The Egyptians had it coming. They enslaved an entire people, murdered their babies, and worked them to death for decades. By any measure of justice, Egypt deserved immediate and total destruction.
But that’s not what happened.
Instead, God turned the Nile to blood. Then He sent frogs, lice, wild animals, pestilence on their livestock, boils, hail, locusts, and darkness. Nine increasingly severe warnings before the final blow—the death of the firstborn.
But think about what God told Moses as he was leaving Egypt:
God announces the tenth plague at the outset. He knows Pharaoh will refuse. He knows where this is headed. So why the nine plagues in between? Why not skip straight to the finale?
The medieval commentator Rabbi Obadiah Seforno notices something remarkable here. Based on the verses above, he says that only the tenth plague was actually a punishment. The first nine were something else entirely: opportunities to repent. God wasn’t interested in simply destroying Egypt. He wanted them to turn around and choose differently.
“God does not desire the death of the wicked,” Seforno explains. “He did not close off the paths of true repentance before them at all.” Even Pharaoh—cruel, stubborn Pharaoh—could have stopped the plagues at any point by genuinely returning to God. The door was open through plague after plague after plague.
Consider what this means. God told Moses from the very beginning: “I say to you, ‘Let My son go, that he may worship Me,’ yet you refuse to let him go. Now I will slay your firstborn son” (Exodus 4:23). He announced the final punishment up front. Then He gave nine chances to avoid it.
Nine out of ten plagues were mercy in disguise, signs and wonders to get the Egyptian people to repent.
This should change how we read our own lives. When things go wrong, when we face obstacles, setbacks, or suffering that seems to come out of nowhere, our first question is usually “Why is this happening to me?” We assume we’re being punished.
But most of the time, we’re being warned. Most of the time, God is trying to get our attention before we drive ourselves off a cliff. The lost job that forces us to reconsider our priorities, the health scare that makes us confront how we’ve been living, the relationship crisis that exposes patterns we’ve been ignoring. These aren’t punishments. They’re course corrections.
The difference matters enormously. Punishment says “You failed, now suffer.” A warning shot says “I see where you’re headed, and I’m trying to stop you from getting there.”
The Egyptians could have listened after the Nile turned to blood. They could have listened after the frogs, or the lice, or any of the six plagues that followed. Each one was an escalating signal: turn back now, while you still can. They chose not to hear it until it was too late.
We shouldn’t make the same mistake. When life sends us a plague of frogs, when circumstances force us to confront uncomfortable truths about ourselves, we must recognize it for what it is. Not divine cruelty, but divine love. Not abandonment, but pursuit. God is warning us, waking us up and giving us another chance to get it right.
The door is still open. The path back is never closed. But we have to choose to walk through it before the tenth plague arrives.
