Thursday, March 19, 2009

Today's Passage: Exodus 9-10

One of my favorite things to do is play poker. Texas Hold'em is my favorite game. In the game there is a term, “pot committed.” When someone is “pot committed” they have put in enough chips throughout the hand that they really should just stay in and continue the hand. The problem with deciding whether you are pot committed or not is that there is no exact science. It is all based on your decision making skills. So more often than not someone will either fold when they were actually pot committed and should have just taken their chances to see if they could win, or they will stay in and end up putting way too many chips into a losing hand. In Hold'em you have several chances to fold and still save your chips. A great player knows when they are committed and when they need to get out.

Pharaoh seems like he is trying to figure out if he is pot committed or if he thinks he can beat God in heads up poker. The livestock would have been enough for me I think. God sends a plague on the cattle so that all of the Egyptian cattle die, but the cattle belonging to the Israelites are fine. At that point I cut my losses and say ok God you win. Pharaoh does not quite think the same way I do. He keeps on being stubborn and will not let the people go. As you read today, Pharaoh had five chances to decide that he could not win, but every time he was faced with the decision he thought that he still had a chance to beat the God of the Israelites. I am not sure if it was that he actually thought he could beat God or that he thought that the worst had passed and he could just endure the hardships. Either way, Pharaoh needs a lesson on when to fold his hand.

There is a great country song by Kenny Rogers called The Gambler, and my favorite line in it is, “You got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run.” I am not sure that Kenny thought about the Biblical implications of his song when he wrote it, but I think it is a great motto for us. I think we put ourselves in Pharaoh’s position more than we think. However, I do not think we are playing against God, but against temptation. If Pharaoh would have just folded against God in the first place maybe all that trouble would not have come to him and the Egyptians. For us, if we fold against temptation and say, “I cannot win this game on my own”, then maybe we will not have as much trouble either. We get on a streak of avoiding temptation and think we can keep on winning on our own, but unfortunately the house always wins. So in the words of Kenny Rogers, “Know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away, but especially know when to run.”