Trusting

DEVOTION

EXODUS

TRUSTING

Ex 14:26-31

26 Then the LORD said to Moses, "Stretch out your hand over the sea so that the waters may flow back over the Egyptians and their chariots and horsemen." 27 Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and at daybreak the sea went back to its place. The Egyptians were fleeing toward it, and the LORD swept them into the sea. 28 The water flowed back and covered the chariots and horsemen — the entire army of Pharaoh that had followed the Israelites into the sea. Not one of them survived. 29 But the Israelites went through the sea on dry ground, with a wall of water on their right and on their left. 30 That day the LORD saved Israel from the hands of the Egyptians, and Israel saw the Egyptians lying dead on the shore. 31 And when the Israelites saw the great power the LORD displayed against the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD and put their trust in him and in Moses his servant.

NIV

It is one thing to cry out to the LORD and it is absolutely something else to put our trust in him. Here we have the whole of Israel, having known the faith of their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, not to mention the life of Joseph, having been in enslaved by the Egyptians, crying out to God and seeing him perform miracle after miracle, with this Red Sea thing, now, at last, after seeing all the dead Egyptians, putting their trust in him.  What was wrong with those people? It took all that before they would put their trust in him. Didn’t they fear and trust him when they cried out to him? Maybe there is a lesson in that. When life brings us lemons, do we make lemonade or just get all puckered up sucking on the lemon? Their lives were certainly not anything like the lives of their forefathers. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob roamed the county side as free men, doing whatever they wanted to. They were not free men, but slaves working under a hard taskmaster. In some sense, when Pharaoh gave the orders to the midwives to kill all the male babies, they were in danger of being exterminated. It might have been rather difficult for them to put their trust in him under the situation they were living in. Are we different than them? Do we put our trust in God no matter what our live situation is? It might be easy to trust him when all is going according to our plans. It may not be as easy to trust him when everything is going according to his plan. It was his plan that Joseph would end up in Egypt and thus bring the rest of his family there, but what happened over the next years may not have been his plan, but rather the plan of the children of Israel. They should have left the land of Goshen long time ago, whenever the famine was over, but things were going too good for them. Their lives were good in this area of Goshen in Egypt so why should they leave. Then everything changed and life was not too good, now they were trapped. We need to be careful not to get sidelined by the good life, in this foreign land we live in. We cannot afford to find ourselves trapped at some point. But that is exactly what the enemy of our soul wants. He would bring us to a place that really looks good so that we might get comfortable there and not really want to leave our life there. But in all reality he has misery planned for us. He wants to enslave us, to entrap us in this life, so we will not put our trust in God. Everything might look good to us, but if we are not trusting God, we are lost into slavery. We should not need to see miracle after miracle in order to trust God, but if we cry out to him, he will save us. If we need to see miracle upon miracle he will act in order to bring us to the place of true faith, pure trust. That is the key of a full life, trusting God. Of course we know in order to get to the other side we need to trust him, for we cannot past from this life to eternal life without total trust in God. Yet it is within this life that we need to have that same kind of trust. When we begin to trust ourselves, our plans, our choices, our decisions, we face real problems. They should have, could have left their situation to go back to where God had them in the first place, but because they did not leave, they were stuck. We need to leave and follow after God in every aspect of our lives. We cannot leave any portion of our lives behind in a bad place, to be enslaved. Although we must trust in the spiritual, we need to also trust in the physical. So here we are, trusting.