Lord Over All

In Exodus chapter seven, verses one through five, God has told Moses that he would do three things.

He would bring the Israelites out of Egypt, he would do it by great judgments,

and he would do it in a way that the Israelites, or excuse me, the Egyptians, would know that he is God.

And he used the phrase that I am the Lord. And so we refer back to what he said

when he was talking to Moses, and Moses asked, who shall I say sent me?

He said, tell them that I am who I am.

And so we look at that name, that Yahweh name, and we understand that to the Egyptians,

they don't understand who this person would be, who this God would be.

If you look at anything in Scripture or in history, and you know the situations,

and you can do the study on Google yourself.

The Egyptians had hundreds of gods that they would worship, but not the one true God. In fact, as we look at this,

we're going to be looking at it, we'll see that they believed that the God on

earth was their Pharaoh. Pharaoh meant son of Ra, the god. And so they believed that Pharaoh was their god on earth, and he was representing all of

the other gods in history. So Exodus chapter 7 verses 1 through 5 says this,

Exodus 7:1–5

Then the Lord said to Moses, See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh,

and your brother Aaron will be your prophet.

You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh,

to let the Israelites go out of his country.

But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in Egypt,

He will not listen to you.

Then I will lay my hand on Egypt, and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my divisions,

my people, the Israelites. And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand,

against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it." In Exodus 12, verse 12, God adds that he was doing

Exodus 12:12

something else very important. Against all the gods of Egypt, he said, I will execute my judgment.

So the judgments God would carry out would be on a certain level against the

Egyptian gods. God's plagues, these things, these judgments that he was going to be

doing, was going to be against the Egyptian gods, pointing out that they really aren't anything. In doing this, he would teach a lesson to both the

Egyptians and the Israelites, who by now had been in Egypt for a number of generations, and we see that Scripture tells us when they did finally

leave Egypt, the day that they left Egypt, it was 430 years from when Jacob and his

family entered Egypt. So 430 years they have been in this land of Egypt, and they drifted far away from the following of their

forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who followed God. Numerous times throughout.

Scripture, God said that he would do what he did so that the world may know that I

am the Lord. The first commandment says this, you shall have no other gods before

me, meaning no other gods except me. Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and

the life. No one comes to the Father, to the one true God, except through me."

Egyptian culture, as I said, was very idolatrous, with multitudes of gods and goddesses.

Many of those were assumed to take the form of animals, so that Egyptians considered bulls,

cows, rams, cats, crocodiles, cobras, frogs, and various insects and birds were sacred.

Now you understand at the very beginning of time, when man came upon this earth, there

became a point where we began to... there was a division of worship. Everybody's

inclined to worship at some point in time. You're created for that. In fact, we're.

Created to serve and worship God, okay? But from the very beginning, after man sinned and left the garden, we see that the division of worship was you

either worshiped the Creator or you worshiped created things. So whenever something happened that they couldn't explain, they found another god, like a,

roach. I don't know if that was a god or not. But there was some other god that

they developed, and so in the Egyptian culture there were hundreds and hundreds

of these gods, and each of the plagues that God sent was a direct challenge to

one or more of the gods and goddesses of Egypt.

And while the Egyptians would have seen such things as locusts and biting insects before,

what made these plagues unique is that God divinely intensified these plagues,

and brought them on the Egyptians at a time of his choosing.

They came exactly when God, through Moses, said they would happen to show that God was the one behind them all.

In fact, there are many theologians and many, many teachers that say the plagues

were just a natural occurrence of things.

Well, if that's the case, which maybe it is, maybe it's not, I don't believe so,

but if that's the case, isn't it miraculous that God told Moses when they were gonna happen

before they happened?

You know, it's pretty profound when Moses went to Pharaoh and all these things and basically

said, this is what's going to happen.

Tomorrow, you're going to wake up with frogs in your ovens.

I don't know if he said that, but that's what happened. So let's begin with the—we're going to be looking at what happened in some of these

things.

We're actually going to be beginning before the first plague with the changing of the

shepherd's rod into serpents.

Let's look at what these are. First off, we see that the Egyptian god, the serpent

god, was Wadjet, and Egyptian goddesses were creator deities. And the,

protectors of the Pharaohs in the form of the Cobra, Vulture, or Lioness, the two protectors of the realm of Egypt, were originally Nekbet, a,

vulture goddess, and Wadjet, a cobra goddess of Lower Egypt. The fact,

that Yahweh turned the rod into a cobra suggests that he is the one who holds

true sovereignty over the God from whom they sought protection. So what God is

saying is, if you think you're getting protection from this serpent God, watch

this. I have control even over your serpents. This emphasized by the fact

that Yahweh's serpent even swallowed up the serpent of the magicians. You know,

the magicians that were able to produce, throw their rods down, and so they

became cobras, but then Moses's rod or Aaron's rod that had become a Serpent when and ate all the others.

God says, I have supreme power over all of your gods. Now, as we're going through these, think of one thing.

The Egyptians, and the Pharaoh especially, placed all of their belief, everything, all of their belief on all of these gods.

If anything happened at all, it was because they sacrificed or they worshiped.

These gods. They did something to please these gods, or to excite them to do something for them, whether it be fertility of the land or whatever it is.

This was their everything. Their gods were their everything. And Pharaoh, as I said,

was the ruler over all of them. So then we see the first plague. The first plague was

waters turned into blood. Now this is referring to a couple Egyptian gods. It was directed against

the Nile River, which was the life and the heart of Egypt.

Egypt was a desert country, and its economy and livelihood depended on the Nile.

Its crops were irrigated by the Nile, and its fields depended on the fertile soil that

were washed in by the river when it was at flood stage.

We've seen flood stages around here where water from a river goes into a field and deposits

nice rich soil in those fields that acts as fertilizer for those.

What this did. So what happened to this lifeblood of the nation? Well, while this

plague was primarily directed against the Nile River, it went beyond that. All

other water sources were affected, including irrigation streams and pools,

and even water stored in pitchers and buckets in their homes. It turned to blood. Terrible disaster. Can you imagine waking up in the morning and going to

your commode to wash your face and reaching into the bowl to put water on your face to wash your face and it's blood.

Can you imagine pouring a pitcher into a glass to drink some water and it's blood?

The whole lifeblood of the country was poisoned and undrinkable.

It was a complete disaster the Egyptian supply of water Was now a toxic mess,

The fish one of the major food services were all wiped out they all died and laid belly up on the shore. So how was this

judgment against the Egyptian gods? Because the Nile was so important to the

Egyptians, they worshiped several gods who were responsible for watching over it.

The great god Khnum, usually represented as a human male with a ram's head, you

see that on the left side of the screen up there, he was responsible for tons of

fresh soil that would fertilize the land. He was also honored as a god of the

fishes, the, is that plural? Fishes? Is that plural or is it fish? Just fish. Okay.

Birdus? Birds? No. And marshes, which is why he was often depicted with marsh

plants on his head. You can see there on that head is some marsh plants on there.

One of Egypt's Trinity of Greatness, greatest gods, was also Osiris. But then,

we look at the also there is a god, the god of Hopi, which is also a god of

fertility in the land, and he was one that was directly over the Nile River,

and basically responsible for all of its its coming and going. So here's an less than this.

While God is in the business of defeating all of the idols and gods of this world,

which we oftentimes have, you know, we've said the root of all sin is self, and if we, you know,

sometimes economics is a god to us. Our job is a god to us, isn't it?

We think we can do all things through these things, and God is in the business of trying to

show that He is the God over all of these things.

So He's a God of judgment and justice, and we see an important lesson here that God is delaying this effect. He didn't kill everything in the rivers

immediately, but it took like three or four days where the water was turned

into blood and nobody could drink or eat anything. Now, if you've ever gone for

even a day without water, you know how thirsty you get. They even dug in the

sands to try to find clean water and couldn't find it. It was all blood. So

then the second plague is the frogs. It was described in the first part of Exodus chapter 8. A large number of frogs would not have been unusual because the

Exodus 8 · chapter mention

Nile had plenty of marshes, especially when the waters backed up and left

little pools. It was a perfect natural breeding ground for frogs, but this.

Plague was different. The frogs were considered a manifestation of the goddess Hecate, who is depicted there,

goddess of birth and wife of the creator of the world.

Hecate was depicted with a head of a frog and the body of a woman.

The frogs were viewed as sacred in Egypt because they lived in two worlds.

They lived in water and in land.

And they were so sacred, considered so sacred, that anybody accidentally stepping on one of them

could be punished by death.

Don't step on that frog. It's holy. Give me a break.

Notice two ironies here. This goddess is supposed to be the goddess who controls birth, but in this plague, literally

millions and millions of frogs were overflowing the land to where the birth rate was out of

control to where they were flooding everything, covering everything in their houses, in their,

beds, in their ovens.

Had frog bread.

And accidentally killing one by stepping on it was punishable by death.

The Egyptians literally could not walk anywhere without fear of stepping on a frog and squashing.

It.

But in so doing, they were violating their own laws and sending themselves to death.

Finally, the people had to go out and gather them into large mounds of decaying, stinking frogs.

Can you imagine what this place is like after the second plague?

You've got the river Nile had turned into blood.

All the fish had died and were belly up on the shore, rotting and stinking.

Now, frogs had covered the land, and it's rotting and stinking. Yeah, I would cough too.

So much for a sacred animal. Here God shows that he's even more powerful than a frog.

Sounds kind of funny, doesn't it? Who would even think that God's not more powerful than

a frog? But in their days, that was one of those gods that meant a lot to them.

The third plague was lice. Found in Exodus 8, verses 16-17, this plague was most likely

Exodus 8:16–17

directed at Geb, the god of the earth, or the god of the dust of the earth. What does

Scripture say that was the covenant with Abraham? I will make your seed as numerous as the dust of the earth, the sand of the seashores, the stars of the

heaven. What did God create man out of? The dust of the earth. So this belief

that Geb was over the dust of the earth believed that this God, Geb, was in

charge of creating everything. So what did God do? He turned the dust and gnats

into lice, and all of this dust of the earth became lice that

infested the people with lice. It's interesting, too, how this affected the

priests of the gods of Egypt. These gods, these priests of the gods of Egypt, who

were supposed to be in charge of all of this. In fact, they probably had priests

for each of the gods to honor and worship each god and make sure they sacrificed and make sure they pleased each god. These priests had to.

Perform many cleansing rituals throughout the day to make sure that they were pure and clean for their services as the priest. And can you

Can you imagine when they became infected with lice and could not get rid of them?

They couldn't worship. They couldn't please their gods. So God has even taken

control of their worship and their overhead. Fourth plague, swarms. On the

surface the next plague sounds a lot like a plague of lice. The phrase of flies that we see in the scripture here was added by later translators and isn't

in the original Hebrew. The original Hebrew simply says the word for swarms

or buzzing flying insects. Likely scenario based on this is they had

swarms which they looked at, they worshipped many different types of insects as well, and the one god that this was aimed at the most was Amun-Re,

Amun-Ra. This was the creator god, the god of the sun, one who controlled the sun.

The skies, the light, the wind, everything else, and when it says that the winds swept all these swarms in from the sea and covered the land, there was, they

couldn't even see the sky because the swarms were so thick. So God did that one

to defeat their god of the sky. Fifth plague, disease on livestock. Now, if you

have blood that's killing the fish, the frogs are dying in stinking heavens, the.

Lice have infested you, and you see then that some of these things get on the

animals and the livestock, and it says a plague came against the animals and the livestock.

This plague created an enormous economic disaster for the Egyptians. It affected their food,

their transportation, their military capability, their farming capacity, their economic goods

that were produced by these livestock. Everything they had and depended on was by these livestock.

India we see that that cows are a sacred animal. In fact in India to the Hindus

cows are the highest of life form. When you are reincarnated over and

over, the last step of reincarnation to the Hindu is to become a cow.

In America, if you call somebody a cow, it's not a nice thing.

Anyway, so the fifth plague is disease on the livestock. The creation god Ptah was represented by a living bull,

one of Egypt's greatest mother goddesses, with Hathor depicted as a cow-headed goddess.

Now this is, you know, this sounds like fun. This sounds like hilarious, right?

Do you want a goddess that has a cow head?

You know, sometimes I know God has a humor, sense of humor, because he's making

these things look to be absolutely ridiculous like they are, these gods. And,

it's all an attack on the Egyptians' gods and their belief system, going back to or

up to the belief in Pharaoh as the Son of God, God on earth. The sixth plague was

Boels. Boels came over all of the creatures, the goddess for that is Sekhmet.

She was believed to control the healing of people, and bringing about healing, and also medicines as well, overseeing medicines,

even to the point that they would sacrifice human lives, human beings, to these goddesses,

and then take their ashes after they'd been burned on the altar and spread them

in the air so the ashes would fall on people and heal them of diseases.

So what did God do?

Scattered the ashes from the furnaces and caused boils to come on the people.

God was refuting that God as well. Our God, Big G, was refuting Little G.

Seventh plague was Hale, Egyptian goddess Nut.

This would have been very unusual as this land very rarely had rain, let alone storms like Hale.

The gods, which gods did this expose? Since God originated in the sky,

the most prominent one was the sky goddess Nut.

In fact, she's depicted here as arching over the earth and everything in it.

The goddess was depicted as that.

But she wasn't the only Egyptian god discredited by this plague.

There was also Shu, the god of the air.

In bearer of heaven, there was Horus, the hawk-headed third member of the Egyptian trinity.

There was Seth, the god of storms. There was Nippur, the god of grain crops, or Osiris,

who was the ruler of life and vegetation. So all of these, God was attacking all of

these little gods of Egyptian lore and showing that they're basically ineffective. The Eight

Plagues, the Eight Plague is locusts. This was in direct conflict or direct opposition.

Defeat of the Egyptian god Nephri. Nephri was known as the god of the grain, and so when the locusts came on the plants and ate up what was left of

the grain that had not been beaten down by the hail, and not had been destroyed like the cattle, the Egyptians had nothing to live on.

Ninth plague was darkness. This again was in direct conflict to Amun-Ra, the Sun God,

the God that supposedly kept control of everything, and you see the darkness if,

you read, and I would urge you to read through these things, it's just amazing,

to think that all of this that happened, especially this one, think of this, the

darkness was so thick they couldn't see each other in their rooms. If you had a

candle, no light would emanate from that candle. It was complete darkness. I don't

know if you've ever been in a completely dark room with absolutely no light on.

You don't even have your cell phone on to give a light. If you're in an absolute

dark room, and you don't know what's there, what do you do?

You do not move. You're afraid, who's there that's going to get me, the boogeyman?

Or what am I going to trip over? Or I know my wife just moved the couch.

Or something like that. There's complete darkness and there was absolute fear,

and in this darkness, Amon-Ra was silent. Nothing could be seen anywhere.

So those are the first nine plagues, first nine plagues. But the last one was

the one that was supreme over all of it. In the first nine plagues, God is

challenging all of the little gods of all of this. He's defeating what the Egyptians were worshiping. They had all of their thought and

all of their... everything about life was dependent on these hundreds of gods. But in the 10th plague, God strikes down the firstborn male of

every household, and all of the livestock, all the animals, the oxen, the donkeys, everything. The firstborn male was stricken dead. So the Egyptian

goddess Isis is the god of life, the god of fertility, the god of birth. This

was probably a challenge to that, but I think even more than that, this was a

challenge to Pharaoh. Pharaoh, as I said, was the son of God, supposedly the son of

Ra. He was the god on earth, and so when Pharaoh died, who would become the new

Pharaoh, his firstborn son.

So when God strikes the firstborn male of every household, including Pharaoh's

household, what God says to Pharaoh is, okay, you think you're God, watch this, you

have nobody to follow you now. There is no other God to come except me. So God is

is working on all this, and the thing that what he is wanting to teach us and

all of them through this is that so that the world may know that I am God. God is

in all of these plagues, God is doing a direct conflict or direct competition

and direct defeat of his people. And now finally all of the gods of Egypt have,

been silenced, even the Pharaoh has been silenced, and with this plague the Pharaoh

finally relents and lets the Israelites go. This forced Pharaoh to act against

his own will, and it would demonstrate God's overthrow of his sovereignty and of

the gods who represented him. But all of these false gods were judged and proven

powerless, but yet there's one problem with all of this. Even after all of that...

After Pharaoh said, okay, you can go into the wilderness, what does Pharaoh do?

After they've gone out, oh man, I just lost my entire workforce.

Let's go get them, guys. So Pharaoh starts going out after him, and then we come to the final

judgment of Pharaoh. The death of the firstborn was the last plague, but it was not the final

judgment. One major god remained to be judged, and that was Pharaoh himself, God himself,

their God, their Creator God, their Son of God, their God on earth.

And so continue to the story, the Israelites have left Egypt, Pharaoh once again changes his mind, he sets out with 600,

of the best chariots plus all of the other chariots of Egypt, possibly several thousands in all, chasing after the

Israelites,

to return them to slavery. They were cornered at the sea,

But God delayed them by a pillar of fire, at nine a cloud by day, and while during the

night they escaped through the Red Sea on dry ground when God parted the waters."

Remember that story, right?

You know, it's interesting that people say that, well, that's really, and in fact if

you go over there now in the Red Sea, in the middle of the Red Sea, there's actually a

land bridge that goes under the water.

Can see it, and the waters would have parted on both sides, we don't know, of

mighty winds. Of course the scripture says, mighty wind. But in that land bridge,

underneath the Red Sea are hundreds of chariots' wheels and pieces of chariots. Interesting. From that time, from that period. But there are

people that say, well, he really didn't go across the Red Sea, they went across the

Sea of Reeds, which was the northern part, which was very shallow, and there were

times of the year as only a few inches deep. So they would walk through the Sea

of Reeds in just a few inches of water. Well, that's amazing if you want to tell

the story that way, but I want to tell you another miracle. If, in fact, they did

go through the Sea of Reeds in three inches of water, two to three inches of

water. How did all of Pharaoh's armies drown in three inches of water?

So you can tell me all your stories, people can tell you all your stories about what they believe it really was,

but to me that's as much a miracle as anything.

Pharaohs were literally considered gods, sons of the divine incarnation of God.

Their greatest responsibility was to keep everything in order,

including the hundreds of gods and goddesses of them.

So when God defeated Pharaoh, who thought he was God, it was complete judgment.

So what do the lessons have for us? First of all, we must realize that God takes sin very seriously. The severity of the plagues in Egypt

shows how seriously God took their sins. Yet it's not just the sins of the Egyptian that God abhors, He hates any sin. We must never minimize the sin in

our lives. Any sin is failure, any sin is serious, and if we don't repent it,

it brings eternal death. Second, God is patient, giving us time to repent,

but His patience has limits. It's long-suffering, but it's not

going to last forever. And He gives warnings after warnings, as He did repeatedly with the Egyptians over and over and over. In fact, the first three,

plagues struck the Israelites as well as Egypt, but after the first three plagues.

They were all against Egyptians. And what follows then is God's fearsome judgment.

Three, many people turn to God in a time of calamity, but when things get better, they almost immediately turn away. Doesn't that sound familiar?

Isn't that the way of our life? 9-11. Why would God let this happen? I mean, the

churches were crowded for two weeks after 9-11, but then things got a little bit quiet.

Number four, God is trying to get our attention. Question is, are we listening?

Remember that the Israelites were victims of the first three plagues along with the Egyptians.

God had to shake them up and get their attention back to Him.

You know, the last one, He got their attention to Him, He created the Passover,

where He had them put blood on the doorposts and the lintel of their house,

and the angel of death would pass over their houses if they saw the sign of the blood.

Was that the blood of the firstborn?

Or signifying the blood of Christ who was the firstborn of God?

Number five, God requires obedience, not just belief.

How were the Israelites spared from the death of the firstborn?

They had to act. They had to do exactly what God told them. And if we don't do what God tells us,

What do we understand? We understand that that's a sin.

Number six question is, what are your gods?

A false god is anything that comes between you and the one true God.

What are the idols that stand between you and your God? Your job? Hobbies?

Sports? entertainment.

Gods of convenience, gods of comfort,

and seven, our all-powerful God is in complete control. Even after all this, we understand,

pure and simply, God is in complete control. We see it throughout the plagues.

He directed everything, He caused everything, He told Moses when they were going to happen so Moses could

even tell,

the Pharaoh, and we could take great comfort and hope in that, that God is in

control. Here's what I want to leave with you. God is God and we're not. Isn't that

great? And why is God God and we're not? Why does God do all this? Why did he do

all this with the Egyptians? Keep this in mind. God did it so that the world may

know that I am God, that He is God.

That's our lesson for us.

All that God is doing in and through us, even what's happening in Israel right now,

telling you God is in control, and God wants us to know that He's still God.

Let's pray. Heavenly Father, as we close this time, we've been kind of a history lesson, Father,

and yet we understand that it's more than a history lesson it's understanding of the fact that you came, and in these plagues you,

defeated all of the other gods of history just to prove to us and to the Egyptians and to the Israelites that you are the only God. We have so many things

that stand in our way on every day, we have so many things that take our attention away from you, but yet you are the only God, and so Father we pray that

would help us to keep our attention on You and only You. In Jesus' name, amen.