“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Tell Aaron: Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the land, and it will become gnats throughout the land of Egypt.’ And they did this. Aaron stretched out his hand with his staff, and when he struck the dust of the land, gnats were on people and animals. All the dust of the land became gnats throughout the land of Egypt. The magicians tried to produce gnats using their occult practices, but they could not. The gnats remained on people and animals. ‘This is the finger of God,’ the magicians said to Pharaoh. But Pharaoh’s heart was hard, and he would not listen to them, as the Lord had said.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The town where I live has gnats. I know what you might be thinking: everywhere has gnats. That’s just life in a broken world. But you don’t understand. We have lots of gnats. And everyone who lives in the other little towns around us knows it. One of the things we are known for is how bad our gnats are. And trust me: they’re really bad. There are some days when you can hardly go outside without being completely engulfed by them. So, when I read about this third plague of gnats, I can’t help but think about how irritating trying to go to our local park is in the summer and how bad this must have been for the Egyptians. Let’s talk through some of the details here and the theme that is emerging as we go.

This third plague bears the distinction of having the shortest description. While you should always click through to read the full passage each day for context, I’ll give you a pass today. This is the whole passage. This one didn’t take much to describe. There were gnats. Everywhere. They were awful. The end.

Still, though, there’s a bit more here worth noting. The plague of gnats marks a turning point in the plague sequence. For starters, this is the first plague that is unannounced. God tells Moses and Aaron to get it started, but doesn’t give them any instructions, nor do we have any indication that they said anything to Pharaoh before launching it. The people of Egypt simply woke up one morning to gnats.

This third plague also seems a bit more widespread than the first two. It displays a broader reach of God’s powers than the Egyptians had seen so far. The first two plagues were intimately connected to the Nile. These would have grabbed plenty of attention as the Nile was the center of life for the Egyptians, but that wasn’t the whole of the land. Here, though, this mysterious and increasingly frighteningly powerful God of the Hebrews had power not just over the water, but over the land. Everywhere there was dust there were gnats. Well, Egypt is a desert nation. There was dust everywhere.

This plague marks the first time the Egyptian magicians couldn’t reproduce the effect. Gnats aren’t as easy to work with as water, blood, and frogs. They couldn’t do any tricks to make them appear. And, even if, as we have talked about before, they actually had some kind of real occult powers, God didn’t allow them to work here. How interesting – and embarrassing for them – that it was something as tiny as gnats that proved to be the first thing they couldn’t mimic; that this was the point at which they had to finally raise their hands and acknowledge this was beyond them. God’s power was so great that something simple for Him was beyond them.

In this way, this was another chink in Pharaoh’s armor of invincibility. And yet, rather than facing the truth and acknowledging it, he stubbornly refuses to respond to it. Instead of taking the path of humility and putting an end to his peoples’ torment, he doubled down on his resistance to the Lord’s command. This, once again was just as the Lord had said.

And that idea brings us to the theme that is developing as the plague sequence continues to unfold before us. All of this is happening, “as the Lord had said.” There are times throughout the various stories we encounter in the Scriptures when it seems like things are unfolding and God is a spectator to the events. There are other times, though – and this is one of them – when we are allowed to see a bit behind the curtain to catch a glimpse of the extent of His real sovereignty over His creation. As Jesus would later observe: not even a sparrow falls to the ground without His knowledge.

Even when He is doing so in a way that feels utterly behind the scenes, God is never not totally sovereign over the events unfolding in His world. Now, that is an idea heavily laden with intellectual challenges. There’s no reason to try and avoid that uncomfortable truth. And I’m not going to try to sort those out right now. But the challenges don’t change the fact. God is sovereign. He was sovereign then. He is sovereign now. This world is broken by sin, and God doesn’t want that at all. He hates it. But the course of history, the course of our very lives, is never not unfolding along the lines of what He has allowed and what He is capable of redeeming entirely if we will submit ourselves to Him. Indeed, if He is sovereign over even the gnats, His sovereignty extends to our lives. Our best bet is to keep ourselves submitted to Him.