1 Later, Moses and Aaron went in and said to Pharaoh, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival for me in the wilderness.”
2 But Pharaoh responded, “Who is the Lord that I should obey him by letting Israel go? I don’t know the Lord, and besides, I will not let Israel go.” —Exodus 5:1-2 CSB
A core value of the modern age: “We don’t
“We all live in a world in which it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to or passively accept.” —Carl R Trueman
We find it really hard to accept
Exodus 7-11
“Our freedom expands or shrinks with each decision we make.” —John Mark Comer, Live No Lies, 159
First Plague: Blood in the Nile
Second Plague: Frogs
Third Plague: Gnats
Fourth Plague: Swarm of Flies
Fifth Plague: Diseased Livestock
Sixth Plague: Boils
“In the practice of their religion, the Egyptians took the ashes of an offering and threw the ashes into the air as a means of blessing. If ashes fell on individuals, they considered themselves very fortunate. But what had been considered a blessing suddenly became a curse, causing boils to break out on the people.” —James Montgomery Boice
Seventh Plague: Hail & Lightning
Eighth Plague: Locusts
Ninth Plague: Darkness
Tenth Plague: Death of Firstborn Sons
“However practiced we become at tuning out sounds that we do not want to hear, including the sound of God’s displeasure at sin, God finds new ways to penetrate our defensive deafness.” —Eugene Peterson, Reversed Thunder, 99
To disobey God is to unleash
and
in your life and everything around you.
Reality will not bend its knee to our
.
So the question is, will we bend our knee to reality?
9 For this reason God highly exalted him
and gave him the name
that is above every name,
10 so that at the name of Jesus
every knee will bow—
in heaven and on earth
and under the earth—
11 and every tongue will confess
that Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father. —Philippians 2:9-11 CSB