918 Biblical Characters – Yahweh vs. Pharaoh, Son of Ra - Plagues of Egypt
Exploring Biblical Characters • Sermon • Submitted
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- Welcome to world championship wrestling!
- What we have here in today’s passage is a showdown, come, all-out war
- Pharaoh is a king who possesses the Egyptians & the Israelites
- But the Israelites belong to Yahweh God & are His possession
- Pharaoh has illegally & wrongfully possessed them & now is enslaving them – they need to be liberated - set free - from their slavery & captivity
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- This is a show down between the eternal God, Yahweh, & the power of the state
- Pharaoh is here represented as the state who assumes the status & rights of deity in order to manipulate & rule despotically over people
- But its more than this – it’s the entry of a new champion on to the world stage
- This champion is revealed as Yahweh, creator of heaven & earth
- He is the One who has selected the Israelites to be His people, in order to bring to all the earth the knowledge & salvation of God
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- Pharaoh, on the other hand, is Amenhotep II & was considered the Son of Ra, the Sun god
- Excavations of mummies have found that the average height of women in Egypt was 5 ft & of men 5½ ft
- Pharaoh, Amenhotep II, was 6 ft tall
- He considers that he owns the people & that they exist to serve him & the gods of Egypt
- What they owe him is absolute obedience
- This was so ingrained into the psyche of Pharaoh & the Egyptians that it would take virtually the annihilation of Egypt, to break free
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- We need to see, in historical detail, God (Yahweh) going into bat for His people
- We are seeing here the first ever redemption of the people of God
6 “Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments.
- When you go to Cash Converters, if you sell something to them, you get cash in return for the item you sold to them
- Perhaps, someone is strapped for cash & they decide to sell an old family heirloom
- But if you want it back later, you can go back & for a larger sum of money, you can get that heirloom back (supposing that no one had bought it in the meantime)
- It means that you have redeemed it back – you can only speak of redeem when it comes to something that had belonged to you
- You redeem back that which, to start with, was yours
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- As I have mentioned before, Moses is on what seems to him as a doomed mission, at least, through the process
- God has announced that Pharaoh will not relent & will not let the Israelites go
- But more than that, God will harden his heart so that he won’t let them go
- No doubt, for a servant of the Lord, this is a conundrum
- You want him to let the people go, but you will cause him to not let them go – I’m not following!
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- This requires a lot of thought as it is one of the conundrums Christians face in understanding God
- For me, I’ve come to love & understand why it is so true
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- God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, so Pharaoh hardens his own heart
- The two issues of God’s sovereignty & human response/free will are not separate as we tend to try & understand the issue
- They are inexplicably linked together
- What God decrees man follows
14 What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be! 15 For He says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” 16 So then it does not depend on the man who wills or the man who runs, but on God who has mercy. 17 For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, “For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power in you, and that My name might be proclaimed throughout the whole earth.” 18 So then He has mercy on whom He desires, and He hardens whom He desires.
- Paul writes this to counter the argument of why most Jews have rejected Christ yet the Gentiles are being incorporated into the kingdom of Christ (mercy on whom He has mercy)
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- God hardens Pharaoh’s heart which gives opportunity for God to show His power & for Israel & all nations to benefit as they come to know what this God is like – so this becomes a revelation (an unveiling of the true creator of all things)
- As I have mentioned many times of Rahab in Jericho & how she protected the spies after accepting the truth of what she had heard about Yahweh & His mighty deeds
10 “For we have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea before you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to the two kings of the Amorites who were beyond the Jordan, to Sihon and Og, whom you utterly destroyed. 11 “When we heard it, our hearts melted and no courage remained in any man any longer because of you; for the Lord your God, He is God in heaven above and on earth beneath.
- Through Pharaoh, God has is making Himself known even to the world
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- Likewise, Judas Iscariot was used of God to betray Jesus & have Jesus handed over to the Romans & condemned to die to bring the salvation of God to the world
12 “While I was with them, I was keeping them in Your name which You have given Me; and I guarded them and not one of them perished but the son of perdition, so that the Scripture would be fulfilled.
1. First Wave of Warnings - Blood, Frogs, Gnats
1. First Wave of Warnings - Blood, Frogs, Gnats
- There are 9 judgements poured out upon the Egyptians in these passages in today’s reading
- Moses is going to go through a process where he will encounter rejection, threats, intimation & the like, because God will harden Pharaoh’s heart to resist Moses’ warnings
- There are lessons here:
- 1st lesson, Moses is 80 yrs of age serving God in a very uncomfortable way – no retirement when you serve the Lord & no age is a barrier to whatever God would have us do
- 2nd lesson, God may work against your success in a ministry (a work of His) if it means success for His cause - in ways that are other than apparent
- Think about that for a minute – we don’t always know the result of what happens in our service to God
Q. How did the apostle Paul consider his situation in His Christian work?
11 To this present hour we are both hungry and thirsty, and are poorly clothed, and are roughly treated, and are homeless; 12 and we toil, working with our own hands; when we are reviled, we bless; when we are persecuted, we endure; 13 when we are slandered, we try to conciliate; we have become as the scum of the world, the dregs of all things, even until now.
- He wasn’t always successful in the work that he was involved with in the Lord - he ended up being treated woefully & several times in prison
- In fact, God is concerned with our faithfulness in our work for Him, not on how prominent we are or how successful we are in the eyes of the world
- These matters are in His hands
- What matters is what we do with what God has given us & that we do it with all of our might, with grateful, loving hearts to the Lord
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- I’ve reduced, from what is a rather vast amount of Scripture, to 3 clusters of 3 judgements that I’ll speak upon, seen here in this graph
- This graph is governed by a structure (right column) – where Moses meets Pharaoh at the river; comes before him or just uses a symbolic gesture prior to the judgements being released
- However, I’m going to run through the plagues in sets of 3 from the first set to the third
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- The first cluster of 3 are the river Nile turning to blood, the frogs overrunning the land & the gnats or mosquitoes biting you relentlessly
- This speaks here to, mostly, the loss of comfort
- The magicians can replicate these feats, so Pharaoh’s heart is unmoved
Q. How could the magicians mimic these miracles?
- Possibly through trickery & illusion – I won’t go into it, but there is a real art to this & they manage to convince Pharaoh
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- These magicians are mentioned by the apostle Paul in his letter to Timothy
- It suggests that, possibly, Paul understood these magicians to be illusionists or deceivers who knew that they couldn’t match the reality of the miracles, except, by trickery
8 Just as Jannes and Jambres opposed Moses, so these men also oppose the truth, men of depraved mind, rejected in regard to the faith.
- It’s like these men knew the truth but still opposed it & they illustrate the sort of men who have infiltrated the church at Ephesus
- Paul calls upon Timothy to deal with this situation in this church
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- It is important to note that these judgements of God against Egypt & Pharaoh were not merely attacking a resistance to obeying God
- These judgements of God are attacking their belief system
Each plague was an assertion of the sovereignty of Yahweh over the deity (or deities) responsible for the area of nature particularly under attack. (Eugene H. Merrill)1
- Yahweh defeated the Egyptian gods of which there were about 80
The Egyptians considered sacred the lion, the ox, the ram, the wolf, the dog, the cat, the ibis, the vulture, the falcon, the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the cobra, the dolphin, different varieties of fish, trees, and small animals including the frog, scarab, locust and other insects. In addition to these there were anthropomorphic gods; that is, men in the prime of life such as Amun, Atum, or Osiris.(John Davis)2
- The Nile was sacred – a document speaks of a “hymn to the Nile”
Hail to thee, Oh Nile, that issues from the Earth and comes to keep Egypt alive!... He that waters the Meadows which Recreated, in order to keep every kid alive. He that makes to drink the desert and the place is distant from water: that is his dew coming down (from) heaven.(John Davis)3
- The plagues of Yahweh were to prove the impotency of Pharaoh both as a ruler and a god & to show that Yahweh is the God of heaven & of the earth - He rules over all!
- With regards to the final plague, the 10th plague
12 ‘For I will go through the land of Egypt on that night, and will strike down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both man and beast; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments—I am the Lord.
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- The 1st plague turns out against the Nile – considered to be the life source of Egypt
- Judgement was rendered against Hapi, considered the spirit of the Nile & Khnum was considered the guardian of the river’s sources
Q. What would the people, when the goddess, Neith, who took special interest in the large fish of the Nile, think when Yahweh turns it into blood or the likeness of the composition of blood &all the fish die?
- What we have here is a statement of sovereignty – who really is King!
- The only way the Egyptians could get water was to dig wells around the Nile to be able satisfy the thirst of their family and animals
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- Then there are the out of control frogs & the crazily annoying billions of, perhaps, mosquitoes
- All very uncomfortable, but still of not enough magnitude to move Pharaoh
- Also, these things came upon the Israelites as well, so Pharaoh is unmoved
- But it will ramp up in intensity as God starts to hit their health, their animals/their property & makes a distinction between the Egyptians & His people
2. Second Wave of Warnings – Loss of Health (Flies, Pestilence, Boils)
2. Second Wave of Warnings – Loss of Health (Flies, Pestilence, Boils)
- These judgements here seem to hit harder than the first 3
- So there is a progressive intensity that we witness as these judgements come
- Now, with these 3, there are actual losses of personal health
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- It is at this point that the Lord draws a distinction between His people & the Egyptians
22 “But on that day I will set apart the land of Goshen, where My people are living, so that no swarms of flies will be there, in order that you may know that I, the Lord, am in the midst of the land.
- Interestingly, in the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, you find there judgements that the Lord pours out upon the earth
- The Bowls full of the wrath of God
- There is a distinction drawn, in the book of Revelation, between the people of Jesus & the people of the world & it all hinges on whether a person has sided, publicly, with Jesus Christ – so no secret Christians allowed
- The test was whether you kept the faith in the midst of persecutions from the world
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- There are 2 types of wrath that you find in the book of Revelation
- The wrath of God & the wrath of Satan
- All people will experience wrath from one of either source – either the wrath of God or the wrath of Satan
- The wrath of Satan is aimed at the church
- The wrath of God, however, is poured out on the people of the world but not on the church of Jesus Christ
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- A person, in this life, may escape the wrath of Satan by going along with the world – by conforming to the patterns of this world
- Yes, you will avoid the wrath of Satan & it is indeed the easy path for it is the wide path that takes you through the big gate & you enter comfortably with the 10’s of millions who happily would go along with you
- However, the problem with this is that this person will face the wrath of Jesus
15 Then the kings of the earth and the great men and the commanders and the rich and the strong and every slave and free man hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains; 16 and they said to the mountains and to the rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the presence of Him who sits on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb; 17 for the great day of their wrath has come, and who is able to stand?”
- So, there’s a definite choice that humanity must make & since the Saviour & King of the Universe has come, there can be no turning back from a decision that must be made in His favour
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- So, live for Christ now, experience the wrath of Satan, along with the church, but escape the wrath of God
- Or reject Christ, experience & join in with the ways of the world, escaping the wrath of Satan, BUT then open yourself up to the terrible wrath of God
- One is temporary but one is eternal
- I wish it never had to be this way – but that is how it is
- Faith is not this little thing that resides in a corner, unnoticed & hidden away
- Faith is a giant & larger than a billboard on a freeway
- The Lord will make a distinction between His people & the people of the world – have you made your choice yet – if you know the implications of what I’m saying, you now know enough to make that choice
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- The plagues/judgements have intensified
- Flies, pestilence, boils
- Flies may not seem to be such a bad judgement, but you haven’t been out to Brad’s farm – in summer, the flies there could pick you up & carry you away
- There were so many flies come over Egypt that they seem to have putrefied the land – the word may also mean other types of insects, we aren’t sure exactly what type
- I’ve seen caucus’ of animals that have been flyblown & full of maggots
- This seems to have happened to the point where it says that “the land was laid waste because of the swarms of flies”
- But in Goshen, where the Israelites lived, there was no plague of flies
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- Pestilence kills animals & Boils are an attack on your health
- The Egyptians lose both health & property as a result of these judgements
- Bulls & cows were sacred and Yahweh, through this event, has shown the impotence of the gods of Egypt in preventing this disaster
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- This is so fascinating
- Elijah had the same problem which resulted in the showdown between himself & the prophets of Baal at Mt. Carmel
Q. Why is it that people gravitate to false gods?
- You might say that there are many who don’t believe in gods today, but I would say, hang on
- You don’t have to be a believer in some false deity to gravitate to false gods
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- You can believe in the sacredness of the earth - trees and animals - by having a hissy fit is someone cuts down a tree or kills an animal for food
- Plenty of the tree-huggers around today so there are no shortages of idolaters
- The essence of idolatry is when God almighty in the OT or Jesus Christ in the NT is displaced by other objects that are, to a person, more valuable
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- Certainly, in the OT, to remake the creator of the world into idols of wood & stone are all designed for the person to gain control over the deity
- There is this symbiotic relationship (you scratch my back, I’ll scratch your) between the worshippers of the false god & the false god itself
- One scratches the other’s back so to speak (in their belief system)
- The false god is used as a tool of manipulation by the people while they still give their religious devotion
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- Yahweh is unable to be manipulated by the ploys of devious hearted people
- Yahweh God stands alone as the sovereign one, unable to be used by men & controlled by men
- Pharaoh tries to deceive & manipulate but the door is shut, shut, shut
- Alright, you can go, but leave your children behind
- Oh alright, you can go, but leave your animals behind
- The idolater never gets it – Only submission to the creator God’s will is the way forward
- Anyone who seeks to control God will end up ruined, but come under His care through obedience & you know His blessing & protection
- Which is what happens in this next set of judgements
- The Egyptians are given a warning & an opportunity to obey – some do & their animals are spared
3. Third Wave of Warnings – Loss of Livelihood (Hail, Locusts, Darkness)
3. Third Wave of Warnings – Loss of Livelihood (Hail, Locusts, Darkness)
- These last 3 judgements speak to an even more serious situation
- The loss of livelihood
- Hail, locusts & a darkness that can be literally felt
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- What the pestilence in the field didn’t destroy, the hail did
- But again the point is clearly made that no hail was found in Goshen
- The opportunity to believe came as the servants of Pharaoh ACTED in faith & in fear of the word of the Lord & brought their animals in from the field
20 The one among the servants of Pharaoh who feared the word of the Lord made his servants and his livestock flee into the houses; 21 but he who paid no regard to the word of the Lord left his servants and his livestock in the field.
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- We remember what locust plague is like – anyone who attended Anna’s birthday party at the resort will remember the billions of locusts that were flying over head & all around us
- (2x photos) Ros & I stopped on the way back at the Moama Bowling Club & took this picture of the greens
- Mind you, after this event, they now have an artificial surface
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- Then there was this supernatural darkness – so dark & deep that it could be felt
- Egypt was immobilised for 3 days as they could not see even a thing, yet, there was light in Israel
- All of this & Pharaoh’s heart was hardened
- It has been shown how inept & impotent Pharaoh & the gods of Egypt are before this awesome, omnipotent God – the One & only who created the heavens & the earth
In the biblical picture, Pharaoh is deprived of his divinity and appears as a tyrant of grotesque hubris. By portraying Pharaoh as ineffectual again and again, the biblical picture denies Pharaoh’s divinity.4
-- Professor Jan Assmann
- Yes, God hardened Pharaoh’s’ heart & yet, Pharaoh acted out of that hardening as if it were totally of him – it was of Pharaoh
27 But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he was not willing to let them go. 28 Then Pharaoh said to him, “Get away from me! Beware, do not see my face again, for in the day you see my face you shall die!” 29 Moses said, “You are right; I shall never see your face again!”
- All that was left for this mortal – this mere man - was to be stubborn & unrepentant in defeat
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- This is the mystery of God’s providential control
- However, before you get all concerned about divine hardening, be glad for the divine calling upon your life
- You have to see this from the total inability of man to return to God
- Divine help, divine mercy & divine intervention, is necessary
28 And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. 29 For those whom He foreknew, He also predestined to become conformed to the image of His Son, so that He would be the firstborn among many brethren; 30 and these whom He predestined, He also called; and these whom He called, He also justified; and these whom He justified, He also glorified.
- But then, this becomes our response, since the Lord has taken hold of us & transformed us in real time & in real life (your here)
- He has taken possession of us & made us His & no one will separate us from the love, God has for His chosen people
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Communion - Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) this week. Passover Supper remember redemption; Lord's Supper - remember redemption from sin & death
1 Eugene H. Merrill, Kingdom of Priests: A History of Old Testament Israel, Second Edition., (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), 81.
2 John J. Davis, Moses and the Gods of Egypt (Baker, Grand Rapids, 1991) 95.
3 John J. Davis, Moses and the Gods of Egypt (Baker, Grand Rapids, 1991) 99.
4 https://www.thetorah.com/article/pharaohs-divine-role-in-maintaining-maat-order