Author: jetbrane

I am a Pastor of a small Church in Mid-Michigan who delights in my family, my congregation and my calling. I am postmillennial in my eschatology. Paedo-Calvinist Covenantal in my Christianity Reformed in my Soteriology Presuppositional in my apologetics Familialist in my family theology Agrarian in my regional community social order belief Christianity creates culture and so Christendom in my national social order belief Mythic-Poetic / Grammatical Historical in my Hermeneutic Pre-modern, Medieval, & Feudal before Enlightenment, modernity, & postmodern Reconstructionist / Theonomic in my Worldview One part paleo-conservative / one part micro Libertarian in my politics Systematic and Biblical theology need one another but Systematics has pride of place Some of my favorite authors, Augustine, Turretin, Calvin, Tolkien, Chesterton, Nock, Tozer, Dabney, Bavinck, Wodehouse, Rushdoony, Bahnsen, Schaeffer, C. Van Til, H. Van Til, G. H. Clark, C. Dawson, H. Berman, R. Nash, C. G. Singer, R. Kipling, G. North, J. Edwards, S. Foote, F. Hayek, O. Guiness, J. Witte, M. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson, Mencken, Lasch, Postman, Gatto, T. Boston, Thomas Brooks, Terry Brooks, C. Hodge, J. Calhoun, Llyod-Jones, T. Sowell, A. McClaren, M. Muggeridge, C. F. H. Henry, F. Swarz, M. Henry, G. Marten, P. Schaff, T. S. Elliott, K. Van Hoozer, K. Gentry, etc. My passion is to write in such a way that the Lord Christ might be pleased. It is my hope that people will be challenged to reconsider what are considered the givens of the current culture. Your biggest help to me dear reader will be to often remind me that God is Sovereign and that all that is, is because it pleases him.

Chit Chatting w/ an Alienist on the Wisdom of Inter-Racial Marriage

Dear Rachel Bentley Ramey ….

Clearly all humans are humans but that does not mean that within the one human race there does not exist distinctions among races and ethnicity. The Holy Spirit understood this as expressed in Roman 9:3

For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my people, those of my own race…

Silly Holy Spirit. Didn’t he know that there is only one race… the human race?

RBR wrote,

Except…I actually do believe this. If a Christian man and a Christian woman are both at a proper stage of life *to marry*, there’s no biblical barrier to their marrying *each other*. And such has been commonly accepted throughout most of history; it’s far from a novel position.)

BLM responds,

55 y/o Christian women marrying 18 y/o Christian men does have a proper barrier. Marriage is about finding the right helpmeet — one who can join in the work of exercising Dominion for Jesus Christ — as a reflected image of one another (hence helpmeet). Plus, as 55 y/o Christian women would not be Biblical for a 18 y/o Christian man since they could not obey God’s requirement to “be fruitful and multiply.”

Marriage has as one purpose to support the community from which it arises. Inter-racial marriages normatively cannot do that. Indeed, the only community that inter-racial marriage supports is a multi-cultural cosmopolitan community. Now we can pretend that is not true that inter-racial marriages do not normatively support the community wherein it is located but we have only to lift our eyes to see how our social order is fracturing. One reason for that (not the only reason) is the proliferation of unequally yoked inter-racial marriages.

And I promise you… what you are suggesting is indeed novel when looking at world history. Marriages in stable communities throughout world history were the union of two people who shared the same religion, culture, race, language, and history. Denying that is just silly.

I do think there is a one and many reality about mankind. Man is one and yet there are clearly racial and ethnic distinctions. It is why God could say in Acts 17

26 From one man (Unity) he made all the nations (Distinctions among the Unity), that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.

So, we see here your argument about there being only one race (the human race) and therefore there are no races of men is not accurate. Indeed, it is only in the last 50 years or so wherein we have found arguments popular that “there there is only one race,” or, “race is a social construct.”

You’ll not be surprised to hear me say that it is you I find unable to think in proper categories. But, as that is not uncommon in the West you should not be too upset by that.

Your counter examples of Rahab, Zipporah, and Ruth do not work but I am not inclined to run through that all again in detail.

Here are some links/thoughts though

Concerning Rahab

Concerning Ruth

Ruth was not an ethnic Moabite, she was an Israelite. For over 200 years Ruben, Gad and half of Manasseh occupied all the territory north of the Arnon to MT Hermon. Part of that territory was once Moab’s but the Amorites under King Sihon took it. Moab tried to take it back and for about 18 years succeeded, at least in that area. Israel fought back and it’s during this time that Naomi’s sons died. Boaz, a righteous Jew, followed the Torah’s steps as Kinsmen Redeemer. As per the Deut. 23:3 prohibition, Boaz could not have redeemed Ruth had she been a true Moabite. Just as a Puerto Rican living in New York City is an American so Ruth living in the land of Moab was still Israelite. Boaz redeemed a fellow Israelite when he served as Naomi and Ruth’s Kinsmen Redeemer. Ruth was a Moabite Israelite, which like many had done in Israel, may have worshiped the local deities but after her husband died chose to repent returning to Judah’s territory with Naomi.

RBR wrote:

Inter-ethnic couples are presented with the added challenge of having to deal with bigots like you. Their divorce rate might be lower if you didn’t make yourself an extra enemy.

BLM

Right… so given those extra challenges that you recognize it is a lack of wisdom to press ahead with marriage in the teeth of all that. Clearly, you’re bigotry against me is acceptable so I’m not sure what the problem is with bigotry in general as long as one is bigoted towards the proper things. You are bigoted against Kinists — a bigotry which is errant. I am bigoted against marriages about to be unwisely contracted. I am bigoted against people entering into marriages unwisely.

In my defense though I’m also bigoted against marriages contracted between people coming form vastly different classes, vastly different cultures, and those who have a vastly different health status. Call me silly, but I think those entering into marriage should have as much in common as possible and I am bigoted against marriages about to be contracted that find the differences to be significant and doubtless abiding.

I’ll just note that your comment about melanin is irrelevant since since race is not merely a matter of melanin just as gender is not merely a matter of plumbing.

You are an Alienist. Alienism requires us to ignore all the implications and deductions that we find throughout scripture is favor of pursuing a cafe-latte world where all colors bleed into one.

The Alienists tried that once before.

It was called Babel.

Cheers,

Winston McCuen on Jewish Perfidy

 

 

In 1543, the German Reformation leader Martin Luther wrote a treatise by the title, “On the Jews and their Lies.” Luther’s beef with the Jews was about their false theology and belief, not their race. The Talmud — the very foundation and centerpiece of Jewish cultural life since the Roman Empire — teaches that Jesus was a bastard conceived from an evil spirit by a whore mother during menstruation, that he had Esau’s soul, and was a fool, an evil man, a conjurer, a seducer, and was crucified, then buried in hell and subsequently idolized by his followers. For centuries, Talmudic Jews have taught their children that Christians are dung-like, beast-like, murderers, fornicators, unclean and hell-bound children of Satan. Thus Judaism became the first anti-Christian heresy.

 

So Luther, despising these wicked blasphemies against the Lord and His Church, longed to see Jews saved by conversion to the true religion. But, as Luther grew older and more familiar with Jewish blasphemy and Jewish sniff-necked, wealth and power-obsessed recalcitrance, his earlier, youthful evangelical optimism turned to skepticism and even pessimism. Like Luther, Christians today are commissioned and commanded to spread the Gospel. But also like Luther, we are obliged to distinguish honestly and clearly, as our lights allow, between carnal or unbelieving Jews — like most of the Pharisees, Judas lscariot, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Freud and MANY others — and converted, regenerate, Christian Jews — like the eleven disciples, Stephen the martyr, the Apostle Paul, and NOT so many others. So the Jews are a byword among the nations (1 Kings 9:6-9), scattered (Amos 9:9:Luke 21:24) — with many being active and implacable enemies of the Church (Philippians 3:2-3) and  subverters of family and society (Titus 1:10-11) — and only a remnant from them will be saved (Romans 9:27-29).

 

In the Bible we find bitter complaints and righteous condemnations by a Jewish Christ and His Jewish believers against their carnal Jewish brethren: by Moses in the Pentateuch (Ex. 32, Num. 26: 9, Deut. 11: 6); by Jesus in His Gospels (John 8: 37,44, 10: 26, 19:11); and by Paul in his letters (Romans 9: 27,10:2-3; 11:5). Thus does Scripture warn believers of the perfidious modus operandi of the carnal Jew. Indeed, those who warn seem to commend segregation — a forced Zionism, for the good of all.

 

In the Jew-controlled West today, a “racist” is anyone an anti-White person doesn’t like; while an “anti-Semite” is anyone a carnal Jew wishes to smear. The statesman’s rule of thumb? Find a problem; and typically you find the carnal Jew behind it as cause. Meanwhile, certain Biblically illiterate Gentiles — of dubious faith (Matt. 13:13, 21), known by their fruits (Matt.7:20), ever cowering before man (Prov. 29:25) on the broad way (Matt. 7:13-14) — serve as flaks and enablers for the carnal Jews, who vainly tried to murder and end Christ on the Cross (John 19:11). Ever oblivious to their Jewish masters’ lies and machinations, these useful idiots, these stupid goyim, these clueless simpletons, handle the Word of God ineptly (2 Tim. 2:15) and deceitfully (2 Cor.2:17) and adulterate by addition and subtraction (Rev. 22, 18-19) while stumbling over and braying like grassless asses (Job 6:5) at all deeper Biblical truths, including free will, election and the dispensational evolution of Israel.

 

But the Lord ordered all things before the beginning of the world, and nothing happens apart from His Perfect Plan. So carnal man — whether Jew or Gentile — can run but not hide. All unbelief, all carnality — was defeated on the Cross two millennia ago, and at the Judgment, there will be no atheists or agnostics or false religionists, and every knee shall bow before the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

Winston McCuen, Ph.D. (philosophy)

Ron Unz on Jewish Perfidy

“Back in those late Cold War days, the death toll of innocent civilians from the Bolshevik Revolution and the first two decades of the Soviet Regime were generally reckoned at running well into the tens of millions when we include the casualties of the Russian Civil War, the government-induced famines, the Gulag and the executions. I’ve heard that these numbers have been substantially revised downwards to perhaps as little as twenty million or so, but no matter. Although determined Soviet apologists may dispute such very large figures, they have always been part of the standard narrative history taught within the West.

Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelming Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, and estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of the American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to WW II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the NKVD.

Both of these simple facts have been widely accepted in America throughout my entire lifetime. But combine them together with the relatively tiny size of worldwide Jewry, around 16 million prior to WW II, and the inescapable conclusion is that in per capita terms Jews were the greatest mass-murders of the 20th century, holding that unfortunate distinction by an enormous margin and with no other nationality coming even remotely close. And yet the astonishing alchemy of Hollywood, the greatest killers of the last one hundred years have somehow been transmuted into being seen as the greatest victims, a transformation so seemingly implausible that future generations will surely be left gasping in awe.”

Ron Unz
Understanding World War II — p. 203-204

Ron Unz is Jewish.

Bahnsen on Ethics Arrived At Apart from God

With painful irony we note the words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Man has learned to cope with all questions of importance without recourse to God. . . . [God] is teaching us that we must live as men who can get along very well without him.” The pathos of these words is that they were penned in Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison, penned after Hitler’s Gestapo, learning to get along very well without God, had imprisoned Bonhoeffer, thereby preventing the completion of his book on Ethics and resulting in his hanging in 1945. When the questions of ethics are answered without recourse to God, the following views of the state become inevitable:

The State incarnates the Divine Idea upon earth (Hegel).

The State is the supreme power, ultimate and beyond repeal, absolutely independent (Fichte).

Everything for the State; nothing outside the State; nothing

against the State (Mussolini).

The State dominates the nation because it alone represents it (Hitler).

The State embraces everything, and nothing has value outside the State. The State creates right (Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

Thus Bonhoeffer’s assertion represented the very outlook which condoned his immoral execution. The source of moral authority and law within a society will either be theistic or political; when the former is repudiated, the latter allows of no logical barrier from tyranny.

Greg Bahnsen, Theonomy in Christian Ethics

God Goes to War — Plague #1; Nile & Blood

Ex. 7:14 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is unyielding; he refuses to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes out to the river. Confront him on the bank of the Nile, and take in your hand the staff that was changed into a snake. 16 Then say to him, ‘The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to say to you: Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness. But until now you have not listened. 17 This is what the Lord says: By this you will know that I am the Lord: With the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water of the Nile, and it will be changed into blood. 18 The fish in the Nile will die, and the river will stink; the Egyptians will not be able to drink its water.’”

19 The Lord said to Moses, “Tell Aaron, ‘Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt—over the streams and canals, over the ponds and all the reservoirs—and they will turn to blood.’ Blood will be everywhere in Egypt, even in vessels[a] of wood and stone.”

20 Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord had commanded. He raised his staff in the presence of Pharaoh and his officials and struck the water of the Nile, and all the water was changed into blood. 21 The fish in the Nile died, and the river smelled so bad that the Egyptians could not drink its water. Blood was everywhere in Egypt.

22 But the Egyptian magicians did the same things by their secret arts, and Pharaoh’s heart became hard; he would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the Lord had said. 23 Instead, he turned and went into his palace, and did not take even this to heart. 24 And all the Egyptians dug along the Nile to get drinking water, because they could not drink the water of the river.


We enter now into a series on the plagues of Egypt and we do so, in part,

In order to see how God is a God who delivers His people
In order to see how God deals with the wicked who oppress His people
In order to see how God is true to His promises
In order to see how the pseudo gods are no gods at all

These and other realities will be brought to light as we consider these ten plagues against Egypt.

In order to provide the background to these plagues we are reminded that Israel went down into Egypt in order to escape a famine. God had set this all up via the life of the patriarch Joseph which begins this drama  w/ being sold into slavery. We could well say that Israel’s occupation in Egypt begins with Joseph in slavery and ends in Joseph’s people being delivered from slavery.

Israel, as a separate people, are given the best of the land in Egypt so that Israel would not get genetically lost in Egypt. However eventually there arose a Pharoah over Egypt, who did not know Joseph (Ex. 1:8) and because of the threat that Pharoah viewed Israel that Pharaoh made Israel slaves in Egypt.

With the passage of time Israel’s bondage became so onerous that they cried out and God heard their groaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob.

At this point God rolls into motion what He had determined from eternity past. He rolls into motion the deliverance of His people from the great and mighty Egyptian empire. God unseen enters into the cosmic ring to absolutely enervate and disembowel the gods of Egypt.

That is was a battle between God and the gods of Egypt is testified to over and over again in Scripture. Here are some examples;

Ex. 12:12 For I will go through the land of Egypt on that night, and fatally strike all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the human firstborn to animals; and against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments—I am the Lord.

Later, Jethro speaking to Moses

 Ex. 18:11 “Now I know that the Lord is greater than all other gods, for he did this to those who had treated Israel arrogantly.” 

 Numbers 33:4 for the Lord had brought judgment on their gods.

Now as moderns we don’t think in these terms any longer. We moderns think we are too sophisticated to have gods and so all of this kind of language is just the stuff of myths or legends.

This is proven by the fact that many liberal commentaries do backflips in order to prove that all of these plagues, including this first plague, was a natural occurrence.

Remember, what you have been taught on this score. The liberal give naturalist interpretations because they begin their inquiry by presupposing that the supernatural cannot be true and since the supernatural cannot be true other explanations have to be found. For these anti-Christs the explanation of this supernatural reality are

1.) Astronomy view — Accounts for the Exodus events as the result of comets hitting the earth.

2.) Geological view — Accounts for the Exodus events as the result of volcanic eruptions or tidal waves

3) Seasonal view — The Nile hit a supercharged high tide water mark whereupon a chain reaction of plague events occurred.

In this 1st plague we are looking at we get the explanation that the Nile turned red because of minute fungi or perhaps because of tiny reddish insects that had overbred.

Anything to avoid a conclusion that all this happened by the hand of God (Ex. 7:5).

As your Pastor allow me to encourage you in the years to come to never make a home in a Church where any of the Leadership takes up this view of the supernatural.

So, as we said we have before us in the plagues an example of God going to war against His Egyptian competition.

We see that first in this text with the mention of Pharoah. In the Egyptian Pantheon Pharoah was a god. Ancient Egyptian texts characteristically describe Pharoah’s power in terms of “Pharoah’s strong hand,” “Pharoah being the possessor of a strong arm” and “Pharoah as the one who destroys the enemies with his arm.” These are the descriptors of a god and we know that because the Exodus account will speak the same way about Yahweh who is opposing Pharoah.

… for by [b]a powerful hand the Lord brought you out from this place. Ex. 13:3

Ex. 6:6 Say, therefore, to the sons of Israel, ‘I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the labors of the Egyptians, and I will rescue you from their bondage. I will also redeem you with an outstretched arm, and with great judgments.

That Pharoah was an Egyptian god whom Yahweh is taking to the woodshed is also testified to by the fact that Pharoah was understood as the one who in the Egyptian mindset was responsible to maintain cosmic order. Through the plagues Yahweh is overturning the Egyptian cosmic order. With each plague Yahweh is casually whittling away at the perceived godlike power of Pharoah to maintain the cosmic order. With each plague the God of the Bible is mocking Pharoah as god.

Now there is another wrinkle here that is going on between God and Pharoah and that is that one of the symbols of power that Pharoah wore on his crown. When Moses confronts Pharoah there stands Pharoah as the seed of the serpent adorned with serpent power. The Egyptian Pharaohs wore a headdress with a serpent in the form of a cobra, and it was embroidered on the robes of princes.

So, not only do we find Pharoah taken as a God but we find him as the embodiment of the seed of the serpent rising up to strike Israel as the seed of the woman. This is Genesis 3:15 in living action.

God speaks to the serpent;

“And I will put warfare
Between you and the woman,
And between your seed and her Seed;
He shall bruise your head,
And you shall bruise His heel.”

So, in this warfare between the gods of Egypt and Yahweh there is also redemptive history that is in bold relief. Yahweh has raised up a deliverer (Moses) to deliver His people from the clutches of the seed of the Serpent with the purpose of making His name known to Pharoah who had said that he had not heard of the God of the Hebrews (Ex. 5:2).

By this you will know that I am the Lord: (Ex. 7:17)

There is another Egyptian God to deal with in this text besides Pharoah and that is the river Nile. The Nile was the lifeline of Egypt. Without it Egypt would have been one with the deserts surrounding it. The Nile was the center of many of its religious ideas and many temple to various gods were built on the shores of the Nile. Many of the gods of Egypt were associated with the Nile;

The god Khnum was considered to be the guardian of the Nile sources
The god was the ‘spirit of the Nile’ and its dynamic essence

The oldest Egyptian text to mention Hapi was “Texts of Unas” where Hapi is mentioned as “Hep.” Hapi was believed to be the god of the Nile River which played the most important role in constructing the Egyptian civilization. It was believed that ‘Hapi’ actually was the name of Nile River during the pre-dynastic period in Egypt. Generally, he was considered as the god of water and fertility.

One of the greatest gods in the Egyptian pantheon was Osiris and the Egyptians believed that the river Nile was his bloodstream. When Yahweh turns the Nile to blood there is then a certain mocking factor to this. It is as if Yahweh is saying, “You think the Nile is Osiris’s blood. Fine! Let it be turned to blood.”

Of course this action reverses the effect of the Nile from being a blessing to the Egyptians to being a curse. They could not drink the water. It gave off a foul odor. The fish could not died.

The Egyptians had sang hymns to the Nile

“O sacred Nile
The bringer of food
Rich in provisions
Creator of all good
Lord and Majesty
Sweet of fragrance”

Yahweh had given a solid kick in the teeth to more than a few Egyptian gods.

And what of these gods of Egypt. Let us note something here about them;

What we see here is that all the gods of Egypt are, are a projection of Egypt collectively speaking.

One thing I hope to tease out in this series is the fact that all peoples and cultures are only a reflection of the Gods that they project reality onto. We will see that that was true of Egypt. Egypt by means of collective projection created their own gods. What the Egyptians did is that they supernaturalized the natural — they invested the natural with the supernatural — and in doing so made gods out of the natural realm.

The fundamental sin of Egypt was to see the world in naturalistic terms. Whatever gods there were to the Egyptians, were merely the projections of the Egyptians upon the natural world.

This is a point to camp on for a moment because this is the reality of all false gods that people serve, whether ancient or modern. People project their own desires and wishes and by that action give life and reality to that which has no life or reality on its own. The false gods people and peoples serve have no reality. In our language today we would say that are all merely social constructs.

We see that with this first plague. Both Pharoah and the Nile were natural phenomena and yet both were invested with the supernatural and were so treated as one of the 80 or so gods that belonged to the pantheon of Egyptian gods.

This should pause us to ask what are the fake gods in our culture that we have, by means of projection, imbued with the supernatural?

What of our Scientism wherein we project divinity upon something that clearly is only a natural phenomenon? What of our technology wherein we do the same?

We laugh and make fun of the ancient Egyptians for their turning crocodiles, rivers, hippopotami, snakes, frogs and vultures into gods but how far are we from just that by turning psychology, management techniques, and the FEDS into gods by means of projecting the supernatural upon them.

We should also note, that all these Egyptian gods running around demonstrates once again that all cultures are hopelessly expressive of the gods they serve. Modern man in the West likes to pretend that his culture isn’t an expression of the gods he serves and yet a how far removed are we really from the Egyptians?  It was clearly the case for the Egyptians that in Pharoah they lived and moved and had their being. Is it any less the case for the Modern West that we look to the State as our god?

Well… let us consider one more reality before leaving off this morning.

Many scholars believe, and I submit that they make a good case that what is going on with the plagues including this turning water to blood is that Yahweh is doing to Egypt a reverse of what he did in Creation. The argument is that just as Yahweh ordered the universe in creation so Yahweh is disordering and undoing creation as applied to the Egyptian world. Now we have already hinted at this but note here some of the Biblical evidence particularly as it applies to the first plague of blood; 

To initiate the plague of blood, we are told that Aaron is to take his staff and hold it over all of Egypt’s bodies (or gatherings) of water. The Hebrew word used in Exodus 7:19 to describe the “bodies” or “gatherings” of water is מקוה the same word that appears in the opening chapters of Genesis when God creates the seas:

בראשית א:י וַיִּקְרָא אֱלֹהִים לַיַּבָּשָׁה אֶרֶץ וּלְמִקְוֵה הַמַּיִם קָרָא יַמִּים וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים כִּי טוֹב

In Gen 1:10 God called the dry land Earth, and the gatherings (מקוה) of waters He called Seas. And God saw that it was good.[6]

The use of the unusual Hebrew word מקוה in connection with the plague of blood[7] cannot fail to evoke an association with the creation of the seas in Genesis 1:10 and indicates the cosmic import of the plague.

Similarly, the expression in Exodus 7:19 “Let them be(come) blood” (וְהָיָה דָם) echoes the use of the same verb (though not in the exact same form owing to a different linguistic context), “Let there be(come)” (יְהִי), in the creation story in Genesis.[8]

However, in contrast to the creation, where the primeval waters are not altered by a creative act, the first plague demonstrates that God is able to change the very nature of things.

God is visiting chaos upon the Egyptians. He is uncreating them.

This is altogether appropriate given that Egypt refuses to live in God’s reality. Egypt has created a false reality to live in and now God is uncreating their false reality. He is disabusing them of their social constructs. He is essence turning them over to their sin.

“You want to live in a false reality… I’ll take from you real reality and you let me know how that goes.”

This next observation is probably controversial, but you’ll be hearing it week to week so we should get it on the table. I think what is going on here is God is mocking the Hades out of the Egyptians. In this battle between the Egyptian gods and Yahweh God is rubbing their pretentious Egyptian noses in their profoundly stupid social constructs. What’s more it is a polemical mockery.

And why does he do all this?

Because God will not share His glory with another. God will not be mocked which is what all idolatry is. Idolatry is a mocking of God.

God does this to rescue a people who are not any better than the Egyptians. He has set His love upon Israel and it is that love alone … a love that was constantly unrequited that drove God to deliver His people.

It is the same love, grace and compassion that provided delivery for us in our houses of bondage. God could have rightly left us in our sin and misery but out of His great love He provided a deliverer for us and rescued from the slavery of sin. It is the character of God to love because He loves. It is the character of God to rain nuclear vengeance upon those who touch the apple of His eye.

Remember vs. 7. He does all this to make Himself known.