This morning’s devotion comes from Nick Lannon’s newly released book, Life Is Impossible: And That’s Good News. The following excerpt was taken from Chapter 4, “The Impossible in Scripture,” a tour of divine surprises.
As Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites looked back, and there were the Egyptians advancing on them. In great fear the Israelites cried out to the Lord. […] Moses said to the people, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.”
Having only recently felt the freedom of having escaped from slavery in Egypt, God’s people are trapped. A huge sea is in front of them, a giant desert is all around them, and an enormous army commanded by an angry Pharaoh is bearing down on them. There seems to literally be no way out but death, and they complain to Moses that it would have been better for them to have been left in punishing slavery in Egypt than to face the fate that is before them now.
But the God of the impossible is just about to get to work. “The LORD said to Moses, ‘Why do you cry to me? Tell the people of Israel to go forward. Lift up your staff, and stretch out your hand over the sea and divide it, that the people of Israel may go through the sea on dry ground’” (Exodus 14:15-16).
God doesn’t send his people around the Red Sea. He doesn’t arrange it so that a great fleet shows up in the nick of time. He doesn’t bring them out of Egypt by any difficult route. He brings them out of Egypt by an impossible route: through the midst of a sea, but on dry ground. As we have seen time and again in Scripture, this is the way the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob works. There are countless more examples—some of which we will look at later in this book—of the God of creation seemingly circumventing the natural rules of that creation to achieve his purposes. Our God delights in accomplishing the impossible. This is good news indeed.
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