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Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that darkness spreads over Egypt—darkness that can be felt.” 22 So Moses stretched out his hand toward the sky, and total darkness covered all Egypt for three days. 23 No one could see anyone else or move about for three days. Yet all the Israelites had light in the places where they lived.

Psalm 112:4 says: “Even in darkness light dawns for the upright…”

When I went to college at the age of eighteen, I experienced a darkness I could almost touch. I had never known anything like it prior to leaving home for Capel, and I’m not sure I have experienced  it’s like since. There were no street lights on the part of the Rusper Road where I was billeted. We were deep in the Surrey countryside, and a solo night-time walk from the campus was quite scary. I know I was far from alone in feeling this.

Be that as it may, I’m sure the darkness which fell on Egypt was even heavier (23a). But note that God makes a distinction between His own people and those who are not (23b). We ‘have’ God’s light in the “places” where we live, but we are not to keep it there. We must not hoard it but share it. If we will simply be who we are – who God has made us to be – we will shine.

“We are told to let our light shine, and if it does, we won’t need to tell anybody it does. Lighthouses don’t fire cannons to call attention to their shining – they just shine.” D.L.Moody

Moses then left Pharaoh and prayed to the Lord. 19 And the Lord changed the wind to a very strong west wind, which caught up the locusts and carried them into the Red Sea. Not a locust was left anywhere in Egypt.

Prayer changes things!

This is the testimony of Scripture; it is the witness of church history; and it is confirmed in our own experience. When we pray to God, in the will of God, He is able to ‘change the wind.’ We may not see in advance how the Lord is going to change things, but He can and He does.

Prayer changes things? But what about you? What about me? What about Pharaoh? Pharaoh saw things change through prayer – again and again. But he remained unchanged.

As I write this on Sunday 12^th December, we are aware of rising concern about the ‘Omnicron’ variant of ‘Covid 19’, now circulating in the community. How transmissible will it prove to be? Will it cause only a mild illness, or something more serious? It seems these questions will have to await an answer. Meanwhile, we pray on.

But, what if God were to ‘carry’ it away, as He did with the locusts? Would the nation be any different? Would the church be any more vital? Would I?

Prayer changes things, but will I let it change me?

And the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand over Egypt so that locusts swarm over the land and devour everything growing in the fields, everything left by the hail.”

13 So Moses stretched out his staff over Egypt, and the Lord made an east wind blow across the land all that day and all that night. By morning the wind had brought the locusts; 14 they invaded all Egypt and settled down in every area of the country in great numbers. Never before had there been such a plague of locusts, nor will there ever be again. 15 They covered all the ground until it was black. They devoured all that was left after the hail—everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees. Nothing green remained on tree or plant in all the land of Egypt.

16 Pharaoh quickly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you. 17 Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the Lord your God to take this deadly plague away from me.”

18 Moses then left Pharaoh and prayed to the Lord. 19 And the Lord changed the wind to a very strong west wind, which caught up the locusts and carried them into the Red Sea.Not a locust was left anywhere in Egypt. 20 But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go.

Repentance must be more than words. What Pharaoh said sounded good. It was orthodox alright. But his heart wasn’t changed. As we have seen before, repentance is more than correct words; it’s a change of mind, a change of life, a change of direction.

The mercy of God is  great. If we are not fooled by Pharaoh, the Lord certainly wasn’t. Yet at the slightest flicker of movement in the right direction, the He moved in mercy towards him

God is to be feared. Pharaoh was very slow to learn this lesson.

Proverbs 9:10a says: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom…”

‘One begins to get smart when he or she fears being crosswise of God – fears not doing what he wants and not being as he requires. Fear is the anticipation of harm. God is not mean, but he is dangerous, just as are some of the great forces he has placed in reality. Electricity and nuclear power, for example, are not mean, but they are dangerous. In a certain sense, if we don’t “worry” about God, we simply aren’t being smart. And that is the point of the verse.’ “Revolution of Character’, p.45.

Then Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. “Go, worship the Lord your God,” he said. “But tell me who will be going.”

9 Moses answered, “We will go with our young and our old, with our sons and our daughters, and with our flocks and herds, because we are to celebrate a festival to the Lord.”

10 Pharaoh said, “The Lord be with you—if I let you go, along with your women and children! Clearly you are bent on evil.11 No! Have only the men go and worship the Lord, since that’s what you have been asking for.” Then Moses and Aaron were driven out of Pharaoh’s presence.

It strikes me that there is something of Pharaoh in many of us. We know what God wants, but we try to strike a bargain; we want to negotiate easier terms. We’ll agree to what God asks, but with our own conditions attached. We’ll water things down. In short, we will attempt to compromise. We want to salve our consciences and say we have done what God asked. But have we?

If Jesus is not Lord of all, He is not Lord at all, and He calls for our unconditional surrender.

Are we prepared to go all the way with God?

G. Campbell Morgan said: “There are hours when the Church must say NO to those who should ask communion with her, in the doing of her work, upon the basis of compromise.”

This verse is very much on my mind at the moment:

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” 2 Timothy 4:3.

Let’s determine not to be among their ranks. May we be those who hold on to the unadulterated truth.

PRAYER: Lord, keep your church true to truth.

So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, “This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me. 4 If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. 5 They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. 6 They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians—something neither your parents nor your ancestors have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.’” Then Moses turned and left Pharaoh.

7 Pharaoh’s officials said to him, “How long will this man be a snare to us? Let the people go, so that they may worship the Lord their God. Do you not yet realize that Egypt is ruined?”

Pharaoh’s officials remind me of the unjust judge in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18:1-8) who gave in to the persistent widow because she kept ‘bothering’ him. They were thoroughly fed up with Moses (7a). But it seems they were more willing to face reality than Pharaoh was. Spiritual blindness is a sad, but interesting phenomenon. We might well ask, ‘How could he not see the truth?’

‘Denial of reality accounts for our perpetual blindness to the obvious. Human affairs at every level are affected by it. Denial alone explains why “the rulers of this age” do the things they do – up to the crucifixion of “the Lord of glory” himself (1 Corinthians 2:8, NRSV). Denial of reality is inseparable from our fallen human heart, and its great power comes from not being recognised for what it is. The fact is, in a world apart from God, the power of denial is essential if life is to proceed. The human heart cannot – psychologically cannot – sustain itself for any length of time in the face of reality. We can’t ponder our own death, we can’t examine the conflicted nature of our motives and actions, we can’t face our fears about other people – nor can we live with our own past or face our future – without profound denial.’‘Revolution of character’, pp.47, 48.

As Mark Twain quipped: ‘Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.’

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them 2 that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord.”

This remains an abiding lesson of the Exodus – both for the church and the world.

It is such an epic story that it has been turned into a block-busting film (and more than once).

But in particular, God wants His own people to know that He is the Lord – the great, eternal God.

He wants us to know about Him…

…to know what He did, what He is doing, and what He can do.

Even more, He wants us to know Him. This is not a call to theoretical information but to a personal, intimate relationship (The same word used of Adam ‘knowing’ Eve is also used of God’s people knowing Him – and I believe Eve was more than a ‘concept’ to her husband!)

In a world where there are so many uncertainties, God wants us to be sure of Him.

PRAYER: Lord, help me to hear and respond your call to be still and know that you are God.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them 2 that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord.”

The concept as the home/family being an essential arena for the teaching and modelling of the Christian faith is a thoroughly Biblical one. We find passages like today’s in a number of places in the Bible. We cannot ‘outsource’ discipleship training to the church or the Sunday school. These have important roles to play, to be sure, but they should be supplementary for children from Christian homes. Our young should be able to learn about Christianity in the family, from who their parents are, and from what they say. Instruction and example belong together. In Joyce Huggett’s book, ‘Listening to God’, she says she learned to pray from being very young, because she saw her dad pray every evening before bed. There are things we inhale (good and bad) from the very atmosphere in which we are raised. It will never be perfect. We are all sinners, but is it a God-honouring place, where Jesus is Lord, and church life is appropriately prioritised? Rod Dreher says to parents: your children ‘’need to see that you are serious about the spiritual life.’’

In his book, ‘the Benedict Option’, he has a section headed ‘Turn your home into a Domestic Monastery.’ He goes on to say:

‘’Just as the monastery’s life is ordered toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty). If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family’s life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members.” (Pages 124,125)

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them…

Exodus tells us three things about Pharaoh’s heart: that the Lord hardened it; that Pharaoh hardened his heart (8:15), and that his heart “became hard” (7:13). It is important to keep these statements together in our thinking.

‘In other words, it is possible to tell two stories about Pharaoh’s heart…One is the story of Pharaoh’s moral choices, whereby his heart became increasingly ‘set in its ways’, committed more and more irretrievably to a course of genocide regarding Israel. The other is a mere statement that from the perspective of the Lord as moral ruler of his world, the point of no return had been reached and the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart must now be judgmentally imposed on him as the justly due consequence of what his own choices had made him.’ Alec Motyer, p.122.

Motyer points out that all three elements are brought together in 9:34 – 10:1:

“When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts. So Pharaoh’s heart was hard and he would not let the Israelites go, just as the LORD had said through Moses.

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh for I have hardened his heart…”

He then adds:

‘With these words we are forcefully reminded that choices are the privilege and price of being human. Our privilege is that of being responsible beings, recognising our moral values, called to make responsible choices, and given the opportunity and obligation to live in the light of the foreseeable consequences of our actions. The price we pay is that every choice, for good or ill, goes to fashioning our characters, and whether in the long or short term – or both – makes us answerable to the Judge of all the earth.’

Someone said, ‘Sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.’

When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts. 35 So Pharaoh’s heart was hard and he would not let the Israelites go, just as the Lord had said through Moses.

It’s been said that the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.

The heart is deceitful above all things

    and beyond cure.

    Who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9

Alec Motyer writes helpfully on the subject of Pharaoh hardening his heart in his book on ‘Exodus’, in ‘The Bible speaks today’ series:

‘Humans are so created that the choices they make contribute to forming character, and character thus formed promotes the making of similar choices in the future. Sometimes it takes a very long series of choices to produce a fixed habit, sometimes one choice is enough, sometimes a prolonged series of choices still leaves the issue in question open. Choosing and habit forming are things we all know about. What none of us knows is when the ‘point of no return’ will be reached. None of us can say, ‘I can risk one more choice and still retain freedom to give up this habit.’ Sadly, we can pass the point where freedom to change has been lost and still retain the illusion that ‘I can give it up any time I want!’ Thus the situation in which Pharaoh found himself was not peculiar to him but is intrinsic to the human condition. Only God foresees the decisive, freedom-destroying choice, and only he knows at once when the choice that kills freedom has been made. Indeed, the Bible goes further and claims that because he is God, it is he that fixes that point.’ (Pages 121, 122).

Jeremiah was right to say that the heart is “beyond cure.” That is, it is beyond human help. No psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, no doctor, will be able to fully deal with its impenetrable depths. But there is a heart specialist who can heal. Indeed, He can perform a heart transplant. His Name is Jesus.