The Wonder of Devouring Battle Exodus 15:3

Did you ever wonder? Did you ever wonder?

I do. Did you ever wonder? Why the sun always rises, but the stars never fall?

Why dry land is never satisfied by water? And why fire never says enough? Enough. As we're doing this weekend in Lexington, North Carolina, where we do sort of a mini masculine journey boot camp for a church that asks us to come in and do that kind of thing. And so I'm speaking Friday night on what are the cortisol of a man's heart. And so God had me kind of working on that this morning as we had finished up Habakkuk. And I was like, God, where do you want me to go?

This was actually right as I was connecting with him. And, you know, what do you want me to study this morning? And he made it pretty clear to me that one of the desires, in fact, the first core desire of a man's heart that we talk about in that discussion is the desire for battle. And one of the scriptures that we quote is out of Exodus chapter 15, specifically verse three, that is translated in English, the Lord is a man of war. The Lord is his name.

And of course, we shouldn't say, of course, I hope someday you get to come to a masculine journey boot camp and experience what we do. We use a clip from the movie Braveheart to show how William Wallace inspired the hearts of men because he inspired men to follow him into battle. And that's not unlike our Lord of being of angel armies. And so, you know, one of the scriptures that we actually talk about this is this is the reason that a lot of men check out of church, et cetera, is we have a heart for battle because God has a heart for battle. And this is one of the scriptures that we use to reference.

Well, God wanted me to go there today. And so I revisited this piece of scripture. It's out of Exodus 15.

You might remember it is the song that Moses sang after the incident at the Red Sea. And I think it's just a critical part of scripture. If you study the Song of Solomon, you study the hundred nineteen Psalm. I think if you almost study almost any Psalm, you end up back here because so many of them based the Lord is my strength out of this idea. And even Habakkuk, to some extent, although the word that is used for strength here in Exodus 15 is another beautiful example of strength that we'll get into here in a minute. But so as I was looking at these two verses.

So to look at the two verses that kind of God had me on this morning, again, in Exodus 15, the two scriptures that he had me do was the second verse of, again, the 15th chapter. And it says the Lord is my strength and song, and he has become my salvation. He is my God and I will prepare him a habitation, my father's God, and I will exalt him, followed by that the first we just described. The Lord is a man of war. The Lord is his name.

So like, wow, there's so much here that, you know, I may study these the rest of my life. But just to begin with, to look at this, these verses in Hebrew, the second verse, when it says the Lord is my strength. It's saying Yahweh, that, you know, the YHVH, the sacred name of God that the Jews weren't able to say. And when it says it's his strength, it's a different strength than Habakkuk uses at the end of the chapter that we just got finished talking about. This particular strength is an Ayin and a Zion.

Okay, that's kind of rhymes, interestingly, but the Ayin is saying that you're yoked to something or that you have the vision of something. And then the Zion would mean a remembrance or specifically something that God did in your life, some part of his energy that you reflect back to him. Like when Jesus said, do this in remembrance of me. Okay, and so as we take communion, certainly we're saying the Lord is my strength and this specific kind of strength because we are yoked to that memory of what Jesus did on the cross. So as you take the communion bread and you begin to crush that up, you're remembering how his body was crushed for you. And as you drink the blood, you know, you clearly think about how he shed that blood for you and that's your cover. And to a great extent, obviously, this is exactly what Moses was explaining. I mean, did they experience all these things that led to their salvation as he goes into here? And then when it says he is become, in other words, he is literally becoming my Yeshua because the word salvation in Hebrew is Yeshua, which is Jesus.

Okay, if you were to say that in English. So I think it's spectacular to say that Moses was saying right here, right here, that not only is he his song, but he has become my Yeshua. Which again, if you get into the word Yeshua, which we're going to get to a little bit more in detail here in a minute. But when you get into that word, it starts, excuse me, it ends with the letter I in which again is to be yoked to something. Okay, the word Yeshua, you can hear the A sound at the end of Yeshua.

Well, that's an I in and that I in is again to being yoked to something. Okay, so I think it's absolutely spectacular to set up and I won't spend a lot of time on the second half of the second verse because I want to get to the third verse really quickly as a connection to the second verse. Maybe some other day we'll come back and do some more study on that. But anyway, so then it's followed in the third verse by saying the Lord again, Yahweh is a man. Okay, let's just stop there for a minute. Wait a minute. What? It says the Lord is a man.

Okay, and don't miss this. What is Moses saying here exactly? Because when he says the Lord is a man, that word is man. I mean, like when the first time you see that word in the scriptures is when Adam says that the woman was taken out of man. Okay, and who is the man in that case?

It was Adam, right? So when Moses is saying the Lord is a man to begin with. Whoa, what did you just say, Moses?

I mean, just think about what he said. And then of war, okay, which is the actually focal point of what the Holy Spirit wanted me to see in this verse. That word war is really fascinating on all sorts of levels. Okay, to begin with, it begins with a mem. Okay, and the letter mem, as you may know, is the middle of the Hebrew alphabet. It is the first letter in the word Messiah, the anointed one. It generally means water, okay? And so what did Moses just experience? A whole lot of water that just killed the Egyptian army, okay? And when you think about it, God's expression, Yahweh, is a yud, hey, the light of expression, okay?

That just the word Yah is the light of expression. So God spoke, and the sea split. That's the water. And then he spoke again, and obviously it consumed the Egyptians, but not the Jews, right?

Or the Israelis in the case. But it says, with that word war, it starts with a mem, and then it says l'hem, okay? And the reason that sounds familiar to you is because you know the word Bethlehem, house of bread. Well, l'hem is bread. And so here is the idea of water that devours, okay? Why don't you just think about this a minute?

Like, what? The Lord is a man of water that devours. I mean, the implications of all that and the idea of the Red Sea and the blood and whatever, they say this, I'll say it again, you can cut the Bible anywhere and it bleeds red, okay?

I don't know about you, but it just stops me dead in my tracks to think Moses is describing, and again, he's using a common word for battle, but he starts it with a mem to make emphasis on the idea of battle, because l'hem is battle because of the idea of consuming your enemy, okay? Which, by the way, when we get into the wedding supper of the lamb, what are we going to do? We'd be eaten, okay? I mean, read it.

That's what's going to happen. And we're going to consume our enemies because that is the heart that God gave you, and again, our battle isn't against flesh and blood. Our battle is against spiritual forces, and so the idea of consuming these spiritual forces is really a fascinating idea, okay? I'm just giving you the Hebrew and something to consider today as you go about thinking through what I just said, and I can't help but note that then it says the Lord is his name. The Lord is a man of this unbelievable battle of devouring, but then it says Yahweh is his name. In other words, his expression is critical to his identity, and he spoke the waters into existence clearly, and he spoke the world into existence, and here he spoke, and the waters parted for Israel, but they swallowed the same waters. They swallowed his enemies, right? And thus is the picture of the largest baptism that, of course, ever took place, and your baptism in the Red Sea is not too dissimilar, and the idea of l'hem and battle are all involved in that, and I can't even begin to unpack all that, but I just wanted to share this morning the marvel of God's Word and how when he orders your steps in there, you just sit there and go, okay, I might be unpacking this one for eternity here because it is just beyond deep, but I hope you enjoyed just a quick glimpse at what it's saying there in Exodus 15 in the Song of Moses. Thanks for listening.