So I want to begin with a premise today, which is that there is a God who is all loving, all wise, all fully present and engaged in our life, and all powerful and wanted to create others to love so that they could connect with us and make us eternally happy. All of God's creation. And there is a system that the Lord created within which we can be happy forever. And when we get in touch with that system and live by it, things start to go well for us. But when we don't, things go poorly, even worse. When we see it and we know it and we ignore it.
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That's the story of our spiritual life, that we are to be led to that heavenly place. That's what the Lord's hoping for us. That's our true home, our true goal. So as we know, these stories are about us. It's a mirror for us to look at ourselves and see where we land and how we're cooperating or not cooperating with what the Lord teaches.
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Now, there's a part of us that wants to follow the Lord, that wants to live in faith and charity. And that's pictured by the children of Israel. As we know from our own experience. It's not a smooth course to get there. It takes journey, which is what this story is about. But instead of being in the promised land, they ended up in Egypt. Egypt pictures worldly knowledge or human intelligence. And Pharaoh, who kept them there, pictures the children of Israel pictures our ego or a sense of self importance.
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So our higher nature ends up in bondage to desires of the lower self. And we get stuck, we all do, at different parts of our lives in different ways. Maybe severely, maybe in a minor way, but there's a way we get stuck paying attention to those things. This story is how the Lord leads us out of that.
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So how do we get up? Well, Moses is a symbol for the Lord's divine law or the Lord's presence with us. A divine law or truth that can set us free, that can turn this situation around. And so the Lord calls Moses on Mount Horeb from the burning bush to free the children of Israel from slavery. And that symbolizes the invitation we all get to free our higher faculties by means of revelation, to be led to a different place through the Lord's divine truth.
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So we see illustrated in the story the freedom that comes when we do follow the Lord. And what happens if we ignore the truth, ignore the warning signs and the wonders, so to speak, and we follow ourselves instead of following the Lord. And all these destructive plagues occur and they illustrate our progression if we follow that path towards increasingly more tragic states of pain and disorder and unmanageability.
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And that's a really important point that the Lord makes very clearly is that these things are not punishments from God. When bad things happen, the Lord is not punishing us. He's incapable of that. It's totally against his nature. He's not even able to turn his face away from us and frown upon us in disappointment. It's not possible. So evil or disorder brings its own punishment. But the Lord is always gently trying to lead us to leave that pain of self centeredness and that trust in ourselves and leave Egypt behind.
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And sometimes the Lord has to permit us to experience pain and hurt so that we wake up and turn our life around. When the Lord does permit it, he does not cause it, the hells cause it. But the Lord might permit it if he can cause good to come from it. He doesn't stop it because of his end, which is our salvation.
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So I know these plagues look like. And the words in the plague sound like, the Lord is sending this punishment on Pharaoh and on Egypt. The Lord is doing this. The Lord is destroying them. It's a picture of how we destroy ourselves. If we don't listen to the truth when we know it, what does the Lord do? The Lord does send truth to us. He does send Moses to us. He reveals eternal truths to our mind.
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So all of us have that Pharaoh within us, that stubborn defensive part of us that says, I don't need to change, I can manage this. That part of us that sees the truth as a plague, or the Lord is trying to mess with us. Like, why do you make my life so hard? Why do you tell me I can't do this when I really want to do this? So we see it as a punishment, but it's foresight of what we're going to be like if we don't possess faith of some kind.
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So the truth, you could say the Lord's truth when he reveals it to us, is like signs and wonders, and they're everywhere if we pay attention to them. How many of you saw signs and wonders this morning on your way to church? Stop signs, red lights and green lights and merge signs and one way signs. There are all kinds of signs to keep us safe on our way here. And looks like, I don't know who didn't make it, but looks like we all arrived safely by heeding those signs.
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But we can ignore them, right? And things can go badly for us. We can hurt ourselves, we can hurt somebody else. And sometimes bad things happen. I forget when it was a year or so ago, I had a simple thing in a parking lot, backing up, just backed up, and I hit somebody else's car because I didn't stop and look. But now I really do stop and look. I pay close attention. I learned my lesson.
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We can pay attention to the signs and wonders when it comes to our own bodies, our own physical health. We may observe that we are gaining weight. We may experience that we're losing weight or that we have chest pain or shortness of breath or dizziness or joint or muscle pain. We can heed these warnings and pay attention to them, or we can ignore them and maybe something worse can happen.
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So we all have bad habits, and we can probably keep them, we think, and get away with it, indulging in them for a while. And you maybe have negative side effects that start to show up, and you might start to think, I need to stop. Yet we keep going back to it. You can imagine someone who drinks too much, and maybe they're doing a really good job of managing that, right? They're a highly functional drinker. You might say they're highly functional. But it begins to impact. Their work begins to impact. They're late, they're tired at work, they're not as productive as they used to be. They make mistakes. Maybe they get a dui and that wakes them up for a little while. Or worse, they get in an accident and injure someone or kill someone. You see how if we don't heed the early warnings, things can get progressively worse.
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Our heart is hardened. We don't let go. And that part of us pictured by Pharaoh sees it again as God punishing us. You ever do that where you do something that you know you shouldn't and you're like, lord, why are you making this so hard for me? Why don't you give me a break? It's a very human thing.
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The bottom line is keeping the Israelites as slaves was wrong. Pharaoh should have responded when he heard it. Okay, you're right. This isn't the right thing to do. I will let them go. And he didn't. We all face Similar things we know are hurtful, we know we shouldn't do, and yet we do them anyway. And we should say, when we're faced with the truth of the situation, you're right, I'll let go. But when we don't, there can be signs and wonders, so to speak, or plagues or warnings.
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So I look at some of the plagues, what they picture, not all of them. There's over 300 pages in the Arcana Celestial Heavenly Secrets that talk about the meaning of these plagues. So if you really want to dig into it and know all the details, you can do that. You'll be reading for a while, but there's lots of stuff there.
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But what's interesting too about these is the magicians could duplicate these early plagues. The magicians of Egypt could do the same thing. So Pharaoh was not that impressed. Like, yeah, so what? My magicians can do the same thing. The craftiness of our ego or self intelligence tricks us into thinking that, yeah, we, I can figure this out. We see excuses as true and as valid. That's how steeped we become.
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But later it starts to fall apart and to get to the point where we can't deny it any longer. And the magicians warn Pharaoh after the next plague, it's like, we can't do these. These are beyond our power. Alarms go off and we start to think, I can't get out of this. I will get out of this. Pharaoh likes to think he can get out of it, but the magicians know better.
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We wonder how we can fall so far. And we fall so far because we reject the Lord's protection. When we choose evil. The Lord doesn't walk away from us. We walk away from the Lord's protection.
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So pay attention to the warning signs. They're here to help us. They're not punishments from the Lord. We always have the chance to do the right thing. Lord says, let my people go that they may serve me. We need to walk away from Pharaoh's control of our lives. That sense that we can figure it out, that we know better, that satisfies our ego and become entrenched in that.
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The Lord actually tells us the old self, that part of us, we can picture it as Pharaoh in the story. That old part of us has to die before the new one can be conceived. So let's not go down that road. Let's try to listen to the Lord's word when it comes to us, and it has things to say. Let's pay attention.
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Remember, the Lord, who's all powerful and all loving and all wise, created you from love to be happy for eternity and is working with all of his powers to help us to find our way to that happiness. We need to look within and find what's stubbornly, selfishly, habitually keeping us under lock and key. Ask the Lord to lead you. Ask the Lord to help you.
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The Lord wants us to have all the happiness possible. So in a moment we will have the opportunity to be invited forward for the Lord's Holy Supper. And that's a chance to step forward and choose a closer relationship with the Lord. The Lord is said to be fully present in the Holy Supper with all of his redemption, all the spiritual gifts that he wants to give us. And he's conjoined with us. If we're regenerating, he's close to us. If we're still working on it. But he's close. Come be close to the Lord this morning. Accept that invitation to receive his spiritual food and drink. That is our spiritual food and drink.
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