The plagues of Exodus 10 are more than a display of God’s power and the next step in the liberation of His people. They also serve as a picture of the effects of sin upon our lives. Only God’s grace to us in Christ is sufficient to restore what the locusts have eaten and deliver us from the darkness we all experience apart from Him.

The Israelites demonstrated yet again covenantal unfaithfulness by marrying foreign women. While this points to the importance of covenantal marriage, it points to a deeper problem: the people of God cannot keep their covenantal obligations. So then it falls to God to provide Christ, who kept the covenant for us.

The difference between remorse and repentance is critical to the Christian life. Remorse is a confession of sorrow before men, while repentance is a confession of sin before God. Despite the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart, in Exodus 9 we see the mercy of God in displaying His power so that all men might repent of their sin and find saving refuge in Him.

The pressures of life often tempt us to try and make deals with God. Like Pharaoh, we promise renewed obedience in return for deliverance from our present crisis. But God is not interested in our offers because He has already made the only deal we'll ever need-the offer of undeserved grace though faith in the sacrifice of His Son.

An idol is anything we love, honor, or depend upon more than God. In His mercy, God relentlessly crushes the idols in our lives so that our hope may be built on Him alone, but the process is rarely pleasant. Turning the Nile River into blood crushed one of the ancient Egyptians’ most powerful idols, but it also opened the door of salvation for those who trusted in Him by grace. Ultimately, the first plague foreshadowed a far greater judgment in blood that would result in a far greater deliverance through the cross of Jesus Christ.

Among the many blessed attributes of Christ, none surpasses His sheer holiness. While not always perceived outwardly, it was the driving force behind His earthly life and ministry and remains the eternal basis of our salvation and comfort as we trust in Him each day.

There are so many things in life that discourage us and rob us of joy. Yet joy is listed second after only love among the fruit of the Spirit and is meant to be a key blessing in the life of every believer. By considering what gave Christ joy during His earthly ministry we better see how His joy can be ours by grace.

The pride of thinking they knew better than God was at the root of Adam and Eve’s first sin and it continues to be at the root of our own sin each day. Only a Savior who was born in humility, lived in humility, and died in humility is able to atone for the sin of our pride and enable us to live with a right perspective before God and one another.

Just as Haggai’s message of God’s past presence and future promises gave his people encouragement, so the Christmas message of the birth of Christ as “Immanuel” and the ultimate fulfillment of those promises gives us hope today.

A snapshot of our extended earthly families reveals quite an assortment of personalities and levels of obedience. The same is true within the household of faith, yet God uses each one- even the rebellious- for His own glory and to teach us about life in His family.