Psalm 105

If you read this psalm in your Bible today, you discovered that it is a recitation of the history of God’s acts in Israel—including a long passage about the ten plagues of Egypt. So, even though this is Psalms, I decided to reiterate a great lesson about God that we learn from the Egyptian plagues: God is a light. Just imagine what it must have been like to be Pharaoh. He was “the” god in a land of gods. The ancient Egyptians had a god for everything—and I do mean everything. They worshiped over 2,000 gods that they believed controlled everything—from the sky to the River Nile to childbirth.

And at the top of the god pyramid was Pharaoh. Believed to be the son of two gods, he was directly responsible for maintaining good relations between the gods and his people. He was the intermediary, if you will, between earth and heaven. Now, as Christians, as people who believe in Yahweh, the one, true God, ancient Egyptian theology sounds like nonsense to us. We look at Pharaoh and think, How deceived he was! He lived in a fantasy world!

And he did. But that’s the whole point: God is a light, and it doesn’t matter how dark your darkness is, God can penetrate it with His light. He is a deception-buster, and He has a million different ways to communicate truth.

When Moses first approached Pharaoh about letting the Israelites go, Pharaoh said, “And who is the Lord that I should listen to him and let Israel go? I know nothing of this so-called ‘God’…” (Ex 5:2) It’s true. Pharaoh was going happily along in his little fantasy land, believing that he controlled the natural world (with the help of some 2,000 other deities) when this guy Moses showed up and said that the true God was demanding the release of His people.

And all of a sudden, after a little blood in the Nile and frogs on the land, Pharaoh’s fantasy world was demolished. In plague after plague, designed specifically to target the most prominent gods of Egypt and expose them as worthless frauds, God communicated clearly that He held all the cards. He had all the power, and He was the only God in heaven and earth.

Did you realize that each Egyptian plague was designed to humiliate and expose as frauds the most prominent gods in Egypt?

1. The plague of the Nile turned to blood was a direct affront to Hapi, the lord of the fishes, birds, and marshes. It also targeted Osiris, the god of the underworld. The Egyptians believed that the Nile was his bloodstream. (Perhaps that’s why God literally turned it to blood!)

2. The plague of frogs was designed to expose Heqt, the goddess of birth, who was always depicted with the head and body of a frog. To even accidentally kill a frog was a crime punishable by death. in Egypt. Yet, after God sent this plague, the people had to heap the decaying bodies of frogs in great piles.

3. The plague of lice exposed Geb, great god of the earth, as a fraud.

4. The plague of flies humiliated Beelzebub, prince of the air, whose “ears” were flies.

5. The plague of cattle disease targeted Apis, one of Egypt’s most prominent gods (who was represented as a bull), and Hathor, the cow-headed goddess of the desert. (She was also considered the mother of Pharaoh.)

6. The plague of boils humiliated Imhotep, the god of medicine, who was powerless to help the people against such a terrible affliction. It was also an affront to Serapis, the deity responsible for healing.

7. The plague of hail destroyed the belief that Nut was in charge of the sky.

8. The plague of locusts targeted two gods—Isis and Seth—who were in charge of protecting crops.

9. The plague of darkness signaled the death of Ra, the great sun god. He was the most-favored god and considered the most powerful. (He was also considered the father of Pharaoh.)

10. The plague of the firstborn was not only against Pharaoh, but all the gods of Egypt (Ex 12:12). This is because the Egyptian firstborn were dedicated to the priesthood. Surely, if there were any gods in Egypt, they would protect those who were charged with attending to them in their temples. Thus, the death of all the firstborn in Egypt proved that either there were no Egyptian gods at all, or if there were, they were totally impotent.

So, just let me end by saying today that if you’ve ever worried that you might be deceived somehow or that you might have committed the unpardonable sin or that you might be spiritually dead to God… stop worrying. Every single one of us is harboring some amount of darkness in our hearts, but God is a light, and He is more than able to communicate truth to us just as He did to Pharaoh and the Egyptians.

Let’s face it, if He can shine light into the heart of a man who worshiped more than 2,000 gods and thought he was a god himself, God’s got it easy with you. He’ll have no problem getting you to see the light!