Plagues and Palm Branches

Key Elements

In Exodus 7-10, God displays His supreme power over the gods of Egypt through nine plagues that bring judgement leading to the final plague that results in the exodus of the people of Israel from bondage in Egypt; this points forward to Matthew 21:1-11, where Jesus displays His power as the King of Kings riding into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday leading to His sacrifice as the passover lamb resulting in the ultimate deliverance of all people from sin and death.

Main Idea: God, who defeated Egypt's false gods and proved His kingship and authority through the plagues of judgment, is the same King who rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday proving He is the King of Kings who has defeated sin and death once and for all.

I want my audience to see the correlation between the plagues on Egypt in the Exodus story and the triumphal entry of Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, recognizing God’s kingship and power is ultimately displayed through the sending of His Son Jesus as the Passover Lamb.

Intro

Today is Palm Sunday. It’s a significant day for us as Christ followers. It’s the day that we celebrate and remember when Jesus Christ, the Son of God, rode down the Mt. of Olives into the city of Jerusalem declaring that He was the promised Messiah for the Jewish people. And everything that surrounds that event is significant: the manner in which Jesus entered the city is significant, the reaction of the people lining the streets and laying palm branches on the road before Him is significant, but probably what is most significant is the time this happened, for this is the week of Passover-the most important feast the Jewish people celebrate. The feast that marks for them one of the most significant events in their history-the event that led to the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt. And today, on Palm Sunday, I love the fact that God has us looking at Exodus 7-10 in our journey through the Book of Exodus. In fact, it could not have lined up more perfectly for us. But before we go there, I want us to turn our attention this morning to the events of Palm Sunday. Look with me at Matthew 21:1-11...

So, let’s get this picture in our minds together this morning. It’s the week leading to Passover. It’s the one time of the year that every Jewish male and their family made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to celebrate Passover. This involved offering sacrifices at the temple, participating in festival meals as a family all culminating in the Passover meal, worshipping and praying together, and remembering and retelling God’s story of redemption about the Exodus. The city of Jerusalem is packed with people who have come from all over the known world to celebrate and remember. So, you can imagine how crowded the city is. The Romans, who ruled Israel at the time, are on high alert. When all of a sudden, on the Mt. of Olives across the Kidron Valley, there is a noticeably large procession happening. Someone is riding down the Mt. of Olives on a donkey, they are surrounded by people who are running to the road throwing there garments on the path before them and cutting palm branches and waving them in the air proclaiming, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” And Matthew tells us that the whole city was “in an uproar.” What is happening here? Jesus Christ, the promised Messiah the Son of God, is making His way into the city in a profound and purposeful way proclaiming to everyone that He is God in the flesh, the King of Kings that He is the Messiah the Jewish people have been waiting for. On that first Palm Sunday, God was making Himself unmistakably known among His people through the person of Jesus Christ His Son.

But for us to really understand what is happening here in the Gospel of Matthew, we have to go centuries back to another time where God was making Himself known. We have to return to the Book of Exodus. Because the same King who rode into Jerusalem that day, proclaiming Himself as the Messiah, is the same God who in Exodus 7-10 proclaimed that He was more powerful than all the false gods of Egypt. He’s the same God who displayed His supreme power by bringing ten plagues that ultimately led to the exodus of the people of Israel from bondage and slavery in Egypt.

Message

And here’s what I want us to see this morning: God, who defeated Egypt's false gods and proved His kingship and authority through the plagues of judgment, is the same King who rode into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday proving He is the King of Kings who has defeated sin and death once and for all.

So, how does this transform our lives? What do plagues have to do with palm branches? Well, I believe it reveals to us three life changing truths that God shows us from His Word today:

1. God reigns with ultimate authority and deserves our complete surrender. (plagues on Egypt’s God’s; Jesus comes as King)

Picking up where we left off in Exodus 6, Moses and his brother Aaron have responded to God in complete obedience. They had taken the message from God to pharaoh and proclaimed to him that God had commanded him to let the people of Israel go. And pharaoh had not yielded. In fact, in the midst of complete obedience, what they had noticed was that pharaoh not only resisted God’s command but he had increased the labor of the Israelite people and had taken some of their resources away as well. And as we came to the end of Exodus 6, we saw that in the midst of increased hardship and carrying the weight of incredible discouragement, Moses and Aaron are still being obedient to what God had commanded them to do. And as we pick up this morning in Exodus 7, here’s what happens… (vs. 1-6)

So, God tells Moses and Aaron again “you are to go to pharaoh again and you are to tell him everything I command you to.” It’s the same instructions as before. But this time God says that “pharaoh’s heart will be hardened and the purpose of that is so that I can perform signs and wonders.” And the ultimate purpose in all of this is so “the Egyptians will know that I Am the Lord.” There it is, the ultimate purpose in everything that is going to happen in the next four chapters of the Book of Exodus is for the purpose of showing pharaoh and the Egyptians one great truth and that is that God reigns with ultimate authority and deserves our complete surrender.

So, consider with me for just a moment the environment of Egypt. Egypt was the greatest superpower in the known world at this point and time. And the Egyptian religion was woven into every aspect of their lives. They worshipped many false gods and they had a god for everything. Every area of their lives-the flooding of the Nile river, the growth of their crops, the rising and the setting of the sun, even the life of the pharaoh himself-was all under the jurisdiction of a false god. And pharaoh himself sat at the very top of that system. He was considered divine himself, the son of Ra the sun god. And it’s into this pagan environment that God makes Himself known. God shows up and says “I’m about to dismantle everything in your world one by one proving that every false god you worship and put your hope in is nothing. I am the God who reigns with ultimate authority and it will happen through ten plagues on the nation of Egypt.”

So, let’s walk through these ten plagues, which are found in Exodus 7-10, for just a moment to get an idea of how severe God’s judgement is on Egypt and pharaoh.

1. The Nile River turns to blood. (7:20-21) The Nile River, which was the life source for the nation of Egypt, turns completely to blood. Everything in Egypt revolved around the Nile. It was believed to be Osiris’ blood stream. And it wasn’t just the main river channel but everything that was fed by the Nile River turned to blood. So much so that the fish are dying. Plague #1.

2. The plague of frogs. (8:1-7) Frogs everywhere-in the houses, bedrooms, and beds. It says they were even in their ovens and kneading bowls where they made food. This was an attack on the goddess Heqet, a fertility goddess. Plague #2.

3. The plague of gnats (8:16-19) Gnats everywhere. You know how annoying gnats are. Imagine the worst situation you’ve experienced with gnats and multiply that by 1000 or more. This was an attack on Geb the god of the earth. But God’s not done.

4. The plague of flies (8:20-32 ) At this point, only Egypt is affected by the plagues and not the place where the Israelites are living. And flies attack everything. This is an attack on the god Khepri, the god of creation and birth and he was represented by a fly.

5. The death of the livestock (9:1-7) All of the Egyptian livestock begin to die. This includes not only cattle but horses, donkeys, any kind of animal considered livestock. Imagine the stench and the cleanup. In the Egyptian religion, there were four gods represented by a bull. And later, after the Exodus, we’ll see the people of Israel make a false god in the image of a bull at the base of Mt. Sinai.

6. The plague of boils (9:8-12) It says God sent boils and every living thing human and animal had painful boils on them. This is an attack on Isis the goddess of medicine. God has now taken this to a very person level but it will get worse.

7. The plague of hail (9:13-35) God causes the greatest hailstorm in the history of humankind to reign down on the Egyptians and it says that it takes out everything it hits and the Bible tells us specifically that the flax and the barley of the Egyptians were struck down. This was an attack on the god Nute, the god of the sky. The plagues continue.

8. The plague of locusts (10:1-20) Swarms of locusts, huge insects a couple of inches long who make a loud noise when they fly. And anything the hail didn’t destroy, the locusts took care of. After this plague there was nothing left in Egypt. The economy of Egypt is utterly destroyed at this point. This is an attack on Serapia the god who protected them from locusts.

9. The plague of darkness (10:21-29) Now this doesn’t seem like a big deal for us but think about this, Ra, the sun god, was the most powerful god they worshipped. Pharaoh also embodies Ra. Their belief was that every night when the sun went down, Ra was wrestling the serpent of darkness and the way they knew he won was the sun came up. The darkness was so thick it was “felt.” So if Ra wrestles the serpent of darkness every night and the sun doesn’t rise for three days, the Egyptians believe Ra, their most powerful god, is defeated and pharaoh has no power.

10. So, we’ve covered nine plagues and the tenth is the final blow-the death of the first born (11) Now, we won’t get much into that one today because we are saving the significance of that plague for Easter Sunday, but a little preview is that the tenth plague is what institutes passover for the Jewish people which is what leads to pharaoh ordering the Exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt.

Ten plagues, ten targeted strikes to prove that God is THE God and Egypt’s gods and pharaoh have no authority. Every plague defeated a false god and ultimately proved that God was sovereign and powerful over it all.

Fast forward to Jerusalem. It’s Passover week-the very feast that commemorates the night that God set the Israelites free from Egypt. And God does something incredible. He shows up. Not through a burning bush or plagues, He comes in the form of His Son Jesus. And on Palm Sunday, He rides into Jerusalem fulfilling a 500 year old prophecy by the prophet Zechariah. He comes as the King of Kings proclaiming that He is the Messiah the Son of God who has all authority and is sovereign and powerful over all. He enters the city in a direct challenge to the ruling powers in Jerusalem. Just like the plagues of Egypt dismantled pharaoh and the false gods of Egypt, Jesus’ triumphal entry was the beginning of the confrontation with every false power claiming authority over the people He had come to set free ultimately proving that He alone deserves the complete surrender of our hearts and lives to Him.

And this is still true today. God still reigns with ultimate authority and still deserves our complete surrender. And I’m not just talking to those who might be considering following Jesus for the first time today. I hope and pray that you are seeing how deserving God is of your surrender. But I’m also talking to those of us who are Christ followers. Because every day there are other kings that are competing with God for our loyalty and surrender. There is always someone or something that wants priority in our lives. So, in response to God’s authority and Him deserving our complete loyalty, here’s what we must do-we daily look to Him recognizing that He is sovereign over it all; we respond in obedience even when it doesn’t make sense; we lay down those false gods of security in our lives and live in total dependence on Him; and we live in the daily posture of surrender to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.

God reigns with the ultimate authority and deserves our complete surrender. But also we see this morning that...

2. God exposes hardened hearts and desires us to respond in repentance.

In Exodus 7-10, there’s a theme that keeps coming to the forefront, it’s repeated over and over again, “pharaoh’s heart was hard” or “pharaoh hardened his heart” or sometimes it says that “the Lord hardened pharaoh’s heart.” After every plague that God inflicts on Egypt, pharaoh will not relent, he will not turn, he continues to resist. And this is a difficult thing for us to wrestle with. Because what it sounds like from reading the text is that God is the one forcing pharaoh to resist Him. But God doesn’t do that, just like God will not force us to follow Him. God desires for us to repent and turn to Him, but that is a choice we make. And I think the best explanation I’ve heard of this is from a commentary I read this week: “God brings pharaoh face to face with the truth over and over; and over and over it reveals what is already in pharaoh’s heart. Each plague brings pharaoh to a moment of decision; and each time, he chooses himself over the truth and every time he chooses to resist God, his heart calcifies even more. This is the terrible logic of persistent unbelief, that every rejection of God’s truth makes the next rejection a little easier.” And again, speaking to God’s ultimate authority, God tells Moses and Aaron at the beginning of Exodus 7 that this is what pharaoh will do. But with each plague comes the opportunity for pharaoh to make a different choice. And in the midst of this horrible scene of judgement in Exodus 7-10, think about the mercy of God here. God gives pharaoh nine opportunities to repent. God gives pharaoh nine chances to relinquish control and submit to His authority. In the midst of horrible deserving judgement, God shows incredible mercy.

And that has never been more evident than in the act of God sending His Son Jesus for us. When we go back to Matthew 21, what we see is the mercy of God being shown to a people who deserve judgement. We see hardened hearts being given the opportunity over and over again to repent and turn to God in complete surrender. And what’s so interesting about this is that the same crowds who shouted “Hosanna, Hosanna!” on that Palm Sunday will be some of the same people who cry “Crucify Him” on Friday. The Son of God had come. God in the flesh performing miracle after miracle, proclaiming over and over again that He was the Messiah, the Lamb of God who would take away their sin and by the end of the week rejection after rejection would harden the hearts of the people to the point that they would nail Him to a cross.

In Exodus, God brings undeniable signs and wonders before pharaoh’s very eyes. Plague after plague. Everyone of them an opportunity to recognize who God is and surrender. And pharaoh hardens his heart. In the Gospels, Jesus brings signs and wonders, teachings and miracles, and the chief priests and the scribes harden their hearts and plot to put the Son of God to death on a cross. And even in that horrible act of the death of Jesus the Son of God, there is mercy from God shown to all of us. For it’s in the death of Jesus for us that God spares us and places the punishment for our sin on His only Son.

And before we sit in judgement this morning, I think we have to examine our own hearts. If you’re not a follower of Jesus today, think about the opportunities that God has given you to turn to Him. In fact, this morning because you are here, this is another opportunity you have to surrender to Jesus as Savior and Lord. The choice is up to you. God desires your repentance but another rejection means that your heart gets more calcified towards the Holy Spirit of God in your life.

And as followers of Jesus, we must ask God to reveal areas of our lives that we need to surrender to Him. Those places in our lives we keep holding onto and when He reveals those areas to us, we repent. Jesus is waiting for us to turn to Him. The question is will we choose to be obedient.

God exposes hardened hearts and desires us to respond in repentance. But there’s one more truth we see...

3. God sees our suffering and provides a Savior who rescues and sets us free.(the plagues lead to passover and exodus; Jesus becomes the Passover Lamb who leads us to ultimate deliverance)

You see, the plagues of Egypt were never the end of the story. In fact, God was using them ultimately to prove that He has all authority and to lead everything to one moment-the Exodus-the deliverance of His people from slavery and bondage in Egypt. And God used Moses as the savior or the deliverer to accomplish this. Through the plagues of Egypt, God is demonstrating to everyone how powerful He is but He is ultimately rescuing His people from slavery, oppression, and a bondage that they were too weak to escape on their own. And what finally causes this to happen? What finally guarantees the rescue and the deliverance of the people of Israel from Egypt? Passover. The tenth plague, the death of the firstborn.

Now, I don’t want to get too deep into this this morning because I’m saving the majority of it for Easter Sunday, but here’s what we need to see. In Exodus 11-12, God brings the tenth and final plagues on pharaoh and Egypt-the death of the firstborn of every household. God gives the Israelites specific instructions for choosing a lamb that is unblemished-they are to choose it at a certain time (the tenth day of the first month-Tenth of Nisan), they are to keep it in their homes for four days, they are to inspect it and examine it, they are to sacrifice it on the fourteenth day, and for their homes to be spared when God passes over Egypt, the blood of that lamb is to be placed on the doorposts and the lintel or the top of the door. And God says in Exodus 12:12–13 “I will pass through the land of Egypt on that night and strike every firstborn male in the land of Egypt, both people and animals. I am the Lord; I will execute judgments against all the gods of Egypt. The blood on the houses where you are staying will be a distinguishing mark for you; when I see the blood, I will pass over you. No plague will be among you to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.”

Let’s go back to Matthew. It’s Passover week. Jesus comes into the city, riding on a donkey down the Mt. of Olives fulfilling ancient prophecy about the Messiah, which is who He is. And on what day did He do this? The tenth of Nisan, the same day God commanded the Israelites in Egypt to choose the Passover lamb. Jesus rides into the city. He goes to the Temple in Jerusalem and turns over the tables. He spends the week teaching and the next four days, He is examined by the Jewish religious leaders. The pharisees test Him. The sadducees challenge and debate Him. They all try to trap Him. Jesus the Son of God is inspected and examined and on Friday, Jesus Christ, the Lamb of God, sheds His blood on the cross for the sins of all humankind. And just as the judgement of God fell on the Egyptian households, the final judgement of God falls on His Son Jesus the final sacrifice for sin.

This is what Palm Sunday is all about. It’s the final plague falling on Jesus Christ not as a punishment for His own sin because He had no sin, but as a substitute for you and me-a people enslaved by sin, unable to do anything to set ourselves free. Here’s what plagues have to do with palm branches, it’s pointing us to the mission of Jesus Christ the Son of God, the ultimate rescue mission. Just as Moses was the savior who rescued the Israelites set them free from slavery in Egypt; Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross proves He is the ultimate Savior who rescues all of us and sets us free from sin and death.

And this morning, here’s the good news-God sees you in your suffering, the suffering that sin has caused in your life and He has sent His Son Jesus to set us free. The question is will we choose to surrender or will we harden our hearts in rejection of Him?

Closing

Think about this, when the plagues fell on Egypt, God commanded Moses to stretch out his staff. When judgement fell on all humankind, God sent His Son Jesus to stretch out His arms and die on a cross. And in that moment, sin was defeated, death was defeated, and forgiveness forever was purchased by the sacrifice of Jesus, the Lamb of God, for us.