The Armies of the Lord

The Exodus as God’s Deliverance from Egypt

Well, we continue on in chapter 12 together this morning. We have one more week before we'll conclude, and then it'll be time to read our next section within the text of Exodus. So that'll be two Sundays from now, and we'll just carry on as we see God's great deliverance of His people from the evil empire, from the land of death and bondage and slavery.

And here, really in chapter 12, beginning in verses 31 through 42, we have the exodus.

Proper.

Of course, the word exodus is a compound from the Greek ek-hadas, out of the way, or in other words, the way out. This is the way out of Egypt. And it's quite an elaboration on this simple event of the exodus proper that corresponds to the entire book as a whole and how exodus will connect to Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy.

Of course, in verses 31 through 42, we're coming off the heels of the 10th plague having struck the land. And so, though we're a week removed from the event of the Passover itself, for the experience of the Israelites as well as the Egyptians, this is all happening simultaneously.

So we enter back into a scene of absolute darkness in the night, of mothers and fathers wailing in the streets, the most eerie scene of tragedy and devastation perhaps we could imagine if you've ever seen the footage of 9 -11 at a street level.

Every now and then around September, I always kind of relive and review some of that footage and video cameras that were running close to ground zero, maybe some cameras that had just been recording tourists taking footage earlier in the day, a bright, sunny morning in September, a day going on like any other day had gone before.

And then by the time the video ends, you're in an unrecognizable gray fog, and it looks like the world has ended, and that must have been what it felt like when the 10th plague struck into the very heart of the empire.

Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron by night and said, Rise, go out from among my people, both you and the children of Israel, and go, serve the Lord as you said. Also take your flocks and your herds as you've said, and be gone.

The very thing that Moses asked 10 plagues ago has finally been fulfilled, as the Lord said it would be fulfilled. He will not let you go, the Lord told Moses, except with a strong hand. And the strong hand came plague after plague, growing in strength, growing in intensity, and now it's finally had the result that God intended all along, that Pharaoh would let his people go, that they might serve him in the wilderness.

Rise, go out. It's a desperate plea now. Now, Pharaoh's the one who's begging earnestly, urging earnestly, when he had been, for all of this time, the one that was stiff-necked. Thankfully, Moses is not like Pharaoh, and Moses is more than willing to leave.

That was the design all along. Rise, go out. John Currid points out, these are the exact imperatives we have paired up in Genesis 19, when Lot was going around, trying to grab his sons-in-law by the shoulders and say, rise, go out of this place, it's about to be destroyed.

So, we get something of the intensity, the urgency of Pharaoh saying, rise, leave my land, you and everything that's associated with you, not one hoof to be left behind. So as Moses had insisted, all the Israelites would leave with all of their possessions in order to worship the Lord.

With the tenth plague, Pharaoh understands that, at least for this moment, at least with the clarity of God's judgment right in front of him, he understands that God is the one who is sovereign, God is the one who is in control.

Pharaoh does not have sovereignty over the Hebrews. He does not have sovereignty even over his own empire. If he thought himself as semi-divine, here judgment has reduced him to but a mere mortal. What a portrait of the folly of sin.

We look at Pharaoh and we look at a portrait of the foolishness of rejecting the will and the way of God. Pharaoh was trying to hold on to all of his power, his prestige, his sense of control, and of course, his possession of the enslaved populace of the Hebrews.

But in the end, all that rejection of God's revelation cost him everything. Everything that he would seek to hold on to, in the end, he lost.

He gained nothing.

He nearly lost everything.

Egypt is now a ruin.

He lost face before his people. He lost his dynastic succession. All of this could have been prevented if he would have relented at the beginning. And that is what sin does. It promises you everything and leaves you with nothing.

Whereas the will of God often promises to take away much, but in the end it gives you all. And so if you would seek to preserve your life, you must lose it. But if you want to lose your life, all you have to do is seek to preserve it.

Foolish king has many a foolish sinner. It's repeated constantly in the life of everyone who rejects the will of God. They think they're grasping onto something. They think they're securing or at least buying some time, some level of comfort before the inevitable end.

But the end comes with this severity. And all there is is remorse, gnashing of teeth, weeping. And Jesus says, the worm dieth not. We do have this rather odd addition in the midst of this desperate plea for the Hebrews to leave.

Pharaoh says, bless me also.

Bless me also.

And that perhaps is the most surprising thing that drops from the mouth of Pharaoh.

Rise, get out of this place.

You, all your people, all your possessions, go, leave us alone. Never set foot again. The most surprising thing he could say is, and bless me also. Moses must have nearly fainted. He must have done a double take.

What do you mean bless? You've been public enemy number one to my people. You've been the chief antagonist of me. You said not that long ago, I will kill you if I ever see your face again. And now you want me to bless you?

But this again shows the wild instability and double sidedness of a sinner in his sin. This is what it's often like when believers engage those who are antagonistic, even adversarial to them. You'll find them at times speaking ill, speaking malice, kind of rallying others against them.

The holier than thou, that Christian who puts us all down. Really speaking ill, maybe even wishing ill upon you. But the moment comes where they say, will you please pray for me? You must be close to God somehow.

You have some purchase, some in with God. Will you still in some way vouch for me or pass that on to me? You'll experience this perhaps in your Christian life. Those that would use you and abuse you often in some ways actually want your blessing.

And we'll see this desire for blessing will quickly melt away, it will quickly dissolve as Pharaoh raises his army and steers them toward Israel at the Red Sea. And of course this is the tragedy and foolishness of sin as well.

Pharaoh wants to be blessed, but he doesn't want to repent. Pharaoh wants to be blessed, but he wants to be blessed in his sinfulness, in his sinful estate. And that cannot be. Pharaoh has no intention of renouncing his idolatry.

We don't see him in any sense motioning toward becoming a worshiper of the true and living God. He does not pick himself up from eating grass like Nebuchadnezzar and confess there's only one true and living God who is God above all else and him alone will I worship and serve.

In fact, my people must serve the true and only God. Now we don't have a Nebuchadnezzar moment of clarity here. We simply have a desire for blessing and a refusal to bend the knee. So many are like Pharaoh in our day.

So many want to have blessing in their life while they hold on to their sins. But there's no real repentance and therefore there can be no real blessing. And I've seen, perhaps you've seen, many a time where people will make some slight motion toward spiritual things.

And as soon as their dilemma, as soon as their crisis is resolved, as soon as they find some semblance of peace or stability or joy, all that pursuit of spiritual things vanishes. And they end up doubling down in their hardness of heart.

Like Pharaoh, they want blessing but not the shame that makes us worthy of receiving God's blessing. They want blessing without consequences. Blessing without a reorientation of one's life. Blessing without repentance which is truly turning around.

They want blessing on the way that they're going, the wide path of destruction. And of course they want the absence of consequence for their sins. That's what blessing looks like. Get rid of the plague, get rid of the consequences for my disobedience.

That is blessing. But that kind of blessing doesn't come unless there's repentance. And so as soon as the plague passes, he's back at it, pursuing the Hebrews once again. He has learned, as we'll see, absolutely nothing across the ten plagues.

He, like every blind sinner in the end, will pursue their own willful ruin. By their own hand and their own desire, they will destroy themselves. That is what Pharaoh is doing. And the Egyptians, we read, verse 33, urged the people that they might send them out of the land in haste, for they said,.

We'll all be dead.

You get the sense that the tenth plague is finally broken into the societal conscience. If we allow these people to be in our midst any longer, there's no telling what calamity will fall. Soon our whole empire will be ruined.

And so they now are the ones urging the people. Moses and Aaron find the Egyptians doing the work for them. Come on people, we need to really hurry. Do you not have time to knead bread? Just take the ball, throw it in your cloak, and get out of the land.

And soon behind the elders and Moses and Aaron are all the Egyptians saying, yes, you really need to hurry.

Please get out of our land.

Of course we have this separation that exists between God's people and the Egyptians. It's been a separation from the very beginning of God's judgment. Having secured His people, God was making a difference.

It's that refrain that we've read several times now. So that the Egyptians would know, I have made a difference between them and my people, says the Lord. And we see this difference now spread out in this sort of urgency to have God's people distant.

And that speaks to us. The Egyptians, of course, urging the people away because they have a dread for the people of God. And you'll experience that as well if you're a Christian for any length of time.

You may not be able to leave the land, much less even leave the workplace, but you will not be a welcome presence to many people if you're a Christian. There will be a dread that surrounds you. You're trying to be salt and light, and for those who are perishing, you are a stench of death.

And there's a dread that is attached to you. A rolling of the eye, I remember coming in morning after morning in that break room. There was at least three attempts to roll their eyes, harumph and harumph.

Here comes Pope Ross, you know, come sit down and give us sharp eyebrows from the break tables. Worldly people have no liking for the converted. And so, like the Egyptians here, they want to rush them away, put them in the corners, get them out of plain view.

And our old friendships, our old companions will often prove to us this discomfort. The more over the years that I've grown in the Lord, the more my heart has grown toward seeking to be reconciled and be winsome and persuasive to old friends.

And at that moment where I finally have a real genuine heart to not mince words and not waste words and speak clearly and directly to their conscience and to their hearts to try to win them over to the Lord, is the very time that they don't want to return my calls or see me or be around me.

They give me fake numbers, old friends, fake numbers. There's a discomfort. There's a dread. The world wants to be rid of God's people. Remember, Egypt is a microcosm of this great redemptive drama. And this is what makes church fellowship so vital for the Christian.

So it makes it so sweet, frankly, that as we grow in the Lord, we recognize how little commonality we have with those who are not in the faith. And because of the commonality we have with those who are our brothers and sisters, we're reoriented toward the family of God and away from those who run in this flood of dissipation.

We no longer can relate to them. If you're thinking rightly, that's not a chip on your shoulder. That's a burden for your heart. You wish you could relate to them for the sake of some friendship, but you're not willing to relate to them if it's going to compromise your stance, your lights, your convictions.

And often this is our burden as believers. We often don't know what to say, don't know how to carry out our relationships. And if we're thrown into the midst of those relationships ad nauseum, we'll soon lose our convictions.

We'll soon become lukewarm in our desires after the things of God. And that's why, again, church fellowship is vital. That the primary relationships we have in this life are garnered toward those that belong to the Lord.

From that place of strength, from that place of courage, we then venture out to seek and to persuade and to win others to the Lord. The people, of course, are happy to leave. They've been slaves now for four centuries.

They're not willing to stay a night longer. And so they do as Moses had said. In fact, they go house to house requesting articles of silver, articles of gold, and clothing. Most likely because slaves, if you've looked at some of the ancient Egyptian carvings, you go to Fitchburg Art Museum, they have a wonderful little Egypt room.

I think it's a permanent exhibit. And I think there's a free day of the month that you could go, maybe a free Thursday. You should go. Go look in the Egypt room. Look at some of the carvings. Get a sense of what this scene might have looked like.

They needed clothing. They weren't fit to travel very far in the wilderness with typical slave garments. And so the clothing is not just a luxury item, it's a necessity. Articles of gold and silver, yeah, that's probably more luxury.

But it's plunder, as God has said. So you shall plunder the Egyptians. Plunder, of course, is an aspect of ancient warfare. So the Lord is showing it's a military victory in no uncertain terms. This isn't just an exit.

This isn't a polite withdrawal. This is warfare, and God is the victor. God is now triumphant. So His people, therefore, like mighty warriors, plunder the enemy. Like they were some mighty, ransacking army, taking the most precious objects, silver and gold.

But notice that God's army didn't even raise a sword. They're sharing in the spoil as if they're mighty warriors. Not one of them lifted a sword. They all hunkered down as wave after wave of plague passed over them.

And then, quite literally, death itself passed over them by the blood of the Lamb. And then they step out of their homes, out of this scene of devastation and judgment, as a mighty army unto God, never having owned or lifted a sword.

And what do they do? They plunder. They take all the precious objects. They take the spoil. Do you see how God, again and again and again, rewards His people with the things that He has done? And if you have ears to hear it, our plunder will be very similar.

It is the meek that inherit the earth. The spoils of the world become the treasury of God's people. Again and again we see this played out, and this will be the great event at the end of history itself.

So on the way out, the children of Israel journey from Ramses to Succoth. They say 600 ,000 men on foot besides children, and a mixed multitude, as well as a great deal of livestock. They travel from Ramses.

Remember in chapter 1 that was the city, the store city that they helped to build. I'm not quite sure where Succoth is. It's probably a border town. It may even be named by them. That's a Hebrew term.

And so there they are in that border town as they're about to leave the very border of Egypt and head into the wilderness proper. The number is significant, of course, 600 ,000 men on foot. The term distinguishes men from children and by implication women as well.

And so conservative estimates put this at about 2 million, between perhaps 2 and 3 million. Of course there were others that aren't counted as well that were mixed in for any manner of reason. Now the population size, according to Exodus 1, God increases people greatly.

That's what necessitated in Pharaoh's mind the massacre of the Egyptian children in the Nile. And of course as we track along the story in the book of Numbers, in chapters 1, 2, and 26, we see again this confirmation of the size of the population of Israel.

So again, thinking of 2 million people, between 2 and 3 million people perhaps, traveling out of the Egyptian empire. That would be equivalent to rounding up the entire city of Boston, all of the population of Boston, three times over and dragging them across the United States towards some destination.

This is a massive undertaking. No wonder it put fear in the hearts of the nations around them as we'll see in the Song of Moses. This is now psyops, psychological warfare, in the eyes of the nations. What manner of God, what God is able to do this for His people, to make a nation mobile and bring them into a land that was not theirs to take possession.

That's the strong God. That's the true God. That's the living God. And of course this God has a desire not only to bring His people, but with His people to bring others who were not of the fold, so to speak.

We have the mixed multitudes. We don't know who these mixed multitudes are. Perhaps they were other enslaved populations. Perhaps they were other Semites. We know there were many that descended from Shem in chapter 10 of Genesis.

Perhaps these were Egyptians that had intermarried. Perhaps these were proselytes that had simply come to believe in Yahweh as a result of all of this terrific activity in the land. Perhaps it's all of the above.

It's a mixed multitude. But the significant thing is this. God had made a promise to Abraham that is being fulfilled as we're about to see. On the very day, God is fulfilling His promise to Abraham. A part of that promise to Abraham, if we not only go back to chapter 15 where this is referenced, but chapter 12 of Genesis where God makes the initial call and promise to Abraham, we're reminded that part of that promise and part of the Abrahamic covenant was that the seed of Abraham would be a blessing to the Gentiles, would be a blessing to the whole world.

And we have that in seed form as a sort of proleptic revelation of the true exodus, the greater redemptive salvation yet to come, that the Abrahamic promise is fulfilled and the Gentiles will have a purchase within it.

The Gentiles will be included as part of this worldwide blessing in the capital S seed of Abraham. The rationale, of course, for Passover is in view and also with it the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Verse 39 explains once more the haste is why they left without leavened bread.

And so this sets the tone for the Feast of Unleavened Bread that will always henceforth follow the Passover. If you've followed along the past two weeks, the Passover, the great event of our justification in the blood of the Lamb, followed by the great work of sanctification that flows from it.

Both aspects, both works of God's grace in the life of a believer. One that is received passively, justification. One that is pursued actively, sanctification. If that's not crystal clear to you, or if you need some encouragement in it, make sure you come to SLBC tonight.

It's one of the points, and it's going to be a very rich study about Christ being our mediator in these ways. And so sanctification is not something that begins apart from God's grace or apart from Christ as our mediator.

If we have any thought of that, we will never be sanctified. There's a grace that flows through the cross that bequeaths to the Christian both the benefits of justification and sanctification. Both are received by the blood through the grace of God.

And yet one is received and enjoyed entirely passively, our justification. The other is actively worked out in our lives, our sanctification. Both by the grace of our God through the blood of our Savior.

We have a summary statement beginning in verse 40. Now the sojourn of the children of Israel who lived in Egypt was 430 years, and it came to pass at the end of the 430 years. On that very same day, it came to pass that all the armies of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.

It is a night of solemn observance to the Lord for bringing them out of the land of Egypt. This is that night of the Lord. A solemn observance for all the children of Israel throughout their generations.

So this concluding summary begins with a very frequent phrase in Hebrew, and it came to pass. Whenever you're continuing narrative in the logic of Hebrew, you have this phrase all contained with the word vayahi.

And it came to pass. And it came to pass. Translators find it so redundant that they rarely translate it. I'm glad they translated it here, because it speaks again to the promise that God had made to Abraham.

It wasn't just typically carrying on the story as the story must be carried on. This is the resolution for a promise that had been made four centuries beforehand. It came to pass. And with the Lord, it will always come to pass.

It may be 400 years or 4 ,000 years, but with the Lord, it will always come to pass with a perfect fulfillment down to the very same day. Spurgeon uses this text as an opportunity to rail against the Arminians.

That's with an I, not an E.

He had no quarrel with the Arminians. Our Arminian friends think some of the Lord's people will never come out of Egypt. They'll be lost at the last. Ah, well, as Hart says, that's Joseph Hart, the hymn writer.

If one poor saint may fall away, it follows, so may all. And none of us are safe and secure. Therefore, we do not give way to that. All the hosts came out of Egypt. Every one of them. Not one soul was left behind.

There wasn't Frank being woken up off the cot. What's going on? Where'd everybody go? Oh no. Frank's the one Israelite left behind in Egypt. The one that couldn't get away. No, not one soul is left behind in bondage or in this empire of darkness.

And yet, all along, the timing was in the hands of God, and the wait was very difficult for that reason. So notice what God is broadcasting for His people in the length that it takes for the promise made to Abraham to come to fulfillment.

And the church, so often like Abraham in Genesis 15, having that dark horror in the midst of what feels like a sleep fall upon us. And there's times in church history where there's a dark, almost nightmarish existence in the church.

How could it be? Who will deliver us? And much like the Israelites were crying out, Lord, come! As so often, persecution breaking out, adversaries rising up, a great flood of martyrs. As Tertullian said, preparing the seedbed for the next generation.

So we say the timing is always in God's hand, but the wait is often difficult. The Lord, for very wise and gracious reasons, delays His fulfillment of promises. He builds up our faith. He exposes our impatience.

He draws out our confidence in Him. Do we really trust Him? Or do we just jump from promise to result? That can never be in the Christian life. There's some promises that God may bless you with rather quickly.

Especially when you're a new convert, when you first enter into the kingdom of light and you've bowed the knee to the Lordship of Christ.

He is your Savior.

And you are His child adopted by the Spirit of God. And so often you ask for certain things. So often your entrance into that kingdom was saying, please, Lord, deliver me from this. And He's pleased to answer that right away.

Then as you progress in the Christian life, you start to pray that prayer for other things. And the answer doesn't come so quickly. And it doesn't come easily. Why is that the case? God's building your faith.

Giving you endurance. He's doing a work of grace in your life. And He's allowing that grace to be cultivated patiently so that it may bear more fruit. And that fruit would never come if it was always an automatic response or a set period of time.

And so He elicits the faith of His people as He's strengthening them, as He's giving them aid in such a quiet, gentle way. He bears the burdens of His own. Timing is in God's hands, but the wait is often difficult.

And so we grow impatient. We grow anxious.

We grow fearful.

We begin, like so often as we'll see the Israelites, to question God.

Is He there?

Will He be true?

Is He slack concerning His promise? And 2 Peter 3 says, No, He's not slack, as some men count slack. And we see it even here in Exodus 12. At the appointed time, He will show His arm mighty to save. In the meantime, His people pray and wait.

The Army of the Lord and the Identity of God’s People

Now this connects to me to a little phrase that I'd like to devote the rest of our time, our application this morning, to unpacking. It's this neat little phrase that we have here in Exodus 12 .41. It came to pass that all the armies of the Lord went out from the land of Egypt.

It doesn't say people.

It doesn't say children. It doesn't say sons. It doesn't just simply say the Israelites. It says the armies of the Lord. We've seen this earlier elsewhere in Exodus twice already, and here it's rehearsed again.

A slightly different term, which would be closer to regiments or divisions, but it's a military term related to hosts or the host, Saba in Hebrew, which is a military term. It took me a long time to learn that when I'd often sing Lord Sabaoth is His name.

The Lord of hosts is His name. And it's like, well, what's the Lord of hosts? The Lord of armies. The Lord of His soldiers. And so we have this phrase here, and it's such an interesting picture of this enslaved population with women, men, children, the elderly, the crippled, the lame, the blind, the paralyzed, the leprous.

Whoever is an Israelite is part of this army. There's no screening process. There's no lining up and filling out a medical card and having a nurse run over some basics and saying, I'm sorry, son, you're not fit for active service.

With here, it's like, you're in. Well, I'm a leper and I can't walk.

Perfect.

I'm a paraplegic.

Come on in.

We've always got room for you on the fighting force of the Lord. There's no bar for entry if you have faith in the blood of the Lamb. And so we have this phrase, the armies of the Lord, and I'd like to look at it in three ways.

First, as we've seen all along, the Passover event, the Unleavened Sacrifice, these are all ways that God is forming the identity of His people. He makes it a solemn observance because it must be in the very cultural stock of who they are as God's people.

They must observe this so that it becomes a form of cultural memory, of nostalgia, and with it, identity formation. Buzzword, very important among biblical studies, this idea of identity formation for early Christians.

I'm fascinated by the topic. How do certain metaphors and analogies and doctrines shape the identity, the self-understanding and moral obligations of the earliest believers? Well, we have it even here in Exodus.

How is God using terms and framing metaphors to shape the self-understanding and identity of His people? And we have it in this phrase, the armies of the Lord. So there's an identity first, there's an activity second, and there's an objective third.

That's what we'll do this morning. Identity, activity, and the objective of the armies of the Lord. First, with identity, we're called to be good soldiers in a good warfare. Our identity, good soldiers in good warfare.

2 Timothy 2 .3, you must endure hardship as a good soldier of Jesus Christ. Paul connecting part of being a good soldier to the endurance of that soldier. I don't know a lot about military life. I didn't spend as much time as I could have reviewing certain things.

But one thing I know is when soldiers are engaged in the battlefield, they don't get to wake up one morning and say to their CO, I kind of have a sore throat today. Would it be alright if I sit this one out?

They couldn't even say, you know, I don't know if you realize this, but the trench is full of water and our socks are soaking wet. You know, there's a cold front coming in and we just don't have the supplies that are sufficient.

Can we just kind of withdraw and pull back? These are not options for soldiers on the front lines. Whatever comes, you must endure that hardship. That's what it means to be a good soldier. Part of the endurance is in recognizing this warfare has a noble, vital cause behind it.

Those days seem to be gone to us, unfortunately. If you watch some documentary, watch Ken Burns, even going back to just the Vietnam era,.

And see at large,.

The majority of the U .S. population still having that post-World War II level of confidence that was just beginning to break down with the Nixon debacle and Vietnam at large. And so for the first time, we have severe intrusions of public confidence and public support for the government, especially when it came to matters of war effort.

Now it's questioning.

Why are we there?

What are our interests? Why should we be there? Who is this profiting? What is this gaining for us? And there's such a cloud of confusion that I don't even think today we could imagine what it would be like to feel so unified and to feel so energized by the patriotism that would go into buying war bonds or foregoing bananas like my grandmother had to do.

And it was like the lament of her life. All those war years, she couldn't have bananas. Thinking like, your husband was overseas, you know, fighting it out, and you were at home saying, I can't believe I can't eat a banana today.

But anyway, sacrifices made by all. But there was this unification that took place in the country. We were at war. The warfare was good. There's evil abroad. We have a just cause. And we must have the victory.

Go support our boys. Go in for the fight. Be mindful. Be useful. Be resourceful. Be helpful. Then you fast forward about 30 years later and the veterans come off the plane to booze and posters of baby killers.

What happened in society? We can't even fathom of what it would be like to be engaged in good warfare that is objectively good for all involved, for soldiers to recognize what we're doing here matters.

There's a cause greater than my life at stake. And that's what it means to be a good soldier of Jesus Christ. There is something greater than my own individual needs or wants, something greater than even my own individual life.

And I will be a good soldier in that good warfare. Paul, of course, had been around his share of soldiers. We read between Acts 21 and 23, he's carried by a retinue of soldiers out of danger. And then the centurion appoints a bodyguard over him with over 400 soldiers surrounding him.

Can you imagine what that would have been like to be in the midst of 400 Roman soldiers marching him? And so across this time, he would have seen in very intimate ways how soldiers had a very disciplined way of life.

That though they had great camaraderie and a warmth of enjoyment in each other's company, there was also a severe discipline that took place within their ranks. And that led to courage and to enduring the rigors of daily life as soldiers.

And how they could snap to with unquestioned obedience. How everything they did was done with purpose and diligence. And then to speak of the utter loyalty, especially to the commander over them. If he said go, they went.

If he said pull back, they listened right away. They never questioned or doubted or hesitated to anything he said. Paul must have been struck by this experience. And so much like the Lord calling his people in army, Paul employs this metaphor to the churches that he wrote to.

And even to Timothy, he says, you need to be like some of these soldiers that I've been around, Timothy. You need to endure hardship the way that they endure hardship. You need to understand you have a good cause, something much greater than a Greco-Roman soldier would have as their cause.

Romans looked for any reason to invade and conquer another land. Literally anything, they can make up anything, and that would be a reason to go. Paul understands the real warfare. So this is part of our identity formation.

The Lord is a commander of his armies, as we read at the beginning of Joshua. And we're following him as our great captain, the captain of our salvation. That can sound tired. It can sound kind of Sunday school-ish to us.

And it's a problem when we let that metaphor lose its evocative power. I grew up singing with all of my friends, a bunch of, you know, 8 and 9 and 10-year-olds. There's maybe a couple dozen of us. And we, from time to time, would get up on the stage in the sanctuary and we'd do these ridiculous motions that we would sing.

Maybe you'll know this. I may never march in the infantry, ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery. That was my favorite part to do that. I may never fly or the enemy, but I'm in the Lord's army.