Scripture Reading: Exodus 14:5-14, Exodus 14:21-31, Exodus 15:1-21, Psalm 57:3
In ancient Greek theater, playwrights would sometimes use what came to be called a Deus ex machina (“God from the machine”) in the last acts of their plays. In it, some god would appear, seemingly out of nowhere, and resolve a seemingly impossible situation.
This plot device has also been criticized since ancient times for its lack of creativity. If you’re writing a play and you can create a divine intervention at any time to get your characters out of a jam, where’s the drama in that?
In Exodus 15, we encounter what might appear like a real-life Deus ex machina. The Israelites were trapped on their way out of Egypt, with Pharaoh and his army on one side and the Red Sea on the other. There was no way out; they were desperate. The enemy was supremely confident that it was the end of the road: “I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil” (Exodus 15:9).
But even this great army was no match for God, who parted the sea to make a passage for His people and then closed it on the aggressors: “But you blew with your breath, and the sea covered them” (v.10). Then the Israelites, led by Moses and his sister Miriam, express their wonder at what has happened: “The LORD is my strength and my song; he has become my salvation” (Exodus 15:2).
In hindsight, this rescue was surprising yet inevitable. God was showing them who He was and is: the God who can make a way out of no way. Throughout their history, Israel would survive similar situations, and the exodus pattern would be repeated regularly.
The exodus deliverance also prefigures the great redemption that Christ brought about with His death and resurrection. Augustine said in a sermon on this passage, “Under the leadership of our Lord Jesus Christ, who was at that time signified by Moses, we have been delivered through baptism from the devil and his angels, who like Pharaoh and the Egyptians were wearing us down in our subjection to the mud of the flesh as with the work of making bricks.” But he went on, “They cannot lord it over us anymore; because our very misdeeds, which made us into their subjects, have been…sunk and obliterated in the sea, when we were set free by the bath of holy grace” (Sermon 363).
Has life ever seemed to you like there was no way forward, and then—there was? The Deus ex machina has been criticized, and sometimes rightly so, for its artificiality and lack of creativity. But sometimes a plot or a situation gets resolved in a surprising-yet-inevitable way. We come away thinking, “Of course it had to be that way. I couldn’t see it coming, but it fits with all that came before.” That is the most satisfying ending of all, and that is the sort of ending God gives in real life. It is the sort of ending that makes our hearts glad and makes us want to sing.
Written by Elliot Ritzema
