Pastor Scott's Musings

"I will plague your whole country with frogs" (Ex 8:2) I'm reading about the ten plagues of Egypt in the book of Exodus. Moses obeys God's call to go down to Egypt. He and his brother Aaron confront the king of Egypt, the pharaoh, and tell him to let the Hebrew slaves go and worship Yahweh their God in the desert. Pharaoh, of course, refuses and makes life even more difficult for the Hebrew people by forcing them to make bricks without providing them the needed straw. They had to meet their expected quotas with the additional task of gathering and cutting their own straw! In response Yahweh, rendered as "The LORD" in most English translations, turns up the heat. If Pharaoh will not let the Hebrews slaves go free, Yahweh will inflict plagues upon all Egypt. First The waters of the Nile River and all lakes and pools, wells and streams turn to blood. The Egyptians had to cleanse the bloody waters through earthen filters along the river banks. But because ...

You must understand this, that in the last days distressing times will come. ~ 2nd Timothy 3:1 ~ When it comes to end times discussions, I shy away from them. So it is with reluctance that I even begin to write about this aspect of Christian faith. In theological terms, the end of the world as we know it is called eschatology. It is the study and explanation of "last things". The Merriman-Webster definition defines eschatology as 1: a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind 2: a belief concerning death, the end of the world, or the ultimate destiny of humankind,  specifically : any of various Christian doctrines concerning the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead, or the Last Judgment So let me start by saying that every person in the history of the Christian faith who has attempted to predict when the end will come has been wrong. The most recent was made by Ronald Weinland who predicted the world wo...

But Moses said, “O my Lord, please send someone else.”  (Exodus 4:13) Moses is a big time hero of the Bible. He is said to be the greatest prophet that Israel has ever known. It is said that he spoke to God face to face as with a friend. He was born into slavery in Egypt. He would have died as a baby due to a royal decree to drown all baby boy Israelites, but his mother hid him. When he was three months old he was set afloat upon the Nile in a basket to save him from slaughter. The daughter of Pharaoh found baby Moses and raised him as her own son in the royal palace. When Moses became a man he went out to see the terrible slavery the Hebrews were suffering. When he saw an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew slave, Moses killed the Egyptian and hid his body in the sand. But his murder was found out and Moses fled for his life. He ended up in Midian in the Arabian peninsula. There he lived as a shepherd for 40 years. He married and had two sons. One day while herding his flock, M...

And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition. (Exodus 2:23b-25) Just before God called Moses to go down to Egypt and tell Pharaoh to "Let my people go", the scripture says God heard the Hebrew slaves' cries under the harsh hand of the Egyptians. Look at the verbs describing God's experience of the Hebrews' suffering. God heard. God remembered. God saw. God knew.  God heard the cries and was moved to remember His covenant promises to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  The covenant promises can be summarized as the promise of becoming a great nation, of inheriting the land of Canaan, and of multitudinous descendants, so many that they cannot be counted. The great nation of Israel is to become the means by...