Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery.

I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and you probably know the basic story of the ten plagues and the exodus.

God sends Moses to Pharaoh to tell him-

Let my people go!

Pharaoh, of course, refuses, and so God sends a series of ten plagues, ultimately leading to the death of the firstborn children of man, beast alike.

Only at this point does Pharaoh relent.

The Israelites are freed.

But that's just the surface of the story.

There's actually a lot more going on with a whole level of spiritual warfare, of divine punishment being meted out against not only the corrupt Egyptians but also on the demons that they've been worshiping as gods.

And God all but says as much in Exodus chapter twelve.

In announcing the tenth plague, God says-

And on all the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgments.

I am the Lord.

On all the gods of Egypt, I will execute judgments.

I am the Lord.

So the judgment isn't just against the humans enslaving and killing the Israelites.

It's against the demonic forces that stand behind and beneath this oppression.

Understanding that spiritual warfare is gonna be critical for understanding why God uses these ten plagues in particular to execute his judgment.

Rabbi Joseph Hertz argued that the plagues of Egypt were far more than a dramatic humiliation of the unrepentant and infatuated Pharaoh.

Instead, God is showing both Israel and Egypt the impotence of the false gods that were being worshiped by the Egyptians.

In Hertz's words, quote, The frog was venerated as the sign of fruitfulness and was turned into a horror.

The cattle, the sacred ram, the sacred goat, the sacred bull were all smitten.

The sacred beetle becomes a torment to those who put their trust in its divinity.

When we add to these the plague of darkness, which showed the eclipse of Ra, the sun god, we see that we have here a contrast between the God of Israel, the Lord of the universe, and the senseless idols of a senile civilization.

In fact, we can go further than Rabbi Hertz here.

After the first plagues, Pharaoh proposes a compromise.

The Israelites can go and sacrifice to God, but they have to do it within Egypt, not in the wilderness as God had said.

Listen to why Moses says this offer is unacceptable.

But Moses said, It would not be right to do so, for the offerings we shall sacrifice to the Lord our God are an abomination to the Egyptians.

If we sacrifice offerings abominable to the Egyptians before their eyes, will they not stone us?

In other words, one reason that the Israelites need to go out to the wilderness to worship God is that they're gonna be sacrificing animals that the Egyptians regard as sacred.

That's probably a reference to the cow in particular.

Later, when Pharaoh offers to let the people go if they'll just leave their flocks behind, Moses explicitly tells them that they need to bring the cattle with them to offer sacrifice.

While the Egyptians would sacrifice bulls, they refused to sacrifice cows, as those were considered sacred to the goddess Isis.

In fact, the Greek Herodotus would later observe that the Egyptians wouldn't even kiss the Greeks on the mouth because the Greeks were cow eaters.

So surely Moses is right in asking, If we sacrifice offerings abominable to the Egyptians before their eyes, will they not stone us?

This also explains what ends up happening in Exodus thirty-two, because once the Israelites are free and they make it to the wilderness, what do they do?

Well, instead of sacrificing their cattle to God, they end up making a golden calf and worshiping it and sacrificing to it.

So just as the plagues weren't random, neither is the golden calf.

Both of these make sense once you understand the background of the spirituality of Egyptian paganism.

So okay, these are two of the ways that the story of the flight from Egypt is a judgment upon the Egyptian gods.

The plagues are showing us that their gods are impotent, and the result is that the animals sacred to the Egyptian gods are offered as sacrifice to the true God.

But this account is still missing something important, because what about the turning of the waters of the Nile into blood?

Many people, including Rabbi Hertz, who we just heard from, and evangelical authors like Roy Zuck, claim that this is either divine judgment upon Hapi, who they claim is the god of the Nile, or else they'll say it was because the Egyptians worshiped the Nile River itself.

Those are popular claims, and on the surface, theories like that make sense.

The Egyptians relied upon the Nile for their life, and many ancient peoples in that situation end up worshiping the life-sustaining river or inventing a god or goddess of the river.

But as the Swedish archaeologist Terje Östgaard points out, the Egyptians are actually notable in not doing this.

They don't worship the Nile, and there isn't actually a god of the Nile.

Hapi, who is sometimes described as the god of the Nile today, was actually not the god of the river.

He was just the god of the river's annual flood, the inundation, which the Egyptians needed to irrigate their crops.

And there's nothing in the story of the ten plagues suggesting the Nile flooding was involved at all.

So we're still left with a hole in our understanding.

Why did God turn the Nile to blood?

Well, there's one Egyptian myth in particular that you need to know to make sense of this first plague.

Now, it's a myth known by two names.

One of those names, fittingly, is The Destruction of Mankind.

This is an incredibly important religious text for the ancient Egyptians.

To give you a sense of just how important it is, we first discovered the myth written on the walls of the tomb of the pharaoh.

I don't think it was Ramses.

I believe it was Tutankhamen.

Tuthankhamen.

Tutankhamen?

It actually turns out it was on the walls of the tombs of both Ramses and Tutankhamen and two other pharaohs from this time period as well.

In the myth, the sun god Ra has grown old and mankind has rebelled against him.

The council of gods assembles.

They determine that Ra should send his daughter, Hathor, who is known as the Eye of Ra, to kill the rebels.

Now, here's Dr. Amy Buettner reading from her own translation of the myth about what happens next.

And the gods said to Re, Let your eye go and smite them for you, those schemers of evil.

None is more able to smite them for you than Hathor.

May she go down as your eye.

So Re sent the goddess to slay mankind in the desert.

And when she returned, Re said to her, Welcome in peace, Hathor, my eye, who did what I asked of her.

I shall have power over mankind as king again by diminishing them.And the goddess said, as you live for me, I have overpowered mankind.

And it was a balm to my heart.

Thus Sekhmet, the powerful one, came into being, and she would not stop her killing.

Throughout Egypt, she waded in mankind's blood.

Initially, Ra, Re in Butler's translation, is pleased that Hathor has carried out his bidding, but she's become blood drunk.

She transforms into the lion-headed Sekhmet, and she continues killing everyone, guilty and innocent alike, and she's swimming in their blood.

To stop her, Ra comes up with a plan.

He has the Egyptians mix red clay into seven thousand jugs of beer.

Sekhmet then mistakes all of this red beer for blood, and she becomes drunk on this instead, reverting to Hathor, and she's heralded on her return as the goddess of drunkenness.

And this is actually the origin of the annual holiday known as the Festival of Drunkenness in Egypt, in which the Egyptians would get drunk both to honor and to appease the wrathful Hathor, an annual reminder that, in the words of the myth, respect is bound to originate through pain.

So that myth appears to be extremely ancient.

It's older than the events of the Exodus.

And it seems to have been pretty central to the Egyptian view of the gods, gods who they worshipped and appeased, but who deep down hated them and might want to bathe in their blood.

So with that in mind, consider how Exodus seven presents the first plague.

In the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants, he, Aaron, lifted up the rod and struck the water that was in the Nile, and all the water that was in the Nile turned to blood.

Unlike the Egyptian myth, this isn't beer mixed with food coloring.

God is striking at the Nile itself, the lifeblood of the Egyptians, and actually turning the river to blood, rendering it undrinkable.

It's hard to imagine the Egyptians seeing something like this and thinking of anything other than the destruction of mankind, since that's what the plague is so directly addressing on the nose.

But Pharaoh remains hard-hearted.

He refuses to listen because the magicians of Egypt did the same by their secret arts.

Now, one interpretation is that the secret arts they're using are some kind of magic trick, kind of in the, like in the myth, using clay or something to make it appear that the water is turned into blood.

But Christians like St. Augustine have long been comfortable in affirming that no, some real demonic powers were at work in imitating the transformation of water to blood.

After all, the Bible is perfectly clear that some paganism involves the worship of mere man-made idols that aren't really alive, but other pagan worship involves the worship of demonic beings that are all too alive.

And the Egyptians seem to have been doing the second of these.

Read in both this Jewish and Egyptian context then, the spiritual battle in Exodus becomes clear.

In fact, understanding these details helps to explain both what comes right before and right after the ten plagues as well.

So right before the ten plagues, in Exodus four, God gives the Israelites three miracles so that they too can know that Moses and Aaron are the real deal, that they're actually coming from God.

The three miracles are these.

Number one, Aaron's rod turns into a serpent.

Number two, there's a creating and healing of leprosy.

And number three, a jug of water is transformed into blood.

Now, each of these are concrete signs that God is greater than both Pharaoh and Pharaoh's gods.

For the first, the serpent was a symbol of Pharaoh's power.

You see it on their crowns.

It was a sign both of the Pharaoh's dedication to the serpent goddess Wadjet and of the union of Upper and Lower Egypt.

So the serpent becomes a symbol for Egypt and for Pharaoh himself, including in the Bible.

And yet here the walking stick of Aaron is greater than the scepter of Pharaoh.

Aaron's rod turns into a serpent that actually devours those serpents created by the magicians of Egypt.

As for the second miracle, one of the claims made about the priests of Sekhmet was that they could both cause and heal disease.

Diseases were caused by the wrathful Sekhmet, and her priests claimed that they could bring about healing by appeasing her through sacrifices.

But here we see Moses able to cause and cure leprosy instantly and visibly.

And then, of course, in the third miracle, we see this clear contrast in the turning of the water to blood.

In the Egyptian myth of the destruction of mankind, Ra is depicted as an old god.

He's no longer able to control his people who are conspiring against him.

And when he sends his daughter Hathor, the Eye of Ra, to punish them for rebellion, he soon finds that he can't really control her either.

One of Sekhmet's titles, fittingly, is the Destroyer.

And we see what that destruction looked like.

It's bloodthirsty, it's indiscriminate, it's out of control, even out of Ra's control.

And as we've seen, the solution to this essentially is to use food coloring to turn beer into fake blood to try to get her drunk and calm her down.

The whole episode reveals even to Ra that he's just too old for this.

This myth isn't just known as the destruction of mankind.

As I mentioned, it has another name as well.

That other name is the Book of the Heavenly Cow.

And that's because of what happens next.

Ra announces to the goddess Nut that my body is weak for the first time.

I won't wait until another gets to me.

And so she turns into a cow and he rides off on her back to his palace in the sky, leaving mankind behind.

Here again, we see why the Israelites might be tempted to turn to the golden calf as an image of heaven when the God of heaven seemed to fall silent.

Now, for her part, Sekhmet escapes to the desert where she can kill with impunity away from the authority of Ra.

Her followers worship her as the distant goddess.

And frankly, it's a good thing that she was distant.

What God is showing through Moses is that he's greater than the gods of Egypt, both in power and in goodness.

He doesn't need food coloring or trickery to turn the Nile to blood, but he's also not running away.

Instead, he comes down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land, leading them into the promised land, even though this means journeying through the desert, that realm of Sekhmet, where they serve him even there.

Now, we see this contrasted really remarkably in the final plague, the one commemorated each year in the Passover involving the death of the firstborn.

For the Lord will pass through to strike the Egyptians.

And when he sees the blood on the lintel and on the two doorposts, the Lord will pass over the door.and will not allow the destroyer to enter your houses to strike you.

Notice how Exodus calls the angel of death the destroyer.

It's that title that the Egyptians had given to Sekhmet.

But in contrast to Ra and Sekhmet, God and his angels are both more powerful and more merciful.

The angel obeys strict orders to kill only the firstborn of the Egyptians, and he passes over the households of the faithful Israelites entirely when he sees the doorposts marked with the blood of the Passover lamb.

And it's not because he's been tricked, but because the God who sent him is a good God.

And while the Israelites don't know it yet, this Passover is itself really pointing to something greater, pointing us to the ultimate sign of God's power and his goodness, namely the Eucharist and the cross.

It's not a coincidence that the Last Supper is a Passover meal because Jesus is our Passover lamb.

He lays down his own life, offering his own blood as the perfect offering to save us from the powers of death and the forces of darkness.

And in the midst of it all, he can pray even for his persecutors, crying out, Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

As St. Gregory the Great would later save this prayer, is it possible to offer or even to imagine a purer kind of prayer than that which shows mercy to one's torturers by making intercession for them?

It was thanks to this kind of prayer that the frenzied persecutors who shed the blood of our Redeemer drank it afterward in faith and proclaimed him to be the Son of God.

There's a way of telling the Christian story that goes something like this.

God promised the Jewish people that he would send them a Messiah to save them from their oppressors, which people thought would be political.

But while they thought it meant saving them from Caesar and the Romans, when Jesus arrives, it turns out he wants to save us instead from Satan and his minions.

But as I hope this brief sketch of Exodus shows, it's not as if there was some kind of divine bait and switch.

God's plan all along was to save us from these forces of darkness and to visit his judgment upon the wicked gods of this age.

That's the real meaning of Exodus and the real meaning of the cross.

For Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer.

God bless you.