The Day the Nations Throw Their Idols Into the Clefts of Rock

The water stood up like two walls of green glass, and on the far shore the watchers could not breathe.

They were not Israelites. They were traders from the coast roads, herdsmen who had followed the rumor of war, merchants whose caravans had stalled at the edge of the wilderness to see what Egypt would do to the slaves who had fled it. They stood on the dunes with their hands shading their eyes, and they saw the chariots of Pharaoh pour into the dry seabed between the walls of water, six hundred of them, the horses screaming, the wheels throwing up the muck of the sea floor. They saw the proudest army on earth ride into a gap that no army should ever have dared.

The Walls of Water Close

Then the walls leaned in.

The watchers felt the ground shudder before they understood what their eyes were telling them. The green glass folded over the chariots all at once, with a sound like the whole sky tearing. Horses and riders and the gold-plated war cars of an empire went under together, and the foam came up brown and then red, and then the sea lay flat and bright and innocent as if nothing had ever crossed it.

Egypt was the master of the world. Egypt's gods were carved on every temple wall from the Nile to the sea, hawk-headed and ram-headed and crowned, and Egypt's gods had just failed to keep a single soldier alive. The watchers on the dunes had carried their own gods in their packs, small things of wood and bronze wrapped in cloth. They thought of those bundles now and felt them turn to nothing in their hands.

A Confession Torn Out of Them

So they opened their mouths. Not the Israelites only, dancing at the water's edge with their timbrels. The nations opened their mouths too, the traders and the herdsmen and the stalled caravans, every people that had come to watch, and the same words came out of all of them at once, torn out of them by what they had seen.

Mi chamocha, they cried, which means who is like You. "Who is like You among the mighty, O Lord?" (Exodus 15:11). The whole shore became one voice. The carved hawks and the bronze rams were lies, and for one shaking heartbeat the world knew it together.

The heartbeat passed.

They Went Home and Unwrapped the Gods Again

The water dried on their clothes. The fear cooled. The caravans turned around and went back up the coast roads, and the herdsmen drove their flocks home, and somewhere on the second night or the third the traders unwrapped the bundles in their packs and set the little wooden gods back on their shelves and bowed to them as before.

They had seen the sea swallow an empire and they had said the true thing with their own tongues, and it had changed nothing. The confession was real and it was useless. It was the kind of admission that overwhelming evidence forces out of a man without ever reaching the room where he keeps his decisions. The lie went back on the shelf. The smoke of the offerings went up again. Centuries of it, generation after generation carving wood and expecting the wood to save them.

The Day That Confession Comes True

There is a day still coming when the confession at the sea finishes itself.

On that day the nations come to God again, but not as watchers on a dune who will forget by nightfall. They come saying, "The Lord is my strength and my stronghold, my refuge on the day of trouble" (Jeremiah 16:19). And then a question rises in their own throats, the question they have been running from since the first man first chiseled a face into a block of cedar. "Can a man make gods for himself?" (Jeremiah 16:20). The answer is in the asking. No. A man cannot. They built things with their hands and called the things divine, and the things were never anything but things.

This time they do not wrap the idol back in its cloth.

Into the Clefts of the Rock

This time a man takes the silver god he made and the gold god he made, the bundle he has carried his whole life and his father carried before him, and he throws it away. He flings it from him into the dark with both hands (Isaiah 2:20). He hurls it where the moles burrow and the bats hang, into the cracks of the cliff face, and he does not look to see where it lands.

He throws it because he himself is running. The presence he once watched from a safe distance across the water is no longer at a distance. It fills the air the way the walls of green glass filled the seabed, and there is nowhere on the open ground to stand under it. So the proud of the earth claw their way into the clefts of the rocks and the holes of the dust, hiding from the terror of the Lord and the splendor of His majesty (Isaiah 2:21). And the idols, which never fled and never could, lie where they were thrown.

The carved gods perish completely (Isaiah 2:18). Not argued away, not voted out, simply finished, the way Pharaoh's chariots were finished under the folding sea. What the nations said for one heartbeat on the shore, with their clothes still wet, they will at last say and mean and never take back.