As predicted, despite the two signs of turning the water of the River Nile into blood and the land teeming with frogs, Pharaoh still would not let God’s people go. One wonders what would it take for him to come to his senses. In the face of his tough defiance, God sent the third plague. This time the Lord said Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth, that it may become gnats through all the land of Egypt.’” Moses did as he was told. So, Aaron stretched out the staff that he was holding and struck the dust of the ground. Immediately the land of Egypt was filled with gnats. These were a small two-winged fly resembling a mosquito. Gnats have two kinds. Those that could bite and those that wouldn’t bite. But when they invade a land they would come in large swarms. It must be a frightening sight to have the whole land teeming with them. Not only were they covering the whole land, but they also infested both man and animals. There is no way to explain how these gnats came about except that God had made it happen. Verse 16 tells us that God precisely said that. He predicted that the dust will become gnats. There would be no place that wouldn’t have any dust, so it is not hard to imagine the whole of Egypt covered in pitch darkness. So far in the first two plagues, Pharaoh’s magicians could replicate them but not for this one. In desperation, they told Pharaoh that “This is the finger of God.”
The question we will probably ask is, why this plague? Why turn dusts into gnats? The reason God did it was to deal a blow on one more god that the Egyptians worshipped. They venerated a god by the name of Geb. This was the Egyptian god of the earth, the one that supposedly supported the world. The Britannica Encyclopaedia said that “…he is being depicted as a man without distinguishing characteristics but would at times be represented with his head surmounted by a goose. He was believed to be the third divine ruler among the gods; the human pharaohs claimed to be descended from him, and the royal throne was referred to as ‘the throne of Geb.’” When God turned every square millimeter of dust into gnats, He was making a loud statement that the earth is His and everything within it belongs to Him. He owns the whole universe. He even had control over every god that the Egyptians worshipped. One can imagine the whole of Egypt being de-stabilized and thrown into chaos. In creation, God brought order out of chaos but now in the face of Pharaoh’s stubbornness, He brought chaos out of order.
This plague also discredited Pharaoh. How so? It was believed that Pharaoh had the power to sustain order in the cosmic atmosphere. He was responsible to maintain order in the environment. He was believed to be the one controlling the climate, regulating the season and preserved order in the world. God was destabilizing their belief system with the plagues. Like it or not God is the one who is in total control. There is nowhere or no one else we should go to when we desire to set order to a chaotic life. It is He whom we must turn to when we are disillusioned by the world of confusion. God is the sole answer to man’s disillusion with life. He is exactly what the song says, ‘He has got the whole world in His hand’.
These four verses also indicate to us that the enemy of our soul has his limitation. Tried as they might, the magicians couldn’t produce a single gnat. They tried to show their power but everything came to naught. They could reproduce the signs of the blood and the frogs but here they couldn’t do a thing. Not a single gnat was produced. Their so-called power was taunted when verse 18 simply implied that they were powerless when gnats were found on both man and animals. What an indictment! All they could acknowledge was that there was a higher power that they could not overcome. So reality sets in and they exclaimed, “This is the finger of God.”
When the magicians could replicate the first two plagues, they probably thought that Moses and Aaron were magicians like them. But with this third plague, they conceded that they were experiencing the power of God that was greater than those gods whose power they were representing. It must be said that the magicians at this point knew something about God but they did not know Him personally and experientially. Let us not be found in similar situations where we only know about God but not truly knowing Him in personal experience. Let us press pass the head knowledge of knowing God to a daily personal experiential encounter with Him. It will definitely change our lives forever. Encountering and experiencing the true God is a needful experience. When we do so we become progressively more and more like Christ our Lord. Let’s go for it!
No comments:
Post a Comment