You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?
Is there something here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink. Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages.
Welcome to More Than Ink. You know, during the wintertime right now, sometimes I look outside when I wake up in the morning and see all this snow outside, 9 or 10 inches, and I think, oh, I got to shovel the driveway. But what about if you looked across the street and there was no snow?
No snow at all. What's up with that? What is that?
Well, that exactly is going to happen today in Egypt on More Than Ink. Well, good morning. This is Jim. And this is Dorothy.
And we're delighted that you're with us. We're reading our way through Exodus, and we're in this section Exodus, which is actually pretty well known for a lot of people. Everybody knows the plagues on Egypt, or at least they know reference to the story. Everybody knows about the plagues.
But very few people look at it closely enough to really discern what it's telling us about God and about hearts. Yeah, yeah. So, so far, to recap, we've been through turning the water into blood, the Nile into blood, lots of frogs, even in the ovens, in the bedrooms. And then we had those bugs coming up out of the dirt, you know, the gnats, or lice, or whatever that's all about. And then we got the swarms of bugs, whether that's flies, probably, mosquitoes, maybe, we don't know.
And now we're up to number five on the list. So we will barely get halfway through the ten plagues at the end of today. So if you're joining with us, you're reading with us, we're reading out of the ESV version, and we're in chapter nine of Exodus, why don't we just dive in and just see what's going to happen.
Sounds good. Yep, yep. So we're picking it up at the fifth plague. And they all sort of begin this way. Then the Lord said to Moses, verse one of chapter nine, Go in to Pharaoh and say to him, Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, Let my people go, that they may serve me. For if you refuse to let them go and still hold them, behold, the hand of the Lord will fall with a severe plague upon your livestock that are in the field, the horses, the donkeys, the camels, the herds, and the flocks. But the Lord will make a distinction between the livestock of Israel and the livestock of Egypt, so that nothing of all that belongs to the people of Israel shall die. And the Lord set a time saying, Tomorrow the Lord will do this thing in the land. And the next day, the Lord did this thing. Should we stop there?
Yeah, that's a good place to stop. Because this is the warning statement. Yeah, it's the warning statement. So this time we do get a warning. We've been keeping tally and sometimes he does give Pharaoh a warning, sometimes he doesn't.
This time he gives him a warning and tells him what's going to happen so he can actually qualify with his eyes and see that's exactly what he promised to do. Well, and it's kind of interesting that as I was looking back over all the ten plagues a couple days ago, it becomes clear that there is actually kind of a pattern here. To the warnings? To the warnings that God says, now go to Pharaoh and then he'll give him a warning, give Pharaoh a warning. And then depending on Pharaoh's response, the next plague comes without warning.
I've seen that three times in a row in my readings. So I think we ought to be paying attention to that, that when God gives a warning he's very specific. He says, now if you don't do what I'm asking you to do or telling you to do, then this will happen. And it would sort of make sense then that God would bring you the next plague without any warning if you were that hard-boiled. And one of the questions to keep in mind when you're reading any kind of a biblical narrative is, what is this telling me about God? Well, I think one of the things we can take from this whole sequence of plagues is that God does warn of disaster, of destruction. Now I'm telling you, if you continue in the way you're going, I will respond a certain way. So that's actually helpful. The question is, do we heed God's warning?
Which we know Pharaoh didn't. So that's all I really wanted to say about warnings, but we're going to see it not with every plague, but with about every third one. Right, right. Well, you know, it reminds me of when my folks would warn me, don't do this or don't do that and stuff like that. And in your adolescent wisdom you say to yourself, well, I think I know better than that. That's not a really good warning.
I'll just do what I want. And then it turns out poorly. Well, God does that in our general lives, too. I mean, he tells us biblically what's good for us and what's bad for us, and we end up as aging adolescents saying, no, I think I know better. And then, you know, after it's all done, we say to ourselves, you know, why didn't I just listen?
Why didn't I pay attention? Yeah, so it's not as though God's springing the stuff on us cold. He's telling us what's going to happen if we don't do this, and you can use the education of experience, which is usually pretty painful, or you can just say, yeah, I think I'll go with what God says. Yeah, so the repeated thing here is God saying every time, let my people go, let my people go, that they may serve me.
My people, not your people. Yeah, and that phrase also, I included on this, too, that's not a new phrase, but let my people, there's the emphasis on who these people belong to for one thing. But even the second half of that statement I find fascinating, that they may serve me. So doesn't it sound like they're just swapping being slaves from Moses to being slaves to God?
I mean, is that a good swap in that sense? And that's where our modern understanding sort of gets in the way, because we see the ultimate freedom of man, you know, not being under anybody's thumb in that particular sense. But from God's perspective, when we live in a relationship with God, we actually live to serve Him. Now, does that make us God's dishwashers?
Does this sound like a bad deal? And you have to understand kind of Kingdom thinking in a sense here, because what happens is that you always serve somebody. You're always in somebody's Kingdom in that particular sense. And so, yeah, if we are in God's Kingdom, what we do is we serve His will and not our own. And it's the will issue that's really very different here in this service. You know, a servant in a household who washes someone's dishes, they do it because the master of the house says you have to. It's the will that prevails.
Well, in God's Kingdom, we just basically say we want God's will to prevail, and that makes us serving Him. It made me think, too, I looked back at what John the Baptist's father had said. Remember just before John the Baptist, well, when John the Baptist was born? And it just rang a bell for me.
I went back and looked. It's in Luke 1. And so when Zacharias gets his tongue back, through the Spirit, he prophesies and says some remarkable things about what's happening in the bigger picture with John the Baptist and the birth of Jesus and all that kind of stuff. And listen to what he says there, because he says that what's happening in Zacharias' real-time experience with the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus is a fulfillment of a promise that God made to Abraham.
And here's what that promise is. It's in Luke 1, and you can sort of pick it up around verse 73, but he says he's following through with this oath that he swore to our father Abraham to grant us that we, being delivered from the hand of our enemies, that would be Pharaoh here, might serve him without fear, might serve God. So really the normal picture of life with God is living, serving Him, but basically saying we want your will to be everything in the place that we live, and you're in charge.
And so that's what's signaled here. It isn't trading slavery with Pharaoh for slavery with God. It's saying, no, we want to live in a place where God's in charge, where His rule, His will rules. And that's really the core idea of this service word right here. Well, and that serving Him comes after being delivered by Him.
Because at this same point, I was thinking about earlier in Exodus in chapter 6 when God had said through Moses, say therefore, this is chapter 6, 6, to the sons of Israel, I'm the Lord. I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will deliver you from their bondage. I will redeem you.
See, we read this a few weeks ago. Verse 7, then I will take you from my people and I will be your God. And you shall know that I'm the Lord your God who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptian. Now here's the important part about serving. And I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession. I am the Lord your God.
Right? We serve the one who delivered us, and we serve out of gratitude and love. Well, and it reminds me of those passages in the New Testament where it says we've been taken from one kingdom and placed into another kingdom.
Right, right. Because there really only are two kingdoms. There really are only two kingdoms, yeah.
And who do you want to serve? A Pharaoh who just wants to make you a dishwasher and a brick maker? Or do you want to serve a God who loves you and who provides for you and, you know, it's a whole different kind of idea. So this is just kingdom talk. Okay, there's something else in this warning that's really intriguing to me. And that is in verse 3 he says, Now behold, the hand of the Lord will fall with a very severe plague upon your livestock. Okay, so the warning is about the plague on the livestock. But that phrase, the hand of the Lord, set me thinking. God had said to them in Exodus back in 3, he had said to Moses, Now I know Pharaoh is only going to let you out under compulsion. Right, right. He said again in chapter 6, He's only going to let you out under a strong hand.
It's got to be a big thing. Here's the first time God has said in the plagues, Now the strong hand of the Lord will fall very severely. So it's almost like the first four plagues were warning plagues. Yeah, here's the hand of the Lord very clearly.
And it struck me too as well. We're not just talking about the killing of food, you know, meat on the hoof. Well, no. We're talking about animals that work for you. Plow animals, cart pulling animals. And transportation animals and the entire thing. And you know, the equivalent in our civilization right now is everything we use as a modern convenience suddenly God's going to take away.
As well as the food, you know. So it turns out that the way you get from city to city on camels, you know, how you pull a plow, the entire thing. Everything you rely upon to make your civilization work that kind of force multiplies for you is going to be gone.
So this is a very radical, very exhaustive turning off of the core of their economy in a lot of ways. So not just we're losing some cows. You know, something else is interesting too, that the first plagues were over the natural world.
Right. The water, the frogs, the flies, gnats, swarms, whatever those are. But now suddenly God is turning his hand against the living creatures, right?
The livestock. And in the next plague we're going to see is against the human bodies. Yeah, it seems to be getting closer and closer. These plagues are escalating and getting closer and closer.
Like God, you're not listening to me, you're not listening to me, you're not listening to me. Yeah, yeah. Even though last time the swarms, he said, ruined the land. Right, right.
Made it a horrible place to live. Well, it's getting pretty close to home here when all of your animals are dead. Yeah. This is a big deal.
Okay. All of your animals. All the animals that live in the field.
In the field, yeah. That's an important distinction. The cultivated animals. Well, let's see what happens. Okay, we stopped after the Lord did this thing in verse 6.
Okay, so pick it up from there then. All the livestock of the Egyptians died, but not one of the livestock of the people of Israel died. And Pharaoh sent, and behold, not one of the livestock of Israel was dead. But the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did not let the people go. So here we see this distinction that God began with the previous plague.
Pretty obvious. Of setting apart his select people. Yeah. Making a distinction that death is not going to fall on their animals. Yeah, I always wondered whether or not if Pharaoh was tempted to think, well, this was just a natural disaster and we didn't do well this week. Right, right.
You know, well, that's how we had a plague, we said swarms. But now when something like this happens, it's just so undeniable. It's so undeniable. And I think it's interesting, it says that Pharaoh sent. That means he says, oh, yeah, well, let's find out.
Let's go look. So he knew enough at least to check it out. And rather than saying, no, you're lying, I'm not going to listen to you. So he goes and checks it out and sure enough, it's true.
It's true. So there's a little bit of, I don't know what you want to call it, heart movement a little bit with Pharaoh. I don't know which way. Well, this is kind of the beginning of Pharaoh responding differently. He doesn't just turn away and doesn't listen. He starts checking it out.
He starts engaging in a little more conversation. We're going to see this developing in the next few plagues. Yeah, exactly. So Pharaoh sent and behold, not one of the livestock of Israel was dead. Just like God had said. Just like he said, just like he said. And so it happens. But still, was this persuasive for Pharaoh?
No, no. Well, it's interesting because it says here his heart was hardened. So he continued to be in his calloused, stiffened heart state.
Didn't really seem to move him at all. Well, so then we move on to plague number six. And like you were saying before, it really does get close to home here now. Yeah, because now he's going to touch your body. Yeah, this is the first time we have a direct affliction right on their bodies. Not just the things around them, the animals, the swarms, the frogs. So this God is not just God of nature.
He's God over human condition. Yep, and I'm near to you. Look what I can do. Let me pick it up from there. We're in verse eight. The Lord said to Moses and Aaron, Take handfuls of soot from the kiln and let Moses throw them in the air in the sight of Pharaoh. And it shall become fine dust over all the land of Egypt and become boils, breaking out in sores on man and beast throughout the land of Egypt. And so they took soot from the kiln, stood before Pharaoh, and Moses threw it in the air and it became boils, breaking out in sores on man and beast. And the magicians couldn't stand before Moses because of the boils, for the boils came upon the magicians and upon all the Egyptians. But the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh and he did not listen to them as the Lord had spoken to Moses. So the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart. Yeah, the Lord hardened.
As a response to Pharaoh being hardened and hardening his own heart. Yeah, I went back and I've been keeping score. Oh, I have a list too.
Go ahead. Well, I just counted up. Previous up to this point, I see Pharaoh hardening his own heart six times.
That's on the scorecards. And at this point, God hardening his heart three times. That's what I see.
This is like a partnership in a way. And again, like I was saying before, there's a sense in which when God places the challenge in front of Pharaoh, he is giving him opportunity to harden his own heart. So could you say that God's complicit in this hardening? Yeah, because he's given him an opportunity to walk through that door and that's exactly what he's doing.
Well, we're going to see that very clearly stated in the next chapter. Yeah, exactly. I mean, the hardening probably would not advance if God wasn't challenging him.
And here he is challenging him. Right. Well, and you know, that sets me thinking about Proverbs. And I don't have the verse right in front of me. Proverbs says, the heart of the king is like water in the hand of the Lord.
He directs it however he will. Yeah, yeah. You know, kings are, whether they acknowledge God or not, they are subject to God's sovereignty. Yeah. But every king thinks he's immune.
I mean, he's the top dog in this society. Right. And that tension of how our individual personal will and God's sovereignty work together, that is a tension that we cannot fully tease apart. It's simply the way God, the condition that God has said, this isn't how it is.
You are responsible morally for your own condition and I will direct you as I will. Yeah, that's right. We sure don't like that tension. We don't like that. We think we are much more autonomous than that, but it's just not true. When you see a title like King of Kings, it kind of brings home the fact that the kings are not quite as autonomous and powerful as they talk themselves into thinking that they are and how people treat them. There is a king of kings just in charge of all the kings.
And so his will ultimately rules. You know, there's something else I noticed in here. I've never looked this up before, but this whole thing about taking the soot from the kiln and chucking it up in the air, I never made the connection of what that was all about. And it could be as simple as what I found out because I'm a word nerd. So I looked up this word boil, and this word boil comes from an unused root that means to burn. So like when you have something on your skin that's inflamed, that's the word we use. So we're talking about something that inflames the skin. It's hot. It's that kind of thing. So symbolically, it's like when he takes the soot out, it's like he's taking hot embers out of the stove and then chucking it up in the air and chucking it all over so the source of all this heat, this flame, this inflammation, he's basically tossing it on the land, and what do they get?
They get inflamed boils. Oh, that's interesting because that adds color to him standing in front of Pharaoh. Right in front of him, in his face. And flinging it really in his face.
Yeah, in his face. And of course, it's not hot coals. It's just the soot. It's the cold, leftover stuff.
So I think for Pharaoh, he would see this and say, what kind of show is this, man? But representationally, and it's very fine. You can't escape it. It gets on everything. So this came out of the hot place, and now it's going to be all over your skin. You're going to have boils. I think that's the explanation.
I wouldn't put a thousand bucks behind that, but that's the connection. This Shaquine word for boil. From the word boil, yeah.
It's an old word that means to burn. Well, that's interesting. Again, with a narrative, we don't want to spiritualize every detail, right?
We're looking for the main point of the story. But it is very interesting to think about these word connections and the natural connections. Perhaps even there was something in the ash that was acidic from a very natural point of view.
You fling, get ash on you, and depending on what's been burned, the residual chemical may still be in the ash. Yeah, but we don't want to lose the point that to the Egyptians, this imagery meant something powerful. Like we've talked about with their gods before, the frog gods and stuff like that. Even with the cattle, there was a cattle god, which was quite prominent. Was there a fire god?
Not that I could find, no. However, there was a god of medicine, basically, which is Imhotep. So he would be the one who would fix this. But in terms of fire, I couldn't really find a connection on this one. But on the previous one with the animals, yeah, there was this god Hathor, which was a pretty famous goddess. But still, I mean, the whole idea is that here he is in front of Pharaoh, and part of the drama of saying what's going to happen with having his skin, inflammations, is I take this thing that comes out of the oven, which is a source of heat, and now it's on you. So it's very dramatic, and it's really unavoidable. The magicians couldn't, it doesn't say they couldn't replicate it. It says they couldn't stand in front of them long enough.
They couldn't do it. It's particularly disabling for the magicians. Yeah, yeah. And many other places in the Bible when we talk about boils, they always amplify the effect of the boils, the pain by saying that they were all over your body. It wasn't just like on your forearm.
It was like from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. Okay, so I have had systemic hives all over my body, from the sole of my feet to the crown of my head, and that is utter misery. And that's not anywhere near a boil. It's just itching. It's just itching.
But that idea of all of your skin being inflamed is pretty complete. Yeah, and it's miserable. It's miserable. There's just really no relief from it. In fact, that's the thing. Their only relief probably would have been medicines, and they probably would have got that from their god, Imhotep.
But ironically, the people who are closest to a remedy are these magicians, and they can't even help themselves. It's pretty bad. It's pretty bad. Now, we were talking about warnings. This one with the boils doesn't come with a warning. No warning. It comes after. It says now the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and then bang, the Lord says now, go and throw this soot before Pharaoh. After they lose all that livestock.
I mean, it's just tremendously threatening. Okay, so it says here that the boils show up on beasts. On beasts, too. So clearly, it wasn't every animal in Egypt that died, but it was those domestic beasts that they kept in the field for certain, right, for food, for service, for whatever. And we're going to see again, a little down the road, that there still were animals in Egypt, well, because the Israelites still had animals. And it wouldn't take very long after yours had died that you went looking to buy one from somebody who had some, right?
Can I buy one of your sheep? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And it's not a small thing here, not only to mention that they lost all of their work animals, their domestication animals, which is how they're actually going to provide for themselves, but with the boils, they lost even the willingness to go outside and do anything. They were so miserable. Well, not willingness, the ability.
The ability, yeah. I mean, the magicians couldn't even stand there. So this is utterly debilitating to the country. And long term, too, even after the boils are gone, they still don't have their horses and camels.
They do not fall victim to this, right? Right. God is making a distinction between his people and setting them apart from the judgment that is falling on all of Egypt. And that actually is a picture that is borne out through all of the scripture. God sets his people apart.
Those who believe him and trust him, as Jesus said, do not come into judgment, but have passed out of judgment into life. That's John 5.24. Yeah. So that is a picture being laid down here in this exodus story that Jesus himself will complete.
Yeah. God's intention for us is to live in his kingdom with him as king. You'll be our God. We'll be your people. That's always been the catch phrase throughout the entire Old Testament. If you'll be my people, I'll be your God.
That's like a contract in a kingship in a country. And God proves right here that even though they're in this exile here in Egypt, they are still his protected country. They're his people. They're his people. He is their God. And all these plagues and all these things are just not touching them. And it's becoming quite apparent, it should be, to Pharaoh that these are not Pharaoh's people. They clearly are under the protection of an unseen God who is not just unseen. He's declaring through Moses and Aaron exactly what he's doing and exactly what his intentions are.
So Pharaoh, you need to let my people go so they can serve me and my kingdom and my place. So if you haven't been paying attention throughout the plagues so far, start very carefully at this point as we go forward in the next few and pay attention to what is this particular narrative telling us about God? Because with every successive plague now, we're gonna get new information, new statements about God, new intensity, new sense of purpose, especially when we move into next week's passage. God is gonna state a purpose that just stops us in our tracks in the middle of the passage.
Yeah, and it intensifies and gets more personal and more close. I mean, it's bad, but here in chapter nine when you look at these two particular plagues, you can pretty much say that the country went on lockdown. We just did lockdowns for COVID.
Okay, we understand that. It went on lockdown. I mean, their cars didn't run, their plows didn't work, their food animals like cows and stuff. And they got sick. They got their milk and they got sick.
They're too sick to be able to do anything. I mean, the whole economy of Egypt, just the gears just came to a stop. And God's the one that said, I did this, you need to let my people go. So that's where we're at. Well golly, we're running out of time.
I know that happens. So what I see here that is saying about God very clearly is we have a God who speaks. We have a God who warns us and then He acts. And then He acts.
And that's what He says He's gonna do. He makes a distinction for His people. He covers us from the judgment. But this is a God who does what He says He will do.
Right, right. And He protects His people. He goes out ahead of them. He engages those who enslave them. I think nothing enrages God more than to see His loved ones undergo that kind of injustice.
And so He's engaging on their behalf in a way that they will be let go. Now, again, and He'll say this when it comes up next, God could have snapped His fingers and just had this all happen. But sure enough, this whole drama is unfolding and sort of in slow motion through these plagues in order to give us understanding about who God is. And to give Pharaoh understanding about who God is. There is a point in time that even the most proud and powerful like Pharaoh will have to eventually admit who God is and what He can do. And to give the whole earth notice of who God is.
That's where I was going. At some point, every knee will bow and every tongue will confess. They'll agree that God's the one in charge. It's only now that, you know, with the resources we have and what we do, we can kind of fool ourselves into thinking we're in charge and there is no God.
Only a fool says there is no God. Well, we're out of time. Yeah, so chipper up, big wave. We're going to come back with the seventh plague and it does get, it gets a lot more bad. A lot more bad.
It gets worse. So anyway, we're glad you're joining us. I'm Jim.
And I'm Dorothy. Continue to read. We're going to stay in chapter nine next week in the seventh plague. Come with us again on More Than Ink. More Than Ink is a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City and is solely responsible for its content. To contact us with your questions or comments, just go to our website, morethanink.org. Here it goes. In three, two, one.
Whisper: medium.en / 2023-06-02 23:25:10 / 2023-06-02 23:38:05 / 13