatred of the World for Christians. All of these things we have applied to ourselves through the years; why not the simple friendship of God?

Pentateuch

Last night my Read the Bible in a Year reading took me through the last chapters of Deuteronomy, which means that for the first time in my life, I have now read all the way straight through the first five books of the Bible! I can't say there was anything there that I wasn't aware of already... decades of reading the books in pieces and sitting through church services and Sunday school classes took care of that... but I can say I did take away some valuable things from the experience.

• I gained an understanding of and new appreciation for the structure and artistry of the Pentateuch. I already knew that the first five books of the Bible were considered sort of a unit or collection, and I already knew that scholars generally consider them to have been written almost entirely by Moses (it's unlikely, for example, that Moses penned the sentence "So Moses the servant of the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord", but he probably wrote almost all of the rest of it!), but I never understood just how important the five books are to each other. Basically, they are the story of the birth of the nation of Israel; all five of them relate to that.
  
  Genesis is like a prequel; it tells not only how humans got here in the first place, but why a "set apart" nation was required (rampant sin which kept messing everything up), how that nation got started (one guy, Abram/Abraham, who trusted God), and how they wound up in Egypt in slavery when God had promised them their own land (the story of Joseph).
  
  Exodus is where the rubber meets the road; Moses is born in the initial chapters (I learned something quite interesting when reading this part!) and we see the new displaced nation of Israel, born in slavery (just like every member of the human race is born in slavery) freed from bondage to Egypt and released by God to travel to their own country. It's an epic story that has inspired people throughout history. It is also the book where Moses first finds out how to build the tent version of the Tabernacle, which later was built in a permanent form as the Jerusalem Temple.
  
  Leviticus is where God first gives the new nation of Israel the bulk of its laws. The Ten Commandments have already been given for the first time in Exodus 20, but the bulk of the laws about sacrifices, feasts, and basic human conduct are given here. This makes for dry reading at times, but it is critical to the overall story.
  
  Numbers starts out with a census right after Israel leaves Egypt, tells the story of how they did not make it into the Promised Land because they did not trust God, tells us about their wandering in the wilderness, and ends with another census, right before the second generation enters the Promised Land. A perfect demonstration of how distrusting what God says, what His Word says, can leave you spinning your wheels for a lifetime.
  
  Deuteronomy is largely Moses' final address of Israel before he dies and they enter the Promised Land without him (I had some interesting thoughts about this part, too). Interestingly, a big hunk of what Moses told them was the same laws that were already detailed in Leviticus! Some of them have a slightly different nuance in this version, but it's a lot of the same stuff. Lesson learned: we need to hear God's Word over and over, and each generation needs to hear from God for themselves.
  
  
• I gained a much greater respect for the person Moses. I don't think I ever truly grasped how amazing a man he really was. How would you like to try to lead two million griping, complaining people around a desert for forty years? The guy must have been made of some good stuff! He has got to be one of the most influential figures in history; the laws he received from God and recorded, and his story, are known just about everywhere, because he somehow made the time, in the middle of leading all of those people, to write the whole thing down. Amazing!
  
  
• I learned how important these five books are to Jewish culture. Almost everything they did and still do from a ceremonial standpoint comes from these books. The major festivals, the sacrifices, even the construction of the temple and their eventual geographical locations within the Promised Land all comes back to these books. Without them, the Old Testament doesn't even make sense. With them, sometimes you understand things in the Old Testament that didn't make sense before... an easy example would be that until you understand the Mosaic laws they were operating under, the situation between Ruth and Boaz in the book of Ruth doesn't make any sense. I ran across several moments like that during my read-through. For example, Gideon sending home men in his army who were afraid makes a lot more sense when you realize that God had codified this as standard practice in the book of Deuteronomy.
  
  
• I realized how important the Pentateuch is to the New Testament. If you know your New Testament well (or if you have a good commentary or study Bible) you will recognize many, many times where the Pentateuch is quoted in the New Testament. In particular I was struck with how many times Jesus quoted from Deuteronomy, but there are references to it all over the New Testament, and I'm not only talking about the obvious ones like the discussion about Abraham in Romans 4. These five books form the bedrock of the Jewish religion, and thus of Christianity as well.

I was actually quite surprised at how much I got out of reading the Pentateuch. I learned, I was often entertained - sometimes even laughing out loud at the funny parts - and yes, occasionally I came across parts that left me collossally bored. Would I recommend reading this to any adult Christian? Yes. There are some parts that are frankly a little bit racy for very young children (!), but Christians need to have the knowledge they can gain from these books. If you don't have a good commentary or reference book or software, may I recommend the ESV Study Bible? It can help you get through the weird parts, and it will help you spot things that you might not notice on your own. You can get a pretty good deal on one at ChristianBook.com, or check at your favorite Bible store.

I wouldn't trade this trip through the Bible for anything!

Moses Said So

"Behold," said Moses to the children of Israel, "you are today as numerous as the stars of heaven."

This is what I read in Deuteronomy chapter one last night as I continued in my Read the Bible in a Year program. Most of Deuteronomy is a series of long speeches Moses delivered to the Israelites just before Moses died and Israel began in earnest their conquest of the Promised Land.

When I read that sentence last night, I automatically did some quick calculations. So far I've read everything in the Bible up to that point, and my razor-sharp brain reminded me that the people of Israel were actually counted twice in the book of Numbers, or at least the number of able-bodied warriors were counted. The first time there were 603,550 warriors (a number which was also mentioned in Exodus before that), and the second time there were 601,730 warriors. Commentators estimate that if you add in women, children, and men who were unable to fight, the nation of Israel at that time must have consisted of something like two million people total.

A quick Google search reveals that modern scientists, on the other hand, estimate that there are in the neighborhood of 100 thousand million stars in the Milky Way galaxy alone. Seems like Moses maybe estimated things a little bit short.

Then something else caught my eye. Moses was relating story points that had occurred back in Exodus, and kept referring to the people as "you". "You" were delivered from Egypt, "you" received the Law from Sinai, "you" were too frightened to enter and take the Promised Land. In fact, in one place Moses takes pains to let them know he is talking about those in his presence as he was speaking: "Not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with us, who are all of us here alive today." The only problem is that none of that had happened to the people he was addressing! All of those events had happened 40 years before, to their parents, who at this point were all dead. Again, Moses loses points for accuracy.

Or does he? Moses was giving a passionate motivational speech, alternately reminding Israel to live according to God's laws and reminding them of God's promises, and certainly Moses was alluding to God's promise to Abraham, not actually counting stars. He wanted the people he had been leading all of those years to be emotionally prepared to fearlessly do what God had called them to do: enter the land promised to them by God, and take it. Reminding them of God's promises, remembering what God had done for them as a nation, those were part of him emphasizing to them that as a nation, God had been with them. His "you" was referring to the nation of Israel. The current batch of persons had inherited the promises given to their forefathers, but they had inherited the character flaws as well, and Moses wanted to remind them of both facts.

But why did Moses choose to use untruth to do so? The fact is, the Bible is truth, and Moses' speeches were also truth, but Moses wasn't speaking as a scientist... he was speaking as a passionate encourager, as a poet. "As numerous as the stars of heaven" is hyperbole meant to indicate that they were a vast nation. "You" repeated over and over in a history lesson about parents and forefathers is meant to identify them with their own history. A scientist might say that Moses' speech had elements of fiction or exaggeration in it, and so it was not entirely true. A poet would say that his speech had elements of hyperbole and identification with history in it, and thus it was transcendent and more true than plain vanilla facts would be.

Now, let's rewind a little. Okay, let's rewind a lot. Most Bible scholars believe that Moses was the author of almost every word of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. That means that Moses wrote the book of Genesis, right? Now, we've determined that Moses was predisposed to mold the historical facts a little bit to make a spiritual point. Let's think about some of the things Moses reported in the book of Genesis that seem amazing to us today:

1. The entire universe created in six morning-to-evening days
2. Water covering the entire surface of the world, including the highest mountain peaks
3. People thinking they could build a building so high that they could reach God with it (and God being nervous that they would succeed)
4. A city destroyed by a rainstorm of fire, and a woman's body changed instantly to salt

Now, I am of the opinion that things in the Bible should be taken at face value unless there is evidence that they are intended to be taken figuratively, and in my opinion, it's entirely possible that those things could have happened exactly as reported. But knowing Moses for the poet he was, I think we should also remain open to people who think that some of his writing may have a figurative element to it. That would not make the Bible any less truth; in some ways, it would add to the truth by inspiring in us the emotional reaction to God, the sense of wonder and awe, that we should have anyway. And in a story that is ultimately about God's relationship to us, that would be an even greater truth.