HALIFAX, Nova Scotia, February 9, 2025 – I love it when God yells at us and puts us in our place. He doesn’t do it often, but when it needs to be done, he does it handily and mightily as only God can.

Jesus had the same knack for unleashing God’s fury when it was needed. We see it when he turned on Peter and called him Satan, and again when he overturned the tables in the temple and whipped the moneychangers to the curb, and again when he railed at the scribes and Pharisees for being, well, scribes and Pharisees. Sometimes these things need to be done.

Exodus 14:14 is another one of those times. The verse follows a whiny lament by the children of Israel, freshly sprung from slavery in Egypt. Peevish, petulant, and worst of all ungrateful, they sorely needed to be put in their place, and fast.

But that’s not the reason for this article. This article is a response to how the worldly church has mistranslated Exodus 14:14, removing God’s fury and replacing it with a mild-mannered request. In modern translations like the NIV, the Israelites are told to “stand firm”, “be calm”, “be silent”, or my personal favourite, “you won’t need to lift a finger”. The implication is that they are just to stand there passively and wait for God to do his thing. But in the KJV, Moses thunders at the restless rabble to “hold your peace”, which is a veiled threat for them to shut their yaps if they know what’s good for them.

The castration of God’s Word by the worldly church makes me furious. The modern translations have Moses addressing the Israelites like a kindergarten teacher afraid to hurt someone’s feelings. Meanwhile, the force and context of the scripture are completely lost. God is not telling people to “be calm” in this verse. He’s not even telling them to “be silent”, respectfully or otherwise. He’s thundering at them to “SHUT THE [bleep] UP AND GET THE [bleep] OUT OF MY WAY!”

When they see the Egyptian army hot on their heels and believe they stand no chance against them, the Israelites immediately turn on God and Moses. Even after witnessing miracle after miracle in Egypt, they still default to fearing the Egyptians rather than fearing God. Moses needed to remind them who to fear, and he does so by simultaneously stamping on their toes and slapping them in the face, hard. It’s very effective. They immediately shut up and submit.

The moral of this story is to shun translations that deball God’s Word. If you’re not occasionally cowed into submission while reading scripture, you’re not reading the right version.