Tabletalk

Tabletalk is a daily devotional Bible reading and comment and is an outreach of Ligonier Ministries. On Friday 25 March it contained the following comment on the passage in Exodus 9:13-16 concerning one of the plagues that the Lord sent upon Pharaoh and Egypt for the ruler’s hardness of heart and refusal to release the children of Israel from slavery, where the Lord declares to Pharaoh:

This time I will send all My plagues on you yourself, and on you servants and your people, so that you may know that there is none like Me in all the earth….For this purpose I have raised you up, to show you My power, so that My name may be proclaimed in all the earth.

How should we understand God’s purposes in salvation and judgment?… In truth, the Lord brings salvation and judgment chiefly for the purpose of manifesting His glory. His goal is to fill the earth with the knowledge of His glory and to have all creation recognize Him for who He is (Isaiah 40:5; Habakkuk 2:14)….. Once we realize this, we begin to understand why history unfolds as it does. Wicked men seem to prevail for a time only so that the Lord can better make Himself known. Matthew Henry comments, “God sometimes raises up very bad men to honour and power, spares them long, and allows them to grow insufferably insolent, that he may be so much the more glorified in their destruction at last.”