“The Lord said to Moses, ‘I will bring one more plague on Pharaoh and on Egypt. After that, he will let you go from here. When he lets you go, he will drive you out of here. Now announce to the people that both men and women should ask their neighbors for silver and gold items.’ The Lord gave the people favor with the Egyptians. In addition, Moses himself was very highly regarded in the land of Egypt by Pharaoh’s officials and the people.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

If you are a parent, have you ever finally gotten so frustrated with your child’s refusal to do something you wanted them to do that you finally lost it and shouted something silly like, “You’re going to do it, and you’re going to like it too!”? Pharaoh didn’t want to let Israel go. The very idea of his doing that was ludicrous to him. He had subjugated them, not the other way around. Why on earth would he accede to their God’s demands to release them? He was clearly the more powerful god or else he wouldn’t have been able to do that. As God prepares to give Moses the instructions for the final plague to share with Pharaoh, He basically says, “Pharaoh is going to let you go, and he’s going to like it.” Let’s talk about what’s going on here.

We’ll talk about the details of the final plague over the next couple of days, Lord willing. Today, we are just going to focus on what God says to Moses here. There are three things to talk about here. The first is that in the end, in spite of all of his opposition to the very idea of releasing the people, Pharaoh is not merely going to let the people go, he is going to drive them out. He is going to be so committed to their leaving that he is essentially going to shove them out the door and slam it on them before they even clear the threshold. Given just how utterly intractable he has been to heeding God’s steady and unwavering demand throughout this whole process, this final plague was going to have to be a doozy indeed. God was going to make keeping the people such an odious concept that Pharaoh won’t be able to get them out of his land fast enough.

Incidentally, this fits with exactly what God told Moses in the beginning. God told him what was going to happen, and things have unfolded precisely along those very lines. He told Moses that Pharaoh was going to refuse over and over to let them go, but once He had performed all of His miracles and signs and wonders, then Pharaoh would let them go. When God says something is going to happen a certain way, things are going to happen that way.

There’s more truth there than it seems. The consistency between God’s words and actions; between HIs words and the unfolding of human history; between His commands and how our lives go is something that applies not just here, but to the rest of the Scriptures as well. When you encounter something God commands in the Scriptures, or if you find a passage that says things are going to happen a certain way if other things happen first, that is an indicator that things are going to happen in a certain way if other things happen first. If He says something good is going to happen if you do X, then when you do X, that good thing is going to happen. It may not happen exactly when you think it should, but it will come. The contrary here is true as well. If God say something bad is going to happen if you do Y, then when you do Y, you should fully expect that bad thing to happen. It may not happen precisely when you fear it will happen, but it will happen. Of that much you can be confident.

Speaking of God keeping His word, the command here for the people to ask the Egyptians for gold and silver seems odd at first glance. Why would they do that? Well, from a big picture perspective, this would ultimately become the gold they would use to build and furnish the tabernacle. But there’s another reason as well. God was keeping His word. We have to keep in mind here that what we have been witnessing in the text over the last few weeks has not simply been two guys locked in a battle of wills. This has been a spiritual war. In the context of the ancient world, when one army defeated another army, the victorious forces took possession of whatever had previously belonged to their now defeated enemies. You’ve perhaps heard the phrase, “to the victor go the spoils.”

When Israel left Egypt, it wasn’t as a broken people limping away meekly from their former captors. It was as a victorious people, marching out in glorious battle formations. In fact, we have seen in the text and will yet see a few more times references to exactly that: Israel’s marching out in battle formations. They were a conquering army. The kick is, though, they hadn’t done any of the fighting. This is how things go when we fight on God’s side. Our job is not to fight. Our job is to be faithful, and He will do the fighting for us. And this is a good thing because when He does the fighting, victory is certain.

This is, again, all unfolding just exactly like He had said it would. But I don’t just mean it was unfolding like God had told Moses it would. The whole thing was unfolding the way God had told Abraham it would. More than 400 years before this time, God appeared to Abraham (who was still Abram at the time) to reaffirm His covenant with him to make a great nation from his descendants. Just before He let Abram drift off to sleep where He had a vision of God’s reaffirming the covenant by passing between a line of split animal carcasses Abram had prepared while he was awake, God said this to him: “Know this for certain: Your offspring will be resident aliens for four hundred years in a land that does not belong to them and will be enslaved and oppressed. However, I will judge the nation they serve, and afterward they will go out with many possessions.” God had promised that the people would receive the spoils of Egypt centuries before. He always keeps His word.

One last thing. This pillaging the Israelites were going to do of the Egyptians was not some ugly spectacle where they went through violently taking whatever they pleased. God didn’t operate like that. Instead, they simply requested the items. Moses tells us that God “gave the people favor with the Egyptians.” This doesn’t mean the Egyptians were all that happy with the Israelites so much as it means they were terrified of them. Yet they were not terrified of them per se. They were terrified of their God. They were impressed with Him and His power. They gave the Israelites what they asked for willingly as a way to make an offering to their God in hopes of His finally leaving them alone. In the same way, Moses had achieved a pretty high status in the eyes of Pharaoh’s officials. Pharaoh himself is conspicuously absent from the list of the people who were impressed with Moses, but everyone else was convinced he was absolutely a representative of a great and powerful God, if not the embodiment of that God Himself. They wanted to make him happy…and get him out of their land.

I think the real point here for us is to not miss this picture of the kind of victories God wins. They are total victories. He doesn’t win or conquer the way we do. Our victories are won through the lens of sin. We humiliate and ravage our enemies. We beat them so thoroughly into submission that they cannot rise again. We are even genocidal in our efforts to demonstrate the totality of our power. God’s victories are won with justice and righteousness. He punishes sin thoroughly, but always in a manner that is properly measured to its evil. He gives us what we deserve or less because He is a God of graciousness and mercy. But in the end, He will win. Our best bet is to be on His side when He does.