God’s Devastation of Egypt)

In my scripture studies I have been making my way through the early chapters of Exodus, in which we read the story of God sending His plagues against the people of Egypt, afflicting them until finally they let the Israelites go. Recently I noted how these chapters show the side of God that is a God of vengeance. It has stood out to me a great deal just how vicious God’s breaking of Pharaoh and the Egyptians was.

God began the whole affair by summoning forth the blood of the innocent Israelite babes thrown into the river, symbolizing that He was about to require the same blood of the Egyptian people. He then procedurally and strategically took from the Egyptians their comfort, their health, their wealth, their sacred animals, and their safety. He announced that He had propped the entire nation up for the express purpose of beating it down in the sight of all the world. When finally He brought His death upon them, He made sure to take someone from each and every household, ensuring that all of the Egyptians had their hearts broken in the very same night.

One cannot seriously meditate on this story without being moved by the absolute devastation God inflicted upon those people. And more meaningful than the size of the devastation was just how methodical and purposeful it all was. God really knew just how, where, and when to intimidate, to apply pressure, and to break.

A Guilty Heart)

Personally, seeing this view of God does not disturb me. I have always understood and been comfortable with the view that God is to be trusted by the righteous, but feared by the wicked. I know that God endeavors to save the sinner, for He saved me. But before my time of repentance He stood against me and afflicted me, and never did I resent Him for that. I have come to see that the nature of my sins is that they inevitably lead to hurting others, especially those that I love most, and in those moments I am absolutely deserving of God’s judgment and punishment.

Granted, God hasn’t visited me with so great of curses as He did the Egyptians, but neither have I killed thousands of innocent babes as they did. I know that some people struggle with the magnitude of God’s punishments in the Old Testament, but when I read the accounts that are given I do not see that He did anything that was unwarranted. Yes, He smote Sodom and Gomorrah, and Egypt, and the various nations who possessed the land of Canaan, but we also know that they were given to all manner of cruelty and perversion. Many of them worshipped pagan gods which demanded horrifying and barbaric practices, such as the sacrifice of living children!

A Lost Perspective)

The fact is, if we struggle to understand the good in a God who uses great power in attacking the wicked and defending the righteous, it is only because we live a life that is so safe and secure that we cannot fathom the horrors of darkness that God has historically stood against.

In general, as a people today we have no firsthand knowledge of what it is like to live without a powerful government to protect us, or to spend our entire life as a slave to another, or to have no welfare support if we become sick or injured, or to be surrounded by a culture that doesn’t believe in the basic dignity of every person, or to be at the mercy of wild animals and natural elements, or to have the necessity of doing hard labor all day just to have enough food and shelter to survive, or to be constantly be at risk of being slaughtered by a roaming army. Some of the most unfortunate among us might encounter just one or two of these daily realities of ancient life, but overall we are left only to our imaginations of how such an existence must have been.

When one is as vulnerable, persecuted, and afraid as the ancient Israelites then, and only then, can one truly judge whether God’s mighty hand against the Egyptians was a good thing or not.