God told Moses that the Egyptians would know that He was the Lord by His pouring out His plagues and rescuing His people. The end outcome of all of history is that every knee will bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is Lord. They will know He is Lord. That doesn’t mean that they will worship and honor Him. But they will know.

Moses is sent with a new speech to say to Pharaoh. When Pharaoh is told that he hasn’t obeyed, don’t you think that would harden his heart? It wasn’t God supernaturally intervening and keeping Pharaoh from submitting to God, as if Pharaoh wanted to and couldn’t. God was revealing what was in Pharaoh’s heart. Using a word like obey certainly would make any Pharaoh bristle. He didn’t bow to anyone. Others had to obey him. He didn’t have to obey anyone.

God knew it. He also knew that to know He was the Lord, He’d have to push the issue. You can’t know God as the Lord and think you don’t have to submit and obey Him.

God turns the Nile into blood. The Egyptians have to dig new wells to get water. Pharaoh’s magicians multiply the curse. They make it worse by also turning water into blood. If they were more powerful than God, they could have reversed it. If there were love behind the power, it would have made things better for the people. They could only make it worse. It made it worse not just by losing more water, but by not recognizing the power of God. They distracted from what God could do. They made themselves out to be like God. That’s the antichrist spirit in action, trying to play god, Satan’s specialty.

The first and last plagues involve blood. We again see blood as significant. Water is necessary for all physical life. Blood is necessary for all spiritual life. Water is used to cleanse the physical body. The river is where people washed. The blood is what is necessary to cleanse us to give us eternal life.

What they saw as death was actually God showing a glimpse of life. There is a greater life than food and drink. There is a greater cleansing than being washed on the outside.

God wasn’t just out to get the Egyptians. He doesn’t just get the bad guys. We should all be thankful for that because otherwise, we’d all be dead. His greater goal was for the Egyptians to know that He was the Lord. It’s God’s will that all might be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4).