“So Moses said, ‘This is what the Lord says: About midnight I will go throughout Egypt, and every firstborn male in the land of Egypt will die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the firstborn of the servant girl who is at the grindstones, as well as every firstborn of the livestock. Then there will be a great cry of anguish through all the land of Egypt such as never was before or ever will be again. But against all the Israelites, whether people or animals, not even a dog will snarl, so that you may know that the Lord makes a distinction between Egypt and Israel. All these officials of yours will come down to me and bow before me, saying: Get out, you and all the people who follow you. After that, I will get out.’ And he went out from Pharaoh’s presence fiercely angry.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In the animated film from DreamWorks Studios about the Exodus, Prince of Egypt, the real climax of the film is when the Angel of Death moves through the city inflicting the final plague on the people of Egypt – the death of the firstborns. Even for an animated offering for kids, the scene is disturbing. The animation is scary enough, but the concept is what is really horrifying. We read this dryly and move on to the next part of the story in part because we don’t want to think about what is happening here. Indeed, when Moses writes about the actual event in the next chapter, he doesn’t describe it in any more detail than we see right here. Today, though, let’s wrestle a bit with what is going on here and what to make of this final plague.

The first question that demands an answer is as horrifying to us as it is uncomfortable: Did God really take all of these lives on this fateful night? And the equally uncomfortable and unavoidable answer is: Yes, He did. How many untold thousands of people and animals died that night we can’t know. Moses would later describe it by saying that every single household in Egypt had someone die in it. Now is that description literally true, or a bit of the hyperbolic language we have seen before on this journey? We don’t know. Perhaps there were some couples who were both second-borns or later, and who hadn’t had kids of their own yet, but given how common it was for multiple generations to live in the same household, it is entirely possible that the description is accurate.

What are we supposed to do with this? How could a God we boldly describe as being good and gracious and loving and merciful and kind do something so horrible as this? There are a few things we have to keep in mind in order to make any kind of positive sense out of this final plague. First and foremost and as we have talked about many times before including recently, we have to get God’s character right. This one story is not the final statement on His character. We have to take the whole counsel of Scripture into consideration for that determination. From there we see a God who is just as I described a second ago. But He is also just and righteous and holy. He was all of those things even while allowing this judgment to play out as it did. Just because we wrestle with understanding that today through the lens of our particular cultural assumptions (folks in Moses’ day wouldn’t have, by the way), doesn’t mean it’s not still true.

Second, as horrible as this judgment was for the Egyptians, sin itself is even more horrible. Egypt had oppressed the Israelites in slavery for multiple generations. How many had been beaten mercilessly for their inability to accomplish the backbreaking labor Egypt forced them to complete? How many had been killed for arbitrary things and mostly just to serve as an example to keep the rest of the people in line? We should not even for a second assume that the Egyptians were innocent victims of a capricious and vengeful God. As we talked about just yesterday, God had told Abram about this whole ordeal 400 years earlier. Egypt was facing the just punishment for their many, many sins. In particular, as God had told Moses to tell Pharaoh back in chapter 4, Egypt had abused and mistreated God’s son, so He was going to take Egypt’s sons in return.

Third, while the Egyptians themselves were indeed far from guiltless, this final plague played out in all of its terrible detail because of Pharaoh’s pride. At any point the entire sequence of the plagues could have been short-circuited and brought to a screeching halt had Pharaoh simply done what God commanded and released the people. But he refused. He refused over and over and over again. He refused when the waters of the Nile turned to blood. He refused when frogs and flies and gnats and locusts swarmed the land. He refused when the livestock all died (which, by the way, couldn’t have been as complete as it was described or there wouldn’t have been any firstborn livestock left to die now). He refused when a plague of boils struck the land. He refused when killer hailstones and suffocating darkness fell. He refused over and over again no matter how bad things got and what kind of price his people had to pay for it. If there is anyone who is primarily to blame for this plague, Pharaoh is an awfully good candidate. He had demonstrated over and over again that nothing but this kind of dramatic event was going to finally change his mind. This was on him.

Fourth, we can’t forget that this whole thing was understood as a divine conflict. This was the God of the Hebrews battling against the gods of Egypt. Up to this point every god of Egypt had been proven powerless before Him save one: Pharaoh himself. Pharaoh was seen as the embodiment of the chief god, Ra. His son was the god incarnate who would one day reign in his place as god over the people. God demonstrated His absolute power over Pharaoh by taking the life of his firstborn son as well as the lives of every firstborn son in the land. It was designed to send a clear message: I’m so much more powerful than you are that you can’t even fathom it. Pharaoh had made clear that short this kind of dramatic message, he wasn’t going to do what God commanded.

Fifth, had the people of Israel given up before this point and tried the thoroughly worldly approach to claiming their freedom of launching a violent revolution, the loss of life on both sides would have been far, far greater. In this sense, what God did here was a final attempt to avoid a much, much greater loss of life than this represented.

Sixth, no household in Egypt faced this death visiting them as an unavoidable outcome. The Angel of Death passed over every household with the blood of a sacrificial lamb smeared on its doorposts. Anyone in Egypt who had taken all of the plagues as a sign of the greatness of Israel’s God, and who had decided to submit their lives to Him would have had opportunity to hear the instructions for avoiding the visiting of the Angel of Death and obeyed them. Mercy through sacrifice was available to anyone who sought it. They only had to seek it. The people who faced this awful plague of death were the ones who refused to take any other path.

Now, do any of these things automatically make this story easier to swallow? Not necessarily. Maybe one of them was finally convincing, but maybe not as well. It may be that this story is just hard for you. And, that’s okay. This should be a hard story. We should not imagine our God delighted in having to take this awful step. He created these lives (which, by the way, is another important thing to keep in mind; all life belongs to God and is His to take when and if He wills it). He did not want to end them like this. And we can rest assured that God dealt justly with their souls when they came to Him. Yet all of this is the result of sin. This is the kind of thing sin finally accomplishes. This is what Jesus died to oppose. He died so that no one has to face something like this. And, the presence of this story doesn’t change the fact that Jesus did indeed die and raise to life again which means your faith in Him is secure even if you struggle with this story.

That, my friends, is the big idea here. Hard stories like this don’t take away from Jesus’ death and resurrection. Those were historical events no matter how hard a particular Old Testament story seems to us. What’s more, Jesus’ death was to pay the price for sins like Pharaoh and the Egyptians were all wrapped up in here. He died and took the punishment on Himself so that the kind of judgment God issued here is no longer a necessary thing for us to face. God doesn’t like this kind of thing. At all. He hates it. But He is just, and He will hold us accountable for our sins. In Christ, though, He has been held accountable on our behalf. Just as God told the people of Israel how to get out from under this awful judgment, in Christ, we can avoid the judgment and just punishment of Hell when we are willing to trust in Him.

So, go ahead and struggle with a story like this one. That’s okay. It is hard. Sin is ugly stuff. But struggle and then rejoice that we serve a God who didn’t want something like this to have to happen again, and so He took the steps necessary to help us avoid it entirely. And He did all of that because of His great love for us. That’s worth celebrating.