But let us go on to the plagues and look at a few of them just to see how they hit directly at some of their gods. Let us go to Exodus 7. This is the first plague on Egypt when the waters of the Nile were turned to blood.
This was a ghastly, gruesome type of plague. But God did it to strike at the very heart of Egypt's religion.
Pharaoh went down to the Nile River, probably for a religious rite. I think in The Ten Commandments movie they have him making some sort of a water offering, or something like that, to the Nile. And remember, as he is pouring it out, blood comes out of the vessel, and he drops the thing, and blood splatters everywhere. Well, it was probably something a lot like that. Whoever did the research did a pretty good job, I think. It was probably a ceremony to ensure the periodic flooding of the Nile, and it was by this flooding that all their crops were grown. They had to have the floods come every so often to flood the fields for the sediment that was laid down; they had very good soil so they could grow their crops.
Now Egypt itself has been called, “The gift of the Nile” because if there was no Nile, there would be no Egypt. It is their sole lifeline, because they get very little rain, if any. So they were very thankful for the Nile, but they made the Nile into a god, and they called this god Hapi.
You see how important it was to them. They worshipped the waters of the Nile.
What did God do? God turned the pagan Egyptian god who gave life to Egypt into a bringer of death, of stench, of suffering, of misery, and fear. If he had wanted to make a bigger statement to the Egyptians, he could not have done it. He struck at their main god, the Nile.
Now this in turn killed, or profaned other Egyptian gods—the fish. The Egyptians considered some of the fish of the Nile sacred: the lepidotus, the oxyrhynchus, the eel, and the carpasensa were all cultish, sacred objects or animals.
Now another thing that we have to understand about this, about what God had done here, was that the ancients believed that their gods were only powerful in a certain land, their own homeland. So Baal in Israel was considered a god of Canaan. And once you went outside the land of Canaan, he was thought to have no power. Then some other god took over.
So what God did here to Egypt was He hit the Egyptians right where it hurt the most. He hit the Nile first. Hit their strongest god.
There is more to this. In addition to losing their drinking water, the Egyptians had to go without bathing for a week. Now you might not think that is all that bad; a lot of people say, “Once a year if I need it or not.” But the Egyptians had a fetish about cleanliness. Among the ancient people, maybe only the Chinese rivaled them for reasons of cleanliness. The priests took four baths a day—two in the morning and two in the evening. That is how much they valued their cleanliness. So God made them feel unclean too. He hit them in a personal area not only in drinking but in bathing.
Another thing is, guess what their favorite food was? Fish! But their diet was almost completely fish because they trusted in the Nile. And so it says all the fish that were in the Nile died. So he hit them in the belly too. God really did a good one on their heads that time.
That's very interesting. Didn't we say, in one of the first sermons, that this is how things happen? We only find out after such things like this occur what God really wants us to learn, and by them we understand who the true God is. It's very much like what happened with Elijah and the 450 prophets of Baal.
In Exodus 7:17, just like the other miracle that Elijah did, this turning the waters to blood reveals the true God. In this case, the Egyptian magicians were in some way able to counterfeit it. I don't know how. It was a trick. That's kind of the sense of verse 22, when it says that they did so with their enchantments or their secret arts. It was a magician's trick, and they were able to convince Pharaoh that they could duplicate this turning the waters to blood. I don't know how they did it. It doesn't say.
But this type of plague should reveal the true God to anyone who sees it. This is very much contrary to nature, the natural order of things. That is, for something like water (which is pure, drinkable, brings life, cleans us up) to suddenly turn to this mass of blood (which stinks, the fish could not live in the blood, and it just defiled everything). It is the true God who is the Provider of all things. He's the One who gives fresh water to drink. He also supplied the fish and whatever else depended upon the waters of the Nile.
