Psalms Lesson 33

Exodus 15:1-5

Continuing the series on the Psalms. There are different kinds of Psalms in God’s Word and this particular one is national because it is sung by the nation for the nation in response to a national incident. It is the Psalm that approximates what we used to call a declarative praise Psalm of the individual. Remember the difference; declarative praise is praise that is response to a specific act of deliverance by God the Father toward the believer. So there is a specific historic event involved in declarative praise. In descriptive praise it is a principle that’s abstracted from a point event. The declarative praise Psalms vary greatly when they are national. They have a set structure when they’re individual but when the nation sings declarative praise they vary a lot. The reason for this is because there are few events of national deliverance in the nation Israel. Most of the declarative praise Psalms hark back to the Exodus and conquest.

Can anyone think why in the history of the nation Israel the Exodus and conquest are the key events? Why are these particular events so critical and it seems that later on, though there are deliverances in the national history, these deliverances don’t appear to be sung about very much at all. It seems most of the singing seems to be about this and then it just dies out. [someone says something] All right, the Exodus was the picture of salvation, Passover, the Exodus and conquest are to Israel what the cross and resurrection is to the Church. And that is why declarative praise of the nation centers on Exodus and conquest, like the Church praise centers on the cross and resurrection. The declarative praise sung by the nation of Israel will one day continue when the nation is brought back to the land but the reason why you have no declarative praise Psalms sung today is because there’s been no deliverance of the nation Israel today. The nation Israel is not in a redeemed state today and therefore the singing of these kind of hymns has just never really caught on in history. It’s very interesting, there are very few of these in the Psalter and this is one of those categories that’s just strangely kind of missing. There’s many individual declarative praise but the nation, no. And it’s a symptom of the whole history of the national experience.

Exodus 15 is a Psalm; it is a Psalm and it is a declarative praise Psalm in at least its rough outline. If you recall a declarative praise Psalm has three parts; a proclamation, an introductory summary and a main section. These are the three parts to a declarative praise Psalm. Of these three parts the most important one, as far as summary, is the introductory summary. That’s the most important part of all, that summarizes everything. Chapter 15 should be written as poetry in your translation. The King James never did it this way but it is a poem. Now as you look in chapter 15 where do you think the introductory proclamation ends and the introductory summary begins? Can anybody see where the proclamation to praise stops and where the introductory summary begins?

[someone says something] The proclamation to praise ends at the end of verse 3, do we have any other bids. The end of verse 3 is one possibility; remember you’re looking… a proclamation to praise is a declaration of the believers to give thanks to God. [someone says something] Just verse 1, all right, we’ve got 1, we’ve got 1-2. [someone says something] 1 and 2, all right. That exhausts about all combinations. So let’s look at the categories again. The proclamation is a declaration of intent; it is not the performing of the thing, it is the declaration that I am going to perform it. So looking at it this way, the verbs in verse 1 are all future, I will, they are cohortatives, I will do this, cohortatives of resolve. Verse 2, “I will prepare Him an habitation… I will exalt Him.” Then in verse 3, “The LORD is a man of war; the LORD is His name,” that’s a declarative statement.

So beginning in verse 3 you have a shift away from that perfect tense, that future tense, and you have something new begin, so that introductory summary begins at verse 3, extends through verse 4. And the main section I am going to place at verse 6, and therefore we’ll give the outline of the Psalm as follows: verses 1-2 is the first part of the song, Moses and the nation vow to praise their God because He has given them victory. That is a summary of the content of the first two verses. Then a second part of the psalm, verses 2-5, Jehovah or Yahweh has revealed His military nature by totally defeating the enemy. People who tend toward passivism never can stand psalms like this. I was told by someone who attended a liberal church in the East that their musical program had formally dropped out all hymns that spoke whatever of warfare, Onward Christian Soldiers was dropped, A Mighty Fortress is Our God dropped because they are too militant. And that simply shows that the person has nothing worth fighting for. Verses 6-19 is the main section, Yahweh is praised for His deliverance in a national crisis and for His future deliverance.

Now the first two verses, Moses and the nation vow to praise their God because He has given them victory. It begins with the word “then.” “Then sang Moses and the children of Israel this song unto the LORD, and spoke, saying….” So the first part of verse 1 introduces us to the hymn. The word “then” means at that time and refers back to chapter 14. So let’s go to chapter 14 to see the historical context for this praise. Verse 30-31 summarize chapter 14 and I want you to notice the historic incident first and then the response by the believers to this historic revelation.

Exodus 14:30, “Thus the LORD saved Israel that day out of the hand of the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead upon the seashore. [31] And Israel saw that great work which the LORD did upon the Egyptians: and the people feared the LORD, and believed the LORD and His servant Moses.” The point is emphasized in verse 31. Verse 31 shows you the mechanics of how Old Testament saints increased their faith and how the Holy Spirit took the record of how they increased their faith, gave it to us so that our faith would be increased. “Israel saw that great work which the LORD did upon the Egyptians,” so the verse shows that their faith developed by reference to historic events. Their faith did not come by speculation, their faith did not come by subjective emotions. It wasn’t that they went into their closet and agonized until they could work up a feeling. Israel’s faith was founded on something objective, an objective historic event. And not just any historic event but an event that was truly a work of the Lord in a direct way. “And the people feared the LORD,” that is the word to respect His authority. It’s the first commandment. They respected Jehovah’s authority.

Now I think if you were on the edge of the Red Sea at this particular time you would have had some respect for the authority of God for what He had done. Imagine yourself with your family trapped on one edge of the Red Sea, as it was one long arm, we’re not sure exactly what the geography looked like because we’re not sure that the geography has remained unchanged to the present day. And the people of Israel were trapped in a perimeter and they were squashed in this perimeter open to Pharaoh’s assault. Apparently from the text they had some protection on their flank from high land and so Pharaoh’s armies had to go through a pass to get at them, this is why the pillar of fire was an effective blocking agent. But they were in this situation which would be analogous to any bad situation that you would face as a believer, there is no escape humanly speaking from this situation. There is no way they can work up emotions and save themselves in this situation. The pressure is tremendous, they have their men here, the women and children in front of them, they know that the only solution they have is either to fight and know they will be annihilated because coming at them is the best military force of the ancient world. Pharaoh’s horses and chariots were fantastic; they were feared all through the ancient world. They were the most magnificent military machine known to man of that age. So humanly speaking there was no solution to the problem, it was a pressure situation and they had panic, many believers did panic in the situation. They did not all trust the Lord. There was one man who did, and that’s Moses. And you know the story of how God opened the way through, they came through and then He just closed it up and there went Pharaoh’s great magnificent army.

If you had lived through this thing, if you had personally walked through the separation of waters and realized… obviously there were many miracles associated with this, it wasn’t just the east wind blew all night and separated the waters, if you stop and think for a moment, even if the waters were separated, how could you move two million people across the floor of a sea. You can imagine the slime and the mud and so on that had gathered down at the bottom of this thing. People would have sunk into it, so another miracle associated with the Exodus event was the fact that He miraculously dried up the floor, all of the slime and everything hardened into a dry crust and the people were able to walk across without sinking. They had carts, they had oxen, they had animals, and all of that went across without sinking. So there are a lot of subsidiary miracles associated with this that simply show God’s tremendous grace, that when God provides for us in the middle of pressure He provides for every detail of our problem. And this is a magnificent illustration of this, that God provides for every single detail including getting your feet wet.

So God had made a complete and total solution to their problem; they came across and then they watched Pharaoh get it. And the other songs in some of the other texts of Scripture, one of the Psalms we studied, Psalm 74 tells that one of the sights the people saw after they got along the side, the waters closed in, was the dead bodies of the animals and men come up to the surface; this is usually what happens when people drown, people go down and then as the body rots there are gases that are released in the body that bloat it and these bodies come back up to the surface and float around for a while. It’s a source of disease, flies, maggots and everything else, but that’s what happens when you have catastrophe like this. So this is the food that God gave to the people of the desert, according to Psalm 74; see the place is just loaded with bodies and the people had a tremendous view of the tremendous wrath and grace of God because they had the gentleness of God in providing for their dry feet in crossing the Red Sea but then they also had a very graphic demonstration of the horror of God’s judgment of the rotting corpses as they floated on the eastern edge of the Red Sea.

So this is what the people were looking and while they were looking at this mess they sang a song. This was the perfect environment for one of the greatest hymns that was ever written, looking at maggot eaten bodies floating on the waters and as they saw this they gave thanks to God. And we therefore have the doctrine of judgment/salvation. You never have salvation in Scripture unless you have judgment, so always think of these two words together: judgment/salvation, you cannot have one without the other. They go together, they are two sides of the same coin and never are we delivered without some judgment occurring. Obviously if you just ask yourself the question, what are you saved from… well, whatever you are saved from has to be judged, doesn’t it. So therefore whatever you are saved from is that which is judged, so these two points always occur together: judgment/salvation.

Now, this judgment salvation has five aspects to it that occur over and over and over; these occurred with the flood of Noah, the same thing, another judgment/salvation. In all of these you have a common set of characteristics; learn to see these and then you’ll understand our salvation in the person of Jesus Christ. The first thing that you always see is that the imprisoning power or the evil from which you are delivered, that evil is judged. In this case Pharaoh was judged; in Noah’s case the earth was destroyed. So you always must have some destruction of something. Now this goes for you in your Christian life. As you mature spiritually there will come crashing down bashings of human viewpoint and rebellion in your soul. And these are going to be eliminated as you are delivered progressively in phase two of God’s salvation. So always salvation is accompanied with judgment of some sort. So the first thing is that you have to have a destruction of the imprisoning power of evil.

The second thing is that you will always have grace before judgment; God never judges without first giving people a perfect chance, a sufficient chance. In the days of Noah God gave a whole generation a chance while Noah was building his boat. He gave that generation 120 years of teaching Bible doctrine and for a generation these people rejected the Word and faced destruction. In the days of Pharaoh God not only gave them grace, He gave them miraculous grace; He gave Pharaoh and the court people of Pharaoh’s time miracle after miracle after miracle; they didn’t have to get trapped in the Red Sea; this is not an act of cruelty on God’s part, they deserved every drop because they rejected grace, rejected grace, and rejected more grace.

The third characteristic that surrounds events of judgment/salvation is that there is always perfect discrimination; there is always perfect discrimination between the righteous and the unrighteous. There are no statistical outcomes, 90% of the believers make it and 10% don’t…NO, that’s not the way it is, 100% believers make it and no unbelievers ever make it. This is the way it was with the flood of Noah, there were only the people in the boat and that was it and no one else survived, and here no one was wet at all. Think of it, these people walked through, not on mud, they walked through on dry ground, every believer, think of it, two million people, think of all the problems God had getting two million people across the Red Sea. Probably someone got halfway across and said I forgot something, or some family had a lot of kids got halfway through and I’ve got to tinkle or something, there were all sorts of problems of getting two million people through the Red Sea. How did He ever do it; they made it and not one person was lost, not one. But every one of Pharaoh’s, including himself, was creamed in the process.

So there is always perfect discrimination. Now how can you apply that? You can apply that by the fact that in the future all of the future judgments of God, if you want a picture of them that is trustworthy and credible, look at the past judgments of God. How did God do it in the past? People always say I don’t see how God can judge millions and millions and millions of people and have it all come out right. How did He do it in these events? It came all right then, why can’t it come out all right in the future.

The fourth thing is there is only one means of salvation; never more than one. There is only one means of salvation in all these events; in Noah’s flood there was only the ark, nothing else. And here it was only those that were identified with Moses in the baptism; this is one of the great baptisms of Scripture, and notice please, it was not wet. The people who were baptized in the baptism of Moses, and this is mentioned by Paul in 1 Corinthians, the baptism of Moses was dry and the agents of the baptism were the clouds and the sea, Moses was identified with this and the people were identified with him, therefore it’s called the baptism of Moses. And no one got wet at all. It was an identification which shows you that the word “baptize” doesn’t mean get wet. The word “baptize” primarily means to identify.

The fifth thing about this, and always you notice it’s true of the flood, it’s true of an event like this, is that the people are saved by faith; they always are using the faith technique to some degree, to some degree at least they had to use the faith technique because obviously they had to trust. Can you imagine walking down and looking up and on one side seeing water, and looking up on the other side and seeing water. You had to trust something; now admittedly the choices weren’t too exciting, you either could chose that or get slaughtered under one of Pharaoh’s chariots. So shall we say God put perfect stimulus to believe in the water, but nevertheless, people did have to trust somewhat. So they were saved by faith. And by the way, this is another illustration of grace; see, they weren’t saved by anything they did. Not one of those persons could say yeah, I just sat there and I held the water up while the rest of the people went by. Nobody could contribute a thing, so it is all faith in God’s grace, always. And that is a picture of salvation, you don’t do anything to be saved; God does all the doing because He wants all the credit. His glory He will not share with anyone.

Now that was the event and that led to this Psalm of thanksgiving. These Psalms of thanksgiving we are studying, and the objective of the whole Psalm series, is to show you a mentality or a way of thinking. The Psalms should teach you, as we have gone over these week after week, by now those of you who have stayed with it by now you have probably picked up the mentality of praise, you now understand that praise is not going around saying “praise the Lord, praise the Lord” or something like this. Praise in Scripture means I recite publicly the evidences of my faith and the content of my faith, what God has done for me and why I believe it to be the truth. That is praise of God. Every time you witness for Jesus Christ to the unbeliever you are in effect praising God because you are making known His truth and you are giving Him credit, that is if you give your testimony correctly you are giving God the credit and therefore it is praise.

Why has God designed it this way? Because God’s grand strategy is to, first of all show that He alone is worthy of all creature worship, Revelation 4, God alone is worthy of all creature worship. And He must demonstrate that by works through history. The second part of God’s grand strategy or His master plan is that Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ is the creature King, He is Creator and creature but He is the King over the whole creation. The “first-born,” as Colossians calls Him, of all creation. And this shows that Jesus Christ qualifies to be the King of creation. We’re going to see that it was really Jesus Christ that parted the waters at the Red Sea.

So this Psalm refers back to God’s grand strategy in that it is a believer recognizing the grace principle and praising God for it. So that shows you why hymns are made in Scripture; all these Psalms and hymns in Scripture have as their purpose to cycle back to God’s grand strategy and recognize, they are a recognition—yes, God is a God of grace; yes, God is worthy because… dot, dot, dot, this event, this event, this event, this event. And that’s what separated good hymns from bad hymns. Bad hymns always say how I feel about Jesus or how I feel; how you feel doesn’t mean a hill of beans with God. How you feel has nothing to do with it, it is what God has done objectively.

Verse 1, Moses and the nation sing together, and when you see “I will sing” in verse 1, verses 1 and 2 are his cohortative of resolve; these are cohortatives of resolve which means that he now announces formally that this is his response as a believer. Now some of you always wonder what you can do for God. There’s something everyone of you can do for God as a believer priest and that is give Him praise. It may be in the quietness of your own heart, you may be out driving, walking, wherever you may be, that is something every believer can do if you know just an ounce of Bible doctrine you know that you can give God praise. And that is a test of the greatness of your soul because a soul that can’t return thanks to God for some event in your life, that’s a point of rebellion and negative volition and if you don’t clear it up you’re going to have compound carnality very shortly. So that’s a good way of testing yourself spiritually; am I this moment in this situation giving thanks? Or am I rebelling against God the Father. So this song cannot be sung by a believer out of fellowship. To sing this song requires a person being in fellowship because it’s a response to grace.

“I will sing unto the LORD” because; this is a quick summation why he’s going to, “because He has triumphed gloriously. Next week we’ll finish the song and I will play Handel’s rendition of Exodus 15 in his piece, Israel and Egypt, and you watch how Handel sets this to music. I’m going to explain certain things next week, why he does what he is doing because of the ending of the song. “…for He has triumphed gloriously,” the word means He has become proud,” and this is odd, this word usually has a sinister connotation, an evil connotation, because God is the only one who can be proud; it’s His work, He’s proud of it. And I want you to notice that this is the gentle Jesus, proud that He has slaughtered an army. So this should straighten out a lot of thinking about the character of Jesus Christ. Here He is proud of the slaughter of soldiers and that is the kind of God our Lord Jesus Christ is. He’s very proud because this was a military victory and He earned it, He deserved it.

“…He has triumphed gloriously,” the word “gloriously” means triumphed again, and what the Hebrew does here, it takes the verb “triumphed,” puts it in a usual state, indicative mood, and then right after it adds the infinitive, “triumph.” So you read it in the Hebrew and it’s triumphed triumph, and when you have this construction with the indicative form of the verb, plus the infinitive form, that extra infinitive increases the intensity of the mood of the main verb. The main verb’s mood is indicative mood; that means it’s a statement about reality. So if you increase the intensity of the indicative mood it means He has certainly triumphed. If, for example, this triumph was subjunctive type mood, then adding the infinitive would increase the subjunctiveness of the verb which would mean maybe He did and maybe He didn’t, it would make it very, very highly conditional. But the main verb mood is indicative and if you increase that mood you get certainty, so therefore the claim here is that He has certainly… see, what they’re looking at is they’re smelling these bodies float by, and as they sing this hymn there they go floating downstream. And he’s saying yes, “Jehovah has certainly triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider has he thrown into the sea.”

And “the horse and his rider” are the people they’re looking at, they’re seeing the men’s bodies and the horse bodies floating by and they’re saying those, the horse and his rider has He thrown into the sea. Notice this militant atmosphere to this hymn. Imagine singing this in some revival some place. It’s completely different than the usual ho-hum kind of thing that floats around in Christian hymnals. Well here the emphasis in this last sentence is on “the horse and his rider,” not the throwing, it’s the horse and his rider showing that this is foremost in their attention.

Verse 2, “The Lord is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation; He is my God, and I will prepare him an habitation; my father’s God, and I will exalt Him.” “The Lord is my strength and song,” notice the emphasis on personal possessions, this is the position of the nation Israel; it goes back to positional truth, “the Lord is my strength and my song,” well, let’s use an analogy. When we become Christians we are in the top circle forever, God the Holy Spirit puts us there by the baptism of the Holy Spirit which is not an experience, it is an identification with Jesus Christ. At this particular point you have certain possessions; they are yours forever, even if you never use them they are your possessions. You have many, many different possessions here. I separate them out, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, emphasis on each of the personalities of the Trinity, but God the Father has done things for you; God the Son has given things to you; God the Holy Spirit has given things to you.

For example, God the Holy Spirit has given you a spiritual capacity called a spiritual gift, at least one. Now you may be an immature believer, an ignorant believer, who never has used your spiritual gift. You may not even know there is such a thing as a spiritual gift. What’s that? Well, that’s a spiritual capacity God the Holy Spirit gives you at the point of salvation. You may never have used your gift but does that change the fact that it’s still your possession? No, it is your possession whether you use it or not. Jesus Christ has given you His perfect righteousness. And you may be the kind of believer that walks around with a big fat guilt complex, oh, I feel so guilty about this, I feel so guilty about that and you never realized that Jesus Christ has given you His perfect righteousness. You don’t have a right to be guilty, Jesus Christ has given you everything, perfect righteousness. And you walk around with a guilt complex, ridiculous. But that’s what happens when believers don’t use their possessions. So here’s your possession and it’s yours whether you use it or not. Smart believers use it; stupid believers don’t, but nevertheless, the believers still have this as a possession.

Now when it says “the Lord is my strength and my song,” what Moses and the nation is saying, He is this by our possession, see this is a positional truth, these are our possessions, but under the historic event of walking through the dry path in the middle of the water and watching these bodies float by, they suddenly become aware, hey, you know that is my possession. So verse 2 is an awareness by the believer under a pressure type situation that all those things that I’ve heard were my possession, by golly they really are, how about that. So it’s a recognition or a growing up to the fact that these are genuinely my possessions, my strength, my song. They are Israel’s by position and now in experience they are too.

“…He has become,” notice the verb “become,” translation of the syntax of the Hebrew, “He has become my salvation,” now wasn’t God Israel’s salvation before? Sure was. Well then why is the verb “become” there? Doesn’t become mean one time He wasn’t and now He’s become? Yes, in experience; it goes back to the bottom circle. God the Holy Spirit has given you all sorts of promises, but they just stay locked up, unused unless you personally apply them in your life. And when you begin to apply those promises in your life now you see something down here in the circle of experience and you say “God has become my salvation,” not in position but in experience He’s become; He wasn’t before, He was positionally but I wasn’t using the promises. Instead every time I faced a crisis situation I’d start crying on someone’s shoulder about it or I’d start complaining that it wasn’t my fault, it was somebody else’s fault, or it was the circumstances or something else. But now when I’m in a pressure situation I pull down one of those promises, apply it, and God has become my salvation. Why? He has become by faith technique, the use of the faith technique.

See the use of the faith technique is non-meritorious; just saying I believe doesn’t make the promise come true; the promise comes true because God acts on our behalf in response to our faith. So God acted here at the Red Sea. He moved several million cubic feet of water very rapidly and that’s what He did; their faith didn’t move the water, it was God who moved the water in response to their faith. And as a result He became something that He wasn’t before. So see how there’s a progress of revelation here. As a result of believing you are rewarded with a greater vision of God. This is why faith does result in further perception; faith is technically, if you want to argue about it, not a direct means of perception but faith surely leads to greater perception and here’s an illustration of it. It’s a greater perception in experience by Israel that God is their God of salvation as a result of the fact that they use the faith technique and God blessed them.

“…He is my God,” here we have a construction that again shows you the mentality of Moses and the nation. Literally it says, “this is my God, so” result “I will praise Him.” In other words, because I am identified positionally with God, it’s “this,” the Hebrew word for “this,” it’s a demonstrative pronoun, “this One is my God,” as distinguished from Horus, as distinguished from Re, as distinguished from the other gods of Egypt. No, not Horus, not Re, but “this One, He is my God” by position, therefore, I will praise Him. I won’t praise Horus for it, I won’t praise chance for it, see that’s how believers often times go astray, you don’t realize it but sometimes God blesses you and you just chalk it up to “chance,” or an occurrence. That’s wrong, you should have this mentality, Jesus Christ is my God and therefore He, not chance, gets the praise, He gets the credit.

So “…He is my God,” so I will praise Him. The word “prepare an habitation,” doesn’t mean prepare a habitation, it literally in the Hebrew means “I will adorn Him,” it means to put clothes on, it means to beautify, put on makeup, “I will adorn Him.” Now isn’t that a fantastic picture of praise? You know what happens when a woman makes herself up, you’ve got a transformation occurring. All right, the same thing here; this is a very interesting expression, everybody can understand this; this is one of those illustrations in the Bible that is very clear, if you don’t get fouled up in the translation, it’s very clear and would have communicated to everybody in the ancient world. I’m putting makeup on God. Now what is happening here? This means that God just showing Himself into creation is a bare God and the Jewish mentality of God just manifesting Himself to a creation and sit there and duh. To the Jew a God who just came into creation and everybody sits there and looks, duh, was not God in all of His beauty and magnificence. The complete picture was when God shows Himself and the creation responds; then God is seen in His beauty. So you see again, this is one of those little fine points that argues for something I have said at least 2500 times in the Psalm series, that the plan of salvation in God’s Word is not complete until the grand strategy is successful and the creation really does praise God. Salvation is not complete until praise occurs.

“…I will adorn Him, He is my father’s God, and I will exalt Him.” Or literally, “He is the God of my father,” and this refers to the Abrahamic Covenant. In other words, God by election chose Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were all regenerate, they all believed in Jesus Christ as revealed in that era. Since all these men did, they were in the top circle; that refers to the top circle again, the Abrahamic Covenant. And so since God was the God of Abraham, I am part of Abraham’s seed, therefore it’s another synonym for “my God, I will exalt Him,” I will raise Him up. This again is a strong word, this is not Atlas raising the world up and it’s not the believer raising God up like that but it is raising God up in a way. It is raising God up in the sense that you have provided a correct image of Him to other creatures.

So when praise occurs you do raise God up in the eyes of other creatures. The raising up of God is not adding to God in any way but what it’s doing is raising Him up relative to the other creatures. For example, look at the Bible itself. Suppose you had just the Old Testament, none of the New Testament. And suppose we all knew the Old Testament and then somebody walked in and suddenly gave us the New Testament with everything God has done in the New Testament era. By walking in and telling us the additional revelation of the New Testament, God would be raised up in our minds because it’s more revelation of Him and what He has done. So the praising of God, therefore, is a raising of Him up to the rest of the creation. This is why it behooves anybody associated with music or praise or even testimony in Christian organizations, that you make it as accurate as you can because a burden falls on you; you have a responsibility to be as accurate as you can so that you will raise God up, and you’re not going to raise Him up if you’re inaccurate because you’re spreading falsehoods about His character. So you have to be correct doctrinally and it’s a very serious business. So much for the first two verses.

Now verse 3-5, the second section. Jehovah has revealed His military nature by totally defeating the enemy. God has many sides to His character. The sides or facets of His personality are manifold and no one song can carry all the weight. If you want a perfect hymn in the sense of something that will give everything about God you’re never going to find it. Every hymn, by its nature, has to be unbalanced. Everything has to shoot in and deal with one aspect, and another hymn another aspect. The same with the Psalms, we haven’t come across the perfect Psalm in the sense that it reveals all of God’s nature in the balance. All the hymns are unbalanced because they emphasize one part of God’s character. This is why there are 150 hymns in the Psalter, so after you read 150 you get the big picture. Well, Exodus 15, this psalm or hymn pictures one aspect of God’s character and it’s His militancy, He’s the God of war here.

This comes out again in Revelation because one of the last pictures of Jesus Christ given to us, in fact the last picture, it’s interesting, the last portrait we have of Jesus Christ is of His militancy. The last full portrait that Scripture gives of Him is given in Revelation 19:12, “His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on His head were many crowns, and He had a name written that no man knew, [13] And His clothes were a vesture dipped in blood, and His name is called the Word of God.” Now there is a picture as He is the Lord of hosts, Yahweh Sabaoth. As Martin Luther put it in his hymn, Saba-oth, not Sabbath, but Saba-oth, Saba is the Hebrew word for army, oth is a plural ending, the armies, the Lord of armies. And this is the way Jesus Christ closes out in the canon of Scripture; He is pictured as the Lord of armies. So the militancy of God’s character is certainly one that is important.

Now Exodus 15:3, “The LORD is a man of war; the LORD is His name.” “The LORD is a man of war” is a declarative statement about God’s nature. This phrase, “man of war,” is a word that refers both to one’s technical preparation and one’s mental attitude; two things, the technical preparation, the skill of the warriors, and not just his skill but also his mental attitude. He is a “man of war; this is why in 1 Samuel 16:18 David’s qualifications are listed and one of those qualifications, remember, they said to get that boy David, the son of Jesse, who is he? He is skilled on the harp and he is a man of war. Why did David have to be a man of war? Because David in his soul had to picture and mirror the character of God and therefore David had to be a man of war in order to adequately picture the person of Jesus Christ. So Jesus Christ was pictured in history by a military man, and that’s why it’s said here, “The LORD is a man of war; the LORD is His name.”

You see what’s happened in our churches; by not emphasizing this militancy what has happened to the average person’s picture of Jesus Christ? It’s degenerated into some sort of an effeminate thing, and so the average person conceives of Christ like Holman Hunt paints Him, some archetype hippie with long hair or something. And first of all Christ didn’t have long hair and secondly, He wasn’t skinny, after all He worked in a carpenter shop for 30 years and they didn’t have skill saws and power drills. So you can obviously imagine that Jesus Christ was well-developed physically. So he wasn’t the skinny emaciated person that the artists love to paint. Now the image has completely become anti-Biblical and I know a lot of people that are simply turned off by the pictures they see of Jesus Christ. I would be too; the sad thing is that those pictures have no base whatever in Scripture; they’re just some mousey artist’s interpretation of the person of Christ.

But this is what you’re looking at Biblically. Now how different the Word of God is from most of society and their view. And here again, human viewpoint versus divine viewpoint. “The LORD is a man of war; the LORD is His name.” Now this has reference to His name, which we might as well go into why He’s named this, in the Bible you’ll see Jehovah, you’ll see Lord and in some new studies you’ll see Yahweh; it’s all the same thing. In the Hebrew it’s called the Tetragrammaton, four letters, and that is the name of God. So you have the four letters for God’s name and they look like this in the Hebrew, this is Y H and V or W H. YHWH and that is the Tetragrammaton, and that is all we know of what God’s name is like. That’s all. Sometimes this could be a V if you want to argue about it and that could be a J, but linguistically it doesn’t matter. These are all consonants.

Now that’s all that is known about God’s name, nothing else is known. Those vowels are pure speculation. The reason for this was that the Jew considered this name so sacred that he did not pronounce it, with the result that since the Jewish writing doesn’t have any vowels in it, they wrote it but never pronounced it, and so when they went to put what we call vowel points in the text, those are vowels that were added later but the original text were just all consonants, no vowels and you would memorize how words are written. Well, every time they came to this word about God they would never pronounce it and they just left it this way and so actually in history we’ve lost the pronunciation of God’s name. It was just dropped out.

The best guesses are that this word comes from the Hebrew word “to be” which looks like this and if you’ll turn to Exodus 3:13 you’ll see where God gives His name. “And Moses said unto God, Behold, when I come unto the children of Israel, and shall say unto them, The God of your fathers hath sent me unto you; and they shall say to me, What is His name? what shall I say unto them? [14] And God said,” and remember God is speaking to Moses out of a burning bush and what’s peculiar about the burning bush? What caught Moses’ eye as he saw this bush burning? It wasn’t consumed, so the fire was independent of the fuel, in other words, the fire was just there but it wasn’t consuming; the fire was not dependent upon the bush for its fuel; the fire was independently existing. Now when God was talking, this voice is modulated out of the fire, it comes out of the fire, “And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM:” and He uses the word hwh, which is the verb to be. That is the verb to be in the Hebrew. So he says “I AM THAT I AM,” that is My name.

And there’s been a great deal of debate about this but the emphasis in this expression appears to be that God here asserts independency of existence, that He is not dependent on anything, He is what He is and there is no law over Him. He can be what He wishes to be period! He is totally independent, the opposite of the creature; the creature is totally dependent but God is totally independent and free to be what He wants to be. “I am whatever I am” is what He’s saying. And out of this we have the name, apparently, of Yahweh. Now this “a” is relatively certain but this is a good guess, it’s still a guess, it’s not certain but it’s a guess and a pretty good guess. The “H” is less certain, but that’s a lot better than Jehovah. The reason why we have the word Jehovah is they took this word, there’s your four consonants, the Jews later on tried, because they didn’t want to pronounce it this way they had a little trick, they had another word for Lord which was Adonai, and they took the vowels out of that and plugged in here, so you have “a,” this is a short “a” so it came out in the English as “e,” this came over as an “o” and this came over as an “a” and that’s how you got Jehovah. But we know Jehovah can’t be the way you pronounce His name because it’s a combination of Adonai and whatever the Tetragrammaton was. But it is not the way the Jews pronounced this. Exodus 15:3, “The LORD is His nature,” or “His name.”

Then verse 4, “Pharaoh’s chariots,” this is a summary statement of what God has done, “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army has He cast into the sea;” and the word “cast” is a word that means to throw, it’s like in verse 1, He has thrown them into the sea. And it must have been stimulated by just looking at these bodies floating on the water, as the whole nation just massed on the shore and gave thanks to God. Do you see what’s happening here in Exodus 15, it’s a tremendous thing. After this great act, what did they do? They just sit there, having watched this happen they sit there and immediately begin to give thanks to the Lord, and this is their giving of thanks and they’re looking at the water is what they’re looking at and they see these bodies floating around and they say look at that, God has thrown them into the sea. The picture is just as though you were on the shore picking them up and throwing them into the sea. So the “throwing” is then used both in verse 1 and verse 4. It’s a picture that is used again in the book of Revelation; the lake of fire, and this is a type of the lake of fire. Who does God cast into the lake fire? Satan, his demons, and any men who are unfortunate enough to have chosen Satan’s way of rebelling against Jesus Christ. So the throwing here is a typology of that.

“Pharaoh’s chariots and his host has He cast into the sea; his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red Sea.” The word “captain” is interesting because this word is the word “three” and literally it doesn’t mean captain at all, it means a triad. Now what is a triad doing here? “Pharaoh’s chariots and his army has he cast into the sea, his chosen triad also are drowned in the Red Sea.” Who are the triad? The triads were three officers, they’d have three officers over units, and this is very interesting for those of you who are interested in ancient history. The triad was a form that Homer uses in the Iliad, the Iliad, Book 2, line 563, the line 567, the Odyssey Book 14, line 470-71 and the Iliad Book 12, lines 85-107 tells of triads in both the Greek and Trojan armies. They operated in terms of triads. More interesting than that, in 2 Samuel 23 and 1 Chronicles 11 David sets up his military organization by triads. And so here you have Pharaoh setting up his organization by triad and it shows you then this is a very, very ancient form. And it also shows you how the Egyptian culture, the Hebrew culture and the Greek culture were unanimous on this point. They all structured their military the same way; there was a great uniformity of culture in this sense.

Verse 5, “The depths have covered them; they sank into the bottom as a stone.” And this summarizes the completeness of the Lord’s victory, the fact that it is a real historical incident and it is not just an idea in somebody’s mind. Next week we’ll begin with verse and deal with Handel’s rendition of this song as an illustration of what can be done with it.