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Exodus 7:11-23; 10:21-29
11 Then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers, and they, the magicians of Egypt, also did the same by their secret arts. 12 For each man cast down his staff, and they became serpents. But Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. 13 Still Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them, as the LORD had said.
14 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is hardened; he refuses to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is going out to the water. Stand on the bank of the Nile to meet him, and take in your hand the staff that turned into a serpent. 16 And you shall say to him, ‘The LORD, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you, saying, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness.” But so far, you have not obeyed. 17 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 into blood. 18 The fish in the Nile shall die, and the Nile will stink, and the Egyptians will grow weary of drinking water from the Nile.”’” 19 And the LORD said to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, their canals, and their ponds, and all their pools of water, so that they may become blood, and there shall be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.’”
20 Moses and Aaron did as the LORD commanded. In the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants he lifted up the staff and struck the water in the Nile, and all the water in the Nile turned into blood. 21 And the fish in the Nile died, and the Nile stank, so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile. There was blood throughout all the land of Egypt. 22 But the magicians of Egypt did the same by their secret arts. So Pharaoh’s heart remained hardened, and he would not listen to them, as the LORD had said. 23 Pharaoh turned and went into his house, and he did not take even this to heart.
(ESV)
21 Then the LORD said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness to be felt.” 22 So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt three days. 23 They did not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for three days, but all the people of Israel had light where they lived. 24 Then Pharaoh called Moses and said, “Go, serve the LORD; your little ones also may go with you; only let your flocks and your herds remain behind.” 25 But Moses said, “You must also let us have sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice to the LORD our God. 26 Our livestock also must go with us; not a hoof shall be left behind, for we must take of them to serve the LORD our God, and we do not know with what we must serve the LORD until we arrive there.” 27 But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let them go. 28 Then Pharaoh said to him, “Get away from me; take care never to see my face again, for on the day you see my face you shall die.” 29 Moses said, “As you say! I will not see your face again.”
(ESV)
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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 into blood. The fish in the Nile shall die and the Nile will stink, and the Egyptians will grow weary of drinking water from the Nile. And the Lord said to Moses, say to Aaron, take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over the rivers, the canals, and their ponds, and all their pools of water so that they may become blood. And there shall be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, even in the vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.
Speaker 1:Moses and Aaron did as the lord commanded. In the sight of pharaoh and in the sight of the servants, he lifted up the staff and struck the water in the Nile, and all the water in the Nile turned into blood. And the fish of the Nile died and the Nile stank, so the Egyptians could not drink from the run from the Nile. There was blood throughout all the land of Egypt, but the magicians of Egypt did the same by their secret arts. So pharaoh's heart remained hardened and he would not listen to them as the Lord had said.
Speaker 1:Pharaoh turned and went into his house, and he did not take even this to heart.
Speaker 2:Exodus 1021 to 29. Then the Lord said to Moses, stretch out your hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness to be felt. So Moses stretched out his hand toward heaven, and there was pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt 3 days. They did not see one another, nor did anyone rise from his place for 3 days, but all the people of Israel had light where they lived. Then Pharaoh called Moses and said, go, serve the lord.
Speaker 2:Your little ones also may go with you. Only let your flocks and your herd remain behind. But Moses said, you must also let us have sacrifices and burnt offerings, that we may sacrifice to the lord our god. Our livestock also must go with us. Not a hoof shall be left behind, for we must take of them to serve the Lord our God, and we do not know with what we must serve the Lord until we arrive there.
Speaker 2:But the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, and he would not let them go. Then Pharaoh said to him, Get away from me. Take care never to see my face again, for on the day you see my face, you shall die. Moses said, as you say, I will not see your face again. This is the word of the Lord.
Joel Brooks:If you would pray with me. Lord, we thank you for your word. We pray that we would be humbled by it. It would be humble before you so as to receive it and obey it. And father through your spirit, I ask that you'd write these things on our heart.
Joel Brooks:Lord, nobody came here tonight to, hear me. We want to hear from you. So I pray that my words would fall to the ground and blow away and not be remembered anymore. But, Lord, may your words remain, and may they change us. We pray this in the strong name of Jesus.
Joel Brooks:Amen. I have had a lot of terrible jobs over the course of my life. This not being one of them. I once spent a summer freezing my tail off, going around and installing alarm systems inside school freezers. And so I would just spend my entire day actually inside of a freezer trying to get my fingers to work.
Joel Brooks:I went the other route, a couple of other summers, and I sat at a desk looking through a giant magnifying glass, putting on microchips, soldering them on into phones 8 hours a day, just soldering. One of my jobs I got, it sounds pretty cool at first, somebody said they'd pay me a $100 for every beaver I would kill. And I thought this is a change of pace, I'll do this one. And I would spend hours upon hours in these mosquito infested kind of swamps, and I never once killed a beaver. When I look at all the jobs I've had over the years, really, I've had a lot of bad ones, but they are all cakewalks compared to what the typical Hebrew slave had to endure.
Joel Brooks:The the job that we see the Hebrew slaves doing in Exodus is building bricks. They make lots and lots of bricks. I read that pharaohs pyramids, one of them would typically take about 24,500,000 bricks. And that the average that a, a Hebrew slave could make in a day is about 3,000 bricks a day. That's horrible work.
Joel Brooks:And that's oppression, it's slavery. And the people of God as they were doing this, they're crying We We saw the the Lord Yahweh. He appeared to Moses, and he told Moses his name that he is the I am. He is Yahweh, and that he was going to deliver his people from oppression. And so he sends Moses to the people and he he tells these oppressed people the words of God, and they get all excited about it.
Joel Brooks:They believe, and they're ready to be free. This is what they've been crying out for years about, and they finally realized God has heard our cries of deliverance, and he is coming to rescue. But but then things shift. Salvation doesn't look like they thought it would. Pharaoh responds to Moses's command in chapter 4 by saying, well, apparently the people are lazy.
Joel Brooks:They have too much time on their hands, and so he makes life for them more miserable. He takes away the straw that they need to make bricks, Yet he says, you still have to make the same number of bricks, and so you you have each slave making about 3,000 bricks a day without being given the ingredients. And so they're in this miserable state now, worse than it was before, and so they immediately grumble, but they don't get mad at pharaoh. They get mad at Moses. They get mad at Yahweh.
Joel Brooks:Now you you promised us deliverance and look what we got. Look look at this guy we trusted in you. You know, we're just saying, I called and you answered, and you came to my rescue. They're like, I called and you answered, and you made my life horrible. Absolutely horrible.
Joel Brooks:Even Moses responds this way in chapter 522, he blames God, and he says, why have you done this evil to the people? Now if the Hebrew slavery that we are reading about is a picture of our slavery to send and what we learn here, the very start is sin does not so easily let us go, Sin doesn't. As a matter of fact, when God begins to free us from our sins, it might be one of the most painful things we endure. And we can even begin pointing at god saying, I thought you said you were gonna free me from this. I thought I was gonna have more joy in my life and things are getting worse.
Joel Brooks:And so as a result, trusting God for deliverance can become even harder after we place initial trust in him. Now remember, the reason that we are going through the book of Exodus is because it's here that we receive the vocabulary we need to understand our Christian faith. It's here that we receive the words like like redemption, salvation, words like slavery. And it's here when we read these things about freedom and salvation, we begin to realize, wait a second, salvation doesn't look like what I first thought it should look like. And we find ourselves in a place where it's hard to trust God when our circumstances begin getting harder and harder and harder for us to believe that he really will save.
Joel Brooks:Well, God does respond to these increased groanings of the people, and he responds by sending the plagues. The plagues are god's response to a people who are in bondage saying, god, our situation is worse because of you. God, you're now the cause of evil happening to us, and god's response to them is the plagues. And what he says to them is, you you you wanna know what life is like for those who don't trust me? I'll show you.
Joel Brooks:And so that leads us into one of the most famous narratives in the Bible. As you know, there are 10 plagues. We're only gonna look at really the first nine, we'll look at the 10th next week. We didn't get to read through everything because it would take a whole lot of time for us to do so, but it's some of the most action packed chapters in all of the Bible, the plays. They're sensational.
Joel Brooks:You you read things like Moses striking the Nile and the Nile turning to blood, or he he strikes the ground and the and the dust in the ground, it it begins to move and it turns into gnats. One of my favorites is when Moses, he he scoops up soot from the ground and he throws it into the air, and the wind catches it and and goes to towards the people, and it turns it into boils on the people. I mean, it's it's really action packed cool stuff. I I can't when you're reading it, it's like, this is kinda Harry Potteresque here, but but this is true. It's true.
Joel Brooks:And it was done for a reason. The question though, is when we go through all these plagues, what do they mean? Why did God do these things? You know, as the point of the plagues, the point of these stories simply to demonstrate that God is powerful. I'd say the answer to that is yes, partially.
Joel Brooks:I I think there's actually better ways for God to display his power than, you know, having a lot of gnats or frogs, but but that they do display his power. You can ask is the point of these stories to show that Yahweh is more powerful than any of the Egyptian gods that they believed in? And I would say, yes. That's part of the reason you have these stories. Because if you look through the 10 plagues, God systematically takes on each one of the Egyptian gods with the Nile River and the sun being the two main ones.
Joel Brooks:And he demonstrates that he is over them all. The problem is they had many, many gods. They had over 500 gods at least, and 500 plagues systematically taking them on would get kinda old. And so, partially, he does take on the gods. Perhaps the story is about God's judgment.
Joel Brooks:God wants to show us that if we disobey him, he will smite us. He will truly punish us. And the people who believe this, they look at things like, you know, hurricane Katrina, or they look at a tsunami, and they think that's right. That is God's judgment, smiting a pagan people who have forsaken him. Is that what's happening?
Joel Brooks:I'd say partially, yes. The the plagues are partially about judgment, but probably not in the way we first think. I guess a fundamental question that we need to ask when we are approaching this text is, why do it this way? Why all of the drama? I mean, besides making it a great story, why does god do all these things?
Joel Brooks:Why does he turn a river into blood? Why does he send in a bunch of frogs? Why does he send in a bunch of gnats? Why send the disease? Why the large hailstones?
Joel Brooks:What's what's the point of all these things? When God already knows, Pharaoh isn't gonna do anything until he gets to the final plague. And if God knows this, why go through all of the drama leading up to it? Why not jump just jump there? Thankfully, God tells us his goal.
Joel Brooks:His goal is this. We read it in chapter 9 verse 16. Pharaoh, he goes he goes up to pharaoh and Moses does and he says, for by now, I could have put my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth. But for this purpose, I've raised you up to show you my power so that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth. The purpose of the plagues is that God's name might be proclaimed in all of the earth.
Joel Brooks:We see something similar in chapter 5 verses 1 and 2, which we read. It says afterward, Moses and Aaron went and said to pharaoh, thus says the Lord, the God of Israel, let my people go that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness. But pharaoh said, who is the Lord that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, and moreover, I will not let Israel go. And so God sends the plagues in response to that question, who is Yahweh?
Joel Brooks:Who is the Lord that I should obey His voice? And let me tell you, that is a very good question. Who is the Lord that I should obey his voice? This is a question that every person on earth needs to ask, and needs to get an answer for. Who is God, and what demands can he make of my life?
Joel Brooks:Now it's not just pharaoh who needs to answer this question. The Israelites need to have that, that question answered for them, because they're in the midst of doubt. Who is God and what demands can he make of my life? I found it interesting that yesterday, Tim Keller, who's a pastor in New York City, he actually emailed out and tweeted out a sermon. In the sermon of all the sermons, 30 years of preaching, he says, I like to send out a sermon on the plagues.
Joel Brooks:And so so he tweets out this sermon, free download. I encourage you to read it or to listen to it. It's very good. But the reason that he wanted to send this out is because it's not just non Christians question is now happening within the church. Just how do we really know who God is, and how can we be so certain as to what he commands that we should obey him?
Joel Brooks:How do we know what his character is? How do we know what he loves, or how do we know what he hates? How do we know how he wants us to live? Who's to really say? Do do you know what the prevalent thinking is today?
Joel Brooks:I I mean, I hear this over and over, people will say something like this, why can't we each believe what we want to believe about God and about whatever he might want from us, and then just learn to live in peace. The plagues are God's response to that. The plagues are the way in which God is going to show pharaoh, gonna show all the people of Egypt and all the world, he's gonna show them through the stories that you cannot believe that. God of the Bible doesn't give you that option because he is not just the God of Israelites, he is the one true God of all the earth. Let let's let's dig in and start looking closely at the first plague in which God tells Moses to strike the Nile and it turns into blood, and we read that in chapter 7.
Joel Brooks:Now, most commentators point out that we really don't know if the Nile turned to blood or not. There's a lot written on that. What you can be sure of is it completely became unlivable and undrinkable at this point, which of course being turned into blood would do this. And this would have been a devastating thing to the Egyptians who depended upon the Nile for their water, they depended upon it for their irrigation, they depended upon it for food. The Nile was so important to them that it had become a god to them.
Joel Brooks:And so Yahweh here is attacking one of their primary gods. And there's a lot of symbolism here as well, and God choosing to pick on the Nile. Because remember, it was pharaoh who wanted to use the Nile and to turn it into a bloodbath earlier. Pharaoh wanted to turn the Nile into into blood by throwing every Hebrew child in it. He wanted to hurt the Hebrews, but now God is using it to hurt the Egyptians.
Joel Brooks:Moses had already been delivered from the grips of the Nile, and and Moses was rescued by the daughter of pharaoh. And now Moses is meeting with that daughter's granddad at the banks of the Nile again, and maybe is hoping for the same compassion that she had shown, although he won't receive it. And so Moses, he strikes the Nile and he turns it into blood. Now this is a terrible thing, but it's one that the magicians could duplicate. We read this later in the story there.
Joel Brooks:They're like, okay. Well, we could do that. Why they want to do that? I I don't know. Why you would want to turn water into more blood.
Joel Brooks:It would be like, you know, I could create a fire to burn down half the house and you do it. And somebody goes, well, I could create down a fire to burn down the rest of my house. You know? Like, why why are you doing that? They every time they try to recreate something, they make the situation worse.
Joel Brooks:Moses, he he he sends in the frogs. You know, like, well, we can do that. So let's double the amount of frogs that are coming in. They finally they can when it comes to the gnats, apparently, the gnats were, like, too hard for them. They they they couldn't do the gnats.
Joel Brooks:So at that point, they had to bail out. But what you see is with all of their wisdom, with all of their powers, all man can do is make a situation worse, not better. Even after the plagues though, Pharoah still doesn't believe. You gotta ask how is it possible to see all of those plagues and him not come to believe? Well, it's because he, pharaoh, does what happens to so many of us in light of God working in our lives.
Joel Brooks:We explain it away. We can explain anything away. Lauren and I, we have a family member, who we don't believe knows the Lord. And he he said, if I could just see a sign, I mean, I just, you know, just one clear cut absolute sign, then of course I would believe. And so he has prayed for that sign.
Joel Brooks:We've prayed for that sign. And, there was a time, you know, shortly afterwards, he was climbing about 15 feet up in a ladder with a chainsaw cutting some limbs, and he accidentally cut himself and then he passed out. He he fell head first down, broke his neck, and lived, and not just lived, but was fine. He didn't snap his spinal cord, and it really was just a minor setback. Like incredible God saved your life.
Joel Brooks:And he's like, well, I mean, I mean, things like that can happen. I mean, it was just natural, I mean, of course, like, you know, I cut myself and then I passed out, they made my body really limp and actually was a really good thing, I wasn't stressed when I hit the ground, and so he can explain it all the way. Pharaoh does the exact same thing. Terence Fretheim, who is a Lutheran Old Testament scholar, He wrote a commentary on Exodus that really shaped the way that I view this. He he points out that you can see a natural progression to these plagues.
Joel Brooks:He calls it an ecological disaster. First, it starts by the Nile turning into blood, becoming unlivable. And then the next plague is the invasion of the frogs. You know, when the frogs, they go into the ovens or in people's beds or everywhere, it's it's kinda humorous when you're reading this story, but it also can be seen as a very natural thing. Well, if the Nile becomes unlivable, well, the frogs have to leave and so they invade the land.
Joel Brooks:And so then the next plague, after all the frogs finally die out, well, the next plague is what? It's the gnats. It's the flies who now no longer have any natural predators. And then once you get all of these flies in, and you have all these dead little carcasses everywhere, what happens next? Well, disease begins to spread first among the animals, and then among the people.
Joel Brooks:And so Pharaoh is looking at all this and he says, well, we've, we've had some ecological disasters before. I mean, maybe not this major, but, but this has happened. He, he sees this as something very natural that's happening and he can explain it away. So why does God do it this way then? I mean, he he could pick more impressive ways, so why does he do it this way?
Joel Brooks:Why give all these natural plagues? And the purpose is to teach, who is the lord, why should I obey him? What happens to my life when I no longer obey him? God answers here by saying, you begin to see things spiraling into utter chaos. What we are witnessing in this moment is uncreation.
Joel Brooks:I realize that's not a word. Fredheim uses it, so I'm gonna use it. Uncreation. What we're seeing is this degeneration of the natural order, the the natural order, the way that God had put things together, God who holds all things together by the word of his power. He holds it all together.
Joel Brooks:He says, you don't want me in your life? I'll back away. I'll back away. And we begin to see the natural world coming apart at it seems as God backs further and further away, the natural world begins to become unglued and spirals out of control all the way until when you get to the 9th plague, it descends back into its pre created state that you find in Genesis 1 in which darkness covered the land. In Genesis 1:2, we read, the earth was formless and void and darkness was over the face of the deep.
Joel Brooks:And then it was God who said, let there be light. Just as the Hebrews were enjoying light in this plague, but the Egyptians were not. So Egypt is experiencing what I will call uncreation, but not the Hebrews. They were experiencing the light of God, but the Egyptians had been come totally undone. And we'll see later as we look at things like the Red sea, you can see it also through the lens of creation.
Joel Brooks:God's people are being recreated. Once again, he separates land from the waters, and he begins making this new work in this new creation as he goes before his people. And this is really how you should primarily understand the plagues. But yes, they're about God's power. Yes, they're about God taking on every one of these Egyptian gods.
Joel Brooks:But primarily, I think you should see them as a act of uncreation, as god withdrawing his presence and withdrawing his hand. And so water systems, vegetation, animals, weather systems, even light and darkness, everything that's being held together by God's word. God says, you don't want me to hold that together? You don't want me there? I'll back away.
Joel Brooks:And now we see the consequences of this. And so what this is teaching us, the reason God's doing the plagues this way is because he's saying, you wanna know what life looks like when you remove me from the center? This is what life looks like. When you don't acknowledge God as a great I am, your life is going to fall apart. You're gonna become undone, And this might start off small, just like it does here.
Joel Brooks:It might start off small, but it will grow and it will grow. I think of you know, obviously, you could think of a sins like addiction sins, in which nobody goes into a sin thinking, I'd really like to be addicted to this. Nobody does. It starts off small, and it grows and grows, and soon you're in bondage, and your whole life has fallen apart. But it it's really in every sin that you see that.
Joel Brooks:I I think of sins like coveting, you know, the the one sin everybody's embarrassed to ever confess. I've never had somebody come up to me and be like, I really struggle with envy. You know, it's coveting because it just seems so petty, yet everybody here struggles with it. But coveting can start as something small. Maybe you just kinda like something about a friend.
Joel Brooks:Maybe, you you know, you were you covered it a little bit. They took a really cool trip or something, and you wish you had gone to that, but you didn't, you know, I kind of wish I could do that. And then you find that growing in you. That coveting turns to a bitterness. A few more months pass by, and you actually find yourself to begin rooting for something bad to happen to this person.
Joel Brooks:Secretly celebrating when something bad is, you know, I lost my job, and Secretly, you're happy. Soon your life becomes consumed with bitterness, and the only joy you derive is when the other person falls. What's happening is your life is becoming undone. You're disintegrating. What I would say you're experiencing is Romans 1.
Joel Brooks:Romans 1 describes the judgment of God this way, the punishment of God this way, in which Paul says to a people who refuse to put God at the center of their life, he says, you refuse to put God in the center of your life, this is your punishment. God's gonna let you keep doing it. God's gonna say, you want it your way, You can have it your way, and he backs out. The punishment is that they get to keep doing what they're doing, and their lives become undone. Where before they just lusted, but then it says, God gave them over to their lust.
Joel Brooks:And he says, no longer will I protect you from your own desires. Now, God doesn't do this quickly. We see through these plagues, he's extraordinarily patient with us, and he keeps calling for the Israelites and calling for the Egyptians to come to him. Look at chapter 9, verses 18. Here we see that the plagues are not just judgment, but they're they're meant to save us.
Joel Brooks:In 918, we we read these words. Behold, about this time tomorrow, I will cause very heavy hail to fall, such as never has been in Egypt from the day it was founded until now. Now therefore, send, get your livestock and all that you have in the field into safe shelter for every man and beast that is in the field and is not brought home will die when the hail falls on them. Then whoever feared the word of the Lord among the servants of pharaoh hurried his slaves and his livestock into the houses. But whoever did not pay attention to the word of the Lord left his slaves and his livestock in the field.
Joel Brooks:I mean, here we see, God's not trying to smite these people. I mean, who who does that, and then tells them how you can avoid it. He's saying, obey my voice and you live. Obey my voice and you will live. You're not gonna get hurt.
Joel Brooks:God doesn't desire to hurt these people. At this point here, you've had 6 plagues, not one person has died. What he's doing is their lives are being disrupted in a way that hopefully they will seek him, both the Israelite and the Egyptian. And we read here that some servants of pharaoh actually believe the Lord, and they come to know him through the plagues. You wanna look at this next week, but apparently some of them go off with the as as the Israelites, as they are freed.
Joel Brooks:So the plagues are about salvation for the Israelites and for the Egyptians, And the plagues are about our salvation. We get to see, God gives us a picture, gives us a visual of what our lives would look like without him, if he wasn't central. And so the point of these plagues are to show us this and to lead us into salvation. I I don't want you to think that the purpose of these plagues is for you to all of a sudden think, I really gotta try a whole lot harder to make God the center of my life because you're gonna fail when you just try. I'm gonna try a whole lot harder to do this because you can't.
Joel Brooks:But it does point forward to somebody who did. It points us forward to Jesus. And with this, we look at the 9th plague. Let me read chapter 10 verses 21 through 22 again. Then the Lord said to Moses, stretch out your hands or heaven that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, a darkness to be felt.
Joel Brooks:So Moses stretched out his hand towards heaven and there was pitch darkness in all the land of Egypt for 3 days. I really love the Hebrew language and how it describes darkness here. Nahum Sarna, he he he translate this. He's a Hebrew scholar. He says it's a darkness that can be touched.
Joel Brooks:And here, you know, you you read that this is a darkness to be felt. It's it's an oppressive darkness, a darkness that starts smothering in on you. It's an evil darkness. Imagine if at noon at noon tomorrow, all of a sudden, things were to start getting dark outside. I'm not talking about like heavy cloud cover, I'm talking about pitch black.
Joel Brooks:No sun, no moon, no stars. You cannot see the hand in your face, and it is noon. You would be you would you'd feel suffocated. You will know that something evil is happening, is pressing in on you, and this happens to the Egyptian people. This is a terrifying thing.
Joel Brooks:And what this darkness is, it's the tangible symbol that they've gone all the way back to pre creation, in which there is no spirit of God hovering over the waters. This is the sign that there is a total absence of God. That's what darkness is. That's the reason that we have hell described as a place of outer darkness, because hell is the place where God is not present. I want you to fast forward 1400 years from this event in which you come to something very similar.
Joel Brooks:You come to a place, Golgotha, Calvary, where there's a man who stretches out his arms to the heavens and darkness envelops the land completely, a darkness that can be felt. And this person, Jesus Christ, the son of God, he cries out, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Because he realizes this darkness is a symbol that God's presence has fled, that he is nowhere near. And this becomes oppressive to him. God's presence becomes visibly absent, and it shook Jesus so much, he becomes undone.
Joel Brooks:You see it in the garden when he begins sweating drops of blood, he's becoming undone, uncreated in this moment. And I would say that it's at the cross that you see all of the plagues of Egypt finding their fulfillment there. On the cross, Jesus took on the plagues so that we might be freed. On the cross is where Jesus, he received the ultimate judgment so that we might receive liberty, we might receive life. Jesus took on the darkness on himself so that we might later be called children of light.
Joel Brooks:He becomes what is due to a slave so that we might be called a son. We are no longer undone because Jesus on the cross was undone, and through his actions, he has made us whole. Now I started off this sermon by saying that sometimes when we trust God, our circumstances can begin to get worse. Addictions might intensify, pains might increase, sins might become even more tempting, and things become really, really hard. And all this might make you want to blame God rather than trust God, and what I say is just look to the cross, look to the cross, because no one suffered more than this man, You certainly don't.
Joel Brooks:And he took on all of the darkness that scares you so that you might be the child of the light. Pray with me. Our Lord and our savior, Jesus Christ, our present and our coming king. To you now, we pray and we say thank you that you took on a darkness that could be felt, a darkness that was oppressive, a darkness that was the tangible symbol of the absence of God. And you did that so that we might never know that.
Joel Brooks:Nothing can separate us from you, father. And we rejoice. Thank you, Jesus. And we pray this in your name. Amen.