The Plagues

Today we begin our journey through the plagues in the book of Exodus. And I know at the outset that there are many of you probably thinking, are we going to go into great detail concerning the Insects and the livestock and the frogs and the water and the blood and all that kind of stuff that we need to cover it all in great detail. And the answer is Of course, we do. I mean, we could sit back and breeze over it. I've got many books in my office that just kind of breeze over the plagues. They kind of list them and say a few.

Sentences or a few paragraphs about them, but those things kind of just leave me wanting more about what's behind each and every plague. And I think it's important for us to study them. And I thought it was even important today to introduce to you the plagues. I mean, I can just jump into the first one and go after it.

But I thought, you know, we need to look at. The aim of each and every plague, and then the analysis of each and every plague, and then an application for every plague. You know, when I think of the plagues, I think about how the bad guys finally get it.

You know, we always want the bad guy to get it. And we always want the good guy to come out on top. And when you look at the plagues, you realize that the bad guys finally get their due.

There's always a payday someday. I want to look at just one verse with you this morning as a springboard to talk to you.

Specifically about the aim of these plagues. And that's in Exodus chapter 3. So we're going to go a little backwards this morning. I know we're in Exodus chapter 7, but in chapter 3, verse number 20, this gives us the premise for our discussion today. It says, in God's promise to Moses, he says, I will stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all my miracles, which I shall do in the midst of it, and after that, He will let you go. That one verse is the springboard for our time this morning. God made a promise to Moses way back at the burning bush.

And said, This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to strike Egypt. You see, Pharaoh's not going to let you go. So I'm going to smite them. I'm going to strike them. I'm going to deal with them. And when I'm done dealing with them, you thou will be set free. And so we've come to that point in our discussion in the book of Exodus where God now is going to deal with Pharaoh, He's going to deal with the Egyptians. And Moses is going to be a part of that. He's involved in the whole process. And the unique thing about this is that God keeps his word.

God made a promise. And when God promises something, he will fulfill it. He's trustworthy. He's reliable. You can count on God. And that's an encouragement to us because God has made us promises, hasn't he? Prom that we know that one day he's going to come back. We don 't know when he's going to come back, but he promised he's going to come back. We believe that. We trust in that. And we hope in that. And we know he's going to come back because he's always faithful to his word. He always does what he says he's going to do.

And so now Moses is going to be involved in this whole process. And so, we begin by looking at point number one: the aim of the plagues.

What do they aim to do? Three things I want you to say. The first aim in the plagues is the glorification of God.

That is the purpose behind whatever God does. His glory, right? It's all about God. It's his world. We're just living in it, right? We tend to think it's our world and God's living in our world, but that's not true. This is God's world, and we're living in His world. And He is going to receive The glory. He has said in the book of Philippians that one day every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. And we need to understand that. And so the very first purpose of the plagues is that God Himself would be glorified.

It says over in the book of Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 42, verse number 8. I am the Lord. That is my name. I will not give my glory to another, nor my praise to graven images. God says, I deserve the glory, and I'm going to get the glory.

And God will spare no expense in order to receive that glory. He will do whatever he needs to do to receive it from you and from me and from the entire world. And so we need to understand that God is going to strike Egypt because his glory is at stake. He's made a promise. He made a promise to Moses. Moses then would go tell the Israelites, this is what God's going to do. His character's at stake. And so he's going to fulfill that promise so that he receives the glory due to his name. Isaiah chapter 48, verse number 11, reads this way.

It says, For my own sake. For my own sake I will act. For how can my name be profaned? And my glory I will not give to another. For my sake, God says, I'm going to act.

I do what I do because it's about me, it's not about you. Therefore, I will act. You know what the book of Revelation says? Revelation 4, verse number 11: Worthy art thou, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power. For thou didst create all things, and because of thy will they existed and were created. God, you are the creator. We are the created. And the created have one main purpose for their existence, and that is to give glory and honor to their God. And God's going to receive that glory.

Now, how is he going to display that? How's that going to happen? Let me give you just two ways. One is through his power. Through his power. When he enacts these plagues on Egypt, I mean, you're going to see the mighty power of God on display. And when God exercises his power, he receives the glory. And so we're going to see what God is going to do. In fact, over in 1 Samuel 4, verse number 8, it was the Philistines who gave testimony to the awesome power of God when they said these words, woe to us.

Who shall deliver us from the hand of these mighty gods? These are the gods who smote the Egyptians with all kinds of plagues in the wilderness. So the Philistines four centuries later would know about the mighty power of God because of how he en his great judgment upon Egypt. God will demonstrate His power over nature when He turns the water into blood. God will demonstrate His power over animals when you talk about the animals and insects, when you talk about the frogs and the lice, the flies, and the locusts.

When it talks about the boil on man, he will exercise his power over disease. When it talks about the hailstorm, how he exercises his power over weather. He exercises his power over light and darkness through the plague of darkness. And he exercises his power over life and death through the death of the firstborn. We're going to see God's power. And you know, is it not true that we need to understand the mighty power of God? And as we go through each and every plague, we're going to see how strong and powerful our God is.

Because you see, we need to understand that. We need to get that. We need to know that our God is more powerful than anything this world has. And we need to trust our God and believe in Him for what He says. And Israel needed to know that. They needed to believe in the mighty power of God. It would give them great encouragement. But I want you to notice something about the power of God.

God is so gracious and merciful because what he does in the book of Exodus is give you just a little taste of his power. Just a little bit. Not a whole bunch. Just a little bit. Because he's setting the tone for what happens in the book of Revel in the end of the world. You see, in Exodus, it's a local judgment, right? It's on Egypt. That's where it is. But in the book of Exodus, when you read about the trumpets blowing, and in Revelation 16, the bowls being poured out, you'll notice that the trumpets blow and it affects one-third of the world.

And when the bowls are poured out in Revelation 16, it affects the entire world. It's a global catastrophe. So God is setting the tone. He's telling us, look, this is what I can do, and this is what I'm going to do. And you can draw great parallels between what happens in the book of Exodus, chapters 7 through 12, and what happens in the book of Revelation, chapters 8 through 16. Because God is telling you, I can do it locally and I can do it globally. Not only can I do it, but I'm going to do it.

And so God enacts his power because it's about his glory. It's all about him. He wants to receive that glory. And isn it interesting in the book of Matthew, when Christ in his Olive dis would tell us about the return of Christ, it says this in verse number 29 of Matthew 24. But immediately after the tribulation of these days, those days, the sun will be darkened and the noon will not give its light, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the powers of the heavens will be shaken. And then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky.

Now, what is the sign of the Son of Man that's going to appear in the sky? Well, read on. It says, And then all the tribes of the earth will mourn, and they will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky. With power and great gl. And when Jesus Christ returns, that sign will be evident to all because every man, every person, every woman, every boy, every girl will bow. And give glory to God because he's king. He rules. He's in charge. Now you think about this. Because when you think about the book of Revelation and the book of Exodus, you realize that is it not true that in Exodus, The nation of Israel cried out to God and God would deliver them?

In the end times, the book of Jeremiah, the book of Isaiah, tells us that Israel shall again. Be sorely oppressed and afflicted, and will cry out to their God, and God will come and deliver them. History is going to repeat itself, except not on a local scale. On a global scale. Why? Because God's going to get the glory no matter what. Because He said so. He's going to receive glory. And so He's going to execute His power. Another thing, too, you need to understand is that his glory is going to come by demonstrating his preeminence.

And so he is going to prove, and we will see, that every plague enacted upon the nation of Egypt. Was enacted against one of their false gods. One of those false gods would be destroyed. And God has a purpose behind that. You know what that purpose is? God says, I want to show you that your gods cannot deliver, but I can.

And that is so good because the magicians ain really trying. They really try to duplicate the water turning the blood thing. They try to duplicate the fraud thing. But when it gets beyond that, man, they're in big trouble. They can't do it. They can't stop what's happening. And God says, I'm just going to show you how pre I am.

That all the gods you have out there, all those graven images you have, all those images you bow down to and worship. They can't do what I do because I'm God and they're not. And let me tell you something that is so practical to us.

So practical. Why? Because is it not true that there are even some of us today who set up gods in our lives, the God of sensuality? It promises to deliver, doesn't it? It promises to deliver fulfillment. It promises to deliver pleasure and joy, but it never does. Never does. The God of money. Money becomes such a fixture in our minds that all we can do is pursue more and more and more. It begins to consume us. So much so it begins to destroy our marriages because we don't have enough money. We can't get enough money.

And it becomes our God. And we want more and more and more because we think that if we had more money, it will give us what we want, but it never delivers because it's never enough. And God says, I can deliver.

Your God can't, the God of power. Oh, just to have power, just to be in control. Just to have my own autonomy, just to have my own independence where I can do what I want, go where I want, be what I want to be, with nobody telling me what to do. I want to be the powerful one, thinking that somehow that will satisfy, that will deliver, but it won't. It never does. Because God's all-powerful. He's the only one who delivers. Pharaoh was that way, right? He was a powerful God. I'm not going to listen to your God.

Why should I listen to your God, Moses? I'm in charge here. This is my kingdom. I don't need you coming in there telling me what your God is going to do. I'm in charge. And you will note that three times, as we will see, that Pharaoh will say to Moses. Pray for me. Pray for me, Moses. You know what Moses does? Prays for him. Prays for him. And you will see that each time that God releases the plague. What does Pharaoh do? He goes right back to his sinful ways. He bends, but he will not break. You never know people like that?

Oh God, just do this for me. Pray for me so that I will be obedient to God. Just pray for me. And then we pray for them. They are delivered from their distress. And what do they do? They go back to living the same way they've always lived. They bend, but they never break. That was Pharaoh, because of the God of power in his life. See? The plagues are so practical. See, we tend to think that it's just this fine little storyline that God just kind of thought up on a whim and put it in the Bible, and we can read about it and tell it in Sunday school.

Good stories in Sunday school. You know? No, this is the word of God. This is true. This is what actually happened. And God put it into print so we would understand, so we would learn from them. It was Jethro who said in Exodus chapter 18: Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods. For in the things wherein they dealt proudly, he was above them. Jethro's father-in-law would know that God was powerful. He was the greatest. Now, you think about that for your life. You think about the idols you set up in your heart, the gods you have in your life.

And you know they're idols, you know they're gods because. They take precedence over the word of the Lord. They take precedence over the worship of God. They take precedence over the ways of God. They take precedence over the will of God. That's how you know you got It is the sole affection of your life. It's what moves you, it's what motivates you, it's what drives you. See? It becomes your priority. It becomes where you set your affections. And when we get to Exodus chapter 20, verse number 3, God says, Commandment number one: You shall have no other God beside me.

I'm it. Don't have anybody else. I got to be preeminent. He does this. He gives them the commandments after he's already delivered them. Now he says, Look, can you actually want somebody else to be your God? Do you actually want something else to be preeminent in your life other than me? You shall have no other go but me. That's his commandment. So he says. And yet, what? Somebody else always takes the priority over God in our lives. And then we wonder why we got all kinds of problems. And God says, well, wait a minute.

You're giving my glory to somebody else. I want the glory. I want the honor. And that's what the plagues are about. You see that? That's the number one aim: the glorification of God.

He's going to be put on display. He's number one. He is the greatest of all, and he wants everybody to see it. All right. Number two, the retribution on Egypt.

The retribution on Egypt. Now, folks, this is going be real practical. He says, I'm going to smite Egypt. I'm going to strike Egypt. Why? Well, one, the head of the gods, right? There was something more important to them than the one true God. Now, note this: God says, when asked, What is the greatest commandment?

In Matthew and in Mark, he says, What? The greatest commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself. Do you want to know why there was retribution upon Egypt? Because they didn't love God. They didn't love God. Don't think you can go through life making up your own gods and loving what you want to love and not experience grave consequences. It just didn't work that way. Now, you might not pay today. You might not pay tomorrow, but you will pay someday.

Egypt did. It was 400 years of slavery for Israel. But you know what? Some 400 years later, they paid. They paid greatly. And I'm sure throughout those 400 years, they were thinking, nothing's going to happen to us. We are powerful. We are great. We are unbelievable. For you to come in here and tell us that there's another God that we should obey, we're not going to do that. We love our gods. Don't tell us to love the one true God that you think is the one true God. So they didn't love God, and because they didn't love God, guess what?

They couldn't love their neighbor, right? They couldn't love their neighbor. Now, think about this for a moment. Because we all have a neighbor that we don't love. Maybe you're sitting next to them today in church. Maybe you met them on the way in as you parked. Have a hard time being around those people. You don't like them. They rub you the wrong way. They irritate you. You ever have one of those people? Of course not. Only the second service people have those kinds of enemies.

You guys don't. Right? No. Sure, we do. Listen, I got a news flash for you. They're not the problem. The problem is Your love for God. Did you know that? That's the problem. The problem is we don't love God as we ought to love Him. We don't love Him with all our mind, and all our heart, and all our strength, and all our soul, and all that we have. We are not consumed with God. If we were, you know what? We would deal with our friend. We would handle our friend. We'd reach out to our friend. We'd love our friend.

We'd be kind to our friend. If our friend was in sin, we confront their sin, right? We would deal first of all with the sin in our own lives because we want to make sure we're pure before God, and then we would deal with our brother.

You see, the problem with the lack of confrontation in the church. Is not the person who intimidates us, or we just don't want to do it, or we're too lazy, it's that we don't love God as we ought to love Him. Because you see, when God said the greatest and foremost commandment is to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and your neighbor as yourself, it's not two commands He gives, it's one. It's one with two facets: loving God first and loving your brother second.

It's about love. And Egypt didn't love their neighbor because they didn't love God. So the retribution of God came down upon them. But note this: they had a double problem because who was their neighbor? Their neighbor was Israel. It wasn't just any neighbor. It was God's people, Israel. And what did God say to Abraham in Genesis 12, verse number 3? I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse those who what? Who curse you? You see, the problem was not so much that they didn't love their neighbor, it's that their neighbor was Israel, and God made a covenant promise to Abraham: if somebody curses you, I'm going to curse them.

I'm going to deal with them. You see, you know, people, you know, I told you this before, they don't understand why I'm so passionate about Israel. I'm passionate about Israel because Israel is my homeland. That's why I'm passionate about Israel. I'm passionate about Israel because Israel is my heritage. That's what it's all about. That's where I'm from. And I'm passionate about Israel because not only is it my homeland, not only is it my heritage, but it is my responsibility to honor the people of God.

And that's the nation of Israel. I am. That's my responsibility to do that. God's not done with Israel at all. He's got a plan for them. In Egypt, they missed it. Man, you can't be cursing God's people. But even in the plagues, you're going to see the mercy of God, his patience, as he releases the turmoil upon the people. That's God's mercy. But they wouldn't repent. Pharaoh would harden his heart, become more and more stiff-necked against. The people of God and against the God of Israel. But that's the aim of the plagues: the glorification of God, the retribution upon Egypt.

And lastly, The emancipation of Israel. The emancipation of Israel. God said in Revelation, excuse me, Exodus chapter 3, verse number 20: I'm going to smite them, and then, and then what? They're going let you go. There's your freedom. You know something with me? Before there was freedom, there was a judgment upon sin. Before there was freedom, there is judgment. And in the emancipation of Israel, we are able to understand how Jesus Christ frees us from our enslavement. To sin. There had to be a judgment upon sin.

For that to happen, God sent His only Son, Jesus Christ, into the world. For He bore in His body on the cross. Our sins. 1 Peter chapter 2, verse number 24. 1 Peter 3, verse number 18, tells us that the one who was just d for the unjust. And the whole picture of God's judgment upon Egypt in order to set Israel free is a picture of God's judgment upon sin at Calvary in order to set his people free. See that? Now you understand a little bit more about why it's going to take us some time to go through the plagues.

You need to understand all that. Now, I know that all of you have read the plagues, and all of you have seen movies on the Ten Commandments, but I promise. I promise that every week you come, you will see something you've never read before or ever seen before. I promise. Now, when you begin to analyze all that and put it together, you know what you're going to find out? You're going to find out. that this just isn't a good literary story. This really is divine inspiration of God who very strategically, specifically placed each plague in its proper order to bring about his perfect purpose.

That's what he does. That's all I want to say about that. We'll talk more about that next week because we begin with the water and the blood. But what's the application for you and me? What do we draw from this? How do we conclude this today? Two things. One is this, and please understand this: that when God judges, He does a thorough job. When God judges, He does a thorough job. We will see throughout the plagues that the land of Israel is protected, protected from what's happening. God protects them, He blesses them.

He ends up setting them free because he wants to bless his people. And, you know, when God wants to bless you, boy, I tell you, he can't. You can't hold him back. No good thing does the Lord withhold from those who walk uprightly. Psalm 8:11. God blesses them. God blesses his people. And throughout the plagues, yes, we will see much devastation. Much turmoil, much pain, much heartache upon a people that are rebellious against God. But the people that are obedient to God, who want to follow God, who want to honor God, the blessings just keep coming over and over.

And over and over again. And when you read through the Old Testament, you read about the blessings upon Israel. God just keeps bestowing blessing after blessing upon them because they're His people. And that's what God wants to do in your life and in mine. If you're part of God's family, if you're one of the people of God, God just wants to bless your life. He does, He wants to honor you. He wants you to experience the greatness of who he is. And yet, he wants you to understand that if you rebel against him and turn your back against him, there are no rewards for that.

As we begin to embark on this wonderful study of the plagues, understand that God has many lessons to teach us. Maybe learn them. Maybe leave here each and every week saying, wow. That was so good, so powerful, so great, because our God is an awesome God. Let's pray.