Today’s passage is Exodus 8:16-32. Because Pharaoh reneged on his promise to let the Israelites go to worship him in the desert if the plague of frogs was lifted, God commanded Moses to inflict Egypt with gnats. The magicians said it was the hand of God, but Pharaoh did not relent. God next inflicted the Egyptians with a plague of flies but left the Israelites in Goshen fly-free. Pharaoh again agreed to let the Israelites go to the desert to sacrifice to the Lord but once the flies were gone he again reneged on his word.
Why a three-day journey into the desert to worship the Lord?
Why would sacrifices to God be detestable to the Egyptians?
“A three-day journey into the desert” (27)
Life is hard.
That is the standard.
Then it gets harder.
When harder returns to hard, the hard seems almost nice.
That seems to be what both Pharaoh and the Israelites are going through.
Plagues of blood, frogs, gnats and flies demand a response, and always the response is a plea for relief.
But as soon as the relief comes so too does the return to the status quo.
Pharaoh’s attitude doesn’t change. Mine doesn’t either, or at least not enough.
For years I have been trying to get my daughter to come to Korea to live with me for a year or even half a year.
I didn’t reflect deeply on why I wanted her to visit.
I never got beyond the worldly thought that it would be a good experience for her and probably for me.
What I didn’t want to look at was my guilt in making a child outside of marriage.
My daughter finally came to stay with me for a quarter of a year.
Like most people, she has many good qualities and many bad habits.
That I was ready for. What I wasn’t ready for, however, were the plagues of feelings and realizations that her presence unleashed in me.
She has complicated my life with guilt in my failure to help raise her, my fear in presenting the gospel to her, which I did in a poor manner because I did not discern what words to use, and the shocking realization that, as much as I have opened my life of events and sins to others, I have not opened myself to my wife or my daughter.
In fact, I have not let anybody past a certain point, not even God.
That makes me lonely, and my loneliness makes others lonely because there’s a part of me that’s currently unreachable.
My daughter’s arrival in my home has shown me that I don’t want to let something in me go.
I don’t want to take a three-day journey into the desert to worship the Lord.
I will endure plagues of sin, failure, bankruptcy, deaths and divorce, but I don’t want to go into the desert to find God in a new way.
In her Sunday sermon, Pastor Kim said that Moses broke the tablets with the Ten Commandments when he saw the Israelites dancing around the golden calf.
What do I have to break?
How do I open the door that lets me go to the desert to worship?
Application: Pray diligently and cry out for the understanding of my crippling guilt and freedom from it.
Lord, let me not be live with the hard heart of Pharaoh. Let me receive your grace to meet you more deeply and free me from my plagues.
