1 Corinthians 10:2-4, ‘…all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ.’
When one turns to Christ such that the veil is removed and the Scriptures are opened, the Exodus account becomes a window into and an anticipation of YHWH’s climactic revelatory redemption in the person of the slain and risen Jesus.
According to Paul, then, it would seem that a true reading of Exodus recognizes that:
It is YHWH Himself who stretches out His arms in the midst of the waters of judgment, dividing the sea of His people’s affliction through His own experience of it such that they might be baptized through wrath’s waters into the radiant cloud of His presence…
It is YHWH Himself who descends from heaven to earth as spiritual food, as Manna—an image of His own incarnate flesh—falling to the ground so that His people might rise up and live…
And it is YHWH Himself who is stricken by the rod of wrath for the sake of His people, split open in the wilderness of their rebellion so that the river of living water—who is the Spirit of God—might flow like an artery of life-giving blood from the pierced heart of the Lord into the sin-sick body that is His chosen people.
This is how Paul reads the text of Exodus, and in doing so he teaches us how to read all of Scripture. But, more than that, this is how we should ‘read’ all things—the text of Scripture *and* the text of created reality itself. Every ‘text’ is read correctly only in light of an as a communication of God as He is declared in the anastasiform Christ.
