Exodus 7

Exodus 7:8-11

Section 2. (Exodus 7:8-11.)The destruction of all fleshly dependence (Egypt) the accompaniment of the word of salvation. And now the judgments begin, prefaced by a sign, however, in the mercy of God, which is not that, and by which, if possible, conviction might be brought home to the haughty king. It takes its place, therefore, with the rest as part of the divine testimony. Of the plagues themselves, Keil has rightly distinguished the last -the death of the first-born -from all the rest. The announcement of it, indeed, falls in with the others, as he places it, for very evident reasons. The principal one which separates the plague itself is the relation which it bears to Israel and their redemption. It is not only the stroke by which they are freed, and in which God Himself appears, no longer acting through what men call “second causes,” but it is that by means of which they themselves for the first time are taught their true condition before God, and take the place in which alone salvation is possible to them.

Thus, in the history of redemption, its relation is with that part in which we shall find the actual accomplishment of this. The present section shows only the preparation for it. As to the nine plagues that remain, Keil has also given reason for believing that “they are arranged in three groups of three plagues each. For the first and second, the fourth and fifth, and the seventh and eighth were announced beforehand by Moses to the king; whilst the third, sixth, and ninth were sent without any such announcement. Again, the first, fourth, and seventh were announced to Pharaoh in the morning, and the first and fourth by the side of the Nile, both of them being in connection with the overflowing of the river. . . . . This grouping is not a mere external arrangement, . . . but is founded on the facts themselves, and the effect which God intended the plagues to produce, as we may gather from these circumstances, that the Egyptian magicians, who had imitated the first plagues, were put to shame with their arts by the third, and were compelled to see in it the finger of God, -that they were smitten themselves by the sixth, and unable to stand before Moses, -and that after the ninth, Pharaoh broke off all further negotiation.” There are other and deeper distinctions, as we shall see; but we may add to these that “in the first three, Aaron uses the rod; in the second three, it is not mentioned; in the third three, Moses uses it, though in the last of them only his hand is mentioned. All these marks of order lie on the face of the narrative, and point to a deeper order of nature and reason out of which they spring.” (Murphy.) The numerical significance accords fully with all this, while it leads us more directly to the deeper reason. Commentators have thus far shown us little of this, while the typical instruction, allowed to be so manifest generally in the book of Exodus, has apparently not been seen at all. Yet it is surely here as elsewhere. This section falls, then, into four parts, the first of which shows us the world in the light of nature simply, or looked at by itself; the second looks at it as distinguished from the people of God, the division being, as it is really called, a “redemption” of the latter; while in the third, the inflictions are more distinctly from heaven; the fourth contains the warning of that final infliction in which the “chief of all their strength” being smitten, they are effectually humbled in the dust before God. But we must proceed slowly.

1. The numerals show us plainly that we must commence the first group of miracles, with the miracle of the rod itself. The signs, then, stand thus: (1) the rod turned into a serpent; (2) the river turned to blood, -the means of sustaining life turned into a cause of death; (3) the plague of frogs, -the unclean things that come out of the river; (4) the dust becoming lice. Let us look at them in order. (1) And first, the miracle of the rod. The rod is the sign of the power conferred upon Moses: hence it is not strange that our attention should first of all be directed to it. The rod turned into a serpent showed the whole power of Egypt delivered into Moses’ hand. As here addressed to Pharaoh, it was a challenge of the completest kind; and if imitated by the magicians, the feebleness of the imitation is apparent in Aaron’s rod swallowing up their rods. Of course, it was impossible for them really to imitate so stupendous a miracle, in which Jehovah, the God of the Hebrews, was demonstrated as the Creator. All the power of Satan was incompetent to bring into being the smallest creature; and the language here is meant merely to affirm that to outward appearance the thing was done, -by what juggle need not be told. It is simple enough, if we recognize the evil that is in the world, and that yet God is, -that the evil must be in His hand, must have at least its permission, and therefore its mission also from Him. His hand has made leviathan, and He that made him can make His sword approach unto him. “He maketh the wrath of man to praise Him, and the remainder of wrath He will restrain.” This enables us, on the one hand, to see God in every thing; on the other, it reveals where the world is before Him. The evil in it is no accident. The forms of misery apparent every where are the multitudinous witnesses of its condition as away from Him. And this truth of God’s indictment of the world is the true Moses’ rod, to work the miracle of conviction in the soul. It is by the power of this truth that all the glory of the world passes away, and sin, judgment, and God who judges become reality to the soul. But here we meet also the power of the enemy to resist conviction in the magicians of Egyptians, -the “wise men,” deep in nature’s secrets, -the prophets of the god of this world. Their work is in imitation of the power of God, to show, if possible, that this is not His hand from which the judgment comes, -that it is not judgment. They cannot abate the evil; they are powerless to avert the storm that is about to sweep through Egypt: they have no real help -cannot pretend to it, never think of it. They have only their pitiful, agnostic evidence, such as it is, that that which is attributed to God can be produced otherwise, so that there is no need for Him in the matter. Their rods too can become serpents: there are other powers in the universe which can produce evil. Be it so: the power of God is demonstrated in this, that Aaron’s rod swallows easily their rods.

All other powers need to be accounted for, are dependent, not original, do not conflict in the least with that divine power above all, to which conscience affirms our responsibility, and which alone satisfies the need of the heart. True, the world is then under His judgment, but that only confirms the truth into complete conviction. (2) There has been yet, however, no judgment. The second sign begins these, and there could not be a more notable one. With the Egyptians, “the Nile was in the strictest sense regarded as divine, and was worshiped under a variety of names. As the bountiful Osiris, and under many other divine names, the Nile was the beneficent god of Egypt -the representative of all that was good. Evil had, however, also its god, the deadly enemy of Osiris, -the hated Typhon -the source of all that was cruel, violent, and wicked. With this abhorred being the touch or sight of blood was associated.

He himself was represented as blood-red; red oxen, and even red-haired men were sacrificed to him, and blood, as his symbol, rendered all unclean who came near it. To turn the Nile waters into blood was thus to defile the sacred river -to make Typhon triumph over Osiris -and to dishonor the religion of the land in one of its supremest expressions.” (Geikie.) But though we may see in this way how such a miracle would appeal to the Egyptians, we do not need the teachings of mythology to interpret it to us. The river, as we see in Scripture itself, was the very symbol of independence. Egypt drank no water of the rain of heaven: its source of supply was not above; and this is the world in its independence of God. But this independence of God, the Giver of life, is only death, and turns to death. The judgment here as elsewhere reveals the actual spiritual condition. That which as the creature of God, and His minister, is but the means of multiplied blessing, separated from Him, produces but more confirmed and complete separation. This is so simple that it needs no insisting on, and Scripture is full of it. (Job 21:14; Psalms 73:7; Psalms 73:11.) But it should be noticed now, what every commentary dilates upon, that these judgments of God which begin here have in measure their natural counterparts. Thus the “Nile, at a certain stage of its yearly rise, assumes a red color, due to the presence of minute vegetative and animal growths.” And “when the Nile and its canals are full, in the height of inundation, the abounding moisture quickens inconceivable myriads of frogs and toads, which swarm every where, even in ordinary years.” Again, “when the inundation has risen above the level of the canals and channels, and is rapidly flowing over the entire surface, . . . gnats and flies innumerable burst from their pupae and spring into perfect existence. The eggs that produce them were laid in the retiring waters of the former flood. They have matured in the interval, and vivify instantaneously on the dust absorbing moisture enough to discolor it.” At the close of the inundation, when the water is very foul, murrain has been noticed to occur. Such a relation of these divine judgments to ordinary occurrences has surely meaning for us, not merely in that economy of the miraculous, which many have remarked upon, but much rather as emphasizing how the whole order of nature marshals itself under the divine hand against the transgressor. The red Nile-water, however, is pleasant and drinkable, not, as in the case before us, a scourge which the magicians again may counterfeit but cannot remove. The priests of nature can show how this can be done -can do it themselves, substituting in a way common to all ages, never more common than to-day, “nature” for the God of nature, “law” for Him who rules by it. In all this, it is confessed however, there is no help for man -no remedy. Rather is his case given up as remediless, as nature’s laws are pitiless; there is no divine heart to turn to. In making man a machine, you escape from sin by denying all morality: but conscience refuses this. Any way, the waters are still turned to blood: the plague is not even moderated, but increased.(3) In the third miracle -the plague of frogs, the river is again a means of distress to the Egyptians.

In this case it is evidently by their numbers, their intrusion every where, and as is implied -swarming out of the mud and slime, -their uncleanness, that they become so. This last is, as perhaps all commentators agree, the fundamental idea, and it is this by which its numerical place is justified. Connected, moreover, with the last plague, as it is, undeniably, we find that we are following the same track as the apostle when he speaks of the result of departure from God: that “even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not seemly,” or, as he otherwise puts it, “to uncleanness.” (Romans 1:28; Romans 1:24.) Here are plainly the unclean things that come out of the river, when the creature is worshiped and served rather than the Creator. Man having cast off God dishonors himself, and the lusts he seeks to satisfy have sprung out of departure from God. To return to Him is the only remedy: “If any man is athirst, let him come unto Me, and drink; and he that believeth on Me, as the Scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.” (John 7:37-38.) The wise men of the world have here again no remedy. The water will readily produce frogs for them also; all their disquisitions tend, as they did in Egypt, to hallow the frog, though they may have too much of it. The gods of the heathen were largely just men’s lusts and passions deified; and to do them honor, they indulged them. But to call evil good cannot make it so; and to harden the conscience cannot satisfy the heart. (4) And now, not the water, but the land, produces its myriads for their torture. The dust of the land smitten with the rod becomes “lice.” I take this, with the A.V., to be the true meaning of the word kinnim. “In the Talmud, the kinnah is a louse. The Jewish interpreters (including Onkelos and Josephus), the Syriac, the Arabic, and the Talmud give this meaning, which is supported by Bochart. The Septuagint gives skniphes, which Gesenius and others take to mean gnats. But konops or empis is the gnat. The sknips is said to be an ant that preys on figs, or an insect that lives under the bark of trees.

Either of these bears more analogy to the louse than to the gnat or mosquito. The louse also is found ‘on men and beasts,’ while the gnat flies in the air.” (Murphy.) Baker suggests that “lice would shrivel at once in the hot sun of Africa,” and contends for the kindred thought of “ticks,” of which a kind lives in hot sand and dust, and is a great enemy to man and beast. (Quoted from Geikie.) The insignificance of the creature used, the dust as that from which it originates, and the place of this plague in the order of these visitations, seem all to point in one direction. Dust is frequently connected in Scripture with death “the dust of death.” (Psalms 22:15.) “Dust unto dust” was the original verdict which put on man the stamp of vanity. The book of Ecclesiastes shows us death as the great tormentor of man, leveling him, with all his wisdom and his pride, to the beast. (Chap. Ecclesiastes 3:19, etc.) What is beyond death only divine revelation and not human reasoning can show (v. Ecclesiastes 3:21); and conscience, if it point beyond, shadows the future with its accusations. This, then, I take as the spiritual significance of this fourth testimony. Without it, the evidence as to the world’s condition would be very incomplete indeed. With it, we have surely a striking picture of what the world is -under Satan’s rule, God cast off, corrupt through lust, death brooding over it! And as to the last feature of it, though the wisdom of the world may labor to make it “natural,” the whole instinct of that nature of man to which they appeal shrinks from and abhors it. If it be so, man is lower than the beast, tormented as to the future as the beast is not, craving as his rational heritage an immortality which is denied to him. No: here (as the magicians say) is “the finger of God,” and it writes upon the dust itself, as Christ wrote upon it for the Pharisees in after-times, man’s condemnation. And if man be under condemnation, his mouth is stopped; it is for God only to open His. Thus Pharaoh’s wise men utter their last word here. The world is now seen in the true “light of nature” -if nature has any light. But God has more to say, if man has not; and Egypt’s revealing plagues are not yet concluded. 2. In the three plagues that follow, we find emphasized the division put between the Egyptians and the Israelites, -literally, redemption,“a word I have preserved for evident reasons. God’s separation of His people is a redemption, the work of His grace in them as well as for them, which in the typical meaning comes out very distinctly. But this typical meaning has been itself almost unrecognized hitherto. I am not aware, at least, of any attempt to bring it out connectedly, though surely such meaning there must be. Apart from this, every commentary will show how barren of any specific spiritual significance these inflictions upon Egypt are. The typical meaning is indeed an illumination. (1) In the first plague here there is a difficulty as to its nature even, which might seem to forbid interpretation. The word used as to it (arob) seems plainly derived from arab, to mix, and would thus mean “mixture,” as in the margin of our common version. It is used nowhere else except in the book of Psalms (Psalms 78:45; Psalms 105:31), referring to the same infliction; but a kindred word, ereb, denotes the “mixed multitude” that went out of Egypt with the Israelites. Symmachus, Aquila, and Jerome, of the ancients, translate it “mixture,” with many more modern, applying it, as again the common version does, to flies. It is objected, however, to this, that ver. Psalms 105:31 is against it, but it does not seem evident that this could not apply to “one” of the myriad swarms that made up the great swarm.

The Septuagint has, however, “the dog-fly,” and by this or “the gad-fly” many would translate it. But the authority of the Septuagint, though great, is far from infallible, and the other is a supposition. Certainly, if we are to abide by the Hebrew, which is alone inspired, the first meaning would seem the true one. But in this case the instrument employed we must be content to ignore. It was something that “devoured,” as the seventy-eighth psalm shows; something of small size, making up for this in numbers; various in kind, whether flies or insects generally: the prominent thought is that of “mixture.” Trying this by its numerical place, we may see that this is not unity, though in its place, and we are led to ask, May not this be the thought suggested, that lack of unity which is implied in “mixture,” -mixture in place of unity? Fanciful enough this will seem, no doubt; but in these types, let us remember, we have what is addressed to the imagination, subject to Scripture and spiritual judgment. Let us go on, therefore, and see whither this may lead us. It is the contrast between the world and the people of God that is before us, and here the index number gives us a plain contrast: it speaks, on the one hand, of “obedience,” “righteousness,” on the other, of “will,” “rebellion.” God’s work is one, manifested always as that, -internally, still more than externally, a unity. Man also, when obedient to His will, is at one with himself as with God, -at one with himself because with God. His life is of a piece, self-consistent and harmonious. If sin come in, it is a confusion, a contrary will: independence of God is discord, disunity, and man no longer at one with God is no longer at one with himself either. His “will,” astray from God, falls asunder into many divided “wills,” as the “lusts” within “war in” his “members.” (James 4:1.) And so with all that comes under the power of evil: it corrupts, falls apart, is disorganized; death, which is the stamp upon and fruit of sin, is separation, dissolution. “Mixture,” combination, union, is still possible, and this is man’s substitute for God’s unity. But it only reveals the want of it. At one with God, we are at one with ourselves, and all things are at one with us also. Outside of this, there is nothing but a jarring concourse of incompatible things: the bond of the universe is snapped; and to one taught of God, the world is a thing smitten with the plague of incoherency, confusion, “mixture.” Out of which is only one way of deliverance. The secret of the condition of things is now revealed. The wise men are useless: Pharaoh turns to Moses and Aaron, but only to suggest an impossible compromise. “Go, sacrifice unto your God in the land. Here again is “mixture” -a half obedience which is not obedience. Worship God where you are, he says; -that is, typically, Remain in the world; don’t leave it. But that is impossible. In the world, faith’s sacrifice is an abomination, -Christ’s cross only an offense.

The cross is the judgment of the world -of man in the flesh, -and if we can worship there, no cross is needed: it is in this case simply a false indictment against man. Thus there is irreconcilable difference between the world and the believer. By the cross, he is crucified to the world and the world to him, and he glories in that which has done this. How impossible, then, to mix the world and Christ! He who has turned to Christ has owned the enmity in which he was, and found the reconciliation. He has obedience endeared to him in Christ’s obedience to death for him. His is the blessedness of “the man to whom the Lord imputeth not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile.” He is separated from the world and from the world’s plague of mixture. He is at one with God and at one with himself: he has taken his true place in that universe of God which has on it every where as that the mark of unity. (2) The two plagues following in this series, however little outwardly connected with the first, will be found to have the most real typical connection. In this second one, the destruction of the cattle takes place, -the ordained servants of man, the type of that service which he needs and must receive from others. Independent really he cannot be. The higher any creature is in the scale of being, the more its needs multiply and the more dependent is it. And with man, the higher (or more civilized) is his natural life, the more complex and numerous are the services he requires from others. The “division of labor” means, of course, but this.

Happy would the world be if men could simply accept this -could serve and be served according to God’s ordinance. Each caring for the other, how well would all be served! how blessed would it be to live in such an atmosphere of love -ministered to and ministering -as this implies! But the world is away from God; weary, restless, dissatisfied, its craving is lust, its god its belly, and “corruption” is “in the world through lust.” In the selfish strife of private interest, the forms of love required by society, serve but as the stones upon graves to mark that the spirit has departed. There is a murrain upon the cattle, except where, among the people of God, the spirit of love has been gained in the knowledge of redemption. Here love manifests itself in service -necessarily, if it be love; there is ability and heart to minister; grace has in a higher way perfected the design in nature: the cattle are preserved. (3) In the next plague, the ashes of the furnace sprinkled toward heaven bring an eruptive disease upon man and beast. The “furnace,” derived from a word which means “to subdue,” was, as some think, a lime-kiln, or for smelting ore, and connected with those public works in Egypt at which Israel had been made so cruelly to labor. Egypt itself had been such a furnace for the people of God, and as such had earned for itself righteous retribution. This seems a very natural explanation of Moses’ significant action. The disease that followed is too briefly described to be identified; but if so, we may be sure there is no need to identify it: all that is needed for the lesson is surely given us. It is noted by all commentators that the uncleanness resulting from such an attack must have been peculiarly severe upon a people who, like the Egyptians, were so punctiliously observant of personal cleanliness, and with whom this was a part of their religion. Typically, it would fittingly speak of the corruption of sin, the breaking out of that moral disease which Isaiah uses language such as might be drawn from it to describe: “From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores.” (Isaiah 1:6.) This is the inward condition of the world exposed; for as already said, these plagues only expose what is the true state of things as before God. And the connection between such a state and Egypt’s lime-kilns is easy to apprehend. The pomp and glory of the world minister to the lust of ambition and greed of all kinds out of which comes the corruption that is in the world, and in which it finds also its judgment; and this seems to be the meaning of what we have here. And now the magicians cannot stand before Moses: as long afterward the words “he that is without sin among you” scatter the would-be judges of the adulteress, so are Egypt’s wise men scattered now; “for the boil was upon the scribes and upon all the Egyptians.” Who, indeed, is exempt, save he in whom Christ is found the object for his heart, and the “exceeding great and precious promises” deliver from the “corruption which is in the world through lust”? 3. Here, then, a second stage in the conviction of the natural man is reached. We are now, in the third stage, to see, man being what he is, what the attitude of heaven must be toward him. The three plagues that follow all distinctly point to heaven as their place of origin. Here too the rod, which in the last three had not been seen, appears again, -a thing which the typical meaning alone as it would seem, accounts for. For it will be seen that the middle plagues to men seem scarcely divine inflictions: they proceed more from man himself, although, in fact, the government of God may truly be seen in them. But now we come again, as in the first plagues, to direct, positive inflictions. (1) And first, we have the hail: and here once more we find what might seem a mixture -a concord of contraries. Yet nature furnishes it, though, of course, in this case, increased into a miracle. With the occurrence of hail and fire, (that is, electricity,) we are all familiar. They are products of the same cause -the meeting of a mass of warm air, saturated with moisture, with a cold upper current. Heat and cold must thus mingle together to produce it, and the electricity is disengaged, apparently, at the same time as the freezing of the vapor. We have in the book of Revelation, under the first trumpet, the occurrence of hail and fire; and in the eighteenth psalm, “hailstones and coals of fire” are emphasized as expressions of the divine wrath.

Cold is the absence of heat, as darkness is of light; and light and heat are near akin, as, of course, are cold and darkness. God is light, and heat is the glow of His presence, which toward sin is wrath -the flame of fire. But cold and heat alike have their part in the storm of His wrath. If He forsake, it must be in anger, never indifference; never, therefore, mere withdrawal, -the chill and the fire mingle, and thus what should have been blessing, like the drops of vapor, becomes a pitiless iron shower which destroys every thing before it. Thus upon the world the wrath of God abideth, suspended indeed by His forbearing love, which at the same time has provided a place of refuge. But still there are “the treasures of the hail which " He has “preserved against the time of trouble, against the day of battle and war.” (Job 38:22-23.) And they will be poured out yet, while the heavens proclaim His righteousness in it. It is this that makes it so terrible, that it is the action of righteousness; and this, faith anticipates and takes home as a present thing governing one’s thoughts and conduct. (2) If the Lord be thus against the sinner, the world is full also of witnesses to this attitude of His. Man may have departed from God and become hostile to Him, but nature in its whole framework is obedient, and serves Him still. Thus the sinner finds himself in a stream of hostile forces, the hosts of the Lord, which the army of locusts vividly presents to us. “The locusts have no king,” says Agur, “yet go they forth all by bands.” (Proverbs 30:27.) “Nothing in their habits,” says a recent observer, is more striking than the pertinacity with which they all pursue the same line of march, like a disciplined army.” This instinctive discipline, with an invisible king, shows whose hosts they are -under whose marshaling: “His army,” the Lord calls them. (Joe 2:11.) “In every stage of their existence,” says the same person who was just now quoted, “these locusts give a most impressive view of the power of God to punish a wicked world.” To contend with them is hopeless, and the destruction caused by them is absolute: “the land is as the garden of Eden before them, and behind them a desolate wilderness; yea, and nothing shall escape them.” (Joe 2:3.) Thus nature, with its laws, serves the Law-giver, and woe to those who contend against their God. They are hopelessly in the grasp of destructive forces which fully own the One they do not -are the disciplined hosts of the Lord of Hosts. This an insect may teach us here, if only we have hearts to learn the lesson. Along with this, we have in this section Pharaoh’s second attempt at compromise, as vain as the first one was. The men may go: the little ones must be left behind; in which case, of course, the little ones become a pledge for the return of their parents. But salvation is here, as the New Testament declares it, for thee and for thy house. If Pharaoh’s thought is to retain or bring back the fathers by the children’s means, God’s is, to save the children with and by means of their fathers. The circumcision of the Israelite’s house gives the divine rule for the old economy. The new cannot be behind it: “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house.” (Acts 16:31.) This, then, is the tenor of universal Scripture. God’s all-embracing love would make of His people hands to reach out to others, and of the human ties which He has established, links by which the new creation itself shall be drawn together. He would thus claim for His own that which is, with no acquiescence on His part, departed from Him, and use as His that natural affection which, though fallen, is not incapable of being renewed and spiritualized. Thus He meets and satisfies the deepest instincts of our manhood, the divine Father manifesting Himself as not strange to what is best in human fatherhood, and teaching us to feel in ourselves the original likeness in which at first He created us to Himself. The children of believers are, of course, naturally like other children. The nature we can impart is the old, and not the new: to have this, they must be born again, as all must. Nor does it follow necessarily, as we know, that because a man is saved his house must be. But if with faith in God there be faithfulness in the place in which God has put us, He has promised, “Train up a child in the way he should go; and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Here is the thing, no doubt, which tests us; for it is not our words only that have fruit in this way; it is the combined influence of our words and ways. That three days’ remove from Egypt, if really taken, will have immense effect. And that we have come out to keep a feast to the Lord will give the positive side, without which separation from the world becomes a mere cold and hard asceticism. These things are our types, and the God of Israel is as full of power to-day as ever He was: of that, these very locusts may remind us. (3.) And now we come to the last plague of these nine -the last but one of all poured out upon the land of Egypt. The plague of darkness is one the significance of which is simple for those who know the meaning of the darkness upon the cross. God is light: darkness is the withdrawal of light, the forsaking of God. And this was (as we may see in the twenty-second psalm,) the most terrible part of that judgment upon sin which our dear Lord bore for us in His body on the tree. God is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity, and cannot look upon sin: even from Him who knew no sin, when made sin, He must turn away; and so the cry of forsaken sorrow interprets the darkness to us. The “outer darkness” is its expression in the eternity to come. God-abandonment! who save that solitary Sufferer can interpret this to us? Men would indeed choose to get away from God here, and the “far-off country “can be for awhile even a place of pleasure while we are recklessly wasting what can never be regained. But even the far-off country is not the hell where men will find the answer to their desire to get away from God. In Egypt, for three awful days they sat overwhelmed; none looked upon another, or rose from his seat. In that darkness that is the “shadow of death,” it is said, “they sit;” but what when it is not the shadow, but death itself, and the eternal flame shall give yet no light? “In Thy light we see light.” In the ends of the earth, no place so destitute but some beams of that light must come. When men have found the place of their choice -a place without God, where, from the necessity of His nature, He can never be, all figures fail to convey the reality of that horror of utter darkness which they shall find it. Here, then, fittingly, these nine plagues end. Pharaoh attempts, at the very last, another compromise. If he cannot prevent their going out, he will at least make them as poor as he can. Their flocks and herds were the main part of all which, as a shepherd-people, they possessed. They are thus the fitting type of our possessions -of that which we have in the world. These must be left, says Pharaoh; -the first attempt we have perhaps to define the doctrine which has since met such wide acceptance, alas! among the people of God, -that we are to separate what is “secular” from what is sacred,” -and that if we ourselves must needs go on pilgrimage, we must not have our all out of Egypt, honestly owning God’s title to all we have. A certain claim, it is owned as reasonable, the Lord should have; but the things are ours outside this tax upon them. Yet does not this show how little we know what it is to be the Lord’s, when we have in any thing divided interests from His? Does it not show that we know little what it is to be in Christ, while we have another self with independent aims and motives? Is this other self, can it be, any thing else than the old self, which knows not Christ, and refuses Him? Thus it is, surely, that along with this lesson of what the holiness of God is as against sin, we are made to learn what is the claim of that holiness -we will not say upon His redeemed, but rather for them. It is, in fact, in the very idea of redemption itself, necessary, in order to realize the fullness of blessing in it, that not only we, but all that is ours, shall be brought out of Egypt. “There shall not a hoof be left behind,” says Moses, “for thereof must we take to serve Jehovah our God, and we know not wherewith we must serve Jehovah our God till we come thither.” How true it is that we have not even -cannot have -the knowledge of the Lord’s will concerning us until we are, with all belonging to us, where God’s salvation brings us -outside the world. (4) But God does not intend His people to go out of Egypt empty. They are to leave it rather with the spoil of Egypt in their hands; and yet, in taking this, they take but what is their own. Take to-day out of the world all that is the fruit or accompaniment of God’s salvation-work -take out of it all that Scripture has enriched it with -how poor would it be left! It is but the result of what the world is, that God could not take His people out of it without leaving it empty of all true blessing and enlightenment. And now one last warning is permitted to Pharaoh ere the final stroke of judgment falls. At midnight, the time of deepest darkness, Jehovah is coming into the land Himself, and “all their first-born, the chief of all their strength,” shall die. The thunderbolt of Israel’s deliverance is at last to fall. The prostration of the world is to be the deliverance of those for whom God has undertaken. The type is easily read by its own light.