(About His Redemption)
Psalm 114
Most of us believe there have always been paramedics to rush to our side in emergencies, but that’s not really true. When I was growing up in Elizabethton, Tennessee, the first Rescue Squad was being formed in our community. Some men got together and decided the town needed a rapid response squad. They used an old surplus army truck from World War II as an ambulance; and when that truck wrecked, the captain of the Rescue Squad used his own station wagon, equipped with a rollaway bed.
One of my earliest memories is my mother being loaded onto some kind of early rescue squad vehicle or ambulance to be taken to the hospital. I was terrified and hid behind a boxwood. I think she had a painful problem with her back, but I didn’t recall that incident until after she passed away in old age and so we never talked about it.
In global terms, the role of paramedics started in the 1960s with a doctor in Ireland. He had done research on heart attack victims and found that men who died from heart attacks usually did so within one hour of the attack. So he began putting doctors on ambulance crews to treat victims of heart attacks more quickly. The teams were called “Flying Squads.”
The idea spread to America, but many American cities were so large there weren’t enough doctors for ride-alongs. So in 1967, the Miami fire department began to teach medical skills to firefighters. These medically trained firefighters became the first paramedics in the United States. But even in 1971, when I was a sophomore in college, there were only twelve paramedic units in the United States.
Do you know what changed it? The NBC television network began a weekly drama called Emergency about two paramedics assigned to the Los Angeles Fire Department. That show went through 122 episodes. This showed people across America what paramedics could do, what these kinds of rescues would look like. Today this show is honored with a display in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for the way it helped pioneer the spread of paramedics across America.
Sometimes when we need help, we need it very badly and very quickly. We know we’re in mortal danger and we need someone who knows more than we do, who can do more than we can do, and who can stay calm and collected while they help us.
The Bible calls this a rescuer, a deliverer, a redeemer, a Savior. This is at the heart of the Biblical story. Redemption is when you are saved, when you are rescued. The word “redemption” conveys the idea of being recovered, being released, being delivered. It conveys the idea of an emergency, during which we need someone to save us.
We see this illustrated many times in Scripture, but there are two great occasions that simply grip us with their drama. The first occurred near the beginning of the Old Testament and set the tone for the entire Old Testament story. The other occurred near the beginning of the New Testament and set the tone for the entire New Testament story.
1. Old Testament Redemption
The first is the Exodus of Israel from slavery in Egypt. That story is told in narrative form in the book of Exodus, but it’s celebrated musically in Psalm 114. This is the passage we’re coming to today, the second in a series of Psalms called the Hallel Songs. Let’s read it.
Scripture—Psalm 114:
When Israel went forth from Egypt,
The house of Jacob from a people of strange language,
2 Judah became His sanctuary, Israel, His dominion.
3 The sea looked and fled; The Jordan turned back.
4 The mountains skipped like rams, The hills, like lambs.
5 What ails you, O sea, that you flee? O Jordan, that you turn back?
6 O mountains, that you skip like rams? O hills, like lambs?
7 Tremble, O earth, before the Lord, Before the God of Jacob,
8 Who turned the rock into a pool of water, The flint into a fountain of water.
Review
This is a very important psalm or hymn because, as I said, it’s the second in a series of psalms we call the Egyptian Hallel.
The word Hallel means Praise, and this particular collection of Psalms is called the Egyptian Hallel because here in Psalm 114, the song celebrates how God redeemed Israel from bondage in Egypt.
These songs, Psalm 113 through 118, were sung at the major Jewish festivals around the temple. They were also sung by families during the annual Passover meal. According to the Gospels, Jesus and His disciples sang together in the Upper Room on the last night of His natural life. They were celebrating the Passover Supper, and they would have sung this song.
Psalm 113 and 114 were sung before the meal, and I simply cannot imagine what Jesus thought or how He felt as He sang these two songs. As we saw last week, Psalm 113 focuses on the Incarnation. The transcendent, eternal, almighty God whose name is praised from the rising of the sun to the place where it sets, humbled Himself to engage with humanity and lift up the needy and give them exalted places of blessings. It’s a song about the incarnation—God becoming human—the God-Man—the Messiah.
And why did He come? He came to do for us something akin to what He had done for Israel 1400 years before—to redeem us from slavery and bondage and death. Psalm 114 is about His work for us. Psalm 113 focuses on the Incarnation, and Psalm 114 on Redemption.
The thing to notice in Psalm 114 is its parallelism. In other words, every single thought in this Psalm is stated and then repeated. This is a form of Hebrew poetry. There are eight verses, and each verse contains a truth that is stated and then repeated poetically.
Verse 1: The Lord Brought His People Out of Slavery
Look at verse 1:
When Israel went forth from Egypt,
The house of Jacob from a people of strange language…
Every Jewish man, woman, and child would know this is the most incredible moment in the history of Israel. In the book of Genesis, God chose one couple—Abraham and Sarah—to be the channel through which He would rescue the world from sin. A couple of generations later, their descendants—a group of about seventy people—went down to Egypt to find grain and food during a time of regional famine. They settled in the land of Goshen, which was the eastern side of the River Nile. There they lived and multiplied for several centuries until the King of Egypt viewed them as a threat and enslaved them—an entire nation brought under bondage.
Then in the book of Exodus, the second book of the Bible, God sent Moses to deliver His people from Egyptian slavery and bring them into the land God had always intended for them—the Promised Land.
Moses went to Pharaoh and said, “Let my people go!” When Pharaoh refused, God sent a series of ten disasters across the land. The Nile River turned to blood, there were supernatural infestations of frogs, lice, and flies. The livestock died in the barns and fields. People broke out with skin ulcers. A locust invasion swept over the land, and then a deep darkness came over Egypt and even at the noontime hour it was as black as sin. Finally, the Lord sent the death angel to kill the firstborn in every family.
Only the Hebrews were spared, and that final plague required a special ceremony among the Jews. Every Jewish family was to take an innocent, helpless lamb, kill it and drain its blood, and paint their doorposts with the blood of the lamb. Then they were to roast the lamb and serve it for supper. The Lord said, “When I see the blood I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13). By the time the sun rose in the eastern sky, Pharaoh had given up. He was a crushed man, and he released the slaves and they began leaving Egypt—families and clans and tribes, all fleeing so quickly they didn’t have time for the bread to rise.
That entire story is told in Exodus 1 through 12, but it’s summed up here in a single verse: When Israel went forth from Egypt, The house of Jacob from a people of strange language…
Verse 2: The Lord Dwelled Among His People
What happened next? The people started a mass migration unlike anything known to history. Chapter 13 says, “By day the Lord went ahead of them in a pillar of cloud to guide them on their way and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light, so they could travel by day or night. Neither the pillar of cloud by day nor the pillar of fire by night left its place in front of the people” (Exodus 13:21-22).
The Jewish scholar Alfred Edersheim says this was “the Shechinah, or visible Presence, which afterwards rested upon the Most Holy Place.”
Almighty God came and dwelled among His people. This manifestation of God’s presence was sometimes called the “Angel of the Lord,” and most conservative Bible scholars believe this was the Second Person of the Trinity, the pre-incarnate Christ. But here is Psalm 114, it’s simply summed up in one verse:
2 Judah became His sanctuary, Israel, His dominion.
Most of us know the word “sanctuary,” but what does it mean? The Hebrew term simply means “a holy place.” Judah, representing the twelve tribes, became the dwelling place for the holy God. The word dominion means the realm over which one rules.
When I was in college, the Jesus Movement produced a new kind of music for the church, and one of the songs was by Ralph Carmichael. It talked about how vast and powerful God is, how He flung the stars into space and how he rules over land and sea. But, asked the song, “What to me?” Then the key lines said:
Till by faith I met Him face to face,
And I felt the wonder of His grace,
Then I knew that He was more than just a
God who didn’t care,
Who lived a way out there….
Now He walks beside me day by day,
Ever watching o’er me lest I stray,
Helping me to find the narrow way,
He’s everything to me.
This was the Exodus experience. God redeemed His people, and then He joined them on their journeys.
Verse 3: The Lord Parted the Red Sea and the Jordan River
What happened next? Pharaoh changed his mind and decided to send his armies to annihilate the escaping multitudes. The Israelites became trapped by the Red Sea, and they were in a hopeless situation. Then God told Moses to stretch out his hand over the sea, and a series of uncanny phenomena unfolded with miraculous drama. The pillar of light and darkness moved over the children of Israel and positioned Himself between them and the Egyptians. Then the wind picked up and began tugging at the waters of the Red Sea. The waves rose up to the North and the South, and became mighty mountains of liquid, and a dry pathway formed through the sea like a valley of escape. It was all lit up like a football field all through that never-to-be forgotten night as the Israelites passed through the sea with a towering wall of water to their right and to their left.
Forty years later, something similar happened at the Jordan River, which was rampaging at flood stage. The waters parted, and the God of Israel who had led the Israelites out of Egypt now led them into the Promised Land. I’ve written about both these stories in The Red Sea Rules and the Jordan River Rules. These were twin miracles, paralleling signs, and the entire story of the Exodus is bookended with parting waters.
All of this is summed up in Psalm 114:3: The sea looked and fled; the Jordan turned back.
Verse 4: The Lord Gave Israel the Holy Land
Then what happened? God led Israel into the hills and mountains and valleys of the land He had prepared for them, the hills of Judea, the mountains of Samaria, the foothills of Galilee. The entire land—the Promised Land, Beulah Land—became alive.
Verse 4 puts this poetically: The mountains skipped like rams, the hills, like lambs. Whenever the Jews are in the Promised Land, Israel flourishes like a garden. When the Jews are not in the Promised Land, it languishes like a wasteland. It’s sometimes said that the land of Israel and the Jewish people are like body and soul. When the Jews are not in Israel, the land is dead. When they are, the land thrives.
So the first half of Psalm 114 is a poetic retelling of the Exodus from the Plagues of Egypt to the Conquest of the land.
Verses 5-8: The World Should Tremble Before God
The last half of the Psalms, the last four verses, all lead to one great implication. Look at them. Verses 5 and 6 are rhetorical questions: What ails you, O sea, that you flee? O Jordan, that you turn back? O mountains, that you skip like rams? O hills, like lambs?
In other words, why did all of creation cheer when God redeemed Israel? The answer isn’t given, but it is obvious. Because the Creator of the Earth—the Maker of the seas and rivers and mountains and hills—was unleashing His power. And what should modern-day Pharaohs do? What should be the response of people on the earth? They should tremble and fear and revere the God of redemption. The song ends: Tremble, O earth, before the Lord,
Before the God of Jacob, who turned the rock into a pool of water, the flint into a fountain of water.
2. New Testament Redemption
That was the song Jesus and His disciples sang before they began their Passover meal, the same meal that had been served in Jewish homes for 1400 years, since the original Passover. And nothing could have been more appropriate, because Jesus was about to unleash the Exodus all over again—not just for Israel but for all the world. Jesus fulfilled the Exodus story.
David Murray wrote, “The exodus was not only the most important redemptive event in the Old Testament; it also provided the redemptive language and concepts for a large number of prophetic predictions. This led Israel to expect something similar to the exodus redemption, though higher and better, in the future.”
He is the One who brought His people, including you and me out of slavery. He dwells among us. He parted the waters for us. He brought us out so that He could bring us in. He leads us into His Promised Land of eternal and abundant life.
I took the liberty of rewriting Psalm 114 from a New Testament vantage point. Here is the way we might interpret it through the prism of the Gospel.
When you and I went forth from Satan’s bondage,
The followers of Jesus Christ from an evil world,
We became His sanctuary; the church, His dominion.
We crossed the Red Sea of His blood and the river of His redemption.
We felt as if the mountains were shaking and the hills were singing.
Why did the Red Sea of His blood free us? What caused the river of redemption to welcome us?
Why are the mountains shaking and the hills dancing?
The whole world should be shaking before the Lord, before our redeeming God,
Because He has satisfied our thirst and given us endless rivers of living water.
Recently I listened to Jim Boone tell his story of redemption. He said he enrolled at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, but his real focus was surfing and going to parties. One day near the end of his senior year of college, he came across some men—members of the Gideons International—on the sidewalk giving away New Testaments. He took one and put it in his backpack. As soon as school was out, Jim traveled from North Carolina to California to join the surfing culture. He met two lifeguards who told him they were going down to Mexico to surf, and Jim went with them. They stayed there a couple of months, surfing and having fun. One day Jim went out into the surf with his camera to take pictures of his buddies surfing. When he was about 200 yards from shore, his buddy paddled up to him and shouted: “Get out of the water. We’re swimming in a school of feeding sharks.” He frantically tried to swim to shore, but he was terrified and, he later said, two thoughts came to him. First, I’m about to die. Second, I am not going to heaven!
Jim did make it to shore, and he decided to go back to North Carolina because he knew a surfing friend there who could tell him how to become a Christian. He boarded a bus in Mexico, but at two in the morning it was stopped by Mexican soldiers. They boarded the bus, pulled Jim off, and pointed their machine guns at him. For the second time within a few days, Jim thought he was going to die. The men started going through Jim’s backpack, looking for drugs. One of them pulled out the New Testament he had placed there at the beginning of the summer.
“What’s this?” they asked.
“My Bible,” Jim said.
The officer looked at the Bible, smiled, put his pistol back in his holster, waved the men away, and escorted Jim back onto the bus. Not long afterward, Jim arrived back in North Carolina, found his friend, and asked him how to be saved. His buddy told him how to have a personal relationship with God. Jim didn’t receive Christ right then, so his friend suggested he read the book of Romans. Jim read through the book of Romans.
Jim went back to his parents’ house and read Romans. He came to chapter 6, which says: “Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness? But thanks be to God that, though you used to be slaves to sin, you have come to obey from your heart the pattern of teaching that has now claimed your allegiance. You have been set free from sin and have become slaves to righteousness” (Verses 16-18).
Jim read through the rest of Romans and went on to 1 and 2 Corinthians. Then he came to Galatians and to chapter four, where he read, “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship. Because you are his sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, “Abba, Father.” So you are no longer a slave, but God’s child; and since you are his child, God has made you also an heir” (Galatians 4:4-7).
Finally he came to Ephesians 2, and he read these words: “As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our flesh and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature deserving of wrath. But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus. For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God— 9not by works, so that no one can boast” (Ephesians 2:1-9).
At that moment, Jim said, “It was as if the Lord Jesus Himself stood in my bedroom.” He sank down to his knees and prayed, “Lord, I’m so sorry. I never realized. Will you save me?” When he stood back to his feet, he knew he was a changed man. Soon he led his girlfriend to Christ. And they went on to establish a Christian home and to be workers for the King of Kings.
God took a young man who thought the greatest thing in life was surfing and going to parties, and He redeemed Him from a life of slavery to sin and death.
Conclusion
Have you ever thought about the parallels between Moses and Jesus? In Deuteronomy 18, Moses said that in the last days God would raise up “a prophet like me” from among the Israelites, whom the people were to obey (Deuteronomy 18:15). Later generations understood that Moses was predicting the Messiah, who would be, in some ways, a prophet like him. How, then, did Moses prefigure Jesus?
- In Acts 7:20, Stephen said, “At that time Moses was born, and he was no ordinary child.” Well, neither was Jesus.
- Moses was the son of a Hebrew peasant girl. So was Jesus.
- The baby Moses was placed in a basket; the baby Jesus was placed in a manger.
- The ruling king tried to kill baby Moses. The same thing happened to baby Jesus.
- Moses left a life of royalty to redeem God’s people. So did Jesus.
- The Israelites rejected Moses. In the same way, Jesus came unto His own, and His own received Him not (John 1:11).
- The voice of God spoke from Heaven affirming Moses’ leadership. The voice of the Father spoke from Heaven affirming Jesus’ sonship.
- Moses performed miracles. So did Jesus.
- Moses was a shepherd. So was Jesus.
- Moses was a great teacher. So was Jesus.
- According to 1 Corinthians 10:2, Israel was baptized into Moses in the cloud and the sea. And all of us are all baptized into Christ by His death and resurrection.
- Moses fasted forty days on Mount Sinai. Jesus fasted forty days on the Mount of Temptation.
- Moses came out of Egypt; and the Bible says of Jesus: “Out of Egypt I have called my Son.”
- Moses parted the Red Sea. Jesus stilled the storms of Galilee.
- Moses fed the multitudes in the wilderness. Jesus fed the multitudes in Galilee.
- Moses gave people bread that came down from Heaven. Jesus said He was the bread that came down from Heaven.
- Moses gave people water to drink from a rock. The Bible says that rock represented Christ, who gives us living water (1 Corinthians 10:4).
- Moses met with God on the mountain and His face glowed with the glory of God. Jesus was enveloped in a cloud of glory on the Mount of Transfiguration and His face glowed like the sun.
- Moses choose twelve spies to spy out the land; Jesus chose twelve disciples to change the world.
- Moses appointed seventy elders who led Israel. Jesus appointed seventy disciples to spread the Gospel.
- Moses led his people out of the bondage of slavery; Jesus leads us out of the bondage of sin.
- Moses mediated the Old Covenant; Jesus mediated the New Covenant.
- Jesus said, “Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up” (John 3:14).
- Moses died outside the promised land. Jesus died outside Jerusalem.
- Moses made a remarkable appearance after his death on the Mount of Transfiguration; Jesus was seen many times, and on one occasion by up to 500 people, after His resurrection.
The prologue of John says, “For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17).
Jesus said, “If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for He wrote about me” (John 5:46).
The Book of Colossians says that these Old Testament events were “a shadow of things to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ.”
Revelation 15:3 tells us that in Heaven we’ll sing the song of Moses and of the Lamb, saying, “Great and marvelous are your deeds, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, King of the nations.
Hebrews 3 says: “Therefore, holy brothers and sisters, who share in the heavenly calling, fix your thoughts on Jesus, whom we acknowledge as our apostle and high priest. He was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses was faithful in all God’s house. Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses, just as the builder of a house has greater honor than the house itself. For every house is built by someone, but God is the builder of everything. “Moses was faithful as a servant in all God’s house,” bearing witness to what would be spoken by God in the future. But Christ is faithful as the Son over God’s house. And we are his house, if indeed we hold firmly to our confidence and the hope in which we glory” (verses 1-6).
How amazing that when Jesus gathered with His disciples in the Upper Room on the night before His crucifixion, with the roasted Passover Lamb sitting in the middle of the table, they would sing this song—Psalm 114—the song of the redeemed!
It was no accident, not a coincidence. It was the plan of God to impress upon you and me how much we need redemption, more than anything else in the world. We need One who is greater than Moses. We need Jesus, the Lamb of God, who saves us by grace through faith, who brings us out to bring us in, and who makes us tremble—not with fear, but with joy—at His amazing grace.