“I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night and strike every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, both people and animals. I am the Lord; I will execute judgments against all the gods of Egypt. The blood on the houses where you are staying will be a distinguishing mark for you; when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No plague will be among you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the ministries I follow fairly closely has a phrase they repeat pretty regularly. It goes like this: ideas have consequences; bad ideas have victims. When we believe things that are wrong, not only will we do things that are wrong, but bad things will eventually come to us and those around us. The wrong beliefs of the people of Egypt had finally brought them to the point we find ourselves addressing this morning. God was bringing judgment against the nation in the form of the death of all of its firstborn. We have talked about it once before. We’ll talk about it one more time in the days yet to come, Lord willing. Today, let’s take a look at a couple of details in this next part of the story that give us a better picture of what was really going on here, and the nature of God’s perfect justice.

If you were to buy Richard Dawkins’ intentionally blasphemous description of God’s character in the introduction to his bestselling book, The God Delusion, the final plague in Egypt was about nothing more than God’s delighting in needlessly slaughtering a bunch of babies and animals. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that I don’t buy his characterization. It looks only at the ugly surface of something like this in the Old Testament and doesn’t grapple at all with what is really going on here and why it happened. Now, as I said last week, having a better understanding of that doesn’t necessarily make the events of this any easier to swallow, but at least it gives us the assurance that there really is more going on than it first appears.

The end of v. 12 here gives us an important clue as to why things were playing out as they were not only in this final judgment, but in the whole cycle of plagues. God tells Moses that He is executing judgment on the gods of Egypt. That is the first time this idea has been mentioned in the story, and it gives us an important pointer to the bigger picture here I have mentioned several times before.

This whole thing was a divine contest between the God of Israel and the gods of Egypt as represented by Pharaoh himself. Each and every plague was primarily about demonstrating God’s power and sovereignty over one of the various gods of Egypt. He let the Egyptians experience the fact that compared to Him, their gods were utterly powerless. They couldn’t stand before Him. They could offer their people no protection from His judgments. They were nothing. The plagues represented the only way the people were going to be convinced of the impotence of their gods.

The Egyptian gods were nothing more than ideas. There was no substance to them. And as far as ideas go, they were bad ideas. Well, ideas have consequences. All of them. All ideas have consequences to their being unleashed in the world around us. Yet all ideas are not the same. Good ideas result in good consequences, but bad ideas result in bad consequences. In this case, the ideas bought into by the people of Egypt that took the form of their various gods resulted in their being able to justify the enslavement and abuse of the Israelites. This was a sin. Their bad ideas made victims of God’s people and He had tolerated it long enough. As a result, having given them much time to repent and turn from these bad ideas, He was bringing judgment to them. He was judging their ideas and the gods represented by them. And with this judgment the pool of victims from their bad ideas expanded to include themselves. Bad ideas have victims, and the longer we stay bought into them, the greater the likelihood that we become one of those victims.

In this case, Pharaoh was understood to be the embodiment of the god Ra. His son was the son of the god and thus divine. In order to finally show Pharaoh the impotence of his own power and the staggeringly greater extent of God’s power, God took his son and all the sons of Egypt. Pharaoh and his gods were powerless. They were nothing before the God of Israel. Their only course of action was to submit to Him and His commands.

But in the communities where the Israelites lived, none of this took place. And why? Not because they were less deserving of judgment for their sins. How many of them had bought into the bad ideas of Egypt’s gods in their long sojourn there? They were protected because of their willingness to place their faith in the God who claimed them as His people. When they took the animal we talked about yesterday, killed it, and painted some of its blood on the doorposts of their house, the Spirit of God going through Egypt to take the lives of the firstborn sons saw the blood and knew they were covered by the sacrifice. The animal’s death served as a substitute for the death of any firstborn sons in the house. Everyone who was covered by that blood was spared the destruction. Had anyone in Egypt placed their faith in Israel’s God and followed Moses’ instructions, they would have been spared too. Those who experienced the tragic loss were the ones who chose not to take the path of avoiding it.

In the end, God’s judgment is just. Those who face it are only ever those who have refused His offer of grace for repentance. He is quick to forgive even those whom we might otherwise deem spectacularly unworthy of such a gift. But when His judgment comes, it will be complete. It will not miss anything or anyone. Our only hope is to make sure we are covered by the blood of a sacrifice. Thankfully, we don’t have to rely on an animal that doesn’t really pay the price due for our sins. We can be covered by the much greater sacrifice of Jesus. His broken body and spilled blood cover us completely and for all times. They open the door to an entirely new way of relating to God through Him that allows us access to His eternal life. Like Israel, gaining access to this eternal life requires of us nothing more than to place our faith in Him and to commit our lives to following Him. If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. That is good news. The Passover was powerful, but it was only a shadow of the much greater reality to which it was always pointing.