Let My People Go!
- R.C. VanLandingham
- Mar 8, 2023
- 3 min read
Updated: Mar 9, 2023
This is Day 13 of my 40 day Lenten Blog.
The Lord commanded Moses to return to Egypt to lead the Israelites out of slavery. And God told Moses not to fear for all of the men who had wanted to kill him were now themselves dead. So Moses set his wife and sons on a donkey, took up the rod of God in his hand and travelled to Egypt.
Moses and his brother Aaron went before Pharaoh and asked that the Israelites be released so that they could go into the wilderness and worship the Lord God. But Pharaoh refused, mocking God. And he said that the Israelites must have too much time on their hands if they wanted to go into the wilderness to worship God. So he told the taskmasters to give the Israelites no straw to make bricks. They had to gather their own straw which made the work longer and harder to perform but they were still expected to make the same number of bricks in the same amount of time. Obviously this greatly increased the burden on the Hebrew slaves.
Through Aaron, Moses told Pharaoh that if he did not let the Israelites go that the Lord would bring terrible pestilence on the land. But Pharaoh did not believe him. He demanded Moses prove himself. So Aaron threw down his rod and it transformed into a snake. But the palace magicians could do the same thing, turning their staffs into snakes using their dark arts. You see, when humans practice dark magic, the devil and his demons will perform amazing feats to fool us into thinking they are powerful like God. This is to discredit God, or to make people think He is not as powerful as He really is. However, Moses' snake ate the snakes of the palace magicians. Still, Pharaoh refused to listen to them.
The Lord brought plagues down on Egypt because Pharaoh would not let the Israelites go. The first plague was turning the Nile River into blood. But still Pharaoh would not listen because the magicians showed they could do the same by their dark arts with the help of demons. The second plague was sending frogs. There were so many frogs that they filled the bedrooms and even beds of the Egyptians. But again the magicians showed that they could do the same by their dark arts.
The third plague was gnats. The gnats covered everyone and everything in Egypt. When the magicians tried to perform the same thing using their dark arts they could not, and told Pharaoh that this was "the finger of God." But Pharaoh's heart was already hardened and he refused to let the Israelites go.
The fourth plague was flies. All of Egypt was ruined by swarms of flies. But there were no flies in parts of the country where the Israelites lived. Moses told Pharaoh that this was to set God's people apart and to divide them from Pharaoh's people. Finally, Pharaoh relented and told Moses to take the Israelites and go. But as soon as the swarms of flies had left, Pharaoh changed his mind and refused to let the people go.
So the Lord sent a terrible plague to kill the cattle, horses and flocks in Egypt. Many of the Egyptians' cattle died, but none of the Hebrew's cattle died. But Pharaoh still refused to let the Israelites go. So God sent horrible boils upon the people of Egypt and when that didn't work, He rained fire and hail down on the land. When Pharaoh still refused to let the Israelites go, the Lord sent a plague of locusts to eat all of the food in Egypt. When that did not work, the Lord turned the sky so dark that people could not even see each other for three days.
Yet through all nine of these terrible plagues, Pharaoh refused to let the Israelites go. But the Lord God had one final plague to unleash on Egypt. The worst plague of all.
R.C. VanLandingham is a Catholic homeschool dad just trying to make it through this life and into the next! He has written a Christian children's fantasy series about a boy named Peter Puckett!
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