February 2 – Exodus Week 5

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Main Focus: Our God is worth following because he is greater than all things physical and spiritual.

Things are about to get crazy in Exodus. This week we’ll look at the first plague, which serves as a template for the next eight, and here the plot line’s tension really ramps up. In Exodus 7 we’ll see what God intends to do with these plagues before jumping way ahead in the storyline to Deuteronomy 4 to hear a summary of what God was doing through his judgment upon Egypt and salvation for his people. But first, a brief commercial:

Hey CG Leaders, did you know we’re putting out a supplementary podcast for our Exodus series? Shaun Cross, Kayla Pleasants, and Nelson Pacheco talk about the tenth plague in the first episode: Listen here! Should we call it the Exocast or the Podcadus? We’re still on the fence.

This week in our series is technically about plagues first through ninth (Exodus 7-11), but we’ll look only at the first to get some of God’s introductory material for the whole lot. There he mentions how he will “multiply [his] signs and wonders” in Egypt (7:3), yet Pharaoh will ignore all but the last one, the Plague of the First Born (which we’ll look at next week). We see that very thing happen with Aaron’s staff becoming a serpent and the Nile turning into blood; both signs are somehow replicated by the Egyptian court magicians and Pharaoh, confident this God has no power he doesn’t also have, refuses to listen.

Interestingly, the magicians are only capable of mimicking the serpent-to-staff trick and the first and second plagues; after that they repeatedly fail. Still, you might wonder, how were they able to do what they did? The short answer is, no one really knows. This could’ve been the same kind of magic you see at a magic show today, mere sleight of hand and illusions, or this could’ve been something decidedly more demonic. Whatever the case, the impotence of the magicians and the Egyptian gods they represented became plain rather quickly.

However, there are still nine more plagues to go and, as God says, only after the full gamut has been completed will his purposes by accomplished, that Israel will be liberated and “the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord” (7:5). We’ll turn to Deuteronomy to see this same point from the other side. In that text we’ve skipped roughly 40 years into the future, with Moses recounting to the people of Israel what God did for them in Egypt. He summarizes these actions as both God showing off his power and claiming a people for his own possession.

This will give us an opportunity to talk about these acts of judgment and how God’s “great deeds of terror” (Deut 4:34) make us feel when we read about them. And it’s reasonable for us to be disconcerted; it’s all too easy for us to imagine being on the wrong side of his judgment, or those we love falling victim to his wrath. In fact, the Bible often picks up the human suspicion that God is not fair to exact judgment as he does (ex. Habakkuk; Romans 3:1-20, 9:14-29). This will help us deal with something that will maybe come up when you ask “What stood out to you?”; odds are, someone will mention Exodus 7:3, “But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.”

Does this mean God is responsible for Pharaoh’s refusal to listen and the prolonged suffering of the Egyptians through the plagues? To be sure, Exodus doesn’t paint Pharaoh as an unwilling participant in his resistance. For example, after the seventh plague it says, “But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet again and hardened his heart” (9:34). Paul takes up this issue in Romans 9:16-21: “For the Scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘For this very purpose I have raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.’ So then he has mercy on whomever he wills, and he hardens whomever he wills.”

This is of course hard to swallow, and yet this trumpets what God is keen to declare in Exodus 7 and Deut 4, that he alone is the Sovereign God. That’s where we’ll start to close out discussion, in noticing how God does all of this with Egypt to declare his name and power. Particularly in Deuteronomy 4 we see what this is meant to affect: that God’s people would hear and obey his voice (4:40). But we’ll continue on to notice an interesting coinciding of terms in verse 37; there God talks about both his love for his people and his great power on display through his acts of judgment. We’ll ask the question in a way that should surface how God’s love and power are not at odds, nor do they detract from each other. However, we tend to think of him with imbalance, either assuming he is all love with no wrath towards sin or all wrath and disappointment with little love for us. But the truth is that he is both loving and angered by sin, evident in the fact that he would willingly send his son to die for sin—death was required because of his justice, but the mission of the Son was also required because of God’s great love for us.

Discussion questions

– Could someone read Exodus 7:1-25 for us?

– What stood out to you from the passage?

– How does God describe what he’s about to do with the ten plagues?

– Turn to Deuteronomy 4:32-40. Could someone read that for us?

– How does this explain God’s purpose for the plagues and acts of judgment on Egypt?

– When you see God do acts of judgment in the Bible, how does it make you feel towards him?

– Look at verse 35—why do you think God wants his people to know who he is?

– Look at verse 37—in what ways do you think you could grow in the knowledge of God’s love and/or his power?