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Reading the Old Testament always causes me to pause. God and Israel have a really rocky relationship. No matter what God does and how much He gives to them, Israel still does not fully trust Him. The other thing that creates problems for me is placing the story in the right context. What else is going on? What was the norm of the day? I was reading the story of Pharaoh and Moses in Exodus and as soon as I started reading about the plagues, the movie about the Ten Commandments popped into my head. How many times have I seen that movie? The images flood over you and even as you are reading the Bible, the scenes from the movie play out. I found myself saying "but where is this or that" referring to things that occurred in the movie but are not necessarily written in the Bible. Anyway, it also caused me to focus my attention on the plagues that God used to convince Pharaoh to release Israel. By digging deeper, I have come to understand that each of the plagues was designed to illustrate that God was showing his dominion over all of the "false" gods that Egypt worshiped at the time. Hapi was the god of the Nile. Without Hapi, Egypt would have died, and so he was sometimes revered even above Ra, the sun god. By turning the Nile red and rendering it useless, God is essentially cutting out all commerce and the livelihood of the Egyptians. Each of the plagues is tied to a god that relates to the action that God our Father takes to convince Pharaoh. As we know, the plague of the first-born is what finally breaks the hardness of Pharaoh's heart. This action, of course, alludes to the coming crucifixion of Jesus Christ, who is God's first born. Sometimes just reading the Bible is enough. Sometimes you really need to dig a little deeper to understand why the story is written. God is complex but our responsibilities are not. He merely wants us to trust Him in all matters.

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