Why Can’t Pharaoh Stop?

This is week number three for us in the plagues. We’re up to #7:

1. Nile to blood
2. Frogs
3. Gnats or lice
4. flies
5. plague that kills the livestock
6. boils
7. hail

By the time we get to hail for the third time Pharaoh has to humiliate himself by asking Moses to intercede with Yhwh on his behalf.

Those Who Feared the LORD

The confrontation between God and Pharaoh full blown. Number 7 begins again in the morning.

Exodus 9:13–19 (NET)

¹³ The Lord said to Moses, “Get up early in the morning, stand before Pharaoh, and tell him, ‘Thus says the Lord, the God of the Hebrews: “Release my people so that they may serve me! ¹⁴ For this time I will send all my plagues on your very self and on your servants and your people, so that you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth. ¹⁵ For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with plague, and you would have been destroyed from the earth. ¹⁶ But for this purpose I have caused you to stand: to show you my strength, and so that my name may be declared in all the earth. ¹⁷ You are still exalting yourself against my people by not releasing them. ¹⁸ I am going to cause very severe hail to rain down about this time tomorrow, such hail as has never occurred in Egypt from the day it was founded until now. ¹⁹ So now, send instructions to gather your livestock and all your possessions in the fields to a safe place. Every person or animal caught in the field and not brought into the house—the hail will come down on them, and they will die!” ’ ”

Then we have a new element.

Exodus 9:20–21 (NET)

²⁰ Those of Pharaoh’s servants who feared the word of the Lord hurried to bring their servants and livestock into the houses, ²¹ but those who did not take the word of the Lord seriously left their servants and their cattle in the field.

Pharaoh’s political/religious hold over his people seems to be eroding. His people are even beginning to take the LORD seriously.

Pharaoh Fears the LORD

Exodus 9:22–28 (NET)

²² Then the Lord said to Moses, “Extend your hand toward the sky that there may be hail in all the land of Egypt, on people and on animals, and on everything that grows in the field in the land of Egypt.” ²³ When Moses extended his staff toward the sky, the Lord sent thunder and hail, and fire fell to the earth; so the Lord caused hail to rain down on the land of Egypt. ²⁴ Hail fell and fire mingled with the hail; the hail was so severe that there had not been any like it in all the land of Egypt since it had become a nation. ²⁵ The hail struck everything in the open fields, both people and animals, throughout all the land of Egypt. The hail struck everything that grows in the field, and it broke all the trees of the field to pieces. ²⁶ Only in the land of Goshen, where the Israelites lived, was there no hail.

²⁷ So Pharaoh sent and summoned Moses and Aaron and said to them, “I have sinned this time! The Lord is righteous, and I and my people are guilty.²⁸ Pray to the Lord, for the mighty thunderings and hail are too much! I will release you and you will stay no longer.”

This seems like total capitulation. Pharaoh now sees that he has sinned.

He has been found wanting, the LORD is righteous.

Where Your Treasure Is, There will Your Heart Be Also

Exodus 9:29–35 (NET)

²⁹ Moses said to him, “When I leave the city I will spread my hands to the Lord, the thunder will cease, and there will be no more hail, so that you may know that the earth belongs to the Lord.³⁰ But as for you and your servants, I know that you do not yet fear the Lord God.”

³³ So Moses left Pharaoh, went out of the city, and spread out his hands to the Lord, and the thunder and the hail ceased, and the rain stopped pouring on the earth. ³⁴ When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder ceased, he sinned again: both he and his servants hardened their hearts. ³⁵ So Pharaoh’s heart remained hard, and he did not release the Israelites, as the Lord had predicted through Moses.

People have long debated the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart. Was this Yhwh setting him up? Was he just a jerk?

[Breaking Bad Spoiler Alert!]

Skyler, at wit’s end, after her life and her family have been destroyed by Walter, wanting to break through the dominant lie (among many) that Walter said he did it for the family, Walt finally tells the truth to himself, her and all of us. 

“I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. and I was really … I was alive.”

There will be moments again and again in Walt’s frenzied life as a drug kingpin that he will be in agony over what he’s done and what might be done to him, but when the dust settles, he always sent back. Walt was not in the meth business or the money business. He was in the empire business. 

I remember Dante Venegas, a former pastor of mine, telling me that when people would make a declaration of intent to follow Jesus he would sometimes try to talk them out of it. He didn’t want them rushing into it without counting the cost. He knew, following Jesus is not something to be toyed with or taken lightly. It does not come naturally to us.

We Use the World, Then the World Uses Us

I’m reading a book by a French philosopher named Luc Ferry who sketches out an outline of the history of philosophy. I won’t obviously try to re-create it here, but by the time we get to the early 20th century he highlights a very controversial German philosopher named Martin Heidegger. If you google Heidegger you’ll see that he’s controversial because he was for a while a member of the Nazi party. Ferry interprets some of his observations about life in our world.

…what is certain and what Heidegger enables us to understand, is that liberal globalisation is in the process of betraying one of the most fundamental promises of democracy – how collectively to make our own history, to participate in it and have our say about our destiny, and to try and change it for the better 

Each year, your mobile phone, your MP3 player and computer games change, along with everything else around you: their functions multiply, they become smaller, their screens get bigger or become coloured, and so on. And you know that a product which does not keep in step is going to fail. Unless it follows suit. It is not a question of taste, of one choice among others, but a necessity without choice, in which survival is at stake.

In this sense, we could say that in today’s world of globalised capital which places all human activities in a state of perpetual and unending competition, history is moving beyond the will of men. Competition is becoming not only a form of destiny, but, what is more, there is nothing to suggest that it is moving in the direction of what is better. Who can seriously believe that we shall have more freedom and be happier because in a few months the weight of our MP3 players will have halved, or their memory doubled? In accordance with Nietzsche’s wishes, the idols are all dead: no ideal, in effect, animates or disturbs the course of things, only the absolute imperative of change for the sake of change. To use an ordinary but suggestive image: as a bicycle must keep going in order not to topple over, or a gyroscope must keep spinning to remain on its axis, we must ceaselessly ‘progress’; but this mechanical progress induced by a struggle for survival can no longer be integrated within a grand design.

Ferry, Luc (2011-12-27). A Brief History of Thought: A Philosophical Guide to Living (p. 207). HarperCollins. Kindle Edition.

I’d suggest this is not a new thing with technology. This is our nature.

Agent Smith in the Matrix notes that humans, unlike other mammals, don’t establish an equilibrium. They consume their resources until they exhaust it and then the move to another area to do it all over again.

In Terminator 2 the machine notes “it’s your nature to destroy yourselves.”

At what cost will Pharaoh capitulate to Yhwh’s demands. It means far more than losing a labor force. Capitulating to Yhwh will require him to give up his identity as god over Egypt and controller of his own destiny. It will require him to abandon his palace and the cult dedicated to his worship along with the rest of the Egyptian pantheon, and to worship this God over all the earth. This is something he is simply not willing to do, no matter how much pain the plagues inflict. He’d rather rule over hell, than worship God in heaven.

No Half Measures Following Jesus

People like to think about Jesus like a nice guy, a guy who lets things slide. We get this impression because Jesus wasn’t the kind of moralist we expect from our church experience. When we see Jesus hanging out with prostitutes and sinners we say “cool”. When we see Jesus talking to the Samaritan woman we say “that’s what I’m talking about!” When we see Jesus defending the “sinful woman” of Luke 7 we cheer for him, standing up for those oppressed by the system.

What we fail to realize is that Jesus was drawn to people who were oppressed by “the system”, and why Jesus was loved and followed by so many oppressed by “the system” was because these people had little to lose in following him. 

When the powerful and respectable Nicodemus came to visit Jesus in John 3 he comes at night. He wants to keep things quiet, test him out, avoid being publicly associated with Jesus until he could maybe feel things out of get some concessions on sensitive religious or political matters. Jesus would have none of it.

When we read about how YHWH takes Pharaoh apart, and is completely uncompromising in negotiating with him we think “that’s that mean OT God again, we sure like Jesus better.”

If this is your refuge, I’ve got bad news for you. Jesus is just as uncompromising.

Matthew 10:34–39 (NET)

³⁴ “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace but a sword. ³⁵ For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, ³⁶ and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. ³⁷ “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. ³⁸ And whoever does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. ³⁹ Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life because of me will find it.

Pharaoh’s dilemma is our dilemma. Jesus won’t meet us half way. We can’t both keep our empire and align with him.

Jesus is patient. He met with Nicodemus at night, and it would take while for Nicodemus to come around and believe enough, and have courage enough to publicly associate with him by claiming his body after Jesus was crucified. I’m sure it cost Nicodemus his reputation.

I’m glad he was patient with Nicodemus because I want him to be patient with me.

The book of James, probably written by Jesus’ brother exhorts the community of Jesus followers not to be “double minded”. You can’t serve two masters, you can’t live in two worlds. We have to choose. He doesn’t compromise.

Not Calling You To Religiosity

The problem with this message is that for most of us this leads us to cultural religiosity. We double down on Jesus and we imagine it makes us moralists and Pharisees. This isn’t what Jesus was asking for either. The heart of following Jesus is one simple question: “Do you trust Jesus more than you trust yourself? You can’t do this simply by force of will. It takes time, and training and practice. I like to understand this training in a three phase movement.

Misery: Am I finally convinced that trying to establish my own little empire is folly and a stupid way to try to secure my life? Will I learn from all of my failure? Will I see that every empire ever built in the age of decay falls apart? Will I stop trying to hoard confederate money?

Deliverance: Do I believe that Jesus came to seek my well-being at his expense and that because of what he did on the cross I no longer face condemnation for my rebellion? Do I believe that in his resurrection the age to come has begun and I no longer have only one life to live?

Gratitude: If all of this is true, then out of freedom and joy I can bit by bit forsake my empire building heart, and more and more pour myself into healing and loving a world that is spinning out of our control. That even when I fail at loving the resurrection guarantees that I haven’t labored in vain. That the joy which motivated God to make the world will one day triumph and I really have nothing to fear. This is what he calls me to. No half measures.