5: The Red Sea

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Season 2, episode 5. We are continuing our Lessons from the Wilderness series. Hello, Father.

[00:07] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:09] Stephanie: You just made me laugh right before we went live.

[00:12] Marcus: Yeah, we have fun. Camera. Okay.

[00:17] Stephanie: Oh, my goodness. You know what else is really fun? Next week you have a book releasing, a very exciting book.

[00:26] Marcus: Yeah, this is pretty cool. My last two books, A Deeper Walk, and now this one, Breakthrough. And the subtitle is Five Essential Strategies for Freedom, Healing and Wholeness. And both of these books, kind of what they have in common, are a summary of my life’s work, if you will. I mean, they’re a summary of the big picture that brings everything together.

A Deeper Walk brings the whole discipleship picture together in one place, and Breakthrough is meant to bring the whole emotional healing journey together in one place. This is the book that’s going to look into the five engines that drive emotions and what the strategies are that we need to employ in dealing with those five engines.

It’s a book inspired by a lot of conversations with people in addiction recovery, especially people looking for a breakthrough in areas where they feel stuck, where they feel like, “I’m never going to get through this. What’s the path? Why am I still stuck after all the things I’ve tried?” So I think it’s going to be an encouragement to a lot of people and hopefully give them kind of a checklist of things to go through to say, “Okay, well, I haven’t tried that. I have done this. Maybe I need to do some more with that.”

[01:50] Stephanie: It is pretty epic, and you all listening, you still have time to preorder. We’ve got a preorder campaign going on. That is fun. Check out my Monday email communications and social media. And then also we want to invite you to a free webinar on release day, which is March 5. And dad will be talking more about Breakthrough and it’ll be a good time. So you are invited.

And with that, icebreaker, morning or afternoon coffee?

[02:29] Marcus: Yeah, it just changes what kind of coffee basically. The morning tends to be a little more straightforward coffee and the afternoon, way more foo-foo coffee.

[02:39] Stephanie: You just need some stimulation as you are working on projects and stuff.

[02:43] Marcus: Yes.

[02:44] Stephanie: All right, well, last episode… I guess I have to answer. I’m just all excited.

[02:50] Marcus: Too much coffee today?

[02:51] Stephanie: I have had a lot of coffee today. I feel like I’m more of an afternoon coffee person. I enjoy morning coffee, but I’m usually looking for it in the afternoon more.

All right, last episode, we started getting into the topic of salvation. We were talking about the Passover, and that was kind of the salvation/rescue story number one. And today we’re getting into rescue story number two, which is the Red Sea. To this day, people say, “Oh, that was a Red Sea moment!” I’m specifically thinking about The Chosen right now. They have a lot of Red Sea moments. That’s something we say anyway. So tell us more. Give us an introduction to the Red Sea moment.

[03:42] Marcus: Yes, this parting of the Red Sea has been in a lot of movies, and we tend to see this picture of Moses throwing his arms out, and then dramatically, the water is just sort of parting, and the whole ocean is parted in 30 seconds. We don’t read through the text that this was apparently an hours long process.

It says he held his staff out over the water, and an east wind began to blow. And it blew, it says, all night long and parted the water, which I think is helpful, too, because even that speaks a little bit to the idea that God doesn’t necessarily do things instantaneously. There is often a process to it. There are a lot of elements of this story that are just kind of fascinating, and there are a lot of details here that are worth unpacking. So, looking forward to getting into a little bit.

[04:44] Stephanie: I know when we were talking about it, we were like, “Why did Pharaoh, if it was going on all night, why did he just sit there?” And I was just wondering if there was some delusion on his part, of wondering if he associated it with Yahweh or if he associated it with his own gods. What was going on there?

[05:03] Marcus: It’s a very realistic proposal. The text does say that his heart was hardened, and that all the Egyptians had their hearts hardened, which, as we saw in an earlier episode, means that’s the first act of judgment. It doesn’t mean that God took somebody who was innocent and hardened them and turned them bad. So there’s hardness there.

The other is that we see that happen exactly in the story of Elijah and Ahab and Jezebel, where Elijah declares that there won’t be rain and it doesn’t rain for three and a half years. And the narrative was that Baal, who is the storm God and the sender of rain, was withholding the rain because he was angry that they had let Elijah live.

Thus, when Ahab binds Elijah after all those years, he says, “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” And Elijah’s caught off guard, “What do you mean, me the troubler of Israel? This is coming because you are not obeying Yahweh.” And they couldn’t agree on the narrative. Which God is doing this? And so they said, “All right, we’ll have a contest to settle it.”

And that’s the context, that’s kind of what’s happening here. On an even larger scale it is very likely, I think, that the Egyptians thought that their gods were doing this because we’re told Pharaoh even thought, “Oh, they’re hemmed in, they’re in confusion. Their God can’t actually get them out of this.”

Think about it, in pagan settings, they thought gods had specific tasks that they were good at and other ones that maybe they weren’t good at. So this is the god of the mountains, but not the desert, or this is the god of the sea, but not the land. And so maybe they thought Yahweh had certain powers that worked in Egypt but wouldn’t work with the sea. It’s very clear that they thought there were limits to what he could do. No limits to what God can do.

It’s also interesting in the Book of Psalms, when the Psalms talk about this story, it brings up Leviathan. That God killed Leviathan when he parted the waters. And it’s a fascinating thing, because Leviathan is this seven headed dragon of pagan mythology that is associated with chaos, with the unstoppable force of storms that are just out of control.

So you might think of a tornado or a hurricane or something really violent and out of control. The rocky waters or the waves that could just take down whole ships. Leviathan was this picture of chaos and destruction. And God defeating Leviathan was an image that, again, nothing is too powerful for God. And brings up, again, this idea that God is not afraid of chaos, that he is not afraid of the situation.

The whole story of the Red Sea is, to some extent, parallel to times in our own lives where we just feel like everything is out of control, “I’m not going to get through this. I’ve finally come to the end. God’s delivered me before, but there’s no way out of this one.”

[08:16] Stephanie: “I’m hemmed in.”

[08:16] Marcus: “I’m hemmed in on all sides.” It’s really fascinating because I think we can all relate to that. We’ve had moments in our lives where it was like, “I see no way out of this.”

[08:29] Stephanie: In storytelling we call that “all is lost”.

[08:30] Marcus: All is lost. It is the “all is lost” moment, for sure.

[08:33] Stephanie: And like you said, from psalms and onward, this has become the definitive testimonial of God’s power to rescue, the ultimate apologetic that God can be trusted. So we have also discussed, it’s interesting to note that of the two stories, Passover was made into a memorial.The Red Sea is referred to, but the thing that you practice is Passover.

[09:00] Marcus: Yeah, It just kind of struck me, why Passover and why not the Red Sea? And I do think it’s because God wanted that lamb’s blood, that substitutionary idea, is what he wanted memorialized. Whereas this became memorialized in another way. It wasn’t in a festival, but everybody, like you said, to this day, knows what it is to have a Red Sea moment. And that is, “I am trapped. All is lost.”

[09:27] Stephanie: Yeah. As you’re talking, it also strikes me that with Passover, the original event was still very community based. People had to act in order for it to happen in the first place. So it is something that makes sense for a community to memorialize because the community had to act. Versus the Red Sea, as we’ll get to in just a little bit here, God says, “Don’t tell me what to do. I’m going to do something. And you can’t even imagine what I’m going to do.” And this is on God’s ability to save, God’s power.

[10:05] Marcus: And that’s a good point, because one of the things that I’ve noticed in working with hurting people is that there is often a sense of impossibility that says, “I don’t even want to try because I’ve gotten my hopes up before.” One of the things you hear the Israelites saying in the Red Sea story is, “We told you not to do this. Why did you even try? You should have left us alone.”

It may sound strange, but there’s a lot of people who are in dark places who are kind of like, “Yeah, it’d be nice to get out, but I don’t think it’s possible, and I don’t want to make it worse. So let’s not stir things up here. Let’s not go places we don’t need to go.” And what happens is that healing journeys are always messy. Because they’re always messy, we have these moments where we’re like Moses saying, “Why did you do this? I told you this wouldn’t work.” Or we get like these Israelites going, “You should have just left us alone. Now we’re going to die. At least there we were only slaves. You’ve made everything worse.”

And what happens is, I take this back to the garden of Eden and to this idea of, do you trust what you can see and understand or do you trust what God can see and understand? Because God saw that it was good over and over again. Eve saw that the fruit was good, but God said “No, no, that is not good.”

I think that the wisdom/ folly theme is often this question between, “Am I going to trust what I can see, what I can figure out, what I understand? Do I have to use my own imagination to figure out how God’s going to get me out of this before I’ll trust him?” There’s a lot of us who mistake thinking we have God figured out for trust, and it’s not the same thing. Oftentimes we have no idea how he’s going to come through.

[11:55] Stephanie: Let’s continue with that thought. So when we’re talking about salvation from the Red Sea event and also from the Exodus story as a whole, we see that we have no ability to save ourselves.

[12:09] Marcus: Right.

[12:09] Stephanie: They had no ability to save themselves. They needed Yahweh. I have written here, you aren’t supposed to use your imagination to figure out how God will rescue you and then ask him to do that. It’s not our job to tell God how to rescue you. And in this case, God even said, “Don’t pray.” Chapter 14, verse 15, which is very interesting. I need you to unpack that a little bit.

[12:34] Marcus: Okay. So there’s a lot of thoughts there, but one of the things, when it comes to praying for healing, one of the things we teach people is when you’re going to do listening prayer with somebody over a memory, what you don’t do is you don’t tell them what to imagine. You don’t say, “Now picture Jesus doing this and picture God doing that.” You don’t do that. That’s a taboo because we invite God to do things because often what he does is surprising. And the surprising part of what he does is often part of the healing. Like, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming.” And it helps me know that I wasn’t making this up, that it was God doing something.

[13:11] Stephanie: He knows what needs to be healed and how. And it’s not for us to be like, “I see exactly what needs to be healed here.”

[13:18] Marcus: That happens with a lot of us. We’re so sure we know what the key is to our problem and what the solution is to our problem, that we actually end up sitting in judgment on God whether or not he does that thing, instead of trusting him that if he doesn’t do that thing, he must have something else in mind, and I must need to look somewhere else.

For example, I met with a lot of people who are like, “God doesn’t love me unless he changes my situation. So unless this happens or that happens or this happens, I can’t believe that God loves me.” What they’re doing is they’re sitting here saying, “Well, God, I don’t care what the Bible says. I don’t care what anybody says. I know you don’t love me because you haven’t done this.” Whatever that is, fill in the blank.

In the same way, we often will pray that way. And that is that we get so specific with our prayers that we can actually use prayer as a way of trying to control God and get him to do what we want him to do. What we’re supposed to do is pour out our hearts to God and invite him to act and “Surprise me, God, because I know I can’t figure this out.”

[14:29] Stephanie: Yeah. Do you have it pulled up there? Can you just read the verse in question? Because I definitely don’t want to make it sound like the Bible says don’t pray. And I think you explain that well.

[14:40] Marcus: I don’t think I dive into that one as much, but let me just give it context.

Moses said to the people, don’t be afraid. Stand firm and see the Lord’s salvation, what he’s going to accomplish for you today. The Egyptians will see you today. You will never see those Egyptians again. The Lord will fight for you. You must be quiet. 

Which is interesting, because up until then, they’re crying out. They’re crying out. And then we get this interesting verse 15. It says, “Yahweh said to Moses, why are you crying out to me?” It’s a “you”, singular. Now, we just heard that they were all crying out. But he’s like, “Why are you, Moses, crying out to me?” Well, crying out is a common metaphor for God, “Please deliver your people. Please do this.”

And he’s like, “This is a time for action.” He says, “Tell the people to break camp. Go do what I’m telling you to do.” And it’s just really interesting because I’ve heard people say nothing happens apart from prayer, in the sense that you almost got to tell God what to do before he’s going to do anything, and that’s not what that means. God, in this case, already knew what he wanted done. He already knew what he was going to do. At this point, he’s having, if you want to call it, conversational prayer with Moses, because he’s like, “Hey, listen to me now.”

And so it’s interesting because a lot of times people think, “Well, if I get enough people praying or if I get this happening, then I can get this to happen.” You can’t always declare to God, “This is what I want you to do. This is what will happen because I have so many people praying for it.” We need a little bit more sophisticated theology of prayer in some cases, I think.

[16:21] Stephanie: That’s helpful. Well, I should probably keep us moving on, but I just thought that was worth talking about. So we don’t want to try to use our prayers to control God. We want to relate to God and be obedient to him in our prayer.

[16:43] Marcus: I keep thinking of Dr. Wilder saying, God’s brain is to my brain basically what my brain is to an ant. And so picture an ant, like going, “This is what you need to do for me.” And I’m going, “Really? You’re going to try to tell me how to take care of this?” And that’s sort of it. It’s like us trying to tell God, this is exactly how I need to be taken care of right now. Doesn’t make any sense when you put it in context. He’s just got so much more wisdom and capacity.

[17:13] Stephanie: Yay for relying on God. So the other thing that is a feature of the Red Sea story is that it is a crossing. It is a crossing from one territory into another territory. What do we learn about things from that?

[17:31] Marcus: Well, I think of that in many ways. It’s like ending one chapter of a book going to another chapter, or ending one volume of the series going to another. It’s the entering. But it’s also, I think, in Colossians where it says that you have been transferred from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s own Son. And there is this transference of kingdom idea here that I have moved from the kingdom of darkness, the land of Egypt, the land of bondage.

Even the Ten Commandments starts off this way, “I am the Lord who rescued you from that smelting pot, from the furnace, and brought you out of Egypt on eagle’s wings.” And there’s this idea that this didn’t happen because the people had such great faith in God that he did this. If they had any faith at all, it was the faith like a grain of mustard seed. They were quick to want to go back. They were rescued almost in spite of themselves.

And so you look at all of this and you realize that there is God’s role and there is our role. God’s role is salvation, deliverance, redemption. Our role is trusting and cooperating. And the core lesson we’re really trying to get across in this series is that the longer it takes us to trust God, cooperate and obey, the longer the whole process drags out.

I often tell people God is actually the most stubborn person I know. I can try to out stubborn him, but it usually ends up with 38 years in the desert. God is stubborn for a reason, and that is that he knows what is best for us, and he doesn’t want to go down to second best or third best or whatever. So it’s all part of that journey of getting to trust him more fully. And that’s the heart of what this is all about.

[19:36] Stephanie: When he introduces himself, the ten plagues or the eleven signs is an actionable introduction. But when he introduces himself and says, “Here I am, this is me,” he says, “I am compassionate, I am merciful, I am gracious, and over- abounding in it.” And so when he is stubborn, he is stubborn because he knows what is best. He is stubborn out of the graciousness and mercy and compassion of his heart. He is stubborn in his compassion. And that’s beautiful.

[20:08] Marcus: Well, you think about it, that one of God’s judgments is actually often giving people what they want. So in Romans, it talks about, he handed them over to their sin. It’s like, “Oh, yeah, you want to persist in that, I’ll just give you over to it.” And so it’s not a good thing when God says, “Okay, you win, your stubbornness prevails.” That’s not a good thing. That does not end well.

[20:33] Stephanie: Well, on that note, any quick final thoughts for the episode? This has been a very good episode.

[20:38] Marcus: Well, it’s a very poignant story, right? There’s a reason why it’s kind of archetypal to so many things that we go through in life. I am surrounded. There is no way out. There’s mountains on this side, mountains on that side, an army behind me. There’s a sea in front of me. I see no way out. And I think all of us can identify with feeling at times in our lives where there is no way out of this. And I’m crying out to God because I am terrified or I’m in despair. This is both impossible and it’s terrifying. And that’s what we call dread when I’ve got impossibility and terror combining together.

And so that’s where they were at. They were in a place of dread. And what’s interesting is despite the fact that they had no faith, God showed up because he had a plan and he knew where he was going to get them and he took care of them. I think there are so many times in our lives where that happens, that God does things for us. It’s not because we earned it, and it’s not because we deserved it. It’s not because we prayed the right way or we had the right kind of faith or we did the right thing.

In this case, they had faith like a mustard seed which was just enough to say, “Okay, you part the waters and we’ll take the step in and we’ll walk across.” That’s not a whole lot of faith, but it was just enough to obey and go through. And look what God did for them. And on the other side of it, they were singing.

[22:10] Stephanie: Huzzah!  Hallelujah! All right, on to next week. Thank you.

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