By most accounts, Egypt was the world’s first great empire. Many of the civilizations around that time period were city-states engaged in constant warfare, which made it nearly impossible to unite as a superpower. Egypt was technologically advanced, administratively sound, and militarily powerful. Their isolation forced a centrality of power, which created an empire that stood for a couple thousand years.
And God defeated them.
The story of the Exodus begins way back in Exodus 3, when God tells Moses that He’s going to free Israel. “What if they don’t believe me?” Moses asks. God responds that He’ll send plagues, perform miracles, and demonstrate His power.
And that’s exactly what He did. Through ten plagues and pillars of fire and cloud, God demonstrated His presence and His power. But for some reason, those two attributes didn’t seem to take hold until the dead Egyptians washed up on the shore of the Red Sea. At that point, Exodus 14:31 says, they “feared the Lord, believed in the Lord, and [believed] in Moses.”
The image of a dead Egyptian charioteer, arguably the greatest single warrior in the world at the time, evokes an image of freedom in the mind of the Israelite. Even though they were set free when they left Egypt, now they were truly delivered. God defeated the power of Egypt; the dead Egyptian is the proof.
But how did their faith change, practically-speaking? Someone might argue that their faith increased as a result of seeing the bodies, but what does that mean? Does faith operate like a bank, where powerful moments fill our faith and trying moments drain it?
I would argue that faith develops more like a muscle. The more you “work” the muscle, the stronger it becomes, and the more you’re able to “lift” as a result.
The more you dive into God’s Word, understand His power, and endure through persecution, the stronger your faith “muscle” becomes. You know you’ll endure through situation Y, because you’ve already endured through situation X. Situation Z is able to be endured as well.
That’s why it’s so important to read these stories in the Old Testament not as far-off fairy tales, but as real demonstrations of God’s power. If we truly believe that God can annihilate the greatest superpower in the entire world using water, what can He do to my childhood trauma? To my anxiety? To my gambling addiction?
The next time you think about your faith, look for those dead Egyptians on the seashore. Try to see evidence of God’s power, then use it to make your faith that much stronger.
