Out-frog, Out-snake, Out-locust: Our God Goes Big

What if salvation isn’t a status but a way of standing in the world? We follow the sweep from the burning bush to Passover to the Red Sea and ask how a people learn to live free. Along the way, the commands that once sounded strange—choose a lamb, paint blood on your door, eat in haste—turn into a training ground for trust. The Israelites don’t signal God’s memory; they form their own. With each act, they move from fear to belonging, from Pharaoh’s script to God’s story.

We sit with the hard parts too: ten plagues, a hardened heart, and the unsettling portrait of divine power. Are these texts showing a vengeful God, or are they mythologizing history to proclaim that counterfeit powers collapse before the Creator? Egypt’s serpents and river gods meet a staff that becomes a serpent and swallows theirs; the message is not pyrotechnics but supremacy. Still, the bigger risk for us may be closer to home: turning “saved” into a scoreboard. When we split the world into insiders and outsiders, we miss that each of us is a mix—faithful and fickle, devoted and distracted—sometimes worshiping God, sometimes the altar of the chocolate chip cookie.

Grace re-centers the whole conversation. By grace you have been saved through faith is more than a memory verse; it’s a map. Grace declares what God has done and is doing; faith makes that truth real in our lives. The Israelites step into parted waters because they’ve already marked their doors. We step into costly love, honesty under pressure, rest that defies anxiety, forgiveness that disarms rivalry. That’s what “blood on the door” looks like now: embodied trust that turns belief into movement. If you’re ready to rethink salvation beyond labels and toward lived freedom, press play, walk with us through the text, and consider where you’re being invited to trust next. Subscribe, share this with a friend who’s wrestling with faith, and leave a review to help others find the journey too.

Transcript

From Burning Bush To Passover

Pastor Darren 0:00

You'll remember last week we uh had the passage visiting the uh burning bush, and uh this week we find ourselves all the way to the passage where uh Sober begins God's Passover of the Jewish people so that they can escape. Uh in the middle time catching you all up is this grand dramatic interplay between uh Moses and Aaron, Pharaoh and God, with Moses or with God telling Moses, all right, get back to Pharaoh and say he's gotta let those Israelites go. And Moses and Aaron showing up there and saying, Hey, our God says you gotta let us go, and Pharaoh saying, No, God hardening his heart over and over again. Uh, and uh this happens over cycles. There are ten punishments or plagues that God delivers unto the Egyptians, unto Pharaoh, in order to get Pharaoh to understand how important this is to God. Ten plagues, including uh uh the final one, which is that the firstborn are going to die of all the Egyptians, including Pharaoh's own son. So heavy, heavy times uh stories designed to uh help us understand God's power, God's strength. But that story lands on our passage for today. And again, it's the passage that introduces Passover, right? Where God is going to pass over the is uh the houses of the Israelites when he does this final plague. Now, uh, for you guys who are exegetical heads, how many do we have out there? How many of you have no idea what I just said? How many of you like to really dig into your Bible and understand what was going on historically, critically, and all that other? For those of you who are into that, we needed Stephen here. He's my guy. And evidently Michael, I learned as well. He'll dig the he'll take a deep dive every now and again. Yeah. Well, so a couple of things here, right? We have this passage. It uh is an interesting passage. As you read through it, you're starting to go, wow, God does this, God does that. Okay. Uh, so first thing, it's a uh this the passage is important because it becomes a new way of living. All of those Israelites being enslaved had a whole different understanding of how to live life, guided by their the Egyptians who are controlling all of them. And so God's coming to them and saying, this is going to be a whole new way to live your life with with my guiding your behaviors and guiding them in a particular way. And those are going to be behaviors that need to get established. They need to become the way you live so that you can know the fullness of life and know the fullness of God. And so you'd probably notice that if you were paying attention, there were a lot of instructions there in that passage about what they were supposed to do to get ready for this Passover. Uh some of it, just realistically, pragmatically, they were going to go take a long, long walk. Best get some protein, yeah? Right? So there's a lot of it that was that way. It was just a lot of instruction. But secondly, and maybe uh more importantly, I think metaphorically, is that it became time for the Israelites to put some blood on the door. Right? Uh you might think, well, why was this important? Why is God asking them to mark their homes? Doesn't God know who's who? Isn't an omniscient God going to know who lives there? But then as you think about it, you go, oh, but that's not the point, is it? To me, the point is it's a symbol, it's an action that marks the Israelites' need to make a commitment to God. You've probably heard the phrase, skin in the game. He's got to get some skin in the game. Well, this is blood on the door. He's got to have some blood on the door, some way of making some commitment to God, some openness to what God has in mind for them. So, with this event, as I said, Pharaoh finally breaks, especially with his son dying, and he allows the Israelites to leave. The quick summary of the rest of the story through today the Israelites leave. Pharaoh's heart is hardened once more, and he starts to chase them. The Israelites are led right to the Red Sea where they're kind of stuck. Pharaoh and his army are on their way looking to uh deliver unto them some bad news. And then God has Moses use his staff to open the Red Sea, and the Israelites are able to cross. Once they get across, the waters converge, takes Pharaoh's army away, and the Israelites are finally free. Yay! Right? I mean, that's kind of where we're getting at with this story, the dramatic release. Now they are free. So two issues worth playing with just a little bit. First of all, why does God Pharaoh harden Pharaoh's heart? Did you ask yourself that? We asked it on Wednesday in Bible study. You know, in a way, does it seem fair that God is hardening Pharaoh's heart? That Pharaoh maybe isn't making his own decision, and so these plagues keep coming because God is uh kind of stacking the deck a little bit. I don't know, maybe you didn't go there. We did a little bit on Wednesday. Uh part of what's going on here is that in many ways our scriptures are a mix of the historical, but adding in some human involvement in there too. Uh they call it uh uh in one of the podcasts I uh suggested you might try, they talked about it as mythologizing history. So you're taking this historical event and kind of adding to it, and in that adding, maybe there's some projection onto God about who God is. Uh and in this case, with the Israelites having been oppressed for so long, it was probably pretty easy and maybe even a little joyous to have a God who was going to deliver some justice, right? And come and say, all right, you've been oppressed a long time. I'm coming to save you, I'm coming to even the score. So that's one question people will wrestle with with this passage. Uh, and in many ways, there are in our Bible, we're trying to emphasize God's power in a specific example of that. The Egyptians used a lot of snakes in their identity and their storytelling, serpents, right? We have the American eagle. Egyptians had these snakes, had these serpents. So when you see Moses's serpent that God created out of his staff eat their serpents, you don't have to be like a genius to figure out what is trying to be said here. All right, my God is more powerful even than your serpents, which you worship, the snakes that you have all over the place. And that's really what they're trying to get across. Our God is so strong, he will out serpent you, then he will outlocust you, he will outfrog you. Some of you know your plagues. Those are some of the things I had said. Anyone got them memorized? I did not. Extra credit. Nats? Yeah. Locust, we got the locust. Oh, yeah, bloody water. Yeah, all right. Well, Pastor with the bad ears is gonna end it there because somebody's gonna say something, and I'm gonna go. I better move on from that thing. Well, second question you might have with this passage, as we're kind of playing around with it a little bit too, is is God really this way? Is this the way God operates? It seems even though the Israelites were oppressed, and one would say there was some justice to all of that, it sure comes off God as this aggressive, maybe even vengeful presence in our Old Testament scriptures. What I will say to you on that one is part of our journey of faith as Christians is looking to understand God better, including the perceptions, the descriptions of God in our scriptures. So we have to do that unpacking for ourselves and with our own faith. And frankly, that's not the sermon for today. So I'm not going there. So I will tell you, hey, enjoy that journey of asking that question on your own of is that who God is? Is that who God has been for you? But where I really wanted to get to with this passage, because you you've heard the story, the theme I'm getting to, this journey of faith, this journey to faith that Exodus models. Uh I land there, and that's really where I wanted to focus. Because we now have these Israelites, and they are free. They are free from their enslavement. The Israelites they put blood on the door and God saves them. But what does that mean? What does it mean that they are saved? We Christians, we are pretty comfortable with that phrase saved, aren't we? We use it in a lot of ways, right? And and we sing it in our songs, right? We've all probably come to some sense of how we understand our lives as being saved by God. And yet, what do you think or how do you feel when you hear somebody preaching about being saved when you're out in the public square, when you're at the park, and somebody's handing out the leaflets, and they come to you and they say, Are you saved? Well different, right? You know, it's you know some of us would be like, Well, heck yeah, I'm saved. All right. Maybe even take the flyer. Some of us will go, Well, I don't really want to get into this, just take the flyer and keep walking. Anybody in all right? Still others of us, you know, there be in that conversation, and you think, oh, am I saved? I don't know that we would agree on what saved means, right? And you think, oh, am I going to get into that kind of conversation? We might not agree on what salvation even is supposed to be happening there. I personally I get kind of cautious when we start using a lot of saved talk. I feel like it starts us and it starts me down a path of giving ourselves permission to begin to judge others. Oh, okay. So so some of us are saved, and some of us are not. Some are in, some are out. Aren't we all a mix of both of the things? Aren't we a mix of the good and the not so good? Sometimes I'm really good. I trust in God, I do what God wants. Sometimes I'm not. You know, I'll be trusting in something else. I'll be worshiping at the altar of the chocolate chip cookie. Right? All of us have our thing. A lot of times when we are worshiping this other thing, it's not something in tune with God. It's not something that God would have us do. And we talked about that small things, but bigger things too. So when we start talking about being saved, underlying all of that is this assumption that we're in and they are out. Am I wrong? We start down that pathway and we start kind of categorizing sheep, goat, sheep, goat. It's kind of like um kind of like Noah's Ark. Where everybody had a chance to get on or to not get on. Right? And those uh who got on, we're loving being with them, or you know, we're loving all those folks that are in there on the ark with us, we're walking around. Hey, what do you need? Hey, they're serving drinks on the Lido deck. Just make sure you don't step in anything, right? It were real comfortable, and then those who didn't get on that ark, uh, so what do I really owe you? You had a choice, you didn't get in. To me, that saved language, it can be a really a slippery slope to that that kind of hubris of giving ourselves permission to decide what is good and what is not good, what is in and what is out. I prefer that level of humility, of doing the best I can and trying to offer love in the many ways that I can. Now, some of you may disagree with me and think, oh, that's not what's going on in the world, and that's fair too, but I would say I would love for you to explain to me today's political and cultural climate. Because to me, we are in that thick of everybody having decided for everybody else, including ourselves, what's in and what's out. These people are gonna bring on the end of things. That was my impression of both sides. Right? Do you feel that? I know I feel it. Friends, I don't think it works if we all feel like we're the ones who are saved. That we're the ones on the good side of the sea, not just because of the overlooking of our own imperfections, our own sin, but because we've also put ourselves in the position of assuming the sins of others, not to mention assuming their salvation or not salvation. So, with all of that, it brings me back to the question. So, what does it mean to be saved? What does it mean for these Israelites who are now free? Personally, I think that God is interested in reaching every single one of us. Paul tells us in his letter to the Ephesians, for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God, not the result of works, so that no one may boast. Again, for by grace you have been saved through faith. God's grace. God's uncommit unconditional love is ours through faith. In other words, God's love is always there. But it's our but it's our faith that makes it real for us. Believing in God's love opens our hearts to that love. Maybe the promise of salvation, like grace, is already ours. We are already saved. We are saved, or it becomes real to us when we make that commitment of faith, when we open our minds and our hearts to the idea that it might be true. God saves us when we put some blood on the door. And isn't this the journey of faith that we're on? It involves the joy and often the challenge of accepting what's already true. Allowing it into our minds, allowing it into our hearts, allowing it into our souls. What would that mean to live like that is true? Have you ever done something with little more than the trust that God is real, that God's love is real? I mean, that's what the Israelites did. In fact, they did a lot of it because God gave them a lot of instructions, and they did every single one of them out of their faith and trust. And in doing so, that saving grace became theirs. That's been the Exodus journey so far. The Exodus journey that to me we are on. It starts with our recognizing that to a certain extent we live as if we're in this basket on a river. We're floating around among these different influences and pressures and temptations, and then amidst that God comes to us with a better way to live. God comes to us in some powerful way and says, There is a better way to do this. And at this point, it starts to uh come to us. It starts to be up to us. Are we going to trust in that better way? Are we going to make a commitment? Are we going to put blood on the door? Wouldn't that be the craziest place to end us end a sermon? Amen.