God Led Israel the Long Way While Egypt Sank

Click for full size

The Father Who Would Not Be Comforted

A king's son came home. His father had ridden out after the highwaymen who took him and killed every one of them, and now the boy was back in the house, and the boy would not stop talking.

This is what they did to me. This is how they hit me. This is the work they put me to.

The men were dead. The king had seen to it himself. And he sat there afterward with his son in front of him, going over it again and again. This is what they did to my son.

He had won. Nobody was left of them to punish. It made no difference to him at all.

The Long Road Out

Egypt had generations of that to answer for. They embittered the lives of the children of Israel with mortar and with brick and with every kind of work in the field.

God sent ten plagues and brought His children out, and Pharaoh stood in the doorway of his own dead house at midnight and told them to go.

It was not enough. "I will not be comforted," He said, "until I have killed all of them."

So when the people came up out of Egypt the short road lay open in front of them, the coast highway through the country of the Philistines, and He would not take it. He turned them into the desert instead. The Hebrew hides the reason inside one verb. He had not led them that way, and He had not been consoled.

Pharaoh Boasted at the Edge of the Water

Pharaoh caught them at the sea. He stood up in his chariot at the waterline and told the water what he was about to do to the people crossing it.

He had chariots. He had six hundred picked ones and every other chariot in Egypt behind them, and he had the fugitives boxed against water with nowhere left to walk.

The answer came down over his head. "Do you have wind? Do you have wings?"

Then the Holy One reached under His own wheels and pulled out the cherub and pulled out the wind, the two He rides on and flies with, and sent them both down to the sea.

The Horse Answered Its Rider

Rabbi Pappos looked at the Song of Songs, at the line about a mare among Pharaoh's chariots, and found the word written a letter short, so that it could also be read as gladness. There was gladness in heaven over Pharaoh that morning.

Every wave that stood up was a mare. The Egyptian horses were stallions in season, and the stallions went in after them. The riders could not turn their heads. They went down that way, chasing water, and sank to the floor of the sea.

One Egyptian was shouting at his horse on the way in. "Yesterday I walked you to the river to drink and you would not come with me. Today you run at the water to drown me?"

The horse answered him. "Look at what is in the sea. The height of the world is down there. I can see it."

Then the water came back over the crossing and the Lord shook Egypt out into the middle of the sea the way a man shakes a thing out of a cloth. Horse and rider both, thrown into the water. Centuries later a prophet would still be writing that Egypt would be a desolation. That was the end of the sentence He had started in Egypt, and it was the only thing He had said would console Him.

Bread Fell and the Dew Went Up

Bread comes out of the ground. Everyone knows where bread comes from. Rain and dew fall out of the sky, grain climbs up out of the dirt, and that is how the arrangement has always run.

In the desert He reversed it. The bread came down out of the sky like rain, and the layer of dew went up off the ground. He had already split water and stood it up as dry land, then let it fall back and be water again. Whatever He wants, He does.

Long afterward Nebuchadnezzar fed Daniel and the other boys of Judah from his own kitchen, a portion appointed for every day, weighed out by a man's hand and written in a ledger. In the wilderness nothing was weighed. It came down the way rain comes down, with no ration and no floor to it, onto a people still counting up what the Egyptians had done to them.