If you'll remain standing for the reading of scripture found in Exodus chapter 15, the first 10 verses, Exodus 15, 1 through 10, and the song of salvation. Exodus 15.1 says, Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying, I will sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed gloriously. The horse and his rider He has thrown into the sea. The Lord is my strength and my song, and He has become my salvation. This is my God, and I will praise Him. My Father is God, and I will exalt Him. The Lord is a man of war. The Lord is His name. Pharaoh's chariots and his host, he cast into the sea and his chosen officers were sunk in the Red Sea. The floods covered them. They went down into the depths like a stone. Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy. In the greatness of your majesty, you overthrow your adversaries and you send out your fury. It consumes them like stubble. At the blast of your nostrils, the waters piled up. The floods stood up in a heap. The deeps congealed in the heart of the sea. The enemy said, I will pursue. I will overtake. I will divide the spoil. My desire shall have its fill of them. I will draw my sword. My hand shall destroy them. You blew with your wind, the sea covered them, they sank like lead in the mighty waters. This is the word of the Lord. Let's pray. Holy Spirit of God, it is said, of You and of the Word, that it is sharp, sharper than a two-edged sword, piercing and dividing joint and marrow, and is the discerner of the thoughts and the intent of our hearts. We pray now that Your Word would rule over us in power, in wisdom, and in razor-sharp precision, convicting us comforting us, repenting us, and where necessary, breaking us in our pride, so that the words of my mouth and meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight. Our Lord, our strength and our Redeemer. Amen. You may be seated. I wonder if you have a victory song, a song you go to that, like, you know when you hear it, man, that's boots on my feet, marching, I will not be conquered. I grew up in the 70s and the 80s, went to a lot of college football games at Florida State, so it is no shock to you to hear me say that I have heard we are the champions and I have the Tiger so many times I can't tell you, but you know When you hear that guitar riff of Eye of the Tiger coming, man, people in Florida State Stadium, Doak Campbell Stadium, they come unglued. They stand to their feet and they start screaming and hollering and great things happen to bad people at that stadium when that happens. I wonder, though, if we as a people beyond college sports and whatnot, if we have a victory song, because you're in the military, you hear it so much, you probably know that Francis Scott Key was a lawyer from Washington, D.C. And when the War of 1812, which is often called the Second War of Independence, when the War of 1812 broke out, even though he objected to the war, he enlisted in the local militia because he believed in defending his home and his county and his state from the invasion of the British. After the British army invaded Washington, D.C., they burned the White House to the ground and began to march north towards Baltimore. And Key was a lawyer of good repute, and so the British took captive a man named William Beans who was a prominent businessman, a wealthy landowner. They took this man captive and Francis Scott Key was sent to negotiate with the British for his release. So he goes up to Baltimore and has to meet with the British and while he's meeting with the British on board a ship to release this man, William Beans, they begin to attack Fort McHenry in Baltimore in the harbor and they detain Francis Scott Key and William Beans on board the ship. And so all during the night when the shelling was going on and the mortars were being fired, they're looking out of a little window and watching the large American flag over Fort McHenry. to determine in their own minds whether or not the Americans were going to win or whether they were going to be defeated. And so you get in the Star Spangled Banner, the rockets red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. But what often gets missed whenever we talk about Francis Scott Key and America's victory song, the Star Spangled Banner, was that Francis Scott Key was not just a patriot. He was not just a really good lawyer. He was also a devoted Christian. He was taught by his grandmother and by his father. He was devout. He led prayers with his family and in his law firm twice a day. When he wrote the Star-Spangled Banner, he wrote it like Lincoln in a hurry on the back of an envelope in the ship during the fight. And my favorite verse of the Star-Spangled Banner is the last verse, the fourth verse, which says, Oh, thus be it ever when free men shall stand between their loved home and war's desolation. Blessed with victory and peace, may the heaven-rescued land praise the power that hath made and preserved us a nation, then conquer we must when our cause it is just, and this be our motto, in God do we trust. And the star-spangled banner, in triumph shall wave, o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. We have a victory song. Does God have a victory song? Today I want you to look at the first one of the victory songs of God recorded in Scripture in Exodus chapter 15. And as we do, I want you to look at two things. We sing for His overcoming glory and we sing for His omnipotent glory. We sing for His overcoming glory and we sing for His omnipotent glory, the song of salvation. First of all, the overcoming glory in verse 1. Then Moses and the people of Israel sang this song to the Lord, saying, I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously, the horse and the rider he has thrown into the sea. If you move on to the beginning of verse 2, you notice three things that become the three sub-points under this. Moses says, the Lord is my strength, The Lord is my song and the Lord is my salvation. Thank you, Moses, for alliterating that for me. I didn't even have to consult a thesaurus. But it is important, as a subset of God's overcoming glory, to note strength, song, salvation. The Lord is my strength. Moses, back in the last chapter, I made a big deal about this two weeks ago in Exodus 14, verses 13 and 14. Moses said, as the entire core of Egypt's chariots with their officers and their horsemen and even Pharaoh himself, the most awesome spectacle of armament in the whole wide world, as they bore down on the people of Israel and they started to have a panic attack and say, isn't this what we said? You should have left us alone. We should have just stayed in Egypt where there are not enough graves for us to be buried. Moses says what? He says, fear not, stand firm, the Lord will fight for you, you just have to be silent, sit still, shut up, just be still and watch, and you will see the salvation of your Lord. Today, having come to the other side of the salvation event, now they sing a song extolling God who saved them. Moses, who led them in silence, silent vigil before the onslaught of this army, now breaks that silence. And how does he break it? Why does he break it? He breaks it with a song, because a shout is just not good enough. Moses explains why. I will sing to the Lord. Why? Because what we do at football games is not good enough. I don't know if you've been there or not, maybe you have not, but I cannot tell you how many times I've been there. FSU's the one that invented the tomahawk thing, right? And been there, and there's a couple of drunk guys, probably more than a couple, behind me, and I don't know if they could sing on key if they hadn't had one too many or not, but it comes time to rally the troops and the tomahawks get to going, and 75, 80,000 sets of hands are swinging like this. Trying to get them to get to victory, right? This is not what Moses was doing. We need to meditate on this thought. Some victories are ugly. I mean, let's face it. No matter whether you're in the army, the navy, the air force, or whatever, there are times when battles are just really ugly. When we squeak it out. Even our football teams, our hockey teams, our basketball teams will say, what? They won, but it wasn't pretty. They won on the scoreboard, but they didn't play like winners. That thought should be contrasted with this thought. When Moses penned this, when the Holy Spirit inspired it, spontaneously or not, How did he put words on what God did? He didn't just squeak it out. He didn't win, but it was ugly. He triumphed gloriously. It wasn't even close. He destroyed the army of Egypt. He crushed them. It's glorious, beautiful. It's awesome, the ruin of the Egyptian army because they were crutched. But in football terms, touchdown God and the crowd goes wild. Big touchdown, crushing touchdown. Do you know whose armed forces are the most glorious in world history? It's not Pharaoh or Khan or Alexander the Great or Hannibal. It's not even Trump. The most glorious armed forces in the history of history is Yahweh Sabayoth, the Lord God Almighty, the Lord of Heaven's armies. There is nothing more glorious than him. Never lost a battle. His soldiers always do what they're supposed to do. They always win, and they don't even come close to the other guy. They crush them, vanquish the foe, Do you reveal the strength, do you revel in the strength of God's glory like Moses did? Notice what Moses said, the Lord is my song. Singing takes a prominent place in redemptive history. Here's a little study for you with eight examples of how redemptive history is a drama, but it's a musical drama, sorry. To begin with, there's a song at creation. Job 38.7 says the morning stars sang together and the angels shouted for joy at creation. What about the song of Deborah and Barak for joy at the defeat of Sisera and Javan in Judges chapter 5? David sang when God delivered him from all of his enemies in 2 Samuel 22. The Psalms of Ascent in the Book of Psalms 121-135 were designed for people that were marching on the Pilgrim Feast up to Zion so that they could, as they were ascending on Mount Zion into Jerusalem, they could sing songs that sounded like they were going up in elevation into the house of God. The song of the Babylonian exiles, Isaiah 51-11, the ransomed of the Lord will return. They will enter Zion with singing. Songs in the Gospel of Luke when Jesus was born, the angels sang. When Mary was told she would be pregnant with the Christ child, she burst into song. So did Zechariah and Simeon and others who joined the chorus of the angels in the Gospel of Luke in chapters one and two. What about the church? We're told in Colossians 3.16, let the word of God dwell in you richly as you sing psalms, hymns, spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts. How about the book of Revelation at the end and also Isaiah 6, which gives us glimpses of heaven, which tells us that the song will never end. Holy, holy, holy and worthy is the Lamb. That's what heaven's doing now. That's what heaven will be doing in the future. And that's what heaven will do with great chorus and great triumph. Sing the song of salvation in one voice. Because our God deserves it. The Lord was Moses' song. Is He your song? Is the Lord your song? When somebody asks you, what's your song? You say, God's my song. Jesus is my song. Do you have a song? For Moses, for the people of God, there's really only one song. It's the song of salvation. The Lord has become my salvation, Moses said. The song is connected to the actual saving event. When you look at the beginning of this chapter, chapter 15, it says, then, then indicates something happened before, right? Then, the next thing that happened after God saved them, while they're staring at the bodies of the Egyptian soldiers washed up in the surf on the shoreline. Suddenly the next thing that happens is Moses bursts out into song and all the people. Now just stop for a minute and imagine what that would have been like. Not like anything you or I have ever experienced. I've never been in a crowd of 2 million people singing a song. I've never been in a crowd of 2 million. What would that be like? What would it be like to be in a crowd that large singing one song about the salvation of the Lord? Amazing. The Lord is my song and my salvation. It's connected to the event itself. They believed and then they sang to His glory. I should say this just so we don't skip over it, that the salvation being described here is real salvation. This isn't a political or a military event that happens where saved needs to be demoted to a word like they dodged the juggernaut of the Egyptians. Like when we say, I dove in the pool and saved my child from drowning, we mean physically save them. We don't mean save their souls. What I'm here to tell you is that this song is evidence that this is a, quote, real spiritual soul-saving salvation. That you'll see the people who sing this in faith in heaven. Here's how it's connected. God does His great act to save them from the Egyptians. The people put their faith into the God that saved them, and they sang a song to His glory. That's real, as real as it gets, as New Testament understood as it gets, salvation. It's not just some political military event where the people didn't get taken back to Egypt as slaves. This is salvation. These people were saved. I think it's interesting to note also that when Moses describes this, he doesn't describe salvation as an event or a thing. He really says that salvation is a person. The Lord has become my salvation. The Lord is my strength, the Lord is my song, and the Lord has become my salvation. Odd construction, right? Think about what that means. Think about what that means if you struggle with security of the believer. And you ask the question, can you lose your salvation? Now, depending on which side of my mouth I'm talking out of, I might say yes or no. Because if you define salvation as, I signed a prayer card, I walked down an aisle, and anything that I did makes me saved. If you, if we, become our salvation, absolutely you can lose that. But when you believe this, when this is salvation, when God is your salvation, when the Lord becomes your salvation, you don't lose that. You understand the difference? One is a religious experience and the other one is a real God that comes and is and becomes your salvation. His salvation is attached to His person. And as much as God can't cease to exist, and as much as God, who is almighty and all-powerful, can't have anything plucked from His hand, your salvation is secure because He's secure. No one's gonna overthrow Him. No one's gonna take it away from Him because it's His. It's who He is. He is your salvation. I added one more thing here. Celebration. This is my God, verse 2D says. Moses says, this is my God and I will praise Him. My Father's God and I will extol Him. What was God's alone? His glorious triumph then gets visited, becomes a position of Moses and the people. It was God's glorious triumph and by association with Him, that glorious triumph becomes the people's. It was God's triumph. They stood on the shore and watched Him do the work. And so Moses then says, this is my God and I will praise him. My father's God and I will extol him. And of course, you know, the mommy and daddy and all of us kind of goes, oh, Moses brought his daddy into it. He's keeping up with the tradition of his daddy's faith. Oh, ain't that sweet? Maybe we can find something besides nostalgia to blame on why Moses mentioned his dad. He mentions his father as a way of magnifying God's reputation. What he's saying is, you want to hear about what kind of God we serve, my strength, my song, my salvation, and why I celebrate? Because this is the reputation of God. He didn't start being this person at the Red Sea. He's been this person even way back before 80 years ago, before I was born with my father and my father's father. The reputation of our God is that he triumphs gloriously. This is just one more chapter in the story of God's salvation. He saved my father. He's the God of my father. And now he's become my God because he intervened in my life. He's become my salvation. Man, this is important. I don't know if you can tell. Not only in the present, But the past and always, God has been, He will always be our strength, our song, our salvation, and our celebration. Do you really celebrate God? I spent a couple of years with some charismatics, and listen, I don't want to create a straw man out of them, but I'm going to tell you what I used to say to them as a compliment. I know you could critique theology all day long, and I did some of that, but the truth is, and I've said this to their faces often, and even from pulpits, You know, one of the things I'm learning from you is you guys know how to celebrate God. I'm not sure I know how to celebrate God, but when you guys decide you're going to celebrate God, it's fun. You believe in enjoying God. We say we believe. The Presbyterians need some work on this. Maybe we need some charismatic friends, but you guys actually do it. You like have dances and parties and celebrate Jesus and you know go to church and you think it's okay to say amen and wave your hands around and stuff like that and actually enjoy God with freedom and abandonment. We're way too theologically correct for that. Thank you. We need some work. You know two reasons why I think we don't celebrate God? Here's an application for you. Two reasons why we don't celebrate God's victories in our life. One, either we don't perceive them because we're dull or weak in our faith. We just don't perceive that God's actually fighting and that he ever wins anything. I mean, come on. When was the last time you actually said, man, God put a whooping on that for me? I prayed about it, I let him fight the battle, and glory be to God, he's victorious. He helped me win a victory over a sin in my life. When was the last time our faith was that sharp and in tune with what God was doing in our life? Would it be okay for God to win once in a while? I mean, we seem to have the theology camped out on top of, okay, when you get kicked, when you get squashed, when you can't explain anything that's going on in your life, come talk to us because we're Reformed and we'll tell you. Romans 8.28 covers that, baby. We got that one down, right? But does it cover it on the glory end of that spectrum when it goes good? When God wins, when there's triumph, when there's shouts, do we have a theology rich enough to stretch through predestination all the way to glorified too? It's there. Second reason why maybe we don't celebrate God's victories in our life because, excuse me for saying so, but our old man is hell-bent on doing something without God's strength for our glory so that then we can go, here God, He did this just for you. Right? I mean, how often do we abandon the power of God in our life so that we can have something to show God that we did for Him? Is that really what it means to walk and step with the Spirit so we will not fulfill the desires of the flesh? Is that what Jesus did in His ministry? Is He did it under His own strength and then presented back to God, apart from God's glory? It sure seems like over and over and over again Jesus kept going back to God again and again and again, glorify your Son, glorify your name. I have glorified it and I will continue to glorify it. Jesus went out in the power of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted and He returned in the power of the Spirit to begin His ministry with the disciples. Is that what we do? Okay, so I beat you up enough. Let me tell you how somebody got it right. Some of you probably, because you have a lot of affiliations with Colorado, remember that in 2007, New Life Church in Colorado Springs was attacked by a gunman. right as church was letting out and that gunman had already been over to the YWAM facility in Arvada and shot a bunch of people and killed them there. And then came to church on Sunday morning and shot a bunch of people in the parking lot, killed a few of them, and then himself was shot by one of the security guards of the church. This is a large church of 10,000 plus people. The year before the shooting happened, Ted Haggard had to resign from the church amidst a scandal. The church had been through the ringer over that year. People had died, the pastor was disgraced, but the people kept coming. And after the shootings happened, the worship leader did something amazing. Wrote a worship song for the people to try to get them through, shepherd them through all that they had gone through, and make sure Christ was glorified in the midst of it. And he wrote the song, and you heard it because Jeremy Camp heard it. and re-recorded it and it became a huge hit on the radio 10 years ago. The name of the song is Overcome. Now listen to where the strength for a church of more than 10,000 came from, and notice how close to the scripture this is. Savior, worthy of honor and glory, worthy of all of our praise, you overcame. Jesus, awesome in power forever, awesome and great is your name, you overcame. We will overcome by the blood of the lamb and the word of our testimony. Yikes. Does it shame you just a little bit that we go through these things in our lives where the glory of God is on the line? And do we overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of His testimony? Do we overcome because we have faith in the One who overcame the world? Do we overcome because we live in a world full of tribulations? But do not fear, I have overcome the world. Is that the Jesus that we worship? Is that the song that we sing? He has overcome gloriously so we could too. Do we worship Him for it? Sing for His overcoming glory. Secondly, sing for His omnipotent glory. By omnipotent, I mean all-powerful. Not just enough power to overcome and win. by an infinite power, all power, all powerful, all glory, this all-powerful gravitas. Look at verses 6 and 7. Your right hand, O Lord, glorious in power, your right hand, O Lord, shatters the enemy. In the greatness of your majesty, you overthrow your adversaries. You send out your fury. It consumes them like stubble. I want you to notice this omnipotent glory of God. in that the Lord is zealous in war, the Lord is glorious in power, and the Lord is furious in majesty. In verse 3, Moses tells us that the Lord is a warrior or a man of war. He's zealous in war. Really, verse 3 provides a context for everything that comes after that in this section of the passage. He's a man of war. He keeps referring over and over, if you like to highlight, find the numbers of times that Moses refers to God as capital L-O-R-D. All caps, Lord. several times right through here. He's extolling the Lord. What does that mean? That's the covenant name Yahweh. He's using not God's title, capital L, lower O-R-D. He's using God's name. The name God revealed to him at the burning bush is the one that's being extolled here. Yahweh, the covenant name. Think with me now, because you're in the military. Think about how many times, and I know it's not an exhaustive metaphor, but think about how many times God uses military defensive or offensive terminology to define what he does and who he is. Go all the way back to Abraham for a second. And at the very beginning he tells Abraham when he calls him, in Genesis chapter 12, I will bless those who bless you and I will curse those who curse you. I will do something nice for those that are nice to you, and I will hit with my hand, and I will strike the enemy that raises himself against you. In Genesis chapter 15, verse 1, when God makes the covenant with Abraham, how does He introduce that to Abraham? Abraham who had no child, He said to Abraham, Abraham, I'm your shield, I'm your very great reward. Who needs a shield? Somebody in combat. Somebody that's out there taking swords and arrows and whatnot from people that are throwing them at Him. We also know that at the burning bush, God called Himself, I Am, and that indicates His eternal, never dimming out glory. His omnipotence, a name that never ends, the great I Am. The Lord is a warrior. He fights for His glory. The nations of the world should watch out because He says in the last chapter, He says, I will get glory over Pharaoh when I destroy his horsemen and his chariots. He says it two or three times and then He does it and the people extol the Lord because the Lord is a warrior who goes out to battle for His people and fights and crushes the enemy. for this reason, to get glory over somebody else. The Lord doesn't play second fiddle for His glory because, in verse 6, the Lord is glorious in power. He shatters the enemy. Your sets off the second part. They go from praising God and talking about Him to talking directly to Him. My dad went to a Bible college. Not many people go to Bible colleges, but my dad took a whole semester course on hymnology. And so as a child, I had to hear the mantra often. There's a big difference, son, in singing gospel songs and singing hymns. The difference is, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't sing gospel songs. The difference is singing about God or singing to him, singing about his attributes or extolling him to his face for his attributes. We need to have both. Lee punches probably hymnology and notice how Moses works into it. He starts off by talking about what God did and he moves pretty quickly the whole congregation of Israel. And now let's look directly into the face of God and talk directly to him for what he did. It's like the difference between preaching a sermon and offering a prayer. I'm talking about God and yes God is here. He's in the audience. We're preaching in the heavenly realms. But when we pray and we're talking directly to God and addressing him by name there's a different tone. Moses makes that corner here and he starts to talk, not the Lord is, the Lord is, the Lord is. He starts to say your, your, your right hand is glorious in power. Do you know the right hand of God is referred to 166 times in the Bible? You think that's important? What about the right hand of God? What is the right hand of God? The right hand is the power hand. The right hand is the hand you hold your sword in, you hold your shield in your left hand. And if you're a good soldier, you hold it in your left hand so that you can cover the weak side of your friend, the other soldier standing next to you. The Lord's right hand is the hand of power. Moses extols the right hand of God and says it's not just powerful, it's not just strong, but it's glorious. You know, there's a big difference between strength and glory. Glory is the weight, it's the reputation of God. We talk about people who have a certain gravitas to them so that when they enter a room, everybody just has to turn and look. Not just because they're pretty or they're handsome, but there's just this certain something that I don't know what the French say. There's something about them that draws you to them, like gravity pulls on spatial bodies. People have this gravitas. You've had friends that have that gravitas. Some of you have that kind of gravitas. You know because you wear uniforms that there are certain people at certain ranks that have gravitas. Maybe by virtue of the office that they hold or by virtue of how they got the office, you know when they're there, you shut up and listen. because they wear a certain amount of glory. Especially those who've been in active combat and who have overcome and have done great things and have been given medals of honor and silver stars and whatnot by their country. You know, that didn't just come by sitting down and thinking about warfare, that came from spilling some blood. God is glorious. in His power. His right hand is glorious because He's accomplished great things with His right hand and Moses extols Him for it. But maybe the reason why God's right hand is so ultimately important is because God's right hand points directly and inextricably at Jesus Christ. If you look in the New Testament, how does the New Testament understand this in Ephesians 1, 19-20? What is the surpassing greatness of His power towards us? That Jesus is raised and seated at God's right hand, far above all rulers and authorities and powers. Jesus sits at God's right hand. The hand of honor, where when you would have a guest over for dinner, they sit at your right hand. John, the apostle, when they had their last supper, John, the one he loved, sat there and leaned against his breast. It's another way of saying he was sitting at his right hand, because they leaned on their left elbow and ate with their right hand. and pointed their feet away from the table. And so the host, the guest of honor, would be sitting in the center of the table, and the person sitting immediately to his right would be the one he could most easily talk to. Jesus is sitting at the right hand of the throne. He's sitting at a place where He sees, where He intercedes, where He talks to the Father in our behalf in a powerful way. When we're in trouble, He says, go get them. They need your help. Exercise your power. When John looks into heaven, the vision that the Holy Spirit gives John of heaven is that he sees the throne of God. And he sees what? Lightnings and flashes of thunder coming out of the throne and being hurled down on the earth. He sees prayers of the saints coming up and filling up a censer. A place where there's incense that makes heaven smell sweet. And when the censer gets full, an angel at the command of the Lord goes over and sticks tongs down in there and hurls coals down on the earth. It tells us that our prayer life can be powerful because it comes into the room of God. It incenses the place and makes it smell good. But when it fills up, God takes action in our behalf. He exercises judgments. He sends out thunder and lightning. even while there's a rainbow in heaven. Jesus is sitting at the right hand of God the Father Almighty. So the Lord is zealous in war, He's glorious in power, but the Lord is furious in majesty. It might sound like an oxymoron, but notice verse 7, you overthrow your adversaries. Why do you overthrow your adversaries, God? Two reasons, haughty Pharaoh and holy wrath. Notice how Pharaoh talks about himself. I know it's Moses sort of quoting Pharaoh, but this is the Holy Spirit giving Moses the words to say what Pharaoh says. Notice there's six self-references that Pharaoh makes in verse 9. The enemy said, Pharaoh said. I will pursue, I will overtake, I will divide the spoil. My desire shall have its fill of them. I will draw my sword. My hand shall destroy them. By the way, that my desire shall have its fill of them. Another way of saying that is I will gorge myself on them. We talk about this in battle, right? My sword is bloodthirsty and I'm going to let it gorge itself on the enemy. This is what this is talking about. The arrogance, the haughty spirit of Pharaoh who thought he could contend with God for glory. having already lost glory in his homeland, when his land was ruined by the plagues of God due to his own hard-heartedness, when his land was ruined and his children were killed, Pharaoh then could not take it anymore and struck out against this people because of something he perceived he had lost. That's the way he said it, right? What were we thinking when we let our free labor go, when we let our slaves go? Let's go get them. And He doesn't send a few. He doesn't just send the best. He sends everything He's got out of the field of battle because this is how kings get to themselves glory. And when they perceive they've lost it, they become enraged and they throw everything they've got, they put everything, all their credibility on the line to go and try to get that face of theirs back. That's what He was up to and God is not mocked. He was not going to allow that to happen. God easily, notice how easily He defeats the most powerful nation, this haughty nation. In verses 8 and 10, I love this. Your fury consumes them like stubble. God's glorious wrath against men brings Him praise. Psalm 76, 10 says, God's wrath against men brings Him praise. You understand that God is holy, and when God executes judgment against evil, He gets glory for it. He gets praise for it. You understand that you can only be holy and get praise for being violent against evil. God is extolled in heaven and amongst his people because he does exhibit holy wrath. Is your God big enough? Is He true enough and real enough to believe not just in some facet of His holiness, where it's good towards us, but also His holy wrath? That the wrath of God is revealed against not some, but all in righteousness. Do you praise Him as loudly for that as you do? That He's holy in heaven and that He loves us? His holy wrath, His glorious anger burns up evil like chaff. You know what chaff is? Chaff is wheat straw, basically. It's the part of the wheat you don't consume. In the Old Testament and in ancient times and even still today, you take wheat, you put it kind of in a big basket and you throw it up and down and you separate the part of the wheat, the fruit of the wheat, the seed of the wheat from the husk of the wheat and it becomes like this wheat straw, like cut grass. and once it's dried out, once it's separated, they would burn it. I didn't grow up around wheat, but I did grow up around pine, pine trees, and it had straw, and we had lots of these loblolly pines in the panhandle of Florida, and my dad would send me out to rake it all up in a pile, and inevitably a fire would get built, and we always loved to take a big armload of that sort of burnt orange early fall pine straw and go over and throw it into a big fire because it made this sound like firecrackers and it instantly went from sort of solid state to ash. As soon as it hit the fire, it just burst and went into ashes and into the atmosphere. I used to love that. God's wrath against his enemies is like chaff in a fire. It just bursts them into ashes immediately. I love that God has a glorious sense of wrath and anger, but he also must have a glorious sense of humor because notice how Moses puts words on what God's wrath against Egypt was like. It says, at the blast of your nostrils the water piled up. You blew your wind and the sea covered them. You get to both events. The division of the Red Sea so they could go across on dry land and also the closing of the Red Sea that drowned all the Egyptians and crushed them was the blast of God's nostrils. Another way to say this, I mean I just can't help but thinking about Monty Python as I think about this. Go away you silly English person or I'll clear my nose in your general direction. God basically defeats his greatest enemy by blowing his nose at them. That's what it says. Hebrews, the place of anger for a Hebrew was the nose. Because the nose gets heated whenever you get angry. You can kind of see a person's anger boiling in their nose. It's flaring and you know, don't mess with them right now. Just go away because their blood's up. And so whenever somebody in the Bible wants to describe God as being angry, they're talking about his nose as being hot. Well in this one, God's nose gets hot and he blows his nose and he just turns his enemies to ash. He just blows them apart like they're nothing. I mean, doesn't this, isn't this just a lovely poetic image to put into a song? You know, you've got the greatest army on the planet that has iron chariots and all their swords and their spears and their horses and their captains and Pharaoh himself with his big golden headpiece on and they're coming after us with everything they've got and God says, hey, stand still, be quiet, watch this. Boom, they fly apart into dust. I mean, that's just so great. Not only does he not break a sweat, he doesn't even use his finger. He doesn't even have to use his right hand. He just uses a nostril. I mean, how great is this? This is better than Benny Hinn's Holy Ghost machine gun. It's better than all that blowing he does on grounds of people, where they just keel over in the spirit. This is God blowing through one nostril and eliminating the entire army and a king. What a greater way to get glory than blowing your nose at them. That's amazing. I love it. I love poetry. God's furious majesty. Does Jesus' furious majesty comfort or frighten you? You ever think about the cross as a fight? You ever think about it in terms of warfare? That the cross was like, not just like, it was warfare. Think about all that went on around Jesus to get Him to the cross and whose hands touched Him to put Him there. He wasn't killed with stones by the Sanhedrin. He was nailed to a Roman cross by Roman soldiers, overseen by a centurion, rendered judgment by Pontius Pilate, the top military commander in the area. You ever think about what a fight it was for Jesus? John chapter 17 and how that fight is tied to God's glory. In John 17, you can't get very far into John 17. I think it's in the first verse where Jesus begins his high priestly prayer, the last prayer he prays with the disciples, the whole corporate body of them, before he begins this, before he goes to the cross. And what does he say? Father, My hour has come. Glorify your son so that I may glorify you. When God talks about glory and about getting glory, there is always a fight involved. Jesus is about to undertake the fight of his life. And though I can't stand the psalm, Carmen had it right this much in the way he compared the cross to a boxing match. It was a little bit more contentious than that, but it was a fight. It was a fight. Peter and John understood this because in Acts chapter 4, where they are telling off the same Sanhedrin that sent Jesus to the cross, what psalm does Peter quote at the end of At the end of Acts chapter 4, after they've done their mano a mano with Sanhedrin, he quotes, amongst the believers, Psalm 2. Remember what Psalm 2 says? Why do the nations rage, the Gentiles, and the peoples plot in vain? The rulers and the kings gathered themselves together, they set themselves against the Lord, and against his anointed. And then Peter pivots and he says, let me tell you who those kings and those rulers of the Gentiles were. Pontius Pilate and all the Jews in Jerusalem gathered together, not for the Lord and his anointed, but against the Lord and his anointed. He understood there was warfare going on. It was a fight. And the same psalm where that's recorded also says, you will dash them to pieces like a piece of iron going through pottery. And they gave glory to God and asked God for even more boldness. He understood God's glory was on the line at the cross and that God got for himself great, maybe his greatest glory in the fight of Jesus to redeem us. As much as Moses standing on the sea, fighting in silence as God fights against their enemies and delivers them from those hands, God fought our enemies and delivered us When He was our enemy, He fought for us by nailing His Son to a cross, and it gives Him great glory. It's an amazing God that we serve that would do such a thing. The cross was a fight. Several years ago I saw this film with one of the great directors of our time and great narrators of our time, Million Dollar Baby, filmed and directed by Clint Eastwood and the voiceovers were done by Morgan Freeman. I mean, nobody greater than Morgan Freeman at doing the voiceovers. The movie started with an interesting quote Freeman's voice, boxing is about respect, getting it for yourself and taking it away from the other guy. Do you know the Lord is about glory? Getting it for himself and taking it away from anybody that climbs in the ring and contends with him for it. He contended with Pharaoh and destroyed him. He contended with Caesar and destroyed him. Do you compete with or contend for God's glory? Be careful how you answer. You want to know one of the things I like to see is I like to watch this thing called the Kennedy Center Honors, where they select somebody, usually musicians, and they fill a crowd up in the Kennedy Center of like a who's who of celebrity from every walk of life and the President of the United States and the First Lady sit in a box with their family and they bring a band or a musician out and they just spend time extolling this person and then they play some of their songs, but then they go and they get newer, more current artists that are really big deals to come and cover some of their songs. I recently saw, it was a couple of years ago now, but I've re-watched it since, when the band Led Zeppelin was honored at the Kennedy Center. I never was a Led Zeppelin fan really very much, but I thought this is interesting. because one of the bands from my life from the 80s covered one of their songs, Stairway to Heaven, and I thought it was interesting to watch the faces of these legends of rock and roll as they sat up there, all of them now like 70 years old, sitting up there watching other artists, Grammy award-winning artists perform their songs. Stairway to Heaven, sung by Ann Wilson from Heart. Comes out, she begins to sing the song, and you can see it on their faces. You can see their faces, they are just riveted by this performance. And as she gets into the chorus, Robert Plant, steely old Robert Plant, tears running down his face as he listens to his song, as he listens to his glory. Why was Robert Plant crying? I'll tell you why. Several years ago, I was invited to go to Promise Keepers event in Jacksonville in the Coliseum, where all the football games are played. Promise Keepers has got a lot of problems. Let me tell you one problem they don't have is they know how to sing. They put 55,000 men in that stadium and we started singing hymns. I'll never forget it. I've never sung with a group of people of 55,000 before or since. Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty. Early in the morning our song shall rise to Thee. Holy, holy, holy, merciful and mighty God in three persons. Blessed Trinity, 55,000 men. Holy, holy, holy, all the saints adore Thee. Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea, cherubim and seraphim. falling down before Thee, who works and arts and evermore shall be. Never sung a song of salvation in such a crowd as that." And when I look back on that now, as I wasn't really singing, I was like Robert Plant. Why? Robert Plant was sitting there and he was looking at his former and faded glory of his youth that would soon be gone. The 55,000 men singing, holy, holy, holy. We're looking at the glory that was to come and anticipating the heaven when we get there and we see God as He is in His holiness. And we join now the song of salvation. The question is not, does God have a victory song? The question is, are we singing it? Are you singing God's song of salvation? Please stand for the benediction.