Exodus 15:1 Then Moses and the Israelites sang this song to the Lord: “I will sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea.
Exodus 15:20-21 Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women followed her, with timbrels and dancing. Miriam sang to them: “Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted. Both horse and driver he has hurled into the sea.”
Miriam, The Prophetic Teacher
The Israelites had just witnessed God perform one of his greatest miracles. The fierce wind that ripped the waters apart suddenly relented, and the Red Sea swallowed the Israelite enemies alive. The Israelite’s response, appropriately enough, was to break out into shouts of praise! Hopefully that is our response as well when we have our own dynamic moments of witnessing God with his sleeves rolled up.
Now pay attention. Immediately after the praise settles to a simmer, Miriam takes up the harp and begins to sing the song all over again. She repeats almost verbatim the first stanza of Moses’ latest Billboard chart topping hymn. This time though you’ll notice the song shifts from a first-person praise to an imperative. “I will sing to the Lord” turns into “Sing to the Lord.” The author of Exodus spares us the entire repeat of Moses’ song, but I believe they are cueing us in to the fact that that’s exactly what happened. Miriam repeated the entire song Moses just sang, this time in the voice of a command.
What is going on here? Why does Miriam repeat the song almost exactly, and why does the scripture find this important enough to show us the redundancy?
The Oral Culture
To answer this question we have to remember something important. This is an oral culture. If you want to remember something you don’t jot it down in your Apple notes on your iPhone. If you want to educate your children, you don’t hand them a text book or show them a YouTube video. The children don’t sit in classrooms to learn about theories of life. In this culture you retell the stories that are worth keeping. Not every story is worth keeping. But those that are valuable are curated by the elders and committed to the collective memory of the children. Valuable stories are the living memory of a community; they are the lenses through which a community sees the world. Children in this culture learned about heritage, and identity, and values by working beside their parents, walking along the road, and telling the stories that their parents told to them. The family unit was the building block of society. In the family we witness authority, tradition, education, economics, and morality all being translated, on a habitual level, from one generation to another. How do you shape the next generation? Through the family, and through the stories the family tells.
Is there any wonder why, in our culture, the family unit has been the subject of withering attack? Is there any wonder why our media and entertainment have been hijacked by a self-indulgent and morally corrosive spirit of the age? Is there is any wonder why education is the latest target in a focused effort to subvert the youngest generation of Americans? The spiritual enemy of our nation is corrupting the family and the stories we tell. There is a war for the formation of the next generation.
Miriam and the women of their community were educating the next generation. Moses sang the song of praise from the people up to Lord. Miriam the prophetess sang the song from the Lord back down to the people. This is an education in the ways of God. The women are committing this Exodus event into their collective memory.
Accumulated Success, or Failure
If a community gets delivered by God’s power and they praise the Lord for it, the Lord receives a single offering. If a community gets delivered and passes the keys of deliverance on to the next generation, the Lord receives praise from every generation that walks in the prophetic power of that message. That’s the power of prophetic education! If you have a song of Moses without a song of Miriam the move of God dies within a generation. If you have a prophetic voice reminding the people of God’s presence and power, you impact every generation that listens. An experience without education and activation leads to stagnation. An experience with education and activation, leads to accumulation. Every generation stands on the shoulders of the one before it. In this case God is re-educating the Israelite people; he is trying to re-stamp their culture with his character.
My deepest concern for our nation isn’t the latest Pharoah in office or the latest policies that are being put into law—important as these might be. These things shift and change like the surf on the sand. My greater concern is over the decomposition of the health of families that imprint children with love and truth. I’m concerned about the video streaming platforms that pump out an overwhelming amount of unfiltered, graphic, and morally degenerate content. Are these really the stories that are worthy of forming the hearts and minds of the next generation? My concern is the virus of secular and Marxist ideas that are hijacking our public school systems. This subversive narrative may contain a kernel of truth, but is cancerous at the core.
I’m concerned because the stories and narratives that I see stamping the minds and emotions of our children are getting farther from the truth of God’s holy love. It’s like they are caught in a rip-tide. Our cultural stamps are no longer truth-seeking, human-valuing, or God-fearing. Children aren’t being imprinted with the values that made America a moral, hardworking, innovative and self-correcting society. The things that formed and stamped our culture 250 year ago, 150 years ago, or even 80 years ago are gone.
Invest in Family and the Stories We Tell
My encouragement to you is to not underestimate how important investing in your family is. Our families aren’t just home base where we recuperate from living in the busy world. Our families are the epicenter of making disciples, ministering to one another, and cultivating healthy relationships. They should be our first investment, first priority, and first expression of love. They are the first community where our collective memory begins.
My second encouragement is to be extremely vigilant what videos, movies, tv, news, and entertainment you allow into your home, children, and soul. The world’s value system has no filters. We should be training our families to meditate on stories worthy of keeping, not stories that gratify our appetites. And finally, it is more important than ever for parents and grandparents to be aware of and invested in their children’s education. What is being taught about human sexuality in public school? What is being taught about the heritage of our nation in classrooms? False ideas have devastating consequences on malleable minds.
Spend more time unplugged from digital space. Learn to love simple hobbies that connect you to the land or to people. Learn to love spending time in worship, prayer, and God’s word. Read more. Enjoy relationships, games, walks, hikes, gardening, making music, puzzles, carpentry, or just spending time together with loved ones. Tell your children and grandchildren stories about your life, your family, your upbringing. Keep passing on the family values through focused conversations. Keep passing on our national and cultural heritage through focused family conversations.
The American experiment didn’t arise in a vacuum. It was birthed out of the accumulation of human wisdom from hundreds of years of mistakes, abuses, and successes in economics and government. Our system of self-government isn’t perfect, but it’s the most judicial and moderated that humanity has ever produced. Be honest about our national failures, but also about our national successes. America was never a Christian nation; only people are Christian. But our culture and government were tailored as a hand-in-glove fit with Judeo-Christian values. Self-government, individual liberty, and judicial equality are the most supportive of the Christian value system and without those values, our Western system falls into chaos.
Fighting for that heritage starts in your own life and your own family. We can imprint the next generation with God’s prophetic education. We can help change the stories we tell. We can starve the self-gratifying beast that creates the industrial machines of media and entertainment. Miriam walked in the prophetic power of the Lord and brought his presence through song and through story. May that same spirit fall upon us today.
Tags: family, culture, education, stories, media, prophetic, arts and entertainment
