A video out of an unidentified beach in Africa, widely reported to be in Lagos, Nigeria, has gone viral this week, showing a pastor in a white robe, staff in hand, striding confidently into the surf of the Gulf of Guinea in an apparent attempt to part the sea the way Moses did in the book of Exodus. The waves had other plans. A larger swell knocked him off his feet within moments, and he scrambled back to shore as onlookers watched from the beach, one of them kneeling with a Bible open in his hands. It makes for an easy laugh online, but it’s worth remembering what backdrop a Nigerian pastor is actually preaching against: a country where Boko Haram and its ISWAP offshoot have spent more than a decade abducting, enslaving and trafficking Christian women and girls, and where UN human rights experts issued a report just last month describing “deeply troubling” violations against Christian women and girls that may amount to slavery under international law.
Whatever else it says, the video is a small, striking data point in something much bigger: more and more people, across more and more corners of the world, are turning toward God and reaching for the biblical stories that define what faith actually looks like in action. That instinct deserves respect even when the execution goes sideways.
Nigerian television picked up the clip almost immediately. On Arise News’s “The Morning Show,” anchors ran the footage for laughs before turning to veteran commentator Dr. Reuben Abati, a longtime co-host on the network, a columnist for ThisDay, and a former media adviser to Nigeria’s presidency, for his read on what had just happened. Abati didn’t mock the pastor’s faith. He questioned the performance around it. “Many of these pastors, you know, they misinterpret the Bible, and many of them are just either sketch makers, content creators, or motivational speakers, and this is yet another example,” Abati said, adding dryly that the man was fortunate the ocean hadn’t swept away the small crowd of “miracle seekers” who had gathered to watch him.
The line that stood out most, though, was Abati’s aside about what the pastor should have done differently. Rather than turning back, Abati said, he should have “stood with your faith” and “seen it through to the end,” rather than treating the moment as content to be filmed and abandoning it the instant it got difficult. It’s a strikingly on-target observation, whether or not Abati intended the full weight of it, because it’s almost precisely the lesson the original story of the sea’s splitting was designed to teach in the first place.
What Actually Happened at the Sea
The Torah’s account of Kriat Yam Suf, the splitting of the Sea of Reeds, does not describe Moses working a piece of theater with a staff while everyone else watched from dry land. It describes a terrified nation trapped between Pharaoh’s charging army and an impassable sea, and it describes God’s response to Moses’s own prayer for help as, essentially, a rebuke: “And the Lord said unto Moses, Wherefore criest thou unto Me? Speak unto the children of Israel, that they go forward” (Exodus 14:15). The instruction wasn’t for Moses to perform a miracle in front of a passive crowd. It was for the people themselves to start walking into the water before there was any sea to walk through.
The Sages fill in the details of how that unfolded in a well-known midrash. As the tribes stood at the water’s edge, frozen, arguing over who should go in first, one man did not wait for a debate to resolve or a miracle to arrive on cue. Nachshon ben Aminadav, a prince of the tribe of Judah, walked directly into the sea while the path forward was still fully submerged. The water kept rising past his neck and up to his nose, and still Nachshon did not turn back. Only once he was in that deep, fully committed, with no path to retreat left that would have kept him dry, did the waters split. The other tribes followed him through on dry ground only after someone had already proven willing to go in without any guarantee that the sea would move at all.
That is the striking contrast the Lagos video accidentally sets up. A man in a white robe walked toward the water expecting the sea to move for him on contact, and when a single wave pushed back, he retreated to shore. Nachshon walked into the water expecting nothing, and kept walking anyway, past the point where retreat was even possible, and the sea moved only after that. The Jewish tradition’s answer to “why didn’t the water part” was never a matter of insufficient staging or the wrong wardrobe. It was that the miracle followed total, sustained commitment and faith, not a gesture toward one.
A Real “Let My People Go” Moment, Even If the Staging Was Off
It’s worth taking a moment away from the humor to say plainly what is actually at stake for a pastor preaching this story in Nigeria specifically. Moses’s demand to Pharaoh was not abstract theology. It was a direct order to free an enslaved people: “And afterward Moses and Aaron went in, and told Pharaoh, Thus saith the Lord God of Israel, Let My people go, that they may hold a feast unto Me in the wilderness” (Exodus 5:1). The Exodus story, at its core, is about a God who leads an oppressed people out of a land where they are being killed and enslaved, into freedom. For well over a decade, Boko Haram and ISWAP have carried out exactly the kind of enslavement that story was written against, most infamously the 2014 abduction of 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, whose leader vowed on camera to “sell them in the slave market.” The U.S. State Department redesignated Nigeria a “country of particular concern” over religious freedom violations in the fall of 2025, and UN experts warned this June of what they called credible allegations of slavery and trafficking targeting Christian women and girls in the country’s north. A pastor invoking Moses on a Nigerian beach is not reaching for a random Bible story. Whether he fully articulated it or not, he was reaching for the one story in Scripture that promises Christians living under real, documented persecution that God has led an oppressed people out of bondage before, and can do it again.
This backdrop makes the video worth taking seriously as a sign of exactly what Abati gestured toward without quite naming it: that the appetite for these ancient stories, for a God who acts in history and asks people to move first, hasn’t gone anywhere, in a country where the stakes of that story are still painfully real. What separates a viral clip from a Nachshon ben Aminadav is not the sincerity of the faith behind it. It’s whether the person is still walking forward once the water reaches their nose.