Call to worship:
13 to him who divided the Red Sea in two,
for his steadfast love endures forever;
14 and made Israel pass through the midst of it,
for his steadfast love endures forever;
15 but overthrew[a] Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea,
for his steadfast love endures forever;
16 to him who led his people through the wilderness,
for his steadfast love endures forever;Psalm 136:13-16
Gathering Video
Questions for reflection:
What’s your approach to the judgement and justice of God? How is it good news?
What are the main things being shown through the plagues?
How does Jesus connect us to the justice of God?
In what ways does the coming final judgement bring about hope?
Corporate Prayer:
Our Father in Heaven,
We thank you that you are the God who makes a way. You are the Lord who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. You keep steadfast love for thousands, forgive iniquity, transgression and sin; but will by no means clear the guilty. As we follow Your Son and our savior Jesus, please empower us with your Spirit to work and wait well, where you have placed us.
In the name of Christ we pray,
Amen
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Notes//Quotes//Slides:
Exodus 7:1-13 - Chris
Exodus 7:1-13
2 Tim 3:16-17
“One could object that it is not worthy of God to wield the sword. Is God not love, long-suffering and all-powerful love? A counter-question could go something like this: Is it not a bit too arrogant to presume that our contemporary sensibilities about what is compatible with God’s love are so much healthier than those of the people of God throughout the whole history of Judaism and Christianity? If God were not angry at injustice and deception and did not make the final end to violence God would not be worthy of our worship.” - Mirolsav Volf
6:6-8
“How are we to interpret all this? With humility, would be a good place to start. There is (and always will be) a mystery in holding together the sovereignty of God and human moral responsibility for our own willed choices and actions. Yet we must, without hesitation, insist that the Bible affirms both, frequently and unequivocally, however difficult it is for us to reconcile them in our human logic” - Chris Wright
“The entire created order is caught up in this struggle, either as cause or victim. Pharaoh’s antilife measures have unleashed chaotic powers that threaten the very creation that God intended.… Water is no longer water; light and darkness are no longer separated; diseases of people and animals run amok; insects and amphibians swarm out of control. And the signs come to a climax in the darkness, which in effect returns the creation to the first day of Genesis 1, a precreation state of affairs. While everything is unnatural in the sense of being beyond the bounds of the order created by God, the word hypernatural (nature in excess) may better capture the sense. The plagues are hypernatural at various levels—timing, scope, intensity. Some sense of this is also seen in the recurrent phrases to the effect that such “had never been seen before, nor ever shall be again” (10:14 cf. 10:6; 9:18, 24; 11:6). Terence Fretheim
“It cannot be accidental that God used ten plagues to teach the Egyptians that he is sovereign and that their gods were of no account. At the time of the exodus, both the Israelites and the Egyptians used a decimal counting system, which meant that the number ten tended to connote a full, complete, sufficient quantity of anything being explicitly enumerated. A run-through of the whole decimal list from one to ten provided more than enough demonstration of God’s power over Egypt for anyone to get the message.” Doug Stuart
“after six occasions of pharaoh hardening his own heart, we at last read that God hardens his heart, it is not so much that God is causing him to make those choices but that God gives him up to the choices he has shown himself determined to make and allows the consequences to take their course” Chris Wright
Romans 12:14-21