You Shall Know That I AM the LORD

Today we're going to study Exodus chapters 7 to 10 and we titled it you shall know that I am the Lord. The reason for that title is that's what God said to Moses in the last lesson you might remember. So I want to start by asking you a question and you might think it's coming out of nowhere but my question is what is the point of your Christian life? What is the point of your Christian life? Now as we're studying Exodus, the Exodus, the movement of Israel out from under Egypt, the point of it is not simply to move the nation from Egypt on their way to the promised land and the point isn't simply to relieve them from being in bondage to a Pharaoh, to another king. The point is also the main thing is that God wanted them to know who he was. You shall know that I am the Lord. He wanted there to be no doubt about who he was to answer Pharaoh's question, who is the Lord? Right? He wanted there to be no doubt that he's more powerful than all the gods of Egypt that they were serving. He wanted there to be no doubt about who was doing the delivering. It was not Moses doing the delivering. It was not Aaron doing the delivering. It was not the staff. It was God and as we closed last week's study you'll remember that Moses went to the people of Israel and he shared with them what it was that God wanted to do and he was trying to encourage them and say God is going to do this for us and you remember it said they had such a broken spirit that they couldn't hear him and Moses, we didn't get to talk about it, we ran out of time last week, but Moses did something that we do all the time. He looked at them and he said you can't even hear what God wants for you. It must be because I can't talk good. That must be why you can't hear. Remember and he said oh but I have uncircumcised lips. It's because I'm not able to express it somehow. It's somehow my fault and you know we do that, don't we? We live with people who have lost hope. Do you have anybody in your life who has lost hope? People do desperate things when they lose hope and sometimes we look at that situation and we go if only, if only I had done this, if only I had, if only I was able to convey the truth better. Maybe they, but in this situation it wasn't Moses, it was just that they were, they had a broken spirit is what the Bible said, but we're going to, one really important observation as we go through this lesson is as we watch Moses, he's growing into the job. We're not going to hear him say things like this anymore about oh I can't do this, I have uncircumcised lips. He has full confidence now that God has a plan for deliverance, it's going to happen in his way and in his time. Moses has confidence that all he needs to do is to obey the Lord and as we would say, he knows God's got it under control, we would look at a piece of scripture like Psalm 46 that says be still and know that I am God and this is now what Moses is armed with. So we are going to, we're going to pick it up in verse 5, we're in chapter 7 verse 5, we're still one week away from the actual deliverance in our lesson. Don't miss next week's lesson, don't miss doing it in your study guide, don't miss coming, it's the most important lesson of this whole series. These nine plagues that we're studying today is still a preamble to the real deliverance, but let's pick it up in verse 5.

Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord commanded them. Moses was, look at this, 80 years old, Aaron was 83 years old when they spoke to Pharaoh. And then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, when Pharaoh takes you to prove, excuse me, back up, when Pharaoh says to you, prove yourselves by working a miracle, then you shall say to Aaron, take your staff, cast it down before Pharaoh, and it may become a serpent. Now why in the world would Pharaoh even say that? Is that something common? You go see a king and they say, prove yourself by doing a miracle. Like why would God have even thought that Pharaoh would say that? Well first of all, God knows what's going to happen, but second of all, I wonder if information got leaked a little bit. See Moses and Aaron had already done this for Israel, and I wonder if that information got leaked, and so when they do see Pharaoh, he's going to ask right away to see what they can do. But look at verse 20.

And then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers, and they, the magicians of Egypt, also did the same by their secret arts. For each man cast down his staff, and they became serpents. All right, Moses, excuse me, God knew exactly that Pharaoh was going to ask for this, and he gave this sign to Moses way back at the burning bush, way back in Horeb. That's when God gave this particular sign. They practiced it on the elders of Egypt, but I want us to think through this initial miracle and think through the implications, and in order to do it, I want you to look at this picture that is familiar to most of you. You could probably even tell me what a king of Egypt that was. It's a more modern king than what we would have had in Pharaoh's, Moses's day. But look at that headdress and tell me what you note on that. Well, I'm going to read to you from a secular source. This is from Wikipedia that talks about what is on a king of Egypt's head, and it's called the uraeus, and it's the stylized, upright form of an Egyptian cobra, snake or serpent, symbolized divine authority in ancient Egypt. It's the symbol for the goddess Wadjet, one of the earliest Egyptian deities depicted as a cobra. She became the patroness of the Nile Delta and protector of lower Egypt. The pharaohs wore this, the uraeus, to indicate Wadjet's protection and to reinforce Pharaoh's claim over the land. All right, so with this in mind, I want you to consider the scene again now and picture a pharaoh with the uraeus on his head. And now Aaron throws down the staff, and what does it become? The symbol of this goddess that is supposedly giving him the authority to rule over Egypt. And of course, we read that the magicians copy the same thing. But look what happens in verse 12, Aaron's staff swallows up their staffs. And so who is triumphant at the end of this day? That is an excellent opening argument that Moses and Aaron bring in answer to who is the Lord. Verse 13 tells us still Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them. As the Lord had said, all right, we're going to get into the plagues in just a minute. But we started last week talking about Pharaoh's strategies as pushback against God's plan. And we made parallels to what we see with our enemy, Satan, because the Bible tells us that we should not be unaware of his schemes. And so we went through four things that we learned last week. I want to review them for you here. We talked about the fact that Pharaoh wanted, brought in a confusion asking who is the Lord, and that Satan over this whole world brings such confusion. Somebody said it to me this morning. There's such confusion in the world, and it is the truth, confusion about who God is. We realize that our enemy wants to keep us busy and burdened just like Pharaoh did, that our enemy works to isolate us and separate us just like Pharaoh did, and also to bring discouragement to us in the same way. We talked about this last week. Now today, I'm telling you this so you can save a little room in your notes or something. We want to bring three more strategies today from our lesson that we see in Pharaoh that we can translate to not be unaware of the schemes of the enemy. And the first one that we see right here is this counterfeiting of the work of God. So we'll start with that, copying the work of God or counterfeiting. The magicians in Egypt did the same thing that Aaron had done by their secret arts, their dark powers, and dark powers are a real thing. It's not make-belief, but some of Satan's best work is done when he copies. Satan rarely comes to confront us through the front door, but he copies. That's why the New Testament calls him an angel of light. Is he light? No, he is darkness, but he copies, and that is one of his modes. And so we know from 2 Corinthians, he's an angel of light. So we need to remember, as we're not being unaware of the enemy's schemes, that not everything that gleams is gold. And we need to be discerning in our life, and not everything that looks like it is a work of God. And we would say, look, God must be in that. Well, maybe, maybe not, but we need to be discerning. We've talked about this before. How do you detect a counterfeit? The people who actually study bills, $50 bills that are counterfeited, don't detect them by looking at all the possibilities that someone might do. But rather, how did they study? They studied the actual, the real thing. And that is a parallel for our lives. We are studying the real thing. When we are in the word, studying God's word, knowing God's word, it helps us to detect a copy of God's work. And something that the enemy is doing that looks like the real thing, but it is not the real thing. All right, now we're gonna get into the plagues. And I'm not gonna read the text for all nine plagues, because number one, that would take up all 30 minutes that we have. Number two, you studied them. So I'm gonna do a lot of summarizing, but I'll read the text for the first one. And so we're in chapter 7, verse 15.

And so with the first plague, we see God going right to the core of the kingdom, because we said that the Nile River is that source of security, source of strength. And there is a God that they relied upon, the God Happy, H-A-P-I, who was the God of the river, had no control over what was happening right now. And so that must have been a humiliation to that God. Blood is mentioned in here. And I think when we come to a historical narrative in the Bible, not poetry and not prophecy, but when we are in a historical narrative, we need to take the common sense of the passage that it turned into blood. People have tried to talk about, there's this red soil that would release and this and that. I like to believe in miracles because that's what the Bible teaches. And how are you gonna explain the water in the vessels of wood and all that sort of thing? So God miraculously turned this into blood. Think about the irony that's involved in that. This river that 80 years ago should have been the death of this man and his generation, and now Moses along with his brother is coming back to bring judgment through the Lord on this same river by turning it into blood. Isn't that interesting? And for seven full days, which to me brings that biblical sense of completion that we know about the word seven. But the magicians did the same thing. Now, I would think that a really good miracle would have been to heal the water. But that's just, I'm just a practical kind of a girl, I guess. Also, before we begin to summarize the other plagues, I want to remind us that this judgment is not on the people of Israel. It is on the gods of Israel. And when we move forward into Exodus 12, 12, there is a reminder on all the gods of Egypt, I execute judgments. I am the Lord. God always holds a way open for mercy in judgment. We see this throughout the Bible. Don't have time to talk about it, but we will see as we look at the people coming out of Egypt. It tells us there's a mixed multitude. And so we are going to see Egyptians and people from other nationalities coming out with them. There is a place in every judgment for individual people to look up and say, I believe in you. Rahab is another good example of that. All right, let's summarize. We talked about the water. The second plague was an infestation of frogs, which probably spoke a judgment on Heket, the goddess of birth. She has a head of a frog. And of course, the magicians copied the plague. Again, practical me thinks that a real miracle would be abracadabra, frogs go away, rather than let's just make even more of them. But that's just how it goes. Third plague was some of your Bibles say gnats, some say lice. And I think what was unique about this is that it was very personal. It was on the body, kind of a thing you can't get away from it. And so this judgment seems to go right into the priests, the magicians of Egypt, because they were clean freaks. That was part of their worship. And now there was real problems with them being able to actually worship. And so they're the ones that say now in this passage, this is the finger of God. It is the priests of Egypt that say, this is God. And then the next one, number four, is the flies. And this comes after a morning warning. And I think that this is a good time for us to pause a little bit and talk about the rhythm and the pattern of the plagues. We mentioned it in the study guide because God didn't just make them up as he went. There was purpose. And I love when we're able to, I hope you were able to do, we switched up this week from a directed study guide to more of an inductive study guide, I hope you were able to follow that. But I did give you a nice little chart to fill out. But I hope that that something, when we can study these things, we see purpose. We see a plan, we see a pattern here. And one pattern, there are many ways that scholars have divided this, but one pattern we mentioned was these three groups of triplets where you have a pattern of how the warning or how the plague came about. And it had a rhythm of warning, warning, no warning. In fact, it had a little bit more of a rhythm to it as warning in the morning. Warning, we don't know when, and then no warning at all. It went three, three, and three, kind of interesting. And another thing we see is right here, the magicians gave up counterfeiting after the frogs, which is a good idea. Because who needs more lice, who needs more gnats, so that was wise to just stop right there. But also, this one right here, this plague with the flies, this is where God drew the distinction between Israel and between Egypt. So another good reason not to counterfeit, cuz they're not being trouble, it's just us, so don't make more trouble for just us here. But we also see here a strategy, another strategy of the enemy, that we're gonna come up now and we're gonna read the text in chapter 8 verse 24. And this is gonna be Pharaoh's response to this plague of the flies. And I'll tell you the strategy right off. The strategy is to compromise the work of God. Our first one was to copy the work of God. And now we're going to see a compromise of the work of God.

And so Pharaoh is trying to bring a compromise to them. Just do a little bit of what God asked you to do, but in the end he didn't hold up his bargain anyway. And compromise is a common suggestion of our enemy. We have things that God has told us to do. We have a certain level of holiness that God has brought to us through his word. And our enemy would suggest to us, just do part of it, and that's going to be good. Don't do the whole thing. That's just so much work to do the whole thing. Just do part of it. Has the enemy ever suggested compromise in your life? Mine too. Yeah. And I don't know where these thoughts come from, but just a little, just do a little bit. Something is better than nothing, right? And so that is a work of our enemy that we should be aware of, so we are not unaware of his schemes in our life. All right. Now as we finish this summary, we're reminded that God is protecting his people from the destruction through the rest of these plagues. Number five was a disease on the cattle, and God actually gave Pharaoh a day to repent before he brought this. And we're in chapter nine and verse six says, all the livestock of the Egyptians died, but not one of the livestock of the people of Israel died. But the heart of Pharaoh was hardened. He did not let the people go. Next was boils. And this plague came without warning. Verse 10, Moses took soot from the kiln and stood before Pharaoh and Moses threw it into the air and it became boils breaking out and sores on man and beast. And then we have hail. We're back to this early morning warning. And interesting about this one, there was a means of protection. Look at God spoke. He said, I'll tell you how to protect if you believe in the words that I'm saying.

All right. We get to our third strategy of Pharaoh in this, in his response to this plague of hail. And it is that remorse is better than repentance or remorse rather than repentance. Look at verse 27, Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and said to them, this time I have sinned. You think the Lord is in the right and I and my people are in the wrong. Plead with the Lord for there's been enough of God's thunder and hail. I will let you go and you shall stay no longer. And Moses said, as soon as I've gone out of the city, I will stretch out my hands to the Lord. The thunder will cease and there will be no more hail so that you may know that the earth is the Lord's. But as for you and your servants, I know that you do not yet fear the Lord God. Moses could see that Pharaoh was sorry that he had stirred up God's wrath and he wishes things were different, but he has not bowed in repentance at this point. And that is a strategy of our enemy. When God brings something into our life that should catch our attention, he would suggest to us that we can say that God is right. We can act like we're sorry. We can even read prepared prayers of confession. The more drama, the better. But stop short of being truly repentant because to repent means to turn and go the other way. And we see here that Pharaoh didn't do that. He was merely sorry. And this is still a strategy in our Christian life that the enemy would tempt us to deal with remorse rather than with true repentance. True repentance is humbling. It brings our pride low. It is not easy to be repentant. It's much easier to be remorseful. But Moses could smell this on Pharaoh and he knew the difference. Look at what happened when the pressure was off. Verse 34, Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased and yet he sinned again. He hardened his heart, he and his servants. So the heart of Pharaoh was hardened and he did not let the people go. The next plague, number eight, is locusts. Moses and Aaron brought a warning that there would be an invasion of locusts. And this is interesting because Pharaoh's servants now come in and lobby with him. And they said, let the man go. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined? And so Pharaoh says again to Moses, go and serve the Lord. But which ones of you will go? Moses said, our young and our old, our sons and our daughters, our flocks and our herds, all of us will go. And then Pharaoh said, no, just the men, just the men. So another attempt at compromise. I haven't taken a strong position about all the gods of Egypt because you guys know me and you know that I'm not an Egyptian scholar and I don't know these things. I have just have the same resources that you do. And I put some of those resources into your study guide to suggest some of them. We can see that these gods of Egypt were very Hindu-esque. Don't you think that when you see them? You think of a lot of the same gods of the Hindu religion. But one of them is, I do want to point out with this next and last plague before there is deliverance, the ninth plague, plague of darkness. And that is that it seems obvious that it is a direct attack on the god of sun that they worshiped, Ra, Amun-Ra. And you know, Egypt, all of us, we need the sun. I mean, this is one of our basic things in life that we need. And they had developed a god to worship that ruled the sun, the god that ruled the light. And look what happens with the ninth plague. There's darkness for three days. And so the god of light is humiliated and Jehovah God is making a statement. I am the Lord. You asked, who is the Lord? I am the Lord. You've made up other things to serve and to worship, but I'll prove it to you with this. I am the Lord. And so for three days, there was a darkness that could be felt. But look at this, verse 23 says, but all the people of Israel had light where they lived. I love that because God was on the precipice of bringing his people out of the kingdom of darkness. And so to protect them from experiencing that darkness, I think is just a really neat thing. And the New Testament still teaches us that this is our place. We are God's children. And I just want to end with a couple verses. The first one is from First Thessalonians 5.5. It says, for you are all children of light, children of day. We are not of night or of darkness. This is our place in the kingdom. We might live within a kingdom of darkness in this world, a kingdom that is confused, but we are not of it in the same way that the children of Israel, the people of Israel, were not under that cloud of darkness in this particular plague. And the last verse I want to bring in closing is just through my Bible reading. I was in Colossians and I ran across this. I thought this is too sweet not to bring up as a parallel to what we're studying here. It's Colossians 1, 13 to 14. He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and he's transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins. This is the work that God has done for us as believers. He's delivered us from this kingdom of darkness that we read about right here in this text. Like I said, next week is the most important lesson. So be sure and come back and we'll finally experience the actual deliverance out of Egypt. Lord, thank you for the insights that we have, insights into your strength and your power. It's true what Moses said, that the earth is the Lord's. Lord, you have the power over the elements and we love reading about miracles because it reminds us that you truly are miraculous and that you have control over all the elements in the same way you have control over our lives. Lord, we thank you. And we thank you for the insights, too, Make us your kids that can smell the aroma of Christ, and that causes us to smell the deception of the enemy, Lord. And we thank you for the insights, too, Make us your kids that can smell the aroma of Christ, and that causes us to smell the deception of the enemy, Lord. And we thank you for the insights, too,