Do You Believe?

A little boy visited Sunday School for the first time. There he heard about Moses and the Israelites crossing the Red Sea.

Back home that afternoon, his mother asked him what he has learned in Sunday School. “Well, Mom,” he said, “Our teacher told us how Moses whipped the Egyptians at the Red Sea.” “And how did he do it?” his mother asked. “Oh, it was easy,” came the reply. “The Egyptians chased Moses all the way to the Red Sea. Moses had to build a pontoon bridge across the Sea to escape. When all the good guys had crossed the bridge, Moses called in his diver bombers and blew up the bridge killing all the Egyptians!”

His mother, rather startled by the account, asked, “Is that really what your teacher told you?” Realizing mom was not exactly pleased with his account of the story, he replied, “No, mother, but if I told you what she said you would never believe it!”

A recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, and quoted in The Columbus Dispatch (3-14-92), argued that the biblical account of this event could have happened precisely as the Bible describes it. According to the article, “a moderate wind blowing constantly for about 10 hours could have caused the sea to recede about a mile and the water level to drop 10 feet. That would have left the land dry in the area where many biblical scholars believe the crossing occurred.”

It has become fairly popular in today’s society to deny the historical nature of the biblical account and to belittle any who might believe in it. The story is sometimes told of a teacher who was telling her class that the biblical account of the crossing of the Red Sea was not anything like what actually occurred. She said, “We now know that they actually crossed the Reed Sea, not the Red Sea. The Reed Sea was a body of water only 4 or 5 inches deep.” At that moment, a student in the back of the class shouted, “Praise God for the Miracle!” “What miracle?” the teacher demanded. “Why, God drowned Pharaoh and all his army in only 4 inches of water,” came the reply.

The Bible is filled with miracles. To deny them is to deny God. We can be confident that they are true, or God, who cannot lie, would not have permitted them to be included in the biblical text (Hebrews 6:18). There is no need to question the accuracy of the biblical record. Those things of a miraculous nature described in the Bible can be accepted with confidence. The Bible is true. It is not too fantastic to believe.

John wrote of Jesus, “And many other signs truly did Jesus in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book: but these are written, that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God; and that believing ye might have life through his name (John 20:30,31).

Will you believe and obey?

— Roger