Dr Paul Allen

Thus says the Lord: “By this you shall know that I am the LORD: Behold, I will strike the waters which are in the river with the rod that is in my hand, and they shall be turned to blood” (Ex. 7:17). The Egyptians worshiped the Nile River . They derived so much benefit from it that they looked upon it as divine. To show His sovereignty and superiority over the Egyptians and their gods, the Lord sent this first plague to taint the waters of Egypt, turning the Nile into blood. It must be emphatically stated at this point that this was not a discoloration from the red clays of the Ethiopian highlands that sometimes washed into the Nile, turning it a reddish color. The term used in the text for blood is never used for a color, but for the actual substance of blood. This was a supernatural act of God, a miracle. God had said that He would enable Moses to perform great miracles that would only harden Pharaoh’s heart. If it had been merely discoloration from a natural occurrence, it woul

English: Moses Pleading with Israel, as in Deuteronomy 6:1-15, illustration from a Bible card published 1907 by the Providence Lithograph Company (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) I am stunned every time I read the story of the Exodus . How can the people of Israel complain like they do? How could they be so ignorant, so stupid, so forgetful? The God of the universe had just tossed around the most powerful man on the face of the earth like a toddler with a rag doll. God didn’t just humble Pharaoh ; he broke his spirit and revealed Pharaoh’s impotence. A slave people and their God left him and his nation in shambles. This display of power sent vibrations throughout the world, inspiring fear and awe. The Deadly Disease of Spiritual Amnesia Yet Israel ’s response to this spectacular deliverance from Egypt is not mainly praise, worship, and whole-hearted trust. Instead, Israel responds with  grumbling  — complaining, murmuring, quarreling. “No water, Moses ! Where’s the beef, Moses?

PLAGUES OF EGYPT . In commissioning Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt , God had warned him that this would come about only through God’s supreme power overcoming all the might of Pharaoh, whereby Egypt would be smitten with wonders or signs from God (cf. Ex. 3:19–20).  After the sign of the rod that became a serpent and swallowed up those of the Egyptian magicians, which left Pharaoh unmoved, God’s power was demonstrated to him and his people in a series of ten judgments. They were so applied as to portray clearly the reality and power of Israel’s God, and thus by contrast the impotence of Egypt’s gods. The first nine of these plagues bear a direct relation to natural phenomena in the Nile valley , but the tenth, the death of the firstborn, belongs wholly to the realm of the supernatural. These first nine plagues demonstrate the divine use of the created order to achieve his ends, and recent studies tend to confirm both the reality of what is described in Ex. 7–12 and the po