The Deliverer (8 page)
“Pharaoh, for your own sake, let them go.”
Ramses bristled in indignation. He rose from his throne and stormed out of the room without saying another word. Moses and Aaron were summarily dismissed and booted out the same door they’d come in. It didn’t take very long for the word about the straw to get to the slave masters, who themselves were Hebrews. In one grumbling group they petitioned a meeting with Ramses and got it.
“It can’t be done,” they said, groveling before him. “The people can’t gather straw and produce the same number of bricks. We’ll fall behind. The building projects will suffer. Why has Pharaoh done this to his subjects?”
“If your people have enough time to ask for three days off to party in the desert to worship your God, then they have too much time.”
The foreman looked stunned. “Did we ask my lord for any such thing? It would never cross our minds to think about a long weekend. Who brought such a request to Pharaoh’s ears?”
“Moses.”
Well, you can guess what happened. The slave masters went back to the brick pits and told the people what Ramses had said. When Moses and Aaron showed up a little while later, the whole Hebrew population had turned on them. The brothers were flabbergasted. God had never given the slightest warning this might happen. From their ashen look, it was clear they hadn’t expected things to go quite this way. Neither said very much in the face of the verbal assaults being hurled at them by the throng, but once they got out of earshot, Moses began to cry out to God.
“O Lord, I tried to tell You I wouldn’t be very good at this. I’ve made things worse for the very people You are trying to help.”
“Tell the Israelites I will bring them out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free them from being slaves, and I will bring them to the land I swore to give Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I will give it to them as the inheritance I promised.”
Aaron was in a quaking heap on the ground in the presence of the Lord, but Moses just kept talking to the Creator of the universe as if they were old chums.
“O God, here’s my idea how we can turn this around. Would You mind doing the burning bush thing one more time? I told the Hebrews about it, of course, but I could see in their eyes that they didn’t believe me. But if You could just fire that bush up again right there in the middle of town where the Egyptians and the Hebrews can both see it, I’m pretty sure we can be out of here by morning.”
God didn’t think much of his idea, so Moses and Aaron went to the Hebrews and told them what the Lord God had said. Moses was right. They didn’t believe one word of it.
Satan squealed with delight when I gave him this news. He walked over to the edge of the second heaven and looked off into the distance.
“Where are they now? Hightailing it back to the desert for sure. Who does God think He’s messing with by sending two country bumpkins into my territory?” Satan swung his fist in an uppercut for effect.
The other demons were congratulating themselves on running Moses and Aaron out of town, but I just stood there saying nothing at all and looking at the floor. I just knew Satan was going to comment on my silence.
“You don’t see anything here to cheer about, moron? The deliverer and his sidekick are on their way back to the sticks. It’s over.”
I chose my words carefully. “Did anybody actually see them leave the city gates, sir?”
Satan looked at the demons, and they looked at one another. When the heads started shaking in response, Satan dispatched one of the lower-ranking devils to scour the city streets for them. They weren’t hard to find, and it was only minutes before the scout was back, reporting what I knew all along. Moses and Aaron had gone nowhere but to bed.
I spent the rest of the night perched on the ledge above the door of the house where Moses and Aaron slept.
“Dog their steps,” Satan had hissed at me as he sent me out on the graveyard shift.
The next morning, God appeared to them again. “You are to say everything I command you. Tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. Aaron can help you.”
Well, I can just tell you that Aaron’s face fell like a rock when he heard that bit of news. He knew he was to stand behind whatever Moses said, but his idea was to stand about forty feet behind and under a rock if one was available. Aaron had zero plans to get in the line of fire between Moses and Ramses, much less to actually enter into the conversation.
“I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply My miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt, he won’t listen to you.”
Moses didn’t say a word, but I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it myself.
What are You saying, God? Number one, Ramses’ heart doesn’t need to be any harder, and number two, he’s not listening to me now.
“Then I’ll lay My hand on Egypt, and with mighty acts of judgment, the Egyptians will know that I am God when I stretch out My hand and bring the Israelites out of it by divisions.”
Here’s what I’ve learned about God over the eons: if you don’t listen carefully to every word He speaks, you can miss something big. And that’s just what happened to Moses. He missed two remarkable things. God said He was going to bring the Israelites out by divisions. Out of divisions come
soldiers
, not
slaves
. Slaves come out in a mob. I didn’t know what He meant by His word choice, but I knew it meant something.
I was more than merely interested in the other thing God said. He was going to play this thing out for a while so the Egyptians would know He was God. Why? Whatever for? What good would it do? As far back as I could remember, at least since Abraham, God had never before cared one way or the other about anybody but the Hebrews. Why would He suddenly be interested in what the Egyptians knew about Him?
Unless …
I couldn’t bear to think about it, but I knew I must. Why would God care what the Egyptians knew about Him unless He intended to save some of them? Impossible. Completely out of order and not fair. The Egyptians were sold out to Satan, way beyond redemption of any kind. The idea that God might be thinking of saving the Egyptians took hold of my mind, and I completely forgot about Moses and Aaron. All I could think about was how I wanted to have a little chat with God.
“God,” I cried out. Sometimes I’ve complained to God with great bravado, secure in the knowledge that He did not hear me. This time I wished He would hear me, although I knew I was just shaking my wing at empty space. “I’m right, aren’t I? You’re trying to find a loophole to save some of the Egyptians, aren’t You? How could You even think about it? How could You give those who don’t know You and don’t care about You time to repent when You wouldn’t spare me five minutes? That’s all I needed to recover my sanity that awful day when the war in heaven happened. Five minutes more and I could have reached Michael’s side to tell him I’d changed my mind. Five minutes more and I would never have followed that lunatic Lucifer.”
In total despair at the mere thought of God counting the evil Egyptians worthier of salvation than me, I flew hard into the nearest wall and tried to kill myself. Of course, it didn’t work and only made my head throb. By the time I pulled myself together, God was still talking to Moses and Aaron.
“When Pharaoh says to you, ‘Perform a miracle,’ then say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and throw it down before Pharaoh,’ and it will become a snake.”
You should have seen Aaron snap to attention at that comment. The first thing he did was throw the staff on the ground to see if it was working. Nothing. Next, he started pulling on Moses’s tunic with one hand while continuing to thump his staff on the ground with the other. He tried to point out to Moses that the staff was just a common tree branch with no supernatural qualities. Moses ignored him and continued listening to God while Aaron feverishly practiced behind his back, trying to make something happen—
thump, thump.
No snake.
The next day I followed them into Pharaoh’s throne room to see what would happen. Moses strode with calm confidence and walked directly to the place where Ramses was seated. Aaron followed a few steps behind, continuing to thump his staff on the floor as he went along to see if it wriggled at all. Nothing. He stopped thumping and came alongside Moses, not looking at all well.
Right on cue, Pharaoh demanded proof that the God of Moses was real. “Perform a miracle,” he chided.
Everyone in the room snickered. Moses turned to Aaron and told him to do what God had said. With trembling hands and closed eyes, Aaron threw his staff to the ground and prepared to run. It was the cumulative gasp from the eunuch slaves that caused him to open his eyes and jump back in disbelief at the writhing snake on the palace floor.
With nary a raised eyebrow, Pharaoh summoned wise men, sorcerers, and the Egyptian magicians to do the very same thing by their secret arts. Each one threw down his staff, and each staff became a snake. But to everyone’s amazement, Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. No one in the room was more surprised by this than Aaron. When Moses reached down and picked the serpent up by the tail and it turned back into a staff, there was a chorus of sighs of relief from every corner of the room. Ramses, however, pretended to be unimpressed. He ordered Moses and Aaron to leave.
I was about to fly back to Satan’s lair to give him an update when it occurred to me that Moses and Aaron wouldn’t go home without reporting to God. I knew I’d better follow them lest I miss something. When they got to the city’s edge, they called out to God. I listened with both ears to what God told them to do next.
“Go to Pharaoh in the morning as he goes out to the water. Wait on the bank of the Nile to meet him. Take the staff that was changed into a snake, and say to him, ‘The God of the Hebrews has sent me to say to you, “Let My people go so that they may worship Me in the desert.”’ With the staff that is in your hand, strike the water of the Nile and it will be changed into blood. The fish in the Nile will die, the river will stink, and no one will be able to drink its water.
“And you, Aaron, take your staff and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, the streams, canals, ponds and all the reservoirs, and they will turn to blood. Blood will be everywhere in Egypt.”
Moses seemed to be taking it in fairly well, but Aaron was getting that woozy look again.
As I flew back to the second heaven to report to Satan, I wondered how he was going to take this news that God had upped the stakes in the battle for the Hebrews. He was enabling mere humans to operate in the supernatural realm. I knew Satan would demand to know if this was legal. I wasn’t sure.
He took the news much better than I thought he would.
“So what? God’s losing His touch if that’s the best He can come up with. I can do the same thing.”
He summoned two of his demons who were specialists in black magic and sent them to the quarters of the court magicians. The next day, Satan summoned all the demons to come and stand on the edge of the second heaven to watch the show. He was very smug about how this would turn out.
There they were, Moses and Aaron, standing before a full house of spectators on the banks of the Nile. They did just as God had commanded. Aaron, with newfound confidence after the snake episode, raised his staff in the presence of Pharaoh and his officials and struck the water of the Nile, and all the water was changed into blood. The fish in the Nile died, and the river smelled so bad that the Egyptians couldn’t drink its water. Blood was everywhere in Egypt.
“Well,
all right,
” Aaron whispered to Moses as he nodded his head proudly at this new supernatural power he had obtained.
But his satisfaction didn’t last long. The Egyptian magicians did the same things with jars of water by their secret arts. Now, right there is where Moses should have thrown down the yellow flag and yelled, “Foul.” Who did the magicians think they would fool with that old parlor trick? What unbiased observer would equate changing the waters of a river into blood with changing a couple of gallons in a primed jar? Obviously, the magicians tossed a little dye into the pots with all their gyrations and hocus pocus.
Unbiased observer
is the key phrase here, which there were none of in the audience that day. I have to tell you, I was sorely disappointed with the cognitive abilities of Moses and Aaron in their failure to identify the trickery. Pharaoh watched with a smug look on his face as if this were a perfectly legitimate contest. It appeared that his heart became harder just as God had said. He wouldn’t listen to Moses and Aaron, and instead, he turned and went into his palace.
The demons laughed out loud at the puzzled expressions of Moses and Aaron. God failed to mention that part about how the magicians would appear to be able to turn water to blood as well. The crowd found better things to do and left, but Moses and Aaron stood there for a long time looking at the Nile and wondering what had gone wrong.
It was seven days before anything else happened.
A
FTER BEING PUBLICLY
humiliated by Pharaoh’s magicians, Moses and Aaron didn’t venture out much during the next week, preferring to avoid the chiding of the Hebrews and Egyptians alike. Some of the demons thought it might soon be all over and Moses would head back to the goats. I couldn’t be sure what Moses would do, but I was certain what God would do. He would up the ante again.
Just as I predicted, He summoned Moses and Aaron and said, “Go to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘God says, “Let My people go so that they may worship Me. If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs. The Nile will teem with frogs. They’ll come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed. They’ll come into the houses of your officials, on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs. The frogs will jump up on you and your people and all your officials.”’”
Moses swallowed hard but didn’t say a word to indicate the doubt he must have had about God’s new plan. Aaron was bursting to ask the obvious question but didn’t. I decided to help them along by projecting my thoughts Moses’s way. Other demons were always sending thoughts into human minds and seeing immediate results; I’d never given it a try but thought now might be a good time. I stared intently into his eyes and thought hard.
