The Lord gave further instructions to Moses. Now see that these plans deliberately set up the Red Sea incident. God deliberately put the Israelites in a position where the Egyptian army would pursue them and they would be trapped. He did this so that He would receive great glory. Now we might think this is rather self-indulgent of God, but we need to look a little more deeply at the meaning of "glory". Part of the meaning of glory is "weight" in the sense of "importance", or "significance". One of the key things the Israelites needed to know was that God was the most important factor in their life. We too need to know this and God sets events up in our life to help us realise this. These events are usually traumatic at first, but what He is doing is trying to teach us that it is His love, His care, His power that is more important, more significant, than anything else in our lives. His love will overcome any circumstance.
In due course Pharaoh realised the Israelites were not going to return, and so sent his army to chase after them. Eventually they caught up with the Israelites.
So the people were trapped. No way forward, and no way back. Most importantly, no way of running away. As we saw in an earlier post, God's main concern was that the Israelites would not run away. For if they had run away, where would they have run too? They would have run back into captivity, into slavery. We may often be tempted to run away from things in life, but when we do all we do is run away from freedom, and run into captivity. We were not created to run away.
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