Tag: Morning Musings

Morning Musing: Exodus 12:1-2, 11

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“The Lord said to Moses and Aaron in the land of Egypt, ‘This month is to be the beginning of months for you; it is the first month of your year. . .Here is how you must eat it: You must be dressed for travel, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand. You are to eat it in a hurry; it is the Lord’s Passover.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

In John’s Revelation, when the last apostle is recording his vision of the various judgments that will culminate in the end of the world, in two of the three series of seven judgments, the final judgment is silence. Just as we are approaching what we are sure must be the end of everything, we are greeted instead with silence in heaven. Read in context and on its own terms, the moment is truly jarring because of how very unexpected it is. That’s a little like what we get here. We are ready for God to unleash His full fury on the Egyptians. Instead, we get something rather different from that. Let’s begin something new today as we explore together how God finally fulfilled His promise to bring His people out of Egypt.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 11:9-10

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“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.’ Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh, but the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go out of his land.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Let me give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain this morning. I often write the introductions for these posts several weeks before I write the rest of them. These introductions serve as placeholders so that when I come back to actually write the full post I have a bit of a reminder of what I was thinking when I was first studying through a particular passage. As a result, I’m often studying one part of the text while writing about another a few chapters back. On occasion this lets me see connections between two different parts that I might otherwise miss. Way back at the beginning of chapter 7, just before God set Moses loose on Pharaoh, He told him (again) what was going to happen. The words He used then were remarkably similar to these words right here. Let’s come back to them again and touch yet again on this theme of Pharaoh’s hard heart. From that, we’ll spend a moment reflecting on why all of the repetition we find in this story is so important.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 10:16-20

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“Pharaoh urgently sent for Moses and Aaron and said, ‘I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you. Please forgive my sin once more and make an appeal to the Lord your God, so that he will just take this death away from me.’ Moses left Pharaoh’s presence and appealed to the Lord. Then the Lord changed the wind to a strong west wind, and it carried off the locusts and blew them into the Red Sea. Not a single locust was left in all the territory of Egypt. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he did not let the Israelites go.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the more fascinating stories in the Scriptures that reveals a great deal about God’s character, and which (ironically, considering its historical reception) gives us confidence the whole thing is true, is the story of Jonah. Setting aside the giant fish part that everybody simultaneously knows and doubts, the story is about God’s granting forgiveness from judgment and destruction to a people who would later conquer and destroy Israel. Why would God do that? Because they repented. God always responds to repentance. The ending of the story of the plague of locusts shows us the same thing about Him. Let’s talk about God’s incredible forgiveness.

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Morning Musing: Exodus 9:10-12

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“So they took furnace soot and stood before Pharaoh. Moses threw it toward heaven, and it became festering boils on people and animals. The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils, for the boils were on the magicians as well as on all the Egyptians. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he did not listen to them, as the Lord had told Moses.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the most challenging aspects of a healthy, orthodox, biblical theology is getting the balance right between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. The uncomfortable tension the Scriptures consistently hold is that both positions are entirely correct. Making sense out of that, though, isn’t always easy, especially when we encounter passages like this one. Here we are at another plague that is again worse than the last one. But this time, God is implicated by the language for the ongoing tragedy of the plagues. Let’s talk about what’s happening here.

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