“And he went out from Pharaoh in hot anger.” Exodus 11:8 ESV
That little line at the end of Exodus 11:8 is easy to read right past. Moses has just delivered the worst news anyone in Egypt would ever hear, and Scripture tells us he walked out of Pharaoh’s presence hot. Not cold. Not smug. Not relieved to finally be done with the guy. Angry.
I want to know why. Because I think the answer says a lot more about us than it does about Moses.
Nine plagues later
By the time we get to chapter 11, Egypt has been wrecked. The locusts ate everything green and left the land brown and barren. Then came three days of darkness so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face. And Pharaoh still won’t bend. He tells Moses to get out and warns him that if he ever sees his face again, he’s a dead man.
It helps to remember how Egypt saw Pharaoh. To them he wasn’t just a king. He was a god. That explains a lot. It’s why he keeps trying to negotiate with the Lord like they’re equals sitting across a table. It’s why he thinks he can threaten Moses with death. Pharaoh believed the power of life and death was his to hand out.
It wasn’t. It never was. That power belongs to the one true God, and chapter 11 is where God makes that unmistakably clear.
One more plague
God tells Moses there is one plague left, and after it Pharaoh won’t just let Israel go. He’ll drive them out. The resistance is about to end, exactly like God promised back at the burning bush.
Then God says something you might not expect. The Israelites are to ask their Egyptian neighbors for silver and gold, “and the Lord gave the people favor in the sight of the Egyptians” (11:3 ESV).
I’ve heard people say Israel stole that gold. I’ve heard others call it reparations. Neither one is what’s happening. Nobody stole anything from anybody. God told them to ask, they asked, and the Egyptians basically said, “Here, take it, just please go.” The text is clear about who’s behind it. The Lord gave. God was not about to send His people into the wilderness empty handed, and He had promised this too, way back in Exodus 3:21-22.
Now, if you know the story, you know Israel is going to go out into that wilderness and do something dumb with all that gold. But that’s a post for another day. For now, look at the heart of God. Over and over He’s telling His people, “You’re Mine. I love you. I’m going to take care of you.” He keeps giving them every reason in the world to trust Him.
God over life and death
Then comes the warning.
“About midnight I will go out in the midst of Egypt, and every firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die” (11:4-5 ESV).
Notice who does this. I will go out. This is God Himself. And no one is exempt. From Pharaoh’s own firstborn, the son who would inherit the throne and, in Egypt’s eyes, his father’s divinity, all the way down to the son of the slave girl grinding grain behind the hand mill. Even the cattle.
That sounds harsh until you realize this didn’t come out of nowhere. God warned Pharaoh about this all the way back in Exodus 4:
“Israel is my firstborn son, and I say to you, ‘Let my son go that he may serve me.’ If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will kill your firstborn son.” Exodus 4:22-23 ESV
Here’s the thing. Every plague between chapter 4 and chapter 11 was mercy. God didn’t go straight to the end. He gave Pharaoh blood and frogs and gnats and flies and boils and hail and locusts and darkness, warning after warning, opportunity after opportunity to see that He alone is God and to turn. God gives life. God takes life. And God was patient with Pharaoh far longer than Pharaoh ever deserved.
There’s also a detail in verse 7 that I honestly think is kind of funny. God says that while Egypt wails, “not a dog shall growl against any of the people of Israel” (11:7 ESV). The Egyptians were obsessed with death. That’s why we have mummies and pyramids and tombs stuffed with treasure. One of their gods, Anubis, oversaw embalming and was believed to guide the dead into the afterlife, and they pictured him with the head of a dog. So I think God is poking fun here. Your firstborn will die, Egypt, and your little death dog won’t so much as growl at My people.
Why Moses was angry
So back to our question. Why did Moses leave in hot anger?
Because Moses wasn’t a heartless jerk. He had watched God come through on every single plague, and he knew God would come through on this one too. He knew that by morning there would be a cry in Egypt like nothing ever heard before or since. Parents all over the land would wake up to find their children dead. And Pharaoh still wouldn’t repent.
Moses was angry because his heart was broken. Broken for people who weren’t his people, in a nation that had enslaved his people.
And that’s where this text puts its finger on me.
Nice is not the same as good
Like a lot of you, I was frustrated with how last week’s election turned out. Honestly I was a little surprised by the margin. But I wasn’t surprised by the result, and here’s why. The people around us are lost.
This isn’t about turning a ballot into a religious test. But when a man presents himself as a preacher and teaches what James Talarico teaches about God, which is heresy, and people who call themselves Christians can shrug and vote for that, something is badly wrong. Either we don’t know the God of the Bible, or we don’t fear Him.
Paul says it this way: “From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16 ESV). As Christians we don’t look at people through the world’s lens anymore. We look at them through the gospel.
The world looks at the guy down the road and says he’s a good person. He’s not a criminal. He helps out in the community. He doesn’t drive like a maniac. Good guy, right?
But Scripture says “None is righteous, no, not one” (Romans 3:10 ESV). There are plenty of nice people out there. There are NO good ones. Not by God’s standard. And when we forget that, we quit sharing the gospel, because we don’t see people as lost. We don’t see them as sinners. We don’t see them as desperate for a Savior. We think they’re fine.
They’re not fine. And neither were we. None of us figured this out on our own. Somebody told us, and God opened our eyes by grace. So we go to people with honesty about sin and hell, yes, but also with humility, because we know exactly where we’d be without Jesus.
Moses offered Pharaoh good news. Submit to the Lord, and you and Egypt can be spared. Pharaoh refused, and it broke Moses’s heart.
Does it break ours? Do we feel anything when we think about our neighbors spending eternity separated from God? Do we believe hell is real enough to open our mouths? Do we love people enough to risk being awkward?
Start at your own zip code
When I say the world is lost, I’m not mainly talking about the United States. I’m not even talking about Texas or Fannin County. I’m talking about Ector, Texas. 75439. Those are the people God has placed my church family among, and we are the ones He sent to tell them.
Wherever you’re reading this, swap in your own zip code. God put you there on purpose.
So what keeps us quiet? I fight this in my own heart, so I’m asking myself as much as anybody. Is it that we love our own sin so much that we’ve started to look just like the world and can’t even see the lostness anymore? Is it pride? Is it fear of being that goofy Christian who brings up Jesus at awkward moments? Whatever it is, we need to repent of it. The people around us need Jesus.
And if you’re reading this and you’ve never given your life to Jesus, here’s the good news. Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, came to this earth and died for sinners. He bore the judgment we deserved and paid the price for our sin, and then He rose from the dead. If you will turn from your sin and put your faith in Him, you can be forgiven and reconciled to God. If you want to talk about what that means, reach out to me. I would love to have that conversation.
Politics will never fix this world. It will never heal this land. The only thing that changes a heart, a home, or a town is the gospel of Jesus Christ.
Moses walked out of that palace with a broken heart. May God give us the same one. And then may He send us out the door.