THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT! (From Exodus Chapters 5 to 12)

         1. Leobim was a hefty, 200-pound official in Pharaoh's court. As he drove home at the end of the day in his chariot, he passed a long line of Hebrew slaves trudging up the road toward the Land of Goshen. Leobim jeered, "So your Prophet Moses says your God will deliver you, huh? Let Him help you make bricks without straw then! Haw haw haw!"
         2. Leobim's vast estate was right on the Southern border of the Land of Goshen in the fertile Nile Delta, and as he turned off the main road to his mansion, the weary Hebrews crossed a bridge over a canal into Goshen.
         3. Jemima looked up from her cooking when her father and brothers came in. "Oh dear God!" she cried out, seeing their bleeding backs. "Those beasts beat you again today!"
         4. "Yes," her father sighed wearily. "Moses told Pharaoh that the Lord commands him to let His people go, but Pharaoh refuses to and has made our toil even harder by giving us no straw! Then his slave drivers beat us when we can't make enough bricks!"
         5. Cleaning their wounds, Jemima prayed, "O Lord, judge our cruel oppressors!"
         6. The very next morning, as Pharaoh went down to the banks of the Nile River, Moses and Aaron met him. The Lord's judgements were about to start falling!
         7. Leobim and several other officials were standing there as Moses came up, raised his staff in their presence and struck the water of the Nile. Suddenly, to Pharaoh's complete shock, all the water was changed into blood! All the streams and canals, the ponds and all the reservoirs everywhere in Egypt, even the water in the stone jars, was turned to blood! The Nile smelled putrid and was undrinkable, and all the fish in it died. Pharaoh, however, refused to yield to God!
         8. Seven days passed, and Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh with the message of the Lord again: "Let My people go!" But Pharaoh hardened his heart. So Aaron stretched out his staff over the streams and canals and ponds, and frogs came up and covered the entire land. Not even Pharaoh's palace was spared!
         9. Driving home, Leobim stared at his fields completely covered with a pulsating sea of croaking frogs. He was even more horrified when he waded through the frogs in his courtyard and entered his house. The frogs were in his kitchen, inside his ovens, even in his bedroom and on his bed!--His wife and son were hysterical with fear as the croaking, burping, bug-eyed creatures leaped all over them.
         10. Jemima and her brothers stood amongst the crowd of Hebrews on the edge of the canal, looking across into the Land of Egypt in amazement. Leobim's property was a seething swamp of frogs, yet in Goshen where they stood, there was not even one frog!
         11. Pharaoh finally begged Moses to get rid of the plague of frogs, and after Moses prayed, suddenly, mysteriously they all died. The deafening din of untold billions of frogs immediately fell silent. Leobim ordered all his servants to sweep the thousands of carcasses out of his house and rake those in his fields into piles. For the next few days, the entire Land of Egypt reeked with the nauseating stench of dead frogs!
         12. Pharaoh hardened his heart again, so the Lord commanded Moses to tell Aaron to strike the dust of the ground with his staff. When he had done it, the dust became lice, and they crawled all over every man and beast in Egypt. But Goshen was completely untouched!
         13. Moses came again and commanded Pharaoh, "Let My people go!" Pharaoh would not listen, so the Lord sent dense swarms of flies pouring into his palace and into the houses of his officials! Throughout Egypt the land was absolutely contaminated with flies! Leobim just about went crazy trying to drive away the filthy flies crawling all over him, and looked in bewilderment at the land of Goshen where not a single fly flew.
         14. Then the Lord sent a terrible plague on the horses, the donkeys, camels, cattle, sheep and goats of the Egyptians, and Leobim saw nearly all of his great wealth of livestock dying before his eyes. But just a few hundred yards away in Goshen, cattle grazed quietly and contentedly in their pastures, and not a single one died.
         15. Leobim was in Pharaoh's palace when the next plague hit. Moses took handfuls of soot from a furnace and tossed it into the air in the presence of Pharaoh. It then became fine dust all over the land of Egypt, and festering boils broke out on men and animals. Leobim cried out in horror as he broke out in painful boils from his head to his toes!
         16. Pharaoh himself and his magicians were covered with boils, but still he would not yield, so finally Moses stormed angrily into his courts and said, "Thus saith the Lord: 'By now I could have stretched out My hand and struck you and your people with a plague that would have wiped you off the Earth! Therefore, tomorrow I will send the worst hailstorm that has ever fallen on Egypt from the day it became a nation until now!
         17. "Bring in all your livestock to a place of shelter, for the hail will fall and slay every man and animal out in the open!"
         18. Pharaoh and all his officials had a full day to heed the warning, and several of the officials who feared the Word of the Lord brought their slaves and livestock into safety. But Leobim, like Pharaoh and most of the officials, defiantly ignored Moses.
         19. The next day, Moses stretched out his staff toward the sky, and suddenly the heavens grew ominously dark with clouds rumbling with thunder. Then, one blazing fork of lightning after another flashed down to the ground and hail came roaring down with deafening noise! All over Egypt, hail fell, lightning flashed and fire raced across the ground! On and on the storm went! Finally Pharaoh promised to let the Hebrews go, so Moses prayed and suddenly the storm stopped.
         20. When it was over, Leobim returned home through the melting slush of the melting hailstones. Mile after mile, as far as he could see on every hand, everything growing in the fields had been completely beaten down to the ground. Every tree left standing was stripped of leaves and branches. When he arrived at his estate, he could see the bodies of his slaves and livestock beaten down to the ground by the rock-hard hail!
         21. Jemima stood watching on the bridge that marked the border between Goshen and the land of the Egyptians. After the horrific noise of the storm had passed, all the Hebrews had come out of their houses to see if their land had been destroyed, but to their amazement and joy, all the fields and trees in Goshen were totally unharmed. Yet only yards away across the canal, the land of Egypt was a complete disaster area!
         22. After the storm had stopped, Pharaoh refused to keep his promise. One more time, Moses warned Pharaoh to let his people go. Pharaoh refused. Then Leobim and the other officials pleaded, "Let the people go! Do you not yet realise that Egypt is ruined?"
         23. When Pharaoh refused, the Lord sent an East wind which blew all night. By morning it had brought vast numbers of locusts, and they came swarming down all over Egypt. Never before had there been such a plague of locusts! From the edge of the bank of the canal, Jemima looked on in horror as the unending black clouds of locusts swept down upon Leobim's fields. They covered the ground until it was black, and devoured all that the hail had left. When they had finished, nothing green remained on any tree or plant throughout all Egypt!
         24. The air was thick with angry swarms of locusts, yet--almost as though held back by some invisible wall--not one of them flew across into the land of Goshen! Jemima and her brothers, as well as the entire crowd of Hebrews standing there, fell to their knees in awe and worship of the mighty power of the Lord to protect His children!
         25. Unbelievably, Pharaoh again hardened his heart after the locusts were gone, so then the next plague hit! When Jemima and her family went out and looked at what was happening, she gasped, "What is that?!"
         26. "I don't know," her father whispered.
         27. There before them was a wall of the blackest, darkest mist they had ever seen in their lives, swirling above the bridge that divided Goshen from Egypt. It was so black that they could not see one inch into it.
         28. The darkness that covered the land of Egypt was so thick, so total that no one could see anything! In his mansion, Leobim stumbled over his furniture and finally found a lamp, but even when it was lit, its light could not pierce the darkness!
         29. "What terrible kind of darkness is this?" he whispered, trembling. "It is so thick that it can be felt!!"
         30. Because of the terrible darkness, not a person left their house in all Egypt, and the entire nation came to a standstill for three days!--Yet in the Land of Goshen, the sun shone as brightly as it always had.
         31. Then the Lord brought one last plague upon Pharaoh and upon Egypt. At midnight He sent His Destroying Angel through the land!
         32. As Moses had instructed, all the Hebrews had eaten the Passover meal and painted their door posts with the blood of a lamb to show their faith in the Lord's protection.--But the unbelieving Egyptians refused to! When the Lord's Destroying Angel came to a house with blood on the doorposts, he passed over it. But where there was no blood, the Angel entered and slew the firstborn child!
         33. At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh in his palace to the firstborn of the prisoners who were in his dungeon. Pharaoh and all the Egyptians got up during the night, and there was a loud wailing throughout the entire Land of Egypt.--For there was not a house without someone dead. From the Land of Goshen, the Hebrews could hear the distant wailing of millions of Egyptians throughout the entire land.
         34. But among the Israelites everything was quiet. Not even so much as a dog barked. The Egyptians, mourning and in great fear of the power of God, came and begged them to leave, for their nation was in absolute shambles and ruins! That night, the Israelites left Egypt for the Promised Land, praising God for His miraculous protection from all these mighty plagues and disasters!

FOOD FOR THOUGHT (THE PLAGUES OF EGYPT!):

         35. (1) If the Lord miraculously protected His people then, surely He can and will protect His children in trying times both now and in the future days of Great Tribulation! When God's judgements fall on the wicked, they usually miss His children or they are spared from them. (Read Psalm 91)
         36. (2) The persecution that the Israelites suffered as slaves under the Egyptians was nothing compared to God's wrathful judgements upon Egypt. While God blessed and prospered His children in Goshen, horrible plagues tormented the wicked Egyptians.
         37. (3) If you're serving God, your life is precious to Him. You're His employee, His Worker, and your service is very valuable to Him, so He'll protect you so that you can continue to spread His Message. All through the Bible the Lord miraculously protected His children. Once in awhile they suffered some, but He always eventually delivered them. The Lord doesn't say you're not going to suffer any afflictions, but He says He'll deliver you out of them all! (Psalm 34:19)
         Although some suffering and persecution is normal for true Christians, the Lord usually does not allow them all to be wiped out at the hands of the wicked! Considering the vast number of Christians who have lived throughout World history, only a very small percentage of them ever died as martyrs!
         38. (4) There's no safer place in the World than in God's Will! The Lord's protection is just like a forcefield around us, and the Enemy cannot penetrate it! God's Word says a Heavenly host is "camped 'round about us!" (Psalm 34:7), and the Devil can't hurt us!--Not unless we run out of the charmed circle of God's Will, away from His protection!--Then we deserve to be punished, because we're disobeying the Lord and are going astray! Then His Own laws prevent Him from protecting you.
         39. (5) We, God's children, are at war with a dangerous Enemy! So you'd better keep in tune with God and His Word and stay in His Will, constantly seeking the Lord and His protection and thanking Him for His blessings. The Devil "walks about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour!" (1Peter 5:8) So don't you be his next meal!
         40. (6) God's Angels are camped 'round about us and our dwellings, guarding us night and day! Even though all around you may be war, turmoil and confusion, you can have peace in your heart and in your home if you trust in Jesus! The Lord is able to keep you through anything! (Psalm 121:8). As long as the Lord wants you to continue to help His Work spreading the Gospel, He has got to take care of you! He has promised it over and over in His Word, so there is nothing to worry about. Your future will be bright if you trust in the promises of God!