Dan: 0:00

Well, hi everyone. And welcome to episode 11 of training for life redeemed. I’m Dan, your host , and I’m here with my dad, David Jackson. In this episode, we will be looking at Exodus 5 to 10 as God demolishes the power of Pharaoh and brings his people out from under the abuse of the offspring of the snake. In our reading, we have reached the point where Moses, at age 80, and his brother at age 83, Aaron, returned to Egypt to face the people of Israel and then Pharaoh with the news that God is going to bring his people out from under Pharaoh’s rule and make them into his own nation. Now, God’s plagues on Egypt must’ve been pretty devastating. Dad, why does God hit the whole nation of Egypt and not just Pharaoh? Yeah .

David: 1:04

Yeah. Well, Pharaoh is just the pointy end of the whole process. Pharaoh is the one who, in a sense, inherited Satan’s kingdom from Satan. So when Adam rebels against God, back in the garden, God had given Adam the responsibility and the authority to govern the world, and he bowed the knee to Satan. So now Satan’s got that power, and he designates human rulers to take over that role. And they worship substitute gods and they claim authority from those substitute gods. So Pharaoh himself actually claimed to be a half god, half human. He claimed that his father was a god. If it’s the Pharaoh I think it was, Thutmosis III, his name means offspring of the God Thoth. So if we’re taking him on, we’re taking on Satan’s control over the whole kingdom. And we’re trying to persuade people that when , if you follow Satan as your King, if you follow, if you tell God to go jump in the Lake, then God’s judgment will fall on all of you, not just the one who tells you what to do. So Pharaoh’s the representative, but everybody in Egypt who comes under his rule is a slave effectively to whatever that god-king wants them to do. They have no choice. They have to be rescued out of that. If they’re going to be saved, they have to change kings. So Satan’s regime is entirely destructive and God needs to teach the people that that is the case. So he’s going to bring Pharaoh down and with him, he’s going to bring down that whole regime and people’s confidence in those gods.

Dan: 2:48

Yeah, I was gonna say, each plague kind of matches up with some of the gods in Egypt and shows off how, you know, God is the one who’s powerful and can control these things that Egypt think that a particular God might control. Can you give us a few examples of how the plagues match up with some of the gods?

David: 3:05

Yeah, it’s actually, it’s lots of fun. Back in 2010, your mother and I went for a tour of Egypt with Macquarie University people. And it’s, it’s amazing to look at how the Egyptian religion of the day just gets smashed by what God was doing here. So they believe that the Nile itself was a god. They believe that the god Osiris was the god of the underworld, the god of the dead. The Nile was Osiris’s bloodstream. So you take a myth like that and you say, well , let’s turn the Nile to blood. You’re mocking their faith, you know , Osiris and your faith in, in the Nile as the source of life. My favourite is the frog, I’ve got to admit. So Egyptians, believed if an Egyptian woman wanted to get pregnant, she’d go down to the temple of this funny little god called Heqt and Heqt was a frog god, and she’d make an offering to the frog-god, maybe by a statue of the frog-god, bring it up, put it by the bed. Hubby would come home, see a frog beside the bed and know that his wife wanted to get pregnant, but Egyptians were having trouble getting pregnant. So what does God do? Have some frogs!! It’s sarcasm, it’s mockery. And it just brings all of their faith in their gods to a crashing disaster. The other one is the god Ra. Ra is the sun-god. They had different gods for different phases of the sun RA for one part of the day, Amun for another. So let’s bring Amun down and Ra down a quick way to do that. Turn the sun out. So Egypt goes into a time of darkness. The gods who support their crops are all thrashed, everything they believe in. And just for fun, we’ll throw in a plague of mozzies. It’s it is God convincing people that faith in these gods is a disaster and you need to bow the knee to the creator, God, and take him seriously. We’re living in God’s world the way he designed it. If you want to mess with that, then the whole thing becomes destructive and dysfunctional. How long does it take to convince somebody that they need to give up that system of belief?

Dan: 5:23

Well, given God’s in control, and God’s already said that he’s going to harden Pharaoh’s heart through this. That’s going to mean, I guess there’s going to be prolonged longer. Why , why does God want it to drag on why does he want the suffering to go on so long here?

David: 5:39

How many , how long does it take to convince somebody to throw away their backup plan, their safety net? If you believe firmly that , y ou’re lucky charm is g oing t o keep you safe. What’s it g oing t o take for you to give it up? If you believe that, u h, you know, going to church and saying the right words and paying money to a minister or going down to your fortune t eller i s going to make it, what is it going to take to prove that these guys are fakes? And the short answer is you’ve got to repeat the lesson and you’ve got to prove that this isn’t a coincidence. So it wasn’t just a coincidence that we had a bad season that year. Yes, there are locust plagues every now and again, but to have a locus plague, turn up, exactly what Moses says it will and go away exactly when Moses says it will. These are, these are not coincidences. After three or four, you start to have some doubts. It doesn’t take long to convince the Egyptian magicians that this is the hand of Moses’s God. but Ph araoh, if he admits that the Egyptian gods are fake, he’s admitting that he’s a fake, that he’s claimed the throne is based on a lie and that would bring him and his entire dynasty down. He has everything to lose and he’s prepared to lose fo r, for the whole nation to suffer rather than lose that. So God hammers this nail all the aw ay d own.

Dan: 7:15

I’m just going to chuck in an extra question here , dad , I think there’s going to be people listening to this who think that God’s being unjust by punishing all of the Egyptians and rescuing just a small little group. How do you deal with that?

David: 7:31

There are no innocent people, you know, from the day of Adam, till the present, we are born enemies of God our natural inclination is only evil all the time. We are born with this damaged , uh , psyche that is totally focused on self and wants to suppress all knowledge of God. The Egyptian people didn’t reluctantly follow their faith and worship their gods. They did it out of a desperate sense of, of trust and need , for them to protect, to turn away from their God, their gods and acknowledge Yahweh would mean acknowledging that everything they ever did or said was wrong and pride won’t let that happen. So it takes a lot to get the message across. And at the end of the day, we’re going to see lots and lots of people who are not Israelites join Israel, because they’re going to be brought to that point of repentance and faith. But we start out enemies of God and God is demonstrating that sin brings judgment.

Dan: 8:43

Yeah. So I guess in one sense, then the fact that anyone is saved, is God showing how gracious he is by the fact that we’re all born in sin, sinful. And yet he does choose to save some, how does this then help to get our life right? This whole, you know, facing down and destroying other gods,

David: 9:00

Look around at our world. Our people serve a multitude of substitutes for God and we trash each other in the process. We trash the planet. We trash relationships and we trash our bodies and we’re doing it all because we’re not living in God’s world, God’s way we’re living it our way. And we’re making up gods . We’re making up ideas where we’re putting beliefs in place that are the things we want to be true instead of the things that are true, we’re trying to live a fantasy and we’re doing so much damage. We live in an age of conspiracy theories and people who are increasingly turned into good, old fashioned, lucky charm mentality, or they just forget it, go jump off a cliff and turn the lights out. We have rising anxiety, depression, you name it because life doesn’t work this way. And so God is reaching into this mess and pulling people out by love and grace. And to do that, to persuade people that this is the case, this is eye-opening stuff. What’s happening in Egypt back then, we’re seeing exactly the same thing in our, our world, a world that is played by the destructive waves of destruction that come about because we tell God to get out of our world. If that, to the extent that he does that the world implodes , uh , we’re sitting here in the middle of a pandemic, it follows drought, bushfire, flood, famine , uh , tsunamis, you name. It was all over the place. What will it take for people to turn from trusting in the stupid things we trust in and turn back to the creator who loved us, walked into the world in flesh and died to take away our sin. That’s the beginning and Moses, and these plagues are persuading the people of Egypt and Israel to turn and to put their trust in Yahweh.

Dan: 11:09

Yeah, I want to say that’s probably one thing that people often miss out is that Israel also needed to repent and turn to God throughout this as well. Well, that brings us to the end of episode 11, if you haven’t yet, please hit that subscribe button so that you don’t miss out on our next episode. As we continue to work through the book of Exodus. And if you would like the study notes for this episode, you can head over to trainingforliferedeem.com/11, and you can grab the study notes there. We hope that you will join us for our next episode where we’ll be looking at the night when God went through Egypt and delivered the last plague while keeping anyone who trusted him safe on the very first pass overnight.