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Light
from the Sidra |
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Biblical quotations are
from The Holy Scriptures published by the Jewish Publication Society in
1917. Have you ever wondered why God bothered with the long, drawn out process of sending ten plagues on Egypt? Could He not have just struck all the Egyptians dead and set Israel free in a moment? In this Sidra
there are words from the Almighty which say, “Yes, I could have done it
that way”. In 9:13-16 God says to Pharaoh: And the
LORD said unto Moses: ‘Rise up
early in the morning, and stand before Pharaoh, and say unto him: Thus
saith the LORD, the God of the
Hebrews: Let My
people go, that they may
serve Me. For I will this time send all My plagues upon thy person, and
upon thy servants, and upon thy people; that thou mayest know that
there is none like Me in all the earth. Surely now I had put forth My
hand, and smitten thee and thy people with pestilence, and thou hadst
been cut off from the earth. But in very deed for this cause have I
made thee to stand, to show thee My power, and that My name
may be declared throughout all the earth. So the reason God
redeemed his people the way he did was to show Egypt and the whole
world something about himself — his power and
his name. The plagues also served a purpose for Israel — that they might
know he was their God (and
they were his people), as we read in chapter 6:6-7, “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm,
and with great judgments; and I
will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God;
and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God, who
brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians”. Let’s think of
those three things: God’s power, his name and his people. The Egyptians
certainly saw God’s power. A
single plague that killed them all in a moment might have been
explained as a freak event. Ten plagues that occurred when Moses
commanded them to were obviously no coincidence. What was clear to the
Egyptians—particularly to
their magicians—was that this was
the “finger of God”. And how thick his finger was! How great was his
power! The earth’s greatest nation was reduced to poverty and
desolation in a matter of weeks by God’s control over his own forces of
nature. Even in the days of Samuel, the Philistines were still talking
about the “mighty things” God did in Egypt, and it caused them to fear
the God of Israel. The Egyptians
also saw something of God’s Name. At
the start of this Sidra we have the difficult passage in which the
Almighty says he would be known by his name the LORD. What God meant
when he revealed his “Name” to Moses can be seen in what follows in
6:6-8, where God speaks of remembering his covenant and bringing Israel
out of Egypt to the land of promise. By his Name he makes himself known
as the one who is able to keep his promises. Up until then it may not
have seemed that God was able to redeem them. Israel had been enslaved
for hundreds of years with no land of their own. But now the LORD would deliver
them and so be seen as the one who was well able to keep his promises
when he sovereignly chose to do so. Israel was also
deeply affected by the plagues of Egypt. They too saw the LORD’s great power.
And the preservation of Goshen, the land where they lived, from the
worst of the plagues was proof to Israel that they were the people of The
LORD. Their
redemption made that fact absolutely plain! But now another
question arises. How could God be sure that his method of judging Egypt
would work, seeing that the outcome hung on Pharaoh’s reaction to
them—that he would harden his heart? According to the traditional
teachings of the rabbis, Pharaoh was quite free to act other than he
did. For example, Rabbi J. Jacobs uses W.E. Henley’s famous poem Invictus
to sum up Judaism’s belief: It matters not
how straight the gate, How charged with
punishments the scroll, I am the master
of my fate: I am the captain
of my soul. If Pharaoh was
the master of his fate then he might not have hardened his heart. He
could have released Israel after the first plague and therefore God’s
determination to show his power would have been thwarted. But the whole
point of the Almighty making His Name known was to show that he was able to deliver precisely as
and when he chose, according to his promises. Did he not say to Moses
at the burning bush, “When thou goest back into Egypt, see that thou do
before Pharaoh all the wonders which I have put in thy hand; but I will
harden his heart, and he will not let the people go” . (Exodus 4:21) This teaches us
that we are not so free as we think we are. Our hearts are not morally
neutral — free to choose
good or evil. God knows that our basic preference is for evil, even
though we know the good we should do. He knows that, if left to
ourselves, we prefer sin and tend to grow harder in it. That is what
happened to Pharaoh. God left him to himself, and he grew stubborn:
that was how God hardened the king of Egypt’s heart. Because of the
state of Pharaoh’s heart, God knew it was inevitable, if he gave him no
help, that he would grow hard in sin. It seems to me
that the teaching of the rabbis about our freedom is far too
optimistic. We are not morally free to choose good or evil but, rather,
our hearts are under the power of sin. If we are honest with ourselves
we can see this in our own lives. What should we do, then? We should
cry to the Almighty to “circumcise our heart”. That is what Yeshua, Jesus,
taught
a member of the Sanhedrin called Nicodemus, “You must be born again”. Have you been born again? Call on the LORD today to work
such a miracle in your heart. |
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