By now I could have lifted my hand and struck you and your people with a plague to wipe you off the face of the earth. But I have spared you for a purpose—to show you my power and to spread my fame throughout the earth. [Exodus 9:15-16 (NLT)]
Over a period of 3,000 years, ancient Egypt’s pantheon of gods numbered between 1,400 and 2,000. During that time, some faded in prominence and new gods appeared. Often depicted as part human and part animal, Egypt’s gods had names, unique back-stories, and their own domain and expertise. Each god/goddess was responsible for a certain part of daily life, from motherhood to music, record keeping to funerals, and cosmic order to hunting. While the ten plagues God sent Egypt through Moses and Aaron may seem somewhat arbitrary to us in the 21st century, every one of them was a direct attack on one or more Egyptian god. They were the ultimate “smack-down” between God Almighty and Egypt’s deities.
When Moses struck the water of the Nile and turned it into blood for seven days, it was a direct attack on the crocodile-headed Sobeck, whose job was to be the Nile’s protector, as well as Khnum, the god of water and life, who was to guard the river’s source. The fouled river also was an affront to Osiris whose bloodstream was said to be the Nile. The plague of frogs who came up from the Nile and into people’s homes challenged the frog-headed goddess Heget who was in charge of regeneration, rebirth, and fertility. Aaron striking the dust of the earth to make gnats/fleas/lice immediately appear that covered both man and beast was a direct attack on Geb/Seb/Keb, the god of the earth and soil. The fourth plague, teems of flies or biting insects filling the air, challenged the power of Shu, the Egyptian god of air, and brought shame to any insect-headed god like Khepri whose head was that of a scarab beetle. With this affliction and the ones that followed, God distinguished between Egypt and the people of Israel. Remaining unaffected by the plagues, the people of Israel did not suffer these annoyances and hardships! While the God of Israel protected His people from the flies, Shu and Khepri couldn’t protect theirs!
The plagues intensified with the fifth plague, a deadly disease affecting cattle and livestock. The deaths of Egypt’s cattle was an insult to Apsis, the god of fertility (often represented as a bull) and the cow-headed Hathor, the goddess of love and protection. The punishment continued when ashes tossed by Moses became festering boils on both man and beast. This was the first direct strike on Egypt’s people and skin diseases and boils were seen as a sign of divine displeasure or judgment. Both Sekhmet, the goddess with power over disease, and Isis, goddess of healing, were helpless in the face of this challenge. The punishments increased with a devastating hail storm and continuous lightning, an attack on Seth/Set (god of wind and storms), Nut (goddess of the sky), and Osiris, the crop fertility god. The assault on those deities continued with the eighth plague, an east wind that blew in swarms of locusts. The false gods couldn’t prevent the locusts from consuming any vegetation that survived the hail storm.
The ninth punishment brought three days of complete darkness to the Egyptians. The most worshipped god in Egypt was the sun god Ra/Re, but both he and Kepri, the god of the dawn, were powerless in the face of Israel’s God. The final plague was death to the firstborn of both man and beast. Even Pharaoh’s son, believed to be a divine birth, died. These deaths challenged the power and authority of Isis and Osiris, the protectors of life, as well as Pharaoh, the god-king believed to be the son of Ra.
Revealing them as the powerless worthless idols they were, each of the plagues challenged, defeated, and shamed the false gods of Egypt. The God of Israel proved Himself to be the one true God—sovereign and superior in all aspects. While directed at Egypt, this message of Jehovah’s supremacy also was meant for the people of Israel as well as the rest of the world.
There is no need to go to heathen lands to find false gods. We can find them right here in our own country (and possibly in our own homes). Anything that gets between us and God is a false god and no more worthy of our devotion and worship than were Ra, Osiris, or Sekhmet. That we don’t depend on Seth to protect us from storms or bow down before statues of the bull-headed Apsis doesn’t mean we’re not guilty of idolatry! Nowadays, we worship the far more subtle false gods of the 21st century—things like wealth, power, influence, property, fame, pleasure, beauty, popularity, education, comfort, science, sex, money, and self. Never forget that our false gods will fail to serve and save us just as easily as Egypt’s false gods failed them!
What each one honors before all else, what before all things he admires and loves, this for him is God. [Origen]
We’re two weeks into the season of Lent. While we typically associate this time before Easter with giving up something, it is more than simply abstaining or fasting from some thing or things. Fasting without prayer is nothing more than a diet and abstaining from some pleasure without prayer is more like dry January than a Lenten discipline! Without prayer, fasting and abstinence are physical acts but not spiritual ones! When we give up something for Lent, we need to deliberately and intentionally seek the Lord in prayer at the same time!
In 1986, holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel said, “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.” That thought, however, has a longer history. In 1897, in George Bernard Shaw’s The Devil’s Disciple, these words were spoken: “The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that’s the essence of inhumanity.” The evil of indifference can be found as far back as 474 BC (during Judah’s exile) in the story of Esther and as recently as today’s news.
Once upon a time, a little boy was busy digging in the sand at the beach. Like other youngsters through the years, he thought he even might be able to dig all the way to China. His steadfast excavations got so deep that he encountered a large rock. With great determination, he dug and dug with his plastic shovel in an attempt to free it from the ground. Unfortunately, the little boy and his small shovel were no match for the rock. When the shovel broke in two, the boy let out a howl and burst into tears. Hearing the child’s cries, his father immediately went to comfort him. Through his sobs, the boy told how he’d tried and tried to free the rock but was too weak, his arm was too short, and he’d broken his only shovel. His father gently asked why he hadn’t used all of his strength. “But I did, Daddy, I really did!” exclaimed the boy. “No, son, you didn’t,” explained the man as he reached into the hole, grabbed the rock with his large hands, and pulled it from the ground. “You should have called me!”
Evil is anything that contradicts the nature of God and it’s easy to see Satan’s presence in malevolent acts like terrorism, genocide, slavery, torture, and human trafficking. The enemy, however, is usually far more subtle. Evil also includes things like anger, pride, fretfulness, immorality, pettiness, selfishness, deceit, envy, spite, unforgiveness, hatred, hypocrisy, envy, jealousy, greed, and unkindness. Although we’re more likely to find them in our hearts than genocide or murder, they’re not as easy to recognize. Because it’s easier to see the evil done by others than it is to face the evil in our hearts, we don’t spot Satan when he comes slithering into our lives.
When writing about nitroglycerin recently, I realized there’s something else in our lives much like this strange chemical that is both helpful and harmful. Like nitroglycerin, man’s capabilities are a dichotomy between good and evil, constructive and destructive, and beneficial or detrimental. The same mind capable of creating a vaccine that saves thousands of lives is capable of creating a nuclear bomb that can take those lives. James speaks of this incongruity when writing about the way we use our words, “We use our tongues to praise our Lord and Father, but then we curse people, whom God made like himself. Praises and curses come from the same mouth! My brothers and sisters, this should not happen.” [3:9-10]
Devotions of the Heart 