And Jehovah said to Moses, Rise up early in the morning, and set thyself before Pharaoh, and say to him, Thus saith Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews Let my people go, that they may serve me.
God speaks again to a king who has already refused Him, and the demand has not changed by a word. Two questions follow. Why does God keep sending the same message to a hardened man? And what does "serve me" mean for a nation of slaves?
Moses did not need an appointment. One writer points out how quickly this visit followed the last plague, and how little room Pharaoh had left to hide.
God's messengers, we presume, could enter the palace when the Lord commanded them. No place Pharaoh could go would put him beyond the reach of a message from God. Uninvited, Moses could appear, and very likely unexpectedly too. This proved true again. Moses sprinkled the ashes in front of the king on one day, and appeared early on the next. If Pharaoh had slept during the night, he must have been unsettled to face Moses and Aaron the next morning.
God names Himself by a despised, enslaved people.
"Thus says the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, 'Let my people go, that they may serve me.'" The God of the Hebrews was persistent. He would take no denial. The slaves of Pharaoh, of Israel's race, had One who took up their cause. True, no invasion from beyond Egyptian territory threatened the security of the land. But a power did threaten its peace again. Pharaoh had felt that power before, and all the might of his armies could not deal with it, or even touch it.
But the name meant nothing to Pharaoh. He judged this God by the state of His people.
He knew nothing of the Lord, the invisible and eternal God, and he laughed at the idea of His power. Were not the Lord's people Pharaoh's own slaves?
The demand is never just "let them go." Each time, it is release for something.
And note, it is "that they may hold a feast to me." If they were to leave Pharaoh behind, it was so that they might begin with God. This was a great change. Instead of toiling under Pharaoh's taskmasters, they were to feast in the company of the Lord.
Why did they have to leave the country at all? The service God asked for had no place in Egypt.
The Exodus is the separation of the people of God from the world. One feature of the scene struck me. Israel was to go out of Egypt to serve the Lord, or hold a feast to Him. They could not serve Him or sacrifice to Him in the land of their slavery, in front of that people. Their religious service was of such a character that Egypt would not tolerate it.
God's own reputation was bound up in getting them out.
A salvation which would have left them still in Egypt could not possibly be God's salvation. We must also keep in mind the Lord's purpose in saving Israel and in destroying Pharaoh. It was "that His name might be declared throughout all the earth." What declaration of that name or character could there be if His people were to try to worship Him in Egypt?
The message that starts here goes on to say why Pharaoh was still alive.
A third time the word of the Lord came to Moses: "Rise up early in the morning and present yourself before Pharaoh." A protest followed. The words should be read to mean this: though God had stretched out His hand, He had not yet cut Pharaoh off. He kept him alive, so that Pharaoh might magnify God's name, either by humbling himself or by rejecting the divine warning.
- Demand. The same words come again, unchanged. God takes no denial, and no palace puts a man beyond the reach of His message.
- Owner. He calls Himself the God of the Hebrews. The slaves Pharaoh counted as property had One who took up their cause, and the king's armies could not touch His power.
- Purpose. They are not just let go, they are let go to serve. They leave Pharaoh's taskmasters to begin with God, and trade toil for a feast.
- Distance. That service could not happen inside Egypt. A salvation that left them there would not be God's salvation, and would tell the world nothing true about His name.
- Mercy. Pharaoh was still alive only because God kept him alive. He had space to humble himself, or else to become proof of the power he refused.
For I will at this time send all my plagues to thy heart, and on thy bondmen, and on thy people; that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth.
Plague after plague has already struck Egypt. Now Moses returns with the heaviest warning yet: this time God will strike Pharaoh himself, so the king who boasted that no one was like him will learn there is no one like God.
The wording itself sets this warning apart from the ones before it.
The way this solemn announcement is made in Exodus 9:14 points to a special and singular character in these grave events. Nothing in the history of nations, then or since, has matched them.
God kept the threat of "all my plagues" open. Pharaoh heard that more was coming, but not what.
He had no rest. No one could bribe or ignore the God of the Hebrews. God demanded unconditional surrender, and sooner or later the king had to give it. Severe plagues had already come. More could follow, and would, if the king stayed stubborn. "All My plagues," said God. What would they be? They came one by one, and God announced the next only when the last had failed to break the king's obstinacy.
God aims the plagues at Pharaoh himself, not only at his land. Older translations read "to your heart" where the ESV has "on you yourself." One writer sets God's words to Pharaoh beside His words to Moses about the same events.
To the proud Pharaoh, who in his haughtiness had said, "Who is the LORD, that I should obey his voice and let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and moreover, I will not let Israel go" (Ex. 5:2), God showed him his own nothingness. He was one of the inhabitants of the earth who are counted as nothing before Him… God said to Pharaoh, "I will at this time send all My plagues to your heart." But to Moses He says, "I will… multiply My signs and My wonders in the land of Egypt."
Pharaoh could come to know God in one of two ways, and his refusal decided which.
Pharaoh said he did not know the Lord, but Pharaoh must know Him (Ex. 5:2; Ex. 9:14). If Pharaoh would disown Him in goodness, he must know Him in righteousness. His judgments were now coming into full view, and "the Lord is known by the judgment which He executes." As His holy prophet says to Him, "When your judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world learn righteousness." God would be known in grace. But if Egypt refuses that lesson, she must know Him in the raised hand of power.
God's closing phrase was Egypt's own claim for its king.
He was the god made flesh. He was actually divine, and at times would appear in a local group of three as one of its deities. In his own kingdom, and by flattering rulers abroad, he was addressed as a "god" — he even offered incense to himself! There was deep meaning in Pharaoh's enormous statues. They towered above temples and obelisks in city and plain, looking down on ordinary mortals… the mightiest, the most terrible, the supreme, none like him in all the earth.
The plagues then showed who really controls the natural world.
By His plagues, God showed that the heavenly bodies were only His servants. He called up darkness and hid the sun and moon from human sight. He also showed that the animal and vegetable kingdoms obeyed Him. He commanded, and insects, reptiles, fish and animals either arose or died, and at His word the trees and the fruit of the field perished… He proved Himself to be God, both creating and overruling.
One writer explains why God, who delights in mercy, still had to act.
God was about "to do His work, His strange work, and perform His act, His unusual act." Judgment is His "strange work." He delights in mercy, but He must act consistently with all that He is. He had borne with great patience the many provocations of this proud and insolent monarch. By refusing to let God's people go, that king had made himself the declared enemy of God. So he brought on himself the necessity of learning that "Everyone who is arrogant in heart is an abomination to the LORD; be assured, he will not go unpunished."
- Refusal. Pharaoh said he did not know the Lord. The plagues are God's answer to that claim.
- Reach. The blow falls on the king himself, not only on his land. Older translations read that God sends the plagues "to your heart."
- Rival. Egypt called Pharaoh a god with none like him on earth. God claims that phrase for Himself, commanding darkness, insects, animals and trees at will.
- Reluctance. Judgment is God's strange work. He delights in mercy, and acts only after long patience.
- Result. Pharaoh will know the Lord either way — in grace if he receives it, or in the raised hand of power.
For now shall I put forth my hand, and I will smite thee and thy people with pestilence; and thou shalt be cut off from the earth.
Just before the plague of hail, God sends Moses to Pharaoh with the sharpest message the king had yet heard. It tells him what God could already have done to him — and had not done. The words look back, not forward. Pharaoh stands at the height of his power, yet he is alive only because God has held back His hand.
The point of the words is that Pharaoh's survival was never his own achievement. He had defied God again and again, yet God had not carried out the sentence he deserved.
God tells him that his life was completely in God's hands. He could cut him off, but He had not… And why was he kept alive? It was to show him God's power, and to declare God's name throughout all the earth (15-16).
Pharaoh's cruelty did not begin with Moses' visits. He had been crushing Israel for years before God moved to rescue them. Judgment would have been just at any point along the way.
God could rightly have cut him off in his sin against Him at that time. Instead He bore with the wicked king. In the end He hardened his heart in His government of the world, so that Pharaoh rushed headlong into the jaws of death in a way designed to show God's power.
If God did not strike him down, He had a reason. God had raised Pharaoh to that height. The fall of a man so high would carry much further than the fall of an ordinary man.
God knew the stubborn self-will and pride of this man. Working behind the scenes, He raised him up to a place where he could keep mistreating His people, and even step it up, and so bring matters to a head. The time was now right for God to deal with him, and in doing so to display His power in such a way that His name would be declared throughout all the earth. A scripture like Joshua 2:8-11 bears witness that the name of Jehovah was declared that way in those days. And even in our day, 3,500 years later, the fame of it has not died away.
That raises an obvious worry. If God kept Pharaoh alive for His own purposes, was Pharaoh's wickedness God's doing? Commentators are firm on this. The evil was already there. God's part was to expose it and at last to seal it.
God never makes a man bad. Pharaoh was already a bad man, and he grew worse by resisting God's most striking appeals. What God did was put him on show. He had been raised from among men to such a height that his downfall would strike consciences far and wide throughout the world. He was hard from the start, and at last God sealed him up in a judicial hardening.
That distinction matters. God's patience with a man He could have destroyed does not mean the man was ever chosen for ruin.
The wicked are not chosen for eternal misery. Far from it. We find that God bears with them — vessels of wrath — with great patience. They are fitted for destruction not by Him, but by their own deeds.
Pharaoh read God's restraint as weakness. Each pause looked to him like proof that nothing final would ever come. That mistake is what makes this verse a warning, not a comfort.
God showed His power at least in part when His dreadful judgment finally fell on Egypt. It came after much patience and many earlier steps, and through them all Pharaoh clearly told himself that nothing could touch him. God is patient today too, sending warning after warning to a stubborn world. Yet He will show His power, suddenly and terribly, to a world that is startled and still hard.
- Spared. The verse is God telling a king that he is alive on borrowed time. God could have cut him off already. He chose instead to hold back His hand.
- Purposed. God kept him alive for a reason — to show His power in him and to spread His name through the whole earth. That report has still not died away.
- Endured. Pharaoh's cruelty long predates Moses' mission. What looks like slowness is God's patience with a man He could rightly have destroyed.
- Responsible. God never made Pharaoh bad. He exposed a wickedness already there, and at last sealed it in judicial hardening. Their own deeds, not God's choice, fit those who perish for destruction.
- Warned. Pharaoh mistook the delay for immunity. The same patience runs on today, warning after warning — and it ends the same way, when God shows His power suddenly.