Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - What the Plagues Reveal About God | Torah | Exodus 7:14-10:29

Episode Date: May 23, 2022

"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us." What image of God do your worship? Do you let the Bible define who God is? Keith shares 6 things you can learn about God from the plagues in Exodus 7:14-10:29. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Exodus 7:14-10:29 Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now.

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. My name is Keith Simon, and right now we're going through the Book of Exodus. There's a book I read decades ago that I still remember the opening sentence. The book was called The Knowledge of the Holy, and it was by a guy named A.W. Tozer. Here's the opening sentence. What comes to our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us. Let me say that again. What comes to our mind when we think about God is the most important thing about us.

Now, one implication from that sentence is that not everyone thinks about God the same way. Maybe that's obvious when you think about people who follow different religions, but it's also true of people listening to 10-minute Bible talks or people who attend the same church. If you were to ask all of us today to write down our definition of God, our view of him, our answers would range from really different to slightly different. Here's another quote by C.S. Lewis. He said, we don't worship God. We worship our image of God. So C.S. Lewis is saying that we all have this image of God in our head and that's who we worship. Now, that begs the question, how close is your view of God to reality? Does the God you believe in exist? Or is he just a figment of your imagination, loosely based on the Bible, but also based a lot on your own intuition and experience?

If our view of God is of massive importance like Tozer says it is, and if some of us have a view of God that is built more on experience of the Bible, like Lewis says we do, you can see that we have a massive problem. We need to let the Bible define God. We need to let God tell us what he's like, not for us to shape God in our own image. Well, we're in the book of Exodus, and specifically today we're going to look at the plagues that God brought against Egypt. In these plagues, we learn a lot about who God is and what he's like. The plagues are the cool part of the Exodus. If you were to make a movie about the Exodus, well, this is when you need all the special effects,

because the plagues play a key role in convincing Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave Egypt. Now, the word plague can be a little misleading, because when we hear that word, we think of a disease like the bubonic plague or black death that hit Europe in the 1300s. The Hebrew words used in this story are better translated blows or strikes. So God is striking the Egyptians. And the reason for the plagues start all the way back in Exodus chapter 5. That's when Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, God wants you to let my people go so they can worship me in the wilderness.

Now here's verse 2. Pharaoh says, who is the Lord that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go. So Pharaoh asks, who is the Lord? Well, he's getting ready to find out because God is going to introduce himself to Pharaoh in these plagues. Here are six things that we learn about God. The first is that God is the creator.

He is the sustainer of all things. He holds all things together. In Genesis chapter 1, God created all things. And now in the plagues, his creation is kind of. coming apart. In the very first plague, the Nile gets turned into blood, and everything in the water dies. So here is water, the giver of life, that now has turned into death. In the second plague, frogs leave the water and cross their boundaries into places human beings live, including the bedrooms and kitchens of the pharaoh. So in creation, God separated. He separated the land from

the sea, the light from the darkness, and now we're seeing that what God separated is being unseparated. If God created, now in the plagues, he's decreating. In the third plague, Aaron strikes the dust of the earth with his staff, and biting gnats cover the land. Well, remember back in Genesis, it was from the dust of the ground from which human beings were created. Now that same dust that brought life is bringing biting insects. In the fifth plague, there's a disease on the cattle. All of Egypt's livestock now dies. Remember that God had created animals and now they're facing death. We see something similar in the seventh and eighth plague, which are the plague of hail and locusts. Those plagues kill animals, humans, trees, plants, fruit, crops, all that which was made by God and declared good.

The ninth plague undoes God's first act of creation. Back in Genesis 1, God started creation by saying, Let there be light. Now in the ninth plague, he sends a darkness that covers the entire land. We'll save the 10th and final plague to talk about on another episode. But the first thing we learn about God in the plagues is that he is the creator. He is the sustainer of all things. And when God brings judgment, what happens is his creation falls apart.

The second thing we see is that God, the God of the Bible, Yahweh, is the only true God, and he does not share his glory. From the perspective of the Egyptians, the plague of darkness is an attack on the very core of Egyptian religion, because Egyptian religion focused on the sun god. So the plague of darkness is a direct assault upon that so-called God. The darkness lasted three days, which underscores the power of Yahweh, to eliminate sunrise and sunset to remove yesterday and tomorrow. In the darkness, Yahweh was teaching Pharaoh that from the rising of the sun to its setting, there is no God besides me. I am the Lord and there is no other. I form the light and create darkness.

The third thing we learn about God is that he created us to serve him. Moses told the people in God's name that Pharaoh should let the people go so that they can worship him. Now that word worship can also mean serve. So what God is saying to Pharaoh is, look, you have enslaved these people, but you don't own them. These are not your people and they never were. They are my people. And I demand you return them to me so that they may worship and serve me. God is the one who created us. We belong to him. We owe our allegiance, our service, our work. worship our heart to him. The fourth thing we learn about God is that he is gracious and his graciousness is demonstrated in that he gives people the opportunity to repent of their sin. In six of the first nine

plagues, God warns Pharaoh what will happen if he refuses to listen and obey him. He says to Pharaoh, if you refuse, here are the consequences. Now at any point, if Pharaoh had responded by letting the Israelites go, there would have been no plague that resulted. Ezekiel tells us that God doesn't take pleasure in the death of the wicked, but he would rather people turn from their sinful ways and find life. God was gracious to Pharaoh. Pharaoh continued to harden his heart. Pharaoh continued to resist what God wanted, but God always held out the opportunity for

Pharaoh to turn from his sin and turn back to him. No matter what you've done, you can always turn back. to God, he is gracious, and he offers you the opportunity to find your life in him. God's judgment in these plagues are not against a nation. Yes, I know. They are in some sense against Pharaoh and all he represents in Egypt, all he represents that is against God. But the offer of salvation applies even to the Egyptians. In the plague of hail in Exodus 9, What we learn is that the officials of Pharaoh who feared the word of the Lord, they brought their slaves and their animals, their livestock inside. It's those who ignored the word of the Lord that left their slaves and livestock in the field that faced the judgment of God.

So the opportunity to repent, the opportunity to turn from your sin is open to everyone. God is not judging people because of their race or their ethnicity or their nationality or their language. God's judgment only comes against those people, wherever they live, whatever language they speak, whatever they look like, who refuse to surrender their life to him, who refuse to give him their allegiance. So God's graciousness is seen in that he gives everyone the opportunity to turn from their sin and find their life in him. The fifth thing we learn about God is that he is not deceived. God knows the human heart. As these plagues start to mount up against Pharaoh, Pharaoh starts bargaining with Moses.

He even starts to make some concessions, but then when God stops the plague, Pharaoh just goes back to who he was before. At one point, Pharaoh goes so far as to even confess his sin and ask Moses to pray for him. But God isn't fooled by the show. God isn't deceived by Pharaoh's words. Here's Exodus 9, verse 30. Moses said, When I have gone out from the city,

I will spread out my hands in prayer to the Lord. The thunder will stop and there will be no more hail, so you may know that the earth is the Lord's. But I know that you and your officials still do not fear the Lord God. See, Pharaoh was talking a good game, but God saw his heart and God knew that he didn't really want to turn from God. He just wanted the pain to stop. He just wanted the plagues to stop.

And sometimes we're like that, aren't we? It's not that our heart has changed. It's not that we really want to turn from our sin and find God. It's just that we want to get out of the trouble that we have found ourselves in. We're more worried about our circumstances than we really are about following God. Well, God is not deceived. He knows the human heart. he knows when we are sincere.

The sixth thing that we learn about God is that he is passionate for the world to come to know him. Remember that Pharaoh said he didn't know the Lord? Well, now he's gone to God's school. God is teaching him about who he is. We find the phrase, then you will know throughout these chapters. God brings the plague so that his name will be known in the nation, so that his name will be magnified, so that his name will be worshipped. Listen to how Paul puts it in Romans 9.

For scripture says to Pharaoh, I raised you up for this very purpose that I might display my power in you and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth. Why did God raise up Pharaoh? Why did Pharaoh enslave the Egyptians? Why did God send the plagues? Well, here we find the answer. We find the same answer in Romans 9 that we find in Acts. Exodus, and that is that God has raised up Pharaoh and done all of this so that his name might be

proclaimed in all the earth. God's name represents God's entire reputation. God's name represents all of God. It's like if I were to say, there are a lot of new faces at the meeting today. It doesn't mean that only people's faces were there. The face represents the whole person. So God's name isn't just talking about his name. His name represents the entire identity of God. Psalm 8 1. Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth? Well, it wasn't just God's name that was majestic.

It was God's whole person, God's whole being that was majestic. Jesus taught us to pray, how it would be your name. But of course, what that's really saying is, God, we want you. all of you to be hallowed, to be worshipped, to be praised, to be honored in this world. So the entire Exodus drama was intended to teach God's people. It was a warning to not sin against God, to not rebel against him, to not forget him, but at the same time, it was an act of grace to say that God remembers his promises. God will deliver you from Egypt.

God sees your suffering. But unfortunately, we're like the Israelites and that we are too quick to forget all that God has done, too quick to forget all that he has promised. In Psalm 78, it lists many of the plagues that were brought against Egypt. And it says this, in spite of all this, they kept on sinning. In spite of his wonders, they did not believe. That's Psalm 7832. Unfortunately, that's true of you and me, isn't it? We've seen God work in our life. We've seen God work in the world. We've seen God's beauty. We've seen God's power, we've seen God's forgiveness and grace and mercy, and yet we too quickly forget. And in spite of all that we've seen, we fail to believe God's promises.

Oh, God, have mercy upon us. Let us see you as you really are, in your power, in your graciousness, in the greatness of your name, that you are the one who cannot be deceived. So we turn our life over to you that we may worship and serve you. In Jesus' name we pray that. Amen. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith,

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