The Song of Moses in Exodus 15 celebrates God's deliverance of Israel from Egypt, highlighting His power and redemptive nature. This psalm, the first in the Bible, draws a parallel between God's creation of humanity and His redemption of Israel, emphasizing that He has a double claim on His people: first as Creator and second as Redeemer through the blood of the Lamb. The sermon explores the poetic structure of the song, its three strophies, and its profound theological implications, particularly the concept of God's eternal reign as expressed in verse 18, contrasting it with the temporary thousand-year reign mentioned in Revelation. Ultimately, the message calls believers to recognize and rejoice in the everlasting reign of Christ, assuring them they are on the winning side of history.
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Remember there are at the back a lot of copies of the February issue of interest magazine. Be sure to take one. If you'd like to have one, even if you're on the mailing list and you want another one, take one. And if you'd like to be put on the mailing list of the magazine, be sure to give me your name and address on a slip of paper and just mark it, send interest. Exodus chapter fifteen, please. Exodus fifteen. In our previous meetings, We discuss passages that are rather familiar. You have no doubt heard many messages on the Passover, Exodus eleven and twelve. You have no doubt heard a few messages over the years on the crossing of the Red Sea.
It's possible that some of you here who have been Christians for many, many years We'll go out of this meeting tonight saying, I never heard anybody preach on the fifteenth chapter of Exodus before. Possible. Now, some of you may have. But I rather suspect that most of us have not heard much at all on Exodus chapter fifteen. This is the first psalm in the Bible. It comes before the book of psalms. But it is, as we shall see, very definitely a psalm. We'll be talking about that. I would like to introduce this chapter though by thinking back to the very beginning of the Bible.
Genesis one, one, in the beginning, God created. Genesis and Exodus are very different books of the Bible. Exodus is the salvation book of the Old Testament. The great emphasis in Exodus is on redemption, on deliverance, on being brought out of bondage, being brought out into the pilgrim journey. And it corresponds so much to our Christian teaching of salvation through the blood of the Lord Jesus. We were lost in sin and Jesus saved us. Took us out of the darkness and out of the path of rebellion and brought us in to the glorious light of salvation. Now, Genesis is not like that at all. Genesis doesn't talk about a lost people getting saved.
It talks about God creating people. And they start out as his people. It's true they turn against him. In sin, there are elements of the salvation teaching but that's not the thrust of the book of Genesis Genesis is the book of beginnings the beginning of the universe the beginning of the earth the beginning of animal life the beginning of the human race the beginning of marriage and family and then of course the beginning of the Hebrew people as God brought forth well into the book of Genesis about chapter eleven and picked out Abraham and And from Abraham, all the rest of the book is the developing of a family.
You know, the first eleven chapters of the book of Genesis cover anywhere from two to four thousand years of human history, depending on whatever the date of Adam's creation was, and that's a little bit difficult to determine. But let's just take the shortest possible dating, and then you have two thousand years of history from Genesis chapter one, the creation of Adam, to Genesis chapter eleven, the selection of Abraham. And then you have from Genesis twelve all the way through to the end of the book of Revelation another two thousand years. So you've gone halfway through Bible history, halfway from Adam to Christ when you get to Genesis chapter twelve, the selection of Abraham.
So a great deal of time compressed into those first eleven chapters, a couple thousand years of human history. coming down through Noah and so forth. And Abraham can be dated approximately two thousand BC. That date is fairly firm. And Moses about fifteen hundred BC. And David about a thousand BC and Daniel about five hundred BC. That's rather helpful to have that little outline there. Abraham two thousand, Moses fifteen hundred, David one thousand and Daniel five hundred BC. That's a rough calculation but it's fairly accurate fairly close so with Abraham God begins the Jewish family and all the rest of the book of Genesis deals with Abraham and the three generations that followed him Abraham Isaac Jacob who is called Israel and Joseph and his brothers four generations there and that you leave the book of Abraham the book of Genesis I think the last words are a coffin in Egypt Joseph dies and they put his body in a coffin in Egypt and you open up about four hundred years later in the book of Exodus and there they are in bondage in Egypt and
wanting to be redeemed and then Exodus is the great salvation book and this fits in with the names of God while the name Jehovah appears in the book of Genesis its meaning is not brought out until you get into the story of the plagues and then God introduces himself I'm Jehovah the God who redeems Jehovah is a name that's associated with redemption, taking his people in salvation out of Egypt by power and redeeming them. Whereas the characteristic name of God in the book of Genesis is El Shaddai, the God who nourishes his people, the Father God, the one who provides for his people and cares for his people. It's quite different.
There's a very familiar illustration that you've no doubt heard a number of times over the years and it so beautifully portrays the difference between these two books that I want to tell the story to you again. There was a boy who was pretty handy with tools and he crafted a boat and back in the days before you went to Kmart and bought all your toys. He built himself a boat, model boat, beautiful and it was a good floating boat too. He put it in the water and it was stable and he lived on the bank of a river. And he took his boat down after he'd spent hours and hours and weeks and weeks building this beautiful craft, hand crafting, and he took it down, it floated in the river, and it got away from him in the current.
And he ran along the bank, but there was no way that he could retrieve that boat, and it got out in the middle of stream. It was gone. Some weeks later, the boy went to the nearest town with his father, do some shopping, and He was wandering around the streets while his parents were shopping, and he came by a hobby shop. And there in the window, the hobby shop was his boat. Somebody had fished it out of the river, and somehow it had got sold to the manager of the store, and he had a price tag on it. A fairly nice price tag, too. Well, the boy was elated, and he went into the store, and he claimed his boat. The only trouble is, the manager of the store also claimed it. After all, he paid for it.
He said, I'm sorry, fella, but that's my boat. I bought it. I paid for it. And the only way you can have it is if you'll buy it. How much is it? He told him. Well, I just haven't got that much money. Well, the manager of the store felt sorry for the kid. He said, I tell you what I'll do. He said, I'll put a tag on it that says that it's being held. So I won't sell it to anybody else. And you go home and you see if you can't earn the money. And if it takes you several months, that's okay. I'll wait and then we'll just leave it in the window on display and you can come back and buy it so the boy went home and he got jobs mowing lawns and shoveling snow and all those things you know and when he had the money he went back to town and he went in the store and he bought the boat and now comes the line that makes it such a beautiful illustration of Bible truth as he walked out of that store onto the sidewalk cradling that craft in his arms he said little boat you're twice mine now First I made you and then I bought you.
You're twice mine. And of course that's the gospel illustration because the Lord Jesus has a double claim on each of us. First he made us and then he bought us. And either one of those claims should be enough to turn the heart to him in repentance and faith. Why he has the right to our surrender because he made us. We're God's creatures. And God has the right to rule over our lives. If the Lord Jesus never went to the cross, He'd have the right to rule over us. Because He made us. We're His by creation. But He also went to the cross to buy us back from sin. And He has the right to our surrender, our devotion, our love, because He laid down His life for us.
And if creation doesn't warm the heart, to surrender as often it doesn't. The blood of Jesus does. Thinking of the cross of Christ and how He suffered for us has undoubtedly turned many people to the Lord Jesus for salvation. As the heart warms in appreciation. Now of course the same truth also fits the book of Genesis and the book of Exodus. Here are the people of Israel. In the book of Genesis God made them. God made humanity and then he formed the nation Israel through Abraham and the whole book of Genesis is sets the stage for Exodus by starting out with nothing and God creating And then the human race spreads into its families, and then God starts over after the rebellion of the Tower of Babel, and he picks out, he makes a new family that was not in rebellion.
Through Abraham, he starts a new nation altogether, and you go on, and by the end of the book of Genesis, they're a large family, and by the opening of Exodus, there's a couple million of them. And they're God, because Genesis is the book of beginnings. He made them. But by the time you get to the end of Exodus fourteen, they're also His by redemption. He drew them out of Egypt with mighty power. He opened the Red Sea before them. They were redeemed by the blood of the Lamb in Egypt and brought out through the Red Sea in great power. And we dealt with that on the Lord's day. The two great aspects of salvation from Egypt, first the Passover, and then the Red Sea crossing.
We compared that to our own salvation, whereby Jesus, the Lamb of God, laid down His life for us. our Passover and then the day came when we opened our hearts to Christ and believed and God saved us and gave us the new birth and worked that miracle that's comparable to the Red Sea crossing and the response to all this well I like to think of my little story again and the way I told the story is the way I heard it many years ago but I was meditating on this these things a few months ago and thinking again about that little story and Out of my own mind and heart came another little line from the story. I began to think about the story from the standpoint of the little boat.
And if the little boat could have talked, what would the little boat have said? Well, I think the little boat would have looked up from its bridge if that's where its eyes are and looked up at the little boy and said, Now I'm twice yours. First you made me and now you bought me. Well, I don't know whether boats can respond like that, but people sure can. And we can lift up our hearts to the Lord Jesus or to God the Father and say, Father, now we're twice yours. First you made us, and now you've bought us, and you've got a double claim on our lives, and we're so thankful that you do, and we appreciate all you've done for us.
And so our chapter starts out. Then sang Moses. And the children of Israel, this song unto the Lord, saying, I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. Then sang Moses. This is the response of the human heart to the God who saves his people. Verse two, this is the song. They sang, The Lord is my strength and song. He has become my salvation. He is my God, and I will prepare him in habitation.
My father's God, and I will exalt him. The Lord is a man of war. The Lord is his name. Pharaoh's chariots and his host have he cast into the sea. His chosen captains are also drowned in the Red Sea. The depths have covered them. They sank into the bottom of the snow. Well, of course, it was the threat of destruction of the chariots of Pharaoh that had put the people in such desperate fright. And now to watch the waters of the sea close in over that army and cut it off from killing the people and massacring them, it was a cause of great rejoicing. Not that they were glad to see people die, but they were glad to see they weren't going to die.
They were thankful that the enemy army that had come to massacre them had been annihilated by God and they were safe. And so they sing the praises of the Lord. And here in verse two, for the first time, the word salvation is applied to God as one of his titles. The Lord has become my salvation. My salvation. God did it. That's the great truth that was expressed in the fourteenth chapter when Moses said, Stand still and see the salvation of God. And now they call God's salvation. Psalm sixty-two, one and two, says, Truly my soul waiteth upon God, and from him cometh my salvation.
He only is my rock and my salvation. You see the transition? My salvation comes from him. He is my salvation. It becomes a title for God that reappears in the Psalms. And Psalm hundred and eighteen has the exact word. the Lord is my strength and song and is become my salvation. So here salvation becomes for the first time in the Bible a title, one of God's titles or one of God's names you might say. Now this is a psalm and a psalm is poetry and poetry in the Bible is always a translation of either the Greek or the Hebrew and if it had been originally a poem in English It wouldn't translate very well.
Now we can translate modern languages into English. For instance, Martin Luther's great hymn, A Mighty Fortress is Our God, is translated from the German into the English. But when you translate, say from German into English or from English into German or English into French or French into Spanish or something like that, you lose the rhyming pattern and you have to reconstruct the phrases and the words in order to find something that will rhyme in that language. What rhymes in English won't rhyme in Spanish and so forth. Our poetry is generally characterized by the rhyming of sounds.
Some of the modern poetry doesn't rhyme, but the older poetry tends to rhyme and there's different patterns of rhyming. You have four lines. The second and the fourth might rhyme. And perhaps the first and the third. But you look at the hymn book and start turning the pages. You'll come across some poems where some hymns where the first and second lines will rhyme and the third and fourth will rhyme. And there's many different patterns. Sometimes you'll have three lines that rhyme and then a fourth that doesn't fit. And then three more that rhyme with each other and then a sixth line that rhymes with that fourth one. Or eighth line it would be that rhymes with the fourth one. There's a lot of different rhyming patterns. Now in Hebrew poetry, there is not sound rhyming, but there is thought rhyming.
It's the thoughts that rhyme, that parallel. And I suppose there's technical names for that, which I don't know. It doesn't really matter. But the idea is that because you rhyme the thoughts instead of the sounds, you can translate Hebrew poetry into English. And it still rhymes. The whole book of Psalms, Proverbs, the Song of Solomon, much of Isaiah and Jeremiah. These books have poetry. They rhyme. If you have a modern translation like the New American Standard Bible, the Revised Standard Version, or the New International Version, you'll find that the lines are set up. Line by line, the way the poetry follows.
You don't have, like in the King James where you have just straight margins on both sides. And the poetry is easy to spot because the page looks different. Take a new International Version, it opens up, it opens up to the Psalms. It's going to look very different than it opens up to Deuteronomy. A lot of white space on the page because every line is set up like a poem. But you can still get the feel of the rhyming in the King James Version once you're aware of it. And once I became aware of how the Psalms were set up and what Hebrew poetry was like, I'd find myself reading along in the New Testament and all of a sudden, hey, wait a minute, I think I just read some poetry. Maybe sometimes I read the Bible and my mind wanders a little bit now. I know you're not like that, but I'm not paying too much attention and all of a sudden something clicks in my mind.
That's poetry. Look at, you get to a place where you can feel it after a while. You feel the poetry coming in because you realize there's a parallelism. You know, the sounds sort of funny. You hear the Psalms read if you think that you're just getting prose read. Once you realize that you're getting poetry read, they begin to come together because they're not written the way we talk in prose. They are definitely poetry. They have this paralleling pattern all through them. So you're coming along in the New Testament, all of a sudden, there, that's poetry. Well, how come the New Testament's not written in poetry? Well, probably it's a quotation from the Old Testament. Like I say, I wasn't paying too much attention. And now I say, oh yes, he's quoting Isaiah. He's quoting Jeremiah.
He's quoting the Psalms. And that's why all of a sudden poetry showed up there. The rhyming comes out here very clearly in verse three, a very simple pattern of rhyming here. Two phrases, the Lord is a man of war. The Lord is his name. Just two parallel sentences, similar, not identical. One thing about the Lord, he's a man of war. Then the next one says the Lord, and this time it says, is his name. You can sort of cross-parallel these two. The Lord parallels the Lord. Man of war parallels his name. So you could say, too, that man of war is his name, as well as the Lord being his name, in this particular case.
And I think that thought is definitely there. The Lord is his name. He's a man of war. And of course they were thinking of the great destruction of Pharaoh. Verse four. Here's a little bit more complex pattern, not much. Pharaoh's chariots and his host had he cast into the sea. That's the first line. Here's the second line. His chosen captains also are drowned in the Red Sea. Now you look at those two lines. Pharaoh's chariots, Pharaoh else, his chosen captains, Pharaoh's chariots and his host. See, what the psalmist does, in this case Moses, is that he rewords the first thought.
He talks about Pharaoh's chariots and his host, and now instead of talking about the whole army, he talks about his chosen captains, the leaders of his army. And then he says they are cast into the sea. And in the second line, he says they are drowned in the sea. A little different thought, the parallel. In the sea, parallels. in the Red Sea. Second line gives you a little more detail on the subject. In verse five, the depths have covered them. They sank into the bottom as a stone. Now there you don't have the word for word paralleling, but the thoughts are certainly parallel. They're covered by the depths. They sank to the bottom. Verse six, thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power.
Thy right hand, O Lord, hath dashed in pieces the enemy. You can think over the Psalms, you know, and yes, that's the way the whole book of Psalms is written. That's poetry. That's parallelism. That's rhyming. And you get many different patterns of rhyming, and I'm no expert on poetry by any means. You get some verses in the Psalms, and you just can't even pick out the parallelism. Sometimes it's opposite. It's two opposite statements. And sometimes, if you study the Psalm with the help of a commentary that goes into the technicalities of it, you'll see that it's like a one of these things where you have several statements in a row, and then a statement that is repeated a number of times over every fourth or fifth verse.
And there are some psalms that have twenty-two verses. Eric can find a psalm that has twenty-two verses in it. The chances are every one of those verses starts with a different letter of the Hebrew alphabet. Very hard to do this in English because you can't get sentences that start with a letter X. But in Hebrew you can do that. And there are Psalms with twenty-two verses, and the first word starts with the letter A and B and C and so forth, right on through. And then you come to that, what is it, that hundred and nineteenth Psalm, and it has twenty-two sections. Each section has something like seven verses. I forget how many. And every verse in this first section starts with the letter A, and every verse in the second section starts with B, and every one in the third section with C.
So you get the very interesting patterns in the Psalms. The first poem in the Bible, and I wouldn't want to call it a Psalm, but it's certainly a poem, appears in Genesis four, verse twenty-three. Genesis four, verses twenty-three and twenty-four. And this is the song that was written by a man named Lamech. Not the good Lamech, but the bad one. The one that was in Cain's line. About eight generations, seven or eight generations down from Cain. And he's the first person in the Bible to become a polygamist, to have more than one wife.
And he has two wives. Their names are Ada and Zilla. And he composes a piece of music and sings it to them. In verse twenty three, hear my voice, ye wives of Lamech, hearken unto my speech. Right away you see the parallelism there, although there's no phrase paralleling wives of Lamech, hear my voice and hearken unto my speech are obviously parallel. Now we come to the second pair. For I have slain a man who wounded me, and a young man for hurting me. I killed a man, he said. Now he doesn't mean he killed two people. I killed an older man and a younger man. This is parallelism. I killed a man.
It was a younger man, a young man that I killed. He wounded me. He hurt me. And the end parallels the phrase. It's not suggesting two murders there. So he has been hurt by somebody. And he took vengeance. And he's boasting of his vengeance. This is a song of violence and vengeance. It's something that would go very well with today's rock group. who tend to stress things of this type rather than love and beauty and holiness. Violence and vengeance, the song of Lamech. And then he boasts, if Cain shall be avenged seventy-fold, seven-fold, truly Lamech seventy-and-seven-fold.
He thinks back to Cain who had killed his brother, and God put a mark on Cain and said, don't anybody touch him, anybody touches him, anybody... hurt's Cain, kills Cain, he's going to be avenged seven times. That was verse fifteen. Well, God said that, but God didn't say this. But Lamech said that. Why, if Cain was going to be avenged seven times, how much better am I than Cain? I'd be avenged seventy-seven times. If anybody dared to hurt me for killing that fellow, I'll be avenged seventy-seven times. So it's a boastful, wicked poem. It's the first song in the Bible, a song of violence and vengeance. Now by comparison, how much better is the song of Moses, which is a song of praise?
The Lord is my strength and my song in Exodus fifteen two. The Lord is my strength and song. You know, did you ever feel sorry for people who have to listen to Christian radio stations all day long that aren't saved? Some of you have worked in places where you had to have rock music on the radio all day long, and there wasn't much you could do about it, and you just had to put up with it, and you were frustrated by it. But how about the non-Christian person who doesn't love the Lord Jesus, who gets in a place where he's got to listen to Christian music all day long? He must get pretty frustrated, too.
That's a pretty heavy dose of religion to put on a lost world, isn't it? All about Jesus, song after song. I guess some folks tune in these Christian radio stations and they must think we're a queer bunch of fanatics that listen to songs about Jesus all the time. But we don't think that. We love it. We love to hear the songs of the Lord because it's real. Now see, worldly music is not, worldly music is fictional. And even the good, the best of worldly music, the most beautiful of worldly music is still make-believe. I love that song about my old Kentucky home far away, and so do most of you.
But I bet you hardly any of you people ever had a home in Kentucky. You still sing the song. It's sentiment. From this valley they say you are going. You know, I sing about the Red River Valley, but I never left any Red River Valley. There's still a nice song. But when we sing about the Lord Jesus, it's real. He lifted me from sinking sand. He lifted me. Oh, praise His name. He lifted me. Stephen Foster wrote that beautiful song, I dream of Jeannie with a light brown hair. I like to hear it. I love listening to it. I can't sing. But I'm telling you, if I started dreaming of Jeannie with a light brown hair, Betty Lou would be running around the house after me with an axe. You got to watch my staff. You see, it's not real.
It's somebody else's experience. So there are songs that relate directly to the human experience. They touch the emotions of the human experience in general. But when we sing the songs of the gospel, every one of them is real. And that's why we can listen to it all day long, because it's all true. Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before. Well, that should be true. Maybe sometimes we sing a few things that aren't so true. Maybe we drift away instead of getting closer to the Lord. Oh God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. A shelter from the stormy blast in our eternal home. That's truth.
And when we sing the songs, we have not only a better theme than the world has. We don't sing about violence and vengeance, but we sing about love and blessing and beauty and salvation, but also we have truth to what we sing. The structure of this psalm is worth noting. I will sing unto the Lord, for he hath triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. That's in verse one. Now, if you will notice, the last verse, verse twenty-one, is almost identical in wording. Sing ye to the Lord. Now, the first verse says, I will sing unto the Lord.
The twenty-first verse says, sing ye to the Lord. And then the rest of it is identical. For he hath triumphed gloriously, the horse and his rider hath he thrown into the sea. Now, let me explain why those two verses are the same. And if you haven't been fascinated yet by this chapter, I think you will be now. The psalm actually ends with verse eighteen. The Lord shall reign forever and ever. That line does not rhyme with anything. It's just a grand conclusion to the psalm. And the psalm ends there. And then verse nineteen is not poetry anymore. It doesn't rhyme. It's an explanation. It's prose. For the horse of Pharaoh went in with his chariots and with his horsemen into the sea, and the Lord brought again the waters of the sea upon them.
But the children of Israel went on dry land in the midst of the sea. That's not poetry. That's just the writer, Moses, explaining why they sang the song. And then verse twenty, this is not poetry either, this is prose. Miriam, the prophetess, sister of Aaron, who's also a sister of Moses. But she's called here the sister of Aaron. She was that little girl that stood by the river bank when Moses was floated out into the river and the baby Moses in a basket. And she just stood guard. And when the princess came and pulled the basket out of the river, she came up to the princess. and said, wouldn't you like me to get you a wet nurse to take care of that baby for you? And of course she went and got her own mother. And Moses' mother was able to get, actually got paid for taking care of her own baby after that.
But Miriam was the key to saving Moses alive there. And now here she is. She was a teenager when he was born. So she's, he's a, what is he now at this age, he's eighty. So she's probably about ninety-three. She ought to make some of you gals here feel good and young. She organized a little women's choir here. She got all the women together, all the girls, and she took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances. And Miriam answered them. That is, this women's choral group became a choral response to the various parts of the song. So that you have a pattern like this, and I should tell you that the various commentaries consider that they didn't just walk up on the riverbank and sing this psalm fully developed.
I don't doubt they started singing that morning. But the psalm became developed as poetry and probably all during the wilderness journey, this was one of their favorite hymns. They must have sang this over and over again. And they developed this choral response type of thing. Like we've sung some of the songs here. The other day we had one where this side sang one part and this side another part. We had another hymn on the Lord's Day where the women sang a different high part while the men sang the lower part. Well, what happened here was that the men would sing the main verse of the psalm and then the women would respond. For instance, can you hear the men singing, I will sing unto the Lord for he has triumphed gloriously.
And then the women's choral group comes back in. Yes, sing unto the Lord, do it for he has triumphed gloriously. The Psalm is thought to divide up into three verses or strophies as they're called technically because they're a little different than our verses. And it's thought that this choral response was sung maybe at the end of each one of these verses. Let's look at these three strophies here. The first one starts in verse two and goes through verse five. And the only way you can pick this out is by the context. There's nothing in the poetry itself. There's no spaces between the verses or strophies.
There's no lines to mark them off. But the pattern is nevertheless there. Every one of these strophy, let me spell that word, F-T-R-O-P-H-E, strophy, pronounced strophy. It is, according to the Random House Dictionary, a separate section or extended movement in a poem. It is distinguished from a stanza in that it does not follow a regularly repeated pattern. Not like our stanzas and our hymns that have the same meter all through. So, but it is definitely a distinguishable section. And in this case, the trophies are marked by starting out talking about the Lord and they end up talking about the victory.
In verse two, for instance, the Lord is my strength and song, and this one ends up in verse five with Pharaoh's chariots sinking to the bottom of the stone. And then the second trophy in verse six, you start talking about the Lord again. Thy right hand, O Lord, is become glorious in power. And it has dashed in pieces the enemy. And then it goes down to verse ten. You did blow with your wind, and the sea covered them. They sank as lead in the mighty waters. And then the third stroke, he comes back to the Lord again. Who is like unto thee, O Lord, among the gods? Who is like thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in praises, doing wonders? Who is like you, God?
And then it goes on to talk in the third strophy, not about Pharaoh, but about future victories. The victory over the Philistines in verse fourteen. And the chiefs of Edom and Moab and Canaan in verse fifteen. And it goes on until it ends up with a great final, final, glorious reign of our God. The Lord shall reign forever and ever in verse eighteen. That's the final statement. So there you have the three strophies. And in these strophies, each one has a different emphasis. For instance, the first one, and only the first one, has a very personal emphasis by using the word my in verse two.
My strength and song. He has become my salvation. He is my God. I will prepare him in habitation. He is my father's God, and I will exalt him. The personal emphasis there that the... Well, it's a congregational thing. You see, the whole congregation was brought through the sea, but the singer makes it personal. My Jesus, I love thee. And our hymns, you know, oftentimes they're plural. But sometimes they come out singular. The whole congregation will stand and sing, my Jesus, I love thee. We get it individualized and we get it set up also for a group. So here is the personal response to salvation. In verse six, the second strophe is the only one that talks about God's right hand.
Your right hand, O Lord, your right hand is dashed in pieces of the enemy. It's the only one that speaks of the enemy as well. And the third strophe, who is like unto thee, verse eleven, O Lord, among the gods, who is like the glorious and holiness, fearful and praised, is doing wonders. I'm sorry, this one does speak about his right hand too. He stretched out your right hand. The earth swallows him. Then it goes on to talk about the future. journey through the wilderness and the many enemies and the entrance into the promised land. Now, I've got just time left enough to talk about verse eighteen. And I want to close with that. And I was thinking tomorrow night of going on to verse chapter sixteen, but I might spend another night on this chapter here.
And talk a little bit about the worship teachings that are in this chapter. We'll see. We'll see how the time goes on that. that I have to cut something else out if I do. If you find it interesting, I might do that. But let's talk about verse eighteen. Because you all know Handel's Messiah. Did you know it came out of Exodus, this line? Well, maybe it did, maybe it didn't. This line in Handel's Messiah about he shall reign forever and ever. He shall reign forever and ever. It doesn't come from the book of Psalms. It's not in the book of Psalms. The closest thing to it In the book of Psalms is Psalm a hundred and forty-six. Psalm a hundred and forty-six verse ten, I believe it is.
The Lord shall reign forever, even thy God O Zion. That's the closest thing to it. But this verse, the Lord shall reign forever and ever. That's the word that Handel used. And he either got it from here, or he might have got it from Revelation eleven fifteen. Revelation chapter eleven, verse fifteen. And the seventh angel sounded, and there were great voices in heaven, saying, The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever.
he shall reign forever and ever. Now, Handel might have got it here. It's interesting that in Exodus, the phrase is applied to God the Father, or at least to the triune God, and in Revelation it's applied to the Lord Jesus Christ, the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ. He shall reign forever and ever. So the Lord Jesus will sit on the throne forever, and of course, so will God the Father. The emphasis in this passage, this forever and ever emphasis. The kingdom of our Lord Jesus is forever. Now, in the book of Revelation, in chapter twenty, it speaks of a thousand years. He'll reign for a thousand years.
And then it says that at the end of the thousand years, Satan will be released out of his prison for a little while, and he'll go out and he'll raise up a rebellion, and God will put down the rebellion, and then heaven and earth will flee away, and there'll be a new heaven and a new earth, And God will set up the great white throne and all the peoples that have died over the centuries will be judged. And then the Lord Jesus will go on reigning forever and ever. And God the Father will go on reigning forever and ever. And I think that we are inclined in our study of prophecy to put so much stress on the thousand years that we overlook the fact that the major emphasis in the Bible is on the forever and ever.
and the eternal kingdom of our Lord, His reign forever, is emphasized over and over again in the prophets and in the New Testament. And only that one chapter in the Bible does it give us that thousand-year breakout and say after a thousand years there's going to be an interruption, but we tend to get the emphasis on the thousand years and not the forever and ever. And this became very vivid to me when I was a student at Dallas Theological Seminary. back in nineteen fifty the about nineteen fifty one and Lewis Barry Chaffer the founder of the school was still alive and he was he was the best teacher I ever had I guess but by that time he was a very old man little tiny fella you know one of these old people that just shrivel up to small size just a little small fella and and bent way over and he just sort of hobbled along he couldn't stand up straight and he he didn't walk freely and so forth and he couldn't go up and down stairs at all And the classes were on the second floor.
Classrooms were on the second floor in those days. And there was a landing where you went in the front door and then a steps up to the first floor and then another flight up to the second. And right down at the bottom of the bottom flight there, where you came in the front door of the class building, was a straight back wooden chair. It was just always sat there. And whenever Dr. Schaefer came to teach his classes, He would just walk in the door and he would sit down on that chair and the first two fellows that came along, the first two seminary students that came along would see him sitting there and pick up the chair and carry him up to the second floor just like an elevator, you know, and sit him down there and then he would go to class and the chair would sit there until he was ready to go back down again. So that was his personal elevator.
And he was never trained in theology. He taught it for years. He was never trained in it. He was trained in music. He was a musician and he traveled for years. as a musician with an evangelist. And then he started doing his own preaching as well as singing. And he used to delight to tell us about the day some lady in the office came up to him and said, in the audience came up and said, Lewis, it's too much for you to do the preaching and the singing both. You ought to get somebody else to do the preaching. Love that story. Well, he never lost his love for music. And this particular day, he was sitting up there in that class, and it was all ten, fifteen minutes before the class was due to end, and he got on this very subject, that the emphasis in the Bible is not on the thousand years, but it's on the forever, forever.
And he had a little satirical way of expressing things, you know, of teaching us. And so he started humming Handel's Messiah, and then he started singing it. And his voice was very cracked by this time. And so I can imitate Beth's point because I can miss the notes as well as he could. And he started singing, And he shall reign for a thousand years. And he shall reign for a thousand years. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. And he shall reign forever and ever. And while that was twenty-some years ago, I can, thirty years ago, I can see him to this day getting up off that chair behind the teaching desk and starting for the door of the room, which is over on this side, just a little fella, just stooped over, you know, and walking out of the room, singing as he went, And he shall reign forever and ever.
And he shall reign forever and ever. And out the door he went, sat on his chair out there, and somebody came and carried him downstairs. And I've never forgotten the truth. Jesus isn't just going to reign for a thousand years. The Lord will reign forever and ever. Shall we bow in prayer? Father, we thank you that Jesus Christ will take the throne of the universe someday. a throne of this planet someday, both here on this presently troubled earth and in that new earth that's to come, He shall reign. Not just for a thousand years, not just for a millennium, but for all the millenniums and ages of eternity.
Thank you, Father, that we're on the winning side. It looks pretty hard sometimes to be a Christian. Seems like we're on the losing side sometime, and some people are afraid to come to Christ because they don't want to be on the losing team. But Father, thank you for showing us the end of the story. Jesus Christ shall reign from the east to the west, from the north to the south. As far as the sun travels around this planet and out into the space beyond, He shall reign for all eternity. In His name we pray. Amen.