Exodus 7

Exodus 7:5

Exo. 7:5. “The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch forth My hand.” The first time that Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh, they told him that Jehovah, the God of Israel, commanded that he should let His people go, as in the beginning of chap. 5. Pharaoh then took it in great disdain to be told of such a command from Jehovah the God of Israel, a poor abject people, a company of slaves; and, by the character they bear, he concludes that He made no better figure among the gods than His people did among the nations. He makes answer, “Who is Jehovah, that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I know not Jehovah.” Jehovah was a hard name to him that he never heard of before, but he resolves that it shall be no bugbear to him. Jehovah! who is that? says Pharaoh in disdain. Now God tells Moses that He will make him know who He is - “He shall know that I am Jehovah when I stretch forth mine hand upon Egypt, and bring out the children of Israel from among them.”

Exodus 7:9-12

Exo. 7:9-12. Moses’ rod, when cast unto the earth, became a serpent. So Christ, when sent down to the earth, appeared in the form of sinful flesh; he was made sin for us. So Christ was represented by the brazen serpent that was made in the form of the fiery serpents that bit the people. Moses’s rod, when on the ground in the form of a serpent, swallowed up the serpents of the magicians. So Christ, by being made sin, he swallowed up the devils, the parents of sin, when he appeared in the form of sinful flesh, and for sin he condemned sin in the flesh; by being made a curse he destroyed the curse; by suffering the punishment of sin he abolished the punishment of sin; and at the same time that, being made sin, he destroyed sin and the devil, and so swallowed the serpents in that sense.

So he received and embraced sinners (that are in themselves serpents) by his love and grace, so that they became as it were his pleasant food, and so he swallowed down serpents. In this sense God’s people are represented as his pleasant food; they are represented as the wheat in opposition to tares, and as his good grain in opposition to chaff. See Isaiah 6:13. “But yet in it shall be a tenth, and it shall return and shall be eaten; as a teil-tree, and as an oak, whose substance is in them when they cast their leaves, so the holy seed shall be in the substance thereof.”