Psalm 136:12

Psalm 136 is a hymn made for worship. It is often called the Great Hallel, and it has traditionally been recited at Passover and other Jewish festivals. Its shape suggests how it was sung: a leader names one of God’s deeds, and the congregation answers with the refrain. The refrain closes every verse of the psalm, twenty-six in all, so that the truth is fixed in the memory of everyone who sings it.

The psalm tells its story in order. It begins with God as Creator (Psalm 136:4–9), looking back to the account in Genesis 1, then comes to the Exodus in our verses, and goes on to the wilderness, the defeat of kings and the gift of the land (Psalm 136:16–22). The events sung here are told in full in Exodus 12 and Exodus 14.

The Exodus is the defining event of Israel’s history. It made a nation of slaves into a free people bound by covenant to the God who delivered them, and it shaped their laws, the words of their prophets and their yearly festivals, above all the Passover instituted in Exodus 12:1–28. It also kept a promise. Centuries earlier God had told Abraham that his descendants would be afflicted in a strange land and afterward come out (Genesis 15:13–14), and these verses celebrate the day he did what he had said.

The refrain gives the reason for every deed in the psalm. Its first word, “for” (kî), means “because”: God struck, brought out, divided and overthrew because his mercy endures for ever.

The word for mercy is cheçed. It means kindness, lovingkindness and mercy, and in this psalm it is God’s steadfast, loyal love for the people he has bound himself to by covenant. It is an active and dependable love that keeps its promises. “For ever” is ʻôwlâm, a word that pictures the point where time vanishes from sight, time out of mind in the past or the future, and so in practice eternity. Put together, the two words say that God’s loyal love has no end and that each generation may count on it as Israel did.

The same thanksgiving is sung elsewhere in Scripture: “O give thanks unto the LORD; for he is good; for his mercy endureth for ever” (1 Chronicles 16:34). Jeremiah’s lament holds to the LORD’s mercies that are new every morning (Lamentations 3:22–23), and Micah closes his book with the God whose mercy toward his people does not change (Micah 7:18–20). Israel sang of this love on the far shore of the sea itself, when Moses’ song praised the mercy in which God led the people he had redeemed (Exodus 15:13). Moses also told Israel that the LORD brought them out because he loved them and chose them (Deuteronomy 7:7–8).

Verse 10 recalls the tenth and last plague (Exodus 12:29–32). The verb nâkâh means to strike, and here it is a blow of judgment that brought death. The bᵉkôwr, the firstborn, was the eldest son and heir, the chief of the family, who stood for its strength, its future and its continuance. In Israel the firstborn was counted as the firstfruits of the family and holy. When God struck the firstborn of Egypt, from Pharaoh’s heir down to the livestock, he struck the nation at what it held most precious.

The plague was a contest over who is God. Egypt treated Pharaoh as divine and honoured many gods, and this blow showed that the LORD rules over all of them and over life and death. God had already told Pharaoh that he was raised up so that God’s power would be shown in him (Exodus 9:16), and Paul returns to God’s dealings with Pharaoh when he writes of God’s sovereign mercy (Romans 9:14–18). The night ended with Pharaoh himself urging Israel to go.

Verse 11 names the Exodus itself. The verb yâtsâʼ means to go out, and here it is causative: God brought Israel out. The freedom of that day was his doing from start to finish, a public display of his rule over the greatest empire of the time. “Israel” is Yisrâʼêl, the name God gave to Jacob, explained as “he will rule as God”, and it stands here for the whole nation descended from him, every family and tribe. “From among them” marks the separation: God took one people out of the midst of another and set them apart as his own.

Verse 12 says how he did it. “A strong hand, and … a stretched out arm” is one of the Old Testament’s best-known ways of speaking about the Exodus. Châzâq means strong, and yâd, the hand, is used throughout Scripture for power and for the agent by whom a thing is done. The two phrases say one thing twice, with growing force. The hand is God’s power acting directly and personally, and the stretched out arm is that power reaching into the world where everyone can see it. Scripture speaks of God in human terms here so that we can grasp how near and how active he was.

God used this very language before the event, when he promised Moses, “I will redeem you with a stretched out arm” (Exodus 6:6). Afterward it became Israel’s settled way of remembering. Moses asks whether any god ever took a nation out of another nation “by a mighty hand, and by a stretched out arm” (Deuteronomy 4:34), the Sabbath command is grounded in the same memory (Deuteronomy 5:15), and Jeremiah uses it in prayer generations later (Jeremiah 32:21). Isaiah also looks back to the God who led his people through the sea by the hand of Moses (Isaiah 63:11–14). In the psalm the refrain follows at once, so that God’s might is always understood as serving his mercy.

Verses 13 and 14 belong together. The verb for “divided” is gâzar, to cut down or cut off, and “parts” is the related noun gezer, a piece that has been cut. The picture is of God cutting the sea in pieces. Exodus tells how it happened: Moses stretched out his hand, the LORD drove the sea back with a strong east wind, and the waters stood up like walls on either side (Exodus 14:21–22). The sea that had closed off Israel’s escape became the road out.

Then God “made Israel to pass through the midst of it.” The verb ʻâbar means to cross over, and it too is causative, so the crossing is God’s act as much as the dividing was. He opened the way and he took his people along it, through the middle of the sea on dry ground. When Israel saw what the LORD had done, the people feared him and believed him (Exodus 14:31). Isaiah later names him by this deed, the LORD “which maketh a way in the sea, and a path in the mighty waters” (Isaiah 43:16), and that title holds out the Red Sea as the pattern of how he saves.

Verse 15 begins with “But”, turning from Israel’s safe passage to the fate of their pursuers. The verb nâʻar means to shake off or shake out, to tumble about. God shook Pharaoh and his army off into the sea. Chayil, “host”, means strength or force, and here an army, the gathered military power of Egypt. Exodus records that the waters returned and covered the chariots and horsemen that had followed Israel in (Exodus 14:27–28). The same sea was a road for one people and a grave for the other, and the creation God made served his purpose in both.

The verse sets this overthrow directly beside the refrain. For Israel the destruction of the army was the end of slavery, since the power that had come to drag them back was gone. Isaiah calls on the arm of the LORD to awake as in those ancient days (Isaiah 51:9–11), because what God did to Pharaoh is the measure of what he is able to do for his people against every power that holds them.

The Exodus points forward to the salvation God has given in Jesus Christ. Israel was brought out of slavery in Egypt, and through Christ God has “delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son” (Colossians 1:13). The price of that redemption was “the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot” (1 Peter 1:18–19).

Each act in these verses has its answer in him. Egypt’s firstborn were struck in judgment, and God’s own firstborn Son (Hebrews 1:6) was “smitten of God” and wounded for our transgressions (Isaiah 53:4–5). He is “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), and Paul says plainly, “Christ our passover is sacrificed for us” (1 Corinthians 5:7). The arm of the LORD that Isaiah asks about is revealed in him (Isaiah 53:1), and the strength of God’s hand is shown above all in raising him from the dead (Ephesians 1:19–20). The path through the sea points to the one who says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). His resurrection opens a way out of the grave, and those who are in him are a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). As Israel passed through the waters to freedom, Christ brings his people through the waters of baptism into new life. At the cross and the empty tomb the powers that held us, sin, death and Satan, were overthrown as surely as Pharaoh was.

The mercy of the refrain is seen most fully here. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son (John 3:16), and being rich in mercy he made us alive with Christ (Ephesians 2:4–5). What Christ obtained is “eternal redemption” (Hebrews 9:12), sealed by the blood of the everlasting covenant (Hebrews 13:20) and leading to an inheritance that is incorruptible (1 Peter 1:4). In him God’s mercy truly endures for ever.

These verses give us a way of reading our own history with God. Israel looked back at the worst night in Egypt and the most frightening hour at the sea and found God’s loyal love in both, and they said so aloud, line after line. The God they thanked is the same today. His power is still joined to his mercy, so that his strength is always at work for the good of those he has made his own.

The psalm also shows that God deals with what enslaves his people. He judged the oppressor, opened a road through water, and walked his people along it himself. Whatever stands in the place of Egypt or the sea for us, whether sin’s hold, fear, or a trouble with no visible way through, belongs to the God who makes a way in the sea. And when his ways are severe or hard for us to understand, the refrain is there to be said after them too, because the love behind every one of his acts lasts for ever.