Jeremiah Knight, June 22, 2026
A reader wrote in and asked whether there is any real significance, purpose, and meaning behind the ten plagues of Egypt, or whether they were simply a series of disasters God sent to wear Pharaoh down until he gave in. It is a good question, and the answer takes us right into the heart of who God is and how He makes Himself known to people who have never reckoned with Him. The plagues were never random. Every one of them carried a message, and that message was as much for the people of God as it was for Egypt.
To understand them we have to remember where Israel was. They had lived in Egypt for around four hundred years, and most of that time had been spent in cruel slavery. They still believed the God of their fathers existed, and they still cried out to Him, yet somewhere across those long generations they had begun to doubt that He could actually break the chains that held them. The Egyptians around them worshipped a crowded sky full of gods, a god for the sun, a god for the river, gods for crops and childbirth and the dead, and they credited those gods with everything they saw in the world. So when Moses stood before Pharaoh and demanded that he release the people, Pharaoh answered with open contempt. “Who is the LORD that I should obey His voice to let Israel go? I do not know the LORD, and besides, I will not let Israel go” (Exodus 5:2). That single sentence framed the whole contest that followed. Pharaoh had thrown down a challenge about whose God was real, and God was about to answer him in a way that neither Egypt nor Israel would ever forget.
We are not left to guess at God’s purpose, because He stated it plainly. As He prepared the final blow against Egypt He said, “against all the gods of Egypt I will execute judgments, I am the LORD” (Exodus 12:12). The plagues were a direct assault on the false gods that the Egyptians trusted, a public dismantling of every power they imagined stood behind their land. With each plague God reached into the very thing a particular god was supposed to control and proved that god to be empty. At the same time He was teaching His own people that the One who had spoken to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob was still alive, still mighty, and still able to save. Both lessons were unfolding at once, one for the oppressor and one for the oppressed.
The first plague struck the Nile itself, turning its waters to blood. The river was the lifeline of Egypt, the source of their food, their trade, and their survival, and they treated it as sacred and divine, tied to the god Hapi who was thought to give the river its life. When the fish died and the water became unusable, the whole nation watched its most trusted source of provision fail. God told Pharaoh exactly why it was happening. “By this you shall know that I am the LORD” (Exodus 7:17). The river the Egyptians had worshipped could not even keep itself clean before the God of Israel.
Then came the frogs, swarming up out of that same river into every house and bed and oven, and the irony was sharp, because the Egyptians held the frog as a symbol of the goddess Heqet who was linked to fertility and birth. The very creature they associated with life now multiplied into a plague, and when the frogs died their bodies were heaped into stinking piles across the land. After this God sent gnats from the dust of the earth, and here something changed. The magicians of Pharaoh, who had managed to imitate the earlier signs with their secret arts, suddenly could not. They turned to Pharaoh and admitted, “This is the finger of God” (Exodus 8:19). Even the men who served the false gods of Egypt were forced to confess that a power greater than all their craft was at work.
The plague of flies brought a new and pointed mercy, because for the first time God drew a visible line between His people and the Egyptians. He declared that no swarms would trouble the land of Goshen where Israel lived, “in order that you may know that I, the LORD, am in the midst of the land” (Exodus 8:22). The distinction was unmistakable. The same God who poured out judgment on Egypt was sheltering His own. When the livestock of Egypt died in the next plague, striking at the cattle the Egyptians revered through gods like Hathor and the bull Apis, the herds of Israel were untouched. Pharaoh even sent men to confirm it, and when they reported that not one animal of Israel had perished, his heart only grew harder. The boils that followed left the magicians so afflicted that they could not so much as stand before Moses, a humiliating end for the men who had once claimed to rival him.
Before the last three plagues God gave Pharaoh a solemn warning, telling him that these would be heavier than all the rest, sent so “that you may know that there is no one like Me in all the earth” (Exodus 9:14). He went further and told Pharaoh something that should stop every one of us in our tracks, that Pharaoh himself had been raised up by God for this very moment. “For this reason I have allowed you to remain, in order to show you My power and in order to proclaim My name through all the earth” (Exodus 9:16). The proud king who boasted that he did not know the LORD was, the whole time, a piece on the board God was using to declare His own glory to the nations. Then the hail fell, a storm unlike anything Egypt had seen, fire running along the ground with it, flattening everything left in the open, while not a single stone of ice fell on the fields of Israel.
The locusts came next and stripped away whatever the hail had spared, devouring the last of the crops until there would be no harvest in Egypt that year. After that came a darkness so thick it could be felt, three days of it smothering the land, and this struck at the very head of the Egyptian religion, the sun god Ra, whom Pharaoh himself was believed to embody. The sun that Egypt trusted as the brightest of their gods was blotted out at the command of the God of Israel, and through it all the homes of God’s people still had light. One by one their gods had been exposed, and the false glory of Egypt was being reduced to ruin.
The final plague reached into every home with the death of the firstborn, and here God taught Israel a lesson that pointed straight to Christ. Unlike the other plagues, this one was not survived simply by being an Israelite. It called for an act of faith. Every family was told to take a lamb without blemish, to kill it, and to spread its blood on the doorposts and lintel of the house. God promised that when the destroyer passed through the land, “when I see the blood I will pass over you” (Exodus 12:13), and the home marked by the blood would be spared. The protection was not in their goodness or their bloodline but in the blood of the lamb on the door. That night Egypt was filled with wailing while Israel sat safe behind the blood, and it is no small thing that the Holy Spirit later tells us, “Christ our Passover also has been sacrificed” (1 Corinthians 5:7). What happened that night in Egypt was a shadow of the cross, where the blood of the spotless Lamb of God covers all who trust in Him and the judgment we deserve passes over us.
When Israel finally walked out of Egypt they carried with them a clear picture of God’s power to judge, God’s mercy to protect, and God’s faithfulness to His promise. Pharaoh hardened his heart one last time and sent his chariots after them, only to watch his armies swallowed by the sea that had opened wide for God’s people. The power of Egypt was broken, and word of it spread until even the people of Canaan trembled, with Rahab later confessing that dread of the God of Israel had fallen on her whole land (Joshua 2:9-11). All of it accomplished exactly what God had said at the start. We can look back on these events now and find our own faith strengthened, because the God who shattered the false gods of Egypt and saved His people by the blood of the lamb is the same God we worship today, the living and true God, the Judge of all the earth, who still saves all who hide beneath the blood of Christ.
Amen… Hallelujah
He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.
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