“I and my people are in the wrong!”
Text: Exodus 9:22-10:2
Forty years ago this past January the space shuttle Challenger was launched from Kennedy Space Center. The NASA mission included a 38-year-old, New Hampshire high school social studies teacher named Christa McAuliffe. This is one of those events where you remember where you were when it happened. I was in school watching it with my middle school classmates. That was part of the allure for schools to be watching this live, not just that it was a space launch but because we had a school teacher who was involved in it as well. She was one of us, a commoner. She got to be a part of the team.
Well, the launch had already been delayed a few times. On the night before the new launch date, NASA had a conference call with engineers from Morton Thiokol, the contractor that built the rocket motors. It was unusually cold on the day of the launch, which concerned Allan McDonald, one of the engineers. He feared that the company’s O-ring seals in the Challenger’s rocket boosters wouldn’t operate properly at that temperature. McDonald recommended the launch be postponed once more, since the boosters had not been tested below 53 degrees. But NASA officials overruled him and pushed for the company to sign off on the decision to launch. McDonald refused to sign the request, but his boss did. The next morning millions of people watched as the shuttle burst into flames.
What do you think you would have done if you had been Allan McDonald? Would you have refused to sign on matters of concern and principle? Or do you think you would have let yourself be pressured into signing? After the accident, the review proved the cause of the explosion to be exactly what McDonald had warned about, that the O-rings might fail. So why, despite that warning, did NASA push on? McDonald would later claim that NASA fell prey to the oldest sin in the book — pride and ego. They had never lost a single person in space, and had even rescued the Apollo 13 crew halfway to the moon. How could this seemingly inconsequential O-ring cause a problem?
Undoubtedly, we have all heard the phrase “pride comes before a fall” (cf., Proverbs 16:18). But sometimes the fall impacts others who did not exhibit the pride. In your life, when are you most likely to exhibit ego? When have you not listened to others and insisted on something happening a certain way because you believed you knew best? Sometimes our pride or ego isn’t blatantly obvious, yet it is alive and well within us in our attitudes toward others.
Prior to our passage from Exodus, God has already begun sending the ten plagues on Pharaoh and Egypt to compel them to release the Hebrews from slavery. The reason for so many plagues, I believe, was because God wasn’t only seeking to rescue the Hebrews, but he was also trying to teach and save the Egyptians, even Pharaoh himself. God’s desire was to also bring the Egyptians into a saving understanding of who he, God, was. Rather than jump to the one plague that would move Pharaoh to humble himself and let the Hebrews go (the death of the firstborns), God wanted to give them a chance to fathom who he was and see him as God over all aspects of creation. Repentance and remorse are part of the change of heart that must happen in order to recognize God as God. Before the Egyptians and Pharaoh could recognize God, confession and repentance had to occur.
Have you ever said you were sorry just to get things back to normal? Perhaps you may not really have believed you were at fault, but apologized just to get peace back in the relationship or you sought to smooth things over by being nice without taking ownership of your fault. And for a while things seemed good, but eventually a conflict or rupture happened again because your behavior hadn’t changed, because you never owned up to your fault.
We often see this with addictions. The person with the addiction insists that things will be different, that they won’t drink or use any more, that things will change, but they don’t actually accept that they have a problem. For a little while things are better, but eventually the pain and deceit start all over again. This doesn’t only pertain to substance abuse but to any relationship where pride or ego is the addiction—office life, board meetings, church life, friendships, neighbor interactions, summer camp staff—it pertains to any relationship where one party is unwilling to even consider he or she may be at fault.
This happens six times in the story of the plagues as Pharaoh tells Moses, “Okay, okay, we’ve had enough! God has proven his point! Please call off the frogs, gnats, flies, blood in the water, boils, stop killing the livestock!” Pharaoh seeks to get things back to normal but never repents, never accepts that he may be at fault. He never really recognizes God as supreme. Then comes the seventh plague.
I want us to notice something that happened after the seventh plague, the plague of hail. We read something that we haven’t heard thus far from Pharaoh: “Then Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron. ‘This time I have sinned,’ he said to them. ‘The Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong’” (9:27). This is the kind of response we’d expect to hear from someone responding to John the Baptist’s message of “repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!” (Matt. 3:2). Or what we’d expect from the lips of the Philippian jailer in Acts 16 as he falls down at the feet of Paul and Silas exclaiming, “what must I do to be saved?” Yet, here it is in the Old Testament coming from the lips of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt!
Oh, if only our leaders and politicians today would admit this! “I have sinned. I and my people are in the wrong!” But instead pride and ego reign and cause destruction.
As the plague of hail is falling and pummelling the land, Pharaoh seems to realize he’s finally outmatched. He can’t compete with the God of the Hebrews. More than that, he has been humbled and he is repentant. “I have sinned,” he announces. He’s willing to at least begin to change. As Rabbi David Foreman and biblical scholar Marty Solomon say, this is a new level of understanding for Pharaoh. We haven’t heard this come from his lips yet.
If at this seventh plague Pharaoh has repented, and God has brought him exactly where he wants Pharaoh to be, why are there three more plagues after this? Sadly, because Pharaoh’s repentance was short-lived: “When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts” (9:34). This is the first time in this plague story line where sin and hardness of heart are connected. In this verse we are told that Pharaoh and his officials hardened their own hearts. But just two verses later, we read: “Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them” (10:1).
So which is it? Did Pharaoh and his officials exhibit freewill and choose to go back on their repentance or did God do it? Is this a discrepancy in the text? What I want to suggest to us today is that God doesn’t override Pharaoh’s choice to turn his back on God again. Rather, God basically says, “Okay, if that’s how you want to play this, I won’t stand in your way. I’m going to let you experience the consequences of your pride and ego. I’m going to give you over to your ego and not rescue you from it.”
Maybe this is akin to a family member refusing to enable a loved one to keep using or to keep gambling or to keep refusing to take responsibility. “Okay, if you’re going to continue to turn back to what you know is killing you, I won’t stand in your way! Go ahead.” It’s the idea of having to hit rock bottom before being able to really see what needs to change. Consider this next exchange in the story:
10:3 So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, “This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me. 4 If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. 5 They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. 6 They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians — something neither your parents nor your ancestors have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.’” Then Moses turned and left Pharaoh.
With this plague, we are now talking about total economic destruction! No food to sustain their own people. No food to export for income. This was a reversal of how God had used Egypt during the life of Joseph centuries earlier to be a storehouse of food for the region as it went through seven years of famine. But now, because of Pharaoh’s hubris, Egypt will be in complete famine and economic failure. “Pharaoh’s officials said to him, ‘How long will this man be a snare to us? Let the people go, so that they may worship the Lord their God. Do you not yet realize that Egypt is ruined?’ Then Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh” (10:7-8).
Who brought Moses and Aaron back? The officials of Pharaoh! Pharaoh’s officials recognize the reality of what will happen and basically tell him that they are ruined, that there will be nothing left if Pharoah keeps making decisions out of his pride. Nevertheless, we learn that Pharaoh ultimately doesn’t humble himself but lets his pride, his ego destroy himself and all around him.
How do we move out of pride and ego and into humility? How do we recognize how our pride causes destruction? There are several lessons we could pull from this text, but one is that God will give us over to the consequences of our ego if we refuse to humble ourselves. God is not afraid to let us experience harm when we persist in our pride. There are so many ways to exhibit pride today: our appearance, our attire, our image, our exploits, our accomplishments, our status, and even a false sense of humility. There are so many venues through which to portray our ego that are far reaching, not least social media.
Back in 2008, Malcolm Gladwell wrote the hugely successful book, “Outliers: The Story of Success.” Within it he has a chapter titled, “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes,” in which he describes how certain cultures have such a deep respect for authority and elders and people in high positions that you don’t question their decisions or orders. The same exists within the military too. Gladwell shares how such an attitude has led to plane crashes because either the crew didn’t question a captain’s decisions, even though they knew it was wrong, or because the captain refused to listen to the crew when they did voice warning.
The practice of self-reflection can help us avoid existing in an echo chamber, where we only seek the input of people who will tell us what we want to hear, what we already agree with. An echo chamber happens when we only surround ourselves with people who won’t challenge us. An unwillingness to consider being wrong leads to destruction, and an unwillingness to point out pride leads to destruction. Eventually, Pharaoh’s officials begin to speak up, but by then it’s too late.
If we really care about helping rather than hurting our relationships, the organizations we are involved with, the churches we call home, the ministries we are called to, then we need to choose self-reflection and seek the input from those who will tell us the truth and not just what we want to hear. Who might that be for you?