On the last day of Unleavened Bread, God symbolically baptized the children of Israel as they went down into the Red Sea during the night and stepped out of their watery grave the next morning. As they looked behind them in the dawn, hundreds of Egyptian soldiers and horses lay dead along the shore, and many others floated in the waves. They could literally see that God had destroyed those who had oppressed them for hundreds of years. The Egyptians would never again be able to afflict them in any way, as God had washed away and destroyed what had enslaved them. They were clean and free. Seeing this, the Israelites feared God and broke into a song of praise to the Lord. The children of Israel were indeed baptized in the sea, and God swept their slavery away. They came up from the Red Sea singing for joy at the victory God gave them. But they could never see past their physical needs and fleshly desires. Almost none of them ever received the baptism of the Holy Spirit, and so, without genuine faith in God, they all died in the wilderness, never entering the Promised Land.

The concept of Israel's baptism, as a significant Old Testament type, illustrates the profound symbolism of water baptism in the New Testament. One of the greatest miracles in the Old Testament, the Israelites' crossing of the Red Sea, serves as a forerunner of true baptism today. As described in I Corinthians 10:2, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, symbolizing their immersion through a supernatural passage. The Israelites left their old lives in Egypt by entering what would normally have been a watery grave, emerging to a new way of life by God's grace. This event at the Red Sea, detailed in Exodus 14:21-22, showed the children of Israel walking through the midst of the sea on dry ground, with walls of water on either side, picturing the death of their former way of life and their emergence into a promised land. For anyone other than the Israelites, such as Pharaoh and his army, this passage was a veritable grave, leading to their destruction due to their persistence in sin. As I Corinthians 10:11 reveals, these Old Testament events serve as examples for Christians, demonstrating a transition from captivity and sin to deliverance. Israel's baptism under the Old Covenant was a physical agreement with material rewards, contrasting with the spiritual depth of the New Testament covenant. This historical immersion typifies the Christian call to crucify the old self, to be buried in a watery grave, and to rise into a better way of life, walking in newness as described in Romans 6:4. Thus, Israel's experience at the Red Sea encapsulates the essence of baptism as a transformative journey from bondage to a renewed existence under God's guidance.