The sea will
make way
They are out. After four hundred years, after ten plagues, after a night of blood on the doorframe, after Pharaoh’s own voice said go the Israelites are walking out of Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of them. With their children. With their livestock. With the silver and gold and clothing the Egyptians pressed into their hands on the way out. They are leaving.
And God leads them. Not by the shortest route the coast road would have been faster. He takes them the long way, through the wilderness toward the Red Sea. Because the short road goes through Philistine territory, and God says: if they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt. He knows them before they know themselves. He routes around the thing that would have broken them before they were ready for it.
The Sea will make way
They are out. After four hundred years, after ten plagues, after a night of blood on the doorframe, after Pharaoh’s own voice said go the Israelites are walking out of Egypt. Hundreds of thousands of them. With their children. With their livestock. With the silver and gold and clothing the Egyptians pressed into their hands on the way out. They are leaving.
And God leads them. Not by the shortest route the coast road would have been faster. He takes them the long way, through the wilderness toward the Red Sea. Because the short road goes through Philistine territory, and God says: if they face war, they might change their minds and return to Egypt. He knows them before they know themselves. He routes around the thing that would have broken them before they were ready for it.
God does not always take you the most direct route. Sometimes the long way is the mercy. The road that looks like delay may be the road that keeps you from a battle you are not yet equipped to win. Trust the route He chose.
He leads them by a pillar of cloud in the day and a pillar of fire at night. The presence of God made visible. Navigable. You never had to wonder which way to go you just followed the cloud. And it never left them. The pillar of cloud did not disappear at night to be replaced by fire. Both were present. The text says neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people.
God’s guidance does not take breaks. He does not lead you into the wilderness and then leave you to navigate the night alone. The fire and the cloud are both always there. Sometimes you see Him differently in different seasons but He has not moved.
And then Pharaoh changes his mind. What have we done? We have let the Israelites go and have lost their services. He takes six hundred of the best chariots in Egypt, plus all the other chariots, plus officers over all of them, and they pursue. They catch up with the Israelites at the sea.
The Israelites look up and there is the Egyptian army. Behind them: six hundred chariots. In front of them: the sea. And they do what terrified people have done since the beginning: they cry out. And then they turn on Moses.
“Was it because there were no graves in Egypt
that you brought us to the desert to die?”
— Exodus 14:11
