All Satan’s craft and all sin’s deceit fail to undo the goodness of the blessing that God spoke in the beginning. The signs of the blessing are all around us, whether in fields of wheat ripe for harvest, in school playgrounds packed with screaming kids, in seeing-eye dogs serving with loyal zeal – all these and more remind us that God’s favor is still at work among the people he created and loved from the beginning.

Like so many others, January finds me in the book of Genesis once again. The creation account can seem so familiar, and yet every visit to these two chapters feels like entering a massive temple charged with mystery and grandeur. The words that struck me particularly this time were those spoken by God over the newly created pair of human beings:
And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”Genesis 1:28
What a weighty and marvelous thing it is to receive such favor from the eternal God. On the day that he made them, God looked at our first parents, and he blessed them. God loved them and delighted to shower his goodness upon them. This is God’s original disposition towards our family, and despite all that happened afterward, the blessing was never rescinded.
After the fall, when God comes to judge his creatures, we encounter the word curse for the first time. “Cursed are you above all livestock,” he says to the serpent, condemning it to crawl on its belly and to eat dust all the days of its life. Then he turns to the woman. She is sorely punished, stricken with pain and dysfunction in her most intimate relationships. She is not, however, cursed. The man too is bowed down with a heavy sentence, but he is not cursed either; the earth is.
The first person to be cursed is Cain (Gen 4:11), and after him many individuals and groups of people fall under God’s curse. But not once does he ever curse the entire human race the way that he blessed us in the beginning.
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The exodus is the narrative heart of the Old Testament. It is the central act of redemption upon which the rest of Scripture depends. The exodus is the foundation of Israel’s identity as a people. They are fundamentally a nation of slaves that God redeemed to be His own people and to fulfill the promises that He long ago gave to their ancestor Abraham. The crossing of the Red Sea, therefore, was Israel’s chief moment of salvation. And throughout Scripture, singing is repeatedly shown to be the proper response to God’s salvation. 

After studying through a genealogy, a psalm that was also a parable, and a proverb about oxen, we at last moved back into a larger text. Particularly, we return to the book of Exodus, which we previously studied last year. We concluded with chapter 14 and then went on to conclude the Gospel of Mark. My reasoning for breaking larger books like Mark and Exodus into multiple series is twofold. First, I enjoy moving between different biblical genres, so I prefer to parse larger texts out over the span of a couple of years, studying other passages in between.
Second, I enjoy organizing sermons each year so that they loosely all build together upon a similar theme. Most often I try to do this with first an Old Testament text followed by parallel New Testament text. I have done this with pairing Ecclesiastes and Philippians under the theme of joy, with Haggai and Ephesians, Daniel and Mark 1-8, and Exodus 1-14 and Mark 9-16 all under the theme of God’s kingdom.
This year we depart from that overarching theme and come under the theme of God as our shepherd. Here in Exodus 15-19, we will see very clearly how the LORD shepherded Israel like a flock through the wilderness and to the foot of Sinai, and later the book of Hebrews will urge us to consider Jesus, “the great shepherd of the sheep” (13:20). For now, we begin our second part of Exodus with the Song of Moses.
Then Moses and the People of Israel Sang
The very first word of our text is then, which ought to immediately make us pause because it means that an effect is about to be given. Thus, we ought to pause to consider the cause. In the first fourteen chapters of Exodus, God redeemed His people from their four-hundred-year captivity in Egypt. By His sovereign hand, God preserved Moses’ life through the slaughter of Israel’s newborn males, established him in Pharaoh’s own palace to receive the highest quality education of his day (something that would undoubtedly be valuable as the Holy Spirit led him in the writing of Scripture), sent him into the wilderness for forty years as a shepherd, and then sent him back to Egypt to lead the Israelites out of their slavery. Through Moses, the LORD worked the wonders that we now commonly call the ten plagues, which left Egypt in ruin. Nevertheless, even after Pharaoh demanded Israel’s departure, God baited Pharaoh into riding out against Israel with all of his chariots, thinking that they had foolishly wandered to the edge of the Red Sea. God, however, miraculously parted the sea so that Israel went across on dry land. With his heart thoroughly hardened, Pharaoh actually had the hubris to chase after Israel into the midst of the sea, which was when the LORD released the walls of water, drowning Pharaoh and all his horses and riders.
That is the cause of verse 1’s effect: Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the LORD… On the opposite shore of the sea, with their four-hundred-year sojourn in Egypt on the other side and with the bodies of men and horses washing upon the shore, Israel sang to their God, the true and living God.
This song, most often called the Song of Moses but also called the Song of the Sea, is the first psalm of the Bible, and there is a very good possibility that it was the very first portion of the Bible to have been written down by Moses. Indeed, we can easily envision Moses writing down these words before Israel sets out from the sea in verse 22. There have been many scholars who see this musical interjection into the narrative of Exodus as being out of place. Yet they fail to see both the theological and artistic composition of this book of Scripture. This musical interlude is a feature rather than a bug, and it is a feature both theologically and artistically.
It is an artistic feature of Exodus because Moses knew what many ivory-tower academics can easily forget: music is as woven into the foundations of the cosmos as much as wisdom is. Job 38:7 tells us that the stars and angels sang and shouted for joy during creation, and Revelation shows us repeatedly that our life everlasting will be marked by songs of praise. And there are songs everywhere in-between. Martin Luther is often noted for calling music the greatest gift that God has given humanity, second only to the Scriptures.
Theologically, this song is necessary. As I repeatedly have said, the exodus is the narrative heart of the Old Testament. It is the central act of redemption upon which the rest of Scripture depends. The exodus is the foundation of Israel’s identity as a people. They are fundamentally a nation of slaves that God redeemed to be His own people and to fulfill the promises that He long ago gave to their ancestor Abraham. The crossing of the Red Sea, therefore, was Israel’s chief moment of salvation. And throughout Scripture, singing is repeatedly shown to be the proper response to God’s salvation. Indeed, Philip Ryken writes, “The history of salvation is sometimes described as a drama–the drama of redemption. However, this drama is actually a musical. It is impossible even to conceive of Biblical Christianity without songs of praise.”[1]
This is why we so often link singing and worship together. Of course, we know that worship itself is far more than just singing, yet even so, singing is intimately bound to our worship of God. Worship is most simply our act of giving to God the worth that He deserves. Thus, being created and redeemed by God, we owe Him nothing less than our very selves. Therefore, Romans 12:1 is perhaps the most succinct biblical description of our worship in Christ: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.”
Worship is nothing less than giving ourselves entirely to God, and this certainly encompasses our singing. To both the Colossians and the Ephesians, Paul clearly expected singing to play a regular role in communicating the truths of Scripture to one another. Indeed, throughout our sojourning through this life, we ought to say with the psalmist to the LORD: “Your statutes have been my songs in the house of my sojourning” (Psalm 119:54).
Indeed, nothing will sink the truths of Scripture more deeply into our hearts than songs. That is why I generally give more serious consideration to adding a particular song to our Sunday morning singing than I do to choosing which texts of Scripture to preach. When it comes to choosing a book or passage to preach, I certainly want to be sensitive to what would best fit our congregation’s particular season, yet in the end, God’s Word will never return void. The songs we sing, however, are compliments to Scripture rather than Scripture itself. They must, then, undergo a far greater degree of scrutiny. This becomes doubly important whenever we consider that songs are far more memorable than words alone. Thus, whenever I select songs for us to sing congregationally, I am actively looking for songs that are worthy of being the soundtrack to our earthly pilgrimage.
Indeed, there is no question that we will sing and make music; that is part of being made in God’s image. The question is what kind of songs will we sing. Particularly, will our heart’s theme song be: I will sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously?
The Song of Moses
As we move into the actual contents of this psalm, rather than moving verse-by-verse through it, we will focus upon its three broad themes: what God has done, what God will do, and who God is.
The whole occasion of the psalm is an exultation in what God had just done. Verses 4-10 and 12 largely give a poetic retelling of Pharaoh’s destruction in the waters of the sea. Ryken calls us to consider a point that many would rather pass over: “Realize that in this song he did not praise God for the exodus in general, but specifically for the death of the Egyptians as a demonstration of divine wrath.”[2]
If that sounds harsh and even unjust, we need to recalibrate our notion of justice so that it accords with Scripture. God’s triumph in the exodus was certainly in bringing His people out of slavery, yet it was also about beheading Pharaoh as an offspring of the serpent. The plagues upon Egypt were judgment, and the Red Sea was an execution. Indeed, God made certain that the execution fit the crime. This Pharaoh drowned just as the Pharaoh before him had drowned so many infants in the Nile. It was right for Moses and the Israelites to celebrate, for as Proverbs 11:10 says, “When it goes well with the righteous, the city rejoices, and when the wicked perish there are shouts of gladness.”
Today, we sing similar songs of Christ’s triumph over the serpent himself. In the hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, we sing:
And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo usWe will not fear for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.The prince of darkness grim, we tremble not for him,His rage we can endure, for lo his doom is sure,One little word shall fell him.
Working the greater exodus upon the cross, Jesus triumphed over the powers of darkness and put them to open shame. Even so, the greatest enemy that Jesus defeated is our own sin.
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When people who love the Bible and love Christ are shown how to see Christ from the beginning to the end of the Bible, their joy explodes. Seeing the beauty, sufficiency, and necessity of Jesus Christ from every part of the Bible — including from the Old Testament — has the power to truly, deeply, and eternally change our lives.

Sunday school has marked me since my childhood — literally. I have a scar on the top of my right hand from being burned by the popcorn popper when I was about 3 years old. Sunday school has left much deeper impressions, however, in my heart and soul and in the way I have read and understood the Bible for most of my life — especially in terms of how I have read and understood the Old Testament.
For most of my life, I saw the Old Testament primarily as a series of disconnected stories about people showing how (or how not) to live the life of faith. I knew that the Old Testament spoke of Christ, but in my mind, that was limited to the prophecies about the coming of the Messiah.
I did not see that all of the Old Testament prepares us to understand who Jesus is and what he would do. I didn’t understand that from Genesis 3:15 onward, we’re meant to trace the woman’s line to the promised offspring — the descendent of Abraham, the son of David — who would deal with the curse and the serpent for good. I was in my forties when I began to understand that the Bible is one story of God’s redemption through Christ.
When I began to understand that the Old Testament can be understood only in light of Christ, a new world opened. I determined that I needed to go back to kindergarten in terms of understanding the Bible’s story. I bought several books on the topic, including one that revolutionized my Old Testament reading.
Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament
I got no further than the introduction of Christopher Wright’s Knowing Jesus Through the Old Testament when I read a passage that blew my mind. Speaking about Jesus’s connection to the Old Testament, he writes,
These are the words he read, the stories he knew. These were the songs he sang. These were the depths of wisdom and revelation and prophecy that shaped his whole view of life, the universe and everything. This is where he found his insights into the mind of his Father God. Above all, this is where he found the shape of his own identity and the goal of his own mission. (11)
This paragraph caused me to think about the humanity of Jesus more deeply. It challenged me to read the Old Testament differently. And it sent me on a mission.
Humanity of Jesus
Though Jesus is fully human and fully God, the deity of Jesus has been easier for me to grasp than his humanity. This passage caused me to stop and give more thought to what it must mean that Jesus “increased in wisdom and stature” (Luke 2:52). Jesus grew in his own understanding of who he was, what his life was all about, and even what his death and resurrection would mean from meditating on the Old Testament Scriptures.
Jesus, typical of Jewish boys of his time, learned from hearing the Old Testament scrolls read in the synagogue.
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