Bible Commentaries

The Song of Deliverance

Exodus 15:1-21

The spirit of this song is above verbal criticism. This is the first composition of the sort which has come under our notice, and therefore it occasions the greater surprise and delight We are not just to the song when we go back upon it from a perusal of Isaiah. We put the song into a wrong time-setting, and therefore miss the music of the occasion. Yet even to go back upon it from a perusal of "Paradise Lost" no whit of its magnificence is surrendered. It is not, I assert, a fair treatment of the Exodus 15:2.

These words are taken from the song which Moses and the children of Israel sang when they saw Pharaoh and his hosts overthrown in the Red Sea.—It was surely an era in their history to see the Egyptians dead upon the seashore.—Such epochs in human life should have some moral meaning.—They should not be allowed to pass without celebration.—There is a time to sing,—surely it is the hour of deliverance from the terrible foe.—Music is the natural expression of joy. A song is the proper conclusion of a victory.—Fasting is the worship of sorrow; singing is the worship of joy.—The words specially chosen for meditation show that the victory did not end in itself; it touched the holy past; it consummated the promises and hopes of ages;—in this Exodus 15:23-25

The children of Israel had just concluded their song of thankfulness for deliverance from the hand of Pharaoh and his hosts. A very wonderful song too had they sung. It might have had the thunder for an accompaniment, so solemn was it and so majestic. It rises and falls like the great billows of the sea. Now it roars by reason of its mightiness, and presently it subsides into a tone of tremulous pathos. The children of Israel had been made "more than conquerors"; they had not simply conquered by the expenditure of every energy as is sometimes done in hotly contested fields,—they had actually stood still, and in their standing had seen the salvation of God. Their references to Pharaoh and his hosts were made in a tone of derisive victory. "Pharaoh's chariots and his host hath he cast into the sea: his chosen captains also are drowned in the Red Sea." "Thou didst blow with thy wind, the sea covered them: they sank as lead in the mighty waters." "Sing ye to the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously: the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea,"—thrown, as a child might throw a pebble into the deep! After singing such a Exodus 15:26.

Every man must have his own special revelation of God.—Some have never seen God in what may be called his metaphysical relations; they do not, in that sense, know God. Others know him in his relation to affliction, sorrow, and the whole of the enduring side of life. They cannot account for their deliverances except by a superior power. In their memory is the recollection of a pit out of which they were lifted, and they know of a surety that no arms could have delivered them from that pit but the arms of the Almighty One.—The infinity of true religion is thus shown by the infinity of the responses which it elicits from human nature.—One man's religion is all music—that is to say—an expression of thanksgiving, delight, and confidence in God. He has no argument, no logic, no well-connected and highly-authenticated history by which to defend himself, or on which to rest his Christian beliefs. He knows who came to him in the day of sorrow, who walked with him to the edge of the grave, who gave him heart again in the time of great loss and pain.—It is needless to argue with such a man; he is himself his own argument.—When the debater has ceased his storm of words, the man retires upon his own consciousness, and in the recesses of his memory he finds a comfort which the war of words can never reach.—This is the kind of experience open to all men.—Few can be scholars, fewer still can be poets; to only one or two has it been permitted to enter into the holy of holies; but every life has had its own difficulty, or pain, or shadow, or cross—its own awful affliction or bitter poverty.—The Christian religion is strong upon every ground, but stronger, perhaps, on this ground than any.—Every one of its believers has his own story to tell respecting the richness of Christian comfort and the cheering of the Divine light.—Every man must base his argument upon the strongest point of his own consciousness.—Let the restored blind man say, "One thing I know"; let him keep steadily to that plain story, and no band of Pharisees, how infuriated soever by malice, can unsettle his position or disturb his serenity.