Signs, plagues, and 'sacrifice in the land'

Cyril went on: And that the faith creeps toward the good as its end, you will know well, when our word has come to its own aim. For when those around Moses came again to Pharaoh to speak, and to persuade him to let Israel go from the Egyptians' land and to loose them from the old bonds, they wished to put him to shame with signs beyond word, and they showed a recasting of a rod into a serpent, and they promised most readily that they could still accomplish the greater and more lifted-up things, clearly through God. But he commanded his own magicians to do equal work, all but crying by this: We are not ignorant of such works. There are very many among the Egyptians, or of your kind; and wonder-working is a practice for the magicians, among whom you too are numbered. And when he grew very hard, and would not let Israel go, four terrible plagues, each worse than the last, are brought on; for a change of water into blood was accomplished beyond expectation, and frogs and gnats, and last a dog-fly, already made Pharaoh somehow softer, as from a necessity not to be borne. Calling in then those around Moses, he says: 'Go in and sacrifice to the Lord your God in the land. And Moses said, It is not possible for it to be so; for we shall sacrifice the abominations of the Egyptians to the Lord our God. For if we sacrifice the abominations of the Egyptians to the Lord our God before them, we shall be stoned. We will go a way of three days into the wilderness, and we will sacrifice to the Lord our God, as he said to us. And Pharaoh said: I will send you out, and you shall sacrifice to the Lord your God in the wilderness, but you shall not stretch far in going.' For when Satan stands against, and has known in a youthful way to set his own hatred of the good against our eagernesses toward the good, God sets himself against him, and presses him down when he grows bold, and tames him with plagues. And then he barely permits, not willingly; yet he tries all the same to persuade us to make the worship toward God not exact, and not yet to leave wholly the slavery to him. For he commanded the Jews that they must sacrifice not outside his own land, but in it. And Moses most wisely says, 'It is not possible for it to be so.' For the inventor of sin is always an introducer of the cheap and low things; and the divine law sends them out, and forbids the doing of whatever would seem good to that one. Those who wish to live rightly must therefore attend not to whatever the Evil One would say, deceiving, but to what the divine oracle cries out to us. 'For a lamp,' he says, 'to my feet is your law, and a light to my paths.'

Palladius said: True.

Cyril: So then, when the Evil One holds us, or wishes to shut us in and to make us under him, we must worship the only God who is so by nature, and going as far as possible from double-mindedness, let us say, 'It is not possible for it to be so.' For no one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other; or he will hold to the one, and despise the other.