Sometimes the Lord opens a door so wide that it shocks you as you stumble through it into a place that is clearly His will. Especially when the door opens in a place where you know there is opposition to you or to your message. Paul said the same of his time in Ephesus, a godless city of affluence, worldly lusts, and idolatry. He wrote to the church in Corinth, “I hope to spend some time with you, if the Lord permits. But I will stay in Ephesus until Pentecost, for a wide door for effective work has opened to me, and there are many adversaries.” (1 Cor. 16:8-9)

On Thursday, May 9, I finished my college classes for the spring. On the occasion when we have time to do it, I love to have the students do an impromptu speech on the last day. They draw two topics out of an envelope, choose one, and then they have two minutes in the hallway outside the class to prepare a 1-minute speech. And I sweeten the pot for them a little by telling them at the end of the round, I will go to the hallway and they can decide as a class what my topic will be. “Anything you want,” I say to them, “but keep it clean.” They are to write it on the board and call me in to speak for at least a minute without notes and without any preparation. I love these days. Especially when they choose a topic like my 8am class this spring. I walked in and saw they had written, “Roe v. Wade” on the board. They were grinning at me like, “Hey, Prof, we know you are a Christian and a pastor, so what are you going to do with this one?” I felt like Brer Rabbit in the briar patch. I smiled and started with this, “The most famous quote from the Declaration of Independence, one of our founding documents, is this: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.”  Then I said that there are two dark and ugly stains on America’s history, the first being slavery. The Three-Fifths Compromise in the US Constitution stated that only three out of five slaves could be counted for the purpose of taxation and representation. That fostered among many a belief that slaves were not fully human and were therefore disposable. In fact, slave owners could kill their slaves and were very rarely punished for doing so.  They could sell a husband to another slave owner and keep the man’s wife. They could sell all of the children that belonged to a slave couple or split them up and sell them. I asked the class, “How could we have ever believed such an atrocity, that it is ok, even good, to own another human being? How could we commit such a heinous crime against humanity? That is the way we think about slavery now, isn’t it? In the same way, I pray for the day that America’s second dark stain will be looked at the same way. I pray the day will come, and it may not be in my lifetime, when we look back at the practice of abortion and say, “How could we have ever believed that it is perfectly acceptable to kill an unborn child? How could we have ever said, “It is a woman’s right to choose?” God alone has the choice to give or to take away. 

When I finished, I saw a student in the class who comes to Antioch grinning at me. He told me later that he now uses that same argument with his friends who believe in abortion. 

I give all glory to God that He gave me the opportunity He did and that He had prepared me to speak to the topic. He did it. Not me. 

There is a wide open door for effective ministry given to us as followers of Christ. Every one of us. Not just to speak on the subject of the sanctity of life, which God surely cares about. But to speak to the issue of eternal life, which is offered only because of the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on the cross. 

We cannot be silent, saints!

John heard a loud voice from heaven, the place that cannot be shaken, and the voice said, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God.” The kingdom of God has come, the authority of Christ is preeminent, Satan is defeated! But not only that, we are partakers in that victory. How? We have conquered him by three things. First, by the blood of the lamb. The devil is constantly accusing us. Jesus ever lives to intercede for his own, the devil lives to accuse us. He accuses us before God. He accuses us before our own conscience, and he accuses us in every way he can. But listen to me, beloved. We are covered by the blood of the lamb. If the death angel had no authority to touch the people of Israel whose doorposts were marked by the blood of a lamb, how much more are we covered, protected, and made conquerors by the precious blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God! Imagine two families in the same house on the evening of the first Passover. These families are sharing a lamb, and one of the fathers is really nervous and tells his friend of his fear. The other says, “We put the blood of the lamb on the door, right?” He responds, “Right, but I am still worried, with everything that’s been going on from the river of blood to the flies and boils. Now God is going to kill the firstborn. What if we didn’t do something we were supposed to do?” The other says, “What are you talking about? We did everything. We are packed and ready to go. The blood is on the doorposts and the lintel. I am telling you we are going to be fine. God will take care of us.” He responds, “Well, I hope so. But I have only one son, and you have two. I don’t know what I would do if I lost my son.” That night the death angel came through. Which one of those men lost their firstborn? Neither. Because the promise was not only that the one whose faith was the most settled and the one who had the greatest peace would be spared. No. The blood on the doorpost settled the matter. In the same way, the blood of the Lamb of God silenced the accuser of the brethren. We have conquered by the blood of the Lamb. Eliza Jane Hewitt’s wonderful hymn, My Faith Has Found a Resting Place” said it beautifully: “I have no other argument. I need no other plea. It is enough that Jesus died, and that he died for me.”

Second, we have conquered by the word of our testimony. How is the enemy defeated? By the word of our testimony, by the gospel. How does the kingdom of God advance until Jesus returns? By the word of our testimony, by the Gospel, by the power of His word. And we who have the word by grace and through faith are given the greatest privilege in all the world: to tell others about the good news of great joy. We are granted the privilege to testify as witnesses who have seen Jesus change our lives, forgive our sins, adopt us into His family and give us the assurance of eternal life. In some places is against the law to do that and sharing the gospel may lead to death. That’s the third way we are conquerors: our willingness to die for His sake. “For they loved not their lives even unto death.” We are more than conquerors through him who loved us, Paul wrote. Dying for Jesus is not the worst thing that can happen to a believer. To die is gain! 

What do we know this Christmas, and every Christmas until Jesus returns? The greatest gift? We have peace because of the blood of the Lamb. We have an eternal home because of the blood of the Lamb. We have fellowship with one another because of the blood of the Lamb. We have “exceedingly great joy” because of the blood of the Lamb. We have nothing to fear because of the blood of the Lamb. 

We have every reason to say, “Merry Christmas!” It is all because of the blood of the Lamb. 

Thank you, Jesus, for your indescribable gift!

We used to sleep in the same bed together, my two brothers and me, on Christmas Eve. That alone was a Christmas miracle, given the fact that the other 364 days of the year would find us plotting ways to hurt one another. I remember BB gun fights, where we were running around the woods, shooting at each other. Or we would fight from room to room in the house with spit wads, using thick rubber bands to wing them on their way. To up the ante, we decided one day to shove straight pins through the spit wads. Yep, three little angels, that’s what we were. But on Christmas Eve, we crawled into bed together and tried to go to sleep, keeping one ear tuned for reindeer hooves on the roof, and one foot ready to launch any brother who got too close.

One of my favorite memories was the Christmas Eve we heard the front door open, and the distinct sound of something heavy being rolled across the threshold. Grandpa never used a wheelchair so we knew it wasn’t him coming for a midnight visit. And we had no idea why Santa would be bringing gifts through the front door, when we had a perfectly good fireplace in the den. So we just lay there in bed, whispering about what it could possibly be, and daring each other to sneak downstairs to steal a glance. Nobody wanted to risk being seen by Santa, or worse by Dad, so we eventually drifted off to sleep.

One of my favorite memories of Christmas Day was the next morning when three sleepy-eyed little Fox boys found a brand new yellow mini-bike parked under the tree. We lived on two acres and had a creek behind and beside us, and empty lots and woods all around, so we could not wait to jump on the bike and start blazing trails. But first, Dad needed to give us a lesson on how not to wreck a mini-bike. This is one of my favorite memories, too, as Dad straddled that kid-sized bike with his 6’3” frame, and proceeded to explain to us young boys how dangerous a mini-bike could be. He had barely gotten the words out of his mouth about how sensitive throttles are, when the bike shot off like a rocket and threw Dad into the air where gravity began to work immediately and brought him quite unceremoniously back to the earth. The bike and Dad were perfectly unharmed, but after a few minutes my sides were killing me. Even mom got a chuckle out of that one.

Christmas is a season of giving, and the yellow mini-bike has to go down in the Fox history book as one of the best gifts we ever received. We also got exactly one of them, so we boys had to learn how to share. I have no idea how we worked that out without BB guns or bloodshed. I just remember many happy hours riding that mini-bike, and I suppose both my older and younger brother did as well.

There may not be a mini-bike under your tree this Christmas, or even a reindeer on your roof. But that’s OK, because the best gift cannot be bought in a catalog or brought down a chimney. The best gift, the only one that matters, was laid in a feeding trough in Bethlehem many years ago. Here’s what the angel who brought the news to Joseph said about the gift: 

“You shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.”

Pharaoh, with a heart hardened by God, called all his army and every chariot in Egypt together and took off after Israel. They caught up with God’s people, camped out and backed up against the Red Sea, just as God had led them! 

The people of Israel heard horses and chariots and men’s footsteps behind them and you get the picture of 2 million people turning away from the Pillar of Cloud to watch the enemy coming from behind. They knew their weapons of warfare were no match for the army headed their way. That is why Moses tells us “they feared greatly.” They cried out to the Lord, but you get the idea that it was just a reflex, “Help us, God!” with no faith behind it. Because then they turned on Moses. I think this illustrates four stages we can go through when we take our eyes off the Lord and put them on men, even godly men like Moses. First, they attacked Moses with irony, even sarcasm: “Did you bring us out here to die because there weren’t places in Egypt we could be buried?” Hey, they were building graves as slaves. Pyramids were graves. There were graves everywhere; Egypt was “Graves ‘r US.” Want a grave? You are probably standing next to one. 

Second, they accused Moses: “What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?” This is angry. Bitter. But wait: WHO brought them out? It wasn’t Moses. God brought them out to see His glory. He didn’t bring them out for their comfort or for an easy life or just to be ‘free.’ To see God’s glory and to live for it would require everything from them. Third they justified themselves: “Didn’t we tell you to leave us alone and let us just live and die as slaves?” Finally, they collapsed into self-pity: “We would have been better off serving as slaves than dying in the wilderness.” They are not even a week out of Egypt and have already flipped the script in their minds on the horrors of slavery. 

Attack. Accuse. Justify. Wallow in pity. It’s an ugly pattern.

Moses showed great restraint here, didn’t he? And great faith. He was standing clearly on the promise God had given him in verse 4, that Pharaoh would pursue and that God would be victorious. I don’t think Moses had any idea how God would do what He promised. But when our only hope is God, it is easier to go to Him and to trust in Him. That is why Moses could say these powerful, hope-filled, soul-energizing words to Israel as God says them to His people today at Antioch. First Moses says, “Fear not.” How often does God tell His people, “Do not be afraid”? It was the first thing the angels said to the shepherds on that glorious night. The Puritans used to say, “Fear God and you have nothing else to fear.” Second, Moses says, “Stand firm and see the salvation of the Lord.” Fear tells us to run and hide. Impatience tells us to do something, even if it’s wrong. Presumption tells us to jump into the sea and start swimming. God says just stand there and keep your eyes open. Watch for Me. Expect Me. There’s no need to run or fight or defend or anything else. Just watch. See the salvation of the Lord that He will work for you today.  And the Egyptians you see today you will never see again. Third, Moses says, “The Lord will fight for you, and you only have to be silent.”  God will do it all. You will contribute nothing to it because nothing is needed but God.

Do you see what God is teaching His people there beside the sea with the enemy approaching? He has taught them about redemption, but here He is teaching them about salvation. They were going to see what God looks like when He reaches down and saves His people from destruction. They were expecting nothing but death. God was showing them that in the darkest hour, He is and always will be triumphant. There is no greater demonstration of this collision of God and the forces of darkness in the Bible. Except one. 

None of us were backed up against the Red Sea, so we can only imagine it as we read this account. But every single one of us was backed up against the pit of hell when Jesus took our sins upon Himself on the cross and conquered sin and death and hell and the grave on our behalf. Can we see that and hold on to that and put away our fears every time they start to whisper to us? 

“The Lord will fight for you! You only have to be silent.”

The importance of the firstborn has been lost in many ways in our culture, and of course we want to love each of our children the same. But in the ancient world, the firstborn son represented the future of the family. He was given rights and privileges that were not given to the others, including the right to inherit a double portion from his father. But this was not to show favoritism. He was to be consecrated, set apart, to demonstrate that the whole family was set apart to God. We are all yours, God. It is the same principle that is illustrated later in Exodus when the people are told, “The best of the firstfruits of your ground you shall bring into the house of the Lord your God.” When we give a tithe or an offering to the Lord, we are saying, “Everything I have belongs to You, God. This tithe or offering represents your bountiful giving to me.”

When Israel, God’s “firstborn,” was about to leave Egypt, He gave them a commandment to set apart the firstborn son. “Every firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem.” They did this by sacrificing a lamb to God. This ritual of redemption was a reminder for every father and mother in Israel that their son did not belong to them but to God. It is the same for all of our children, and one of the reasons why we encourage child dedication at Antioch. We don’t have to sacrifice a lamb or even a turtledove. We simply ask the father and mother to hand their child into the arms of one of the elders, and by doing so they acknowledge their complete dependence on God’s grace for that child’s salvation. The elder prays for the child and for the parents, acknowledging that same dependence on God the Father. When the child is handed back into the parents’ arms, they receive him with a renewed desire to be good stewards of this precious gift that belongs to God, to do all they can, by God’s grace, to love and nurture and bring up their child in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. 

The people of God leaving Egypt were being given a new catechism and instructions on how to teach their children. They were being taught how to speak to their sons and daughters about God and faith. The firstborn son may say when he is old enough to understand it, So you dedicated me to God when I was born? Yes, we did. And you had to kill a lamb in my place? Yes, we did! A lamb had to die so that I could live in a holy way for God? Yes, son. You belong to God. You were born for a reason. You were redeemed for a purpose. God wanted you to be here now to ask me these questions so you could see that your life matters. You are not your own. You were bought with a price. You were not created by God to go your own way. You were not created by God to live for your own pleasure. You were created by God and redeemed by a lamb so that you may come to know the greatest pleasure, the greatest treasure in all the world: to know and love the Father, the one who loves us and redeems us and with a strong hand brought us out of Egypt.

How does all of this relate to us? You and I are redeemed by the One who “like a lamb (was) led to the slaughter…and opened not his mouth.” You and I were redeemed by the “firstborn of all creation.” God offered up His firstborn for us! 

I read this week that the greatest amount ever paid for anything at auction was $450.3 million dollars. That amount in 2017 purchased a painting by Leonardo da Vinci called “Salvator Mundi,” or “Savior of the World.” That is a lot of money. What if the owner of that painting gave everything he owned to be able to buy that painting and proudly display it in his home? And what if he now invites everyone he knows, everyone he meets, to come and see it?  That would be generous of him, to share that painting with others. But what if the person who owns that painting has not come to a saving knowledge of Christ, the subject of the painting, the one who laid down His life to save all who come to Him by faith? That would be a sad irony, indeed. 

None of us own that painting. We don’t have a DaVinci original painting of Christ. We have much, much more to invite people into our homes and into our lives to see. 

We have Jesus.

The feast instituted by God in the Old Testament and the Lord’s Supper instituted by Christ in the New Testament are purposeful remembrances that point to God’s mighty acts of deliverance. Moses said to Israel, “Remember this day in which you came out from Egypt, out of house of slavery, for by a strong hand the Lord brought you out from this place.” He repeats that twice more, “For with a strong hand the Lord has brought you out of Egypt.” They did not leave. They were brought out. 

Jesus said the same to His disciples as He gave them the Lord’s Supper for the first time. “Do this in remembrance of Me.” In other words, We did not find a way to salvation. We did not find God. We were not even looking for Him. God found us. God delivered us. With a strong hand, God brought us out to bring us in!

That’s what Moses tells the people of God, that He was taking them out of Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. It is a good place. We know the story and all the troubles and trials and dangers and disobedience the people of Israel faced over the next 40 years. God knew it too but promised them they would get there. It reminded me of the time Jesus told His disciples as they stood on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, “Let us go across to the other side.” They piled in and started across and suddenly a great storm came up, as can happen on that sea, and the disciples were terrified. Especially when they looked around and saw Jesus fast asleep in the back of the boat! They woke him up and basically asked Him if He didn’t care that they were all getting ready to die. The Lord rebuked the storm, and it became perfectly calm immediately, and then He said to the disciples, “Why are you so afraid? Have you still no faith?” Jesus told His disciples, “Let’s go to the other side.” You can trust Me, Jesus spoke into their fears. And Jesus has promised all who believe in Him, “I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come again and take you to myself, that where I am you may be also.” We will get to the other side. 

God gave Moses other instructions about how the Passover Feast would be remembered and repeated year after year. I would argue that a powerfully important part of God’s instructions on the Passover is about discipleship, particularly of our children. He made it known that the language of our faith and the truth of God’s Word would be passed down from one generation to the next. So that a hundred years from that night, a father would say to his children, “It was your great, great, great, great grandfather who was brought out of Egypt by the mighty hand of God. If God had not kept His promises, you would not be here. Let me tell you about God and His salvation.” Fathers and mothers today, and all people of faith who follow the Lord and want to be conformed more and more to His character, are very intentional about the Word, to know it and to love it and to follow it and to share it. And to remove even the slightest hint of leaven, of false teaching, that the world has added to or taken away from the Word of God. 

We make disciples one day at a time. We grow as disciples one day at a time. By the grace of our great God.

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.

God ordained the Passover as an annual celebration for Israel after the first one in Egypt right before the people of God were delivered from bondage. This meal would become part of a Feast of Unleavened Bread.  Here are a few observations on this story in Exodus 12. First, notice that God says this is a memorial day. God commanded it in order to remind them forever of God’s great deliverance from slavery in Egypt. God set up a memorial stone, as it were, for their good and for God’s glory.

Second, it was a feast to the Lord. This was a time when the whole nation of Israel, all of God’s people, stopped what they were doing to gather and worship God. We don’t celebrate week-long feasts as Christians now, Sunday is supposed to be a weekly feast! It is a gathering of God’s people to go hard after God, to worship Him with all that we are and all that we have. When we come into this place on Sundays with every intention to give ourselves to God, to worship Him in spirit and truth, what happens? We are blessed. We taste and see that God is good. We see Him and hear His voice and grow in our faith. 

Third, it was to be a statute forever. They were to keep this reminder before them continuously so they did not grow proud or complacent, thinking they didn’t need God. He says it again: “You shall observe this day throughout your generations.” And Moses again tells the people they are to keep this feast as a way of reminding themselves and teaching their children of how great God is. “And the people bowed their heads and worshiped.”

There are only a handful of times the Old Testament when the Feast of Unleavened and the Passover are written about being observed after the Exodus. Maybe there were many times, but only 6 or so are mentioned. Remember during Josiah’s reign when the Book of the Law was found by Hilkiah and then it was read to Josiah? He tore his clothes saying, “Our fathers have not obeyed the words of this book.” He then began reforms in the nation, including restoring the Passover to Israel, saying, “For no such Passover had been kept since the days of the judges…” That was a 400-year lapse! Despite the meticulous instructions God had given His people about keeping this feast, they forgot to do it, failed to do it, and ultimately forgot the Lord and did what was right in their own eyes. 

If there are only 6 mentions of the Passover being observed in the Old Testament, the seventh mention is in the New Testament. Jesus kept the Passover with His disciples on the day before His crucifixion, and that was the last time He did. That was the last Passover meal and on that same evening Jesus instituted the Lord’s Supper which became a permanent sacrament for the church. There is no religious significance for the Passover now because it was fulfilled finally and forever in Christ. The Passover looks back to the deliverance of Israel from slavery. The Lord’s Supper looks back to the death of Christ on the cross and our deliverance from sin, death, and the grave. And the Lord’s Supper looks forward to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb which we have been invited to by virtue of our salvation.

Our Passover? Jesus said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment but has passed from death to life.” 

That is our daily celebration of deliverance.

When Ernest Shackleton and his crew on the ship Endurance set out on December 5, 1914, they were bound for Antarctica. On January 15 their ship got hopelessly stuck in an ice pack east of Antarctica in the Weddell Sea. From then on, their goal was simply to survive. The freezing temperatures and the near starvation were horrible, but when winter approached in late April, the crew of the ship grew more nervous. The sun disappeared in early May and was not seen again until late July. Shackleton’s biographer wrote, “In all the world there is no desolation more complete than the polar night. It is a return to the Ice Age— no warmth, no life, no movement. Only those who have experienced it can fully appreciate what it means to be without the sun day after day and week after week. Few men unaccustomed to it can fight off its effects altogether, and it has driven some men mad.” (adapted from Philip Ryken’s book, Exodus: Saved for God’s Glory)

Darkness was the ninth plague God brought to Egypt. It was the last of the three sets of three and as has been His custom with plagues 3 and 6, God gave Pharaoh no warning for number nine.  He simply told Moses to stretch out his hand toward heaven and there would be darkness over the land of Egypt. Let me remind you of the creation of all things, how God spoke on the first day, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And it was good. And in or around 1450 B.C., God spoke again and with a word turned out the light in the land of Egypt. And as God said, this was “a darkness to be felt.” The boils brought physical pain and the hailstones and locusts brought death and destruction to animals, people, and the land. But darkness brought a different kind of pain, a suffering that was felt in hearts and souls. It must have been terrifying for the Egyptians who worshiped the sun and praised Ra the sun god every morning when they saw the sun and because of the sun were able to see everything else. But they were worshiping the wrong god, so God took it away for three days! One of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes is this one: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.” The Egyptians, most of them, were living in utter spiritual darkness all the time, and God made it plain to any who had eyes to see and understand that He alone is our light and our life. 

Three days of darkness. There is no mistaking the foreshadowing here, is there? This may have been the darkest three days in Egypt’s history, but the darkest three hours in the world’s history started on a Friday at noon, about 1480 years later, as Jesus hung on a bloody cross: Matthew wrote, “Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour.” And though the sun may have shone after that, there was three days of darkness as the Savior lay dead in a borrowed tomb. The disciples mourned and the world rejoiced that Jesus of Nazareth was dead and gone. They thought. Then the glorious Resurrected Savior, the light of the world, burst forth from death and grave and conquered hell for all who believe! Isaiah wrote, “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who dwelt in a land of deep darkness, on them has light shone.”  For those of us who know Jesus, our joy is just beginning.

The darkness continues for all who do not believe.

I love the question God asked Pharaoh in Exodus that starts with “How long?” That phrase is also repeated by Pharaoh’s servants. “How long?” God asks Pharaoh, “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, that they may serve me.” There are many times the Psalm writers asked the Lord, “How long?” When will you deliver us, O Lord? But this time it is directed at a man. “How long, Pharaoh, will you stand there in your pride?” It reminded me of the time Elijah took on 450 prophets of Baal, all by himself (he thought) at Mt. Carmel. Except he wasn’t all by himself, was he? God was there, and there were still 7000 who had not bowed their knees to Baal. Elijah stood before a people who had gathered to watch this battle and who clearly represented the great indecisive middle. Like the people today who have a cross around their necks and a rabbit’s foot in their pocket and a daily horoscope tucked in their copy of the Koran and a statue of Buddha on their desks. Elijah cries to them, “How long?” “How long will you go limping between two different opinions? If the LORD is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” We know how that story ended and how God answered the question of “Who is worthy?” He settled the matter with fire.

“How long?” We have to be very careful asking someone else that question. But we can and should regularly ask it of ourselves. In what areas of your life could you ask yourself, “How long?” How long will I stay where I am and not move forward in healthy ways? In my walk with Jesus, my relationships with others, my practice of discipline in the Word and prayer and gathering with a local church, my work ethic, my giving, my practice of spiritual gifts, my encouragement of others, my being fully present wherever I am, my worship, my consideration of others as more important than myself. Hey, if you dare, give someone you really trust permission to ask you those same questions! 

I am not sure Pharaoh had given his servants permission, but they asked him anyway. “How long shall this man be a snare to us? Let the men go, that they may serve the Lord their God. Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?” What boldness! There is dissent in Pharaoh’s house. These servants may not have lived another five minutes, but they spoke truth to power, didn’t they? They had just heard Moses and Aaron say that the locusts would come the next day and finish off the destruction of Egypt. 

Are you old enough to remember the song, “Sixteen Tons,” by Tennessee Ernie Ford? My dad had that record and would sing along with it, so I heard it too. Many times. As a middle son of three boys whose regular pastime was fighting each other, my favorite line to quote to them was this one: “One fist of iron, the other of steel; If the right one don’t get you then the left one will.” Ha! I dreamed about being that tough but it was always just that. A dream. 

But not for God. His right pinky brought the father of all hailstorms to Egypt in the seventh plague. And His left pinky finished it off in the eighth plague. The locusts ate everything green in the land that the hail had not already destroyed. It is a reminder that with a word God brought forth all the vegetation on the third day of creation, every plant and every tree. And with a word from God in the eighth plague, every source of food in Egypt was destroyed. Every plant and every tree–gone. Famine and starvation was sure to follow. The de-creation of Egypt was almost complete. 

Which begs the question for us today: How long will God have patience with a world that has reviled the cross and the empty tomb?