The Plagues in Exodus

We see in the book of Exodus something that seems awfully unsettling, God bringing ten plagues among the Egyptian people. Along with those ten plagues, we read something in the text that says "God hardened Pharaoh's heart." These two separate, but correlated, instances give a lot of us a really confused or bleak picture of who God truly is. Often we tend to "just not believe" that God actually did these things, skip this part of scripture or just leave ourselves unknowing why these things are written in a Holy Book that claims God is "all-loving." And this with good reason. But what I want to show is that these seemingly contradictory passages are really not contradictory at all. And that our reasoning for skipping over this passage is simply a misunderstanding and misinterpretation of what the Lord is really trying to get across. Let me show you what I mean.

So what we see in Exodus is that God brings ten plagues among the Egyptian people that are under Pharaoh. Three of these plagues that we will look at (for the sake of not making this ten pages) are the Nile being turned to blood, darkness falling across the entire land and the hail that rained down and destroyed much of the Egyptian livestock and those who had not went inside. Most of us look at this and ask ourselves why God would do something like this. The explanation is not apparent, nor is is able to be found without a bit of study. But what we see is that God brought these plagues on the people... for the people. The three plagues I have mentioned above each have a false Egyptian god or goddess attached to them. Hapi is the Egyptian God of the Nile (Plague of the Nile), Ra the Egyptian god of the sun (Plague of darkness), and Nut is the Egyptian goddess of the sky (Plague of Hail). What the Lord is trying to show these people here is that He is much more powerful than their false gods. They are praying to, and worshiping, these idols that will do absolutely nothing for them. Their mind has already been made up. God has seen that they will not turn to Him by any other means, so as a last resort He is going to show them that their gods are nothing compared to who He is. Each of these plagues lines up with a false god whom the Egyptians of this time were worshiping.

You see, these plagues were meant to turn these people away from the vanity of worshiping false idols to serving a God who has the power to create and destroy, to love and to care for, to save and to condemn.

The Lord says in Exodus 9:15 "For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the earth." But this wasn't His purpose or His plan, He wanted to allow these people to be free of such awful slavery, slavery of worshiping something that will provide nothing. As Exodus 9:16 states, "But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth." God wanted to show them His power so they would turn from their truly ignorant ways.

This idea flows directly into the actions of the God we see today. God continually allows suffering in our lives so that we will grow to realize that we can trust in Him for everything and that we do not need to rely on "false gods" to bring us fulfillment. What these false gods will do is bring us true destruction and true condemnation. God is willing to go to the deepest depths for you.

The hardening of Pharaoh's heart-

This, similar to the ten plagues, is an extremely difficult section of scripture to cope with if we do not understand the full meaning of what is written. Time and time again throughout Exodus the words "God hardened Pharaoh's heart" are written. This, at it's face value, seems to be saying that God caused Pharaoh to turn against Him, or to sin. When we look at the text in it's original language we see that the word qashah (in Hebrew and Greek) actually means to stiffen or to strengthen. The idea being presented in this phrase (eg. Exodus 7:3) is that God allowed, or stiffened, Pharaoh's desires that were already in his heart. God did not cause Pharaoh to sin, but God did give Pharaoh over to what he already wanted. The Lord will not force us to believe in Him. He would rather deliver us over to our desires (Romans 1:24a) so that we can live a falsely meaningful life, than force us to do something that we have our heart set against. We, beings of free will, have the choice whether we want to follow or believe in God or not, and He will honor that by not forcing us to follow or believe in Him.

This correlates to what is taught in the New Testament. James 1:10a and 1 Corinthians 15:32 speak of how we should do everything we can that is presented to us on this Earth because, if that is what we so choose to do, God will not stop us from doing so. 1 Corinthians 15:32 says that if there is no resurrection of Jesus, if His work meant nothing, if He is a nobody, then we should "eat and drink for tomorrow we die." If we do not want to believe in God, then He will not force us to. James 1:10a speaks of how the rich should be boastful that they are rich because eventually all of their possessions and, inevitably, their entire life will burn up leaving nothing behind. So we might as well enjoy the pitiful things that we have now.

If we want to spend our entire life praising and worshiping what is here, then we are free to do so. But I tell you that the God of Creation has much more to offer you.

Revelation 3:20 "I (Jesus) stand at the door and knock If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him and he with me."

Ephesians 2:14-22

My mind is boggled by the amount of grace that has been given to me through Christ. Along with the rest of humanity, I am so undeserving of a relationship with God, let alone undeserving of the life He has given to me. Day by day I see the hand of God at work in this world to reconcile the lost to Himself. In the words of Jeremiah the Prophet "You will seek me (God) and find me when you seek me with all your heart." and again, repeated by Jesus himself in Matthew 7:7-8 " ⁷ “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. ⁸ For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened." (emphasis added)

To those who seek, you will find. God is pulling on the strings of your heart and mind. And when you do find, the blessings that come with that are innumerable. As the apostle Paul writes in Ephesians 2:14-22,

¹⁴ For he himself is our peace, who has made the two groups one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, ¹⁵ by setting aside in his flesh the law with its commands and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, ¹⁶ and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. ¹⁷ He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. ¹⁸ For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.

¹⁹ Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and strangers, but fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household, ²⁰ built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. ²¹ In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. ²² And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

There is no distinction when it comes to those in Christ Jesus. There is no "holy man" or "priest." The cross has made both Jew and Gentile one, in Christ. Once this gift of God has been applied to our lives, we become one with the brothers and sisters. There is no hierarchy, no clergy-laity distinction, nothing that makes one believer in Christ better than the other. The man of God is chosen by his personal decision to receive Jesus into his life, no other way. The gospel is not just for the murderers, the prostitutes, the drug dealers, no, the gospel is for those who feel near to God, not just for those who are far away. We must receive and apply the gift of Jesus' substitutionary death on a cross to our lives. The law was never meant to save. By no means could we ever do enough good deeds to please a God who's very being is perfection. Christ set all of that aside. You are a child of the living God, a member of His Holy residence. Only by the work of Christ through the spirit can we work together to fulfill our duty as the Lord's temple. This work is never ceasing. From the day you start that relationship with the Lord and creator this work begins. As Paul writes in Philippians 1:6 "being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus." You will be molded and sculpted into the person that you were meant to be. Your life will become more meaningful than you ever thought possible. You will begin to understand the purpose for humanity and, more applicably, the purpose of your very life.

The work is good. God is good.

Daniel 9

This passage in the bible is the most incredible thing that I have ever found. This is one reason that I converted from Atheism to Christianity. We have copies of this text from around 125 B.C. That is, 125 years before Jesus Christ was ever even thought about in the world. Modern scholars agree that Daniel wrote his copy of this text around 500 B.C., 500 years before Jesus Christ walked the earth.This passage is called

The Seventy “Sevens”

²⁰ While I was speaking and praying, confessing my sin and the sin of my people Israel and making my request to the LORD my God for his holy hill— ²¹ while I was still in prayer, Gabriel, the man I had seen in the earlier vision, came to me in swift flight about the time of the evening sacrifice. ²² He instructed me and said to me, “Daniel, I have now come to give you insight and understanding. ²³ As soon as you began to pray, a word went out, which I have come to tell you, for you are highly esteemed. Therefore, consider the word and understand the vision:

²⁴ “Seventy ‘sevens’ are decreed for your people and your holy city to finish transgression, to put an end to sin, to atone for wickedness, to bring in everlasting righteousness, to seal up vision and prophecy and to anoint the Most Holy Place.

²⁵ “Know and understand this: From the time the word goes out to restore and rebuild Jerusalem until the Anointed One, the ruler, comes, there will be seven ‘sevens,’ and sixty-two ‘sevens.’ It will be rebuilt with streets and a trench, but in times of trouble. ²⁶ After the sixty-two ‘sevens,’ the Anointed One will be put to death and will have nothing. The people of the ruler who will come will destroy the city and the sanctuary. The end will come like a flood: War will continue until the end, and desolations have been decreed. ²⁷ He will confirm a covenant with many for one ‘seven.’ In the middle of the ‘seven’ he will put an end to sacrifice and offering. And at the temple he will set up an abomination that causes desolation, until the end that is decreed is poured out on him.

Context: Seventy times seven they didn't follow the sabbatical law. The angel Gabriel (vs. 9:24) gives them another seventy times seven years to follow the sabbatical law

Seven sevens and sixty two sevens from the issuing of the decree to restore and rebuild jerusalem until the messiah= 483 years. Convert Hebrew lunar years into solar years (1000 AD). 30 day months, 12 months, 360 days a year. Every little while (5 or 6 years) they would add an extra month in because they are losing 5-6 days a year (solar year- 365 days). 483 x 360= 173, 880 divided by 365 (solar year) 476 solar years is = 483 lunar years. We can date the decree, stated above, to the month by going to Nehemiah 2:1-8. Artaxerxes started his reign in 465 BC (Encyclopedia Britanica Vol. 1 P. 598). 'Twentieth year' (of artaxerxes reign)= 465 + 20= 445. Nehemiah says that it begins in Nissan (spring). 444 BC is the date of the decree. 444 + 476= 32 AD + 1 because calendars have no 0 year. 33 AD is when the Messiah will come to restore things (according to this principle). This is the same date Jesus Christ died on the cross according to history.

3 bc 2 bc 1 bc – 1 ad 2 ad etc. no space for a zero year.

In Daniel it says 3 and a half years is 1260 days.

Daniel is writing over 500 years before any of this happened. The date for the decree is accepted by all. Could NT authors fake its fulfillment? This is not possible. The NT never says Jesus came in 33 AD. We found the date because of a matrix of chronological data found in the gospels which all line up on that day. IE. Born under Herod, about 30 when He began ministry, when they talk about the temple being built and how it took them 46 years to build (John), Herod III. All of these have to line up and as you line them up only one year is left and that is how we date the death of Christ. To fake this, NT authors would have to know how modern scholars were going to date things.

God wrote in the bible that a man would come to restore all things in 33 A.D. Jesus Christ came and died in 33 A.D. and when he died he took the fallen nature of man with him so that we could once again be in relationship with God. All he asks is that we take this free gift from his hands, just like a child takes gifts from his parents on Christmas. God wants a relationship with you. Who can predict the future like God? Who can tell of the things to come so accurately?

Isaiah 44:6-8

God's Love

The theme of the day: God's love

Since about 9am the theme of my day has been, strikingly enough, God's Love. Why is this striking to me? For probably the past two or three months I have been in a constant struggle with belief that God is loving, or that God really cares at all. This concept to me had seemed so distant, foreign almost. I felt like the world around me was being consumed by my sinful nature. Lust was at an all time high, I had distaste for the world around me; my Christian brothers and sisters, I was supremely uncomfortable in believing that what I was doing with my life was what I was supposed to be doing. Countless nights I would spend awake just thinking about what I could do to change things. It was always based around my self-worth and work. I prayed constantly. I would ask God to show me, clearly, what it is that He wanted me to do with this cynicism. I prayed that He would show me how I could love my roommates and how I could love those I fellowship with. Did I hear an answer? To me, I heard nothing. What was I expecting? I was expecting a divine intervention, I was expecting God to stop time and stand in front of me and say "Kyle, this is what I want you to do". My mind was obsessed with this idea. I had become so dependent on thinking that God would give me this feeling of knowing what I should do with these sin areas, and really with my life as a whole. The more dependent I became on a feeling, the more distant I grew from God. It all came to a breaking point after reading the incredibly influential book Disappointment with God by Philip Yancey. What I pulled out of this book changed my life, and really my view on a real relationship with the personal Creator God. What do you expect? I felt was the theme of this book. Over and over again would the author ask What do you expect? And I would continuously find myself realizing that I expect things that I can't even give out. In fact, I expect things that, if given to me, would not change the way I thought at all. What I expected were feelings. All I wanted was to feel like I had control of myself, to feel like there was significance to my life. Rather than thinking of the truth God has set before all of us, I relied on this erroneous desire for feeling. But what does this accomplish? Does having a specific feeling towards something make it objectively true? I would argue that it does not. When we think about things such as our families, do we also think that our families give us a good feeling all the time? If you are a father (or mother) you know that your children do not always bring about a sense good feeling in your life. In fact a lot of the time children make us angry because they don't seem to listen to a word we say. Does this mean we should not take care of them? Does this mean we should stop believing that taking care of them is what we are supposed to do?We don't do things like take care of our families because it brings us a good feeling. We do it because we know that it is objectively the right thing to do. Our feelings and emotions change constantly. If all we based our actions off of revolved around feelings, we would be extremely lost, depressed, individuals. Rather than basing our mindset and actions off of feelings, we need to look at objective truth. The truth of the bible is that God loves us and nothing can separate us from that love (Romans 8:38). The truth is that God has a plan for everyone (1 Timothy 2:4, John 3:16). The truth is that God is with us wherever we go (Matthew 28:20). The truth is that the Lord has already promised to provide everything we need (Matthew 6:26-34) The Lord came to sacrifice Himself so that we could have a relationship with Him. Our purpose is to be one with God. We are here to live for Him and for His work. We are here to bring others to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). All of this cannot be done without Love. Love is not an emotion, not a feeling, but a truth. The truth is that God is love and the only reason we can love is because God first loved us. If we are connected with God, we have the capability to love others as He loved us.

Today I taught on God's love to a class of fourth and fifth graders, read 6 chapters in the book A Praying Life- Paul Miller which talked all about God's love and read a paper on the Love of God. It seems to me that the Lord is speaking. I have sinned today and I will continue to sin every day, but God knows that and God forgives that.

"Your Grace is sufficient for me. The God of forever, from everlasting to everlasting, praise be Your name."

Beings of Independence?

If God, the One who created and sustains life (Colossians 1:16-17), exists, then should we not be subject to Him? Is He not the most important thing, or being, we could ever think about? If we depend on Him for every breath we take, every step we walk, why should we not be subject to Him? Our existence, without God, is no existence at all. If God exists as a personal, loving and perfect God, which He must according to the concept of man being made in the image of God (Genesis 1:27), then He must desire a relationship with us. Does desire mean that God needs a relationship with us? Of course not. God is self-sustaining which means that God needs nothing to exist. This is best described in Exodus 3:14, 14God said to Moses, "I AM WHO I AM"; and He said, "Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, 'I AM has sent me to you.'" I AM has the direct implication that “nothing was before Me and nothing is after Me because I not only sustain myself, but I exist infinitely”. If God is perfect and can see nothing but perfection, how is it that a human, being sinful and full of evil (Genesis 3), could relate to the perfection that is God​? Surely we could do nothing to please God. There are no amount of good deeds and/or good works that could bring us close to a perfect God that has no wrong and no evil. If God has a standard of perfection, how do we think that we as humans could attain that by trying to do good things on earth? For us to come into a relationship with God must mean that God had to bring us to Himself... reconciliation (John 12:32). A completely perfect being cannot make an imperfect decision. If God chose to redeem us, then that must be a perfect, and good, decision. And God, being perfect, must also be just and punish evil. For God cannot be perfect and accept evil. God, in the form of the man Jesus Christ, reconciled all humanity to Himself. He, that is God, came to earth and lived the perfect life, the life that only God himself could live. God became fully man (Philippians 2:7) and relieved Himself of His divine power (Philippians 2:5-8) so that he could taste death for everyone (Hebrews 2:9). Not only did He taste death, but He Himself saw no decay (Acts 13:37), but rather was raised from the dead(John 20). The resurrection of Christ was the final step in God's plan of reconciliation (John 16:16-22). The man Jesus Christ was one with the Father God (John 5:18-32, 10:30). Jesus is the savior that God sent down to reconcile fallen humanity (Genesis 3) to Himself (John 14:6, Romans 10:9, Revelation 3:20, Acts 13:38-39, 1 Thessalonians 4:14, Colossians 1:13-14). Through Him, that is Christ Jesus, forgiveness of sins, the wrong things we have done that separate us from the presence of the perfect God, is proclaimed to us (Acts 13:38). We can enter the presence of God without fear by simply accepting this free gift God has offered to us. You see, He, God, desires a relationship with His creation. So much so that He came down in the form of a man, Christ Jesus, to make that relationship possible. All He asks is that we accept His forgiveness proclaimed through Christ. We just cry out to God saying Abba, Father (Romans 8:14-15) and say “Lord, I want Jesus' death on the cross to apply to my life, I know that I am a sinner and that I am separated from you God, but I want that gap bridged and I believe that the death and resurrection of Your Son Jesus Christ is the bandage that will heal this wound of separation”. Once we make this choice and proclaim it vocally to God (Romans 10:9) He will send us His Holy Spirit(John 16:5-15) as the helper(John 16:5-15) that we so desperately need. Those who choose to refrain from accepting this free gift will suffer the just punishment of the perfect God, that punishment being eternal separation from His good and perfect presence (Romans 1:18-32, Colossians 1:13) . In other words, we will be in Hell. We are not independent beings, nor were we created to be. We may want to be independent, we may say that if we do not believe in God that we are independent because God does not exist, but the truth is that you exist because God wants you to exist and because God causes you to exist. No matter which way we look at it, we are always dependent on God, whether we believe He exists or not.