Robert McLaughlin Bible Ministries |
“For this very purpose I raised you up, to demonstrate My power.” Part 2.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
God used the most powerful man in the world, at that time, the Pharaoh of Egypt, in order to evangelize the entire inhabited world.
ROM 9:22, What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath as he did with the Egyptians and to make His power known, the 10 plagues and the Red Sea incident,
endured with much patience He gave Pharaoh opportunity after opportunity vessels of wrath prepared for His glory.
One of the most fascinating things that will ever come to us when we learn the divine decrees is to see history strictly from the divine viewpoint.
The word purpose means that which the Lord desires us to know and it means that which I have done to cause Pharaoh to continue in history.
The conjunction hopos in the Greek, and this conjunction is used to indicate a divine purpose.
Correctly translated:
that, or in order that.
With this forming of the final clause, which is the purpose clause,
endeiknumi
to indicate (by word or act).
Endeiknumi is the word for evangelism, it means to show, to manifest, to demonstrate.
The corrected
translation is;
in order that I might demonstrate.
God is invisible, but there are manifestations of His great character and these manifestations all come from His power.
The prepositional phrase in the Greek, comes before the phrase, my power,
en plus the instrumental from the personal pronoun su,
en is the preposition, plus su = by means of you.
Then comes the accusative singular direct object from the noun dunamis, for power. And with that we have the possessive genitive from the personal pronoun ego which means that God was using His own power by means of you – Pharaoh.
1. The demonstration of divine power became the means of releasing the Jews from slavery.
Not only releasing them from slavery, but this was the birth of the first priest nation or client nation in history.
GAL 5:13, For you were called to freedom, brethren; only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.
2. The evangelization of Egypt was another result, plus the evangelization of the entire world.
3. Any Jew, any Egyptian, any Ethiopian or Canaanite who wanted salvation had a clear picture of the source of salvation, from the manifest power revealed by means of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart.
4. It was not until the sixth plague that we read the phrase God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, as in EXO 9:12-16.
The mechanics again, of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was the removal of all restraint on his negative volition, plus keeping him alive.
5. Pharaoh’s freewill moved him without any restraint from God on a collision course with historical disaster.
6. Just as God turned the heathen over to their vial lusts, affections and reprobate minds in ROM 1:24 through 28, so God turned Pharaoh over to his negative volition, his arrogance, his jealousy, his vindictiveness.