Augustine of Hippo — Commentary on Scripture

Exodus 14:22

This people of God, freed from a great and broad Egypt, is led, as through the Red Sea, that in baptism it may make an end of its enemies. For by the sacrament as it were of the Red Sea, that is by baptism consecrated with the blood of Christ, the pursuing Egyptians, the sins, are washed away.

EXPLANATION OF THE PSALMS 107.3

Exodus 15:1

As far as we are concerned, you see, they are dead, because they cannot lord it over us anymore; because our very misdeeds, which made us into their subjects, have been, so to say, sunk and obliterated in the sea, when we were set free by the bath of holy grace.

SERMON 363.2

Exodus 15:1

“For he has been gloriously extolled” who has already granted us in the bath of regeneration what we have been singing about: “horse and rider he has cast into the sea.” All our past sins, you see, which have been pressing on us, as it were, from behind, he has drowned and obliterated in baptism. These dark things of ours were being ridden by unclean spirits as their mounts, and like horsemen they were riding them wherever they liked. That’s why the apostle calls them “rulers of this darkness.” We have been rid of all this through baptism, as through the Red Sea, so called because sanctified by the blood of the crucified Lord. Let us not turn back to Egypt in our hearts, but with him as our protector and guide let us wend our way through the other trials and temptations of the desert toward the kingdom.

SERMON 223E.2

Exodus 15:4

The devil had placed “teams of three” in each chariot, who were to terrorize us by haunting us with the fear of pain, the fear of humiliation, the fear of death. All these things were sunk in the Red Sea, because “together with him,” together with the One who for our sakes was scourged, dishonored and slain, “we were buried through baptism into death.” Thus he overwhelmed all our enemies in the Red Sea, having consecrated the waters of baptism with the bloody death which was utterly to consume our sins.

SERMON 363.2

Exodus 15:4

And the worldly pride and arrogance and the troops of innumerable sins which were fighting for the devil in us, he obliterated in baptism.

SERMON 363.2

Exodus 15:5

But if our enemies “went down into the depths like a stone,” the only ones the devil remains in possession of and the only ones who have the hardness of the devil are those about whom it is written, “When the sinner has come into the depths of evil, he behaves disdainfully.” They don’t believe, you see, that they can be forgiven for what they have done; and in that mood of despair they plummet to greater depths than ever.

SERMON 363.2

Exodus 15:9

The enemy does not understand the power of the Lord’s sacrament, which is available in saving baptism for those who believe and hope in him. He still thinks that sins can prevail even over the baptized, because they are being tempted by the frailty of the flesh. He doesn’t know where and when and how the complete renewal of the whole person is to be perfected, which is begun and prefigured in baptism and is already grasped by the most assured hope.

SERMON 363.2

Exodus 15:12

Certainly at that time no yawning chasm of the earth swallowed up any of the Egyptians; they were covered by water, they perished in the sea. So what’s the meaning of “You stretched out your right hand, the earth devoured them”? Or are we correct in understanding God’s right hand to be the one of whom Isaiah says, “And the arm of the Lord, to whom has it been revealed”? That, you see, is the only Son, whom the Father did not spare “but handed him over for us all.” And thus he stretched out his right hand on the cross, and the earth devoured the godless, when they thought of themselves as victorious and of him as despicable in defeat.

SERMON 363.2

Exodus 15:20

This is what Moses sang and the sons of Israel with him, what Miriam the prophetess sang and the daughters of Israel with her. It is what we too now should sing, whether it means men and women or means our spirit and our flesh. “Those who belong to Christ Jesus,” you see, as the apostle says, “have crucified their flesh with its passions and desires.” This can be suitably understood in the drum which Miriam took to accompany this song: flesh, you see, is stretched over wood to make a drum. So they learn from the cross how to accompany in confession the sweet strains of grace.

SERMON 363.4

Exodus 17:8

There is no vice which the divine law resists more [than pride]. That most proud spirit becomes an obstacle to things above and a mediator to things below. It thereby receives a greater power of domination, unless one avoids the secret snares he is laying by going along a different way. If he is openly raging through a sinful people, he is like Amalek. By his opposition he denies the passage to the land of promise. He then must be overcome by the cross of Christ, which was prefigured by the extended hands of Moses.

THE TRINITY 4.15.20

Exodus 18:19

God spoke to Moses, did he not? Yet Moses very prudently and humbly yielded to the advice of his father-in-law, foreigner though he was, with regard to governing and directing such a mighty nation. For he realized that from whatever intellect right counsel proceeded, it should be attributed not to him who conceived it but to the One who is the Truth, the immutable God.

ON CHRISTIAN TEACHING, PROLOGUE 7

Exodus 18:21

Moses in fact took care to appoint teachers of reading and writing for God’s people before they had any written record of God’s law. The Septuagint Scripture calls these instructors grammatoeisagogoı́, which is Greek for “bringers-in of letters,” because they brought them, in a sense, into their students’ minds or perhaps introduced their students to them.

City of God 18.39

Exodus 19:1

The Pentecost too we observe, that is, the fiftieth day from the passion and resurrection of the Lord, for on that day he sent to us the Holy Paraclete whom he had promised. This was prefigured in the Jewish Passover, for on the fiftieth day after the slaying of the lamb, Moses on the mount received the law written with the finger of God.

AGAINST FAUSTUS, A MANICHAEAN 32.12

Exodus 19:1

But the fifty-day period is also praised in Scripture, not only in the Gospel, because the Holy Spirit came on the fiftieth day, but even in the Old Testament. Therein fifty days are numbered from the celebration of the pasch by the killing of a lamb to the day on which the law was given on Mt. Sinai to the servant of God, Moses.

LETTER 55

Exodus 19:1

We come now to the desert, where the law was given, and this is what Scripture says: “But in the third month from when the people were brought out of Egypt.” The Lord spoke to Moses that those who were going to receive the law should purify themselves in readiness for the third day, on which the law was to be given. So at the beginning of the third month a purification is commanded in readiness for the third day.

SERMON 272B.6

Exodus 19:12

In this wonderful agreement there is the very great difference, that in the Old Testament the people is held back by a fearful dread from approaching the place where the law was given; whereas in the New the Holy Spirit comes upon those who were assembled together waiting for his promised coming.

ON THE SPIRIT AND THE LETTER 17.29

Exodus 19:16

Again God produces the ordinary lightnings and thunders. But because they were done in an unusual manner on Mt. Sinai, and those voices were spoken there without a confused noise but in such a manner that it was evident from the most unmistakable proofs, … certain significant meanings were attached to them. Then they were miracles.

THE TRINITY 3.5.11

Exodus 19:16

The law then was obviously given on the third day of the third month. Now count the days from the fourteenth of the first month, when the pasch was kept, to the third day of the third month. You will have seventeen of the first month, thirty of the second, three of the third, which makes fifty.

LETTER 55

Exodus 19:18

What shall I say about this except that no one is so insane as to believe that the smoke, the fire, the cloud and the darkness and everything else of a similar nature are the substance of either the Word and the Wisdom of God which Christ is or of the Holy Spirit. For not even the Arians have dared to say this about God the Father. Therefore all those things were produced by a creature serving its Creator and were manifested by a suitable dispensation to the human senses.… Perhaps carnal thoughts will suggest that the cloud was certainly seen by the people but that within the cloud Moses saw the Son of God with his bodily eyes, whom the raving heretics will have to be seen in his own substance, because it was said, “Moses entered the cloud where God was.”

THE TRINITY 2.15.25

Exodus 19:18

But the sound of that voice and the corporeal appearance of the dove and the “parted tongues as it were of fire that sat upon every one of them,” like those terrible manifestations that happened on Mt. Sinai and that pillar of cloud by day and of fire by night, were performed and carried out as figurative acts. Now in these matters special care must be taken lest anyone believe that the nature of God, either the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit, is subject to change or transformation. And let no one be troubled because sometimes the sign receives the name of the thing signified. Thus the Holy Spirit is said to have descended on Christ in the corporeal appearance, as it were, of a dove and to have remained upon him. Thus also the rock is called Christ because it signifies Christ.

LETTER 169