Good evening, everyone. Please take your Bibles and turn to Exodus chapter 15. Exodus 15. Exodus 15 verses 1 through 21 is our scripture reading and our sermon text for this evening. Exodus 15 verses 1 to 21. This is God's Word. Then Moses and the sons of Israel sang this song to the Lord and said, I will sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted, the horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea. The Lord is my strength and song and he has become my salvation. This is my God and I will praise him, my Father's God and I will extol him. The Lord is a warrior. The Lord is his name. Pharaoh's chariots and his army he has cast into the sea. And the choices of his officers are drowned in the Red Sea. The deep covers them. They went down into the depths like a stone. Your right hand, O Lord, is majestic in power. Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy. And in the greatness of your excellence, you overthrow those who rise up against you. You send forth your burning anger and it consumes them like chaff. At the blast of your nostrils, the waters were piled up. The flowing water stood up like a heat. The deeps were congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy said, I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil. My desire shall be gratified against them. I will draw out my sword, my hand will destroy them. You blew with your wind, the sea covered them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters. Who is like you among the gods, O Lord? Who is like you? Majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders. You stretched out your right hand, the earth swallowed them. In your loving kindness, you have led the people whom you have redeemed. In your strength, you have guided them to your holy habitation. The peoples have heard, they tremble. Anguish has gripped the inhabitants of Philistia. Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed. The leaders of Moab, trembling, grips them. All the inhabitants of Canaan, I have melted away. Terror and dread fall upon them. By the greatness of your arm, they are motionless as stone. Until your people pass over, O Lord, until the people pass over whom you have purchased, you will bring them and plant them in the mountain of your inheritance. The place, O Lord, which you have made for your dwelling, the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established, the Lord shall reign forever and ever. For the horses of Pharaoh, with his chariots and his horsemen, went into the sea, and the Lord brought back the waters of the sea on them. the sons of Israel walked on dry land through the midst of the sea Miriam the prophetess Aaron's sister took the timbrel in her hand and all the woman went out after her with timbrels and with dancing Miriam answered them sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted the horse and his rider he has hurled into the sea may God bless the reading of his word let's pray please father in heaven we thank you for this wonderful explosion of praise and thanksgiving on the part of your newly redeemed people, who were as helpless as helpless could be, there with their backs at the Red Sea, with the world's most powerful army bearing down on them. And you delivered them, you saved them, despite their doubts, despite their fears, despite their lack of faith. Be with us now as we walk through this glorious song, which we know from the book of Revelation, we ourselves will sing in heaven. We pray you'd bless us as we do that, in Jesus' name, amen. My father used to tell me, music and silence are gifts from God, but noise is from the pit of hell. Music is one of God's grand inventions. It's difficult to find anyone who simply does not like any sort of music. Music is powerful, it's memorable, it stirs mankind's hearts and emotions. There was singing when God created the universe, Job 38 verse 7, when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy. When Israel defeated Jabin and Sisera, Deborah and Barak sang for joy there in Judges chapter 5, in which they praised the Lord for the things that He had accomplished for them. When God did great redemptive works and gave His people great deliverance from their enemies, this would inspire new songs of praise, which the people of God kept and sang throughout succeeding generations. Psalm 40 verses one through three. I waited patiently for the Lord and He inclined to me and heard my cry. He also brought me up out of a horrible pit, out of the miry clay and set my feet upon a rock and established my steps. He has put a new song in my mouth. Praise to our God. Many will see it in fear and will trust in the Lord. When Jesus was born in Bethlehem, a multitude of angels appeared to the shepherds and praised God. saying glory to God in the highest and on earth, peace, goodwill toward men. Can you imagine hearing that, what that sounded like? Mary sang her wonderful magnificat, it's called, to the Lord because she knew that the Messiah and Savior in her womb was the Savior of the world that God had promised to Abraham long ago. And she thanks God for the mercy that he's been faithful to show. Zacharias, John the Baptist's father, when his powers of speech were finally restored to him after he lost them there in the temple, after doubting the angel's message, Gabriel's message to him, he was gonna have a son, his wife was gonna have a son. When he finally can speak again, he sings his famous, it's called the Benedictus. where he worships God because, quote, he has raised up a horn of salvation for us in the house of his servant David, as he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets who have been since the world began. God's people have always praised God and spoken back to him the wonderful works that he has done in redemption. Colossians 3.16 says, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly with all wisdom, teaching and admonishing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with grace in your hearts to the Lord. In heavenly glory we will be part of a singing multitude. that will never end. Revelation chapter 4 and Revelation chapter 5 shows this to us. Christ will be the center of our affections and we will at last be able to sing to him the way he has always deserved. From perfected and undivided hearts we will worship God in song together. The singing and music there in heaven will be beautiful beyond anything that we've ever heard here. And everyone in heaven will sing on key. If fallen and sinful people can write music so beautiful here, we can only imagine what the music of God will sound like in heaven. If the creator of Beethoven and Mozart, Chopin, Bach, and all the rest of them, if they can make such beautiful music with their fallen minds and fallen corrupted gifts, imagine what God's music will sound like. Music is to be part of God's worship in this life, and it will be part of God's worship in eternity as well. will be singing to God forever and ever. If it is the great redemptive acts of God, which the redeemed people of God sing about and praise God for, here is the greatest redemptive event in the Old Testament, the Exodus event and the deliverance of the people, not only from Egyptian slavery, but deliverance from all their enemies who hated them and wanted to harm them. When the believer dies, those types are perfectly fulfilled in heaven. We are at last finally and fully delivered from bondage to sin and corruption, even the bit of sin and corruption that clung to us all of our Christian lives here. And we're also delivered for the rest of eternity from the hands, from the plots, from the schemes of everyone and anyone that ever hated us, persecuted us, or tried to destroy us, delivered from the plots of Satan, We sing about the anticipation of those wonders during this hard and difficult life. We sing in anticipation of deliverance from sin completely in heaven. But there we will sing and praise God that all those promises have now been realized. Not about our hope for them one day at death, hope for them one day at the resurrection, but praising God we have them all now. A redeemed body, a redeemed mind. All of the effects of sin gone. When the people of God see God working, helping, redeeming, saving, glorifying His mercy and grace and fulfilling His promises, God's people sing. God's people write new songs. So let's walk through this great passage. A lot to get through here. Verse one. Then Moses and the sons of Israel sang this song to the Lord and said, I will sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted the horse and its rider. He has hurled into the sea. Okay, stop there. The first part of the song is simply telling to God what he has done. It is openly acknowledging the work that he himself has done for us and in our behalf, for the people of Israel. Pharaoh's horses, his chariots, and the officers riding them, they were a fierce fighting force that was feared by all the world at that time. Israel had done nothing but slave labor for 400 years. They had no possible way of defending themselves against such a force. They had no soldiers, no fighters, no weapons. They had women and small children with them. They were as helpless as they could possibly be. And it was only the divine miraculous intervention of the hand of God that delivered them. God hurled Pharaoh's horses into the sea. In our church hymns, we bless God for what he has done for us in Christ. We praise the Lord for the cross work of Christ. We praise the Lord for his mighty miracles. We praise him for his conquering death for us by his glorious resurrection. We praise him for his gift of righteousness that is imputed to our legal accounts such that we stand once and for all eternity declared righteous, perfect, and free from all guilt in his holy sight. The contemplation of divine accomplishments and the salvation of God's people. That is the anchor that holds us in the midst of the terrible storms of life. And that's where our hearts and our minds go when we're the most troubled. It goes to the promises. It goes to the mighty redemptive facts that have been accomplished by God. We're commanded by God to sing. And one of the reasons that we sing is the reminder of truth that we get by singing. One of the reasons God commanded singing and one of the reasons that when you study the Hebrew language, you see that the Psalms were written on purpose to be easily memorized. The Old Testament was written to be easily memorized. It was written to be easily sung by the people of God. When we sing certain hymns, I've learned over the years what hymns really bless the hearts of certain people here when we sing them. And there are certain lines from certain hymns that are hard to get out and they're hard to sing without breaking up because they contain the truths that are the most precious to us in the world. Truths that we know we don't deserve to know, we don't deserve to believe, and yet we do. When God's people tell back to God the wonders of His saving redemptive work, they are singing the faith into their hearts and bringing promises into the forefront of their minds they already know, but perhaps have not meditated upon sufficiently recently. Imagine how moving it would have been to hear the people of Israel singing this song, having just felt the terror of certain death coming upon them with Pharaoh's horses and his riders bearing down upon them only to witness with their own eyes the almighty hand of God bringing the walls of water down upon them. One thing I want to encourage you all and myself to think about, our measure of gratitude will determine the passion with which we sing and worship to God. And they worship the Lord. They just observed this incredible miracle, this incredible deliverance from certain death of all of them, their wives, their children, the whole nation. Verse two, you see it? The Lord is my strength and song, and he has become my salvation. This is my God, and I will praise him. My Father's God, and I will extol him. You see, our strength to face life, to face tomorrow, to face trials is the Lord and the Lord alone. In ourselves, there's weakness, there's doubt, there's death. But strength comes from the Lord alone. Determination comes from God in our lives. The song sings that God has become my salvation. He does not help us become our own salvation. He in himself is our salvation. Now there's a great name by which God reveals himself, Jeremiah 23 verse six, in his days Judah will be saved and Israel will dwell safely. Now this is his name by which he will be called the Lord or Yahweh our righteousness. Remember looking at that when I was in seminary and looking at the form of that word, our righteousness. Notice it's not the Lord who helps me be righteous or the Lord who makes me righteous. It's the Lord our righteousness. It's the plural possessive suffix on the end of the word righteousness. It's Yahweh our righteousness. He is my salvation. It is the Lord who is himself my very righteousness before God. The Lord himself is my salvation. Only God's righteousness is able to justify us and save us from the wrath of God. God is my salvation. We are saved from God by God, by the imputation of his righteousness to our account. It is this gift of righteousness that saves us. And therefore the Lord Yahweh is my strength and song. He has become my salvation. This is the God we praise and worship. The God who is our salvation. Look at verses three through six. The Lord is a warrior. The Lord is his name. Pharaoh's chariot's in his army. He is cast into the sea, and the choicest of his officers are drowned in the Red Sea. The deeps cover them. They were sent into the depths like a stone. Your right hand, O Lord, is majestic in power. Your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy. Israel emphasizes in this song, just like all of God's people emphasize in all their songs, that it's the Lord alone who fights. It's the Lord alone who wins. The Lord alone who is glorified. He is the one who delivers. The Lord alone destroyed Pharaoh's chariots and his army. God threw them into the sea. God killed them all because they were coming after his covenant people. God will not allow his people's enemies to triumph over them. God has spoken up in what's called anthropomorphic terms here. He has said to have a saving right hand. By God's power was what that means. The enemies of his people were shattered. While there are times the enemies of God's people will have free reign to harass, to hurt, and even imprison and kill God's people if God wills it for a time, they are always and forever on his divine leash. One of the best Martin Luther quotes I ever read was, the devil is powerful, but the devil is God's devil. Hear the Exodus as the greatest Old Testament type of the final redemption of the whole church of God. It involves the total destruction of all of God's enemies, of all the enemies of his people there in Egypt, and the total deliverance of all the people from their hands. Remember what God told them before they went through the Red Sea? You will never see these people again. You will never see them again. That's a type of when it goes, we go into heavenly glory, we'll never have enemies again, ever. We'll never be under the subjection of the schemes and plots of the devil, the world, none of it. Persecutors, unbelievers, we'll never have it again. And it's God's hands that will crush them. He shatters them with his right hand, it says. They were all thrown into the sea and they sunk like a stone. Look at verse seven. And in the greatness of your excellence, you overthrow those who rise up against you. You send forth your burning anger and it consumes them as chaff. In this life or the next, none of God's enemies will be left standing. So many rise up against God and against his Messiah. So many rose up against God and against Christ during his life and his ministry in this world. Herod, you remember, rose up to murder Jesus when he was a little boy. When he heard that a King had been born in his vicinity, the chief priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the lawyers, the elders of Israel, they rose up against Christ. Even in their hatred of Jesus, God fulfilled countless prophecies regarding the suffering, the rejection of Jesus in order to save his people. Man cannot win in his plots to overthrow God and to eradicate the truth from the earth and to snuff out Christians in the world. Man cannot win. See it there again in verse seven, in the greatness of God's excellence, he overthrows those who rise up against him. He overthrows them. They are like chaff, which is burned so easily and quickly in fire. Look at verse eight. At the blast of your nostrils, the waters were piled up. The flowing water stood up like a heap. The deeps were congealed in the heart of the sea. Here's another illustration of speaking of God in human terms here to emphasize it was God alone who was at work here. The waters were piled up like two high walls around Israel and the ground was dry and hard for them to walk through. And into this mysterious wonder world, the chariots and the armies of Egypt boldly pursued Israel into the Red Sea. And as their wheels began to come off their chariots, even as they recognized that Yahweh was fighting for Israel, they said that, He fights for them. Only the great supernatural power of the whole universe could do such a thing as to pile up walls of water like this, but they pursued them nonetheless. Amazingly enough, their arrogance followed them into the Red Sea in that miraculous state. Look at verse nine, here's what they were thinking. The enemy said, I will pursue. I will overtake. I will divide the spoil. My desire shall be gratified against them. I will draw out my sword. My hand will destroy them. The wicked Egyptians still held out hope for a victory. Somehow we're going to do it. They'd won military victories before. They had defeated many enemies in battle. Surely these lowly slaves, despite the fact that their God had destroyed the entire nation and economy and spirit and religion of Egypt, surely these lowly slaves, we're going to get them if we can just overtake them. If we can catch up to them on our chariots, they don't have chariots, we can catch up to them. If we can get close enough to them, we're gonna kill them with a sword. We're gonna pull out our swords and kill them all. They told themselves, we're gonna pursue them, we're gonna overtake them. They told themselves, we're gonna get our swords out and kill them. Verse 10, you blew with your wind, the sea covered them, they sank like lead in the mighty waters. So much for that idea. Psalm two, verse four, he who sits in the heavens shall laugh. The Lord shall hold them in derision. God laughs at the plots of God's enemies to overthrow his purposes. Isn't that amazing? Those plots and those purposes from God's enemies and from the devil himself, they stress us out. They break our hearts, but God laughs at them. God blew the waters back upon them. They sank like lead in the mighty waters. God just decided to let gravity go back to work. The waters came back and crushed them all. And while they were telling themselves in their minds what they're gonna do to Israel, God covered them with the sea and they all sank like lead. And now the song turns again to the direct praise and worship of God for this. Look at verse 11. Who is like you among the gods, O Lord? who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders. In worship, God's people ascribe to God the attributes which he is and possesses. Majesty, holiness, power to work wonders, ability to accomplish all he promises, faithfulness, steadfast love for his people, always telling the truth, never sinning, being true, real, and living, contrary to the false deities that were chiseled into the walls and tombs there and statues and obelisks and pyramids throughout Egypt. God is alive and real contrary to them. We tell God how great and mighty and wonderful and holy He is because that is what He is and that is why He is to be worshipped. There is no one like the true God among the gods of the world and the gods of man's religions. All of man's deities look like us and they act like us. They envy like us. They plot and scheme like us. They kill each other like us. None of man's deities are like the one true and living God, the tri-personal Father, Son, and Holy Spirit three in one. None of them are like him. And that's why God's people have sung through the centuries, who is like you? Oh Lord, who is like you? Verse 12, more, you stretched out your right hand, the earth swallowed them. And that's a parallelism. They're saying in a different way what the previous line said. It's very common in Hebrew poetry in the Psalms. Why does God do that? Why does he say something and then say the same thing in different words? So people will remember it. So they'll remember the truth in as many ways as possible. Why does the New Testament? I've wondered how many different ways Paul could explain the gospel. I think he said it in every possible way it can be said. So it would be really hard to misunderstand it. You have to work hard to miss the gospel in the New Testament. You think about it. Just off the top of my head, I wrote this paragraph. He says, justifications by faith apart from works, by faith apart from works of law, by faith apart from law, by faith apart from observing the law, by faith apart from deeds of righteousness. He uses that phrase. By faith apart from a righteousness of our own from the law, by faith apart from works, lest anyone should boast. How could you possibly miss the point? Repetition, explaining from different angles, using different expressions is key. The Hebrew poets do it all the time. Our songs do it all the time. He does that to help us remember. When Paul wrote Philippians from the prison there, Philippians chapter three, I love this verse, Philippians 3.1. Finally, my brethren, rejoice in the Lord. For me to write the same things to you is not tedious, but for you it is safe. In other words, don't give me a hard time for telling you about the gospel again. which he goes on there in Philippians 3 to describe it again. Don't you dare write me back and say, you're so tedious. No, it's safe. You need to hear it again. Look at verse 13. In your loving kindness, we're gonna talk about that word. You have led the people whom you have redeemed. In your strength, you have guided them to your holy habitation. Here we have that wonderful Hebrew word. It's translated loving kindness. You've heard me mention it to you before, that term chesed, chesed. It refers to the faithfulness of God to his promise. And translators really struggle to just give it one English word. It's translated as loving kindness. It's translated as mercy. It's translated as love. It's translated as steadfast love. And the thing is that one word is all of those things. All those terms together really capture what chesed means. But look at, in light of that, look at verse 13 again. In your chesed, you have led the people whom you have redeemed. In your strength, you have guided them to your holy habitation. When David repented of his sin with Bathsheba after Nathan's rebuke, he prayed, have mercy upon me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to your covenant faithfulness to the gospel promise, according to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. And that phrase, according to your loving kindness, those four English words is actually one Hebrew word. It's chesed with a preposition slammed onto the front of it and a possessive second person singular pronoun slammed onto the end of it. According to the preposition, your loving kindness. Why do we get to go to heaven? It's according to God's loving kindness. Upon what basis do we pray for forgiveness? God's faithfulness to the gospel promise. That's what David's talking about. Have mercy upon me according to your chesed, to your loving kindness, that faithfulness to grace, please have mercy upon me. The term refers to that loyalty to a promise, that faithfulness to a promise, integrity in an obligation. God gave the church to Christ before the foundation of the world, and God the Son is accountable to God the Father to redeem, to rescue that church, that multitude so vast that no man can count them. The reason we can be absolutely assured that if God has begun a good work in us, regenerating us, granting us repentance, granting us faith in Jesus alone for our salvation, by the very integrity of God's divine nature, and by the very nature of God as good, holy, and as one in whom there is no darkness at all, he will surely make good on that promise because of his chesed, his faithfulness to it. It cannot be anything other than that. 2 Timothy 2.13, if we are faithless, he remains faithful because he cannot deny himself. Once he swore that oath, he will never deny it. Why did God lead the people he redeemed out of Egypt there, the people of Israel? Because of his covenant faithfulness and his steadfast commitment to his redemptive promises. The entire Exodus event, the whole thing was in remembrance of the promise that God made Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. You remember the end of Exodus chapter two, after all those babies, all those Israelite boys were being murdered and the people were crying out and they were groaning for God to hear and to help them At the very end of Exodus 2, right before God calls Moses there in the wilderness, it says at the end of Exodus 2, verse 24, God heard their groaning and God remembered His covenant with Abraham and with Isaac and with Jacob. Why did God go down there into Egypt and get His people out of there? Because of His covenant faithfulness, His chesed. God looked upon the children of Israel and acknowledged them. It may seem at times like God has forgotten about us, like He's forgotten His promises, but He never does. The promises of God are always faithful. They don't depend, thank goodness, upon how we feel about them. Psalm 77, verse seven says, will the Lord cast off forever? Will He be favorable no more? Has His mercy ceased forever? Has this promise failed forevermore? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has He in His anger shut up His tender mercies? And I said, this is my anguish, but I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High. It was because of God's chesed, His absolutely unwavering faithfulness to what He promised that causes Him to lead Israel out of Egypt and to protect them. That very same covenant faithfulness will deliver safely into heaven every single elect person so that Jesus Christ will present them all as a redeemed multitude to His Father on the day of judgment. Hebrews 2.13, Jesus will say, Here am I and the children whom you have given me. Here they are, everyone, not one lost. Here they are. Yeah, I brought them through some hard things. We chiseled away at them in their life to make them more like me, but here they are, not a single one lost. Here am I and all the children God has given to me. In his covenant faithfulness, he led the people of Israel out of Egypt. Look at verse 14 through 16. The peoples have heard, they trembled. Anguish has gripped the inhabitants of Philistia. Then the chiefs of Edom were dismayed. The leaders of Moab, trembling grips them. All the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away. Terror and dread fall upon them. By the greatness of your arm, they are motionless as stone until your people pass over, O Lord, until the people pass over whom you have purchased. Remember the purpose for which God destroyed Egypt and all of Egypt's gods and all their worldly power and wealth and power. Remember why he did that? We know he did that to make a name for himself, that's why. The Pharaoh existed at that time for that purpose. God told Moses, Moses go to Pharaoh and say these words to him. Indeed, for this purpose, I have raised you up that I may show my power in you and that my name may be declared in all the earth. And that name, Yahweh. Yahweh was proclaimed throughout all the earth at this time. The nations around Egypt, they knew all about the true God. They had all heard about him and they were terrified of him. Remember Rahab, the Canaanite prostitute? Remember her incredible profession of faith in Yahweh after she heard about him there in the promised land? After she hid the spies, she told them in Joshua 2.9, I know that Yahweh has given you the land. that the terror of you has fallen on us, and all the inhabitants of the land are faint-hearted because of you. For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were on the other side of the Jordan, Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. And as soon as we heard these things, our hearts melted, neither did there remain any more courage in anyone because of you. For Yahweh your God, He is God in heaven above and on earth, beneath Israel's route as they came out of Egypt. It took them past all the nations that are mentioned in this text. You see it there in verse 14, at the end of verse 14, Philistia, and then verse 15, Edom, Moab, and then Canaan. The nations that they walked past there in the wilderness were scared to death of them because they knew about their God, Yahweh. All four of those nations, all four of them, would eventually become Israel's enemies in the books of Kings and Chronicles. This next section, it really looks into the future of what's coming rather than looking back and praising God for it. Look at verse 17. You will bring them and plant them in the mountain of your inheritance. The place, O Lord, which you have made for your dwelling, the sanctuary, O Lord, which your hands have established. What's that talking about? That will be Mount Zion, of course, Jerusalem. That will be the final location of the grand sanctuary of the living God, the temple that Solomon would build. Israel, the redeemed people of God would live in that good land flowing with milk and honey. They'd be planted by God in the mountain of God's inheritance, it says. If only Israel would have been satisfied with knowing God and following Him, they could have been safe and happy. It would only last for a very short season before they turned away from God and turned away from all the good that he had done for them and forgot about it. There would be occasional revivals that would be sponsored by good kings in the Southern kingdom, but eventually the land would spew them out. And that's why we look to the true promised land. which will not be a narrow strip of land on the West Bank of Palestine, but will be a redeemed, restored new heavens and new earth. That's the true promised land that the Old Testament type pointed to. And the song ends with a praise to the Lord's reign. Look at verse 18. The Lord Yahweh shall reign forever and ever. And that's where the song ends. And verse 19 is simply a summary statement after the song of what they were praising God for. Once again, repetition is a good thing. Verse 19, for the horses of Pharaoh with his chariots and his horsemen went into the sea and the Lord brought back the waters of the sea on them. But the sons of Israel walked on dry land through the midst of the sea. Now this next thing here, this is actually the first time that we get Moses' sister's name, Miriam. This is most likely the same sister who followed her baby brother, Moses, as he traveled down the Nile River in that little basket coated with pitch so many years ago, where he's found by Pharaoh's daughter, who then pays to have him raised at home. And Moses learns about who he is. You gotta love the irony of that. While they're trying to kill all the Israelite Hebrew baby boys, Moses ends up having a stipend paid to his mother to raise him at home and then he is adopted into the court of Pharaoh, the one that God would use to destroy them. Once again, God blows away those who rise up against him. Verse 20, Miriam, the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took the timbrel in her hand and all the women went out after her with timbrels and with dancing. Now she's identified here as a prophetess. She's one of only four other women in the Old Testament to be given that title, prophetess. Deborah, there in the book of Judges, Huldah, Noah, Diah, and then the unnamed wife of Isaiah, the prophet, are called prophetesses. The timbrel, the tambourine that she was playing was an instrument which when dancing accompanied the playing of it, was always used to sing victory songs. So she's playing a victorious instrument and there was dancing because it was a great victory for God's people. It was a victory for God. And notice verse 21, last verse, Miriam answered them, sing to the Lord for he is highly exalted, the horse and his rider he has hurled into the sea. Answered who? Answered who? The men who sang the song. They were singing back and forth to each other. It must have been a wonderful melody, a joining together of their voices to make a beautiful sound. The song the women sang, it's identical to the first part of the longer one that we just walked through. I want to encourage you. The song of Moses and Israel that we just walked through here in Exodus 15, it's not just sung here after the Exodus is complete and the liberated people have been saved from all their enemies. It's also sung here, Revelation 15. Listen, then I saw another sign in heaven, great and marvelous, seven angels having the seven last plagues, for in them the wrath of God is complete. And I saw something like a sea of glass mingled with fire and those who have the victory over the beast, over his image and over his mark and over the number of his name, standing on the sea of glass, having harps of God." And a lot of commentators point out there that standing over and looking at a sea that's smooth and glassy was reminiscent of the Red Sea. After the walls of water came down and crushed, there's definitely a parallel here. And listen to verse three of Revelation 15. They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God. And the song of the lamb. They sing the song of the Old Testament type of redemption, the Exodus, and then they sing the true song to the Lamb. Both of those songs are sung by the people of God. They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, Great and marvelous are your works, Lord God Almighty. Just and true are your ways, O King of the saints. Who shall not fear you, O Lord, and glorify your name? For you alone are holy, for all nations shall come and worship before you, for your judgments have been manifested. The church, at the end of all things, will sing these same hymns and songs of deliverance before the throne of God in heaven itself. One of those hymns will be the song of Moses from Exodus 15. Our songs to God in eternity will be the same ones that we sung on earth. All of which extol, magnify, worship, praise, and honor God for the same things. Verse 11, see it? Who is like you among the gods, O Lord? Who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders? Will it not be a glorious and a wonderful thing when we can sing that and we're not exhausted? We can sing that and our minds aren't wandering onto 15 other things we're worried about, when we can sing it in pure, perfect, redeemed devotion and love to God. Can you feel it in your heart and soul? You long for that day. May God hasten it. May God hasten it. Let's pray. Our Lord and God, we worship you and praise you. Indeed, who is like you among the gods of this world, oh Lord? who is like you, majestic in holiness, awesome in praises, working wonders. You have abolished death by the work of your Son, who destroyed it at the cross, was taken down dead, buried, continued under the power of death for a time, but now is alive and has conquered it in our behalf. We bless your name. Death is a defeated foe. Sin is no longer our enemy. It has been forgiven. It has been answered by your justice, satisfying death at the cross. And we stand arrayed and clothed in the garments of righteousness, in that robe of righteousness that was woven together by the perfection of motives and heart and works of Jesus Christ. In whose name we pray, amen.