Come and study the Holy Scriptures with us as Father Stephen DeYoung teaches verse by verse on the podcast, The Whole Council of God.

Father Stephen holds a Ph.D. in biblical studies.

And it's an Orthodox priest serving at Archangel Gabriel Orthodox Church in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Okay, we'll go ahead and get started.

When we get started here, just a few moments we'll be picking up at the beginning of Exodus

Chapter 11.

So last time we went through nine of the ten plagues, and we talked about how the plagues were directed not just against Pharaoh,

but against the gods of Egypt, of which they considered Pharaoh to be one.

But we talked about how Pharaoh's responsibility, as in their minds, a god king, as a sort of incarnation and embodiment

of Horus, his job was to maintain Ma'at, to maintain justice, the correct order of things,

everything functioning correctly. So when there are problems like swarms of frogs, swarms of locusts, the river turning

to blood and no one can drink it, he's the guy who's supposed to be able to interface with the

gods or whoever it is that's upset and make those things right.

And so as the plague sort of snowballed, it becomes more and more apparent that Pharaoh can't

do this.

Right.

And we saw how Pharaoh consulted with his priest.

The priest's job was sort of to advise him and tell him what they needed to do to fix things.

And at least with the first couple plagues, the priests were like, hey, we could do that too.

We could make things slightly worse.

But they couldn't actually fix anything.

They couldn't actually make it better.

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