Exodus 12:29-32

29 At midnight the Lord struck down all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on his throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the firstborn of the livestock. 30 And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants and all the Egyptians. And there was a great cry in Egypt, for there was not a house where someone was not dead. 31 Then he summoned Moses and Aaron by night and said, “Up, go out from among my people, both you and the people of Israel; and go, serve the Lord, as you have said. 32 Take your flocks and your herds, as you have said, and be gone, and bless me also!”

From the very beginning, Pharaoh’s actions have been all leading to this moment: the death he caused by ordering the Hebrew boys to be murdered in the Nile was always going to bring back death onto himself. This is the logic of sin—it ultimately and always leads to death.

To take a contemporary example, the very moment Adolf Hitler took power in Germany on January 30, 1933 was the moment that Germany’s defeat and destruction was assured. This is because evil always ends up leading to death and destruction on those who perpetuate it. Now, sometimes the time between the act and its consequences seem long, but always the consequences will come. In the specific case of the Nazis, it was 12 years between Hitler’s assumption of power and his suicide in a Berlin bunker.

The Lord, however, desires that no man should perish. (2 Peter 3:9) And so, with each of the nine previous plagues, the Lord has given Pharaoh the opportunity to repent. However, in the deeply mysterious interplay between the Lord’s foreknowledge and our freedom, the Lord has also known that Pharaoh would never repent and has therefor given Pharaoh over to his own rebellious and stubborn desires.

Leadership matters. The leader’s actions affect the lives of others. (This is why leadership is such a weighty responsibility.) Here the leadership of Pharaoh has brought destruction on his own people. (The same thing happened with Adolf Hitler, whose murderous evil brought back evil on the German people as a whole, particularly as the Red Army made its terrible advance into Berlin in 1945.)

The best way to understand the tenth plague is to see that human rebellion always leads to death. But, the biblical story doesn’t end with the Passover; in fact, the story of Israel continues and then culminates with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. So, whenever you think of the death of the firstborn and the tenth plague, you should also think about the mystery that God gave up His only Son for a sinful world.