Israel in Egypt

“And they sing the song of Moses the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvellous are thy works, Lord God Almighty; just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints.” Revelation 15:3

Suggested Further Reading: Exodus 15:1-18

One part of the song of Moses consisted in praising the ease with which God destroyed his enemies. “Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them; they sank as lead in the mighty waters.” If we had gone to work to destroy the hosts of Pharaoh, what a multitude of engines of death should we have required. If the work had been committed to us, to cut off the hosts, what marvellous preparations, what thunder, what noise, what great activity there would have been. But mark the grandeur of the expression. God did not even lift himself from his throne to do it: he saw Pharaoh coming; he seemed to look upon him with a placid smile; he did just blow with his lips, and the sea covered them. You and I will marvel at the last how easy it has been to overthrow the enemies of the Lord. We have been tugging and toiling all our lifetime to be the means of overthrowing systems of error: it will astonish the church when her Master shall come to see how, as the ice dissolveth before the fire, all error and sin shall be utterly destroyed in the coming of the most High. We must have our societies and our machinery, our preachers and our gatherings, and rightly too; but God will not require them at the last. The destruction of his enemies shall be as easy to him as the making of a world. In passive silence unmoved he sat; and he did but break the silence with “Let there be light” and light was. So shall he at the last, when his enemies are raging furiously, blow with his winds, and they shall be scattered.

For meditation: Creation took God a matter of a few days; the destruction of a great power will take him only a fraction of the time (Revelation 18:8,10,17,19).

Sermon no. 136
14 June (1857)