Q&R: The 10th Plague: if God isn’t the destroyer, is the destroyer the redeemer?

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Question:

In your books and articles, you cite John 10:10 to say that God is not ‘the destroyer’ but is revealed by Jesus as the life-giver. But in stories such as the 10th plague of Egypt or the fall of Jericho, God’s victory seems to come through the destruction for the firstborn or the crumbling walls of the city. Curiosity and reason lead me to ask, if God isn’t the agent of destruction, does that make the Destroyer the agent of deliverance? It seems like a pretty big coincidence.

Response:

Thanks for your insightful and VERY difficult question. This is exactly the kind of quandary that the Jews wrestle with throughout the text of the Old Testament itself. It then gets picked up later by philosophers and theologians under “the sovereignty of God and the problem of evil.” Already within our Old Testament (and explicitly in Paul in 1 Corinthians 10:10), we see the people of God shifting away from (1) thinking God is the destroyer to (2) sending the destroyer to (3) overcoming the destroyer. I write more about that here: Why the Prophetic Directives to Destroy?

I can’t offer very satisfying answers to the problem of WHY or HOW of divine and human agency or way destruction and deliverance interact. We can speculate but where I start and end is that God is good and the God revealed in Jesus is not a destroyer. As you’ve noted, John 10:10 is Jesus’ bottom line: It is the thief who steals kills and destroys, but the God revealed in Jesus is a life-giver, not a death-dealer. If you can stand on that bedrock and read from the end, it does lead to all these ‘what about’ questions in retrospect. And fair enough. But for me, Jesus gets the last word, even if it means questioning and speculating over these ancient stories. 

That said, you’ve laid out the question in a unique way that demonstrates an important logical problem: If God is not literally the destroyer in the Exodus plagues… and the destroyer or ‘the wrath’ is, according to later Jewish readings, associated with satan, then doesn’t that make the destroyer the agent of deliverance? Let’s distill that problem further: if God is not the destroyer, does that make the Destroyer the deliverer?

I’ll approach the problem from several angles. I think the first response (theological and practical) is best, but I’ll share the others, too, FYI. 

A Theological Response

It is not either/or. God and ‘satan’, deliverance and destruction, are often at work simultaneously both in the Scriptures and in our lives. We came to call this dynamic ‘wrath’… Some initially thought (and still do) that God ‘wraths’ [brings destruction on] people directly, but eventually (already in Isaiah and then in Romans 1:24-28), defined the ‘wrath’ as God ‘giving us over.’ You can see the layers in Isaiah 34:2.

  • The LORD is angry with all nations;
    his wrath is on all their armies.
    He will totally destroy them,
    he will give them over to slaughter.

You can see how anger, wrath and destruction are assigned directly to God, but then in the last line, the means described is ‘giving over.’ So what actually happens. I’ve described this ‘giving over’ in A More Christlike God as “divine consent to the destructive consequences of our sin.” God always seeks our welfare and deliverance, but Love will not and cannot violate our agency, our self-destructive choices, or the open door that leaves to destructive consequences (personified as the destroyer). Ironically, it is often only when we’ve experienced those consequences that we cry out to God and experience redemption from them… or even through them! And that’s why we (and the biblical authors) both identify and distinguish the deliverance of God and the destruction of ‘the enemy’ in any given story. The two coincide but it’s no coincidence. 

Think of the Cross, simultaneously a wicked murder AND the deliverance of humankind. God didn’t kill Jesus. ”Satan entered Judas’ (Luke 22:3), inciting him to betray him and conspiring with a wicked governor, a corrupt high priest, a cruel king, a angry mob, the military and the temple establishment to linch Jesus. But even through that evil act, the Father through the Son drives out the destroyer, removes sin, and defeats death. God weaves together these natural and supernatural acts of wickedness and righteousness to save the world. 

Real-life Examples: I have many friends who have struggled with addictions of all types. The most common testimony of recovery I hear goes like this.

  1. An activating trauma occurs, often in childhood, so horrible that they cannot face the feelings.
  2. They find a disordered way to numb out the emotions… self-medicating with substances or activities to anesthetize the pain.
  3. The bad medicine typically becomes addictive, progressive, and destructive.
  4. The power of the addiction makes life unmanageable, causing harm to oneself and others.
  5. The addiction ripens until the harm caused is worse than the initial pain.
  6. They come to a point where they ‘bottom out,’ at which point they are willing to get help.
  7. Recovery occurs when they are able to surrender their lives to the care of a loving God and supportive community so they can get to the roots of their pain.

Now here is the irony. Those who truly bottom out, seek help, and experience recovery eventually testify that the destruction they experienced through their addiction led them to get help for their addiction, and the addiction itself was part of guiding them to pursue healing for the original trauma. Some even say, “I am thankful for my addiction… I can’t see how I would have surrendered to God’s love without it.” So somehow, they experienced that strange dance of destruction and deliverance. The worst thing that ever happened to them became the means by which God saved their lives. This is a mystery.

In the Exodus story, Pharaoh is given many warnings, but every time he defies God, he gives the destroyer space to wreak havoc on his own people. As is often the case, the destruction escalates every time he defies God. And God consents to this. The author sometimes even describes it as ‘God hardening Pharaoh’s heart.’ Why? Because that very escalation of defiance and destruction will ripen until God’s people are delivered. This often happens in our lives. In love, God consents to our waywardness and its awful results until we bottom out and just when the destroyer has us down, God saves us. (Think of the prodigal son!) It’s not just that God saves us from the Destroyer. It’s more than that: in God’s redemptive genius, even the destroyer’s work is subverted to save us from ourselves. 

Thus, in a way similar to how God turns the murderous crucifixion of Jesus into the ultimate act of salvation, the hardened heart of Pharaoh, the destructive plagues, and the death-dealing of the destroyer also become the occasion of Israel’s deliverance. 

This doesn’t solve everything. But it does in the end lead Jesus to conclude that even in the Passover, while the enemy is at work, his Father is also at work, and he himself is present as the Lamb who shields anyone who receives him from the destructive consequences of our defiance.  

For more on this, see our PTM blog articles such as The Wrath of God – Nuanced as Divine Consent and Punisher or Pushover? How is Wrath God’s.

That’s the best I can do as a theologian humbled by mystery. But I mentioned other responses that avoid seeing God as destroyer. I’m not as sold on these but you should know about them:

A historical and literary perspective

You might be surprised at the conclusions of many conservative Jewish commentators since the time of Christ and to this day. A great many rabbis regard Exodus as a story that is not historical but nevertheless speaks truth. Jewish scholars such as the great translator, Robert Alter, see these early stories in Exodus, Joshua and Judges as legends concerning Israel’s backstory… their origin story. I asked one elderly Jewish rabbinical student, “What do your rabbis say about the problem of the violence of God and his people in your history?”

She laughed at me. She said, “Problem? The 10th plague, the fall of Jericho… You don’t think they actually happened do you! Hahaha! No, these stories don’t describe literal history. But they do teach us something much more important.” Like what? She tried to show me how these stories function like parables and that their historicity is no more literal than the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son. They convey VERY important truths wrapped in powerful stories, based on well-developed oral traditions, and composed by exiles over a 1000 years later. She didn’t want me to waste time on historical fact-finding or metaphysical problems when that’s not what these books are about. 

For example, she (and even many conservative evangelical OT scholars) pointed out that archaeological evidence demonstrates NO destruction layer at Jericho anywhere within hundreds of years before or after the Book of Joshua claims the walls came down. That is, when Israel is said to have occupied the city, it was already a pile of uninhabited rubble.

What do we make of that? Maybe the archaeologists are wrong. Or maybe the story is misplaced. Or maybe it never happened. Or maybe this is a profound story (like Lord of the Rings) with heroes of faith , possibly inspired by real people, framed in a way that tells us the truth: that author’s intent shifts our perspective from “warfare is worship” to “worship is warfare.” Why? Because it was written for exiles who no longer had a king, a judge, an army, or an ark. But what they have is God and a story that calls them to worship.

Personally, if the fall of Jericho is proven NOT to be historically factual, I won’t lose my faith. What happened or didn’t does not diminish the importance and truth and power of the story. I love Rahab, whether as a historical figure or a character in a narrative. I happen to think she was an ancestor of David and belongs in Jesus’ genealogy. The story can stand on its own without me proving or disproving its factuality. For the Jewish rabbis, it’s clearly a precious gem in the Hebrew canon that carries treasures for us today. We might ask what they are… certainly one is that we don’t overcome by military might or political power but by the Spirit when we trust God and do things God’s way.  

But to your question, the Jewish rabbis came to the same conclusion I have: you can’t read these stories literally or you’ll end up throwing God under the bus. Philo of Alexandria, a rabbi who died just as Jesus was growing up, insisted that God is good, so we must read these stories allegorically. Literalizing them risks impugning the nature of God. Philo would not take the ‘destroyer’ as a literal satanic entity, but as a personification of destruction itself whenever human sin generates it. We create the destroyer out of our own defiance… a projection and personification of our own actions and outcomes.  

Literalist Scientistic Perspective

Finally, I’ll share a more literalist and scientific perspective angle that I don’t really buy, but so you know… there are those who want to (1) defend the Bible by (2) redeeming the ten plagues as historical but also (3) explaining them scientifically (4) so as not to blame God. I suppose if you go down the literalist path, you may as well go all the way.

In this version, apologist come up with a scientific explanation for every plague and how one plague leads to the next. When they get to the 10th plague, they think about privilege in the practice of social hierarchies. The firstborn in each family gets to eat first because they get preferential treatment. And what are they eating? The food they ingest was from crops and/or animals that have been infected with bacteria and fungi and toxins from the previous plagues. Those who ate first, died first and apparently rather quickly. And the Bible never minds saying ‘all’ or ‘every’ in destruction texts as a fact, even if it’s a generalization and some individuals might survive (you especially see this in the genocide passages).

So when a plague would come, it was normal for folks to assign causation to either God or the destroyer, whether it was drought or locusts or snakes or foreign armies. The only prerequisite is that it was destructive. But the scientific apologists point out that the actual means of the destruction were typically calamities brought about by people or nature. In the story world of the 10th plague, the death of the firstborn looks supernatural but if the deaths can be explained scientifically and these things happened naturally, so was the deliverance. The Israelites would have been spared by restricting their diet to their own, undiseased lamb chops. Glory to God.

Maybe. But both explanations that dig into history or science still seem obsessed with a literalist reading and fail to tell us the more-than-literal truth or what God is actually revealing through the text. Which is? For Christians, Christ told his disciples on the Emmaus Road to read these stories as prefigurements of the gospel story of Jesus’ death and resurrection, and how his Passover passion and victory redeem us from ‘satan, sin and death’ once and for all. 

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