God Exceeds Our Expectations
Let’s pause a bit and talk about Moses and Pharaoh. Notice God’s words to Moses in the beginning
part of this chapter. After one more
plague, Pharaoh will drive you out. Keep
in mind all along Moses has been asking for the Hebrew people to just go three
days into the wilderness to worship God.
Now God promises that Pharaoh will not only let them go and worship, but
driven them out forever. What God
promises is true emancipation. God
promises that the people will go and ultimately Pharaoh will not be able to get
them back.
Plunder?
Next, we have this “plundering” of Egypt. Here is another area where I admit to have
struggled. Actually, I don’t struggle
with the text so much as I struggle with people feeling the need to explain the
text. I can’t tell you how many
commentaries I read that say something along the lines of “The Hebrew people
were unpaid slaves for all these years under the Egyptians, now they finally
get the wages they deserve!”
No! That kind of
thinking rubs me the wrong way, and it always has. I think I now understand why. Thoughts like that are rooted in the pattern
of belief that the plagues were punishments of Egypt. To see the Hebrews plundering the Egyptians
in this manner means that we are seeing Egypt as the great evil beast that
deserves only condemnation. Therefore,
they deserve to be plundered. But that
does not mesh at all with the idea that the plagues were an attempt to show
God’s power – the power of the Creator – to the Egyptians so that they might
repent.
Actually, here’s how I really prefer to think about the
“plundering.” It is not the Hebrew
people finally getting their just wages at all.
Rather, this is the Egyptian people coming face-to-face with the power
of God and finally acknowledging that they cannot deal with it. They see that they are no match for the
powerful demonstrations they have seen. At
the same time, they are unwilling to change their lifestyle and worship the God
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Although
they recognize God’s power and because they are unwilling to change their life
in order to worship this God, they will do anything to get this God out of
their life. They pay the Hebrew people
to leave and to take their powerful God with them.
The Hebrew people are not plundering the Egyptians so much
as the Egyptians are paying for the right to go back and live in spiritual
darkness. That is precisely what I
believe is going on here. The God they
got to know through Moses was so powerful that they could not live without
choosing to change or drive Him away so they could go back into ignorance. They chose ignorance.
Unfortunately, I think that is true today. How many people fall away from true preaching
because it’s too hard? How many people
walk away from true discipleship because it asks too much?
Isn’t this really the same pattern that we see in Jesus’
life over and over again? He brought the
greatest message and the greatest displays of God’s power since the
plagues. Yet how many people followed
Him compared to the amount of people who saw His power and decided it was just
too hard to follow? Welcome to the
world, folks. The majority of this world
ultimately settles for “cheap grace” and “pointless discipleship” because the
other way is just too hard.
Setting Up the Gospel of Christ
Here’s the teaser to get you back to read tomorrow. What is it that God asks of all of
Egypt? God will ask of all of their
first-born males. God will essentially
say to them, if you want to live in spiritual darkness, it will cost you a
first-born male.
What is it that it costs the people in Jesus’ day who wanted
to choose spiritual darkness instead of spiritual truth in Jesus? It cost them a first-born male as well, but
this time it was God’s first-born male. In
that sacrifice those who wanted spiritual darkness earned the right to live in it. Yet at the same time, those who followed
Jesus also won the right to live in spiritual truth like has never been known
before.
That’s the power of Christ, and that is the power of what
God is getting ready to set-up tomorrow in the Passover. God has given His last warning to Egypt. Tomorrow God will teach the world the power
of redemptive blood.
<><
No comments:
Post a Comment