 |
| ©kokanary |
Exodus 14:14 “The Lord will fight for
you; you need only to be still.”
In January, I started a plan to read
the Bible through in a year. I was familiar with many Bible stories
as a child, you know, through flannel boards at church and such. So I
thought this would be a nice review. Ha! Apparently only “G-rated”
stories were selected for Sunday school. Forget trash TV when you’ve
got adventure, suspense, scandal and betrayal on every page of the
Old Testament. Each day, I find myself anxious to find out what
happens next, as each story unfolds.
But it’s not just an episode of “The
Real Housewives” that I’m reading in the Bible. It is beyond
anything that most people in our society today could fathom. It is a
story of redemption. It is a story that carries a strong current of
hope and a promise. Over and over again, God promises to deliver His
people. All they have to do is listen to His instruction.
In the book of
Exodus, God rescued the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, just as He
promised. That was a big deal. It was a huge answer to prayer for the
Israelites after years of bondage under Pharoah’s control. However,
they had only begun their journey to freedom, when they began
complaining of being hungry, thirsty, and tired. They became frantic
and terrified that they might die in the desert. As a reader, I can’t
help but yell back into history, “Are you crazy?? You have the
nerve to question the God of the entire world? The One who just
helped you escape Pharoah’s control? The One who literally just
parted the seas so you could walk among the whales and other sea
creatures and escape from Pharoah’s army? What? You think he
brought you all the way out of Egypt just to let you starve to
death?”
I thought they were crazy. I became
really frustrated reading some of those passages. And in a moment of
clarity, or rather, in a moment of intervention by the Holy Spirit, I
realized that the Israelites are me. I am the one who has a hard time
trusting in God sometimes, even when He continues to reveal Himself
to me over and over again. I am not unlike the people in the story
that I criticize.
And my favorite part of the story comes
when the Israelites said to God, “It would have been better for us
to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” I love how they
were confident that their plan was better than the one God created
for them. It’s humbling to know I am not the only one who
ridiculously thinks I can make a better plan for myself than God can.
And I love God’s response. He said, “The Lord will fight for you;
you need only to be still.”
No matter our life stage or the
circumstances in which we find ourselves, we need to remember one
thing. We need to remember God’s hope and promise. He will fight
for us. We do not need to create a plan, try to figure out what’s
next, or waste time and energy on solving our problems. We need only
to be still.
- Rebekah H.
