God told Moses to go camp in this place by the Red Sea in stead of going aroind the north end of it into Canaan. When Pharaoh’s army shows up to kill them all, they believe the Israelites are lost and wandering the desert. The Israelites believe that too and promptly freak out and start blaming Moses for their eminent deaths at the hands of the Egyptians, because even being oppressed by slavery is better than getting stabbed by charioteers.
God commands Moses to hold his staff over the water and a dry path will appear. It takes all night for an east wind to dry a path through the sea bed, but the pillar of smoke they’d been following moves around to the back of the camp in between the Israelites and the Egyptian army. It lights the Isrealite camp as a pillar of fire, but casts darkness over the Egyptians so they can’t find anything. The rest plays out just like the cartoons and Sunday school stories. The Israelites walk through, then the waters close in and kill the Egyptians to a man.
I feel like there’s this pattern in how God gets people to worship Him. With Adam and Eve He just talked to them and hung out like another corporeal creature. It didn’t seem like they had to do much of anything, but God let them know that He had made everything and was in charge of everything and expected them to pass that along to all their descendants. With Noah, God again spoke directly with Noah but now He wasn’t around all the time, so He worked miracles all around Noah and his family so they would know He was in charge of things. When He started humanity over again with Noah and his family, it’s again assumed that the knowledge of God will continue on through all their descendants. Both times though, the message seems to run out of steam pretty quickly and people have all but forgotten about God within a few generations.
For Abraham then, God connects up with the family in the long term, working directly with Abraham’s line for generations, subtly helping them out and making things work out for them. This works better and, when Moses comes, the descendants of Abraham still hold onto some idea of what the Lord is about, but it sounds like it’s kind of a theoretical knowledge. No one really does anything about it. So now there’s a new chapter, no more subtly telling kings to be nice to the Jews or multiplying flocks to help out Abraham’s line, and no more working with one man and expecting him to pass the knowledge of God along to his family. God actually goes out of His way to prevent Pharaoh from giving in to Moses’s demands to make a big show for everyone to see. In Exodus 14:17-18 God says He hardened the hearts of the Egyptians so they’ll chase after Moses and then He will have the glory for killing Pharaoh’s army. It was a huge, flashy miracle and everyone saw it.
This change of tactics seems to sound again like God changing his mind about things. It reminds me though of the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonugut’s book Slaughterhouse 5, and a few other books of his too. The Tralfamadorians see time differently from us. They see all time at once, but they still exist in only one instant at a time. There’s a major revelation for the protagonist of the novel when they tell him about some mistakes they are going to make in the future. Billy Pilgrim can’t understand how they could know something’s a mistake and still go through with it, and they try to explain how it works, but Billy just can’t process it.
I’m not saying that I think God is using different methods because He’s making mistakes, but only that we don’t really know what omniscience entails. We assume that perfect foresight implies unchangingness, but that’s really naive since we can’t even get our heads around what perfect foresight even looks like. I can’t remember if I’ve seen anything so far about God claiming to be unchanging Himself, but it seems to come up a lot in church doctrine. I’ll have to keep an eye out for that claim specifically in the future.
In the end, God’s plan whips the Israelites into shape though. The grand display in front of the entire nation brings everyone into line and no one ever questions God for generations to come.
Just kidding. They actually start complaining and cursing Moses again in the very next chapter when they travel through the Sin Desert and there’s no good source of food or water there.
“We told you you should have left us alone” They gripe at Moses. “We may have been slaves, but at least we were fed in Egypt.”
So Moses explains (again) that God is running this show and that complaining to Moses and Aaron was complaining against God. God heard them though and sent a bunch of Quail to eat every night and every morning He frosted the ground with manna, which were like little bread crumbs that tasted like honey cakes. I think God was still working on making a point about how dependant the Israelites were on Him though because they weren’t allowed to store any extra food ever, but had to wait for God to send each serving.
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