THE FINGER OF GOD

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Tell Aaron, 'Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the ground,' and throughout the land of Egypt the dust will become gnats."

They did this, and when Aaron stretched out his hand with the staff and struck the dust of the ground, gnats came upon men and animals. All the dust throughout the land of Egypt became gnats.

But when the magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts, they could not. And the gnats were on men and animals. The magicians said to Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God."

But Pharaoh's heart was hard and he would not listen, just as the Lord had said.

Exodus 8:16-19

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Lying in the presence of God is never a good idea.

Unfortunately, Egypt’s Pharaoh didn’t quite grasp this when he decided to make a false promise to Moses.

You’ll remember that God had unleashed the second of what will end up being twelve curses (also referred to as plagues) on the Egyptian nation. That curse involved an onslaught of frogs that found the way to get into everything, including an invasion of Pharaoh’s palace. This frog incursion became so severe that Pharaoh summoned Moses and his brother Aaron, asking for Moses to pray to God so the frogs would be taken away. If Moses would do this, Pharaoh vowed that he would let the people of Israel go to conduct sacrifices to God.

With this, Moses prayed and God removed the frogs but Pharaoh refused to release the Israelites. The scriptures tell us that his heart remained hardened as he continued to hold the Hebrew people hostage within their oppressive enslavement.

And so as we see in today’s scripture verses, God continued to bring punishment on Pharaoh and his nation. Look again at this passage here as we continue studying from Exodus, chapter 8:

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Tell Aaron, 'Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the ground,' and throughout the land of Egypt the dust will become gnats."

They did this, and when Aaron stretched out his hand with the staff and struck the dust of the ground, gnats came upon men and animals. All the dust throughout the land of Egypt became gnats.

But when the magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts, they could not. And the gnats were on men and animals. The magicians said to Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God."

But Pharaoh's heart was hard and he would not listen, just as the Lord had said. Vv.16-19

Unlike the first two curses, note here that God doesn’t give Pharaoh the courtesy of knowing what was to come. Rather, He just issues the following command to Moses:

"Tell Aaron, 'Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the ground,' and throughout the land of Egypt the dust will become gnats."

And so Aaron did as God asked, stretching “out his hand with the staff” and striking “the dust of the ground”. When he did this, we read where “all the dust throughout the land of Egypt became gnats” and those “gnats came upon men and animals” alike.

Have you ever encountered a gnat before?

They are essentially a very small fly and I don’t think I need to tell you how annoying a single fly can be let alone swarms of millions upon millions. They are especially drawn to moisture and body heat which makes human beings and animals like magnets for them. Couple this with the propensity of a gnat to bite and it’s a bad combination.

So how many gnats are we really talking about?

Well, someone has estimated that there are around 1.5 septillion grains of sand in Egypt and if you want to see how that looks written out, here you go:

1,504,000,000,000,000,000,000,000

That’s a lot of gnats and only God could produce numbers like that.

Now, imagine the impact of this on Egypt as hordes and hordes of swarming, flying, biting gnats appeared everywhere, so many in number that there was no escaping them. It had to make the blood filled waters and massive frog intrusion seem mild and tolerable by comparison. But there was something else very different about this latest curse from God, something that sent a powerful message to Egypt that seemed to register with everyone except, yes, you guessed it, Pharaoh.

For the scriptures tell us that no matter how hard they tried, the magicians of Pharaoh could not "produce gnats by their secret arts", not like they were able to do previously with changing water to blood and creating frogs.

And so, we see where they went to Pharaoh with only one viable explanation.

"This is the finger of God."

In other words, what was happening couldn’t have occurred any other way except through the power of the God of Israel, who was also the Maker and Master of all, even if the Egyptians failed to understand or acknowledge it.

This statement was before Pharaoh for consideration and he couldn’t deny the evidence that was before him, especially as the pesky gnats bit away at him, his family, and his people. Yet, despite the inability of his magicians to duplicate what God had done, despite the magicians’ testimony that the gnat invasion was from the finger of God, despite all this, the scriptures tell us that Pharaoh continued to harden his heart.

As we read this, we can take heart that at least the magicians had come around to give Israel’s God the honor He deserved. They came to see that the finger of God is powerful and able to do the miraculous.

Of interest, later in this Book of Exodus, we will see the finger of God at work again, this time inscribing two stone tablets which will contain His ten commandments before giving them to Moses at Mount Sinai. (Exodus 31:18).

We also will see God’s finger mentioned in the New Testament, Gospel of Luke. There, Jesus mentions that He drove out demons by the finger of God while telling His listeners that the Kingdom of God had come to them (Luke 19:20).

Today, the very finger of God is still at work, writing His expectations and desires on hearts that are often as hard as stone, like Pharaoh’s was. As He does this, He seeks to draw us ever closer to His Kingdom, driving out any demons that may plague us along the way as He shapes and molds us to be the people He wants us to be. All we need to do is submit ourselves to Him and understand, like Pharaoh’s magicians, that no one has the power to do what He can. Indeed, He can make the impossible possible and the improbable probable.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.