Category: Digging in Deeper

Digging in Deeper: Exodus 10:1-4

Leave a comment

“Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may do these miraculous signs of mine among them, and so that you may tell your son and grandson how severely I dealt with the Egyptians and performed miraculous signs among them, and you will know that I am the Lord.” So Moses and Aaron went in to Pharaoh and told him, “This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, that they may worship me. But if you refuse to let my people go, then tomorrow I will bring locusts into your territory.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

C.S. Lewis once wrote that in the end there will only be two kinds of people: those who say to the Lord, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom the Lord will say, “Thy will be done.” It makes for a wonderful and thoughtful bit of prose, but he’s not quite right. His point was that those who finally oppose the Lord will be able to be eternally separated from Him. In other words, their will to be separated will be accomplished. Beyond that, God’s will is what will happen. Pharaoh arrogantly thought he could oppose the Lord’s will and do what He wanted. God wanted him to know that he was going to lose this contest of wills and power. Because he hadn’t listened thus far, God was about to turn up the volume even more.

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Exodus 9:13-18

Leave a comment

“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Get up early in the morning and present yourself to Pharaoh. Tell him: This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. For this time I am about to send all my plagues against you, your officials, and your people. Then you will know there is no one like me on the whole earth. By now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague, and you would have been obliterated from the earth. However, I have let you live for this purpose: to show you my power and to make my name known on the whole earth. You are still acting arrogantly against my people by not letting them go. Tomorrow at this time I will rain down the worst hail that has ever occurred in Egypt from the day it was founded until now.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We’ve talked about this before, but one of the reputations God has resulting from people’s reading the Bible without understanding is that He is all anger and wrath. He looks for opportunities to judge, and delights in raining down excessive punishment on people for the smallest and silliest things. At a glance, the plagues in general, but especially this seventh plague seems to be a case in point of this. After all, what else are we to call a deadly hailstorm? Yet this plague is set within the longest narrative any of them have so far received, and this narrative paints a very different picture of God than a mere cursory reading reveals. Let’s talk today about God’s character, the judgment for sin, and why you really can’t understand one unless you understand the other.

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Exodus 9:1-4

1 Comment

“Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go in to Pharaoh and say to him: This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. But if you refuse to let them go and keep holding them, then the Lord’s hand will bring a severe plague against your livestock in the field – the horses, donkeys, camels, herds, and flocks. But the Lord will make a distinction between the livestock of Israel and the livestock of Egypt, so that nothing of all that the Israelites own will die.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I’ve recently gotten to see one of Jesus’ parables played out right in front of me. In the parable of the wheat and the tares, a man plants a field but then an enemy comes at night and sows a bunch of weeds in the field. The man’s response to his servants’ inquiry about whether he wants them to try to pull the weeds is to tell them to let them all grow up together, and he’ll sort them out at the harvest time. He doesn’t want to risk damaging any of the wheat. A field of wheat near my house was growing with lots of big patches of weeds. The farmer just left them there until the harvest. The idea, of course, is that God lets evil exist alongside righteousness until the end at which point He’ll sort and separate. God is patient with evil. But when it gets bad enough, God can be surgical in dealing with it. He demonstrates this ability here in the fifth plague. This one is a bit more uncomfortable than the ones before it, but it’s not quite as bad as it sounds. Let’s talk about what’s going on here.

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Exodus 8:5-7, 15

Leave a comment

“The Lord then said to Moses, ‘Tell Aaron: Stretch out your hand with your staff over the rivers, canals, and ponds, and cause the frogs to come up onto the land of Egypt.’ When Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt, the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt. But the magicians did the same thing by their occult practices and brought frogs up onto the land of Egypt. . . .But when Pharaoh saw there was relief, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them, as the Lord had said.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I love getting into early summer when it’s warm enough to sit outside in the evenings and you start hearing the frogs for the first time. Their cacophonous chorus is a welcome note of the changing of the seasons. Their music is a gift from God and speaks to the wonderful variety of creatures He has created to fill the earth to His glory. But frogs belong in the ponds and puddles around my neighborhood. If they started to encroach on my living space and in greater numbers than the one or two you occasionally find hopping around the yard, they would not be quite so endearing. In fact, I suspect I would come to hate frogs with the same passion I bring to my hatred of gnats. Today we talk about the second plague God sent on Egypt: frogs. Let’s explore what was going on and its outcome.

Read the rest…

Digging in Deeper: Romans 5:1-5

Leave a comment

“Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We have also obtained access through him by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. And not only that, but we also boast in our afflictions, because we know that affliction produces endurance, endurance produces proven character, and proven character produces hope. This hope will not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is the worth of hope? That’s a trickier question to answer than it might appear at first glance. As a follower of Jesus, I would argue that hope gives our lives purpose and meaning and even direction. Hope gives us something to live toward. It brings the promise of a future that will be better than the present. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be hope at all; it would be dread. Yet this understanding of the nature – and more, the worthwhileness – of hope requires a certain view of the world to make sense. Absent that view, hope can seem like little more than foolish wishful thinking that will only serve to distract a person from what is really real, or of doing the hard work necessary to make our future plans a reality on our own. Hope, you see, requires us to surrender ourselves to someone higher and more powerful than we are; someone who knows and controls the future in a way we cannot. At a little more than four episodes in, this grimmer view of hope lies at the heart of the second prequel series to the hit series, Yellowstone, and the follow-up to the immensely popular first prequel series, 1883, called 1923. Today, let’s talk about how the series has been at the halfway mark, and why its worldview isn’t one worth adopting for ourselves.

Read the rest…