Exiting Egypt Chapter 8 P2

Exiting Egypt

The Third Plague – The Finger of God

Exodus 8:16-19

By Dennis Lee: Chapter 8 P2

Read Ex. 8: 16-19

What I find interesting in this plague is that no warning, no chance to repent and turn is given. But what we can deduce is that Pharaoh would have rejected it anyway because He had just reneged on his promise to let God’s people go.

Such suddenness would have been another punch to the gut of the Egyptians, and the reason God did so, I believe, is that He will not be mocked, and no one will ever escape His judgment until they have repented, that is turned away from their sins and turn to God.

And so, Aaron stretched out the rod and smote the earth, or the dust, and the entire land of Egypt was swarmed with billions upon billions of insects. The entire land of Egypt became infested.

Now, the King James Version has the word in the Hebrew that means lice, but most commentators prefer fleas or gnats. I like lice, because the last thing that you want to start building a nest in your scalp or have crawling on your skin is lice. One person talked about seeing somebody whose scalp was so infested with lice, they said they saw the person’s hair come alive.

But whether it was lice or gnats, the Lord sent the plague, and it wasn’t pretty. They swarmed over all the people and animals, and they were so thick that no one could escape being attacked, bitten and infected by them.

Lice were extremely repulsive to the Egyptians, as they are to us as well. And while the Egyptians valued cleanliness, they couldn’t prevent the lice from residing on their person. But the lice also attacked the beast, and probably drove them crazy, not to mention preventing the priest not only from performing their priestly duties, seeing that they were unclean, but they also couldn’t offer up animals in sacrifice, seeing that they were unclean as well.

Beyond stopping their worship of these false gods, it also challenged on god in particular, Seb, the god of the earth. This god was worshipped in the hope that he would bless the earth by making it productive and by protecting the earth and the land of Egypt from natural catastrophes.

But it would seem that he couldn’t protect it from the finger of God, from God’s judgment against such idol worship.

The magicians attempted to imitate the miracle, but to no avail: they failed. Their only hope was to acknowledge the existence and the power of the Lord.

What made these magicians believe that? Well, after they duplicated all the previous miracles, that is, turning their staffs into snakes, the water into blood, and bringing the frogs out of the water, now they were confronted with something they couldn’t duplicate with their magic enchantments, or with their deceptions.