Psalm 114:1-3, 7-8 (NIV)
When Israel came out of Egypt, Jacob from a people of foreign tongue, Judah became God’s sanctuary, Israel his dominion. The sea looked and fled, the Jordan turned back; Tremble, earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the presence of the God of Jacob, who turned the rock into a pool, the hard rock into springs of water.
Charles Spurgeon had high praise for Psalm 114, the second in the series of Psalms sung as the Egyptian Hallel as part of Israel’s Passover ceremony: “This sublime SONG OF THE EXODUS is one and indivisible. True poetry has here reached its climax: no human mind has ever been able to equal, much less to excel, the grandeur of this Psalm.” The Huguenots agree! Huguenots were French Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries who followed the teachings of theologian John Calvin. Persecuted by the French Catholic government during a violent period, Huguenots fled the country in the 17th century, creating Huguenot settlements all over Europe, in the United States and Africa. They fled this persecution—the loss of their political and religious freedoms—and sang this psalm often and gladly.
Perhaps we should learn it, too.
As America becomes more secularized by the day, bible-believing Christians are being pushed to the margins of society. If you take the bible literally, believe faith in Christ is the only way into Heaven, declare that marriage is only between a man and a woman, and that there are only two genders, like the French Huguenots, you are now out of favor with the prevailing culture in which you live. Welcome to life in the Spiritual Israel. Psalm 114 calls us as Christians in the twenty-first century to ask ourselves about our identity. Are we at home in this world, or do we feel in some sense that we are foreigners even in our native land? Do we have a profound sense that the saving power of God has rescued us from a life of bondage and slavery in which the world as a whole still lives?
God took one small family in a foreign country and made them into a great nation of people to be his own. In doing this, He showed his mighty power by the plagues brought on Egypt, by parting the waters of the Red Sea and destroying their armies. When they arrived as his Holy Nation to the land he had promised, he opened the Jordan for them to cross over on dry land. We are told that the hearts of the people of Canaan melted with fear. They knew he was really God. His chosen people, Israel, had finally learned that he could be trusted to deliver them out of any situation and that in the end, he would deliver them into paradise. Through Christ, you and I are a part of that same family.
We also need to remind ourselves that Jesus sang this Psalm together with His disciples on the night He was betrayed and arrested. He would grant the people of God a greater deliverance than Israel out of Egypt, and in that work all nature would be shaken (Mt. 27:45, 51). Israel’s story of deliverance is our story, as well. Through Christ, you were brought out of slavery to sin and into true freedom. Through Christ, you have been rescued from the armies of hell by an act of God’s sovereign will and delivered into His Kingdom on dry land. Through Christ, one day you will appear before the peoples of the world as a member of His family and conquering army, sealed forever by His blood as a citizen of the New Heaven and New Earth.
The Israelites. Christ and His disciples. The French Huguenots. Like those who came before us, marginalized by the societies in which they found themselves, we too must learn to sing the praises of God’s promises and deliverance as found in Psalm 114. For, like our forefathers in the faith, we too are being pushed to the edges of our society. Will you cower and complain? Or will you take up the chorus of Psalm 114, declaring the guaranteed deliverance assured by membership in the Family of Faith.
