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In the past few months I’m sure a good many of you have likely developed a new relationship with YouTube. It’s amazing the stuff you can find. Take the parting of the Red Sea. Search YouTube for the parting of the Red Sea. There’s some interesting videos. There’s Cecil B. Demille’s Moses played by Charlton Heston standing on the shore of the Red Sea with rifle in hand. There’s the Disney version from The Prince of Egypt. But, most of what you will find are some very sincere videos showing either archaeological evidence and/or scientific proof that the Red Sea parting and crossing actually happened. Yet, all of these videos seem to be working from our ingrained cultural assumption that truth can only be established upon historical or scientific validation. This assumption carries over into the world of faith by saying that the Bible can only be true if its details and “miracles” can be historically or scientifically validated and if they can’t be, then through God and everything else out with the bathwater. So, archaeologists go looking for chariot wheels in the Red Sea and find them and weather scientists note that a strong wind can part shallow waters and so forth.
I would like for us this morning to look at the story of the parting of the Red Sea from a different angle than it was a miracle that can only be true if there’s hard historical or scientific evidence. You see, the people who wrote the Bible did not have the save philosophy of truth that we have. For us, truth is in the details – get the facts, assemble them in the right order, voila, truth. For them, truth was the story. When they wrote down the stories of the Bible they didn’t think they were writing down detailed facts in a God-ordained history textbook or scientific journal. They were simply writing the stories that said who they were as God’s people.
The Red Sea crossing is a story of a foundational event that formed the identity of the Israelites as the people of God whom he delivered from slavery. It is also a story that was passed down by word of mouth for generations before anyone ever wrote it down. Moreover, the story seems to develop over the years. It was also old differently among these cousins than it was among those until finally what we have in the Bible today actually appears to be two stories of this foundational event from two different time periods combined into one.
It’s like this. Your great-great-great-grandparents had an eventful wedding back in Scotland a long time ago. The story was told every year at Thanksgiving. One year, you’re great-uncle decide to write a family history as many in the family starting moving to Canada and he included the story as it was told to him in his part of the family. Still, the story continues to be told every year at Thanksgiving. Your grandfather, not wanting to forget it and wanting something to pass to the younger generations because they are spreading all over the place now, took your great-uncle’s version that he got from his cousin and mushed it together with the story as he had heard it but neglected to mention your great-uncle’s written account as a source because your grandfather was a storyteller not a historian. Now, you’re working on an official family genealogy to be published and handed out at Thanksgiving and you have your grandfather’s account in hand not realizing it’s a mush up of two versions of the same story. That would be similar to the process of how we have come to have the stories of the first five books of the Old Testament.
For the people who wrote it down, the story crossing of the Red Sea on dry ground was a bigger story than just a historical record. It was their family’s story that told them something about their family’s nature. It says this is part of the reason we are the way we are. It is also even bigger than that because it is about something God did for them. To them, this story is the story of how their God, the God who created this good ordered world by parting the primordial waters of chaos and creating land for humans to live on had now created something new by once again parting waters, the waters of the Red Sea, to create dry ground for his people to cross over and be free from that evil resurgence of chaos that had broken forth into God’s good ordered world in the form of Pharaoh and his oppressive power. When their God drowned Pharaoh and his army in the sea, he was putting this outbreak of chaotic evil back into the primordial waters of chaos.
I’m reasonably sure you’ve never thought of this parting of the Red Sea story in quite those terms before, as a fight between God and the forces of Chaos, so I realize I’m going to have to explain myself. Brace yourselves, this is going to be different, but what we’re going to try to do is hear this story in a way that people from back around 600BC and earlier would have likely heard it.
The person or persons who wrote this story of God parting the waters of the Red Sea so his people could cross and escape Pharaoh and his armies is also the same person or persons who wrote the Creation story in Genesis 1. It also seems that this person or persons wants us to hear the Red Sea story from the perspective of the Creation story because there are some pretty awesome similarities between the two stories. Let’s dive in.
First, there’s the role of waters, wind, and darkness in the two stories. In Exodus we are told, “The LORD drove the sea back by a strong east wind all night.” We should be thinking, “Hey, that sounds like Genesis 1:1-2” which reads, “In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.” There’s water. There’s wind. There’s darkness.
I need to tell you some things about the Genesis story too. We’ve been taught the doctrine that God created everything out of nothing. The “out of nothing” part of that doctrine doesn’t come from Genesis 1. We have to look elsewhere in the Bible to find that. In Genesis 1 we see God’s creating work beginning with the primordial elements of shapelessness, darkness, and water, yes water, not nothing, but water. Reading further, we see on the first day that God in essence turns on the lights so he can see what he’s doing. He creates Light. Then God creates a big bubble in the midst of the waters. Verse 6: “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” Please note that the waters do not go away. There is just a bubble of safety, so to speak, in the midst of the waters in which God is going to bring about a good, ordered, and beautiful place for life to flourish and in which he may come to repose, to relax and enjoy its goodness.
Again the waters, the darkness, the shapelessness are not gone. In other creation stories written in the same ancient period the catchword word for those primordial things outside the bubble is chaos. They are still there outside the bubble with the possibility of being able to break in and mess stuff up. It seems that one way they find way back in is that human sin opens things up, but not always.
For an example let’s talk about Noah’s flood. Humanity had become so unrighteous that God needed to cleanse his creation of us so God causes a flood. In Noah’s flood, it didn’t just rain. It rained the primordial waters of Chaos back into the bubble and those waters also broke forth from the ground. We can’t just read the flood of Noah as a literal water flood. We have to add to that the understanding that this was also the primordial waters of Chaos form outside the big bubble pouring back in so that God’s safe and good ordered bubble was awash with the primordial waters of chaos. But yet again, just like at creation God provided a bubble of safety for Noah and his family – the Ark – and eventually God made the dry ground appear once again.
Looking back again at the Red Sea crossing and Genesis 1, a second commonality we have to note is that parting things, separating things, dividing things to create a bubble in which to bring forth firm, safe ground is the way God brings new things into existence. Genesis 1:9 reads: “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” That dry land would be where land life inclusive of humans would live and move and have their being and in the end God would come and repose with them. In like manner, in the Exodus story God gathered the waters of the Red Sea and exposed dry land for the Israelites to cross on to reach safety on the other side. They would then be free to god to the land God had promised their ancestors, the land where he would come and repose with them once his dwelling place was built.
Just a footnote here on the image of “The Sea”. In many places in the Bible “The Sea” isn’t simply a reference to the Mediterranean or Red Seas. It is a metaphor for the unknown and something to be feared. Who knows what lies in the deep, dark depths of the Sea? There are monsters in the Sea. The Sea is chaotic and can’t be controlled. God’s parting the waters of the Red Sea wasn’t simply that God was literally parting the waters of the Red Sea. (I have no problem believing God literally did that. With God all things are possible.) We also have to see here that God is also parting the waters of chaos in the primordial sea of Chaos in order to provide a bubble of safety with dry ground and a safe path for his people to cross through the Sea to get to the other side where a new good, ordered, and beautiful life awaits them in the land God had promised their ancestors.
Last week, I talked about how God by means of the Ten Plagues defeated the gods of Egypt by showing he had power over the things these particular gods were supposed to control. Here at the Red Sea, God went all out and put this outbreak of chaotic evil, which came into the bubble by means of idolatry, power mongering and greed and embodied in Pharaoh and his army, back into the realm of the waters of Chaos where they belonged, the waters outside of the bubble that he created for us to live in and for him to repose among us.
Just to wind this down and maybe even have a point, we are now living in a time when it seems that Chaos has yet again broken into the bubble. This Pandemic caused 100% by human lifestyle has us on edge. American politics has us on edge. There are so many fearful things we can be anxious about. But, you know, there is a bubble we can go to where we can meet God on the safety of dry ground and find rest – the daily discipline of a devotional life.
There’s simply taking the time to sit and be aware of God’s presence with us. I’ve talked before of setting up a chair in the room and let that be where God sits. Sooner or later, you will get a sense that God has come to you there. Your reaction to God’s presence may be just to start crying or burst out with anger at God or a profound sense of thankfulness. God is there to be with us. Talk to him. Get whatever you got on your chest off your chest; even if you’re livid angry at God. God’s a big kid. God can handle our anger at him. God will take tthat anger and move us forward from there. There’s also taking the time to read the Scriptures everyday listening for God to speak to you. There’s keeping a prayer list and praying daily for the people on it.
Take the time to walk the solid, dry ground that God provides by spending time with God. You’ll find God is parting the waters of this present outbreak of Chaos and leading us to a new thing that he is creating. Amen.
