EXODUS 15:1-3
In Exodus 15:1-3, we see very clearly that the Lord fights the battles for his people. This is important for us to remember because so often we eclipse the work of the Lord simply by not recalling, not proclaiming, not remembering God’s Word. We can often forget God’s faithfulness, goodness, mercy, grace, and the complete salvation which he has procured for his sheep by his Son, Jesus Christ. And in Exodus 15, Moses declares that the people who are redeemed by God are a people that sing out the honor of his name. And so the song in Exodus 15 is a call to remember to sing unto the glory of God.
Now, it’s a wondrous thing that God has sustained the Reformed Church in the United States for 300 years, and it’s the right thing to do to celebrate that milestone. But let’s not eclipse the glory of the Lord in all the celebrations and festivities. Let’s not eclipse the glory of God and what he has done. He has sustained the RCUS. He has worked in the hearts of his people and through generations brought others to faith in Jesus Christ so the RCUS might remain and be a denomination that sings out the honor of God’s glorious name. Let’s not forget that, beloved! Therefore, Exodus 15 is truly a song of remembrance, remembering the salvation of our God.
If you read through the Scriptures, you will find numerous times that we are called to be people who remember. Why is it that we are called to remember? Simply because we so easily forget. We don’t remember the work of the Lord simply because we don’t recall it to our mind. We don’t meditate upon it as we ought. So, there is a great call and cause for the people of God to be a people of remembrance. The Lord told the children of Israel when they entered the Promised Land that they must not forget who gives them strength to get wealth (Deut. 8:18). We are told to remember the Sabbath Day to keep it holy, a day that God set apart that we might gather specifically, deliberately, and corporately to lift up our voices in prayer and praise to Him (Ex. 20:8). The Lord’s Supper is a call for us to remember the work of Jesus Christ on our behalf, not simply his death, but also his life (1 Cor. 11:24-25). We need a positive righteousness by which we can stand before the throne of God. That righteousness is Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:30). We need his death to cleanse our sins and cast them as far as the East is from the West (Ps. 103:12), never to be remembered against us again. Jesus said we are to remember Lot’s wife (Luke 17:32). Remember what happened to her? We find the admonitions to remember all throughout Scripture.
You covenant children are called in Ecclesiastes 12:1 to “Remember now your Creator in the days of your youth, Before the difficult days come, And the years draw near when you say, ‘I have no pleasure in them.’” Remember the hand of the Lord who sustains you. Remember that God is providentially directing everything that happens in this world, whether we understand it or not. God is sovereign, and he controls everything in this world so that not even a bird falls in the forest, or a hair leaves our head, or a cricket chirps on a hot summer night apart from the will of our God (Matt. 10:29-30). We need to be people that continually remember God’s wondrous works and righteous judgments, such as the ten plagues in Exodus Chapters 7-11. As Moses said, “The LORD is a man of war; The LORD is His name” (Ex. 15:3). He deals with sin. If you don’t think so, look to the cross of Christ and see that God takes sin very seriously. He takes sin so seriously that his Son had to be condemned and had to suffer the second death in our place that we might be restored to fellowship and enter a covenant of peace with our God. Christ had to cry out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken Me?” (Mark 15:34). Christ had to suffer and be condemned in our place so that we would be brought in from the fields of sin. Christ suffered the malediction,
the curse of the covenant, that we would receive the benediction and blessing of the covenant (Deut. 27-28). How often do we think about that today? How often do we sing about the cross and talk about the cross, but we don’t listen to the message of the cross? The cross speaks, beloved, and it says that God punishes sin, and he saves sinners through the cross.
By the Holy Spirit’s superintendence, Moses deliberately penned these words so that we, as the redeemed, might be a people that sing out the honor of God’s praise. So, let me ask you: how is your praise to the Lord? How is your remembrance of the work of Jesus Christ on your behalf, the one who in love was given by the Father, the one who lived the perfect law-abiding life, and died the perfect sin-atoning death, and then rose again from the dead? How is your remembrance of the one who sits at the right hand of the Father and is there to be worshiped by his people? How is your praise to your Lord and Redeemer Jesus Christ? Are you remembering him?
Let me give you three points from Exodus 15:1-3. (I will only address the first point in this article. Lord willing, I will deal with the other two points in future articles). The first thing we see is the response of deliverance, which is singing. It’s appropriate, isn’t it? The people who are delivered sing out to the Lord. The second thing we see in verse 2 is that the object of the song is the Lord. He is the focus of Moses’ song. It’s important to hear this in the sappy, sentimental, self-absorbed age in which we live because the church seems all too desirous of staring into a mirror to admire her beauty like a teenage girl going on her first date. It’s important to hear that the object is the Lord. And, thirdly, we see that the content of the song has to do with God’s character, with God’s work, with God’s attributes. It is the calling of the church to be enraptured with the beauty of Christ. He is precious to the Father (1 Pet. 2:4-7) and, therefore, must be precious to the church. The church must be fixing her gaze upon Christ (Heb. 12:3) as she longs for his return to consummate his kingdom.
The Lord has redeemed people from every tribe, tongue, nation, and language (Rev. 5:9-10) to praise Him. The Apostle Peter tells us, “We are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood that we might proclaim the praises of him who called us from darkness to light” (1 Pet. 2:9-10). We are not redeemed by the Lord so that we might exalt ourselves. We are a people that exalts in the Lord. That’s how we honor and glorify him! Have you ever noticed that our hymnal was designed to sing out the glory of God’s name? We live in a day when the church desires to be exalted in the world and it eclipses the glory of God. That’s blasphemy! The Lord did not redeem us to sing to ourselves. The Lord redeemed us that we would be a people that sing to him and about him.
In Exodus 15:1 the children of Israel are delivered through the Red Sea. What a glorious miracle! We could say that it’s a miracle of miracles in the Old Covenant, and it was a type, it was a shadow. And it’s important for us as new covenant believers because, as the Belgic Confession of Faith, Article 34, declares regarding Holy Baptism, “Not that this is effected by the external water, but by the sprinkling of the precious blood of the Son of God; who is our Red Sea, through which we must pass to escape the tyranny of Pharaoh, that is, the devil, and to enter into the spiritual land of Canaan.” In other words, as the children of Israel could only escape the Egyptians and Pharaoh’s army by crossing the Red Sea, only God could provide that miracle. In the same way, if we are going to escape the tyranny of Satan and sin, it is only through God’s provision, which is Jesus Christ. As there was no other way to cross through the Red Sea except by God’s provision, so in the same way, you cannot be redeemed, you cannot be reconciled, you cannot be forgiven except through the person and work of Jesus Christ. As we read in Acts 4:12, “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” This is mentioned and demonstrated continually in the Old Covenant and throughout the New Covenant.
Let me give you one other instance. Do you remember the children of Israel murmuring, grumbling, and complaining and the Lord was displeased about it? The Israelites said these words in the book of Numbers, “We loathe this worthless manna” (Num. 21:5). Now, as you read the Old Testament in light of the New Testament, you know that the manna was a type of Jesus Christ. He is the manna that became man (John 6:32). The manna had all that was necessary for the children of Israel to be sustained in the wilderness. They needed none other than the manna that was given to them, yet they were not satisfied with it. They wanted more. We are in the same boat, are we not? When we are not satisfied with the ordinary ministry of the word and the sacraments, when we want more, when we think we must have more, we behave just like the disgruntled Israelites. So the Lord sent poisonous snakes into the camp to bite the Israelites, and they were dying. And they cried out to Moses, and Moses cried out to the Lord. The Lord told Moses to erect a bronze serpent and put it on a pole and put it amid the camp and tell all the people to look at the bronze serpent, and those who look would be healed. Notice the act of faith in believing the word of God. That’s the difference, beloved, between a believer and unbeliever; a believer believes God’s word. And those in the wilderness who looked to the bronze serpent were healed of the poisonous snake bites. Those who did not look died (Num. 21). The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Cor. 10:8-9 that 23,000 died in the wilderness because they did not believe the word of God.
In John 3:14-15, Jesus said, “As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.” The parallel is unmistakable. The only way to be saved in the wilderness from their temporal affliction was by looking to the only instrument that God gave. It is the same spiritually: there is only one way to be saved, and his name is Jesus. Don’t miss the types and the symbols that are given in the Old Covenant that point to Jesus Christ. Jesus told the Pharisees, “You search the Scriptures for in them you think you have eternal life, but these are they that speak of me” (John 5:39). When Jesus was walking with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, He said the same thing to them. “If you believeed Moses, you would believe Me because Moses wrote about me.” The Law, the Psalms, the Prophets, they all spoke about Jesus Christ (John 5:46; Luke 24:25-27, 44). They pointed to him. So don’t forget that all the types and the shadows and the symbols and the sacrifices and the ceremonies and the feasts and all the other things in the Old Covenant are pointing to the Lamb of God who would take away the sin of the world.
Moses then cries out in this song (vs. 1), and it’s not just Moses but all the children of Israel are gathered to sing out the honor and the glory of God. And notice they sang this song to the Lord and not to themselves. This same attitude is found throughout the Psalms, for instance, Psalm 5:11, “But let all those rejoice who put their trust in you; Let them ever shout for joy, because you defend them; Let those also who love your name be joyful in you.” Now, when you gather on the Lord’s Day to sing to the Lord, do you have this thought in mind that you are singing to the Lord? Our text shows Moses and all the children of Israel singing to the Lord because of the Lord’s deliverance. They sang out the honor of God’s name and they spoke saying, “I will sing to the Lord.” Notice how personal this is. “I will sing to the Lord.” Me! I will do it! I am going to sing out to the honor of our God, my God, my LORD, the covenant God, the One who keeps peace and who forgives the iniquities of multitudes of generations who love him and worship him. “I will sing to him.”
Songs are a great motivation to the heart. There is a great connection with song and remembering. This is the first inspired song that we see in Scripture, and it corresponds with a new song that the people of God sing in Revelation 15. Song and remembering go together. We often remember things in song. You can remember songs that you sang 20 years ago, even 30 years ago. A song comes on the radio, and you know the words and you begin singing along. Why are we not this way with the hymns in singing praise to our God? We ought to know the hymns so well that when we are on our deathbed, the hymn of praise to God is the song in our heart. We declare with our dying breath, “I will sing to the Lord!”
Rev. Scott Henry
Hope Reformed Church
Sutton, NE