Death of the Firstborn

According to a 2022 article in Time magazine, we have really wasted a lot of time over the past several weeks talking about an omnipotent and sovereign God who brought 10 plagues on Egypt to force Pharaoh’s hand and deliver God’s people from 430 years of slavery. Nope. Didn’t happen, and Olvia Waxman, the author of the article clears it all up very simply with three alternate theories. I will just bless your sanctified imaginations with her first one. The so-called plagues, she wrote, were a result of a volcanic eruption in Greece around that time.  Yep. The ash from the eruption landed in Egypt, turned the water of the Nile a reddish color, causing all the frogs to jump out and look for clean water. The dead bodies from the volcano collected insects which bred by the millions and swarmed the country. Oh, and the volcanic ash caused acid rain which caused boils on peoples’ skin. The grass was contaminated so the livestock died. Should I go on? Ok, one more. The desperation of the people during all this mayhem led them to sacrifice their own firstborns. How many agree that it takes a lot more faith to believe that version than the truth of God’s Word? 

Moses warned Pharaoh that God would kill all the firstborn of Egypt and the cry that would go up in the nation would be like none that had ever been or ever would be again. Moses even told Pharaoh when it would happen: “about midnight.” It is hard to understand a leader of a nation who had seen his nation destroyed by 9 plagues, each one worse than the one before, and each one happening exactly as predicted, sitting on his hands and yawning at the latest promise: you will all lose your firstborn. Your firstborn son, the prince of Egypt, will die, Pharaoh. Also, the most miserable criminal sitting in a dungeon, a pit, like Joseph once did, will lose his firstborn. Finally, even your livestock will lose their firstborn. That was the promise and Pharaoh’s hard heart, made even more resolute by our Sovereign God, was unmoved. 

I would guess that each of you have suffered loss. But there is no loss as painful and as tragic, I am told, as the loss of a child. Some of you can say, “I know how that feels.” I remember one of the first times I went to Haiti, around 1983 or so, and we visited a hospital in Port au Prince one evening. As we walked onto the grounds, we heard and saw a woman wailing, unconsolable, her screams of anguish piercing the night, her face racked with agony. The Haitian guide told us, “Her child has just died.” 

And as I read this passage, I imagine that scene being played out in every household in an entire nation. “There was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead.” The estimate of historians is there were about one million households in Egypt. One million firstborn children died that night. We cannot even imagine it. But, it was not that way in the land of Goshen, where the Israelites lived.

The 600,000 households of the people of God were not touched. The angel of death passed over their houses because there was blood on their doorposts. Believer, it is the same for us. The people who trust in the blood of Jesus Christ will be spared and not only that, will be welcomed into the joy of fellowship with the Father and the Son for eternity. The people who do not trust in Jesus and care nothing for His perfect blood sacrifice for sin, and broad is that road and many there are who find it, will be weeping and gnashing teeth as they are cast into darkness and eternal torment.

Jesus, our Passover Lamb, died as “the firstborn among many brothers.” That is good news, indeed.