The Decontamination

Exodus 15.1-21

God has divided the Red Sea in two, allowing the people of Israel to safely cross, then the Pharaoh and his army chased them into the sea, and God brings the sea back down on them. The people of Israel watch, amazed, as God exercises his judgment against their enemies…

And then, after a beat, Moses starts tapping his toe, and Aaron next to him begins to snap his fingers in rhythm, and Moses starts to sing a solo. Pretty soon all the people of Israel, all two million of them, have broken into song and dance, like in La La Land.

That’s not exactly what happens in this text, but it’s true that Exodus 15 can be a bit jarring to our modern ears. There is an explanation for it. It was customary at this place and time for women to welcome their men home with songs and dancing after a victorious battle. This time the men join in, because in this battle there was only one victorious warrior: God himself. (Even Moses is not mentioned in the song—finally, the people fully acknowledge the power of God alone.)

The form of the song suggests that this wasn’t just a song they sang this one time, but that it entered into the lexicon of songs they sang repeatedly. So rest assured: the fact that they’re singing here wasn’t as weird as it may seem when we read it today.

However, even if there is a cultural reason behind this song, it’s still difficult for us. It’s difficult for us, not because they’re singing, but because of the song’s content.

If you believe much of what you may find online today—all these descriptions of a God of love who only wants everybody to be happy and fulfilled, a God who accepts absolutely everyone unconditionally—this chapter is going to feel very odd, maybe even offensive. But this didn’t come from a blogger, it came from the Bible—the Word of God himself.

The first thing we need to remember is that nearly everything the people of Israel did together—their feasts and their sacrifices and their songs—had a pedagogical goal. Everything the people did was designed to teach the people something, and help them remember that thing.

So our big question today is, what was this song designed to teach us about God?

Two main things, in fact; but these two main things are absolutely monumental.

God Judges Evil (v. 1-10)

Like I said before, this song can be unsettling to our modern ears, because it describes God in a way we don’t often think of him. Let’s read the first few verses again, starting at v. 1:

Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying,

“I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.

2  The Lord is my strength and my song,

and he has become my salvation;

this is my God, and I will praise him,

my father’s God, and I will exalt him.

So far so good. Most of this sounds like the psalms we’d be comfortable singing. But then comes v. 3:

3  The Lord is a man of war;

the Lord is his name.

4  “Pharaoh’s chariots and his host he cast into the sea,

and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea.

5  The floods covered them;

they went down into the depths like a stone.

6  Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power,

your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy.

7  In the greatness of your majesty you overthrow your adversaries;

you send out your fury; it consumes them like stubble.

8  At the blast of your nostrils the waters piled up;

the floods stood up in a heap;

the deeps congealed in the heart of the sea.

Already, all of this is hard enough. But it isn’t just the violence of the events the song describes that we have a hard time swallowing; it is the fact of the people celebrating that violence. It seems like they’re reveling in it, almost in the way that spectators would cheer at a boxing match.

We have to remember something absolutely crucial if we’re going to understand why they’re singing. We must remember that the people of Israel here are not celebrating the deaths of the unrighteous. That kind of celebration would be understandable, given everything they’ve been through, and probably some of them felt that way. But Moses wrote these words under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit; his intent was not to encourage flippancy over the loss of human life. That’s not what they’re celebrating.

They are celebrating God’s justice, his judgment against evil. That is a very different thing. V. 9:

9  The enemy said, ‘I will pursue, I will overtake,

I will divide the spoil, my desire shall have its fill of them.

I will draw my sword; my hand shall destroy them.’

10  You blew with your wind; the sea covered them;

they sank like lead in the mighty waters.

This enemy was the enslaver of God’s people; their intentions were to exploit and destroy these people until there were none left. That God would execute justice against such evil is right. And anyone who has ever suffered injustice knows it. If you are abused or manipulated, or if someone you love is abused or manipulated or mistreated, you want to see the abuser come to justice. You want to see them punished. Even if you don’t want revenge against that person, the fact that they would suffer the consequences of their actions is right. It is just. Justice is a good thing to celebrate.

But that kind of thinking will only take us so far; our challenge isn’t going to be acknowledging that it’s a good thing for God to judge evil. If we follow that logic—that it’s a good thing for God to judge evil—all the way down to its root, we’ll realize that we should be targeted by that judgment as well.

When we talk about evil, we tend to think of the worst things imaginable. We think about genocide. We think about torture. We think about the Coliseum and the Holocaust and the famine in Ukraine under the Soviet Union. But evil isn’t merely all the worst things we can imagine. Evil, by definition, is the absence of good.

And that’s a problem for us, because Christ himself said that “No one is good except God alone” (Mark 10.18).

Now of course we tend to think that’s an exaggeration; I can think of twenty people off the top of my head whom I would consider to be “good” people, even great people. But we need to think about that word in a theological sense: what does the word “good” mean for God?

Think of Tchernobyl. Most of us know what happened there. In April of 1986, the reactor in the Ukranian nuclear plant at Tchernobyl melted down and exploded, sending out a plume of radioactive fallout that spread all over the nearby region. Over 91,000 people had to be evacuated, and an “exclusion zone” was formed; it’s still there today. This exclusion zone stretches over a thousand square miles, because the radiation within that zone was so powerful, everyone had to stay away. They had to set up systems to keep water from the exclusion area escaping into rivers.

Of course some areas were “worse” than others. The power plant itself was more radioactive than the surrounding towns. But all of it was uninhabitable.

This is what sin is like. Sin is radioactive. It is a contaminant. God will not go near it. God’s standard for good is infinitely higher than ours: nothing less than moral perfection will fit the bill, because God is morally perfect. He is, as verse 11 says, “majestic in holiness”.

And the contamination of sin goes much further than the contamination of Tchernobyl. Sin doesn’t just need to be isolated; it must be destroyed, because it is an affront to God’s holiness. If God is going to maintain his goodness—and the world he created good—sin much be destroyed. Sin must be judged.

The Pharaoh, and his enslavement of the Hebrews, is one example of sin at its worst. So the people celebrate God’s judgment, because it means decontamination. Imagine if, in the weeks that followed the meltdown at Tchernobyl, the people who lived in the surrounding areas were told there was a way to get rid of all the radiation. That there was no longer any danger for them, their sickness could be healed, and they could go home.

That is a good reason to celebrate.

God’s judgment of evil is absolutely worth celebrating, because that is how heaven is made possible: when evil is reduced to nothing, when all sin is eradicated, all that is left is holiness. That is heaven.

All of that, everything I’ve just said, you can learn from just this song, which reminds us of the events at the Red Sea.

Even so, by itself, that is an incomplete picture. The people were well served by learning that lesson, but it wasn’t the only lesson to be learned. There’s a whole other section of this song that, taken on its own, could be celebrated as true, but not fully understood until much later.

The song celebrates God’s judgment on evil, thus describing one of the main joys of heaven: a place where sin is no more, and where a holy God reigns over all.

But in heaven, there is not just the absence of sin and the presence of a holy God. There is also the presence of redeemed sinners. And that, at least from the little the people could know at this point, was incomprehensible.

God Dwells with Sinners (v. 11-21)

So far we’ve seen that God judges sin. That makes sense—we can wrap our minds around that. Sin is injustice; if justice is to be done, then that injustice has to receive its proper consequence.

But the mystery of salvation is this: not only does God rightfully judge sin, he also dwells with sinners.

In the first ten verses we see how the people celebrates God’s victory over the Pharaoh and his army in the Red Sea. But starting in, the song marks a certain transition.

V. 11:

11  “Who is like you, O Lord, among the gods?

Who is like you, majestic in holiness,

awesome in glorious deeds, doing wonders?

12  You stretched out your right hand;

the earth swallowed them.

13  “You have led in your steadfast love the people whom you have redeemed;

you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.

14  The peoples have heard; they tremble;

pangs have seized the inhabitants of Philistia.

15  Now are the chiefs of Edom dismayed;

trembling seizes the leaders of Moab;

all the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away.

16  Terror and dread fall upon them;

because of the greatness of your arm, they are still as a stone,

till your people, O Lord, pass by,

till the people pass by whom you have purchased.

This hasn’t happened yet. God has led them out of Egypt, but he hasn’t yet led them to Canaan, the country he had promised to give them. All these nations that are mentioned—Philistia, Edom, Moab—are enemies the Israelites will have to fight against once they get there. But they haven’t fought anyone yet. They’re not in Canaan yet.

And in fact, the song seems to be speaking about something bigger than just Canaan, the land God promised to give them. Look again at v. 13: you have guided them by your strength to your holy abode.

And then, in v. 17:

17  You will bring them in and plant them on your own mountain,

the place, O Lord, which you have made for your abode,

the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established.

18  The Lord will reign forever and ever.”

19 For when the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his horsemen went into the sea, the Lord brought back the waters of the sea upon them, but the people of Israel walked on dry ground in the midst of the sea.

Now there is a mountain coming up later in the story—the Mount Sinai, on which God would give Moses the law. But this can’t be the mountain they’re talking about here, because this mountain is the place which God has made for his abode, the sanctuary which his hands have established. It would be on this mountain that God would bring his people and plant them, making his dwelling place their dwelling place as well.

This mountain pops up often in the Bible, and is later referred to as Zion, or the new Jerusalem, or the new heavens and the new earth. Or, to say it the way we often say it today, heaven. Not heaven as it is today, but heaven as it will be: the place where God will dwell in the midst of his people, on a creation freed from the effects of sin and death. A place of perfect peace, perfect life, and perfect holiness.

So here is the question we are left with: How is this possible? We said it before: we are all contaminated with sin. We may not be as bad as the Pharaoh, but no one is good except God.

You see, this song poses a problem for which the people don’t have yet have an answer. How is it possible that God would “purchase” sinners for himself (v. 16)? How is it possible that God would lead sinners to a place where he himself will dwell with them (v. 17-18)?

This is the question that will start to be answered later on in the book, and this is the question that the church spent the first several centuries of her existence trying to answer: How can a just God forgive sinners?

It seems like a silly question for us today, because how many times have we seen stickers posted on traffic lights or bar windows saying, “Jesus saves”? How many times have we repeated 1 John 1.9 to ourselves: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness”? It seems obvious to us that God would forgive us of our sins; in fact, it seems unthinkable that he wouldn’t. This is why sometimes we still find ourselves asking the question, “Why doesn’t God save everyone?”

Remember Tchernobyl. When the meltdown happened, it wasn’t enough for you to not go near it; you couldn’t go near anything else that had gone near it. Trucks and hazmat suits had to be scrubbed clean with decontaminating solution. People had to be isolated. If rocks from the site got stuck to the bottom of your shoe, that was enough to be dangerous.

Sin is a contaminant. By all reasonable metrics, God’s justice shouldn’t be able to go near it.

And yet, what do we see in this song? We see God bringing a sinful people to his mountain, to his dwelling place, where they will live with him.

It shouldn’t be possible, but it is: God came into proximity with our sin, in the person of Jesus Christ. Christ took on a human nature like ours, and he came close. We see him not only not rejecting the sinners around him, but actively seeking them out. We see him go to the leper that everyone is terrified to approach, and actually touching him and healing him.

And not only did he come near our sin; he took it on himself. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 5.21: For our sake [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. Christ gave us his sinless life, and he took our sin, and his punishment on the cross was our decontamination. Now, when God examines us, he does not see our sin; he sees the perfect life that his Son lived for us, and he declares us righteous.

But here’s what most of us already know: one of the primary struggles of the Christian life is fully and continually believing that. It’s hard for us to believe that God has really and truly decontaminated us. We look at our lives, and we see plenty of sin—we feel it radiating off of us. How could God come near to that?

The apostle Paul actually goes into this in quite some depth in his letter to the Romans, which we studied last year. He explains that for every Christian, as long as we are still alive and living in this fallen world, we have one foot in two separate realities.

The first reality is the new life we have been given in Christ. That is, Christ’s sacrifice in our place removed both the power of sin, and the penalty of sin. Sin no longer has the power to control us, and it no longer has the power to condemn us. That’s the first reality.

The second reality is that even if we have been given new life in Christ—new hearts, new desires, and new minds to know him and love him—the one thing that hasn’t been made new, for now, is our body. We still have the same bodies we had before we met Christ. And those bodies are still weak; they are still used to sinning; they still want to sin.

The struggle between those two realities of our experience is what Paul describes in Romans 7.14-20:

14 For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh, sold under sin. [There’s the sinful body, still used to sinning.] 15 For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. 17 So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right [There’s the new desires, the new heart that came with Christ], but not the ability to carry it out. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me.

As long as we’re living on this earth, that’s what we have to deal with: new desires fighting against old habits. And one of the hardest things about this is that we’re always tempted to imagine that our old habits define us; we’re always tempted to imagine that our old habits have the ability to control us. But Paul says this isn’t the case. Romans 8.9-11:

9 You, however, are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if in fact the Spirit of God dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him. 10 But if Christ is in you, although the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness. 11 If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you.

So here’s what Paul is saying: at the cross, when God poured out his wrath on Christ, he didn’t remove the struggle, but he robbed sin of its power.

This is how the believer’s sin and the unbeliever’s sin are different—not fundamentally different but different in terms of their effect on us. Think of the sin of an unbeliever as an open wound. It is exposed to the elements; it hasn’t been cleaned; and now it’s infected. That infection is ravaging the body, because it’s being left untreated. If left unchecked, eventually an infection like this will kill you.

The sin of a believer is different. A few years ago my brother Jeremy (whom some of you know) was in a motorcycle accident. He was okay—he didn’t suffer any severe injuries—but he had pretty bad road rash on his arms, legs and back. So he got it treated. They took steps to prevent infection. And pretty soon his wounds scabbed over. They still hurt—he had a hard time lying down or getting dressed for several weeks, and they made his life difficult—but they couldn’t get infected, and they were healing. Eventually those scabs started falling off, revealing the clean, new skin underneath.

Now I know that’s gross, and I know that between this and Tchernobyl we’ve gone to some dark places today, but that’s appropriate. Jesus had to go to some pretty dark places to take care of this problem for us. Our bodies are still used to sinning, so we still have sin that we struggle with. Today, as Christians, our sin is like a scab. It still has an impact on our lives; it still hurts, and there are still negative consequences attached.

But that sin no longer has the power to control us, and it no longer has the power to condemn us. The Spirit of God living in us is giving life to our mortal bodies, and little by little, the scabs are falling off, revealing the new skin underneath. We’re learning to obey Christ. We’re learning to live more like him. We’re learning to follow him.

Brothers and sisters, the end result of God’s plan is the decontamination of the entire creation. God judges the evil of the Pharaoh and his armies in the Red Sea, and he promises to make a dwelling place for his people, where he will dwell with them.

We’ll find out in a few chapters how he provides for the purification of his people, so that he might dwell with them. But ultimately, he fulfilled this purification, this decontamination, perfectly in Christ. Once and for all, Christ suffered the judgment of the sin of his people, so now, although we still feel the effects of sin in our lives, we are no longer slaves to it, and it no longer separates us from God.

Now, we can come near to him, and he can come near to us, because that sin has been dealt with.

Now, that sin is slowly but surely being whittled away, like a scab falling off and revealing the new skin beneath.

We need to know this, just like the people of Israel needed to know that God would fight for them in the future. Because they would very soon need to persevere in their trust in God, and in their obedience to him. In the same way, we have to know that God will take care of us, will make us more and more like his Son, because we too must persevere in our faith until the end. And God will fight for us, to make sure that we get there.

Today, because we dwell with him and he dwells in us, we are becoming more and more like him; and one day, we will dwell with him fully and forever, freed from the effects of sin as well as its condemnation.

The decontamination of God’s creation is a marvelous thing, and absolutely worth celebrating. C.H. Spurgeon wrote:

“I, for one, am perfectly satisfied with everything that God does.… I make bold to say that I would have praised God as the waves went over Pharaoh; for the Lord did it, and he did right. I would have cried with Moses, 'I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea.’ I expect to be among the number, though some seem as if they would decline the service, who shall for ever bless God for all his dealings with mankind—the stern as well as those that seem more tender. The Lord God, even Jehovah, the God of the Old Testament, is the God whom I worship.”

My prayer for us is that we would lend a hearty amen Spurgeon’s sentiment. That’s exactly this that the people of Israel are doing. We read at the end, v. 19-21:

20 Then Miriam the prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand, and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing. 21 And Miriam sang to them:

“Sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously;

the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea.”

After the great celebration of the people of Israel, what happens? Miriam (a woman of some authority, since she was a prophetess) and all the women of Israel perform an encore, dancing and banging tambourines and singing the exact same thing they just sang: the Lord’s justice against Egypt was right. It was worth celebrating, because it was judgment against sin.

This is right—this is the God we worship.