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Life Of Moses: Part 4
Contributed by Nate Buchner on Oct 5, 2020 (message contributor)
Summary: God Never Misses an Opportunity to Show Love: 10 Plagues of Egypt
If you were to take a poll of the world as to what they dislike most about God, I’m guessing they’d come up with quite the list. One of the dislikes that would stand near the top, though, would probably be God’s stern and severe punishments. People, even Christians, have problems with the actions God’s taken in the flood, or with the creation of hell, or with what we have here in the 10 Plagues of Egypt.
Yet, even here, with the 10 Plagues, God never misses an opportunity to show his love. How can we say that, though? God caused so much pain and affliction to fall upon the Egyptians! He turned their water to blood, gave them gnats, flies, frogs, boils, darkness, hail, and eventually killed off many of their livestock and people. You would assume that there’s no possibility of God’s love making an appearance here. But there was. In fact it appeared in multiple ways to multiple different people.
Just with this first plague, we’re going to see God displaying his love in three distinct ways. Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is unyielding; he refuses to let the people go. 15 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. 16 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. 17 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. 18 The fish in the Nile will die, and the river will stink; the Egyptians will not be able to drink its water.’ ” 19 The Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron, ‘Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt—over the streams and canals, over the ponds and all the reservoirs’—and they will turn to blood. Blood will be everywhere in Egypt, even in the wooden buckets and stone jars.” 20 Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord had commanded. He raised his staff in the presence of Pharaoh and his officials and struck the water of the Nile, and all the water was changed into blood. 21 The fish in the Nile died, and the river smelled so bad that the Egyptians could not drink its water. Blood was everywhere in Egypt.
At first, this appears to be a cruel God acting in a cruel way. He took the water away from the people in Egypt and instead turned it to blood. Not only would this have affected their thirst, with the Nile River being fresh water, it also would’ve affected their economy. Without water fishing industries would’ve taken a massive hit, travel would’ve halted in many ways, and crops would’ve been ruined without the irrigation.
Yet, if all we see is the pain, we are only getting one perspective from the account. We must agree with those who say that God’s actions were severe, because they were, but we also must say that it could’ve been worse. God could’ve gone ahead and simply wiped the Egyptians off the map. In that way, God would’ve been able to bring his people to their homeland of Israel as he had promised.
However, God is an opportunist. He is always looking to show that he is slow to anger and abounding in love. Even with the Egyptians. And especially because they didn’t deserve it. God didn’t go with the nuclear option because the plagues would allow him to reveal his love multiple times to a people who did not know him. His love made it evident to them that their gods were not real. If they would’ve been real, they wouldn’t have allowed God to destroy them one by one. Such as here with the Nile River, which they worshiped, and the sun, and other things too. Secondly, it would reveal to them who the real God was, that he is love. And thirdly, these plagues gave the Egyptians opportunities to repent. People will reject God’s love continually unless they are shown their need for it. God’s plagues would’ve given openings for that need to be revealed to those people.
Contrast then the patience of God for his enemies to us with our impatience to those we supposedly love. Rather than looking for opportunities to show more love, we instead look for opportunities when we might shrink back from that love because the person has wronged me in some way. Just because you feel like it sometimes you’ll grow impatient with your spouse over something they have no control over. They might not have come home at exactly the time they said they were going to, so you decide that they don’t deserve as much of your love today. Sometimes it’s as simple as a family member didn’t put the pickle jar on the right shelf in the fridge. Then we have the audacity to ask why God would remain so patient and so caring.