Sheep and Goats

Month: October 2025

  • What is it With Pharaoh’s Obstinacy? A Lesson from Football

    What is it with Pharaoh’s obstinacy as his land and people in it are being destroyed? It’s been the content of the mid-week meeting for two weeks running. Frogs, gadflies, boils, locusts, hail, darkness, etc. He just gets more stubborn! I mean, you can admire a guy for sticking to his guns, but there is also such a thing as taking a hint!

    Maybe the way to look at this is when a city roots for its lousy football team. Not all teams are good. Some are lousy. And they have been that way for a long, long time. Yet, even as they play and get shellacked as usual, as they always get shellacked, there are true-blu fans who root for them! They will not throw in the towel!

    Now, we know enough about ancient Egypt and the 10 plagues to know that it was a contest of the gods. People don’t matter when the reputation of the gods is at stake. Those ten plagues: water to blood, frogs, gnats, gadflies, plague, boils, hail, locusts, darkness—Egypt had a god for every one of those categories, charged to keep disaster at bay. The Hebrew God pummeled every one of them, play after play! Yet, Pharaoh is rooting for his team of losers!

    ‘What’s wrong with you? Do you have a screw loose?!’ the servants say to Pharaoh, but not too forcefully because he is Pharaoh, after all. (Exodus 10:7) He did and he didn’t. He was rooting for his team. Too bad for the people, but they didn’t count. Maybe it’s even their fault. Had they been cheering for their gods a little more, or serving them a little more dutifully, maybe those gods would not be having their butts kicked so decisively! Meanwhile, Pharaoh keeps himself relatively isolated from harm in his pharoah-castle. Sorry, but “critical thinking” was not a thing back then.

    Is it today? We live in a time where people loudly proclaim their critical thinking skills, yet come to polar opposite conclusions on the facts laid before them. Surely, one can see Allan Guelzo’s concern that critical thinking may not only not improve his field of historical research, but may even make it worse, by “cloaking human bias in a veneer of science.” The trouble with critical thinking is that those who most openly espouse it frequently claim a monopoly on the stuff.

    It was not until Pharaoh’s own quarterback was taken out that he relented. And even then, it was temporary. He reneged, whereas it would have been better for him had he not.

    When the Israelites pulled out of Egypt, not so much as a dog barked: “But not even a dog will bark at the Israelites, at the men or their livestock, so that you may know that Jehovah can make a distinction between the Egyptians and the Israelites.” (11:7) They were all glad to see them go; Pharaoh having been the last holdout.

    This verse resonated with me because I’d been out in service with Ken that day and I finally found a car in front of the house that I must have tried a half-dozen times over the years, but never with anyone at home, junk spewed all over the yard as usual. Dogs were there, all right, securely behind the stolid barrier, and did they ever raise a ruckus! Big grey demon-like dogs, four of them, identical, as though the kind guarding mythological the gates of hell. ‘Let’s just stand here a moment,’ I said to Ken. ‘See if anyone shows.’ He did, but when he understood our purpose, he waved us away.

    This has nothing to do with Pharaoh or the Egyptians, but they sure were surly dogs, of a breed I could not determine.

  • The End of War—When?

    Through ingenuity, humans overcome their natural limitations against flight and deep-sea diving. They can fly and they can submerge. But no amount of ingenuity can equip them to overcome their inability to self-rule, “man dominating man to his injury.” All such efforts devolve into some permutation of “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.>” Such were the takeaways from Sunday’s talk on End of War. Many time’s I’ve compared inability to fly to inability to rule, but I’ve never extended it that the first can be overcome but not the second.

    “Come and witness the activities of Jehovah, How he has done astonishing things on the earth.  He is bringing an end to wars throughout the earth.” (Psalm 46:8-9) Pretty good trick if he can pull that one off.

    The solution advanced in that talk—all Bible promises—on how God would do that is:

    1: bringing an end to human governments, replacing them by the rule of his Son

    2: raising humankind to a state of perfection

    3: removing the influence of Satan, the one right now “misleading the entire inhabited earth.” (Revelation 12:9)

    So it was in the ministry that I answered the Muslim man who, in good faith, watered down the solution to war to that of all people sincerely living the tenets of their faith. Yes, it’s a good thing when they do that, I agreed, but make no mistake: that will not be sufficient to overcome man’s inability to rule and their resulting proclivity to war.

    This was the fellow from Bangladesh who had escaped war there as a child and still had nightmares about it. He’d been in America for decades and was “living the American dream,” he and all his siblings having attained PhD status. He, not me, was the one who brought up, all on his own, his prime concern that ending war was mankind’s greatest need, along with his fear that humans are regressing in that goal.

    But even after a return call, I couldn’t shake his equally prime concern that I had come to “change his religion.” “Look, if I come 200 times and we agree each time, on the 201st time I will say ‘Do you want to change your religion?’ but it’s not going to happen until that time. In the meantime, it’s just conversation. Nothing to worry about.” Nope. Didn’t fly with this fellow. 

    The trouble is, there’s really not too many faiths that point to the above solution of war. Most water it down to God somehow blessing human efforts to end it through political means. Or, to this man’s hoped-for outcome that each person will start sincerely living the tenets of their faith. “When the broken-hearted people living in the world agree,” is how McCartney put it. Good luck on that goal.

    ******  The bookstore

    Q: If God really can bring an end to war that easily, then what is he waiting for? After all, the longer he delays, the more generations live and die in suffering.

    Yes, they do, but it is reversible through the provision of resurrection. In time, former distresses will be forgotten, as though a bad dream.

    One must not rush a trial. One must allow it to play out, distressing as it may be to those under the gun. For Witnesses, the question to be determined arose at the very beginning of human creation, with Adam rejecting God’s right to rule for his own. God could flatten them and start again, but who’s to say the next pair won’t raise the same point? Better to let it play out.

    The overall Bible tale is that, starting with this rebellion, God allows humans to make good on their claim of independence from him. He allows them to devise their own governments down through the ages, their own economies, justice, ethics, inventions—organize or disorganize any way they will. Only when the results become the absolute trainwreck that human rule is today does the question begin to be answered. Questions answered and precedent supplied, then God can forcibly bring about the rule by his Son.

    It’s the theme of a book I wrote not too long ago, entitled “A Workman’s Theodicy: Why Bad Things Happen.” Probably you know that theodicy is a theological term referring to the attempts to answer how a God of love would coexist with evil and suffering. It is among the oldest questions of time, and likely the most important:

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    https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F2HDS4Z1