Sermon Tone Analysis

pigh-huh HIGH rahth

BAY uhl-ZEE fahn

We have a lot of ground to cover today, and I want to plainly state my aim in preaching.

My goal is to show you from the Bible that

1) Exodus 14 teaches us that God’s glory in deliverance (salvation) is seen most clearly against the backdrop of just judgment.

2) The New Testament teaches us that baptism symbolizes passing through judgment you deserve by union with God’s deliverer and coming out alive and part of God’s new creation.

Let’s break these two apart.

First...

1) Exodus 14 teaches us that God’s glory in deliverance (salvation) is seen most clearly against the backdrop of just judgment.

Before we go any further, let’s define the term glory.

The way it is used in the Bible - glory is the manifestation of the essence of God in the full array of his attributes.

If you want to know God in all his glory, you understand him rightly for who he is in all of his many attributes.

In the book of Exodus Moses asks God to manifest his glory to him.

A quick look at that exchange would be instructive for our study today.

So when Moses asks God to show his glory, God says he will make all of his goodness pass before him and proclaim his name (the essence of who he is) to Moses.

The essence of who God is - is 1st seen in Ex. 33:19 as freedom to show grace to whomever he wants and to show mercy however he pleases and secondly in verses 6-7 of Exodus 34 - that he is by nature merciful and gracious, but also just in judging those guilty of sin.

In other words, God’s nature, his character... HIS GLORY is both seen in mercy and judgment.

Now that we understand what we mean by God’s glory, our goal is to rightly understand how his glory is displayed in the text before us - the chapter we just read to you.

Look at verses 1-4

By all military strategies this was absolutely absurd for the Israelites to turn back on themselves and get boxed in between the army of Pharaoh and the sea.

But God says in verse four that he intends to receive glory by means of Pharaoh and his army.

One expert said this could better be translated “I will get glory for myself this way...” In essence God is saying I intend to receive glory for judging the Egyptians.

When, by all human considerations, the situation becomes truly impossible for the people of God, Moses then tells the Israelites:

So God intends to receive glory in judgment AND in salvation.

And the summary statement at the end of the chapter is this:

So God’s glory was manifested in merciful salvation to his people, and just judgment on the Egyptians.

And when Israel saw the power that Yahweh used against the Egyptians they feared the LORD and believed in Him.

This is why I say God’s glory in deliverance is seen most clearly against the backdrop of just judgment.

It’s like painting a mountain.

You could paint a mountain in two dimensions with no way of seeing how big the mountain is because the only thing in the painting is the mountain.

You wouldn’t know how big the mountain is because you have nothing to compare it to.

But when you have a background, you immediately get perspective on the grandeur of the size of the mountain in the foreground.

You come to appreciate the mountainous heights only when you see it portrayed against a backdrop.

So it is with the glorious heights of God’s mercy.

Brothers and sisters, we cannot possibly grasp the depth of the riches of the glory of God’s MERCY until we understand the awful and just judgment we all deserve for sin.

Or to put it in terms of our text today, you can’t begin to understand how good it feels to be alive until all you see is dead bodies washing up on the shore around you.

Why are you standing on dry ground and not floating in the red sea of God’s holy and just wrath?

MERCY.

GRACE.

One of our church members did rescue work in the Navy.

In recounting what he did, he was trying to take it easy on me and I think also trying to keep at bay the horrors of what he saw when he told me that unfortunately in his career he had to recover “dead stuff” from the carnage of wrecks.

I’m sure he went home and hugged his family tighter that day.

The family was always there, but against the backdrop of the ugly carnage of death, you appreciate your life and all of God’s mercies all the more.

You start to think - that could have been ME in that plane that went down, and you become all the more grateful to God for every day he gives you.

Death is God’s universal punishment for sin.

Just because calamity, natural disaster, or terror strikes, it doesn’t mean its because the people who die tragically were worse sinners than those who do not die in similar fashion.

We’re ALL sinners, and the Bible teaches us that

Israel came to understand that the glory of their deliverance all the more when they walked through the very same sea that the Egyptians did and yet God spared them by his grace.

And they realized the power of God’s judgment on evil and feared God and worshiped him.

Deep down inside, we all want God to be just.

We usually just point that judgment on other people and other sins, not our own.

We want God to judge the man who threw battery acid on the face of another man simply because he looked Hispanic.

We want God to pass judgment on the evil person who shot a seven year old trick or treater.

We want God to show the GLORY of his judgment on genocidal dictators and race-motivated murderers.

But the question is do you feel the weight of God’s justice when it comes to you and your sin?

Friends, until you recognize that you are worthy of God’s just judgment, you will never marvel at the glory of the cross of Jesus.

You will never marvel at the grace and mercy you’ve received.

Until your picture of God includes his just judgment of your sin, your painting will have no backdrop for you to appreciate the mountain of God’s grace that he has heaped upon you.

The cross is the greatest manifestation of God’s glory in Salvation over against the backdrop of his just judgment of sin.

At Calvary, God vented the full wrath of his anger towards sin on his son Jesus so that if you would believe that HE took the punishment you JUSTLY deserve, you will receive his righteousness and his obedience and his life.

You or I would NEVER have been good enough to escape the judgment of God - but we can receive it freely as a gift from God by his grace.

You can’t give God anything - you can only receive MERCY and worship him for his just judgments.

So Exodus 14 paints the picture in full relief - you can see the glory of God’s salvation against the backdrop of his glorious justice.

Now we must turn to the second endeavor in this message.

That is to show you how...

2) The New Testament teaches us that baptism symbolizes passing through judgment you deserve by union with God’s Deliverer and coming out alive and part of God’s new creation.

Last week we talked about how God Delivered the Israelites with illustrated reminders.

And a good portion of that text and that message focused on the depth of meaning behind the lamb, the passover and ultimately its relationship to the Lord’s Supper.

In a way, this message is an extension of last week’s - because the Red Sea crossing of Exodus 14 is another illustrated reminder of how God delivers - namely by passing safely through the very judgment you deserve by nature of your union with God’s deliverer.

Let’s unpack this.

Point number 2 has three basic parts:

We’re saying that New Testament teaching informs us that baptism first symbolizes passing through judgment you deserve.

I hope that became plain in the first part of our message - that the Israelites ALSO deserved death and judgment but were only saved by God’s mercy.

So the Waters picture the Waters of Judgment in death and the Israelites in essence passed safely through death.

Now to part two of the 2nd point.

Baptism symbolizes passing through death BY UNION WITH GOD’S DELIVERER.

SO let’s unpack that concept.

To do so I’m going to start with our present narrative and then reinforce it with the flood narrative from the Genesis as a support for this concept.

Nod to Timothy Brindle “The Unfolding”

Philip Ryken writes this… Paul was making a connection between the exodus and baptism.

For the Israelites, passing through the Red Sea was a type of baptism, and thus it was “a forecast of our final deliverance in Christ.”

Once we were enslaved in the Egypt of sin, but now Christ has set us free.

All of this is symbolized in the Red Sea event of baptism.

Notice the specific language - they were baptized into Moses.

They were saved by their union with God’s deliverer, Moses.

So our present text is used in the New Testament to say the Red Sea crossing was a type (a foreshadowing) of BAPTISM.

What it prefigured, Baptism shows the reality.

But I want to bolster this baptism connection by pulling in another Old Testament narrative that the New Testament says is a TYPE for Baptism.

And this connection is not arbitrary.

Let me show you how Exodus 14 is closely linked to the Flood Account in Genesis.

First there is the fact that Moses identified himself with Noah back in Exodus 1 by saying he was delivered in the waters of the Nile in an ARK (remember that connection? the Tevah?

/ Basket / Ark

But in our specific chapter, we see two unique verbal connections between the red sea salvation/judgment and the flood’s salvation/judgment

RuaCH spirit/wind

Tehom / Depths

So Moses says poetically in Exodus 15 that the floods/the depths covered the Egyptians.

A water judgment on those who were not united with him by faith in YAHWEH.

So how then does the New Testament understand Noah and the flood?

1 Pet.

3:20 and 21 tells us that eight people were brought SAFELY THROUGH WATER.