The Grammar of De-Creation Text: Psalm 105:26-36
Introduction: When God Unmakes a World
We live in an age that is squeamish about divine judgment. Modern man, particularly the soft evangelical, wants a God who is a celestial guidance counselor, a divine affirmation machine, but not a King who judges. We want the Sermon on the Mount without Sinai. We want the Beatitudes without the plagues. But the God of the Bible is not a tame lion. He is the sovereign Lord of heaven and earth, and His judgments are as much a part of His glorious character as His mercy. In fact, you cannot understand His mercy until you have reckoned with His wrath.
Psalm 105 is a great historical psalm, recounting God's covenant faithfulness to His people, from Abraham to the Exodus. It is a call to "give thanks unto the Lord" and to "make known his deeds among the people." And what are these deeds? They are deeds of salvation and deeds of judgment, inextricably woven together. Our passage today zeroes in on the plagues of Egypt, the mighty acts by which God broke the back of the greatest empire on earth to deliver His covenant people. But this is not simply a historical highlight reel. This is a theological lesson in the nature of idolatry, the power of God's Word, and the pattern of de-creation that God unleashes upon those who set themselves against Him.
The Egyptians had built their entire civilization on a pantheon of gods who supposedly governed the natural world: gods of the sun, the river, the crops, the cattle, and life itself. The plagues were not a random series of unfortunate events. They were a systematic, surgical, and polemical dismantling of the entire Egyptian worldview. Each plague was a direct assault on a specific Egyptian deity, demonstrating with terrifying clarity that the God of the Hebrews was the God of everything, and the gods of Egypt were nothing, less than nothing, vanities. God did not just defeat Pharaoh's army; He humiliated his gods. He unmade their world before their very eyes.
This is a truth we must recover. When a nation or a culture sets itself up in defiance of the living God, when it builds its life upon lies and calls evil good, it should not be surprised when God begins to take that world apart, piece by piece. He is a creator, but He can also de-create. He can turn the lights off. He can poison the water. He can send a plague. And He does so not out of caprice, but as a righteous King judging rebellion in His own cosmos.
The Text
He sent Moses His servant, And Aaron, whom He had chosen. They set forth the words of His signs among them, And miracles in the land of Ham. He sent darkness and made it dark; And they did not rebel against His words. He turned their waters into blood And caused their fish to die. Their land swarmed with frogs Even in the chambers of their kings. He spoke, and there came a swarm of flies And gnats in all their territory. He gave them hail for rain, And flaming fire in their land. He also struck down their vines and their fig trees, And He shattered the trees of their territory. He spoke, and locusts came, And creeping locusts, without number, And they ate up all vegetation in their land, And they ate up the fruit of their ground. He also struck down all the firstborn in their land, The first of all their vigor.
(Psalm 105:26-36 LSB)
God's Word on Display (v. 26-28)
The great drama begins with God commissioning His agents and establishing the authority of His Word.
"He sent Moses His servant, And Aaron, whom He had chosen. They set forth the words of His signs among them, And miracles in the land of Ham." (Psalm 105:26-27)
God does not act in a vacuum. He sends His authorized representatives. Moses is called "His servant," a title of great honor, and Aaron is "whom He had chosen." Their authority comes not from themselves, their pedigree, or their resume, but from the God who sent them. This is the foundation of all true authority. It is delegated authority.
And what do they do? "They set forth the words of His signs." Notice the order. It is not just "His signs," but the "words of His signs." The miracles are not mute displays of power. They are sermons. They are signs that signify something. They are attached to the prophetic Word of God spoken through Moses. God declares what He is about to do, and then He does it. This demonstrates that these events are not freaks of nature, but the deliberate acts of a sovereign God who speaks and it is done. The plagues are God's Word made visible, His performative utterance written across the landscape of Egypt.
The psalmist then begins the recital of the plagues, but in a slightly different order than Exodus, starting with the darkness.
"He sent darkness and made it dark; And they did not rebel against His words." (Psalm 105:28)
The psalmist likely begins with darkness to make a profound theological point. Darkness was the state of the world before God said, "Let there be light" (Gen. 1:2-3). By plunging Egypt into a palpable darkness, a darkness that could be felt, God was essentially hitting the reset button on their world. He was returning a portion of His creation to its pre-creation state of formlessness and void. This was a direct assault on Ra, the great sun god of Egypt, the head of their pantheon. God demonstrated that He could turn off their chief deity with a word. Ra was powerless. He was a creature, and God was the Creator.
The last phrase is curious: "And they did not rebel against His words." Who is "they"? Commentators debate this, but in the context of Moses and Aaron being God's faithful agents, it most naturally refers to them. Unlike the rebellious Israelites in the wilderness, Moses and Aaron faithfully carried out every fearsome command of God. They did not flinch. They spoke God's word of judgment, and it came to pass. This stands in stark contrast to the rebellion of Pharaoh and the Egyptians against that same word.
The De-Creation of Egypt (v. 29-35)
The psalmist now runs through the plagues that systematically dismantled Egypt's ecosystem and economy, all of which were under the supposed protection of their gods.
"He turned their waters into blood And caused their fish to die. Their land swarmed with frogs Even in the chambers of their kings." (Psalm 105:29-30)
The Nile was the lifeblood of Egypt. They worshiped it as the god Hapi. God turned their source of life into a river of death. The water became blood, a symbol of judgment and death, and the fish, a primary food source, died. God controls the water. He controls life and death. The frog-goddess, Heqet, was the goddess of fertility and childbirth. God showed His sovereignty over fertility by making her symbol a curse, swarming everywhere, even into the bedrooms of their kings, a place of supposed ultimate security and power. No place was safe from the judgment of God.
"He spoke, and there came a swarm of flies And gnats in all their territory. He gave them hail for rain, And flaming fire in their land." (Psalm 105:31-32)
Twice in this section, we see the phrase "He spoke." This echoes the creation account. In Genesis 1, God speaks and brings forth life and order. Here in Psalm 105, God speaks and brings forth judgment and chaos. The swarms of flies and gnats were not just a nuisance; they were a defilement. They brought disease and filth, undoing the meticulous purity rituals of the Egyptian priests. Then God assaults the sky, which they worshiped in the goddess Nut. Instead of life-giving rain, He sends destructive hail and fire. This is a perversion of the natural order. God is turning their blessings into curses. He is taking their world apart.
"He also struck down their vines and their fig trees, And He shattered the trees of their territory. He spoke, and locusts came, And creeping locusts, without number, And they ate up all vegetation in their land, And they ate up the fruit of their ground." (Psalm 105:33-35)
The judgment continues on their agriculture, the foundation of their wealth and sustenance. The hail shatters the trees, and then what is left, God sends locusts to devour. This was an attack on gods like Osiris, the god of agriculture and vegetation. God shows that He, and He alone, gives the increase. He can give it, and He can take it away. The locusts are described as being "without number," a picture of an overwhelming, unstoppable army of God. Pharaoh thought he had the greatest army in the world, but he was powerless against God's army of insects.
The Final Blow (v. 36)
The plagues culminate in the final, devastating judgment on the firstborn.
"He also struck down all the firstborn in their land, The first of all their vigor." (Psalm 105:36)
This was the ultimate blow. The firstborn represented the future of the family, the strength of the nation, the "first of all their vigor." Pharaoh himself was considered a god, and his firstborn son was his divine heir. This plague was a direct strike against the supposed divinity of Pharaoh and the future of his kingdom. It was an attack on the very concept of life and inheritance as the Egyptians understood it. God demonstrated that He holds the keys of life and death, and no one, not even the son of the most powerful man on earth, was exempt from His sovereign decree.
This final plague is what broke Pharaoh's will. It was the judgment that finally distinguished between the Egyptians and the Israelites, who were saved by the blood of the lamb on their doorposts. And this, of course, is where the whole story points. The plagues are not just a historical account of what God did to Egypt; they are a foreshadowing of the final judgment and the great salvation.
Conclusion: The God Who Still Judges
It is comfortable for us to read this as ancient history, a story about a faraway land and a hard-hearted king. But we must not miss the point. This is a revelation of the character of our God. He is the God who hates idolatry. He is the God who will not share His glory with another. He is the God who judges nations that institutionalize rebellion against Him.
Our nation is filled with idols. We worship the idol of sexual autonomy, sacrificing our children on the altar of Molech through abortion. We worship the idol of materialism, believing our economy and our technology will save us. We worship the idol of the self, declaring that every man is his own god, defining his own reality. We have built our "land of Ham" on foundations of sand, and we mock the God who laid the foundations of the world.
We must not think that the God who de-created Egypt will simply look the other way at our rebellion. He is patient, yes. He is merciful, yes. But His judgments are also in all the earth. When we see our culture unraveling, when we see chaos in our streets, when our crops fail, when plagues descend, we should not see these as random, unfortunate events. We should see the hand of a sovereign God beginning to dismantle a world that has set itself against Him. He is turning our water into blood. He is sending swarms to devour us.
But the story of the plagues is not just a story of judgment. It is a story of salvation. In the midst of the darkness, God had a people of light. In the midst of death, God provided a Passover Lamb. The blood of that lamb was the only thing that could turn away the wrath of God. And that is our only hope as well.
The final judgment is coming for the whole world, a judgment of which the plagues of Egypt were just a faint echo. But God has provided a Passover Lamb for us, the Lord Jesus Christ. All who are found sheltering under His blood will be saved when the destroyer passes over. The judgment that we deserved fell upon Him at the cross. He took the darkness, the death, the curse for us. For those who reject Him, all that remains is the terror of de-creation. But for those of us who are in Him, we can look at the judgments of God in the world not with terror, but with sober understanding, knowing that our God is a consuming fire, and knowing that He is clearing the ground to establish the kingdom of His Son, a kingdom that cannot be shaken.