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“‘Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, “I am the LORD, and I will bring you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians, and I will deliver you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm and with great judgments. ‘Then I will take you for My people, and I will be your God; and you shall know that I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. I will bring you to the land which I swore to give to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and I will give it to you for a possession; I am the LORD.”‘”
Exodus 6:6–8 NASB
This verse is the source of the tradition of sharing the four cups (or sips) of wine during the Pesakh (Passover) seder. When God does great things for us, God expects to respond with recognition of His goodness to us. We are expected to acknowledge how He defines Himself and accept Him as our God. God responds to this acknowledgement by bring us closer to Him, to His land. If we want the land God promises to us, we have to recognize Him and Him alone as our God.
“So Moses spoke thus to the sons of Israel, but they did not listen to Moses on account of their despondency and cruel bondage.”
Exodus 6:9 NASB
When Yeshua came, did the majority of the people respond positively to Him and His mission? No. The same thing happened to Moses before Him.
The reason that the people did not readily believe Moses is because of the oppression and bondage they were experiencing. Even though they were miserable, it was still very hard for the children of Israel to leave what little they had in Egypt, which they had gained with very hard work and toil to go somewhere else.
Moses is concerned that if the children of Israel, who believe in God, won’t listen to him, how will he persuade Pharaoh, who doesn’t believe in God, to listen to him?
Moses sees this as a shortcoming in himself. Yeshua said something similar:
“‘no prophet is welcome in his hometown.’”
Luke 4:24 NASB
We should expect to see what happened to Moses to be repeated or foreshadowed in the life of Yeshua. In the days of Moses, Egypt received supernatural chastisement, while in the days of Messiah Yeshua, the Jewish people and their leadership were the ones who experienced supernatural chastisement.
God reassures Moses that Pharaoh will fear him as a god by the time God is done with him. Pharaoh will treat Moses as his master. God made sure that Pharaoh feared Moses too much to kill him. This similar to the fear that God put into the animal kingdom after Adam’s sin. The clean animals do not have a fear of humans that the unclean animals do.
The Egyptians had a natural fear of Moses, which wore off towards the end of the plagues to the point that the Pharaoh and the army chased after them to try to forcibly capture them and return Israel to slavery.
Both Moses and Yeshua’s earliest miracles were for small, private audiences and later made more public demonstration of their miracle power.
It’s hard to say that exactly what point in time did Pharaoh realized that he was losing control of the situation but it seems to have been after Israel were on their way out the door. He realized he had lost his authority and reacted violently to his loss of power and authority by sending an army out to try to capture the children of Israel with a show of force.
I see something similar in the time of the Messiah, that the Jewish leadership didn’t realize how completely they had lost control of the Yeshua movement until the time of Saul of Tarsus, when they sent him and other people to many Jewish communities in the diaspora to try to crush the Yeshua movement, aka The Way. The Jewish leadership sent Saul and others out with the authority of the Sanhedrin to arrest and even execute Jewish believers in Messiah Yeshua. Just as Pharaoh’s violence failed, so did Saul’s.
8 more plagues
Blood and water
We know that blood and water are connected spiritually and physically. Life is in the blood (Gen. 9:4; Lev. 17:11, 14; Deut. 12:23), and water is also essential for life. When Moses was instructed to turn the Nile into blood, he was Heaven’s instrument for connecting them together. When Moses did that, he was harkening back to the edict of Pharaoh or Pharaoh’s father who had condemned infant Israeli boys to be thrown into the Nile.
Yeshua also turned water into wine, which is a symbol of blood and when He was stabbed by the Roman officer, both blood and water poured out of Him. Even though Yeshua physically died, He was resurrected three days later.
Fish
The fish died in Egypt when Moses turned the Nile to blood. Yeshua connected His ministry with fish and fishermen. He called several fishermen as Apostles. One of Yeshua’s earliest miracles was when He told Peter and John to put out their nets and they gathered up an abundance of fish after they had given up their fishing all-nighter unsuccessfully. Yeshua called them to be “fishers of men.”
Frogs
Egypt was contaminated by the stench of the dying and dead frogs. The same thing happened spiritually in the city of Jerusalem which from the death of Yeshua to the exile, was contaminated when they shed Yeshua’s innocent blood.
Lice
Lice is never considered a good thing. We don’t have lice parties. It’s considered a plague on poor people. They are inherently unclean and we loath them. They are a nuisance and symbolic of misery.
We see the same loathing of leprosy. In Yeshua’s day, a lot of people had leprosy and made one unclean. Yeshua felt compassion for these poor people and healed many of them.
Flies
Flies are attracted to death and this plague in Egypt isn’t the only time God uses flies to drive people away from places He doesn’t want them to enter. God used flies to drive both the Israelites and the Romans out of Parthia later in history.
In Messiah’s day, we don’t see swarms of flies but we do have a type of swarm, not in the form if insects, but of armies. Yeshua warned that when you see an army approaching Jerusalem, they need to flee quickly.
Disease of livestock
Egypt was known for worshipping animals as deities. When Pharaoh told Moses that the children of Israel could offer their animals in the land, God took that as an invitation to kill all their livestock as an offering to Himself. Pharaoh thought he was appeasing a nuisance, but he only opened the door to God to take out more competitors to Himself. After all, the livestock owned by the children of Israel were protected from the plague. Only the Egyptians lost their livestock.
After Yeshua’s death and resurrection, believers in Yeshua still went to the Temple and made sacrifices but they no longer brought offerings for sins to the Temple. They only brought peace offerings to the Temple.
Then later, then the Temple was destroyed all together, the believers in Yeshua still had their sin offering in Yeshua Himself while the Jews who didn’t believe in Yeshua no longer had an offering for their sins. Their sin offerings were taken away.
Boils
Boils are ugly, painful and unsightly. Job had experience with boils, but he used them as an opportunity to humble himself. God used the boils in Egypt in the same way, to humble and humiliate the Pharaoh’s magicians so completely that they refused to appear before Moses with them.
We see that those who followed Messiah and then rejected Him (because of His teaching that they need to eat His body and drink His blood) were humbled and removed themselves from following Yeshua after that point.
Hail
God used hail to physically crush and trample on the land of Egypt. The hail destroyed their food, the livestock and the people that didn’t have shelter. Even the non-believers who obeyed Moses warning received a blessing.
God also used flaming hail to destroy the city of Sodom and Gomorrah. Those who heeded the warning to flee, their obedience saved their lives.
After Yeshua’s death, the believers who heeded His warning about the future destruction of Jerusalem fled when the Roman army paused their attack (Matt. 24:15–17; Mark 13:14–16; Luke 21:20–22). Their obedience saved their lives.
Summary: Tammy