The Contest

Imagine what it would be like to live in a world where there were no churches, only funeral parlors. When you wanted to worship God, you’d have to go to a funeral home instead of a church. When you were there, you’d sing hymns about death instead of about God. Instead of ministers you’d have morticians. These guys wouldn’t have seminary education, they’d have cemetery education! Instead of learning how to preach and how to counsel people, they were highly trained in how to embalm dead bodies. In a world like that, if you wanted to know the truth, instead of turning to the Bible, you’d have to open a big black book called the Book of the Dead.

Sounds pretty gruesome doesn’t it? Not a very attractive place! But such a place did exist. You have just had a glimpse of what life must have been like in ancient Egypt. The ancient Egyptians were a people who were absolutely preoccupied with death. Their whole culture revolved around it. They regarded life as just a prelude to death, and they busied themselves in preparing for death.

Their whole national economy was built on death. They had a huge religious establishment, made up of thousands of priests, whose sole purpose was to serve the cult of death. When a king ascended the throne of Egypt, plans went immediately into motion to prepare for his death and burial. Many of the pharaohs practically bankrupted the country to build enormous tombs for their dead bodies.

In fact, the most impressive structures that we have today from ancient times are the pyramids of Egypt. They were nothing more than gigantic tombs. From other cultures we have the remains of palaces and arenas and temples - places that speak of life. But from Egypt, we have mainly their cemeteries.

The cult of death was such an obsession to the Egyptians that they became uncanny undertakers; master morticians who learned how to embalm a corpse so it would last for thousands of years. They even embalmed animals. There is a place in Egypt called Saqqara - the City of the Dead. About a hundred years ago, a British archaeologist stumbled upon an underground tomb that was filled with the remains of mummified cats. There were 300,000 of them.

More recently, we have uncovered more underground caverns, where there are mummified birds - mainly falcons and ibises, both of which the Egyptians worshiped. In one cavern, there are 800,000 falcons and 4 million ibises, all neatly wrapped in bandages and carefully placed in clay pots. The Egyptians mummified baboons and crocodiles and even bulls.

In 1851, archaeologists discovered an enormous underground catacomb called the Serapeum. It was named after Apis, the bull god of the Egyptians. There, in a long underground passageway, were dozens of rooms, each containing an enormous granite coffin (sarcophagus) which weighed 65 tons. Inside the coffin was a mummified bull. The Egyptians did this because they thought that that particular bull was the earthly incarnation of one of their gods.

The Egyptians were totally preoccupied with death and with life after death. They feared it, they were in awe of it. So they worshiped gods and goddesses who were represented by various animals - Apis the bull, Anubis the jackal, Horus the falcon, Taweret the hippopotamus - in the hope that these gods would help them to somehow defeat death. And it was to this people that God sent his servant Moses.

Now Moses was not a young man when he set out on this mission for God. The Bible tells us that he was eighty years old, and his brother Aaron was eighty-three when they went to Pharaoh. They were senior citizens. We might even say (uncharitably) that they had one foot in the grave when they went to Pharaoh. They were old men. But they had a message of life and hope for God’s people who were enslaved in a land that was obsessed with death.

When Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh, we have a classic confrontation between the forces of God and the forces of Satan. It is described in Exodus chapter 7. And that confrontation revolves around the issue of who is more powerful - God or Satan? If Satan was more powerful, then there was no reason why Pharaoh should let God’s people go. But if God was more powerful, then Satan was defeated.

Now God knew that Pharaoh, acting as Satan’s representative, was going to challenge Moses and Aaron on this very point. He was going to demand that they prove the power they said they represented. Pharaoh was going to say “Okay, you guys claim to come from God. Prove it. Prove to me that I should listen to what you say. Give me a demonstration of your God’s power.”

The world is not impressed with the claims of us Christians unless they can see a power at work in our lives that they cannot explain away.

Look at Exodus 7:9-12

Aaron throws his staff on the ground and it turns into a snake. Is Pharaoh impressed? No. He calls for his sorcerers, and sets up a little power contest.

Now there are two things I want you to know about this contest. The first thing is that Moses and Aaron were not the only ones who had power. Some people suggest that the Egyptians did what they did by sleight of hand. They probably had some real snakes up their sleeves - I shudder at the thought! When they threw their staffs down, they only appeared to throw their staffs down. Instead, they quickly exchanged their staffs with their snakes and they threw the snakes down. Very ingenious! The only problem is that that is not what the Bible says.

The Bible says that they did the same things that Moses and Aaron did, but they did it by their secret arts. It says that their staffs became snakes. Moses and Aaron were not using sleight of hand here, and neither were the Egyptians. Moses and Aaron had supernatural power and so did the Egyptians. The difference is where their power came from. Moses and Aaron’s power came from God. The magicians’ power came from Satan.

Satan has the ability to do supernatural things. But his power is a counterfeit power - it is an imitation of the real power. It may look a lot like the real thing, but the aim of a counterfeit is to deceive people and lead them away from the real thing.

2 Thessalonians 2:9 The coming of the lawless one will be in accordance with the work of Satan displayed in all kinds of counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders,

Revelation 13:11 Then I saw another beast, coming out of the earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all the authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to come down from heaven to earth in full view of men.

Matthew 24:24 For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect—if that were possible.

So these priests of Egypt were plugged into Satan’s power. They were able to do terrifying things with that power. Moses and Aaron weren’t up against some two-bit parlor magicians. They were up against some of Satan’s top people - men who had sold their souls to the devil and who were immersed in the occult. There was a very real power play going on here.

The second thing I want you to see is something that comes out of the original language of this passage. The Hebrew word for “snake” that is used here is not the same as the one used back in chapter 3 where we saw Moses’ staff turn into a snake at the burning bush. The word that is used here is translated everywhere else in the OT as the word dragon, or water-monster.

That leads me to suggest that when Aaron threw his staff on the ground, it didn’t turn into a snake, it turned into a crocodile. Why a crocodile? Because the crocodile was one of the most powerful gods of Egypt.

You remember that the Egyptians worshiped the Nile River. For them, it was the source of life. Egypt didn’t get much rain, but they didn’t need much rain; they had the Nile. No matter how hot it got, or how dry it got in Egypt, the Nile just kept flowing and flowing, watering their land.

But the Nile wasn’t an entirely peaceful river. Every year, it would flood. The heavy rains 4,000 miles upstream in the mountains of central Africa would cause the Nile to overflow its banks. Depending on the severity of the flooding, the people would have to flee their homes and their fields. (The flooding had a good effect, in that it brought down sediment which replenished and fertilized their fields.) But while the flood was on, their river of life had become to them a river of danger. When the flood waters would recede, and they would return to their homes, what do you think they would they see?

There, sitting on the muddy banks of the river were the crocodiles. Great big dangerous 20 ft. long man-eating crocodiles. Even to this day, several people per year - usually children - are eaten by crocodiles on the banks of the Nile River. (You may be interested in knowing that in 1945, 900 Japanese soldiers were eaten by crocodiles in Burma.) In ancient Egypt , the croc was the king of the river. He didn’t care if it flooded. He was there when the people ran away, and he was there when the people came back.

So the Egyptians began to worship the crocodile. They called their crocodile god Sobek. They believed that he was the god of resurrection, because he was always there after the river flooded. They thought that he brought the new growth to the fields. You can see pictures of Sobek on the tombs of the Egyptians. He has the body of a man, but the big old ugly head of a crocodile.

It was that god that the Egyptian magicians served. It is no wonder that they were able to make their staffs turn into crocodiles too. They were operating with the power of the demon behind their god Sobek. The Bible tells us that behind every idol or false god is a demon. We tend to think that the gods and goddesses of ancient mythology are charming and innocent legends. Our school children study stories about them. But they actually represent a very dangerous spiritual power that is still at work in our world. We need to be very careful with them. They are just a front for the demons.

1 Corinthians 10:20 …the sacrifices of pagans are offered to demons, not to God.

So here we have Aaron’s staff turning into a crocodile by the power of God and the magicians staffs turning into crocodiles by the power of Satan. Who was more powerful? Well, there was really no contest. Aaron’s crocodile had the others for lunch! That’s a pretty graphic way of showing that the power of God is superior to the power of Satan.

I wonder what sort of power contest we’d have today if Moses came to Long Island on a mission from God? The people all around us don’t worship Sobek, or Anubis, or Horus. But they do worship other false gods. Like the people of ancient Egypt, they are afraid of dying. And they are putting their hopes, not in the God of heaven, but in their false gods.

There are three things that people are looking for today. Happiness, meaning, and love. These things have become the false gods that people worship today.

They are worshiping the god of happiness. For the most part, they have bought into the idea that happiness will come from having things. So life becomes a contest to see who can get the most things. Another way to get happiness, so they think, is to have experiences. So people are constantly on the look-out for new and exciting thrills. The drug culture is built on this foundation. And most of what people do with their leisure time activities comes down to this. They anesthetize themselves with VCR’s and music and sports events.

People are also worshiping at the temple of the false god of meaning. They want to know that their life has significance; that they are here for a reason. There’s a part of us that yearns for transcendence - we want to rise above our mere mortal selves. Many people who seek meaning tend to try to find it through accomplishment. There is a tremendous drive for accomplishment here in New York, as people try to find meaning by excelling in some way. Whether in drama or the arts, whether in business, or finance, or literature, or athletics, people are trying to make a name for themselves in the hopes of finding that elusive something that will give their lives meaning. Others pay psychiatrists $200 an hour to try to make sense of it all.

Finally, people worship the god of love. As human beings, we need love. We’re looking for someone out there to affirm our worth as human beings. We’re looking for somebody who will appreciate us for who we are. We’re looking for somebody who will care for us. So we make love our god. Some people think that you can find love in the act of sex. So their lives become a dizzy spiral downward into debauchery. Other people pursue a vague Hollywood notion of romance, failing to understand that romance is nothing more than a fickle feeling that can come and go at a whim.

So the people of our culture are really not much different from the people of ancient Egypt, worshiping false gods in the futile hope that they’ll give them something to hang onto.

As children of God in our culture, we need to show people that you will not find these things by worshiping these false gods. We need to show them that in our lives, we have a power that is greater than the power of those false gods. We need to show the world that when you serve God, He’ll give you greater happiness, greater meaning, and greater love that you can ever get by making those things your god.

In that way, today in 1990 here on Long Island, we are in a power contest just like Moses and Aaron were. As we follow Jesus Christ, He wants to build us into people who can show the world that they are serving the wrong gods. He wants us to show them that God’s power is greater than their power.

We may never get a chance to do supernatural things like Moses did. But we can all live a life of obedience to Christ. And that is the key to the contest. An obedient life is a life will have a supernaturally powerful impact on the people we meet. The key to Moses and Aaron’s power is found in verse 6:

Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord commanded them.

As people around us see that we are deeply happy people, even though we have not made the pursuit of happiness our goal;

As they see that we have a sense of meaning and fulfilment to our lives, even though we may not have done anything great;

As they see that we have a deep inner peace that comes from knowing that we are loved, even though we have not sacrificed all in the pursuit of love;

Then they will know that there is a power in us that is greater than what they find in the world.

Have you ever seen a movie preview? They always make the preview look fantastic. They always show the chase scene or the love scene. And it make you want to see the movie.

We, as Christians, should be like movie previews in our society. When people look at our lives, they should say “Hey, I want to know what this is all about. I want to see that show.”

And then we can tell them that we’re just previews to a show that’s coming that’s out of this world! And when they say “Hey man, where can I get a ticket to this show? How much does it cost?” We can tell them “The price has already been paid!”