EXPOSITION
THE TENTH PLAGUE. At last the time had come for the dealing of the final blow. Nine plagues had been sent, nine inflictions endured, and no serious effect had been produced. Once or twice Pharaoh had wavered, had made profession of submitting himself, had even acknowledged his sin. But each time he had relapsed into obstinacy. Now at length the fiat had gone forth for that last plague which had been announced the first (Exodus 4:23). Pharaoh's own son, his firstborn, the heir to his throne, was smitten with death, in common with all the other male Egyptians who had "opened the womb." What the effect on the king would have been, had he alone suffered, we cannot certainly say. As it was, the whole population of the country, nobles, tradesmen, peasants, suffered with him; and the feeling aroused was so intense that the popular movement left him no choice. The Egyptians everywhere "rose up in the night" (Exodus 12:30), and raised "a great cry," and insisted that the Israelites should depart at once (Exodus 12:33). Each man feared for himself, and felt his life insecure, so long as a single Israelite remained in the land.
At midnight. As prophesied by Moses (Exodus 11:4). The day had not been fixed, and this uncertainty must have added to the horror of the situation. The first-born of Pharaoh. We have no proof that the eldest son of Menephthah died before his father, unless we take this passage as proving it. He left a son, called Seti-Menephthah, or Seti II, who either succeeded him, or reigned after a short interval, during which the throne was held by Ammonmes, a usurper. The first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon. This phrase takes the place of another expression, viz. "the first-born of the maid-servant that is behind the mill" (Exodus 11:5). In both cases, the general meaning is, "all, from the highest to the lowest." This is perhaps the whole that is in the writer's thought; but it is also true that captives in dungeons were in some cases employed in turning hand-mills (Judges 16:21). And all the first-born of cattle. Rather, "of beasts." There is no limitation of the plague to domesticated animals.
And Pharaoh rose up in the night, and all his servants. This general disturbance differentiates the present visitations from that which came upon the host of Sennacherib (2 Kings 19:35). Then, the calamity came with such silence and secrecy, that the deaths were not suspected until men rose to go about their various tasks in the morning Now, every household seems to have been aroused from its sleep in the night. We must suppose sharp and painful illness, terminating after a few hours in death. The disaster itself may have been one from which Egypt often suffers in the spring of the year (Kalisch); but its attacking all the firstborn and no others, and no Israelites, as well as its announcement, plainly showed it to be miraculous. There was a great cry. See the comment on Exodus 11:6. For there was not a house where there was not one dead. This is perhaps a slight hyperbole. There would be many families in which there was no son; and some houses might contain no male who had opened the womb. It is always to be borne in mind, that the language of Scripture—especially where exciting and tragical events are narrated—is poetical, or at the least highly rhetorical.
HOMILETICS
The death of the first-born.
From the death of the first-born we may learn:—
I. THE SEVERITY OF GOD'S LONG DEFERRED JUDGMENTS. That punishment will overtake the wicked sooner or later was the conviction of heathendom no less than of the Jewish and Christian worlds. Horace says—"Judgment may halt, but yet it rarely fails to overtake the guilty one at last." Tibullus—"Wretch, though at first thy sin no judgment meet, vengeance will come at length with silent feet." But the greater heaviness of the punishment that is long deferred does not appear to have attracted their notice. Yet experience might have taught it them. Who has not seen the long triumphant career of a thoroughly bad man, crowned with success for years, seeming to turn all he touched to gold, "flourishing," as the Psalmist has it, "like a green bay tree," yet ending in calamities and misfortunes so striking, and so heaped one upon another, as to draw general attention? It is invidious, perhaps, to note instances; but the present generation has seen at least one example among the crowned heads of Europe. And Scripture is full of examples. How long God's Spirit strove with men in the antediluvian world, as they proceeded from one wickedness to another, heaping up to themselves wrath against the day of wrath, till the flood came and swept away the ungodly! For what a prolonged term of years must the long-suffering of God have borne with the cities of the plain, as they more and more corrupted themselves, till in all Sodom there were not ten godly men left! And then, how signal the punishment! Again, what an instance is Ahab of the operation of the law! Flourishing in every way, in spite of his numerous sins—his idolatries, cruelties, selfishness, meanness, hatred of God's servants—victorious over Benhadad, supported by all the forces of Jehoshaphat, encouraged by his successes to undertake an aggressive war against Syria—and then struck down in a moment, slain by an arrow shot at a venture (1 Kings 22:34)—his blood licked up by dogs—his wife and seventy sons murdered! The Pharaohs and the Egyptians had now worked their wicked will on Israel for a century or more, since the king arose "who knew not Joseph"—all this time they had been treasuring up to themselves wrath (Romans 2:5)—and now it had fallen upon them in full force. Let sinners beware of trying the forbearance and long-suffering of God too far—let them tremble when all goes well with them, and no punishment comes. Let them be assured that the account of their offences is strictly kept, and that for each they will have to suffer. Delay does but mean accumulation. However long suspended, the bolt will fall at last, and it will be proportioned in its severity to the length of the delay, and the amount of the wrath stored up.
II. THE SUDDENNESS WITH WHICH THEY COME UPON MEN. It was night—it was the hour of repose, of peace, silence, tranquillity. All had gone to rest unsuspectingly. No one anticipated evil. Each said to himself, as he lay down, "To-morrow shall be as this day, and much more abundant," when suddenly, without warning, there was death everywhere. Fathers saw the light of their eyes snatched from them—mothers beheld their darlings struggling in the agonies of dissolution. A shrill, prolonged cry sounded throughout the land. So the flood came upon man unawares (Luke 17:27)—and a sudden destruction overthrew the cities of the plain (ib. 28, 29)—and Ahab found himself mortally wounded when he was thinking of nothing but victory—and in the height of his pride Herod Agrippa was seized with a fearful malady—and Uzziah's leprosy smote him in a moment—and in the night of his feast was Belshazzar slain. Wicked men are for the most part thinking of nothing less when the judgments of God fall upon them. They have said to their soul—"Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry," when the dread sentence goes forth—"Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." God's judgments often come in the night. We know not what a day, nor what a night may bring forth. Let us commend our souls to God when we lie down to rest, and repeat the prayer of the Litany against sudden death.
III. THE IMPARTIALITY WITH WHICH THEY ARE DEALT OUT UPON ALL CONDITIONS OF MEN. "Pale death smites equally the poor man's but and the king's palace," says a heathen moralist. And so it is with all God's judgments. He is no respecter of persons. "Without respect of persons he judgeth according to every man's work" (1 Peter 1:17). Greatness furnishes no security against him. His messengers can enter the palace, elude the sentinels, pass the locked doors, make their way into the secret chamber, smite the monarch, sleeping or waking, with disease, or death, or frenzy. Nor can obscurity escape him; "All things are naked and open unto the eyes of him with whom we have to do." The lowest dungeon, the most wretched garret, the obscurest cellars are within his ken, their inmates known, the moral condition of each and all of them noted. His judgments find men out as easily in the darkest haunts of vice, or the most wretched abodes of poverty, as in royal mansions. And as greatness will not prevent him from chastising, so neither will meanness The "woman behind the mill," the "captive in the dungeon" are his creatures and his servants, no less than the great, and must be either his true servants, or rebels against his authority. If they are the-latter, their obscurity and insignificance will not save them from his judgments, any more than the great man's greatness will save him. Vice must not look for impunity because it is low-placed, and hides itself in a corner.
HOMILIES BY J. ORR
The death of the first-born,
On this see Exodus 11:4-2. Observe here—
I. THIS JUDGMENT IS BASED ON THE PRINCIPLE OF REPRESENTATION. Hitherto, the plagues had fallen on the Egyptians indiscriminately. Now, a change is made to the principle of representation. Egypt, Israel also, is represented in its first-born. When a death-penalty was to be inflicted, the lines had to be drawn more sharp and clear. We are reminded that this principle of representation holds a vitally important place in God's moral government. The illustrations which more immediately affect ourselves are, first, the representation of the race in Adam, and second, its representation in Christ (Romans 5:12-45). Hence it is not altogether fanciful to trace a relation to Christ even in this judgment on the first-born.
1. Christ is the great first-born of the race. We catch some glimpse of this by looking at the matter from the side of Israel. Israel, as God's son, his first-born, is admitted to have been a type of Christ (cf. Matthew 2:15). Much more were the first-born in Israel—the special representatives of this peculiar feature in the calling of the nation—types of Christ. They resembled him in that they bore the guilt of the rest of the people. But Christ, as the Son of man, sustained a relation to more than Israel. He is, we may say, the great First-born of the race. Egypt as well as Israel was represented in him.
2. The death of Christ is not only God's great means of saving the world, but it is God's great judgment upon the sin of the world. It is indeed the one, because it is the other. There is thus in the death of Christ, beth the Israel side and the Egypt side. There is some shadow of vicarious endurance of penalty—of the one suffering for, and bearing the guilt of, the many—even in the destruction of Egypt's first-born.
3. The death of Christ, which brings salvation to the believing, is the earnest of final doom to the unbelieving portion of the race. This also is exhibited in principle in the history of the exodus. In strictness, the first-born were viewed as having died, both in Israel and Egypt. The Egyptian first-born died in person; the Israelitish first-born in the substituted Lamb. The death of a first-born in person could typify judgment in the room, or in the name, of others; but the first-born being himself one of the guilty, his death could not (even in type) properly redeem. Hence the substitution of the lamb, which held forth in prophecy the coming of the true and sinless first-born, whose death would redeem. But Christ's death, to the unbelieving part of mankind—the wilfully and obstinately unbelieving—is a prophecy, not of salvation, but of judgment. God's judgment on sin in the person of Christ, the first-born, is the earnest of the doom which will descend on all who refuse him as a Saviour. And this was the meaning of the death of the first-born in Egypt. That death did not redeem, but forewarned Egypt of yet worse doom in store for it if it continued in its sins. The first-born endured, passed under, God's judgment, for the sin of the nation; and so has Christ passed under, endured God's judgment, for the sin even of the unbelieving. Egypt, not less than Israel, was represented in him; but to the one (Egypt as representative of hostility to the kingdom of God) his death means doom; to the other (Israel as representative of the people of God) it means salvation.
II. THIS JUDGMENT COMPELLED PHARAOH TO RELAX HIS HOLD ON ISRAEL. It was the consummating blow. Imagination fails in the attempt to realise it. As we write, accounts come to hand of the terrific storm of Oct. 14, attended by a lamentable loss of life on the Berwickshire coast of Scotland. The storm was sudden, and preluded by an awful and ominous darkness. Cf. with remarks on ninth plague the following:—"I noticed a black-looking cloud over by the school, which shortly spread over all the sky out by the Head. Sea, sky and ground all seemed to be turning one universal grey-blue tint, and a horrible sort of stillness fell over everything. The women were all gathering at their doors, feeling that something awful was coming. No fewer than 200 fishermen and others are believed to have perished, the village of Eyemouth alone losing 129. So connected by intermarriage is the population of the villages and hamlets, that there is scarcely a family in any of them which is not called to mourn its dead. The scenes are heart-rending. Business in every shape and form is paralysed." An image this, and yet how faint, of the cry that went up in Egypt that night, when in every house there was found one dead. Yet no stroke less severe would have served the purpose, and this one is to be studied in view of the fact that it did prove effectual for its end. Observe,
1. It was a death-stroke. Death has a singular power in subduing and melting the heart. It is the most powerful solvent God can apply to a rebellious nature. It is sometimes tried when gentler means have failed. God removes your idol. He lays your dear one in the dust. You have resisted milder influences, will you yield to this? Your heart is for the moment bowed and broken, will the repentance prove lasting, or will it be, like Pharaoh's, only for a time?
2. It is a death-grip upon the soul which is needed to make sin relax its hold upon it. "The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of hell gut hold upon me; I found trouble and sorrow. Then called I upon the name of the Lord: O Lord, I beseech thee, deliver my soul" (Psalms 116:3, Psalms 116:4). God comes in the preaching of his law, and lays his hand, a hand carrying death in it, upon the soul of the trembling transgressor, who then for the first time realises the fatal and unspeakably awful position in which he has placed himself by sin. It is a death-sentence which is written in his conscience.
3. That which completes the liberation of the soul is a view of the meaning of the death of christ. Terror alone will not melt the heart. There is needed to effect this the influence of love. And where is love to be seen in such wonderful manifestation as at the Cross of Christ? What see we there? The first-born of the race expiring in awful agony under the judgment of God for our sins. Is not this a spectacle to melt the heart? It is powerful enough, if earnestly contemplated, to make the Pharaoh that is within us all relinquish his grip upon the captive spirit. What read we of the prospective conversion of Israel?—"They shall look on Me whom they have pierced, and they shall mourn for him, as one mourneth for his only son; and shall be in bitterness for him, as one that is in bitterness for his first-born" (Zechariah 12:10). See again, Acts 2:36, Acts 2:37, "Let all the house of Israel know assuredly, that God hath made that same Jesus whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ. Now when they heard this, they were pricked in their hearts," etc. Cf. also Revelation 2:7. The Cross inspires mourning—
(1) By the spectacle it presents of holy suffering.
(2) By the recollection of who it is that there suffers.
(3) By the thought that it is our own sins which are the cause of this suffering.
(4) By the thought that it is the judgment of God in the infliction of the curse of sin which the Holy one is thus enduring.
(5) By the conviction of sin, and the dread of Divine justice, thus awakened.
(6) Above all, by the infinite love shown in this gift of the Son, and in the Son's willingness to endure this awful agony and shame for our salvation.—J.O.