The Finger of God
When Aaron struck the dust with his staff, the people of Egypt were covered with gnats. There are a couple of firsts in this, the third plague. This is the first one for which there is no warning. That happens for each set of three. There’s no warning given for the 3rd, 6th, or 9th plagues. This serves perhaps to draw attention to the last and deadliest plague. This is also the first plague that has to do with earth or land. The first two plagues, Nile and frogs, are related to water. The next 4 plagues have to do with land. The last 4 plagues have to do with the sky. As we talked about last week, the Egyptian ‘gods’ were related to either earth, or sky, or sea. This is also the first plague that the magicians cannot replicate. You have to believe Pharaoh was glad they could not use their magic to produce more bugs.
Again, the Great I Am is striking a blow against a false god by showing that He is sovereign over all of life, right down to the very dust that we walk on. One belief popular in ancient Egypt was that Heqet, the frog queen (confronted in the second plague), had a husband named Khnum, who had the power to create new humans from the dust of the ground. He could shape them into people out of dust or clay but only Heqet, the goddess of fertility, could breathe life into them.
When Aaron struck the ground, Moses wrote that “All the dust of the earth became gnats.” The last time that phrase was used, “the dust of the earth” was God’s promise to Abraham: “I will make your offspring as the dust of the earth.” In other words, Abraham would have more offspring than he could count. And Egypt was covered with more gnats than it could ever imagine. Most scholars believe these were not gnats, which are a nuisance, but they were mosquitoes, which are blood-sucking terrorists. Ligon Duncan tells the story of Alonzo Ramiriz working with a team of missionaries in the Amazon basin right off the river. When he got there, he saw the team going out to the river to bathe. Everyone went except for anyone who had cut himself shaving, because of the piranhas. The rest would risk the piranhas…because of the mosquitoes. Alonzo said that the sound of the mosquitoes around them around the clock was like a gigantic aircraft landing, and the sound of the swarms of mosquitoes would literally drive some people mad. The only relief from the mosquitoes was underwater, but the second they emerged, they were covered by them again. That gives you some taste of what happened in Egypt. They swarmed on every human being and every animal in the land. What was God doing in these plagues?
John Currid at Reformed Theological Seminary wrote that God was “de-creating Egypt.” God demonstrated His power and brought such chaos that He who created water and gathered it into seas on the second day of creation and made the waters swarm with fish on the fifth day of creation turned the Nile into blood in the first plague. He who made vegetation grow on the third day of creation obliterated almost all the crops and the fields of Egypt in the 7th and 8th plagues. He who made two great lights in the heavens for the earth on the fourth day of creation turned those lights out with the 9th plague. He who made man in his own image and gave him dominion over the earth on the 6th day of creation afflicted the men and women of Egypt with boils in the 6th plague. And then He took their firstborn in the tenth plague. The de-creation of Egypt reveals who God is to the people and results in the release of their captives. Remember, God told Moses, “The Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.”
Maybe the magicians, even as lost as they could be, were the first to see the truth. They said, “This is the finger of God.” They may have added, And if this is God’s finger, we don’t want to see His fist. The magicians did not know God. But they had eyes to see His power.
The Psalmist wrote, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” On that day, so did the mosquitoes.