Exodus: How to Respond When We Get Rescued

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Well, my name is Clyde Copeland.

I'm the worship pastor here at Grand Parkway.

It's my privilege to uh bring God's word here today.

Uh I joked with Neil, our lead pastor, after I was first hired to be the worship pastor.

I said, I don't I don't think I should have the title worship pastor.

I think that's your title because you can't worship without understanding the truth of the Bible.

So you're really the the the worship pastor.

He said, No, you're gonna be the worship pastor.

So I said, okay, I'm stuck with it.

The thing is, today I do get to be our worship pastor because we're looking at God's word, which is the Bible says something about how you can't worship what you don't know.

And so we're gonna understand and know God today by looking at the first song in the Bible.

So take your Bibles if you've got one and go to Exodus 15.

We're gonna look at the first song in the Bible, and it's also the first worship song in the Bible.

If uh you don't have a Bible, there's one at the end of your pew.

I'm gonna be on page 57.

We've been working through the book of Exodus.

Last week we looked at the famous crossing of the Red Sea, and this is what happens right after that crossing.

So look with me, starting at verse 1 in Exodus chapter 15.

Exodus 15 · chapter mention

Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying, I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously.

The horse and his rider he is thrown into the sea.

The Lord is my strength in my song, and he has become my salvation.

This is my God, and I will praise him, my father's God, and I will exalt him.

The Lord is a man of war.

The Lord is his name.

Pharaoh's chariots and his host he cast into the sea, and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea.

The floods covered them, they went down into the depths like a stone.

Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.

In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries, you send out your fury, it consumes them like stubble.

At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap, the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.

The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them, I will draw my sword, my hand shall destroy them.

You blew with your wind, the sea covered them.

They sink like lead in the mighty waters.

Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?

Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?

You stretched out your right hand, the earth swallowed them.

You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed.

You have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.

The peoples have heard, they tremble.

Pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.

Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed, trembling sees the leaders of Moab and all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away, terror and dread fall upon them because of the greatness of your arm.

They are still as a stone, till your people, O Lord, pass by, till the people pass by whom you have purchased.

You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain.

The place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode, the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established, the Lord will reign forever and ever.

This is the word of God for the people of God.

Thanks be to God.

Today we're going to look at how we respond when we get rescued.

How to respond when we get rescued.

And it's three simple things.

Remember, understand the rescue.

Look back to the rescue.

Enjoy the rescue.

Now, present day.

Enjoy the rescue.

And thirdly, look forward to the rescue.

So that's simple.

We'll be done before lunch.

Let's look at what it's got here for us.

The first part of this song is we want to understand and remember that God rescued us.

The key thing being they're not rescue and not us, but God.

This is a song about God.

This is a song about God.

What does it teach us about God?

God's motivations in this whole Red Sea crossing and this whole Exodus has been his own purpose.

It hasn't been because Israel's so good and they're so worthy to be rescued.

God's motivations started with God and they end with God.

And so the first thing we see here in understanding this is it's powerful.

This rescue is powerful.

Now, when we think of power, it's easy to look around these days and see power is very shifty.

It doesn't stay at one place for too long.

This week, apparently, there was a lot of power given to little red cups with a green circle on them.

You know, Amy, our admin, came in my office and uh brought her red cup in for some coffee, and I said, get that out of here.

That is not a Christmas cup.

That is sacrilege.

You are ruining my religion.

She filled up her coffee and left.

It's funny the things we give power to.

I think that's silly.

I think some of you do too.

But on a little more serious note, uh, this week, if you also noticed, uh, there was a uh university in Missouri that students uh protested, and the leader, the uh the uh authority, the power, that university had to step down.

And so power went from administration to students.

And then I wish this wasn't an example, but we we look at what happened Friday.

And power was senseless violence taken by force to kill people.

By the way, this is not for the sermon as much as it is to recognize the video we watched earlier for veterans.

There's two kinds of people in the world that use power.

Some people use it to serve others, others use it to serve themselves.

So let me just look at the men and women in this room who have uh used your power in an army or air force or whatever branch you were in and say, thank you for serving me.

Thank you for serving the people in this room.

Let's give those people a hand.

When you see power being used like this, you understand that God is powerful and his power is not shifting.

His kingdom isn't changing.

The borders aren't shrinking, they're actually growing.

So that's the first thing we understand.

It's powerful.

Another thing, it stays in line with promise.

It's a promised rescue.

Now, what do we mean by that?

Well, look here at the text.

In verse 2, halfway down it says, This is my God and I will praise him.

My father's God, and I will exalt him.

What is going on there?

Well, when this song's written, and what I believe happened here is they crossed the Red Sea, and Moses writes the song on the spot.

People argue about when the song is written, all this kind of stuff.

Uh, if God can cross the Red Sea, I'm pretty sure he can send the Holy Spirit to inspire Moses to write a song on the spot.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Okay.

So Moses writes the song on the spot, and he says things in this song to help Israel start understanding and remembering what happened when they got rescued at the Red Sea.

And he says, My father's God.

Now, where does that come from?

Well, it starts in Exodus 3.6.

Everybody remembers the burning bush, right?

Moses is there, he's pastoring and he's shepherding and all this stuff.

And uh he looks and sees a burning bush, and the burning bush says to him, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Jacob, the God of Isaac.

And I made a promise to them, I'm here to keep it.

And that goes back to Genesis 12.

We can keep looking back.

I mean, Exodus is just one little part of this story.

This started back in Genesis chapter 12.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

God says to Abraham, I'm going to bless you, and I'm going to give you land, I'm going to give you descendants.

Now, if I'm Israel at this point in the story, I've gone through slavery, I've gone through all these plagues, even coming to the Red Sea, I'm sure they were probably wondering all throughout that, because things aren't exactly easy for Israel if you didn't know that.

Uh Egypt has them in slavery and they're attacking and now they're chasing them.

If I'm Israel at this point, I'm going, okay, God, you kept that promise to Abraham about the descendants, because there's a lot of us.

There were so many of us that they were scared and they enslaved us.

But uh, we don't have land, and we're not very blessed right now.

And then they cross the Red Sea.

And they look back and they see a dead Egyptian, a dead horse, a chariot floating on the water, washing up on the seashore.

And then they start thinking, so this is what Moses was talking about when he said a burning bush appeared and said, My father, the God of your father Abraham.

It stays in line with the promises.

And then one more thing here.

Understanding how God rescues, again, the emphasis being on what God's doing.

Understanding that rescue is key in understanding the nature of salvation, how salvation works.

And what do I mean when I say that?

When you look at the Exodus, when Israel looked at the Exodus, all the history of the Old Testament, going from what happens here in the Exodus, they make it to the promised land, right?

They're supposed to start kicking people out, and you got the story of David and Goliath, and you got these other stories of kings and wars and fighting, and then they end up going to exile, and then they come back out of exile, and you got Ezra and Nehemiah, all this.

Every single Israelite that knew God's word and knew the story, they look back to this Exodus moment as the best example they had of salvation.

If there's any words they were going to use to describe salvation, it was going to come down to this.

And it wasn't so much in the fact that they were the ones getting saved, it was the fact that God used a miracle to save them.

I mean, God could have taken them right out of Egypt, right?

I mean, he could have ended the slavery, killed all the Egyptians, but he didn't.

He used plagues.

He kind of uses the long play here.

And then once they finally leave after the Passover, I mean, he could have taken them through the land.

He didn't have to take them to the sea and put the sea to their backs and put Egypt on their front side.

Why did he do that?

Because he wanted to show them and he wanted to show you, and he wanted to show me how helpless we are in our own salvation.

He wanted to show Israel, at the end of the day, you need me and nothing else to save you.

I will win battles.

I will be your warrior.

That's verse 3.

The Lord is a man of war.

God uses things like miracles to do the stuff he wants to get done.

Let me say this to everybody in the room.

There are things in your life that should only be able to be explained in terms of miracles.

There are things in your life that should only be explainable in terms of what God can do.

I'm talking to all the engineers in the room.

There is some stuff you should not be able to explain.

Science cannot answer this.

Reason cannot answer this.

That's the point God's making here.

Israel didn't contribute anything.

What did Moses say to them in the previous chapter, 14?

He said, You have to do nothing.

Just stand there, be silent, watch God, because he's about to open a can.

We need to think of miracles as serving this purpose of showing us something about the character of God.

We use words like miracles for things.

Oh, I got a job, it was a miracle.

Or my baby was born.

It's a miracle.

You know what?

I've seen a baby be born, and I think, yes, it to me the miracle is how does a baby go from an all-liquid environment to being an all-air environment?

That doesn't make sense to me.

But babies are born every day, and so in some ways that's not a miracle.

But you know what is a miracle?

God opening the womb.

God opens wombs that were closed.

He does those kind of miracles in the story of Sarah, in the story of Hannah, the story of Elizabeth.

He makes people pregnant when they haven't done the stuff they were supposed to do to get pregnant.

Anybody heard of Mary?

That's the kind of miraculous God that we're talking about here.

The point being is that God does the work.

Some people get this and some people don't.

Jesus understood this.

Jesus said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the what?

The kingdom.

The people that get to be in God's presence are people that understand they don't have a leg to stand on.

They're poor in spirit.

That's you and me.

That's everybody that has ever been born except for one guy, Jesus, because he was perfect.

But he said to us all, Blessed are the poor in spirit.

The people that understand, I know what Israel felt like there at the Red Sea.

Because there was nothing they could do to save themselves.

Just like there's nothing I can do to save myself.

David got this.

You know, David, the story of Goliath, let me just read this passage here.

This is 1 Samuel 17, 45.

You don't need to turn there, I'll just read it.

Then David said to the Philistine, Goliath, the giant, You come to me with a sword and with a spear and with a javelin.

But I come to you in the name of the Lord of hosts, the God of the armies of Israel, whom you have defied.

This day the Lord will deliver you into my hand, and I will strike you down and cut off your head, and I will give the dead bodies of the host of the Philistines this day to the birds of the air and to the wild beasts of the earth, that all the earth may know that there is a God in Israel, and that all this assembly may know that the Lord saves not with sword and spear, for the battle is the Lord's, and he will give you into our hand.

When I was a kid and we taught missions and evangelism, we used texts like, you know, Matthew 28.

Go therefore into the world, make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

I like David's version.

He says, I'm gonna cut your head off so that the whole world knows there's a God in Israel.

Let's preach on that for a missions text next time.

Amen.

David got that he wasn't gonna win because he was such a good aim with a slingshot.

David knew the battle was gonna come from the Lord.

You come against me with a spear, with a chariot, with horses.

God says, I'm a man of war.

I have my right hand, and I'm gonna crush you with it.

Luke Skywalker has his lightsaber, Indiana Jones has his whip, Tony Montana has his lethal friend.

God has his right hand, and it wins every time.

And that's what we see here next in the text.

That's the second thing I want us to see today in this church.

We get to enjoy this rescue.

We get to enjoy this rescue.

Now, what do I mean by that?

Look with me here at verse 4.

Now, starting at verse 4, I don't know how your Bibles are kind of structured.

I'm using the ESV here, and you have this block of text from verse 4 all the way down to verse 12.

The biggest chunk of this song is just talking about how God goes to town on these Egyptians.

Let's look at part of what it says.

Starting at verse 4.

Pharaoh's chariots and his host he cast into the sea, and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea.

The floods covered them.

They went down into the depths like a stone.

Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.

In the greatness of your majesty, you overthrow your adversaries.

You send out your fury.

It consumes them like stubble.

At the blast of your nostrils, the waters piled up, the floods stood up in a heap, the deeps congealed in the heart of the city.

Now stop right there.

I want us to point out next is coming a little bit something about Egypt.

And this is why I want us to understand why we get to enjoy the rescue.

The bad guys lose.

Violence has a redemptive purpose.

After Friday, we want to see bad guys lose.

Amen?

And yet at the same time, we always got to realize we're bad guys too.

Ever heard of Paul?

The first Christian terrorist.

He was persecuting Christians.

And what happened?

God saved him.

A man responsible for murders becomes one of the most important people we read today.

The Bible says, Pray for your enemies.

Because we understand that we're all enemies of God at some point in our life.

I'm getting off here.

Enjoy the rescue.

Back to Pharaoh.

This is what Pharaoh says.

This is what the enemy says in verse 9.

The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil.

My desire shall have its fill of them.

Now, here's what we need to understand about Egypt.

They were evil.

Pharaoh is evil, he had a hard heart.

I don't think he's the only one.

I think other Egyptians had hard hearts too, seeing what God was doing.

And you kind of get a picture of this first with how Egypt treats Israel.

I mean, they did evil things, they put them in slavery.

Alright?

That was evil.

They didn't do anything wrong.

Israel didn't do anything wrong.

They put them in slavery.

But it got worse.

I mean, the first chapter is how evil do you have to be to make a woman carry a baby for nine to ten months?

I know my wife is around that seven-month mark.

We're getting close.

And so everything that woman thinks is in terms of this.

And that's not a bad thing.

There is a nurturing, a care that goes into creating that life, and then it's killed.

You tell a woman delivering the baby, you gotta kill it.

And then that doesn't work.

And so you throw alive baby boys into the river.

This is evil.

And this evil has been building up and building up, and God's judging it.

But the problem most importantly, is not in that they did evil things.

The problem is that they don't have faith.

Their lack of faith determines why they do evil things.

Where do I get that from?

Hebrews 11, 29 says this.

By faith, the people crossed the Red Sea as on dry land.

But the Egyptians, when they attempted to do the same, were drowned.

Now, what's the point that the author of Hebrews is making there?

Yes, Egyptians were doing evil things.

But it doesn't say they were drowned.

It doesn't say the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea because they did good things.

It says they crossed because they had faith.

Egypt didn't make it because they didn't have faith.

Their faith, their lack of faith, determined why they were doing evil things.

God shows, God sends Moses and He sends Aaron to go to Pharaoh, say, let my people go.

What does Pharaoh say?

I haven't heard of this God.

Pharaoh considered himself God, and his people did too.

That's why the enemy didn't stand a chance here.

That's why God brings down the water on these faithless people.

So they're evil, they're faithless, and therefore they were hopeless.

I mean, I picture this from the soldier's point of view.

You know, the the the Egyptian soldier, he's probably lost a son.

He's probably lost some of his best valuables.

It says they took all the jewelry.

Uh he's gone through having boils and all this stuff that happens in Egypt.

And so he's sitting there thinking, Pharaoh said, we're gonna go and kill these people.

We're gonna get them back, one or the other.

And so I've still got a sword, I've still got a horse, I've still got a chariot.

Let's go.

And so they're following Pharaoh, they're going, they're coming up on him.

There's the Red Sea.

They think, I got them.

They're there.

And then this big giant pillar of cloud comes out of the sky and it stops, and then they watch as the sea opens up and Israel starts going through on dry land.

And then, as if on cue, that pillar goes away.

And the Egyptians thinking, Egypt's thinking, this is my only chance.

If they get across that Red Sea, they're gone.

So what happens?

They go in.

We know what happens.

I mean, but they're going in, you know, they're whipping the horses, and they're getting the chariots, and they're and they're they're riding, they're right there, they're pulling out the swords, they're ready to go in for the kill.

They want blood.

And then the wheels on the chariots start coming off, and and their horses start rearing up.

And all of a sudden, they're not going forward as an army anymore.

They are in disarray.

It's turned all of a sudden, Black Friday at Walmart.

Y'all know what I'm talking about.

It's ugly.

They're stepping on each other, they're screaming, there's yelling, and then it gets quiet.

And you look up, you see a lot of water.

And you start to think, I think Israel does have a God.

And so you see the seashore and you realize this God fights for them.

I better get out of here.

And so you start going to the seashore, and right as you get towards the edge, it seems like you can't get out.

And then all of a sudden, the ground ain't dry anymore.

And all of a sudden, you don't hear everybody yelling, you hear a lot of water crashing down on you.

And then everything just goes dark blue.

And your ears fill up with water.

You died because you didn't have faith that God was who he said he was.

God defeats them with his mighty right hand because they didn't have faith.

They denied the God of the Bible.

This right hand of God worked wonders.

Question Where do you need to see the mighty right hand of God right now?

If if God this is the kind of God we serve for his people, he protects them in this kind of a way.

And not only this way, not always this way, but he does use these kind of ways.

Where right now in your life do you need to see God's mighty right hand?

You might not need him to split open an ocean.

But you might need him to split open your womb so you can have a baby.

Or you might need him to just help you sell your house, or help your daughter heal and get out of the hospital, or to just put his right hand in the midst of your marriage and remove all the hostility that's built up over the years.

This is the kind of miraculous God we're talking about here.

And when we get to see him work, we get to enjoy that work.

We get to enjoy that rescue.

And the last thing we look at today, we look forward to that rescue.

We look forward to that rescue.

Earlier we sang this as Lindsay and the band were leading us.

The Lord shall reign forever and ever.

That's what this has been about this whole time is getting back to where we understand that God is reigning in a good way.

He's not a dictator, he's not Hitler, He's not Stalin, He's God.

There's no frame of reference that we have for this other than God being God as the one reigning over us.

So when I say look forward to the rescue, what I want you to picture is actually turning.

Turning away from what's over here and looking forward to what's over here.

And start thinking about it in terms of Israel.

What did they know over here?

Well, over here was slavery.

Over here was Egypt.

Over here was watching our babies get killed.

Over here was wondering whether God's going to keep his promises.

And then you turn, you make it through the Red Sea, and this is what you say at verse 13 to God.

You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed.

Verse 17, you will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain, the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode.

The Lord will reign forever, ever.

All of a sudden, you're not turning and looking at your past in slavery.

You're looking forward to your future with God.

This has been about getting back into the presence of God.

Ever since the Garden of Eden, what did we lose?

We didn't just lose our original perfect nature.

We lost presence with God.

And for Israel, they're looking forward to going to the promised land and being with God.

They're going to have a tabernacle, they're going to have a sacrificial system, they're going to have, you know, the Levites and the priests and doing all these things.

When you get into those parts of the Bible, your eyes kind of glaze over and you say, What is going on here?

Because you read books like Leviticus and Numbers.

All that's there to show the people of Israel how they can be around God's presence.

It's kind of his limited presence.

If they were around his full presence, what happens?

They die.

But those, all that tabernacle, all that being in the land, it looks forward to something even better.

And that's where I want us to kind of land today.

If this story for them, it ended with them, you know, God's people in God's place, the promised land, under God's rule.

We're going to do things God's way.

The same thing is true for us.

Our story is going to end with us, God's people, being in God's place, the new heavens and the new earth, under his rule.

Now, how does this work?

Well, as I said before, understanding salvation for Israel involved letting go of that old identity of slavery and embracing the new identity of being obedient to God.

We're saved from something, but we're also saved to something.

I'll say it again.

You're saved from something, but you're also saved to something.

The thing is, Israel can only hope in what they were saved into.

They can only hope for limited presence.

What they were getting actually looks forward to a person.

And it says things about him like he is that Passover lamb that they sacrifice.

He is that tabernacle.

He is that great high priest.

In verse 2 of this song, it says this the Lord is my strength in my song.

He has become my salvation.

Funny thing about that word salvation.

The word for that in Hebrew is Yeshua.

That's where we get the name Joshua.

Yeshua.

Joshua.

There's another name for it that you see show up in the New Testament.

Anyone know what it is?

Jesus.

Yeshua means Jesus.

So if I read this again, verse 2, as a Christian, I say the Lord is my strength and my song.

He has become my Jesus.

He has become my Jesus.

God Yeshua's us.

God Jesus' us.

And it takes a miracle.

There was nothing we did.

It's what God did.

It's why He sent Jesus in the fullness of time, born of a woman.

God taking on flesh, living a perfect, sinless life to die for sins and then rise again.

Remember earlier I mentioned mentioned God beat Israel with his right hand?

Who's sitting at the right hand?

Who's sitting at the right hand?

Jesus.

God has had a purpose all this time for this song, this first song, this first worship song in the Bible, to look ahead to this final rescue.

And there's another song at the end.

So I want to get to this final song.

Are y'all still with me?

We're almost done.

Turn in your Bibles to Revelation chapter 15.

Revelation 15 · chapter mention

So we were in Exodus 15.

Now we're going to go to Revelation 15.

I love it when people bring their Bibles to church.

I still hear pages turning.

I'll wait.

Okay.

I'm in chapter 15.

I'm starting at verse 2.

This is what John sees.

By the way, this scene, it also takes place by the sea.

It's almost like God planned it that way.

And I saw what appeared to be a sea of glass mingled with fire, and also those who had conquered the beast in its image and the number of its name.

Evil was defeated, basically.

Standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands, and they sing the song of Moses, servant of God.

And the song of the Lamb, saying this: Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty.

Just and true are your ways, O King of nations.

Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify your name?

For you alone are holy.

All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed.

When we say this morning, we look forward to rescue, this is what we look forward to.

But we have to understand first your past.

You have to understand that you didn't have a leg to stand on.

You had what the Bible calls a dead heart.

Ephesians 2 1 says, and you were dead in your trespasses and sins.

How dead is dead?

Do I contribute a little bit to my salvation?

No.

Now I'm not knocking saying things like, make a decision for Christ, pray the sinner's prayer.

No, I'm saying understand who did it, who started it.

Did it take a miracle?

Because here's my question earlier.

What has happened in your life?

And it could be more than one thing, but we should all have at least one if we're Christians.

What has happened in your life that can only be explained in terms of a miracle?

It has to be God taking your dead heart and making it alive.

Because you have faith in Jesus Christ.

If you don't have faith, you're not alive.

And so that's where we're going to end today.

What has happened in your life that can only be explained in terms of God's work?

God wrote this song so that we would see this.

He is great, he is highly exalted, and he kills the enemy.

And he does it so we can be with him.

Do you want to be with him?

Let's pray together.

I ask you to bow your heads, and we're just going to take some time here at the end of the service to think about what we've heard today.

Lindsay's going to come and play.

She may sing something over us.

Ask ourselves the question, God, where do I need to see you work most right now?

Is it in my health?

Is it in my job?

Is it in my family?

Lord, show me what you're going to do and show me how to be obedient in the midst of it.

Let's think about these things together.

Lord, we thank you for that truth.

Wretched hearts get redeemed.

We go from I never wanted to follow Jesus to I have decided to follow Jesus.

No turning back.

No turning back.

So Lord, we we we we say thank you today for your word because it sheds new light on what some of us have been walking through.

Some of us we've we've started the Christian life a while back, and yet we feel like we've been in the valley for a while.

And we're wondering, we're kind of wondering if we've got buyers' remorse.

And what we see today is we never bought it.

There was no deal that got made.

You did a miracle and rescued us.

So we rejoice in that miracle today, Lord, as dead bones shouting out, now as alive people, great are you, Lord.

In Jesus' name, all God's people said.

Amen.

Stand to your feet.

I want to speak a blessing over you.

Hold your hands out like this.

Horses, chariots, and spears and swords won't get the job done.

But the right hand of God will.

Look for that right hand and ask it what do I need to do to be obedient to you and trust you?

In Jesus' name, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Bless you're dismissed.