Mar 16-22
Let My People Go
๐ Exodus 7-13
Exodus 7-13: Why Pharaoh Said No (Even When He Knew Better)
Imagine you watch someone turn your city's water supply into blood. Then frogs cover everything. Then lice. Then flies. Then your livestock dies. Then you get painful sores. Then a hailstorm destroys your crops. Then locusts eat everything that survived the hail. Then there's total darkness for three days.
At what point would you change your mind?
For Pharaoh, the answer was never โ until it was too late.
The Problem With Pharaoh
Every time a plague hit, Pharaoh would say, "Okay, okay โ make it stop and I'll let the Israelites go." Moses would pray, the plague would end, and Pharaoh would immediately change his mind.
This happened ten times.
He wasn't dumb. He clearly understood that Moses represented a power greater than his own. He just couldn't make himself care more about the truth than about being right.
There's a word for this in the scriptures: hardening your heart. It doesn't mean becoming emotionless. It means choosing, over and over again, to ignore what you know is true โ until ignoring it becomes habit.
The scary part? The early plagues say Pharaoh hardened his own heart. He made that choice. By the later plagues, his heart was just already hard.
Here's the application: we don't usually make one big decision to reject God. We make a hundred small ones.
What the Plagues Were Really About
Each plague targeted something Egypt worshipped as a god.
The Nile was sacred to them โ and God turned it to blood. The sun was their supreme deity โ and God took the sun away for three days. Pharaoh himself was considered a living god โ and his firstborn son died.
God wasn't just showing off. He was saying: everything you trust in more than Me โ I want to show you what it's actually worth.
That question hits differently when you think about what we sometimes trust more than God. Our own reputation. What other people think of us. Our ability to handle things ourselves.
The Passover: A Meal About Something Bigger
The last plague was the death of the firstborn. God told Israel to sacrifice a lamb, put its blood on their doorposts, and stay inside. The death would "pass over" any house marked with blood.
They also had to eat the lamb โ fast โ with unleavened bread and bitter herbs. And then do it every year forever.
Why so specific? Because this meal wasn't just about Egypt.
A thousand years later, Jesus sat with His disciples at a Passover meal and said, "This bread is my body. This cup is my blood." He was completing the symbol that had been pointing at Him the whole time. The lamb without blemish. The blood on the door. The meal eaten in haste before a journey.
The sacrament we take each week is the Passover, completed.
Application
Pharaoh's real problem wasn't stubbornness โ it was that he kept asking "how do I make this stop?" instead of "what is God asking me to change?"
Which is a better question to ask yourself right now.
๐ฎ What does "hardening your heart" mean in this story? - Making a single bad decision [correct: false] - Repeatedly ignoring what you know is true until it becomes habit [correct: true] - Becoming angry and emotional [correct: false] - Disagreeing with God openly [correct: false]
๐ฎ Why did the plagues target specific Egyptian gods? - Because those gods were fighting back [correct: false] - To show that what Egypt trusted was powerless compared to the Lord [correct: true] - To punish innocent Egyptians [correct: false] - Moses chose them randomly [correct: false]
๐ฎ What was the purpose of putting lamb's blood on the doorposts? - To identify Israelite homes so they would be spared [correct: true] - To scare away the Egyptians [correct: false] - It was a sign of wealth [correct: false] - Moses required it as payment [correct: false]
๐ฎ What does Paul mean when he calls Christ "our passover"? - That Jesus celebrated Passover once [correct: false] - That Jesus fulfilled all the symbolism the Passover pointed toward [correct: true] - That Easter replaced Passover [correct: false] - That Christians should still sacrifice lambs [correct: false]
๐ฎ What was Pharaoh's repeated mistake when the plagues stopped? - He forgot about them [correct: false] - He broke his promise to let Israel go [correct: true] - He asked for more plagues [correct: false] - He blamed Moses [correct: false]
๐ฎ What small daily habit connects to the Passover in our worship today? - Tithing [correct: false] - Family home evening [correct: false] - The sacrament [correct: true] - Baptism [correct: false]
What's one thing you keep telling yourself you'll change "after this"? What would it look like to stop waiting and act now?