The Red Sea and Jordan

 •  2 min. read  •  grade level: 14
 
The Red Sea for the children of Israel was the door of deliverance from the house of bondage, the placing of them forever beyond Pharaoh's power and setting them in the wilderness as a redeemed people brought to God.
It is to us a type of the death and resurrection of Christ, not so much in the passover aspect of the former, where the blood met the claims of God's justice as regards the people's sins, but as that which has annulled Satan's power, delivered us from it, and brought us to God in perfect peace, so that we can joy in Him whose power has wrought so great a deliverance for us. This line of truth will be found in the Roman epistle.
Jordan was the entrance into Canaan. The crossing of it is in nowise a type of the death of the body, nor is Israel's entering into it a picture of the departure of a believer to be with Christ. It was when the people had crossed Jordan that the wars of Canaan properly began. There will be no fighting in heaven, no Canaanites to be dispossessed when we get there. But the Jordan must be crossed before Canaan can be reached; and Canaan, or rather what answers to it, is our place now, if indeed by faith and the power of the Holy Ghost we enter there. If the passage of the Red Sea is our redemption from Satan's power, so that henceforth we might walk with God through wilderness scenes, at peace with Him and standing in His favor, He being for us in all His love and unfailing resources, the crossing of the Jordan is our entrance by faith into the blessed fact that we have not only died with Christ, but that we who were dead in sins have been quickened together with Him, raised up together, and made to sit together in heavenly places in Him.
The Red Sea and the Jordan have closed forever our history as men in the flesh, and now we have a new place in Christ before God, and are in spirit associated with Him where He is now, having been quickened with His life, and having the Holy Ghost dwelling in us. And this is the true Christian position, the proper portion of every believer. But let it be remembered that it is one thing for all these things to be true of the believer when viewed as in the place which the grace and power of God has made his, and another for the soul to be consciously standing in possession of it all. It is in the Ephesian epistle that our heavenly position and privileges are unfolded, and it is there we learn the need of the whole armor of God to enable us to stand (even when it is known) in the present enjoyment of what is infallibly and eternally ours in Christ.