Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Exodus 7:14-19

Exodus 7:14-19 

  Like so many things in Scripture and in life, it comes full circle.  Moses was meant to be hurled into the Nile as an infant to die, but instead he floats in an Ark until he is saved by someone from Pharaoh's household.  Now, as an adult, he goes back to the Nile to meet Pharaoh, where he tells Pharaoh that the Nile, the source of life in Egypt, will turn to blood.  It didn't turn to blood due to the violence Pharaoh meted out to all those Israelite children, but now it will turn to blood to show Pharaoh that he is not in charge of the world.  Pharaoh had probably given little thought to all of this, but we see the bigger picture when we are patient to see what God has in store.
  I would never promise you that things always wrap up in such neat little packages exactly when we want them to in life.  Plenty of Israelites were waiting for this day their entire lives, never to see Pharaoh humbled.  The Israelites were in slavery for 400 years -- how many prayers seemed to go unanswered?  God was there, but planning in a completely different time scale than most of the people would have imagined.  
  One of the hardest things about being a Christian is accepting that there is a time greater than the one we know.  True life, as it is known in God, extends beyond the life that we know in the here and now.  We can't see it or touch it, and so we struggle to trust it, but the Bible tells us about it, and Jesus shows us the path to it through his own death and resurrection.  
  May that reality, the one we cannot see, teach us to trust in God to resolve injustice, and may it encourage us to work for peace in the time that we do have.

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