Salvation

​Midweek 6 – 2025                                                                       LSB #’s 423, 555:1, 4, 6-7, 9; 918
Text – Exodus 14:30
 
Thus the Lord saved Israel that day from the hand of the Egyptians, & Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore.   
 
SALVATION
 
 
The Exodus is the salvation event of the OT.   The Israelites were living in the land of Egypt, but Pharaoh was afraid because they were becoming too numerous.  So, he enslaved them & forced them to make bricks & work in the fields.  He ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill all the male children as they were born.    As time went on, their situation grew worse & worse.  
First the Egyptians forced them to make bricks with straw that the Egyptians provided.  Then they told the Israelites they needed to gather their own straw, but still had to produce the same number of bricks. 
God delivered His people from this dire situation.  He sent Moses to lead them out of slavery, culminating in the crossing of the Red Sea, which is the text for this evening.  With the Egyptians in hot pursuit, Moses lifted his staff & stretched out his hand to divide the sea.  
God sent a strong east wind that divided the waters, opening up a path of dry ground for the Israelites to cross.  The Egyptians pursued them into the sea, but after the Israelites were safely on the other side, Moses stretched out his hand once again.  The sea returned to its normal course & drowned the entire Egyptian army. 
This story is not only about what happened to the Israelites long ago.   It sets forth a pattern of God’s deliverance that we see repeated multiple times in the Bible, & in our lives as well.  The story itself echoes the pattern that God established at creation.  Then the pattern is repeated in Christ’s resurrection, & in our baptism. 
CREATION        In the first verses of Genesis, we read that the “Spirit of God was
hovering over the face of the waters.”  (Genesis 1:2)   On day two of creation, God separates the waters from the waters & installs the sky to keep the waters above separate from the waters below.  On day 3, God gathers the waters below into one place, & dry land appears.  We see these same themes in the crossing of the Red Sea.  
God sends a strong east wind.  Now, the Hebrew word for “wind” can also be translated as “Spirit.”  The east winds correspond to the Spirit hovering over the waters.  As in day two of creation, also here God separates the waters from the waters.  As in day three, dry land appears.  
That means we can understand the crossing of the Red Sea as not just any miracle, but as God re-engaging in an act of creation.  The Israelites were dead, in a sense, as they served their cruel Egyptian masters.  Yet, by leading them through the sea, God re-created them.  He brought them from death to life.  He made Himself a people. 
CHRIST        We see the same pattern play out on a cosmic scale in the story of Christ once we realize that Moses finds his fulfillment in Messiah.  In Deuteronomy 18, the Lord says to Moses, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers.  And I will put my words in His mouth, & He shall speak to them all that I command Him.”  (18:18 ESV)  
The early church identified this passage as one of the most important prophecies of Christ in the OT.   It shows that, what Moses accomplished in a preliminary way, Jesus accomplished in ultimate reality.  As Moses delivered the Israelites from the Pharoah in Egypt, Jesus delivers the world from the true Pharaoh, Satan himself. 
This deliverance takes place through the sea, which in the Bible is an image of chaos & death from God’s wrath.  We see it in the story of Jonah, where God’s wrath appears as a storm on the sea, & the only way to quell the storm was for the sailors to throw Jonah into the sea.  He spent three days & nights in the belly of a fish until he was spit up on dry ground.  Jesus refers to this describing what would happen to Him: “…just as Jonah was three days & three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days & three nights in the heart of the earth.”  (Matthew 12:40 ESV)  
When Jesus died on the cross, we can say He went into the sea, into the heart of God’s wrath, where He suffered that wrath on our behalf.  When He rose from the dead, He came out the other side, at which point all the powers that would enslave us – sin, death, & the devil – were drowned in the sea of Messiah’s sacrifice.
BAPTISM          The same pattern plays out in our baptism.   Baptism is structured upon Christ’s death & resurrection.  It has the crossing of the Red Sea built into it, as St. Paul wrote:
“Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?  We were buried therefore with Him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”  (Romans 6:3–4 ESV) 
Just as the Israelites go into the midst of the sea, we also go into the waters in our baptism, where we die with Christ.  And just as the Israelites come out of the sea alive on the other side, we also come out of the water of baptism alive in Christ’s resurrection, & are walking in newness of life.  
This is the pattern of the Christian life that the Small Catechism uses when it says that such baptizing with water indicates that the Old Adam in us should by daily contrition & repentance be drowned & die with all sins & evil lusts  & a new man come forth & arise to live before God in righteousness & purity forever.  
In our baptism, the victory that Christ won becomes our triumph over death.  But there is a detail in the story that is not so triumphant.  As the Egyptian army is approaching, the Israelites are afraid, & actually wish they were back in slavery.  They say to Moses, “Is not this what we said to you in Egypt: ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’?  For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”  (Exodus 14:12 ESV) 
The longing to return to slavery can be a powerful force.  In the baptismal liturgy, that force is dealt with in the following exchange between the pastor & the baptismal candidate.  Sometimes the congregation is encouraged to speak the responses as well:
Do you renounce the devil?                  Yes, I renounce him.
Do you renounce all his works?                  Yes, I renounce them.
Do you renounce all his ways?                 Yes, I renounce them.[1]
Sinners struggle to say that whole-heartedly.  Does sin still have its allure?  If so, then you need to understand that sin is slavery.  St. Paul says, “Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?”  (Romans 6:16 ESV)  
Sin demands ever more of you.  First it demands bricks.  Then bricks without straw.  Sin is the anvil on your chest interfering with your breathing.  It is the slipper that’s so tight you can’t feel your toes.  It is the rope that envelopes your desires & constrains them, dragging them off in directions they were never meant to go.  
Sin is a lizard that cannot stand the idea of being a great & noble creature, but Christ has freed us from that slavery.  He’s lifted the weight from our chest & burned the ropes that bind us.  
By daily contrition & repentance we are led into the fullness of our humanity & begin to experience the freedom, nobility & significance of being God’s own creatures, the way He designed us to be.  Honest repentance doesn’t make us less human; it makes us more, as Jesus
said, “I came that they may have life & have it abundantly.”  (John 10:10b ESV)   Through His perfect life, death & resurrection, Jesus has saved you & me from slavery to sin.  He has given us hope & a future in eternal paradise.  Meanwhile, His work of re-creation is going on each & every day of our lives.  Salvation unto us has come.  Amen. 
 
 
Salvation unto us has come by God’s free grace & favor; good works cannot avert our doom, they help & save us never.   Faith looks to Jesus Christ alone, who did for all the world atone; He is our one Redeemer.    From sin our flesh could not abstain, sin held its sway unceasing; the task was useless & in vain, our guilt was e’er increasing.   None can remove sin’s poisoned dart or purify our guileful heart – so deep is our corruption.     Since Christ has full atonement made   & brought us to salvation, each Christian therefore may be glad & build on this foundation.   Your grace alone, dear Lord, I plead, Your death is now my life indeed, for You have paid my ransom.  Amen.  LSB 555:1, 4, 6. 


[1] Lutheran Service Book (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2005), 270.