Hey friends, welcome back.
Happy Wednesday,
midway through the week here as we continue to get into the story of the
book of Exodus.
We are some light at the end of the tunnel as we get through this section on the plagues.
It has been long.
It’s been fairly intense.
This is a significant and serious part of the book.
Today we go into – I’ve not counted the verses,
Michael, but I – just a quick overview.
This has to be
the plague with the longest description as we move into chapter 10 here
and the 8th plague,
which is locusts.
And again, we mentioned this yesterday,
I think we may have said something Monday too.
We get a small tweak to the formula with each new plague.
We see some language we’ve seen before.
We see some things we haven’t seen before,
and the same thing will be true today.
This is probably long for me to just read it to you.
You can read this yourself,
but let me hit a couple of the high points here as we go
through chapter 10.
“The Lord said to Moses,
‘Go to Pharaoh,
for I have hardened his heart
and the heart of his officials,
in order that I may show signs of mine among them,
that you may tell
your children and grandchildren how I made fools of the Egyptians,
and what signs I have
done among them, so that you may know that I am the Lord.’”
Let’s stop there for a moment,
Michael.
So this is one of the changes we’ve seen.
Normally, we get this language of Pharaoh’s heart being hardened at the end of the thing.
Here we get it at the beginning.
God tells Moses, “I’ve hardened his heart.”
And now there’s a new condition,
to make fools of them,
which is language we’ve not really seen,
and that you may tell your grandchildren how I made fools of them.
And I’ve done this,
“So that you may know I am the Lord.”
And this is a very interesting and very subtle transition to some language we’re going to
hear in the rest of Exodus.
As God has been working out this sort of
negotiation/contest with the Pharaoh,
we now begin to lay the
groundwork for that relationship shifting and the focus being between God and the people.
And throughout the rest of the book of Exodus,
God is going to say things like,
“Well, I’m going to do this,
and now they’ll know that I’m the Lord.
Now they’ll be faithful.
Now they’ll get on board.
Now they’ll figure it out.”
And we get a little bit of that language here.
This is a demonstrative thing as God understands it,
that his power is on display,
and the response to that will be that the people will know that I am the Lord.
And that’s going to have mixed results in the long run throughout the story.
There’ll be times where they kind of know it and many times where they don’t know it.
But we introduce that idea here,
Michael, and I don’t think we’ve seen this in the plagues yet.
Right.
I also want to point out,
Clint, let’s take a closer look here,
where we’re told that
the heart of his officials are hardened in verse 1.
So there is a broadening,
a widening happening here,
Clint.
There’s both in this purpose statement the idea that the Lord is metering out the sign
of judgment, that action that proves what is the just reward for these things, for this
transigence by Pharaoh.
But there’s also here,
to your point,
a demonstration of power before the people
of Israel, before God’s own people,
a proof that what God promised God is going to accomplish.
And that may not seem unbelievably important at this stage of the story because it’s a
theme introduced relatively new for us.
But if you know the rest of Exodus,
you know how much the people are going to struggle
with that.
They’re going to struggle to remember God’s action.
They’re going to struggle to trust.
They’re going to struggle to pass it on generation to generation.
Here it’s explicitly said,
your children and grandchildren.
And it introduces what I think will be a question that we will all have as the text
continues on, and that is,
how do we pass the faith,
the faith that we see come about
as God performs these signs and miracles of deliverance?
How do we pass on that faith to a generation that didn’t see that
transformation,
that deliverance?
It’s a
thing that is practical to the extent, Clint,
that we asked this question in our churches today.
How do we pass on the good news that we received and the work that God has done?
But I think it’s a specific Exodus question.
And it’s also a specific question that now comes up here as where eight plagues in
and as the plagues get even more and more serious,
they bear more and more weight in
the life of the Egyptians and even the life of the Israelites to some extent.
I think it’s an interesting beginning to some final sets of questions that the plagues are
going to raise here.
Yeah, obviously, this book, as of
our place in it,
has been very heavy with Pharaoh’s
presence and Pharaoh’s interaction.
But as we are at the eighth plague and as we see knowing there are 10,
as we see a transition coming,
the book begins to prepare us,
I think, for the story which Pharaoh fades into the
background and the primary players in the story become God,
Moses and Aaron remain.
But the people of Israel will take that other part of the stage.
And I think they will be the primary now focus,
the relationship between God and the people.
We’re not quite there yet,
but it is coming.
And I think we’ll see,
we see some clues in the language that that transition is going to happen.
So the threat is given here.
We move to this,
the Lord tells
Moses, Moses goes and says to the Pharaoh,
thus says the Lord,
the God of the Hebrews,
how long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?
Let my people go.
And the threat is they will bring locusts.
And let me just read a little bit of this language.
They shall cover the surface of the land so that no one will be able to see the ground.
They will devour the last remnants left alive after the hail.
They shall devour every tree that grows in the field.
They will fill your houses,
the houses of your officials and all the Egyptians,
something that neither your parents nor your grandparents have seen from the day they came on earth
to this day.
Then he turned and went out from the Pharaoh.
So this is the threat that locusts,
an unheard of, an unimagined amount of locusts,
the kind of plague that the world has not yet seen will descend upon the land of Egypt.
And this is interesting,
Michael, as we move on a little further, especially given
what it said here about the hardness of the officials’ hearts,
we get–this is another
wrinkle that we’ve not seen.
Verse 7,
“Pharaoh’s officials said to him,
‘How long will this fellow be a snare for us?
Let the people go,
that they may worship the Lord their God.
Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?’”
So Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh,
and he said to them,
“Go worship the Lord.”
He says, “We will go with our young.”
Well, we’ll get into that in a moment.
But I think this,
Michael, is particularly interesting.
We saw in the last plague that some of the officials prepared for it.
They heeded the word of the Lord,
and they took their livestock,
and they put them under
cover so that they wouldn’t be harmed by the hail.
Here,
they are very bold in confronting the pharaoh.
“How long are you going to keep this up?
Can’t you see we’ve lost?
It’s over, Pharaoh.
Let these people go.
Do what the Lord says.
Do what their God is asking,
or we’re all doomed.” And this is,
in the context of the story,
almost unimaginable, and I think a very good
narrative technique to show us how desperate it has become in Egypt and how convinced and how
beat down maybe these people are. Yeah, at this point, Pharaoh stands alone.
I mean, the text makes that clear.
And even though at the beginning of this story,
we saw that the Lord hardened both the pharaoh
and his officials’ hearts,
here even at least some of those officials are speaking plainly the truth,
that we don’t stand a chance in the face of this God.
And Pharaoh is going to take a similar path to what he’s taken before where he
relents, where he gives of something.
But maybe what is going to be different as we see this story turn,
Clint, is as Pharaoh gets
more and more entrenched,
he begins to want to start negotiating details.
He wants to pivot away from sort of making a lie and then turning back on it at the last second,
which has been our pattern up to this point.
And now we see him beginning to quibble over who’s going to go is the next question he’s going to
ask.
And as the story continues,
it’s fascinating to see how,
in many ways, I see it like a hallway
with many different doors.
Pharaoh’s trying every door.
Will this one work?
Nope, that didn’t work.
Will this option work?
Nope, that doesn’t work.
And he’s narrowing down the possibilities of,
“Can I out power?
Can I outsmart?
Can I outwit these people or their God?”
And here, we’re going to see a new path,
a new opportunity that he’s going to explore.
Yeah, I want to be careful because I don’t want to be insulting to people who serve the public.
But he is very much here functioning in the role of the kind of stereotypical or
stereotyped politician.
“I’m losing, but do I have to lose everything?
Can I still weasel my way into something that would be beneficial for me?”
And the out he sees here is that he won’t let the children go.
Now,
in the story, we’ve seen Pharaoh claim lordship over children before.
That’s where this story started as they threw children in the river.
Here he says, “The Lord indeed be with you if I ever let the little ones go.
Plainly you have an evil purpose in mind.
Never.
Your men may go and worship the Lord,
for that’s what you’re asking.”
And they were driven out from Pharaoh’s presence.
This again is new.
We’re going to see this again in a moment.
But here Moses and Aaron are sort of expelled from the Pharaoh’s presence.
And Pharaoh says, “I’m not letting the children go.”
Some of the men can go, great,
but I will not let the children go.
Still trying to, I don’t know, save face or convince himself he’s at some level in control or in charge.
But then not meeting the arrangement,
the plague comes.
The Lord tells Moses,
“Stretch your hand.” And you can read this.
This is verse 12 following.
It’s as bad as predicted, locusts are everywhere.
What is interesting as we come out of that,
the Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron again
and says here in verse 17,
late 16 and 17,
“I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you,
so forgive my sins just this once and pray to the Lord that at least he
removed the deadly thing from me.”
So he went out from Pharaoh and prayed,
“And the Lord changed the wind into a west wind
what lifted the locusts and drove them into the sea.”
Now, the single one remained,
verse 20, “But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he would
not let the Israelites go.”
So we bookend this part of the story with Lord saying how hard his heart and then doing
that at the end.
Most of this is a kind of pattern we’ve seen.
We saw a little bit of this yesterday,
“I have sinned against the
Lord,” theological language from the Pharaoh,
again, very unexpected and very telling.
And that brings us closer to the kind of final showdown as this sort of negotiation
now has started and it will continue in the next plague.
I think the orientation that Pharaoh has to children is really interesting.
We know, of course, that the people of Israel were gaining in strength.
We’re told that’s the reason why he ordered for the young male babies to be killed.
There’s some wondering if
potentially here holding back the children is a way of keeping
some version of collateral,
right, that the men wouldn’t leave permanently if that meant
leaving behind all of their children,
that they wouldn’t try to escape or get away.
Maybe there’s some truth in that,
but the text doesn’t go out of its way to provide
a reason for Pharaoh’s unwillingness to budge.
The text makes it clear,
in fact, it puts in Pharaoh’s mouth the language of sin.
And I think it’s striking that as the story continues,
the text of Exodus doesn’t really
even anymore present this
as Pharaoh misunderstanding or Pharaoh misreading the
circumstance.
It doesn’t really present Pharaoh as if he doesn’t see that he is
continually losing.
It leans back on this language that we’ve talked about so many times already,
Clint, that idea of the hardened heart,
this idea that this is a stubborn will.
This isn’t an oversight.
And the fact that Pharaoh is so committed to the path in which he continues to wreak
devastation upon the people by his unwillingness to be humbled that were used earlier in our study today,
it is striking.
And I think it’s worth noting that while the people of Israel won’t in the future maybe
struggle with humility in the same way,
they certainly will embody stubbornness.
And there is a contrast here between Pharaoh’s heels dug in, unwillingness to move,
and what we know is going to happen after deliverance.
And that is the people are stubborn and in some cases dig their heels in and are unwilling to move.
If this seems like it’s leaning hard on Pharaoh,
Clint, I guess my point is
that I wonder if there’s actually not some universality if you read the book of Exodus as a whole.
Here it’s Pharaoh said against God’s people,
but there’s going to be other times where
God’s people are doing their own harm to themselves as well.
Yeah, I think that’s fair, Michael.
I think Pharaoh is characterized here as not operating from a place of wisdom, of logic,
this inference, we’ve talked about it a lot and we don’t need to rehash it,
but this inference that maybe some of it is being done to him.
But there remains, we’ve not heard in multiple chapters now,
we’ve not heard any reference
to Israel’s role as labor in Egypt.
The Pharaoh does not seem to be counting the costs of what it would mean to lose some of the workforce.
We are not operating there anymore.
This is just about stubbornness,
an unwillingness to concede,
an unwillingness to bow,
to humble.
His own officials are now
telling him, “It’s over, be done.”
I think we’re not in a place where this is about anything except Pharaoh’s ego,
Pharaoh’s sinful pride, and I think the story has carefully delivered us there,
but I would make the case
that’s exactly what it wants us to focus on at this point in the text.
Yeah, I think it’s hard at this point to be looking for lessons.
This part of the narrative,
maybe that language about the generations,
maybe this idea of showing God’s power,
maybe there’s a lesson in that,
but I don’t think that the narrative has been constructed to
deliver us to a devotional type outcome.
At this point, we’re watching what happens when
the human sinful heart refused to allow God to be God.
Yeah, if there’s a lesson in here,
it’s a lesson through the history by which Israel
is reminded our God is superior to all the other powers of the earth.
But it’s not a
takeaway teaching lesson.
It’s a glimpse of history that has reminders in it and a certain
call to remember in it,
but it’s primarily about what happened when a ruler of a powerful
empire took it upon himself to anger God and the punishment that he receives because of it.
I think that’s the ground we’re covering here.
There may be other stuff in it,
but I think fundamentally that’s what it’s about.
Yeah, you already tipped off,
Clint.
It’s been a slog.
The plagues require some commitment,
but it’s about to get very different,
and there’s a lot that’s to come that will be
incredibly, substantially important, fundamentally important, not only to the rest of our reading
of Exodus, but actually to Christians in the New Testament and some of the rest of the Bible’s
use of metaphor and understanding are going to come in the next couple chapters.
So certainly stick with us.
Yeah, hang in there.
It doesn’t get easier necessarily,
but I think in some ways it gets
more interesting, and it certainly then opens up to the rest of the story.
So I hope you can
join us tomorrow and following.