The Sea That Swallowed Pharaoh Waits for Gog

The water came down like a fist closing.

One moment the seabed was a road, dry sand packed hard under iron-rimmed wheels, walls of standing water rising on either side like green glass. The next moment the walls forgot their command. They fell. Pharaoh's charioteers had no time to turn the horses. The horses had no room to rear. The whole army of Egypt, the chariots and the riders and the picked captains, went down together into the churning dark, and they did not float. They sank. They sank like lead, straight to the bottom, the way a plumb weight drops through still water (Exodus 15:10).

On the far shore Moses stood with the people of Israel and watched the sea close over the place where an empire had been. Then he opened his mouth and sang. He sang of the wind that blew, of the deep that covered them, of the mighty waters that took the strongest soldiers in the world and pulled them under as if they weighed nothing at all.

The Sea Learns What It Is For

Something happened in that water that did not end when the singing stopped.

The sea had been taught a lesson it would not forget. It had learned what it was for. When the powerful of the earth come in their thousands and their tens of thousands, armed and certain, riding down on the people of God, the water knows now how to answer. It rises. It stands. It waits for the word. And when the word comes it falls, and it swallows, and it carries the proud straight down into the dark.

The Egyptians were only the first to learn this. They were a rehearsal. The sea was practicing.

A Voice From Babylon Names the Last Enemy

Generations later, far from any shore, a man in exile saw the same water rise again.

Ezekiel stood among the captives by a foreign river and the vision took him by the throat. He saw a day still coming, a day no one in his time would live to see. He saw a king from the uttermost north, Gog of the land of Magog, gathering a coalition of nations the way a storm gathers cloud. They would come up against the mountains of Israel like a covering for the land. Horses and horsemen, a great company, a mighty army, all of them turning their faces toward the people of God with hunger in their eyes.

And Ezekiel heard the answer that was coming for them. He heard God speak from inside the fury. On the day Gog comes against the land of Israel, the word said, My anger will rise in My nostrils, and the fish of the sea will quake before Me (Ezekiel 38:18-20). The mountains would be thrown down. The cliffs would fall. The fish in the deep would tremble.

The fish would tremble. The fish of the sea.

The Same Words, Spoken Twice

Listen to the two scenes set side by side, and the trick of it shows itself.

At the sea, the proud sank like lead into the deep. In the vision, the proud march toward the land and the deep begins to shake before they arrive, the water already remembering its old work, the fish already feeling the tremor of what their own element is about to do. The same sea quakes in both. The same depths open their mouths. What the water did once to Pharaoh's chariots it will do again, on a scale no chariot could measure, to the last army that ever dares the march.

The drowning of Egypt was not a closed event, finished and filed away. It was the first performance of a thing that will be performed once more, at the end, when the nations of the earth gather for the final time and the sea is called again to its labor. The same divine power. The same plummet into the dark. The same water, quaking before its Maker.

The One Enthroned Above Them Laughs

And while the kings gather and the captains plot and the great company sharpens its spears, there is one more sound coming down from above the noise.

It is laughter.

The rulers of the earth take counsel together. They rage and they scheme, certain that their massed strength can pull down the throne of heaven itself. Why do the nations rage, the song asks, and the answer comes from the highest place. The One who sits enthroned in the heavens laughs at them (Psalms 2:1-4). He looks down at the elaborate conspiracy, the marching and the boasting, the whole machinery of human pride, and to Him it is absurd, a thing too small to fear.

They snarl like dogs prowling a city at night, baring their teeth, convinced of their own ferocity, spouting threats with their mouths. And the Lord laughs at them (Psalms 59:8-9), because He has seen this exact army before, sunk to the floor of a sea that closed like a fist, and He knows precisely how the marching always ends.

What the Water Remembers

So the sea keeps its memory and its appointment.

It remembers the weight of iron chariots dropping past it into the silt. It remembers the road it made and then unmade in a single breath. It holds that memory the way a coiled thing holds its tension, waiting for the day the last Gog comes down from the north with his great company at his back, certain as Pharaoh was certain, blind as Pharaoh was blind. The fish are already trembling at the bottom for a day that has not yet dawned. The water already knows the song it will be made to sing. And above all of it, the One enthroned in the heavens is already laughing, because the ending was written the first time, when an empire sank like lead and a freed people stood on the far shore and watched the sea close over the proud.