NOTES for Exo 8:1-32
Today's reading continues the account of how the Egyptian magicians competed with the God of Moses in their ability to work miracles. Here, as in every other case, God's miracle can of course be explained by natural causes, but such an explanation in itself does nothing to diminish the significance of the miracle as an act of God. It is no accident that the Hebrew text of the Bible very often uses a word for a miracle that would be more accurately translated as “sign”: God's miracle often proves to be precisely such a sign. The fact that a natural phenomenon becomes the sign does not diminish its significance in the least, for what matters here is not nature but the One who stands behind it. For the magicians, however, the situation looked different. As a worldview, magic is very close to science, particularly in the fact that the magician, like the materialist scientist, tends to explain everything that happens exclusively by natural causes. Their ideas about the limits and laws of nature may differ considerably, but neither will ever admit into his theories and concepts anything that falls outside the natural order. Methodologically, this is of course correct, but as a worldview it often leads to a dead end. One of the most widespread errors of this kind is the belief that a natural explanation of a phenomenon in itself excludes any possibility of a spiritual dimension within it. Having succeeded in bringing frogs out of the river (v. 7), the magicians apparently considered this sufficient proof that there could be no question of a miracle. Yet this approach is a serious error: it plainly confuses the spiritual with the natural. Nature always remains within the framework of causes and effects; chains of cause and effect completely determine and describe all natural processes. The spiritual begins where causes and effects recede into the background and tasks and purposes come to the fore. Spiritual life begins where there are relationships, above all the relationship between a human being and God, but also relationships between people. A miracle becomes a miracle only in the context of the relationship between a human being and God; otherwise it remains merely a natural phenomenon. Even when an experiment cannot be reproduced, as in the case of the gnats (v. 18), this impossibility does not in itself prove a miracle: for a materialist or a magician it becomes only evidence of a scientific problem that remains unsolved today, or of a phenomenon inexplicable at the present stage of scientific development. Pharaoh is even prepared to turn to Moses for help when other means fail (v. 28), but his heart does not become softer as a result (v. 32), for a relationship with God cannot be established by compulsion.