Daily Lesson for Wednesday 22nd of October 2025
According to Exodus 14:13-14,25, what was God’s original and ideal plan concerning the involvement of the Israelites in warfare?
In that moment of crisis, when the people of Israel were forced into a physical impasse, “Moses answered the people, ‘Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today.
Image © Jeff Preston at Goodsalt.com
The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still’ ” (Exodus 14:13-14, NIV). According to the biblical narrative, even the Egyptians themselves understood that reality: “ ‘Let us flee from the face of Israel, for the Lord fights for them against the Egyptians’ ” (Exodus 14:25, NKJV).
God’s miraculous intervention for the helpless Israelites, untrained in military skills, becomes the pattern. The Exodus constituted the model, the paradigm, for God’s intervention on behalf of Israel. Here, not only is the battle fought by Yahweh, but Israel is required not to fight (Exodus 14:14). God is the warrior; the initiative belongs to Him. He establishes the strategy, defines the means, and conducts the campaign. If Yahweh does not fight for Israel, they have no possibility of success.
Ellen G. White interprets this as an expression of the fact that God “did not design that they should gain the land of promise by warfare, but through submission and unqualified obedience to his commands.”—Ellen G. White, Signs of the Times, September 2, 1880. As in their deliverance from Egypt, God would fight their battles for them. All they had to do was stand still and witness His mighty intervention.
History demonstrates that whenever Israel had sufficient trust in God, they did not need to fight (see 2 Kings 19:1-37, 2 Chronicles 32:1-33, Isaiah 37:1-38).
In God’s ideal plan, the Israelites never needed to fight for themselves. It was a consequence of their unbelief, expressed after the Exodus, that God permitted them to have a part in the war conducted against the Canaanites. In the same way, they did not need to raise a single sword against the Egyptians during the Exodus; it would have never been necessary for them to fight in conquering Canaan (Deuteronomy 7:17-19).
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“If the children of Israel had not murmured against the Lord, He would not have suffered their enemies to make war with them.”—Ellen G. White, The Story of Redemption, p. 134. How might murmurs impact our lives today? |
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