Exiting Egypt Chapter 8 P6

Exiting Egypt

The Third Plague – The Finger of God

Exodus 8:16-19

By Dennis Lee: Chapter 8 P6

2. The Finger of God Addresses our Conduct

This comes from the story found in Daniel where Belshazzar, the king of Babylon was having a great feast and was drinking from the holy vessels from the Temple of God, that which his father had taken as loot from Jerusalem when he burnt it to the ground. And then God’s finger came and shook Belshazzar to the core.

In the same hour the fingers of a man's hand appeared and wrote opposite the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote (Dan. 5:5 NKJV)

Literally, Balshazzar went to the bathroom in his pants. That what is meant when it says the joints of his hips were loosened. Daniel interpreted what was written on the wall, and this is what it said,

“God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it. You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting. You kingdom has been divided, and given to the Medes and Persians” (Dan. 5:25-28).

What this episode reveals is how a person will behave without God in their lives. Belshazzar was the king of a pagan empire. He didn’t think much if anything about the Lord God, especially seeing how his dad pillaged God’s temple and took His sacred vessels.

By bringing them out and drinking from these vessels, Belshazzar was putting on a display of his own might and power, that he was a great king and above the God of the Jews.

But what Belshazzar hadn’t reckoned upon was God showing up. And through God’s finger writing these words upon the wall, it reveals that Belshazzar was really in God’s hands, and that his father was only carrying out God’s chastening upon a wayward Jewish people.

Like others, Belshazzar gave himself to excess and gloried in his own greatness, and seeing that God did nothing to stop him with all that he had done, he reckoned that God was a myth, and therefore would not judge him.

God, who is king forever, will hear me and will humble them. For my enemies refuse to change their ways; they do not fear God (Psm. 55:19 NLT)

In other words, because everything remains the same, and that nothing bad happens for their misdeeds, people assume that nothing is going to change in the future and that God will not act. This is what will happen in the last days, and then, like with Balshazzar, God will show up and recompense.

While people are saying, "Peace and safety," destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman, and they will not escape (1 Thess. 5:3 NIV)

Today men have ruled out the possibility of Jesus’ return. They consider themselves more sophisticated than those back in the day when the Bible was believed as truth. And therefore they have thrown out the very idea of the judgment of God. But like Belshazzar they are going to be in for a shock. And like Belshazzar, then faced with God’s judgment for their conduct, they’ll soil themselves.

3. The Finger of God Addresses our Conscience

But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, "If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her." Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground (Jn. 8: 6b-8 NIT)

When a woman was caught in adultery and brought to Jesus for judgment, he knelt, scratched something into the dirt, and then stood up and said, “Let him without sin cast the first stone.” It says that they all left, from the eldest to the youngest.

We have no real idea about what Jesus wrote in the sand, some have suggested that there’s always two that commit adultery, so where’s the guy. Or it was the sins of those who were poised to stone the woman. Whatever he case, the finger of God pricked the consciousness of these men.

It’s always easy to examine the sin in other people’s lives than it is to examine our own. It’s easy to point fingers at other people’s lives, than it is at our own. But when God points His finger, it isn’t at others, it at us.

The writer of Hebrews says,

And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account (Heb. 4:13 NKJV)

When the finger of God searches our hearts, and it reveals our lives and exposes our motives. And so, if we would have been standing there in that crowd that day, then we would have feared no better. We would have left with our heads bowed, because we would have been accusing others of what we ourselves are guilty of.

4. The Finger of God Addresses Our Condition

But if I cast out demons with the finger of God, surely the kingdom of God has come upon you (Lk.11:20 NKJV)

In this passage, Jesus had been accused of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebub, which is another name for Satan. But Jesus points out that Satan isn’t going to dismantle his own kingdom, as he said that a kingdom divided against itself will not be able to stand.

And so, Jesus said that deliverance from the human condition of sin is done only in and through the finger of God, His finger.

The same finger that turned the dust into lice as a judgment against Israel, the same finger that etched the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone, the same finger that wrote of Belshazzar’s doom because of his blasphemy, and the same finger that wrote in the sands Jerusalem pricking the consciences of those accusing the woman caught in adultery, is the same finger that delivers you and I out from under the human condition of sin.

It is nothing less than the finger of God.