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In recent years, members of Redeemer Community Church from across north Jefferson County began praying and dreaming together about seeing a similar church planted in their community. This had already happened once before in Homewood when Grace Fellowship was planted in 2017 and they wondered whether it could happen where they lived. The more they prayed and discussed this with the leadership of these two churches, the more it became clear that God was leading them to partner together to plant Trinity Fellowship.
The long-term aim is for Trinity to be an independent church that continues to partner with the Redeemer family of churches in celebrating and declaring the gospel across the region.
When I was very young, my great-grandfather was still around.
I only have one memory of my great-grandfather, but it's a good one.
I remember going to his house and toddling to the back room where he was sitting in a
comfortable chair, and he didn't have long left.
He had an oxygen tank sat right beside him, and he had tubes coming up into his nose.
When he saw me come in the room, he drew me close because he wanted to show me something
very important.
It was the WWF.
It was the late 80s.
It was the heyday of guys like Hulk Hogan and Macho Man, Randy Savage.
You could just hear those guys talking smack to each other, and then they go and they're
delivering blows to one another.
Papa, we called him, he was struggling to draw in what would be some of his final breaths,
but when he exhaled, he would manage to shout out things like, gouge his eyes out.
I tell you what, four-year-old me was there for it.
I loved it.
That's my memory, observing this battle together with my great-grandfather.
This morning, we're going to look at a great battle, something even more raucous, if you
will.
We're going to be looking at the plagues that God brings to Egypt.
You've got this massive public contest of power.
On the one side, you've got Pharaoh, the most powerful king in all of the earth, thinks
about himself as a god, and along with him are all the so-called gods of Egypt.
On the other side, you've got Yahweh, the god of Israel, the god of the Hebrews.
God sends a message over to Pharaoh, chapter five and verse one, let my people go, that
they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.
Pharaoh answers back, and you can hear the contempt in his voice, who is the Lord that
I should obey him?
Well, God answers that question in a dramatic fashion.
Back in chapter three, he told Moses that he was going to compel Pharaoh with a mighty
hand.
He told Moses, in chapter three and verse 19, to let his people go.
Now in chapters seven to 12, he takes that mighty hand and he strikes Egypt with 10 blows,
referred to as plagues.
That word plague simply means to strike.
That's literally what's going on here.
God is striking Egypt with his mighty hand and these plagues.
But they're not just called plagues, they're also called signs.
They are symbolic messages from God.
They aren't just miracles done at random to kind of display power in a general sense.
They are a means of revelation.
God is saying some very particular things here, and they're centered on who he is.
Remember, this is all about the I am, who God is.
Throughout the account, we see that God is doing this to show who he is.
So he says to Moses back in chapter seven and verse five, he says he's doing this so
that the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt
and bring out the people of Israel from among them.
When you get to the Nile River, when it's turned to blood, it says, thus says the Lord,
by this you shall know that I am the Lord.
Behold, with the staff that is in my hand, I will strike the water that is in the Nile
and it shall turn to blood.
We can look at many other passage where this is repeated throughout the plagues.
He does this so that we may know that he is the Lord.
The plagues are answering this very important question from Pharaoh, who is the Lord that
I should obey him?
Now, Pharaoh is asking this from a place of resistance.
Nevertheless, this is a really good question.
It's a question that we should all ask.
Who is the Lord that I should obey him?
As we look at the plagues, we're going to see God as the supreme judge of all.
That can be bad news for some, but we see that it's good news for others because even
through his judgment, he's carrying out a good purpose.
We're going to see his supreme judgment in the plagues, but we're also going to see as
we look at the people, what it means to respond to him.
That's where we're going.
We're going to look at the plagues themselves and how they point to the Lord, and then we're
going to look at the people involved in these plagues and what they tell us about our own
response.
Let's look at these plagues.
There's so much that we're not going to see.
Let me encourage you to take a deep dive into these plagues because it really is remarkable
what's happening here.
But even before the plagues, we have that amazing account which puts before us God's
supremacy from the start where Aaron's staff becomes a snake, and then the staffs of the
Egyptian magicians, they all turn to snakes, but then Aaron's staff then swallows up all
of these other snakes.
If nothing else, this is a sign that shows God's supreme power over Egypt and these competing
powers that are there.
But that's not enough to cause Pharaoh to relent and let God's people go.
So what happens kind of in private now goes public.
God goes public with these, as he calls it in chapter 7 and verse 4, great acts of judgment.
So God reigns supreme, and he's bringing about these great acts of judgment.
That's what the plagues are.
So his judgment falls in these 10 plagues, and that first glance as you look through
the plagues, as you're kind of flicking through and you're seeing water being turned to blood
in chapter 7, and the frogs, and the gnats, and the flies, and the livestock dying, and
boils, and hail, and locusts.
Let's keep going.
Darkness, and then the death of the firstborn.
It might feel a bit random, but it's not random.
They are very deliberate.
I'll just give us a couple things to show how deliberate they are.
One is that these plagues deliberately expose the false gods of Egypt.
So they're not just an attack on Pharaoh or on Egypt in general.
They are an attack on their false gods.
So in an Egyptian mindset in that day, it isn't the laws of nature that are being interrupted
here.
That might be where our minds go to in the kind of modern world.
Now, in their minds, it's their gods being attacked.
It's the gods who are controlling these different elements of nature as far as they're concerned.
If you go to chapter 12 and verse 12, we're told this expressly, that these plagues were
a judgment on the gods of Egypt.
You can go throughout history and see different gods, but it's right here in the text too.
When you look in history, you see that there was a god, a land god, who protected the land
from pests.
But this land god could not guard against Yahweh as these pests come through, the locusts
and all the rest.
Yahweh reigned supreme.
Another major god that they worshiped was the sun god, Ra.
He was one of their chief deities.
When darkness then falls on the land during the ninth plague, or as the ninth plague,
the one thing that they could see, they couldn't see anything else, but they could see that
there was a god who was greater than Ra, who was the god of Israel.
You go back to the frogs.
When Pharaoh asked for the frogs to be taken away, there's something that's kind of interpretive
that's said there, what's being shown.
Moses said to Pharaoh, be it as you say, the frogs are going to be taken away, so that
you may know that there is no one like our god in all the earth.
So none of these powers that you are relying upon compare to Almighty God.
He's incomparable.
He reigns supreme.
So yeah, so they've got all these gods that they're worshiping and believing are controlling
these different domains of creation, but as they're separated out in these different domains
of creation, we're seeing in these plagues that there is a god who actually doesn't just
reign over one area of creation.
He rules over all of it.
And the supposed powers that were ruling over different aspects of it, they are subservient
to him.
In fact, I mean, they're being exposed here as being part of creation itself.
When you come to a place like the New Testament in 1 Corinthians chapter 8, verses 5 and 6,
we see that these are not gods at all.
They are so-called gods.
They are false, and they are unreliable.
But there's something else really important going on here that we may not pick up on necessarily
at first glance, and that's that the plagues are not just an attack on these gods.
These plagues are an act of what you might call decreation, decreation.
So God's acts are unmaking things.
They're an echo of Genesis 1 and 2, but a kind of a reversal of what we read about there.
If you think about Egypt here as almost like a world in miniature.
So if you go back to how Exodus opens, you've got echoes of Genesis there.
So God's people, remember they're fruitful and they're multiplying, and Pharaoh is concerned
that they are going to take dominion.
That's the language of Genesis 1.
That's the creation mandate.
And so the Pharaoh then is going to resist God's good purposes in creation.
So instead of submitting to God as the creator and ruler of all, Pharaoh resists him and
he resists his purposes.
And God answers by showing where that leads.
He shows, like, if you don't want me to be your ruler, if you don't want to be ruled
by the creator, you're going to have a taste of what a world without this ruler is like.
And so here we have these plagues.
You know, in Genesis, you've got, yes, seven days of creation, but those seven days, you
might say, well, there's not seven plagues here.
What's going on?
Well, in the seven days of creation, that happened because God speaks 10 words.
He says, and God said, and God said, and God said, it goes through that.
And the result of God saying those 10 times is things are created.
Creation happens.
But here we've got these now 10 plagues, and God is speaking through these plagues.
In creation, God ordered the world for fruitfulness and flourishing.
But in these plagues, it's as though this order is beginning to unravel and descend
into chaos, and you see it affecting all the different domains of creation.
In Genesis 1, we've got kind of three major domains of creation.
You've got the water and the land and the heavens or the skies, and then God fills each
one of these three domains with the creatures that he creates.
And here it's almost like the demolition crew is coming in.
And as we read about the plagues, we're reading about the water being affected, the land being
affected, the skies being affected, decreations happening.
When God created the world, he created it in an orderly way so that it is all working
together.
But now, no matter where you look, creation seems to be going berserk.
The very things that were sustaining life are now being removed, whether or not it's
water or the crops or the animals.
It's being removed here.
Death is on its way because these plagues are going to escalate.
You see kind of like pictures of death here, but it's all moving towards the death of the
firstborn, which we'll look at next week.
We're seeing what a world devoid of God's rule looks like, where he instead gives judgment.
And by the ninth plague, it's as though creation is being brought back to its formless state.
You know, that early part of Genesis 1, the earth was without form and void and darkness
was over the face of the deep.
And then God speaks into that darkness and he says, let there be light.
And there was light.
Well, here we have the opposite happening in that kind of penultimate plague.
God says, let there be darkness and there is darkness.
God is almost like a potter sitting at the wheel with a lump of clay.
I'm not a ceramicist.
Julia knows about these things, so I asked her about it last night.
So potters, when they're at the wheel with the clay, don't they kind of like form it
and they have to kind of break it back down, don't they?
It's true.
Like somebody like me who doesn't know what they're doing, it might look like a vase that
they're creating and that vase looks really, really good as far as I'm concerned.
But that potter knows that actually they've got an end goal and this is not it.
And they've got to break that clay down that they might build it back up again, right?
It's the potter and the clay.
So really you see this kind of thing happening here with the plagues, this decreation.
So God reigns over all of creation and he's bringing destruction here in Egypt, bringing
about this decreation, but it isn't for the sake of destruction.
He's doing this with a new creation in view.
He's bringing it down that he might bring up a good purpose through it.
But before we see that good purpose, we need to sit with the hard truths here of God's
judgments.
You see, this is showing us what life looks like when God is not at the center.
His word, when he speaks, brings life and peace and the kind of flourishing that we
were made for.
So what happens when he speaks and we refuse his word?
Well, those things begin to unravel.
What happens when we follow our own path instead of the path that he has designed for us?
The answer is, decreation.
It's our unmaking.
Our lives begin to unravel.
You see this in our relationships too.
You see this in society and even in creation itself, order moving into chaos.
We think, well, yeah, I feel that kind of unraveling.
I want to fix it.
The trouble is we can be like the Egyptians because they depend on their false gods.
Like them, we too can depend on created things and we can worship them and think these created
things are going to fix the brokenness that we feel.
We may not be relying upon raw, but we might be relying upon a bank account or a job offer
or a political party.
We could just list on and on and on the things that we rely upon.
The fact is, if we are depending upon created things to sustain us or to satisfy us or to
give meaning to our lives like the gods of Egypt, they will let us down.
They are not the creator.
They are created.
It is only our creator who can provide us with these things that we need ultimately.
When things feel like they are unraveling and we are not at peace and it doesn't feel
like we're flourishing, let's look to where the signs are pointing.
They're pointing us back to him.
The good news is that the creator who brings down in decreation also builds up in new creation.
These signs call us to look to Christ.
The fact is that God makes broken people whole.
He makes us new in Jesus.
2 Corinthians 5, 17, Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation.
Behold, all things have passed away.
Behold, all things have become new.
As new creations, God then leads us to live as people who are a new creation, people who
are living as his new creation live gladly under his supremacy, under his reign, knowing
his word is for our good.
We've seen these plagues confronting these gods, bringing about decreation, but ultimately
in God's control.
So let's see these people.
So we've got lots of different people in the plagues.
You've got the magicians, you've got Pharaoh, we've got the Egyptians, we can go on, but
we're just going to look at kind of three different people or groups of people, if you
will, for some of them.
First of all, let's look at Pharaoh and his response as he sees these plagues.
Pharaoh shows us that it's a bad idea to exalt ourselves against God, we're to humble ourselves
before him.
You see, right from the start, Pharaoh doesn't submit to God's supremacy.
No, he exalts himself over God.
When these plagues come and God shows himself to be the creator and the judge and the supreme
ruler of all, does Pharaoh change his tune?
No, he does not.
I mean, there are times when he says, like, I'm going to let the people go repeatedly.
It's like, oh, he's going to let them go now.
No, he doesn't.
And then it goes back and forth.
And one of those times he even appears to repent, but at the end, none of it sticks.
He's still at the center of his own world in his thinking.
Another interesting approach that Pharaoh takes is he tries to come to a compromise
with God.
You know, he thinks he's a ruler and this other God's a ruler and maybe we can, you
know, almost like two presidents trying to discuss, you know, come to a deal, some agreement
with each other.
And so he says, well, how about you go, but you just take the adults with you, but the
children stay here.
Another time he says, well, how about you take the people of Israel, but you leave the
livestock here, right?
It's like, meet me halfway.
But the thing is, that's unacceptable because God's supremacy isn't partial.
It is absolute.
We don't strike a deal with God.
We submit to him entirely because he reigns over all.
And in the end, Pharaoh remains defiant and he pays a price.
What Jesus said is absolutely true.
Matthew 23, 12, whoever exalts himself will be humbled.
Pharaoh's certainly humbled here.
But there's a certain kind of language that's used to describe Pharaoh's resistance and
it's that he hardens his heart.
You might have noticed that repeated several times in our passage.
But it also says, it doesn't just say Pharaoh hardened his heart, it also says God hardened
his heart.
So what are we to make of that?
Which one is it?
You can ask your home group leaders this week and they will be glad to explain all of that
to you and how it all works together.
We could spend a lot of time on this, but let's just say this for now.
They are both true statements that is put before us in such a way that we're to hold
to both of these true statements at the same time.
Pharaoh hardened his heart.
Absolutely he did.
He defied God's command and he is absolutely responsible for his actions, for hardening
his own heart.
So at a human level, that's what we see happening here.
He defies God and he's judged for that.
And yet there's another level.
At the same time, God is fulfilling his divine purposes even through hardening Pharaoh's
heart.
He could have shown mercy to Pharaoh, he could have.
He could have softened Pharaoh's heart and brought him to repentance then and there,
but he doesn't.
But we can still know that he has a greater purpose in view through the hardening of Pharaoh's
heart.
A good place to go to do further kind of study of this is Romans 9.
It speaks specifically about God's hardening of Pharaoh's heart there and he actually uses
the illustration of a potter and clay and applies that to humanity.
And he's essentially making this point is that God is totally sovereign and free to
deal with humanity as he chooses.
And he does that with this ultimate purpose in view, that his glory might be made known.
So we are totally responsible for our actions and God is absolutely sovereign.
We don't have to know all the ins and outs of why God does this here, but we can know
that it's part of his good purpose.
What is that good purpose?
Look with me at Exodus chapter 9 and verse 16.
God is something good in mind.
There's the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, but this is with the good of so many more
in view.
He says, for this purpose, I have raised you up to show you my power so that my name may
be proclaimed in all the earth.
So God is doing this so that his name might ultimately be known in all the earth.
So the hardening of Pharaoh's heart here and Pharaoh's resistance is so, is part of God's
ultimate plan to bring salvation to the whole world.
Another example of this in scripture is Judas.
Can you think of a worse thing to do than to betray Jesus in the way that he betrayed
him?
Judas is absolutely wrong in what he does.
He's absolutely accountable for what he does and at the same time, Jesus' death became
about as a result, was part of God's good plan that he was bringing about for the salvation
of the whole world.
Yes, Judas' disobedience was part of that and yet God was sovereignly bringing about
his good purpose, but in Pharaoh, we ultimately see someone who is given over to self-rule
and unwilling to submit to God.
This is a call to humble ourselves before God's mighty hand as the sovereign ruler
of all and to be confident that the Lord is accomplishing his good purposes even when
things are going wrong in the world.
Let's not just look at Pharaoh though.
Let's look at Israel.
So when God's judgment falls on Egypt, what happens with his people, with the Israelites?
They're kept safe.
There is a distinction made between them and Egypt and that's a word that's used repeatedly.
You see that in chapter eight specifically.
When the flies arrive in Egypt, you get this plague of flies.
There's a place that the flies don't go to and they're absolutely everywhere, but all
of a sudden you get to this area called Goshen where the Israelites were living and the flies
are not there.
So God has made a separation, a distinction between those who belong to him and those
who do not.
Chapter nine, the livestock began to die, but the livestock of the Israelites were fine
and so on.
So God's people were in Egypt and yet they were not part of Egypt.
They were living under the supreme reign of another king and the same is true of the church
today.
It's been said many times over and it's true.
We are in the world, but we are not of the world.
The Lord separates his own from the world and to himself.
There are those who want to claim Christ, sure, but also just blend in with the world
and go with whatever the current trend is, regardless of what God's word says.
And we happen to live in a cultural moment where it's still okay to call yourself a Christian
even if you're no different to the world.
But here we see there is a clear distinction between those who belong to the Lord and those
who belong to the world.
We are a distinct people who bear the name of Christ and oh, that's a good thing because
Romans 8.1 for one, there is now therefore no condemnation to those who are in Christ
Jesus.
At the end of the day, as it says in 1 John, the world is passing away and all its lusts
thereof, but those who do the will of God abide forever.
You see, in Christ we are kept safe.
We live forever.
Jesus prayed this for his disciples in his day, but also those disciples that would come,
namely us, John 17.15.
He prayed to his father, I do not pray that you would take them out of the world, but
that you would keep them from the evil one.
They are not of the world, even as I am not of the world.
So he's praying that we would be kept from the evil one in the world, so we'd be kept
safe in Christ.
And yet he says, I'm not praying that they would be taken out of the world.
Just like God's people are present in Egypt, we are still present in the world.
Why are we still present in the world, even though we're distinct from the world?
It's because God has put his name on us, so that others might come to know his name as
well.
So although we are a distinct people, we're not just going to run off into some enclave,
we're to be a distinct people so that Christ might be made known through us to the world
around us.
So you see that what is happening here is for, yes, as it said in chapter 9 and verse
16, it is for all the earth.
So God judges Pharaoh and saves his people so that his name might be proclaimed among
all the nations.
And you see this already, so during the seventh plague of Hale, you notice some Egyptians
start to break rank, and they bring their property indoors so that they're not struck
by hail.
In the end, when the Israelites leave Egypt, they leave with, chapter 12 and verse 38,
they leave with a mixed multitude.
So we're not told about other nations living in Egypt, so this mixed multitude.
So as the Israelites are saved and they're coming out of Egypt, it's not just Israelites,
there's people from other nations.
So we don't have the names of those other nations, but we are told about the Egyptians.
So we can presume pretty safely that that number of people going out of Egypt included
some Egyptians as well as the Israelites, because this isn't about one ethnic people.
This is about the new humanity that God is creating that is ultimately going to be created
in Christ Jesus.
It's interesting that that includes the Egyptians as well.
In Isaiah 29 verse 21, we read that God has a plan for the people of Egypt.
The Lord will make himself known to Egypt.
And on that day, Egypt will acknowledge the Lord.
They will worship with sacrifices and offerings.
They will make vows to the Lord and fulfill them.
So God's aim in the Exodus is that he and his salvation would be known in all the earth,
even amongst the Egyptians.
Fascinatingly, one of the places that the early church grew was in North Africa, including
Egypt as well.
But if this is happening here so that all the earth might know that, well, that's also
including us sat here this morning.
So this is happening so that we might know the name of the Lord.
And in knowing the name of the Lord, we see that we're called to make him known to others
as well.
So where do we come to know the name of the Lord?
Well, ultimately, we come to know him in Jesus.
Jesus is utterly unique.
There is no one like him.
He is supreme.
He is the ultimate declaration of who God is.
You see, in Jesus, this is the Lord himself, the Lord we're reading about him, him coming
to set us free from sin and its tyranny in our lives.
And he came preaching good news, but he also performed signs that attested to the truth
of who he was and what he came to do.
So this is why you see Jesus, yes, preaching, but you also see Jesus' miracles here.
It's an echo of the Exodus showing this new Exodus that he came to bring.
So Jesus is the supreme judge, and yet when the judge came, he came not to bring down
judgment but to bring salvation.
And like the plagues, that salvation came about through judgment.
When Jesus came, he didn't come bringing judgment, no, he came to bear our judgment.
He did that on the cross.
I love the way Tim Keller once put it.
He said, our maker came to be unmade so that he could remake you and me.
Amazing.
Where did that happen?
Well in Matthew chapter 27 and verse 45, we see that it happened in darkness on the cross.
Remember that ninth plague?
There were three days of darkness as God's judgment fell upon Egypt.
And in Matthew 27, we see that on the cross, as Jesus hung there, there were three hours
of darkness.
There on the cross, the plagues that we deserved fell upon him instead, and he received the
judgment that we were due, and he died in our place.
And so from the cross, salvation then comes through that judgment.
But three days later, after his body being in a dark tomb, he rose again.
New creation springs up.
We have new life in him when we receive him as our creator, our savior, and our king.