Being Silent

“The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to be silent.” – Exodus 14:14

Why does Moses say, “you have only to be silent”? Words matter. The Israelites’ fear, bracing as they were for a brutal massacre, was understandable, but what comes out of their mouths is not a confession of fear or a plea for help. What comes out is disparaging sarcasm (“is there because there were no graves in Egypt…?”), vitriolic accusation (“what you have done…?”), self-justification (“is this not what we said… leave us alone?”), and distorted perception (“it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians…”). Jumping to conclusions about outcomes and motives, laying blame on others, feeling the grass is greener on the other side.

It’s so easy to grumble in these ways, in marriage struggles, when depleted from childcare, when angry or fearful or tired. Be quiet! Moses says. I wrote in my journal: “When I reach the end of my rope, I need wisdom to not speak.” To just hold my tongue, which I will probably never regret, whereas my complaints can do serious damage and be sin against God. “I tell you,” Jesus says in Matthew 12:36, “on the day of judgement people will give account for every careless word they speak.”

But it is a particular kind of silence that Moses refers to here. In Hebrew, this verse has only three words: YHWH [The Lord] lacham [shall fight] charash [for you, and you have only to be silent—or in other translations, be still, hold your peace]. There are over thirty Hebrew words for the absence of speech, for the particular kind of stillness or silence being referred to, and the one Moses uses here is charash. It literally means “to engrave,” as a craftsman etches in wood, or a farmer plows into the ground—in fact, charash is translated “plow” or “craftsman” elsewhere. This is a silence that happens in the context of a carefully-wrought, skillfully-devised plan. This is a silence that sees, mysteriously, that sometimes one must hold back from speaking or acting for that plan to come about. This is an expectant silence.

In this case, the plan is for God to show his people a great truth about salvation: it is what God does, not what we do. Salvation begins with hundreds of chariots thundering towards you and the sea at your back. Stop imagining what went wrong, how you would have done it better, whose fault it is, because it was never a human project to begin with. How easily we miss what God wants us to see when we fail to be silent.