Victory at Sea: Reflections on Exodus 14:19-31 in this "Season of Creation"

At the last, to focus on the "where" and the "how" is to deflect ourselves from the central question of "so what." That question can be answered in several ways, but for our creation concerns today the answer must be something like the following: the world and the great cosmos of which it is a very tiny part are first God's creation. And because that is so we must always focus first on just what sort of God this is who created it. That God is bent, finally and forever, on making that world whole again in the face of our human desire to fragment it, carve it up into bits of our own devising, heat it up until it becomes unlivable for many or all of us and our non-human friends, too. And that God begs us, pleads with us, to join God in that work.

I believe that we are in the process of being saved by God. God is working on us at this very moment to turn us toward the healing of the planet, the tikkun olam of Judaism, "a healing of all." The victory of God at the ancient Sea of Reeds is a foretaste of that victory that God has had in mind from the very start of things. But that does not mean that there will not be great heat, and too much water in some places and not enough water in others, and too many and the wrong kinds of insects where they used not to be, and too few insects when we so desperately need them in places where they used to be.

The victory is God's; of that we may be certain. But human defeats have been the way of the world since humans first appeared and when they began to record their thoughts about all of this, little more than six thousand years by most reckonings. Since the universe is 14.7 billion years old, give or take a million or three, six thousand years of writing seems a very short time. My bet is still on God. What else would a Christian do?

12/2/2022 9:10:38 PM
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  • John Holbert
    About John Holbert
    John C. Holbert is the Lois Craddock Perkins Professor Emeritus of Homiletics at Perkins School of Theology in Dallas, TX.