Exodus 7-10 "Creation Replies" Scott Hoezee

This past week was a bad one for many areas of this country as devastating tornadoes destroyed whole towns and killed dozens of people. Whenever such "natural" disasters occur, it is all-but certain that sooner or later someone will start to wonder about God's role in it all. Some will be very sure God was behind it and so will ponder what greater good the Lord is trying to achieve through this death and destruction that he himself sent. Others will claim that although God did not send the disaster, he did allow it to happen and so they, too will wonder why. Still others will say God could not possibly have had anything to do with this--it was just a bad and terrible thing that God laments the same as the rest of us.

I have told you the story before about how Richard Mouw was asked to preach at a southern California church some years back following that devastating earthquake in San Francisco. The church wanted Mouw to explain to them what God's purpose behind sending this quake was. Some clearly were hoping Mouw would declare this a divine punishment for the decadence of Hollywood and the permissive culture of San Francisco. Mouw, however, demurred, choosing instead as his text for the day that verse from the Elijah story in I Kings 19, "but the Lord was not in the earthquake."

It is always dangerous to try to discern divine purposes behind global events. Theologically and philosophically speaking, it is even dangerous to assume that God is behind every last thing that happens. In a fallen world we believe that many things happen, many evil deeds are committed, that cannot be the will of God and so these sins and evils should not be chalked up to something God ordained. In fact, this morning I claimed that if we make God our refuge and spiritual fortress, then we should believe that when bad things come to us anyway, they do not represent God's dearest desire for our lives.

But this is a complex matter. Even those of us who resist claiming that God ordains bad things cannot deny that God may now and then have something to do with such events after all. Based on the witness of Scripture, we cannot say that God is never involved in even dreadful occurrences. If it is spiritually arrogant to claim that you can always trace down the divine purpose behind every disaster, it is equally arrogant to claim that there is never any divine purpose behind world events. Tonight's passage on the Ten Plagues may well be Scripture's premiere example of how the Lord God can sometimes be the direct instigator of natural disasters that are in the service of a higher divine purpose.

The Ten Plagues inflicted on Egypt are among the better-known portions of the Bible. This is the stuff of gripping Sunday school stories and of high-tech Hollywood special effects whenever a movie is made based on Exodus. Because we are so familiar with them, we also assume that we already know the why and the wherefore of the plagues--this was the method by which God got Israel out of Egypt. And although that is true, there is far more going on here than just that one-time, local angle on it. Intertwined with the ins and outs of these plagues are cosmic themes of redemption. Let's delve into these plagues a bit more to see the emergence of these grander ideas.

A first and main item to note is an idea that has been very convincingly advanced by Old Testament scholar Terrence Fretheim. Fretheim believes that the entire Book of Exodus not only follows Genesis in sequence but is itself an intentional sequel to Genesis. If the Book of Genesis showed us the Fall of the creation into sin, the Book of Exodus shows God's reclaiming that same creation for himself. Last Sunday morning, in a different connection, I reminded you that theologically speaking, "cosmos" is the opposite of "chaos." What God accomplished in the beginning as Genesis 1-2 present it to us was imposing cosmos on the primordial chaos. God imposed his divine order on the disorder that existed when all was "formless and empty" as Genesis 1:2 put it. The Hebrew of that verse is tohu wabohu, which in the rest of the Bible will often be used to describe the wilderness.

In Scripture the wilderness or desert regions represented particularly dangerous places precisely because of how chaotic and disordered they were. When God's good cosmos fell into sin, a measure of chaos crept back onto the scene. The order of God decayed due to evil. When God created the heavens and the earth, he did a lot of careful separating and sorting out. He separated the water from the dry land, the waters from the waters, light from dark and so put what we could call certain "safety features" into place so that life could flourish and survive. By separating things, God carved out a safe niche for life. But a main effect of sin is the erosion of, and sometimes the erasing of, God's orderly boundaries and barriers. Sin involves elicit mixing together of what God set apart. Sin introduces confusion and dangerous combinations of things God did not intend to have mixed together.

Among other things, the plagues inflicted on Egypt represent just such chaos. Things slip out of place with disastrous results. It is almost as though God is fighting fire with fire. A few weeks ago in this series we noted that Pharaoh represents the complete anti-God force of chaos in the world. In Exodus 5 Pharaoh threw down the gauntlet of challenge by asking, "Who is Yahweh that I should listen to him?" Pharaoh asked the question and God is now answering it by providing Pharaoh and all the Egyptians with the education of a lifetime! Pharaoh represents the very force of chaos that has for so long despoiled God's good order. In an ironic twist, God turns the chaos of a creation run amok into his key weapon in fighting Pharaoh. Along the way, as we will see, God also demolishes the idol gods of Egypt. All through history there has been the temptation to worship the creation instead of the Creator. In the plagues God will make clear why this confusion must not happen. He alone must be worshiped!

To see how this works out quite literally "in action," let's take a brief tour of these chapters. We will begin with the Nile turning to blood. The Nile River, of course, was the linchpin in nearly all Egyptian agriculture. The Nile's annual overflowing of its banks watered otherwise arid soil while also leaving behind a rich deposit of silt. It is no surprise that the Nile was regarded as a god, and so Yahweh begins by attacking this supposed deity. "Who is Yahweh?" the Pharaoh had sneeringly asked. Yahweh begins answering that by showing his power in toppling a leader in the Egyptian pantheon. We should also recall that the Nile was the same place where Pharaoh had his troops drown Israelite babies. So now the body of water that had become a graveyard for the Israelites becomes a source of stinking death to the Egyptians as well. Again, God is fighting chaos with chaos.

The second plague of frogs is a good example of what I said a moment ago: the chaos of sin makes God's good cosmos go berserk. Frogs are a necessary and harmless creature but here God lets them slip out of the place assigned to them in the larger cosmos by multiplying beyond all control. There is even some biblical humor here. Just imagine it: frogs in your bathtub, frogs in your dinner, frogs under your pillow. The whole land was filled with their croaking! Things get even funnier when the Egyptian magicians duplicate this plague. I have the feeling that God himself probably assisted these quacks this time around because after all, by duplicating the plague, they made it worse! I don't imagine Pharaoh was thrilled to hear that his magicians had just succeeded in doubling the number of frogs in the land! Sometimes sin really is its own worst punishment!

The next two plagues bring waves of gnats and flies, again probably more annoying than genuinely harmful but also another example of creation running off the rails. The gnats, by the way, may have been mosquitoes according to some scholars, magnifying our sense of how maddening this must have been (even as it lends new meaning to the idea of a West Nile plague!). It drove Pharaoh sufficiently mad that he promises to let the people go if only Moses will make the plague stop. Pharaoh hardens his heart, however, thus impelling the drama forward.

Plagues 5-8 grow quickly in seriousness and the harm they cause. Cattle drop dead all over Egypt, though the Israelite cows were spared. Loathsome boils appear on the skin of the Egyptians, although again not on the Israelites. Hail and locust roar up to destroy what little is left of Egyptian cattle and crops. Each time Pharaoh acts like he will relent if only the plague will relent and each time he goes back on his word. Still, Pharaoh gets weaker as time goes by. No one can live in a world this out of control. More than even the most sinful people around realize, we depend on the cosmos of God's good order if life is going to be anything other than plain miserable.

The ninth plague introduces darkness to the land. Like the first plague that attacked the Egyptian god of the Nile, so this ninth plague attacks the number one god in the Egyptian pantheon: the sun god Re. Again God proves his ability to reduce the idol gods of the Egyptians to nothing. We are also reminded of the darkness that pervaded the entire pre-creation void before God began the creation process by declaring, "Let there be light!" If God is using the chaos of a creation gone mad to fight the mad chaos of Pharaoh himself, then by returning the earth to darkness, we have indeed seen the most dramatic return yet of all that is anti-God, anti-creation, and just so chaotic.

Many scholars divide the first nine plagues into three sets of three. In the first three plagues (blood, frogs, and mosquitoes) God shows that he is bigger than both Egyptian magic and Egyptian gods. In the second set (flies, dead cattle, and boils) God reveals his presence right in the land of Egypt itself. God can and will touch the flesh of the people themselves. In the final set (hail, locust, and darkness) God reveals his supremacy over the entire universe. The weather, the success of agriculture, the very shining of the sun in space are all finally matters in Yahweh's control alone. Systematically, and as a direct result of Pharaoh's own stubbornness, God shows his power, his presence, and his sovereignty.

In the last sermon of this series, we peeked briefly at the first plague. The title of that sermon was "Instead He Turned," referring to the fact that after the magicians somehow duplicated the plague of turning water to blood, the Pharaoh turned his back and marched back into his palace. The Pharaoh was not going to be distracted by, much less turned around by, these things. But in the course of the plagues, Yahweh keeps getting into Pharaoh's face, as it were. More and more it becomes impossible for Pharaoh to turn his back on Yahweh because everywhere Pharaoh turns, on the earth or even in the heavens, Yahweh is undeniably there. It will still take that terrible tenth plague to make Pharaoh fall to his knees. Only then will Pharaoh know the answer to his cynical question, "Who is Yahweh?" Who is he? He is the God of heaven and earth, of life and yes, of also death.

"The earth is the Lord's and everything in it" the 24^th Psalm tells us. Indeed, these stories illustrate that majestically. The God who created the heavens and the earth will not let those who despoil creation get away with it. In a way the plagues were ecological signs of historical sin. But because God won the battle by using the weapons of creation, there is hope for that same creation--God remains passionately involved with, and will win the victory for, all his creatures one day.

The purpose behind these plagues is nothing short of cosmic. As we said earlier tonight, we don't generally like to think of God being in any way behind natural disasters. And indeed, we need to exercise extreme caution (and more often than not profess our ignorance) when it comes to parsing out the theological whys and wherefores of this or that event in the world. But make no mistake: when a person or even a whole society thumbs its nose at God, when someone asks some version of Pharaoh's question, "Who is God that we should care what he thinks?" then God will respond and sometimes he will let the creation itself do the responding for him.

In the 1950s Chairman Mao Tse Tung, the "Great Leader" of Communist China, was consolidating his grip on the land. Mao wanted total control and so as part of his Cultural Revolution he determined to eliminate what he called "Four Evils:" rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows. The sparrows in particular, the Great Leader declared, consumed too much of the people's grain and so needed to be exterminated. And through the concerted efforts of millions of Chinese citizens, the little birds were about wiped out by the iron fist of proletariat dictatorship. It was, however, a pyhrric victory. In the two years following the death of the sparrows the Chinese people suffered a devastating famine. The wheat crop failed terribly because without the sparrows to eat them, legions of insects descended on Chinese wheat fields and ate up everything in sight!

God does have his eye on the sparrow indeed! But then, he has his eye on the entire creation. Creation is worth redeeming and so God takes all chaotic threats to the goodness of the earth very seriously. Whether or not God sends plagues on the earth, many times we suffer various plagues because we ourselves destroyed the barriers that God set in place. Like Pharaoh, we too often fancy ourselves as gods and goddesses who can do what we want in all of life, including in matters pertaining to the physical earth. But when we pursue the practices of chaos, we should not be surprised if we find that the earth has become something that takes life from us instead of giving life to us.

Yes, through the Ten Plagues God ultimately succeeded in getting his people out of Egypt. But the plagues were not merely a means to an end and they were not just some entertaining side show. In Exodus God is overtly beginning the long process of reclaiming the same cosmos whose creation Genesis told us about. If Exodus really is a theological sequel to Genesis, then it should come as no surprise to find the physical creation playing this kind of a role in the drama of redemption. Creation and Redemption are Scripture's two key themes. We dare never separate those two. The redemption of Israel from Egypt, like the latter-day exodus from sin that Jesus made possible upon the cross, is not just about scooping up and preserving human souls. Even as the Exodus from Egypt pointed the Israelites toward a Promised Land flowing with milk, honey, and the abundance of God's cosmos, so even now we as followers of Jesus are on course toward a New Creation in which chaos will be forever eliminated and cosmos will flood every inch of the universe.

Small wonder that in one of his more lyric moments of ecstatic prose, the apostle Paul once wrote to the Christians at Rome that the entire creation is standing on tippy-toes, craning its neck to watch for the return of Christ. For then, and only then, will all creatures of our God and King know the full redemption for which the whole creation has been groaning as in the pangs of birth for ever-so-long now. When that day comes, no one will ever again ask Pharaoh's question, "Who is God?" For the nature of God will be on shining display in the glorious bursting of every daffodil, in the gossamer flap of every butterfly's wing, and in the sparkle of sunlight off that crystal sea beside which we will forever sing, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain. For you have created all things and for your glory they were created!" Amen.