When people won’t listen to anything else God says, Preacher Death gets their attention.
The land of Egypt was asleep. Only in Goshen were the inhabitants awake, shoes on, bags packed. Suddenly at the stroke of midnight, the word of the Lord came true. “The Lord struck all the firstborn in the land” (Ex 12:29). The destroying angel cut a swath of sorrow, the Bible says, “from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon.” Ironically, those were the two most secure doors in Egypt—at the palace and the prison—but nothing held back the specter of death that night. The stillness was suddenly broken with a growing wail of anguish as home after home discovered that God meant exactly what He had said. “So Pharaoh rose in the night, he, all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where there was not one dead” (v 30). Had they been warned? Yes. It was the very first thing the Lord instructed Moses to say to Pharaoh, recorded away back in chapter 4. Had God been patient with them? Certainly! Seven times He had declared, “Let My people go.” Pharaoh may have only considered them cheap labor, but God had decreed that through this nation would come the Scriptures, and the Savior, and the Spirit, all prophesied before. God’s program must go forward and time is up. It was a very drastic step, but it worked! Pharaoh, we read, “called for Moses and Aaron by night, and said, ‘Rise, go out from among my people, both you and the children of Israel. And go, serve the Lord as you have said. Also take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone.” Then quixotically he added, “and bless me also” (vv 31-32). So began the greatest escape in the history of the world! Millions were now on the move.