9 And he said unto his people, Behold, the people of the children of Israel are more and mightier than we:
10 Come on, let us deal wisely with them; lest they multiply, and it come to pass, that, when there falleth out any war, they join also unto our enemies, and fight against us, and so get them up out of the land.
11 Therefore they did set over them taskmasters to afflict them with their burdens. And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses. Exodus 1:9-11
Pharaoh had an agenda to make the Jews his perpetual slaves, thereby frustrating God’s agenda for them to return out of Egypt into their own land of freedom. The stage was therefore set in Egypt for the conflict of two determined agendas. To achieve his goal, Pharaoh had a plan, but he was going to be very careful, and very wise in how he pursued the plan; he was going to “deal wisely with them” without drawing undue attention to what he was implementing (v.10).
Pharaoh’s vision of perpetual enslavement of the Jews, and his mission of tactful implementation did not go unnoticed by Heaven. God also had a plan, and men; a plan perfected long ahead of the time, and men some of whom had been trained covertly in Pharaoh’s own facilities, at Pharaoh’s own expense.
Pharoah’s veiled plot to “deal wisely” with the targeted Jews was going to take three cautious phases, which were actually three options.
Option 1: Affliction
Egypt’s first option in the grand plan of perpetual enslavement, in opposition to God’s timetable of Jubilee and freedom, was to afflict the dreaded slaves; to make life very difficult for them, too difficult for them to think of freedom (v.11; 5:15-17). ”And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage” (vs14).
Pharaoh still employs that option today, against nations, against organizations, against individuals. He sends them so many distracting troubles that they are unable to focus enough to think of their welfare and their future according to the plan of God, like David, who “could not build an house unto the name of the LORD his God for [because of] the wars [“many wars," NLT] which were about him on every side” 1Kings 5:3)
Pharaoh kept them ‘very busy’; he inundates them with so many activities that they hardly have space for reflection. Pharaoh deliberately gets them too overwhelmed with others’ welfare to think of theirs: gets them so engaged with physical tasks that they lose touch with the spiritual. This anti-God authority confronts the chosen people so much with Egypt’s urgencies that heaven’s plans gradually negligently pale away into inconsequence. Often these people of destiny work under threat and pain; they work more out of compulsion than out of love.
In the Parable of the Sower, this strategy of the evil one is hinted at in the seeds that fell on stony places, representing those who gladly hear the word but soon are terminated by twin the troubles of “tribulation and persecution,” so they never get to the dreamed destination of fruitfulness (Matthew 13:20-21). Is that you? Have Pharaoh’s taskmasters succeeded to slow you down, even if they might not have stopped you? How effectively has Option 1 worked against you and your dreams?
Prayer: O God, frustrate every taskmaster that Pharaoh has mobilized against my life, against my future, against Your purpose and calendar for my life, in Jesus name. Ye evil taskmasters over Nigeria, over the Church of God, may your plots turn against you now, in Jesus name. Amen.
Option 2 Abortion of Dreams
Whereas the first option was aimed at the present of the Jews, the second option targeted their future, their seeds, their dreams, their aspirations, their unborn sons, and their potential candidate for future governance and opposition. Whereas the first option focused on the persons alive, the second option was targeted at those yet to be born. The agents in this first option were unsmiling, weapon-wielding masters who caused pain; the agents of the second option were going to be smiling, professional care-giving midwives. Should option one fail because of its brazenness, this should succeed because of its apparent camouflage of charity. What was impossible to achieve by whips should be possible by ‘love.’
May we rewind again to Case 3 in the Parable of the Sower: the seeds that fell among thorns, who were destroyed not by the troubles of life, like their fellows at the previous stage of stony places but by the pleasures of life, cares and riches (Matthew 13:22) Pharaoh still uses the same tricks today, to distract and destroy with pleasure those that would not be moved by troubles.
Pharoah was very determined: He was not going to take any chance with the unpredictable people of God. Should Option 1 fail, there was a backup plan: midwives hired to abort the babies of those they were trained to assist; professionals hired by the desperate government shamefully against the ethics of their business; hired to do the unbelievable opposite to their sworn oaths and lofty professional practice.
Of what threat are unborn infants to the incumbent monarch that he should go that far? Pharaoh surely sees farther than many of us.
Pharaoh gave the hired midwives very strict terms of reference: “when you help the Hebrew women as they give birth, watch as they deliver, if the baby is a boy kill him” (Exodus 1:16 New Living Translation) In other words, he was saying to them, "Study their seed; if it is likely to amount to any future significance, waste it, but if it has no future, let it live and become a burden and a liability to them. Kill their sons before or soon as they are born. Let these people carry a pregnancy, go through the travails of birth, but never see the fruits of their labour. Supervise their circumstances to ensure that they always labour but have nothing to show for their pains.”
Those were going to be a special squad of midwives recruited, indoctrinated and Satanized, then posted to stand between the past labour and the future dreams of the carriers of the pregnancy: evil midwives positioned between conception and delivery, between plans and implementation; agents instructed to be so smart as never to blow their cover, or leak their mission; midwives who could make abortions and infant mortality look like ‘accidents’ explainable by every ‘scientific’ and gynaecological means.
While appearing to show professional care and concern to their pain-dazed, half-conscious patients in labour, the midwives were to carry out their secret mission known only within their bloody cult membership and to the recruiting powers of Egypt. The same drugs which have been used to great fame in delivering other women who carried no threat to Egypt, the same facilities that have nursed other babies to health and life, were to be carefully manipulated in the case of the Hebrew woman to frustrate their delivery of threat-sons,
If anyone, especially a Hebrew, were therefore to judge the reliability of these professionals based only on their expert record with other non-Hebrew women, that person would have been fooled and doomed. The ‘signboards’ and advertorials do not always say everything. Women without discernment, who judge only by the midwives' past record in handling ‘other women,’ who judge by the government-sponsored state-of-the-art equipment in their airconditioned maternities, will ignorantly sacrifice their innocent babies on the concealed malicious altars of Pharaoh.
Can anyone see a parallel between this Old Testament mission of Pharaoh‘s midwives and that of the apocalyptic Great Red Dragon of Revelation 12, that “stood before the woman who was ready to be delivered, for to devour her child as soon as it was born” (v.4). The same spirit, different eras, different spaces. What is a dragon, a red dragon, doing before a pregnant woman about to deliver? Who made it a midwife? Reading through Revelation 12, the dragon’s plan seemed failure-proof, but God also had a plan, of which the devil never knew. While the dragon waited at that very opportune time and place to prey on the helpless, tender, tiny newborn baby of the traumatized mother weakened by the travails of delivery, God had prepared unseen hands to snatch the baby, faster than the dragon could conceive, up to His throne beyond the reach of the wicked dragon.
God had also prepared the earth to help the woman by frustrating the drowning waters that the furious and disappointed dragon was going to unleash against her. God knew that she will need to be relocated from that maternity soon after delivery; accordingly. He also “prepared” two wings of a great eagle to help her fly away from the danger to the prepared place of safety where she was going to be nursed for the stipulated period of asylum. If the dragon had known, he will not have wasted his time.
Prayer: Father, in the name of Jesus, please frustrate every dragon-midwife sent against your sons in this season, against the mothers that nurture them, against the Church, May the earth, yea, may all of nature arise to fight Your cause now. Lord grant wings to fly and speed to go: grant wisdom in what direction to go at the time of refuge until the indignation be past. Amen.
Like the midwives of Pharoah the champion apocalyptic dragon, that unprovoked Challenger from hell, failed unbelievably in three consecutive rounds against two very weak opponents (1 Corinthians 1:27-29) Frustrated at his failure, Pharaoh called the midwives to a conference, wondering why they had been able to deliver on their assignment. They confessed to him, “Hebrew women are not as the Egyptians women; for they are lively” (v.18)
That is hell’s frustrated report about you. Truly, your case is different. Hell laments that it has been unable to succeed against you with the arrows that have worked so well against other targets in other lands. You are not as the Egyptians. Your case is different!
Why would Pharaoh pursue anyone so madly? If one plot failed against a people, why keep trying so many other options, in the hope of eventually entrapping them? Why did not Satan give up on Jesus after a first and second temptation had failed? How many temptations does it take for Satan to give up on the person of destiny? When will Pharaoh ever surrender? Until he is drowned in the Red Sea? Then so be it. Amen.
Prayer: May frustration come upon every midwife hired against God’s agenda for His people in these significant days of the end times, and may God expose the powers that sponsor them. Amen
Option 3: Mass Mobilization
Whatever escapes the first two options will likely face more direct and undisguised violence intended to exterminate
“And Pharaoh charged all his people saying, Every son that is born ye shall cast into the river, and every daughter ye shall save alive” (v.22)]
Pharaoh could be patient no longer. He was not going to leave this anymore in the hands of unsuccessful taskmasters or compromising professionals; he was not going to make it a gender army strictly of hard male taskmasters or soft female midwives. Everybody, “all his people” had to be mobilized. . Also, it was no longer going to be the secret mission of some select few. Public mass mobilization and become imperative. It was no longer going to be an agenda of 'wise' dealings. It had become a public embarrassment needing a draconian decree. Accordingly, “Pharaoh charged all… According to the New International Version, It was an “order”; waste their boys and marry their girls.
In other words, Pharaoh was declaring, “ If we could not stop them from being born, we would not let them grow into manhood. Throw them into the Nile; sacrifice them to the powers of the waters; use the means of sorcery and unveiled physical violence to destroy them. There is no more need to pretend, no more need to hide the malice and the agenda. Every other means would ultimately have to be used to achieve the same goal.” Option 3 does not rely only on the secret instruments of the midwives. Everyone is co-opted ” And Pharaoh charged all his people… "(v.22) It is also not as diplomatic and ‘democratic’ as many of the covert methods. It is more naked, more violent.
How many hurdles does one have to cross before one had fought all the battles of life? How many consecutive obstacles does Satan place in the path of the one whose freedom he dreads? After how many attempts does the devil give up on anyone, especially the woman pregnant with the seed that threatens Egypt’s future of continued wickedness?
Prayers: O God, it is nothing with You to save by many or few; to save with a spear or with a sling and a stone. They have come against us again. Scatter them in seven ways. , O Lord, preserve Your heritage. Let Pharoah’s decrees turn against him, in Jesus name. Amen.
He that hath an ear, let him hear!
From The Preacher
October 10, 2012
