In Exodus 8, the revelation of God through his great acts of judgment against Pharaoh and Egypt make known the fact that God does not treat his own people neutrally. To be sure, the Hebrew people are caught up in the plagues of frogs and gnats, but even in these plagues, we can discern the better blessing that comes with membership in the covenant community. In the frog plague, we see the better blessing of prayer that is heard. In the gnat plague, we see the better blessing of God’s greater power over the power of the Egyptian magicians. However, in the fourth plague of flies, God specifically declares that he will make a distinction, or set redemption, between his people and Pharaoh’s people. Up to this point, the fourth plague communicates most clearly how God does not treat his children neutrally; they are preserved from experiencing this plague.
Now, the distinction that is made between the children of Israel and the people of Egypt in Exodus 8 is worked out passively in this instance. God’s people don’t do anything other than carry on with their lives while God does the work of making a distinction. This reflection will instead focus on the active side of how this distinction is worked out. Specifically, it will build off the idea of the folly of a hardened heart and then turn to the wisdom and blessing of active life in the church.
Last week, Exodus 7 gave an opportunity to reflect on the folly of Pharaoh’s hardened heart. It was noted that because of Pharaoh’s hard heart, he could not correctly interpret the events that were unfolding before his eyes. More precisely, he chose to interpret these events differently. J. H. Bavinck expresses this idea with clarity when he writes, “In a certain sense, one may say that a man sees and thinks and remembers and understands what he wants to see and wants to think and wants to remember and wants to understand, whereby we must think of ‘wanting’ in terms of unconscious aspirations.”[1] Reflecting on Paul’s words in Romans 1, J. H. Bavinck identifies the source of this counterproductive unconscious operation as the effects of exchanging the truth for a lie. He writes, “Directly following from this tendency to exchange is that one will become foolish. His ‘thinking’ becomes idle, hollow, senseless, and his ‘foolish heart,’ his heart that no longer takes the connections in the universe in themselves, is darkened (v21). As punishment for this cardinal sin of paganism God applies the ‘giving over to sinful passions,’ against which paganism offers no shelter. With poignant seriousness Paul lays bare this consequence three times, in his three-fold repetition: God has given them over (vv24, 26, 28).”[2] We could then say that Exodus 8 foreshadows these destructive consequences of sin.
These consequences of sin provide the backdrop for the distinction that is made on the positive side. In contrast to the “giving over to sinful passions,” those who are brought into the community of faith, the covenant community, “are renewed in the whole man after the image of God” (WSC 35) in knowledge, righteousness, and holiness. The gift of the Holy Spirit poured out on believers enables us to resist being conformed to this world and instead to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (Rom 12:2). The origin of that renewal and transformation is the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom. It is the cultivation of true wisdom that enables us to actively enjoy this distinction that is made between God’s people and all others. What is wisdom? As one scholar summarizes it, wisdom “is a practical knowledge that helps one know how to act and how to speak in different situations. Wisdom entails the ability to avoid problems, and the skill to handle them when they present themselves. Wisdom also includes the ability to interpret other people’s speech and writing in order to react correctly to what they are saying to us.”[3] When we cultivate wisdom, we are able to either avoid or endure much heartbreak and heartache in this world that so often characterizes an unbelieving approach to life. Because the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, true wisdom is both a blessing and fruit of this distinction that God makes, the fact that he does not treat his children neutrally but equips them to live well in this world until he comes again to make all things new.
[1] J. H. Bavinck, “Het Probleem van de Pseudo-Religie En de Algemeene Openbaring,” Publicaties van de Reunisten-Organisatie van de N.D.D.D. 12 (1940): 15.
[2] Bavinck, “Het Probleem,” 8.
[3] Tremper Longman, How to Read Proverbs (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2006), 14–15.
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