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Good Sunday morning to you friends, it’s July 7 and we’re reading together Exodus chapter 8, today.
Have you noticed how the Bible often could be on the front page of the newspaper or TV Headline News or your favorite Internet news source? I think Exodus 8 sounds very similar to the leadership confrontations in Washington DC we see almost daily / or how about the Brexit debate in the UK which finally resulted in Prime Minister May resigning / or the current leadership crisis in Venezuela / or the Sudan / or even Hong Kong in recent days.
In Exodus chapter 8, the undisputed leader of Egypt is the great Pharaoh. For generations in Egypt, leadership has been a stable but ruthless monarchy. The Pharaoh did whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted. And whatever the Pharaoh wanted, regardless of the cost, even in human lives, was his for the asking. 1 million Hebrew slaves were part of the huge slave workforce whose purpose in life was, to provide whatever the Pharaoh wanted.
But God has now stepped into history in Egypt, and Moses His ambassador, confronts the Pharaoh three times in Exodus 8, with three different and very powerful plagues from God. Remember these plagues have several purposes…
1. To demonstrate in undeniable, tangible, specific and overwhelming ways, the unlimited power of the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph and Moses.
2. To convince both the Pharaoh and the Egyptian people that the God of the Hebrews is the ONLY living, true, Almighty God, and that their idols and religious practices are meaningless in comparison.
3. To convince the Egyptians and the Hebrews, that the God of the Hebrews has chosen the Hebrew people, beginning with their parents Abraham & Sarah, to be HIS people, and He has a purpose and a place for them… the land He had promised to Abraham 500 years before. And God was going to deliver them from their slavery and return them to the land of His provision, and there bless them and lead them in being His people, showing to the world what it looks like when a nation truly lives as,,, “one nation, under God”.
Notice please, the progression of the plagues which I showed you yesterday in chapter 7, continues today in chapter 8. I wonder what you see about the plague of the frogs in vs. 1-15 that is different from the previous plagues of shepherd staffs turning to snakes and water of the Nile turning to blood?
Listen to vs. 3 “The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs.”
This time the plague is invasive, aggressive. The frogs invade the homes of the people, starting with those in leadership, in the palace. But you’ll notice the Pharaoh’s sorcerers duplicate the miracle. However, while they can produce the frogs, evidently their black magic cannot limit or stop the frog invasion, and Pharaoh is forced to admit the power is beyond his ability to control, and for the first time, Pharaoh is forced to request Moses for help. The God of Moses is the only force powerful enough to stop the plague… and for the first time arrogant Pharaoh needs God’s help, and requests it.
“And the LORD did what Moses asked. The frogs died…in the houses, in the courtyards and in the fields. They were piled into heaps, and the land reeked of them. But when Pharaoh saw there was relief, he hardened his heart…” (Ex. 8:13,14)
I wonder if you see an important spiritual and moral lesson here? Yes it is true God is ready and able to rescue us from our terrible choices and the damage being done in our lives and impact on others, by our sin… but often, when God brings rescue, the consequences of the sin leaves a brokenness, a wounding, a mess that may require lots of effort and time to clean up.
We’ve seen what a mess “natural disasters” can cause our planet and our clusters of humanity living in towns or cities. Huge snow storms can paralyze a city. Remember Hurricane Katrina and the devastation of New Orleans? Or raging fires in California or tornadoes in Oklahoma. So it’s not difficult for us to imagine the clean up mess in Egypt and heaps of decaying frogs everywhere.
Exodus 8 does not tell us the gap of time between the frogs and the gnats, but I presume it was not long. Do you notice what is new about the gnat plague? verse 18 & 19 are a strategic turning point in this confrontation between God and the Pharaoh. “But when the magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts, they could not. And the gnats were on men and animals. The magicians said to Pharaoh, ‘This is the finger of God’.” (Ex. 3:18,19)
What happened here? May I suggest God had allowed the black magic of the sorcerers to turn their staffs into snakes, and Nile river water into blood, and then into frogs…but do you notice in each case their black magic hit a wall, a limitation, that their magic could not overcome? With the snakes, Aaron’s staff/snake attack and swallowed up all the magician staffs/snakes, and the magicians could not prevent it, and they walked out of Pharaoh’s presence without the magical staffs they had entered with!
With the Nile river turning to blood…the magicians could not reverse the process and when they started getting thirsty, they too had to dig new wells.
With the frogs, while the magicians could make them, they couldn’t control them or kill them, and their homes were invaded with them just like everyone else.
Finally, with the gnats, God blocked their black magic completely and their words stand as an undeniable proclamation and subordination to the supremacy of the God of the Hebrews “This is the finger of God.”
But you see the Pharaoh’s response… “Pharaoh’s heart was hard and he would not listen…” My friends, does this sound like some leadership in all those places I mentioned to begin my thoughts today? Hard hearts paralyze minds. A paralyzed mind can see the logical evidence and knows the truth, but refuses to acknowledge it or honor it. I believe in America the best example of this in our day is the Abortion issue.
There is no doubt the ‘fetus’ is a child, with a beating heart, being developed by God, cell by cell, tissue by tissue, every second of the day and night, during pregnancy. God has given to all humanity a natural love for children and an instinct to protect them, in their vulnerability as infants, both before and after birth. But, a hard heart will result in a paralyzed mind, and thus we have Dads and Moms, nurses and doctors, and politicians with hard hearts who so desperately don’t want the pregnancy, their hard heart paralyzes their intelligent mind, and they actually kill the innocent, vulnerable, living baby…legally. While at the same time going to extremes to protect children from predators of all types. It’s Exodus 8.
Christians and those with conscience scream “This is the finger of God” when looking at an ultra sound of a pregnant woman, while some with hard hearts and paralyzed minds cry… “kill it, it’s nothing”, and 60 million babies have been slaughtered, in America!
And then there’s one more plague on Egypt in Exodus 8, and do you see God does it again? God again raises the bar of progression in the plagues. Do you see vs. 22? “…on this day I will deal differently with the land of Goshen, where My people live; no swarms of flies will be there, so that you will know that I, the LORD, am in this land. I will make a distinction between My people and your people.”
Wow! God is making it very clear… the Hebrew slaves are God’s chosen people, and God will now begin to protect them from the plagues He is inflicting on the Pharaoh, and everyone else in Egypt, who are the Pharaoh’s people.
You’ll notice there is no further mention of the Pharaoh’s magicians, and once again Pharaoh has no power to stop the plague or avoid it or protect himself or his people from it. Only the Almighty God who is bringing the flies, can remove them. But still Pharaoh’s heart remains hard and his mind paralyzed by anger and pride.
So friends, today is Sunday. How will you live the hours of this day? How much of this day will you spend in worship and conversation with God? What about your children and grandchildren? I wonder what God wants to do in each of our lives and our families this Sunday, as so many in our wonderful nation continue to clench their fists and say “NO” to God or worse…”God, get out of America”??
Remember 2 Chronicles 7:14 today my friends? Read it a few times today…and spend some time with God LISTENING to what He wants to say to us today.
O God. . .
Pastor Doug Anderson 262.441.8785
“Let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us, with our eyes fixed on Jesus…” (Heb. 12:1,2)
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