You know what I find weird? How many people think that being Christian automatically precludes belief in ghosts, aliens, the paranormal, the occult, witchcraft and all those other things. Well actually, it's not that people think that that confuses me, but rather that people think that because so many Christians will tell them things like it.
Even if I didn't think it was just a waste of time to protest things like Harry Potter or Ouija Boards, and that all that ends up happening is you look a bit silly and are somewhat less likely to be taken seriously next time around, I sort of see it as a sign that Christians who rail against the existence of actual magic and powerful, non-Godly supernatural forces haven't really been paying attention to the Old Testament.
Here we get the first hard biblical evidence that God (or His emissary) is not the only one capable of miracles (or at least, miraculous-ish signs - more on this later).
Moses and Aaron are sent to Pharaoh and given a number of signs to perform to show Pharaoh that they and God mean business. First, there's the staff-to-serpent trick, then water-to-blood followed by FROGS EVERYWHERE!
But here's the thing - the text says clearly that each and every one was repeated by Pharaoh's magicians (often with the description "using their secret arts"). They made their staffs serpents (although clearly not as bad-ass as God's, since His devoured them all...), they turned water into blood and they summoned legions of frogs. It wasn't until gnats (side note: the Hebrew word apparently can also refer to lice... *shudder*) that the court magicians were stymied.
Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention in Sunday school, but I don't remember a whole lot of attention being paid to this little tidbit when the story of the plagues was told.
Normally the telling goes something like this:
1) God's miraculous, amazing, incredible sign of power
2) Pharaoh doesn't care
3) Repeat 1 and 2.
Nothing about the fact that there's more going on here than just Pharaoh somehow ignoring someone with the power to turn the Nile to blood or to summon frogs from the ground.
Probably not the same frogs, but you never can tell...
Maybe this has something to do with the (ongoing and upsetting) business of God saying that he'll harden Pharaoh's heart to His signs - He must have known that the Egyptian magic men could to the same things as Moses and Aaron's first three signs, so there must be something else.
(Fair warning - wading into C.S. Lewis-inspired theology here.)
Perhaps the other side of this (because the primary mission is clearly to get Israel out of Egypt) is to show that God is not something that is completely other than what their experience of the supernatural is, but rather that He is the pinnacle of it.
I'm paraphrasing from memory and on the fly here, and if John Bowen happens to be reading this, I suspect I'm about to get an email, but Lewis essentially held that the Christian myth (myth meaning story here, and not necessarily carrying the connotation of fiction) is similar to many other ancient myths, except that it happens to be true. Moreover, the Christian story (which, it may come as a surprise to some, definitely and necessarily includes the Old Testament) contains in it all the Truth that the other myths' truths point to.
Maybe God's starting out with the stuff that "anybody" can do on purpose, so that it's so much more effective when the real show starts. It still bugs me that the real show contains to much death and destruction, but, as is so often the case, the death and destruction are the result of a freely chosen course, after the paths and consequences have been clearly delineated. There's even a guy who's on the ball enough to think "maybe this next one will come true like all the others" and brings his flocks and slaves inside before the deadly hailstorm kicks off, but most seem to not have that foresight.
While we're with Lewis, there's something strange about these signs/plagues. As Lewis points out in Miracles, God's miracles differ from magic in two ways: 1) they all point to something specific, and 2) they're actually quite rooted in existing natural laws, but tweaked in some way. So the miracle of water into wine, as Lewis puts it, is merely a hyper-fast version of the process where water is absorbed by grape vines, transferred into the grapes, turned into grape juice, extracted, fermented, bottled and enjoyed with some tasty multigrain crackers and a nice slice of 5-year-old Balderson cheddar...
dang
With this idea of miracles in mind, it's interesting to look at the signs themselves in these three chapters.
First, a stick turning into a snake. Not, by Lewis' definition, a miracle.
Second, water turning into blood. Maybe slightly closer, along the same lines as the water-to-wine process, but still, I'd say, outside of the parameters Lewis would describe.
Third, frogs all over the place, coming from the ground and the water. This is interesting, because it's at least a sort of description of a process from earth to animal, which could seem like a Lewisian miracle's framework. I'd put it on the fence, since frogs materializing out of the ground is still not really something that just happens, no matter how long you give it.
So those three, progressing more and more into the realm of the miraculous, but still not firmly there. They're definitely signs, though. They're magic, and can be done by magicians. Whether they're real in whatever sense you want to use is another question, but there's no indication that the blood wasn't real blood or that the toads weren't real toads, so we'll just assume they were and that they were magic.
Then we start getting into signs that are more clearly manipulations of the natural world (giant swarms of gnats/flies, followed by livestock-killing pestilence, followed by an outbreak of human cold sores, etc... and then magicians are left in the dust.
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Throughout all of this, I've constantly had the "I'll harden his heart so I can kill his kid" prophecy of God hanging over my head, and then I get to 9:15-19:
15 "For if by now I had put forth My hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, you would then have been cut off from the earth. 16 "But, indeed, for this reason I have allowed you to remain, in order to show you My power and in order to proclaim My name through all the earth. 17 "Still you exalt yourself against My people by not letting them go. 18 "Behold, about this time tomorrow, I will send a very heavy hail, such as has not been seen in Egypt from the day it was founded until now. 19 "Now therefore send, bring your livestock and whatever you have in the field to safety. Every man and beast that is found in the field and is not brought home, when the hail comes down on them, will die.""'He does make a strong point here (I know, big of me to concede a point to God...). If death (or the liberty of Israel at any cost) had been the goal, it would have been done long ago. There would have just been a word, and then nothing out of Egypt anymore. But that's not how it went down.
Even when the plagues go from inconvenient to downright dangerous, there's a specific warning, a plea, even, to choose safety over recklessness, faith over arrogance and obedience over a highly inflated sense of self-suficiency. God basically says to them "look, you've seen what I can do, and now I mean business. If you choose for this to happen, make sure you're inside, because...
And so it goes... The plagues continue.
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