There remained not one of them

As I was reading the astonishing story of the ten plagues, I was struck by one phrase.

Amongst our Heavenly Father’s systematic destruction of everything the Egyptians had, with wave after wave of devastation and catastrophe, my eye was not caught by how the incredible plagues arrived. It was how they left.

It occurs first in the plague of the flies in Exodus 8:31 where, once Moses entreated Yahweh to remove them, we read, “there remained not one!”

And it was even more noticeable in the plague of the locusts where, in Exodus 10:19 we read, “And Yahweh turned a mighty strong west wind, which took away the locusts, and cast them into the Red Sea; there remained not one locust in all the coasts of Egypt”! To imagine the land crawling with locusts is utterly staggering and frightening enough! To imagine that the next day it was impossible to find even one is terrifying, and yet magnificent!

So, the plagues were not just to impress Egypt with God’s utterly devastating power by which He could destroy, but to impress Israel with His utterly comprehensive forgiveness by which He could save! He had not only the power to bring the plagues, but also the desire to remove every remnant of them and “cast them into the depths of the sea”, that not one should remain!

Even Pharaoh associated the plaque of locusts with sin and death (Ex. 10:17), and their comprehensive removal was just a foreshadowing of God’s ultimate plan to remove all His people out of the land of bondage. This is seen in Moses’ words in Exodus 10:26, “There shall not an hoof be left behind!”

But human nature being as forgetful and dull as we all experientially know it to be, when Israel reached the shores of the Red Sea themselves, and saw the Egyptians racing up behind them, all assurance of their Heavenly Father’s deepest desires to utterly deliver them were forgotten in the blink of an eye. But God was determined that what He had foreshadowed with the locusts would be unmistakably clear to His people. And so, in Exodus 14:27–28 we find that, once the waters engulfed Pharoah’s hosts, “there remained not so much as one of them”! The enemy had totally disappeared!

Now, I must confess that in my mind’s eye, as I conjured up this remarkable scene, I had always imagined the Israelites, still panting with exhaustion and with immense relief, looking back over a carpet of floating bloated corpses — the the sea littered with thousands of bodies bobbing on the surface…. But, as I read Exodus 15, I was struck with this consistent theme — “they sank into the bottom as a stone” (v.5), “the sea covered them, they sank as lead in the mighty waters” (v.10), “they shall be as still as a stone” (v.16), and Nehemiah adds his testimony in Nehemiah 9:11, “their persecutors thou threwest into the deeps, as a stone into the mighty waters”!

The Scriptures give us the overwhelming sense that the Egyptians sank, never to rise again, held by an unseen force at the bottom of the sea! So, whatever Exodus 14:30 means (and maybe it means that from the sea shore the Israelites saw that the Egyptians were dead), now my vision of this scene is totally different!

The intense blackness of the night, the roaring of the wind, the blood curdling curses of the Egyptians getting ever closer, the pounding of galloping hoofs, the terrifying sound of thousands of tonnes of water crashing down, the sickening screams of drowning men, the cries of children and distraught animals — had past. Now, as the first pink gleam of dawn broke the horizon, the Israelites were startled not just by the eerie silence, but as they looked out over the sea where minutes before the waves had thrashed and foamed, now there was an indescribable stillness! The sea was like glass, and as for the Egyptians, apart from a few that lay in the shallows (which may also answer Exodus 14:30), the sea was bereft of them! Deserted! There was not a ripple or a sign of life. It was as if they had never been! As Psalm 106:11 puts it, “water covered their enemies… there was not one of them left”! God had been faithful. Not one remained!

The connection to the forgiveness of our sins in Micah 7 is well known to us, but also gives us cause for a moments solemn and heartfelt reflection and thanksgiving. Our Heavenly Father is prepared to do to our sins what He did to the locusts and to the Egyptian charioteers — “cast them into the depths of the sea” — never to rise again! And not just “some”, or “most”, but “all” of our sins (v.19). Not one remains! This is the wonder of forgiveness!

It is interesting that in all the Scriptures there are only three places where the words “cast” and “depths” occur together — Nehemiah 9, Micah 7 and the parable of Jonah.

Jonah 1–2 records the story of us as the sailors who face certain death at the hands of a terrible storm, and who are only saved by casting an innocent man (1:14) into the depths (2:3) of the sea. Here is our Lord who bore the sins of the world on his shoulders, and who buried all our sins where Micah said they should be! His death, burial, and resurrection that Israel only prefigured in the waters of the Red Sea, is the means by which we can be forgiven with such a comprehensive victory that not one of our sins will remain!

As we celebrate each week this consummate victory and the calm of sin forgiven, let us do it in the hope that one day, by God’s good grace, we will stand with divine nature with the Lamb on the sea of glass described in Revelation 15, and rejoice in new wonder at the comprehensiveness of our deliverance. The pains of our own mortal exodus experiences, as Pharaoh’s henchmen almost caught us and carried us back to cruel bondage will be a distant memory, overwhelmed by the immense gratitude of knowing that our loving Heavenly Father has taken our sins and forever cast them into the depths of the sea, never to rise again.

Image credit: Corrals at Elphinstone Reef, Red Sea, Egypt by Dereck Keats under CC by-SA 2.0