We Are on Dry Ground
Perhaps many young moviegoers today have missed Cecil B. De- -Mille’s 1956 cinematic depiction of the parting of the Red Sea as the Israelites fled from Pharaoh’s army.
Were they to see The Ten Commandments in one of its numerous television reruns, they might wonder how this movie received an Academy Award for Best Special Effects.
Charlton Heston as an aging Moses holds an outstretched arm over the parting water as the sea rolls up into two huge waves on either side of the Israelites.
While the superimposed images of the tumultuous waters don’t generate the Wow! response viewers experience in so many movies today, they do convey that a miracle was taking place.
I saw The Ten Commandments several times, and I always marveled at the parting waters and never once took notice of the dry ground Exodus 14:22 mentions.
Why does the Bible even give us this information?
I think we, like the Israelites, often forget that God has placed us on a firm foundation.
The Israelites were God’s chosen people. He was in the course of taking them out of Egypt and into the promised land, but they started complaining as soon as they saw Pharaoh’s army pursuing them.
How soon they seemed to forget the terrible slavery they had suffered under the hand of Pharaoh.
Despite their grumbling, God took the Israelites safely to the other side of the Red Sea and destroyed Pharaoh’s army by causing the waves to collapse on them. The Israelites had traveled on dry ground.
Imagine thousands of people, animals, carts, and wagons struggling through the muck had God not supernaturally dried up the seabed. Their progress would have been slow and perhaps altogether impossible.
I think the reminder for us in this verse is that God’s power holds us firmly on the dry ground of his love, no matter what is happening in our lives. We may feel threatened by the waves of life.
We may not feel as if we are secure, but we are. Our spiritual feet may feel mired in the slush of uncomfortable circumstances, but God’s presence in our lives keeps us going.
Just as the Israelites were God’s people, we who believe in His Son are his people. Sometimes his power is evident in our lives in spectacular ways as the parting of the Red Sea was in Exodus.
At other times, we experience God’s power in almost unnoticeable ways, such as the ground being dry when the Israelites crossed it.
God’s most dramatic rescue in my own life unfolded in the years immediately following my first husband’s death. I was thirty-four years old with two daughters, ages seven and ten.
My husband and I went to high school together, and I couldn’t remember what it felt like to live without him.
Many of my friends remarked that they fully expected to see me carried into my home on a stretcher when returning from the scene of the hot-air balloon accident that claimed his life.
Instead, the evidence of God’s grace and provision was amazing. I experienced a confidence that God would “part the waters” for us and was able to focus on our future in ways that can only be explained as miraculous.
I went from being a homemaker who relied heavily on my husband to being the sole adult in our household. Like Moses, I stepped into the water and God dried up the muddy ground.
Whether we notice it or not, the power is there. Whether we feel it or not, we are on dry ground.
Father, thank you that we rest on the firm foundation of our relationship with Jesus Christ.