The Song on the Far Shore

When the sun came up, the sea had lain back down, flat and shining, as if it had never moved at all. Along the edge of the water lay the soldiers of Egypt who had chased God's people into the sea. Every one of them was dead. Not one Israelite had lifted a sword.

The people stood on the wet sand and stared. Then Moses began to sing, and the whole crowd sang with him:

"I will sing to the LORD,
for he has won a glorious victory!
The horse and its rider
he has thrown into the sea!
The LORD is my strength and my song.
He has saved me.
He is my God, and I will praise him!"

(Moses was the one who had held his staff out over the water, but there is not one word about Moses anywhere in his song.)

Then the song told the whole night over again, the way children tell about a thunderstorm the next morning. It even gave Pharaoh's army a part. "I will chase them!" the enemy had bragged. "I will catch them! I will pull out my sword and grab everything they have!"

"But you blew with your breath," the people sang to God, "and the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters."

The song says God piled up those tall walls of water with one blast of breath from his nose. (It took all of Pharaoh's horses and chariots to chase Israel to the sea. It took God one breath to stack the sea up and one more to knock it down.)

"Who is like you, LORD?" they sang. "Who is like you, so holy and so glorious, doing wonders?"

Then the song looked down the road ahead. "In your faithful love you will lead the people you have rescued. The nations will hear and shake. You will bring your people in and plant them on your own mountain, the place you made for your home. The LORD will be King for ever and ever!"

Then Miriam picked up her timbrel. (A timbrel is a hand drum with jingles around the edge, like a tambourine.) Miriam was a prophet, and she was Moses' big sister. Moses was eighty years old by then, so she was not a young dancer. She danced anyway. All the women followed her with their timbrels, spinning on the sand, and Miriam called out, "Sing to the LORD, for he has won a glorious victory! The horse and its rider he has thrown into the sea!"

God's people kept singing the song of Moses for hundreds of years.

Most of the grown-ups on that beach never saw the mountain they sang about. They stopped trusting God, and they died in the desert. Their children reached the land, but they kept wandering away from God too. The song kept waiting for the day God's people would be home with him and never wander off again.

More than a thousand years later, God showed an old man named John what is still to come: another sea, smooth as glass and glowing with fire. On its shore stood a great crowd with harps from God, safe at last from the worst enemy of all. They were singing "the song of Moses and the song of the Lamb":

"Great and wonderful are the things you do, Lord God Almighty! Who will not fear you, Lord?"

The Lamb is Jesus. Beside the Red Sea, not one Israelite lifted a sword, and on that glassy shore it will be the same: the Lamb fought the last enemy for them all by himself. Everyone he rescues will sing about him there for ever.