3: Plagues, Plans, & the Tunnel of Chaos

[00:00] Stephanie: Welcome to Season two, episode three. Today we are continuing our healing journey series, and we are talking about the ten plagues. Hello, Father.

[00:11] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. And yes, we’re talking about the ten plagues. Do we just dive in right now and tell people that both are wrong?

[00:21] Stephanie: Stay tuned. I’m actually gonna throw a really rapid fire icebreaker at us.

[00:28] Marcus: All right.

[00:28] Stephanie: This is a listener icebreaker. This listener wants to know, do either of you do winter sports?

[00:37] Marcus: You know, that’s an excellent question. The short answer is no. When I was a kid, I did play a little hockey outdoors, and I did sledding now and then, but winter was when I was mourning the loss of baseball for the most part. And I was a basketball player, so winter was consumed with basketball for most of my life.

[01:04] Stephanie: My winter sport is reading.

[01:07] Marcus: There you go. That makes sense.

[01:10] Stephanie: Yeah. I’ve never played any winter sports, but, you know.

[01:13] Marcus: There you go.

[01:14] Stephanie: It is what it is. Do you play winter sports? Do you enjoy one? Is there one that we should try out at some point? Let us know in the comments on YouTube. All right, Father, ten plagues. You just came right out and said it. Ten and plague. Both wrong.

[01:29] Marcus: Yeah, both wrong.

[01:34] Stephanie: Should we dive into that, or should we actually give the context for why we’re about to talk about it?

[01:39] Marcus: Sure, whatever you want to do.

[01:40] Stephanie: Let’s give the context first and then dive into it, even though it’s, you know, fun to shake the boat or whatever the metaphor there.

[01:48] Marcus: Rock the boat.

[01:48] Stephanie: Rock the boat. Yeah. Okay. So the ten plagues are an introduction, which is part of why plague is not the right word. The linchpin of the story of Pharaoh and let my people go. And that whole part of the Exodus story is Pharaoh saying, “Yahweh who?”

[02:11] Marcus: Right.

[02:11] Stephanie: And God saying, “Yahweh. Me.”

[02:14] Marcus: Yeah, basically.

[02:15] Stephanie: Would you expand?

[02:16] Marcus: Yes. Chapter 5, let’s just read it here. It says

Later, Moses and Aaron went in and said to Pharaoh, “Pharaoh, this is what Yahweh, the God of Israel says, ‘Let my people go. So they may hold a festival for me in the wilderness.’ But pharaoh responded, (and here it is, highlight it. Underline it.) ‘Who is Yahweh that I should obey him and let Israel go? I don’t know Yahweh. And so I’m not going to let Israel go.’” 

So we have this. “Who is Yahweh? I don’t know Yahweh,” throughout the plague’s narrative, what we’re going to see is, ten times this phrase, “So that they may know that I am Yahweh.” So the whole narrative here is sort of like God saying, “You don’t know me? Let me introduce myself.” And it’s pretty powerful.

That actually leads us nicely into the explanation of at least number one, and that is that the word, plague, is in a lot of our English translations, but there is no Hebrew word for plague in the text. It’s actually the word for sign, that there are ten signs that are performed. You might say, well, what’s the big deal? Plague sounds like punishment and destruction and it’s led sometimes to the idea that we have an angry God throwing a hissy fit.

What’s actually going on is he’s answering this question, “Who is Yahweh that I should obey him?” And God is giving him signs. So, while plagues are associated with destruction, signs are associated with a message. Like, here’s a sign pointing you to a truth and here’s a truth about me. And a lot of these signs are directly contrasting who Yahweh is with the gods of Egypt, and who they are and what they’re capable of versus what he’s capable of.

What’s interesting is, I actually read this expecting him to say over and over again, “So that Pharaoh may know. So that Pharaoh may know.” But that’s not what we see. Sometimes it’s so that Pharaoh may know, sometimes it’s so Egypt may know. But once it’s so that you, Moses, can know who I am. Other times it’s so Israel can know who I am. And sometimes even, so the whole world will know who I am.

So there is this idea here that God wants to use what he’s doing through what we traditionally call the ten plagues as signs to everybody to understand his true identity.

[04:52] Stephanie: And that is the Hebrew word. It is, sign or “ot”. So now let’s go after the idea of ten, because why don’t you just go ahead and give your recap?

[05:07] Marcus: Yeah, sure. This is where I kind of wish I had a chart and diagram. Maybe we can find a way to put one in the comment somewhere. But essentially, you’ve got a first and a last sign. And the opening sign is Moses throwing his staff on the ground and it turning into a serpent, and that serpent then is met by two magicians who throw down their staffs that turn into two serpents, and Moses’ staff serpent consumes them. Eats those two. It’s one of the freakier stories in the Bible, right?

It’s like, yeah, wait a second, a snake ate two other snakes, turned back into a staff. But what it’s doing is it’s setting up what my dad would call a power encounter. Power encounter is “Who is stronger, Yahweh or the gods of Egypt?” So here are two magicians, we call them magicians, but they were probably priests. They were probably sorcerers or something like this where they excelled in the occult arts, and Egypt was widely considered the leader in the occult arts in the ancient world.

When the Greeks stumbled on them with Alexander’s invasion, they were stunned at how advanced the Egyptians were in their occult practices. And so in some ways God chose Egypt, I think, because they were the epitome of the false gods and what they were capable of. And so we call it magic, we call it sorcery, we call it things like this, but it’s really this whole occult system that was under attack.

And so the reason I say not ten, there are actually eleven. If you start with the staff turning into a snake, sign number one, there are eleven signs, so I’d rather call this the story of the eleven signs than the story of the ten plagues. I think it gives us a better idea of what’s going on here.

[07:12] Stephanie: And then it’s going to be really cool to see as you unfold this narrative here how you have the matching, you have the one at the beginning that kind of stands alone, and you have the one at the end that kind of stands alone.

[07:25] Marcus: Yeah. So you got the standalone thing with the snakes and then you get the standalone Passover at the end where blood is applied. And again wrath, the angel of destruction, passes over and spares people. We’re very familiar with those. In between them are the nine, and these nine are set up very systematically. You can tell the person who wrote these, let’s just say Moses wrote these, laid them out very strategically and with a purpose.

They go into three groups of three. The first group of three I call basically demonstration. These are three demonstrations of God’s power. The second three are distinction because when we get to the second three, for the first time it says God made a distinction between the land of Goshen and the land of Egypt. So the plagues or the signs, the bad things that happened, affected the Egyptians but did not affect the people of Israel.

And then the third round of three, I call destruction. So it’s demonstration, it’s distinction, it’s destruction, because at that point, he’s just wiping out the land of Egypt. So we can walk through the first demonstration – turns the Nile into blood. Well, that’s huge at multiple levels, right?

[08:50] Stephanie: Multiple levels.

[08:51] Marcus: At multiple levels, because, first of all, who’s ever heard of turning a whole river into blood? That in itself is just staggering. But the Nile was worshipped. The Nile was also directly connected to Pharaoh. Pharaoh, as his deity was connected to the life-giving waters of the Nile. Because Egypt is basically in the desert, and if it wasn’t for the Nile, it would just be part of the Sahara Desert. It’s the Nile that turns Egypt…

[09:19] Stephanie: It’s the life source.

[09:20] Marcus: It’s the life source for the whole country. It’s what turns Egypt into the breadbasket of the Mediterranean. And it’s everything. So for the Nile to flow red with blood is a direct attack on everything that Egypt stands for. It’s a pretty big opening blow.

We then go from there to frogs, which makes sense. The Egyptians worshipped a lot of deities. You sometimes see them with different animal heads on them, and one had a frog head on it. There are not so subtle attacks on various gods and goddesses of the Egyptian order if you know the mythology of Egypt.

But from there, we get then to gnats, which is the third one. And what I find fascinating about this is that the gnats, the smallest thing that God does in some regard. It’s big, the Nile is wiped out, now we’ve got little tiny gnats. But the gnats are just, if you’ve ever been around them, if you can’t get away from them, that would be really annoying.

We’re also told that this was the first sign that the occult experts of Egypt could not duplicate. And they say, “This is the finger of God.” I think there’s something kind of satisfying about the narrative that says the tiniest thing God did was the thing they couldn’t do. As if he’s making a point of, “Hey, look, even this little tiny thing, you really can’t do.” And so at the end of the first round of three, we have the magicians unable to do this, and recognizing the finger of God.

When you get to the next round of three, you have flies, right? The flies come and flies carry disease. And so then we have cattle getting diseased, and then we’ve got the humans getting diseased with boils. So that by the end of the third round, the magicians, it says, are so covered with boils, they can’t even make an appearance. They can’t even stand. And so again, God is emphasizing who he is, and the distinction between the land of Goshen and Egypt is happening for the second three. The judgment on the magicians specifically becomes very clear.

And then we get to destruction. We’ve got hail mixed with fire, which basically destroys the spring crops, and then you get locusts, which basically destroys the fall crops. And at this point, the advisors of Pharaoh are saying, “We’re ruined. Don’t you see? You’ve got to wave the white flag here. It’s time to surrender.”But it says God is hardening Pharaoh’s heart. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later.

The last one, just like it opens with this big, splashy judgment on the Nile, the last one was his slap in the face to the high god of Egypt, who we know is Amun-Ra or some form of that Aten-Ra. But he’s always the sun disc. And the idea that the sun was darkened and that the sun could not rescue them from this darkness that you could feel was, again, a direct assault on this idea of, “Let me tell you who I am. Ra, your high god, is nothing to me. The Nile is nothing to me. I can do what I want. I can free those who trust in me, and I can judge those who defy me.” There’s a very powerful message coming through all this.

And then you get to the Passover. And the Passover is just so embedded and infused with its own kind of message. So I think it’s worth laying this out, that there’s a clear strategy in the book of Exodus related to these signs and related to this idea of who is God?

Now, for the person who’s deeply wounded and going through things, it’s also this, I think God often sends signs for them that are beginning to introduce them, because they’re asking the same question, who is God that I should trust him? Who is God that I should obey him? Who is God that I should do things his way? What has God ever done for me? Kind of is that attitude. And so there are often signs in a journey, and it didn’t take just one sign and everything was better. There was a series of signs that went into laying the foundation for trusting God.

And then the big deliverance moment where they first left Egypt, and then the Red Sea was the huge final climax of that. And I think it’s all related because God not only wanted to judge, he wanted to teach people to trust him. So it wasn’t just, “This is who I am – I’m the biggest, baddest guy on the block.” It was, “This is who I am. Fear me. That’s the beginning of wisdom.” And then, “Trust me when I tell you this is going to end well, and this is going to end badly. And let’s choose the path that’s going to end well.”

[14:19] Stephanie: And he is just the oppressor.

[14:22] Marcus: Yes, he’s just. And justice is the idea of restoring order from what has been chaotic, and what’s been totally messed up, and putting it back in order. That’s justice in a nutshell.

[14:36] Stephanie: Yes, justice is the way things should be and bringing it back to that. Yes. You said we’d come back to hardening, so let’s go ahead and do that because I know there are some people who are like, “God is hardening Pharaoh’s heart. What is that about?”

[14:53] Marcus: Right, because it feels very unfair, doesn’t it? It’s like, “I’m going to harden his heart so that he cannot obey me, and then I’m going to punish him for disobeying me.” We’re like, “Wait a second. That is so messed up. How could that possibly be God?” So what we need to understand is that when God hardens people, he is not taking good hearted people who love him and follow him and saying, “I’m going to turn this person against me.”

When he’s hardening someone, he’s essentially keeping them where they are. You can think of it this way: that hardening is actually the first act of judgment. So when God says, “It is time to bring judgment on this person for their defiance of me and the way they’ve been living their life,” he will for a season, harden them. And during that season, they actually can’t repent. Because we forget repentance is a gift. It’s a gift God gives us as the opportunity to repent.

He will not extend that gift to them during the period of their hardening until he is done doing the things that he needs to do to teach them the lessons that they need to learn and to accomplish all of the purposes that he needs to accomplish. Now, I believe that in the end, Pharaoh could have repented after it was all done. I think he could have had a change of heart and given his trust to Yahweh. There’s no evidence that he did. But hardening doesn’t have to mean permanent and forever.

Even the apostle Paul, when he talks about a hardening of Israel in the book of Romans, he says it is a partial hardening. It’s not on everybody, and it’s temporary. It’s not forever. And we get this idea that it is part of his judgment on them for not receiving the Messiah. And so there is this idea that we need to look at hardening not as God is first hardening somebody and then judging them for being hard. He is judging them by hardening them. And I think that’s an important distinction to make.

[17:01] Stephanie: All right, interesting. Thank you. So what else do we learn about God from these? He says, “Who am I? Here we go. 24601.” No.

[17:19] Marcus: Les Mis. All right, we have a Les Mis reference, right?

[17:22] Stephanie: I was that close to being like, “Who am I?” And then I just, you know, I couldn’t hold back. I’m sorry. So this is answering the question, who am I? Obviously, we don’t have a lot of time to just unpack everything. This isn’t a series on the ten plagues or eleven signs or whatever. But what are some things that we learn about God from this introduction besides his justice.

[17:48] Marcus: I think one of the things we find is that God cares, and he’s meticulous, and he definitely does have a plan. In other words, God wasn’t winging this. We get caught up in the chaos of it all. What’s happening next? Why is this happening to me? What are you doing? Moses got caught up in that. Pharaoh asked the question, “Who?” Moses asked the question, “Why?”

So chapter five begins with Pharaoh saying, “Who is the Lord that I should listen to him?” But Moses is going, “Why are you doing it this way, God? This makes no sense. In fact, I told you this would happen.” And so a lot of us, as we get into our healing journey, our big question for God is, “Why now? Why? Why? Why aren’t you fixing this faster? Why aren’t you making this easier? Why aren’t you doing this in a way that, uh. Uh, is. Is taking away the pain sooner?”

Because the first thing that happened on this journey was their pain actually got worse. They had to make bricks without straw. There were more beatings or more things that they found themselves in a terrible position of being surrounded by the Egyptian army. And it looked for all the world like they were about to get wiped out.

And in both cases, God’s like, “Yeah, don’t worry. I’ve got them right where I want them now. This is part of that strategic plan. I had to gather the enemy together into one place so that I could take care of this.”

And so I think one of the things we learn is that God has a plan. And just because we’re observing chaos, just because we don’t know why, just because we don’t understand, doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have a plan.

[19:30] Stephanie: Well, what it reminds me of in some ways is, I’m picturing the Jim Wilder story when he was helping a counselor counsel someone through depression or despair. And instead of immediately coming in with hope, he was like, “Oh, it must be even worse than that. Right?” I think that sometimes God lets things escalate, even to say, “I can meet you even there, in this deepest, darkness, where there is no way out, things couldn’t possibly be worse. Actually, I’m right there. And it’s going to be okay.”

Well, we are going to continue as the theme of my wrap-ups have been, because there’s more to say. But for this episode, do you have final thoughts?

[20:23] Marcus: Yes. One of the things that has always struck me about these eleven signs and what God is doing here is it reminds me constantly of that CorrieTen Boom statement, “When I look at the world, I am distressed. When I look within, I am depressed. When I look at God, I am at rest.”

And it’s this idea that a lot of times we look at our own journey and it feels like everything’s a mess. I’m out of control. I don’t see God doing anything to make this better. Ever since I started trying to push into God, it actually feels like it’s falling apart. This is what I call the tunnel of chaos, and it is that season of the emotional healing journey where it feels like the more I try to do the right thing, the more I try to press into God, the more I work at this, the worse everything seems to get.

And we can take that as a sign that, well, this is pointless, this is hopeless, why am I even doing this? And I think most people go through that kind of a period where we, with Moses, say, “Why, God, why? Why are you not delivering your people? I said, “I did everything you asked me to do, and you haven’t delivered anybody at all.” So that’s what I refer to as the tunnel of chaos section of the healing journey where we’re just going, “God, I don’t get it.”

It reminds me of, what is that Casting Crowns song? “I was sure by now you would have come down and saved the day. But I say amen, and it’s still raining.” That same idea that just because we have these times when I’ve done everything right, I’ve sought emotional healing, I’ve tried to deal with demons, I’ve done other things, but it doesn’t seem to be actually changing anything. It’s part of God building trust with us.

Not that that’s making us trust him, but it’s showing that no matter how dark it gets and no matter how bad it gets, he is there. And just because it’s really bad right now doesn’t mean that’s the end of the story. The deeper the struggle we face with God and then he gets us out of it, the more deeply bonded to God we get. And in the end, that’s really what he’s after. He wants a deep bond that doesn’t just take away our pain, but that really has us so attached to him that there’s nothing that we can face in life that scares us anymore. Because I have learned that no matter what I’m going through, I’m gonna get through it.

In fact, I remember talking to a lady one time who just lost everything. I mean, her story was painful to listen to. One time she said to me, “I’m not afraid of anything anymore.” And I think that that’s part of the lesson God’s after. It’s like, “Look, you can go through the worst that life has to throw at you, and I’m still here, and I will get you through it, and you’ll still be standing on the other side. And not only that, this is going to end up better than you think. So just trust me, and let’s stay on the journey together.”

[23:35] Stephanie: Amen. Thank you.

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