Daily Lesson for March 19, 2018

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Exodus chapter 7 verses 14 through 19:

14 Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh’s heart is hardened; he refuses to let the people go. 15Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is going out to the water; stand by at the river bank to meet him, and take in your hand the staff that was turned into a snake. 16Say to him, “The Lord, the God of the Hebrews, sent me to you to say, ‘Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness.’ But until now you have not listened. 17Thus says the Lord, ‘By this you shall know that I am the Lord.’ See, with the staff that is in my hand I will strike the water that is in the Nile, and it shall be turned to blood. 18The fish in the river shall die, the river itself shall stink, and the Egyptians shall be unable to drink water from the Nile.”’ 19The Lord said to Moses, ‘Say to Aaron, “Take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt—over its rivers, its canals, and its ponds, and all its pools of water—so that they may become blood; and there shall be blood throughout the whole land of Egypt, even in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.” ’

Pharaoh’s sins have come back to haunt him. 

Pharaoh’s order — begun eighty years before — to have all the male Hebrew babies drowned in the Nile River meets its judgment and ultimate consequence first of the Ten Plagues as the Nile is turned to blood. 

Just as the blood of Abel cried out from the earth after he was killed by his brother Cain, so now the blood of the Hebrew children reveals itself in the Nile River and all the vessels and basins that have ever drawn from it. 

Pharaoh thought he had forever done away with the lives of these children; but the LORD could still hear their cries. For to the LORD, these children were still alive. 

William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  Now the dark sins of Pharaoh’s and Egypt’s past were surfacing to the light of the present day.

The point: a person or a nation who has never really confessed, or made amends, or sought repentance will again be plagued by the sins of its past. This is the mandate for the processes of truth and of reconciliation. 

The Israelites know the truth and the truth will set them free. What Pharaoh does not understand is that the truth could set him free also.