God's Response to Pharaoh

This morning, we continue our look at Exodus. If you were here last week, you'll remember that we saw that moment where Moses and Pharaoh had their great standoff. The great confrontation, the first confrontation that Moses had with Pharaoh, where he came to Pharaoh into his courts and said to him, this is what God Yahweh, the God of Israel tells you. Let his people Israel go. Set them free, Pharaoh.

And we saw Pharaoh's smirk and his smugness as he said to Moses, "Who is this Lord? I do not know him and I will not let Israel go." And so instead of releasing Israel, we see that he goes one step further and he makes their slave labour even more difficult. He removes the straw that they were allotted. They had to gather their own straw in order to fulfil the same quota that they needed to for brick making that they were involved with.

And so he oppresses them even more in order to subdue them so they will not revolt. And so we see Pharaoh's initial reaction to this. Now this morning we're going to look at God's response to Pharaoh's reaction, and it's a response that actually spans across seven chapters. Now don't worry, we're not going to read all seven chapters. We'll be here the whole morning, and then I can just say amen and go back home.

I guess that'll be an easy sermon to preach. But this morning we're just going to highlight some of the events that happened in God's response. We know this response as the 10 plagues. This is how God responds to Pharaoh's rebellion. We know it as the 10 plagues.

So we're going to skip through some of them this morning. If you have your Bibles open, let's turn to Exodus 7, and we're going to read of the first plague, so-called, that comes to Pharaoh and to Egypt, the plague of blood. Exodus 7:14. Then the Lord said to Moses, "Pharaoh's heart is unyielding. He refuses to let the people go.

Go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes out to the water. Wait on the bank of the Nile to meet him, and take in your hand the staff that was changed into a snake. Then say to him, 'The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you, let my people go so that they may worship me in the desert. But until now, you have not listened.' This is what the Lord says.

By this, you will know that I am the Lord. With the staff that is in my hand, I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood. The fish in the Nile will die and the river will stink. The Egyptians will not be able to drink its water." And it happened.

It came to pass. Then we skip ahead a little bit more and we look at the plague of hail, which happened a few days or weeks later. Exodus 9:13-16. Then the Lord said to Moses, "Get up early in the morning, confront Pharaoh and say to him, 'This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews says: let my people go so that they may worship me. Or this time, I will send the full force of my plagues against you and against your officials and your people, so you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth.

For by now, I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the earth. But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I may show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.'" And so God sends a plague of hail that destroys all the crops in Egypt. And then we skip ahead again to Exodus 11. The final and the very severe tenth plague.

Exodus 11:1. "Now the Lord said to Moses, 'I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here, and when he does, he will drive you out completely. Tell the people that men and women alike are to ask their neighbours for articles of silver and gold.'" The Lord made the Egyptians favourably disposed towards the people, and Moses himself was highly regarded in Egypt by Pharaoh's officials and by the people.

So Moses said, "This is what the Lord says: about midnight, I will go throughout Egypt. Every firstborn son in Egypt will die. From the firstborn son of Pharaoh who sits on the throne to the firstborn son of the slave girl who is at her hand mill and all the firstborn of the cattle as well. There will be loud wailing throughout Egypt, worse than it there has ever been or ever will be again. But among the Israelites, not a dog will bark at any man or animal.

Then you will know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. All these officials of yours will come to me, bending down before me and saying, 'Go, you and all the people who follow you.' After that, I will leave." Then Moses, hot with anger, left Pharaoh. And that also came to pass as we know.

This morning we're not going to look at every plague that happens, even though I believe that each one is significant, and it would be really worthwhile to do a study on the significance of each one. But I want us to look at the wider picture of why these events had to happen in Egypt for the Israelites to go. Why did God send them? Now firstly, in the book of Exodus, the 10 events that we call the 10 plagues aren't actually referred to as commonly as plagues, but rather signs and wonders. Over and over again, God uses the words "signs and wonders." And in fact, it's not 10 plagues or 10 signs and wonders, but 11.

Because Moses initially, before the river Nile turning into blood, used his staff, remember, to turn it into a snake, which was also considered a sign and wonder. So there were 11 of them. So these events were there to show that this was not a catastrophic disaster for Egypt itself, but to show that God used these events to point people towards Himself. These were signs. These were signs and wonders God wanted Egypt and Israel to know.

They were signs that pointed to the power, the holiness, and the justice of God. In each of these signs and wonders that God performed, there was a repeated pattern. I don't know if you noticed that as we read through the three passages. There's a repeated pattern. Just in passing, I have to make a few noteworthy points.

Firstly, the report of each miraculous sign always begins with these words: "The Lord said to Moses." "The Lord said to Moses." Now this is important for us to realise again because this is showing that God was the initiator every single time. He is in control of what is happening here.

It's important for us to realise because we need to see that the initiative always rested with God. At every stage of this encounter between Pharaoh and God, it's that between Pharaoh and Moses, it's not between Pharaoh and Moses, really. It's about Pharaoh and God. Each time this event was driven by God. Secondly, each plague concludes with the explicit reference over and over again that Pharaoh's heart was hardened.

Pharaoh's heart was hardened towards God. So after every plague, Pharaoh was on the cusp of releasing Israel, but then it says his heart was hardened, or he hardened his heart towards God and towards his people. And this is really used, like I said, over and over again in contrast with another development happening through this story where we see more and more of his officials and his people and even his magicians started to say to Pharaoh, "Listen, this is the finger of God. This is the hand of God at work." So for example, we see in Exodus 8:19 that Pharaoh's magicians, even though they could copy some of the signs and wonders that Moses was doing, were performing, even though they could keep up with some of them, there came a point where the magicians just couldn't do what Moses was doing.

They had reached the limit of their power, and they tell Pharaoh in Exodus 8:19, "This is the finger of God. This is God at work." Yet Pharaoh hardens his heart. Later on, when Moses predicts the hailstorm much later in the story, you can see some of the Egyptians making sure that their livestock and their slaves come under the roof. They hear this pronouncement again from Moses and they've seen these plagues happen and they know, well, this is going to happen.

They believe Moses. And so in Exodus 9:20, these people start making precautions against the storm. They get people indoors. They park the car in the garage. Yet Pharaoh's heart is hardened against God.

When Moses warns against the plague of locusts coming, we see the court officials urging Pharaoh to let Israel go. Exodus 10:7. Yet we see that although more and more people are starting to recognise God's power, it is Pharaoh that remains stubbornly resistant towards Moses and God. Now it is significant to point out that the story of the plagues describes Pharaoh's hardening of the heart in two ways. Firstly, initially, it is Pharaoh that hardens his own heart.

It is Pharaoh that sees what is happening and he decides to resist God. But later on in the story, it is stated that God starts hardening Pharaoh's heart. It seems at first that Pharaoh has the ability. Pharaoh has the opportunity to repent from his sin, to turn away from what he has been doing, how he has been resisting God, and to obey Him, and yet he decides to resist.

But interestingly, as the story goes, he loses the capacity to make any other decision other than to resist God and harden his heart. He has no more opportunity to turn back to God until God has had His way completely and absolutely. By describing the hardening of Pharaoh in these two ways, the Bible actually indicates and gives us some insight into how both human guilt and the sovereignty and the power of God to direct our paths work together. How free will and that theological understanding of predestination or sovereignty work together. Pharaoh has no excuse.

Pharaoh has no excuse for the judgment that came on him. And at the same time, God's plan to rescue Israel and to show His glory is made perfect as Pharaoh resists God. It's amazing how these two work like that. And this is important for us to understand how our decision-making is still considered our decisions, all the while knowing that God controls and maintains this world. Tim Keller summarises this in this way.

He says that all opposition to God will be seen in the end as having done nothing but confirm and further His design. Imagine it. All the opposition to God and to Christianity and to God's people, at the end of time, as we look back to the history of the world, will be shown to have done nothing but confirm and further His designs. And this is what happened in Exodus. When we see evil decisions being made around us, as was done with Pharaoh and the Israelites, this week when we saw a gunman take lives, as we saw people murder dozens of innocent children in Pakistan.

While in that very moment it feels like this person's evil choice is his to make, at the end of time when Christ has returned and we look back on the long history of mankind, we will see how all these things in some way have worked to further God's plan for this world. It's amazing to think about it that way. Imagine if you were an Israelite, and you would have been affected by the frogs, and you would have been affected by the flies, and you would have been affected by the locusts, and you would have asked, what is God doing? And same for us. The Sydney man's attack we could say was judged by the fact that he died that very same day, but there is another judgment that awaits him when he will meet Jesus Christ.

And that's the other point we need to see in Egypt's judgment this morning. When God judges, He does a thorough job of it. When God judges, He does it completely. And it is a fearful thing, as the book of Hebrews says, to fall into the hands of the living God. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

This segment of history we read this morning reminds us that we cannot scoff at God forever. A day of reckoning will arrive. And Pharaoh, we see, as the god of Egypt, had led the entire nation of Egypt astray. Egypt, Pharaoh were oppressive and unjust. Pharaoh was a man whose pride had driven him to build Egypt on the carcasses of thousands and thousands of slaves.

But nevertheless, we see God's grace even in that towards Egypt because Egypt flourished. They became wealthy. And wealth is given by God, we understand. Egypt flourished despite their sin, despite their lack of acknowledgement of God. His grace and His goodness even extended to them.

They became a place of culture and of refinement, of art, of science, of education. They were the hub of the ancient world. But Egypt and Pharaoh took God's grace and His blessing for granted. They believed that it was due to their intelligence, their planning, their gods, and they walked all over God. Not only did they grow rich through unjust means, but when it was time to repent, hear and obey God, when He had confronted them as the God who will give and who may take away, when Pharaoh was pointed out towards his sin and the call to repentance came, even warning after warning would not persuade him.

He was so dead to his own sin. His conscience was seared, as the apostle Paul writes. Even nine out of the 10 plagues, nine out of the 10 plagues, he was still unmoved. And these were terrible things. And we see, or we have to ask the question, why?

After nine terrible plagues of annoying flies and frogs being in your bedroom and under your sheets and gnats biting you and giving you itchy bites and all those sorts of things, nine out of the 10 times he wasn't moved. Why? Because all of these things could have been avoided for him personally with slaves maybe swiping away all the flies from him or the frogs being herded out of his room. He would have always had clean water even if the river was red with blood. Hailstones that destroyed the flocks doesn't matter. Everyone else would starve. He would be eating that night.

All these things happened to his people, but not to himself, and that's the egotistical man that he was. God's judgment had to go all the way to the death of his firstborn son to finally break Pharaoh. When Pharaoh lost his son, it finally hit home, and the selfish, egotistical dictator finally realised that God is God and that he would be at the mercy of His judgment. He realised that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. But we have to make this painfully personal now. This morning we may be in the danger zone as we hear these words.

We may have played fast and loose with God's commands. We may have very deliberately ignored His warnings on our guilty conscience and the prodding of the Holy Spirit. You may have shoved off essential truth about God's will for so long even that your heart has become hardened. And the truth is the longer you harden it, the more difficult it will be to allow God's light to finally break through and to clean up this mess in your life. Let this morning's warning of the 10 plagues be a final warning to us. Let these plagues preach to us. Romans 1 speaks of two types of judgment.

Two types of judgment. A judgment that will come to all men at the end of time, like I said, when we will all stand before Jesus Christ and have to give an account of our lives. But Romans 1 also talks about a judgment that happens in this life, where God will let people be handed over to the full implications of their sin. You see, in our day-to-day failing, God, as the God of grace, holds His hand over us, and the effects and the consequences of our sin are actually shielded by Him in many ways. But there might come a time where our deliberate decisions to reject God and rebel against Him will cause Him to remove that hand of grace.

And we will be affected by our decisions. And these consequences will come to us with full effect. God will hand us over to our sin, Romans 1 says, like a man being thrown to the lions to have their way with him. Pastor Charles Swindoll tells of a story that happened where he had dinner with a man who was one of the best orthopaedic surgeons of his time and in the city where he lived. And he was having dinner with this man and the man started telling him his story, that he had, at one point, given himself without reservation to something that I know a lot of doctors struggle with, and that is making money.

And he said to Pastor Swindoll that he made it by the hundreds of thousands of dollars. By the time he was in his late forties, he was extremely wealthy and he was working between eighteen and twenty hours a day. Now over this time, he says, this brilliant surgeon started using heroin and other various drugs to keep him working, to keep him going in that time. But when the truth of his addictions finally came out, as it often does, he lost his credentials. They revoked his licence.

And then in the blink of an eye, as God removed His hand of grace, this man was an unbeliever then, and in short order, he lost his reputation, he lost his home, he lost his wife and his children. He became a modern-day Job. He literally lost everything. It was as if one plague after another just beat upon him until he was finally crushed beneath the hands of the living God. Then he says, eventually, through the gentle witness of a believing pharmacist that he knew, who was actually at the dinner at the same time, this broken physician discovered the answer to his crushing problems.

And he swallowed his pride. He admitted his spiritual emptiness and he gave his heart to the Lord Jesus Christ. A man who was actually Jewish by birth came to know the Messiah. And as this man told this story to Pastor Charles, through tears of great personal pain, he talked about leaning all of his weight into the grace of God. He realised and he needed to think about the full-time recovery that needed to happen now, but he was eventually going to take his tests again, he was saying, to become a doctor again, have his licence restored.

And he said day after day, morning after morning, he would be on his knees to God, to the God of grace, he called Him, to bring back his wife and kids as well. At the end of the night, after the dinner, this ex-doctor told Pastor Swindoll Chuck, "For the first time in my life, I can tell you I finally have peace after having lost everything. I've had to come from judgment to a whole new understanding of God's love and grace in my life." Friends, God can and does come to a point where He says, enough is enough. I cannot tolerate this in your life anymore. He is a God, remember. He is the God who revealed Himself to Moses as the God of holiness.

"Take off your shoes, Moses. You are in the presence of God. This is holy ground." Remember, He showed Himself as a God who is completely other, removed from the imperfections of this life. And in His holiness, He must deal with sin. He is the God of light, remember, and light and darkness can have no dwelling with light.

And yet we also see that God, Yahweh, revealed Himself to Moses as compassionate and caring. The prophet Habakkuk would, many years later, in the wake of God's judgment on sinful Israel, would say this: "In your wrath, O Lord, remember mercy." And God did. In your wrath, remember mercy. But friends, this morning, I want us to also remember that there is hope for us.

This God of holiness, this God of perfection, this God who has the power to turn rivers into blood, this God who can snuff out the light of the sun as easily as He can snuff out the life of a firstborn son. This God of power and justice so loved fallen and broken humans that He did the unimaginable and reached out to us anyway. As we reflect this week on the sending of His son Jesus to us, we also have to remember two things. Firstly, He said that this sin of ours deserves judgment, that it deserves an eternity's worth of plagues, and that sin cannot continue.

But secondly, instead of us receiving that punishment, God Himself, through Jesus, bore it on our behalf. Two Corinthians 5:21 says this magnificently. "God made Jesus, who knew no sin, to be sin for us, that we might have the righteousness of God." Christ became sin itself. Christ became the putrid, black, stinking mess of our greed, of our gossip, of our lies, of our lust.

And on the cross, the Father viewed Christ as the embodiment of all this sin. God the Father viewed His son Jesus Christ as the embodiment of all this sin, and He was deemed guilty on our behalf. But it went further than that because at that same moment, Christ's punishment in that, we became as righteous as Christ is. A royal exchange happened. Our sin for His perfection, and that is who God is.

One John 4 says this: "This is love. Not that we loved God firstly, but that He loved us, and He sent His son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins." Friends, God must deal with our hardened hearts towards Him. A time of judgment will come sooner or later, whether in this life or the next. And as we see this story of God's massive rescue plan of Israel, we have to realise that we are not perfect.

And we should not judge Pharaoh for his hardened heart because at one point we also had hard hearts. And like Pharaoh, we are reminded not to harden our hearts any longer. We are to accept His grace and we are to thrive in the holy calling that God has placed on us. Let's pray. Well, we realise that there are events in our lives, so-called plagues that preach to us.

Plagues that preach to us. And we know, Lord, that we have to wrestle through these things because of our own decisions, our own mistakes, and the consequences of our rebellion against You. Father, help us to see these things in the right light and that we don't make excuses, that we don't rationalise these things. But Father, that we are humbled enough to accept the blame for ourselves because it is so natural and so normal for us to try and shift this blame. Father, this morning we realise again that You are a holy God, a powerful God, a God who moves through signs and wonders to point back to Your power.

Signs and wonders to show that there is no one in all this earth besides You. And Father, I pray that as we look at our lives again and as we reflect on these things, we will come to it with sobriety, that we will look at it with clear eyes. And Father, that we will come to You and seek Your forgiveness. That we will repent of these things in our lives, that we will turn away from that, that we will not have hard hearts towards You, but that You will give us the grace and the mercy to break us. Father, thank You for the sending of Your son, Jesus, that You loved us enough to do that before we loved You, God.

And Father, let us rest in that finally. That as we repent and as we confess, we are also reminded and assured that there is full reconciliation available to us. There is full redemption of our mistakes available to us, that we are much more than forgiven and loved, that we are also adopted into Your family to be loved by You forevermore as sons and daughters. And so Father, lastly, as some of us may deal and have to deal with the consequences of bad decisions and choices in our life, I pray, Lord, that You will give us the grace to forgive ourselves, to understand that You forgive us, to deal and to live with these consequences in strength and perseverance, to do the right thing from now on.

And Father, finally, to know and to rejoice in the fact that You are our God and our Father and that You still love us amazingly. So Father, we bring all these things before You, ask for Your strength in all of them. In Jesus' name. Amen.