“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Stretch out your hand toward heaven, and there will be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt.’ So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was thick darkness throughout the land of Egypt for three days. One person could not see another, and for three days they did not move from where they were. Yet all the Israelites had light where they lived. Pharaoh summoned Moses and said, ‘Go, worship the Lord. Even your families may go with you; only your flocks and herds must stay behind.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The summer after we moved to where we live now, there was a total solar eclipse that was almost fully visible from here. You had to go a bit further west to experience the moment of actual darkness, but it was pretty cool to look at through the special lenses we had. And the dimming of the light of the sun was wild. It was an interesting reminder of just how powerful the sun is. A great majority of it was blocked out and yet it was still mostly light. The penultimate plague God brought to the people of Egypt was darkness. It has always seemed to me to be a bit out of place as compared with the others, especially the ones that came just before it. Let’s talk about what is going on in this second-to-last plague, and why it was almost effective enough by itself to accomplish God’s purpose.

The first thing we should settle out of the gate here is the fact that this was almost certainly a supernatural darkness. Any attempt at explaining what happened here through entirely natural terms simply fails. This was not merely an eclipse. For starters, it lasted for three days. No eclipse could reach anywhere near that particular mark. They only last a few minutes at best. Second, from the description, this was a far deeper darkness than an eclipse could generate. This also wasn’t merely some kind of a dense fog. I’ve been in fogs before that were thick enough that even during the day it was almost like nighttime outside. This wasn’t that. This was something else entirely. It was supernatural. God made it dark in Egypt and not anywhere else.

What’s more, from the description Moses gives us, this was an unnatural darkness. It was a thick darkness. He describes it as a darkness so thick it could be felt. If you have been on a cave tour before, you have probably experienced something like this. Pretty much every cave tour includes a moment when the tour guide shuts off the lights and gives the audience a taste of cave darkness. That’s a level of darkness that is difficult to reproduce without being down in the bowels of some cave. It’s so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. If you linger in it for too long, you begin to lose any sense of time and space. Your other senses shift into overdrive to make up for the total lack of sight. It can mess with your mind if it lasts too long. And Egypt got three days of it.

There are a couple of detail things at least worth noting here. Like the previous third-in-the-sequence plagues, this one was unannounced. God simply tells Moses to “stretch your hand toward heaven,” and this would trigger the darkness. It’s not clear if this was immediate like a light switch being turned off or if the darkness began slowly rolling in at this moment. Also, for God to tell Moses to initiate the plague with a physical gesture like this suggests Moses did it where at least someone else could see it. Like the sixth plague of boils when Moses didn’t say anything to Pharaoh, but threw the handful of furnace soot into the air where he could see him, I wonder if Moses’ gesture toward heaven was done in Pharaoh’s sight as well.

If the darkness was not immediate, this would have perhaps given Moses time to return to Goshen before he couldn’t see to do it any longer. Yet I wonder if Moses stayed in Egypt and endured the darkness with the rest of the Egyptians. Did God somehow miraculously exempt he and Aaron from the darkness such that they could see where the people around them could not? The writers of the Left Behind book series envisioned it along those lines years ago, but I don’t know that I put much stock in that. Without any clear direction from the text, we’re not sure.

Pharaoh’s communication with Moses, though, in v. 24, does create some potential interesting problems. Moses tells us in v. 23 that once the darkness settled, no one moved from where they were. It was so black they all just hunkered down and sat still. But in v. 24, Pharaoh summoned Moses and Moses evidently went to him. At the very least, a messenger went between the two parties. How could that be if the darkness was so thick no one could move for three days? The solution to this is fairly simple. There’s no reason from what we see in the text to assume this communication happened during the darkness. No one moved for three days just like Moses said, and it wasn’t until after this that Pharaoh sent for Moses. It was the threat of this kind of thing happening again that prompted Pharaoh to send for Moses to tell him to hit the road. I say all of that to remind us that things which look like contradictions at first read can often be worked out fairly easily by looking a little more closely at the text.

One last thing here, and this will take us where I want to go today. This penultimate plague is a reminder that God’s purpose in all of these plagues wasn’t simply to make the Egyptians’ lives miserable. It is easy to imagine that God’s plan here throughout these plagues was to just make things so miserable for Pharaoh and his people that they finally released the people of Israel to get out from under all the bad things that kept happening to them for keeping them. Yet that was almost certainly not God’s plan at all. Instead, and as we have talked about before, each one of the plagues was about God’s demonstrating His power over one of Egypt’s gods. He was showing Himself to be the superior God on absolutely every front. He was systematically demonstrating the gods of Egypt to be utterly powerless before Him.

In this case, the chief god of the Egyptians was Ra. And what was Ra’s sphere of authority? The sun. Ra was the sun god. Throughout all of the plagues, his authority had been untouched and unchallenged. For Pharaoh and the Egyptians, this meant their chief god was unchallenged by Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews. His power may be great, but He hadn’t yet demonstrated He was stronger than all of Egypt’s gods. And then God turned out the lights. For three days. It wasn’t a fluke. It wasn’t a mere sidestep around Ra’s power. It was a direct subversion of it. It was a clear defeat. Yahweh was indeed the most powerful God. He was the one true God.

So, Pharaoh finally says: take your people and go. Yet in spite of this total defeat, in spite of this enormous embarrassment, he still won’t give up his position entirely. He will let all the people go, but they have to leave their flocks and herds behind. He’ll bend most of the way toward Yahweh’s command, but not all the way. He’s holding out because at least he himself hasn’t been defeated. Remember, Pharaoh considered himself a god. He was the embodiment of a god; the embodiment of Ra. If he was still standing, then he could still resist. And so he would. He would hold out as much as he could get away with for as long as he could. This is why the final plague was ultimately necessary.

What does all of this mean for us? Jesus called His followers to be the light of the world. John, in the prologue to his Gospel, described the world as walking in darkness. He describes God as light in whom no darkness is to be found. This is all spiritual and symbolic language, of course, but that doesn’t mean we should take it lightly. The Egyptians here experienced physically what was going on spiritually. They were living in darkness. God merely gave them a taste of what they were going through spiritually. Apart from Christ, our lives are similarly shrouded in darkness. We cannot see what is real and what is not. We cannot see what is right and what is wrong. We know in part, but our lens is so badly fractured that we keep choosing the wrong thing, believing ourselves to be choosing the right one. It is only when we are willing to walk in Christ that we can live fully in the light. Choose light, not darkness.