Honest Repentance: Salvation
Notes
Transcript
The Exodus is the salvation event in the Old Testament. The Israelites were living in the land of Egypt, but the Pharaoh was afraid because they were becoming too numerous. So, he enslaved them and forced them to make bricks and work in the fields. He also ordered the Hebrew midwives to kill all the male children as they were born. As time went on, their situation grew worse and worse. First the Egyptians forced them to make bricks out of straw that the Egyptians provided. Then they told the Israelites that they needed to gather their own straw, but they 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 captivity, culminating in the crossing of the Red Sea, which is our text for this evening. With the Egyptians in pursuit behind them, Moses lifted up his staff and 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 to the other side, Moses stretched out his hand once again, and the sea returned to its normal course, drowning the 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 can see repeated multiple times in the Bible and in our own lives as well. The story itself echoes the pattern that God established at creation. And then the pattern is repeated in Christ’s resurrection and also in our baptism.
CREATION
CREATION
In the first verses of Genesis, we read that the “Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters” (Gn 1:2). On day two of creation, God separates the waters from the waters and installs the sky to keep the waters above separate from the waters below. On day 3, God gathers the waters below into one place, and dry land appears.
We see these same themes in the crossing of the Red Sea. God sends a strong east wind. The Hebrew word for “wind” is the same word that means “Spirit.” So, the east winds correspond to the Spirit hovering over the waters. As in day two of creation, so also here God separates the waters from the waters. And as in day three, the dry land appears. That means that we should understand the crossing of the Red Sea as not just any miracle, but as God engaging in an act of creation. The Israelites were dead, in a sense, as they served their cruel Egyptian masters. But by leading them through the sea, God re-created them. He brought them from death to life. He made himself a people.
CHRIST
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 Christ. 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, and he shall speak to them all that I command him” (Dt 18:18). The early church identified this passage as one of the most important prophecies of Christ in the Old Testament. 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, the devil.
This deliverance takes place through the sea, which in the Bible is an image of chaos and death and God’s wrath. We see it in the story of Jonah, where God’s wrath appears as a storm on the sea, and the only way to quell the storm was for the sailors to throw Jonah into the sea. He spent three days and nights in the belly of a fish until he was spit up on dry ground.
Jesus uses this story to describe what would happen to him: “Just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Mt 12:40). We could make the same point with the imagery from the Exodus. When Jesus died on the cross, he went into the sea, meaning not only that he went to his death, but he went into the heart of God’s wrath, where he suffered it in our place. When he rose from the dead, he came out the other side, at which point all the powers that would enslave us—sin, death, and the devil—were drowned in the sea.
BAPTISM
BAPTISM
We see the same pattern play out in our baptisms as well. Baptism is structured around Christ’s death and resurrection, so it has the crossing of the Red Sea built into it. St. Paul says, “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” (Rom 6:3–4).
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 the Israelites come out of the sea on the other side, we also come out of the water of baptism and share in Christ’s resurrection, 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 and repentance be drowned and die with all sins and evil lusts and a new man come forth and arise to live before God in righteousness and purity forever. In our baptism, the victory that Christ won becomes our own triumph as well.
But there is one detail in the story that is not so triumphant. As the Egyptian army is approaching, the Israelites are afraid, and they wish they were actually 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” (Ex 14:12).
The longing to return to slavery can be a powerful force. In the baptismal liturgy, there is the following exchange between the pastor and the baptismal candidate. Sometimes the congregation speaks 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.
Do you ever struggle to say that whole-heartedly? Or 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” (Rom 6:16)? Sin demands more and more from you. First it demands bricks. Then it demands bricks without straw. Sin is the anvil on your chest that interferes with your breathing. It is the shoe that is so tight so that you can’t feel your toes. It is the rope that wraps around your desires and constrains them and drags them in directions they were never meant to go. It is the lizard that can’t stand the idea of being a great and noble creature.
But Christ has freed us from slavery. He has lifted the weight off our chest and burned the ropes that bind us so that by daily contrition and repentance we can be led into the fullness of our humanity and begin to experience the freedom and nobility and significance of being God’s own creatures, the way he designed us. Honest repentance doesn’t make us less human; it makes us more. Jesus says, “I came that they might have life, and have it to the full” (Jn 10:10).