“Now at midnight the Lord stuck every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the prisoner who was in the dungeon, and every firstborn of the livestock. During the night Pharaoh got up, he along with all his officials and all the Egyptians, and there was a loud wailing throughout Egypt because there wasn’t a house without someone dead. He summoned Moses and Aaron during the night and said, ‘Get out immediately from among my people, both you and the Israelites, and go, worship the Lord as you have said. Take even your flocks and your herds as you asked and leave, and also bless me.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

God is going to one day bring judgment on the earth for all the sin that has been committed on it over the course of human history. Now, a great deal of sin was covered by Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Actually, all of it was covered, but this covering only extends to those who have been willing to receive it. That’s the problem. Not nearly everyone has accepted His gracious gift. Many have and will yet decide to bear the weight of their sin on their own. They pridefully believe themselves capable of handling the load. They will be proven disastrously wrong in the end. That will indeed be a terrifying day. We know this because the mere snapshots God has given us of judgment in the Scriptures are themselves terrifying to behold. The final plague was a judgment against the sins of Egypt. Let’s talk about what is going on in these hard verses, and why they point us to a God worthy of our devotion.

I said last week that we would come back to this awful idea one more time, and here we are. It’s not any easier seeing the real thing happen than it was hearing God tell the people about its coming last week. This is one of those stories in the Scriptures that is going to be hard every single time we encounter it. That’s okay. In fact, reading a story like this should be hard. If it’s not hard, then we’re not tapped in very well to God’s way of seeing things. While this final plague brought Him glory, and He unleashed it willingly, we should not imagine that He was pleased with having to do it. He was filled with a righteous wrath against Pharaoh and the Egyptians because of their sin, but He was also utterly heartbroken because these were people He had created and whom He loved in spite of their thorough and committed rejection of Him.

This won’t make the story here any easier, but let’s remember some of the points I’ve already said we have to keep in mind here lest we risk losing any chance of making positive sense out of this. Remember that all ten of these plagues were understood by everyone who was aware of them to be divine contests between the God of Israel and the various gods of Egypt. He kept showing Himself powerful over areas where the Egyptians believed them to hold sway. That same thing was happening here.

Firstborn sons were enormously important to the culture of Egypt as they have been in nearly every human culture across the annals of history. In the case of Egypt, with Pharaoh being seen as the embodiment of their chief god, Ra, the firstborn son of Pharaoh was the son of god. He was the one who would become the embodiment of Ra when Pharaoh’s current physical form finally expired. Pharaoh believed himself to be sovereign as the embodiment of Ra. But for all of his supposedly great power, he was powerless before the God of Israel. Seeing the other gods of his pantheon overcome in the previous nine plagues certainly rattled him – after all, he was finally willing after the darkness to let the people go as long as they didn’t take everything with them – but he was still personally unaffected by all of them. Now that changed. The God of Israel had shown Himself powerful over even Pharaoh himself. And, by taking every firstborn male in the entire nation, He demonstrated that His power over Pharaoh was not merely superlative, but absolute.

Moses writes that there was not a house without someone dead in it. That’s a hard statement to imagine. As we have seen with some of the other plagues and the way Moses described their effect, that may not be intended to be taken literally. Even if it is not, though, the loss of life in this final plague was nonetheless staggering. It was staggering enough to finally shatter Pharaoh’s worldview. With the unbelievable power of Israel’s God made absolutely clear, Pharaoh finally broke – just as God had said He would way back in chapter 3 before all of this started – and wanted them out. All of them. And everything they owned. They could take all of their stuff and go and worship their God. He was going to finally and fully grant their request. There were only two caveats to this: He wanted them out now, and he wanted them to bless him when they met with their God.

The request for blessing tagged on at the end of his command to Moses is probably not what our minds first imagine when hearing it. When we hear the word “blessing” we imagine God doing something good for someone. When we praise God for His blessings on us, we are expressing our gratitude for the good things He has done in our lives. The original Hebrew word we translate as “blessing” also means for something to be heavy. A heavy load was a blessing in Hebrew. A blessing, then, as far as the Hebrews understood, was the heaviness of God on a person or situation. That could be a good thing, but it didn’t have to be. Whether it was or not depended on your perspective. The blessing Pharaoh sought was probably not some good turn from God, but rather for God to leave him and the rest of Egypt alone.

It is interesting here to note that Pharaoh is not giving them a permanent and final release from slavery. Note the language Pharaoh uses carefully. What he is doing here is finally giving in to Moses’ original request for the people to go into the wilderness for three days and have a festival to worship God. God will yet give them the freedom they longed to have, but all this final plague won them was permission to take a short vacation.

We should also not miss the fact that the timing on all of this justifies the instructions God gave the people for celebrating the first Passover meal together. Remember how they were supposed to get it all ready, but to eat it quickly while they were dressed to hit the road rather suddenly? When God (rather appropriately from a thematic perspective) came and visited this final judgment on Egypt at midnight, Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron in the middle of the night (probably through a messenger and not in person) and told them to get out immediately. He wanted them gone before morning. The people who had been enjoying the Passover meal with their families had their festivities suddenly interrupted by a set of eviction orders that were effective immediately.

Let’s consider just two more things here, and then we will hopefully leave this heavy subject for the last time. First, on the judgment itself. When Pharaoh and Egypt refused to let God’s children go, He ultimately took their children in exchange. Now, seen strictly on its own terms, this was an awful thing. A life in exchange for a life is terrible to experience or even behold. I heard a story the other day about the culture of blood feuds in the nation of Albanian. While there are officially laws against the practice, if a man is killed, his family is honor-bound to kill a male member of the family of the man who killed him. There are rules around it that are pretty strictly observed, but once the revenge killing has happened, the first family is now honor-bound to kill a male member of the second family in retribution for the killing of their family member. Back and forth it goes until either there are no more male members left to kill (and age isn’t considered; children are at risk just like adults), or until one family decides to take on the shame of breaking the cycle. It’s an ugly thing.

And yet, as we have talked about again and again, and as God had told Moses from the beginning, it was ultimately a necessary thing. Pharaoh was not going to agree to let the people go peacefully until this particular threshold was crossed. In this sense, it is a little like the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While there are certainly arguments against this position, I am very much of the opinion that the dropping of those bombs, while utterly terrible both in terms of the practical effect and what their use unleashed on the world, was also absolutely necessary to finally force the Japanese army to the point of surrender and avoid a forthcoming loss of life in the full-scale invasion of Japan by the American forces that would have dwarfed what was lost in those two bombs. What happened here to the Egyptians was horrible. But what is even more horrible is that sin takes such a strong grip on our hearts that it requires this amount of force to dislodge it even temporarily (for, as we will yet see, Pharaoh’s decision to release the people didn’t last, leading to even more unnecessary suffering and shame for the Egyptians).

The second thing here is the larger perspective we must have in place when taking in this story. While the Egyptians and the people of Israel may have experienced this story on its own terms, we do not. This story comes to us in the context of the Scriptures as a whole. We can take in this story while at the same time setting it alongside the rest of the stories contained within the collection of ancient documents that make up the Scriptures for us. More to the point, as followers of Jesus, we have to read this story in light of the larger Gospel narrative of the New Testament. That’s why God gave us both parts of the story at the same time.

And through the lens of the Gospel, we can learn something incredibly powerful and important about our God. God would yet act in history in dramatic ways to bring about the judgment of sin. The destruction of Israel and Judah by the Assyrians and the Babylonians, respectively, comes to mind here, of course, but there is one more powerful and significant than that. All four of the Gospel accounts of the life and ministry of Jesus in the New Testament tell us about when God finally moved in human history to dislodge the power of sin in the hearts and lives of all humanity. But in this next dramatic action on God’s part, He didn’t demand another harvest of firstborns to satisfy His justice. Instead, He sent His own Son to be the one to die. He made the sacrifice we could not make so that we could have access through Him to the life we did not deserve, but which in His amazing grace and mercy He wanted us to have anyway.

In Christ we see the justice and wrath of God perfectly satisfied and the love and compassion of God perfectly magnified. God will one day act to right all the injustice and sin in the world. That will be a terrible day when it arrives. Yet no one has to fall victim to it like the Egyptians did here thanks to Pharaoh’s stubbornness. All are welcomed to submit to Christ, to accept His sacrifice on their behalf, and instead of God’s just judgment, they can receive the eternal life He earned. He would become the Passover sacrifice for all the world such that when we are covered by His blood, we are removed from the rolls of God’s wrath. A God who would do such a thing is indeed a God worthy of our devotion. I would invite you to consider seriously giving it to Him. You will be glad that you did.