Exodus 07

Updated
2001-05-26; 14:31:19utc

In chapter seven the confrontation between God and Pharaoh becomes acute. Up till now it has been Pharaoh's word against God's Word. Now words change into actions.

In vs. 1-9 God gives precise instructions to Moses, which heals Moses' despondency and changes his attitude for good.

In vs. 10-13 Moses orders Aaron to perform the first sign in front of Pharaoh. The king counters this by ordering his magicians to perform the same sign, but, although they produce their snakes, their performance is obviously inferior to Moses'.

In vs. 14-25 the second sign is executed and should have devastated Pharaoh's power, since it affected the symbol of Egypt greatness, the River Nile. But in spite of the fact that the river god is killed and his blood is all over the country with the smell of decay, Pharaoh is unmoved.

In vs. 1 God says to Moses: "See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet." Obedience to God's command brought about a drastic and fundamental change in Moses. This change was so obvious that one as hostile as Pharaoh would notice it. It is the work of God. "I have made you like God," God said. It started with Moses' shepherd's staff. God had shown him in ch. 4 how to use the staff and in ch. 4:17 we read that God told him: "Take this staff in your hand so you can perform miraculous signs with it." In vs. 20 Moses' staff became "the staff of God." "So Moses took his wife and sons, put them on a donkey and started back to Egypt. And he took the staff of God in his hand."

So it started with the surrender of a simple stick. It does not take much to be transformed by the power of God into His likeness, does it? Jesus says that if the Word of God comes to a man, it makes him into a god. Quoting from the Psalms, He says: "Is it not written in your Law, 'I have said you are gods'? If he called them 'gods,' to whom the word of God came; and the Scripture cannot be broken; What about the one whom the Father set apart as his very own and sent into the world? Why then do you accuse me of blasphemy because I said, 'I am God's Son'?"[ 1 ]

When the Word of God first came to Moses in ch. 3, Moses was shocked profoundly. He tried to refuse. Finally he accepted reluctantly. At the end of ch. 5 he felt himself rejected, a complete failure. But here the Lord became his confidence. This confidence increased to an intimacy that was unparalleled in the Old Testament. God said to Israel about Moses: "When a prophet of the LORD is among you, I reveal myself to him in visions, I speak to him in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the LORD. Why then were you not afraid to speak against my servant Moses?"[ 2 ] And in Deuteronomy we read: "Since then, no prophet has risen in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, Who did all those miraculous signs and wonders the LORD sent him to do in Egypt; to Pharaoh and to all his officials and to his whole land. For no one has ever shown the mighty power or performed the awesome deeds that Moses did in the sight of all Israel."[ 3 ]

The hardest thing to understand for us New Testament Christians is that in Jesus Christ Moses is inferior to us. Jesus says about John the Baptist: "I tell you the truth: Among those born of women there has not risen anyone greater than John the Baptist; yet he who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he."[ 4 ]

And Paul, comparing the ministry of the Holy Spirit to us now with the ministry God gave to Moses, says: "Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, fading though it was, … and if what was fading away came with glory, how much greater is the glory of that which lasts! …We are not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face to keep the Israelites from gazing at it while the radiance was fading away. … And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord's glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit."[ 5 ]

With this transformation Moses was ordered to go to Pharaoh again and to repeat the unqualified demand that they depart. The Lord also repeated to Moses what Pharaoh's reaction would be. Again God took responsibility for the hardness of Pharaoh's heart. As we have seen already, this means that Pharaoh would reach a point of no return, but the reaching of this point was the result of his own choices. Pharaoh would push his resistance beyond the limit. Even after the exodus took place, after the death of all the firstborn of Egypt, Pharaoh changed his mind and tried to recapture the people. Ch. 14:5 - "When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, Pharaoh and his officials changed their minds about them and said, 'What have we done? We have let the Israelites go and have lost their services!'" It all started out with Pharaoh's question: "Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go." But God assured Moses that, when the tenth plague occurred, "The Egyptians will know that I am the LORD when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it."

The audience described in vs. 10-13 was the second that Moses and Aaron had with the king. Maybe we should say it was the second audience Pharaoh had with Moses. The details are quite sketchy. Evidently Pharaoh had prepared himself and had ordered his court magicians to be present because he wanted to elevate the matter and bring it on a supernatural plane. It was Pharaoh's initiative. He was the one who challenged God by asking for a miracle. The sign he received was very strange: Aaron's rod turned into a snake. Ever since sin entered the world, the serpent had become its symbol. In Revelation, Satan is called "that ancient serpent."[ 6 ] Here God confronted Satan with his own symbol; He met him on his own ground. I wonder if the devil guessed at this point that Jesus Christ would eventually crush him by meeting him on his own turf?

There is, of course, a danger of seeing too much symbolism in signs such as these. But what happened here is too strange not to ask questions. What did God mean by opening the confrontation with a sign that obviously stood for sin? The snake in Paradise was sin personified. Jesus used the term snakes and scorpions for demonic powers. He said to the disciples: "I have given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions and to overcome all the power of the enemy; nothing will harm you."[ 7 ] The snake is the only animal in the Bible God cursed. Now, here God has Himself represented by Moses as a snake, as a curse. The only explanation I can think of is the one Paul gives: "Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: 'Cursed is everyone who is hung on a tree.' He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit."[ 8 ]

The mystery of the Incarnation is that Christ became a curse for us in order to conquer the curse. This was what happened symbolically in Pharaoh's court. Aaron's rod, which became a snake, swallowed up the snakes of the magicians. It must have been a very convincing performance that caused fear in the hearts of the magicians. They understood that they were facing superior power. Pharaoh must have understood the same, but for him too much was at stake to admit and confess. He decided to harden his heart.

During the German revival in the Ruhr area shortly after World War II, one of the leading brothers in the group of Hermann Zaiss visited a woman in a mental ward, who told him: "I am the personified serpent." The man, who must have been full of the Holy Spirit, answered: "The personified serpent was Jesus Christ when He died on the cross. And I command the evil spirit in you to come out." The woman was healed.

The first sign indicated that God immediately penetrated the core of the matter. It was not only, or even in the first place, a confrontation between a nation of masters and a people of slaves, but between the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness. The sign indicated the mode in which God was going to subdue the enemy. He would become man, so that through His death He could conquer death.

The second sign, which was also the first plague, described in vs. 14-25 is even more horrendous. It affected the heart of the life of Egypt, the source of its sustenance of its religion. The River Nile was not just a river of water, it was a deity. Egypt's god died when Moses struck the river with his staff. Nietsche once dismissed religion by saying: "God is dead and the stench of His decaying body fills Western Europe." The great German philosopher was partly right. He was wrong in his identification of the corpse that was the source of the odor.

The king went to the river to take a bath. This was probably an act that combined hygiene with ritual. It was a meeting of deities: the king and the river. If there was a place that was separated for the baths of royalties, the place where Moses and Aaron met Pharaoh may have been close to the spot where baby Moses had been found by the princess eighty three year before. Pharaoh never got into the water; in fact, he went home without touching it. This must have made him furious. But this was not the worst part of the power encounter. Not only did the water of the river turn to blood and spew out its fish, but the drinking water, which is one of the most fundamental needs of man, became a severe problem. To make it worse, the magicians imitated the miracle, using up whatever usable water there was to turn it into blood, thus making the emergency worse. I can understand the rationale in countering Moses' snake with their own snakes, but why spoil more water?

The result of the "miracle" produced by the magicians, which may have been a fake, was that Pharaoh did not take the matter to heart. He had already made up his mind, of course, before this evidence was presented to him, but it gave him the pretext he wanted. In doing so, he purposely missed the point God had made, that He is the LORD. In ch. 5:2 Pharaoh had said, "Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD and I will not let Israel go." In each of the plagues that God sent over Egypt, he received the answer to his question.

The last verse of this chapter says: "Seven days passed after the LORD struck the Nile." Whether this means that the Nile remained in this condition for about one full week or whether this was the interval between this plague and the next one, is not clear. Some commentators believe the water remained blood for the week.

[ 1 ] John 10:34-36; See Ps. 82:6

[ 2 ] Num. 12:6-8

[ 3 ] Deut. 34:10-12

[ 4 ] Matt. 11:11

[ 5 ] II Cor. 3:7,11,13,18

[ 6 ] Rev. 12:9

[ 7 ] Luke 10:19

[ 8 ] Gal. 3:13,14