River of Blood - Exodus 7:15-25

7:15-25 - It’s finally time for the show to begin and as God instructs Moses on what to do, I wonder if Moses knew that it was going to take this long and this many events to convince Pharaoh, or did he think with each iteration, “ok surely this is going to be the one that convinces him?” God tells Moses to go stand by the river bank in the morning to see Pharaoh, which must have been a predictable routine for Pharaoh, and state, “The Lord God of the Hebrews hath sent me unto thee, saying, Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness: and, behold, hitherto thou wouldest not hear.” At that point, Moses is to “smite” the water of the river with the staff, “and they shall be turned into blood.”

Not only will the water from the river be turned into “blood” but that will spread to any and all water throughout Egypt including any that had already been gathered, but also the fish in the river will die and the water would stink. And this is what happened, M&A went to Pharaoh, made the statement, stuck the water with the stick, and all the water in the land turned in “blood” and “the fish that was in the river died; and the river stank,” and no one could drink the water “and there was blood throughout all the land of Egypt.”

One thing that’s interesting to me is that the first plague is turning the river into “blood” which is kind of how the story of Moses starts, with the Hebrew baby boys being drowned in the river, essentially turning the river into blood with murder. I wonder if anyone else at the time made that connection, I’m sure they did.

I put “blood” in quotation marks because while it is possible that the river turned into blood biologically, just like “all things are possible through Christ,” it would seem more likely that God used the power of nature to accomplish these miracles. It seems more likely to me that God used a naturally occurring “red tide” to accomplish this, and honestly, if the river turned red and killed everything in it, wouldn’t that be the equivalent of “blood” anyway, kind of like how it says in Revelations that in the last days the sea will turn red with blood, which to me just indicates mass death and pollution of our oceans which is definitely happening right now.

The naturally occurring red tide would make sense because verse 24 says “all the Egyptians digged round about the river for water to drink; for they could not drink of the water of the river.” The Egyptians obviously knew what to do when this phenomenon occurred, indicating that they had experienced it before. Plus we never hear that God reversed the curse of the water, but “seven days were fulfilled” which indicates to me that after seven days the water went back to normal.

But just because it can occur naturally doesn’t mean that this wasn’t an act of God, because it happened out of season and to an extent never seen before with all the water turning into this “blood” substance, even if it had already been gathered. When there is a natural disaster, no one can dispute that God had a hand in it, even if it has occurred before. This is probably the same kind of concept.