Exodus 7:25-8:15

Hey everybody, welcome back.
Thanks for being with us as we continue through Exodus.
We are continuing as we begin to look at the plagues that befall Egypt.
Rather than read all of this
in each particular case,
we’re probably trying to do some summarizing.
Remember yesterday we saw
the first plague, which was the water of the Nile and other water as well,
turn into blood.
Today, we move to the second plague where God tells Moses,
go to the Pharaoh.
This is out of chapter eight,
go to the Pharaoh,
tell him this says,
“The Lord let my people go so they may worship me.
If you refuse,
I will plague your whole country with frogs.” And there’s this wonderful description that follows.
They’ll be in your palace,
they’ll be in your bed chamber, your bed,
the houses of your officials,
they’ll be in your ovens and your kneeling bowls.
The
frogs will come upon you and your people and all your officials.
So the Lord then sends Moses to Aaron and tells him to stretch out of his hand.
And they do this and the frogs happen.
The frogs come and plague Egypt.
And then again, we get this funny note,
Michael, we got yesterday, verse seven,
“But the magicians did the same
by their secret arts and they brought frogs up to the land,
up on the land of Egypt.”
And so once again,
we see the pattern we established in plague number one,
there’s a threat,
there’s the fulfillment of the threat.
Then there’s the response in which the sorcerers of Egypt
produce something similar.
The indication being maybe that Moses is doing this through trickery,
maybe that this is not divine,
maybe that Moses is happening here doing this on his own.
What is interesting, what breaks the pattern this time is that the Pharaoh relents.
So in verse eight,
we read, “The Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron,
said to them, ‘Pray to the Lord
to take away the frogs from me and my people,
and I will let the people go and sacrifice to the Lord.'”
So we’re beginning to see a change in the pattern.
And I’m not sure we can call one
plague a pattern, but in the story,
it kind of evolves.
So here we have the sorcerers able
to mimic the results,
but Pharaoh affected by this for whatever reason says, “Okay,
I will do it.
I’ll let the people go.
You pray to the Lord and it will stop.” And at this point,
Michael, if that’s where the story stopped,
we’d think good result.
Yeah.
Well,
we have framed these plagues from the very beginning,
Clint, as being a series of
increasing confrontations between Pharaoh,
who is of course the one who holds the people of Israel in
subjection and in slavery,
who’s oppressing these people.
And we’ve taken great pains to show how
that is a severe kind of oppression.
But also we’ve cast this as a real ratcheting up of arms
of Pharaoh against the God of Israel.
And the question at hand in the text is that God is going
to bring judgment upon the Pharaoh,
that there really is no shot that Pharaoh has to win this.
It’s striking up to this point, Clint,
we once again have the Nile involved in this plague.
We had blood,
and of course that went all the way throughout the land.
But here, once again, these frogs are connected to the lifeblood of the people.
The river, again, will swarm with frogs,
we’re told here in verse 3.
The same way that we had in the first where that blood was even in
these vessels of water stored for later,
here we have these frogs in your bed chamber, in your bed,
in the house, in the ovens, in the places where you’re making food.
The idea being that this will be pervasive,
that it will absolutely impact every single person again.
And what is interesting here
is that move by Pharaoh initially to ask for reprieve or relief,
Clint, is surprising because everything we’ve seen thus far has been one-sided.
Pharaoh has had the magicians do their thing,
his heart has been hardened,
and it just keeps going.
It’s maybe the first time that we’re tipped
to the idea that this is going to take some twists and some turns,
Clint, and there is certainly
going to be more turn than this story.
But I just want to point out,
I feel like there’s a
rising sort of slope here,
and we’re on it as we continue on to the second plague.
This is in no way academic,
Michael, but what I find interesting is we have the first moment here
that Pharaoh slips a little bit.
It’s the first
idea that Pharaoh begins to relent,
to give in a little.
And really, as I read it,
I guess, and I suppose this is an opinion,
this would be, for me, the most preferable plague of all the plagues that are coming.
I mean, this one is inconvenient.
It’s a nuisance.
But it’s strange that it’s at this moment,
maybe it’s simply the recognition that the things Moses calls into being happen.
And maybe that’s his idea here.
There’s this wonderful response
at verse 9 here.
It says, “Moses said to Pharaoh,
kindly tell me when I am to pray for you and your officials and your people,
and the frogs may be removed from your houses and be left only in the Nile.” It’s a strange
conversation between people who are talking life and death and punishment and plague.
They, you know,
“Please pray to the Lord.
Kindly tell me when.” It seems very civil,
given the backdrop of what’s at stake here.
So, the Pharaoh says, “Tomorrow,
Moses says he will
go and do it.” He does that.
He prays to the Lord.
And it says,
“The frogs died in the houses and the
courtyards and the fields,
and they gathered them together in heaps,
and the land stank.”
I mean, this is not getting better.
This is probably in some ways the worst part.
And this is the most important part,
the end here, verse 15.
“But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite,
he hardened his heart,
and he would not listen to them,
just as the Lord had said.”
Two things are interesting about this to me,
Michael.
The first is that it perhaps gives an
indication of Pharaoh’s character,
which is not the first indication,
maybe not the first
suggestion that Pharaoh is not 100% honorable.
When things get better,
he changes his mind.
So, when he’s under pressure,
he says one thing.
When the pressure is off,
he says another thing.
And that’s not good.
The second thing that is,
I think, more interesting theologically is,
we talked about this the other day,
there is this movement between God saying,
“I am going to harden the Pharaoh’s heart,” and then there are moments where it seems like that’s
just of the Pharaoh’s own personality.
And here, we’re told,
he hardened his heart,
and the he here
clearly seems to be the Pharaoh.
I don’t think that’s a reference to God.
When the Pharaoh saw
that there was a respite,
he hardened his heart.
So, in other words,
he went back on his word,
he became callous again,
he refused to do what he had said he would do,
he doesn’t follow through,
and no progress is made,
no respite is given for the people.
He gets a respite,
but then in the
result of that is that he refuses to give respite to the people.
One commentator pointed out helpfully,
I think that frogs were a very symbolic and religious symbol in Egypt.
So, don’t make any mistake here,
while there is a telling of the rising confrontation,
there’s also a direct setting against
the symbolic, religious significance of the Egyptian Empire,
this thing that they hold sacred,
and then God’s ability to use the thing,
to use frogs which are held in this high religious esteem,
to be the thing that at first, I mean,
Clint,
frogs in your bed is embarrassing,
it’s frustrating, it’s dirty,
it’s going to get a lot worse if you made the point,
you know, if you’re
right.
So, we began with blood,
right, which is this very gritty image of the water red,
and not just colored red, but blood, the life flow is literally the thing that it gets turned into.
Now,
here in this story,
the life comes out of the river,
and it’s annoying and frustrating,
and in some way it makes fun of or mockery of the religious symbols of the oppressive power of Egypt,
but then on the back end of the parable,
Pharaoh gets what he wants,
in some ways, which is for the frogs to be done away with,
the prayer is answered, in other words,
but in its answer,
there’s a, I love when the Bible makes things so clear, it’s stank,
there’s a stinky kind of
gross cost for the death here that happens, and mind you,
these frogs come out of the very place
where Pharaoh has been killing babies,
right?
I mean, all of this is tying together when,
as this story talks about God’s judgment here,
Clint, I don’t think any of these details are accidental.
I don’t think that they just wound up here from imagination.
I mean, these are in many
ways countering the things we’ve seen of Egyptians power thus far.
You know, to my knowledge, Michael, I’ve never heard of
sermon series on the plagues,
I’m sure there have been some.
It’s interesting though, there is a certain looseness to these stories that is really
fascinating.
So,
you know, we’ll remove the frogs.
Well,
remove means they’ll die and you can pile
them up and they’ll rot.
I mean, you know, there’s just a kind of oddness to these stories that I
think is really interesting.
But in each plague,
I do think there’s something that is being said to us.
And here,
what is being said is that the Pharaoh is likely going to be the kind of person
whose word can’t be trusted.
We’ve heard that insinuated,
we’ve kind of gotten clues of that before.
But here,
we begin to see that the Pharaoh may not,
for whatever reason,
be honorable
when he promises to do something,
which leads us then to the third plague,
which is gnats.
The Lord said to Moses,
“Say to Aaron, stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth
so that it may become gnats throughout the whole land.” And they did so,
“Aaron stretched out his
hand with the staff,
struck the dust of the earth,
and great gnats came on humans and animals alike
like dust of the earth.
It was turned into gnats throughout the whole land of Egypt.
The magicians tried to produce gnats by their arts,
but they could not.
There were gnats on both humans and animals.
And the magicians said to Pharaoh,
‘This is the finger of God.’ But Pharaoh’s
heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them,
just as the Lord had said.” So here,
we kind of leave the pattern all together.
Here,
the magicians, who have kind of convinced Pharaoh
in other times to take this less seriously,
run up to the limits of their own knowledge.
They can’t do this.
They don’t know if this is a trick.
They don’t know how it’s being done.
In fact, they don’t believe it’s a trick.
Listen to the words.
They say to Pharaoh,
“This is the finger
of God.” But now,
Pharaoh won’t listen to them either.
And this is the picture of a stubborn leader.
He will not accept counsel.
He will not keep his word.
This is now about him.
This is now
a contest of ego,
and Pharaoh brings a lot of ego.
He would not listen to them because his heart
was hardened, just as the Lord had said.
And again, in this plague,
we don’t read that the Lord
hardened his heart, but the Lord had predicted it would be the case.
The Lord had said he may
be at work even in it.
So it’s a little hard to know what we should take of that.
Is this the Pharaoh’s
doing, God’s doing?
Whatever the path to get there,
the result is the same.
Egypt is suffering.
Pharaoh has the means to ease the suffering,
but not the willingness.
And now the magicians will
sort of fade into the background of the story.
They’re not likely to make many more appearances.
In fact, I don’t think they make—I shouldn’t say that.
I don’t believe they show up again.
But here, they’re at their limits.
They tell Pharaoh, “This is divine work.
This is happening
because of this situation.” But Pharaoh doesn’t care.
Reminds me a little bit, verse 19 here,
Clint, of the Centurion, who says, “Surely, this is the Son of God at Jesus’s death.” There’s a kind of irony,
and yet a beautiful image of
revelation happening here, where it has been made clear to the practitioners of anti-God religion.
You know, those who are stewards of Egyptian power and Egyptian faith,
they see in this moment the truth,
“This is the finger of God.
This is the thing that we cannot equal.” They,
by the third plague,
is the point.
By the third plague,
they’re on the train.
They get it.
They have seen we’re dealing with a force here that’s beyond our ability to counter,
which does, Clint, go to your point.
I think it forces us, the reader,
to begin to
ask questions about who Pharaoh is.
And, you know, you use that word,
I think—did you say arrogant?
I mean, there’s a sense in which he is stuck.
He is unable to hear counsel.
He’s unable to deal with this change.
To whatever extent this is him hardening his own heart,
or God hardening his heart—and we know that we’ve already talked about how these ideas
actually intersect in some
really interesting ways in these parables—it actually doesn’t matter.
What does matter is,
here you have the one with the power to let the people go,
matching power with the God who
is determined that the people will be let go.
And we’re beginning to see a story of this man,
I think, begin to take a significance that’s far greater than one person.
I mean, Clint, there’s a kind of—I want to be very careful with this word—there’s a kind of mythic
quality to this story.
I’m not suggesting that it’s mythic as in that it is pretend,
or that it is
fictionalized and therefore not meaningful,
or purely sabbak.
What I do mean is,
I think Pharaoh represents in this story more than just the Pharaoh.
I think he represents that hard, hardness,
set-apartness from God,
which,
by the way, the people are going to encounter in many
different ways in this story beyond Egypt.
And I do think the sheer extravagance of the symbolism
of these plagues will continue
to point out the beyond human quality of this attack of God,
this resistance to God is probably a better way to say it.
And it’s going to
be like a clash of
titans, except for the fact that Pharaoh’s not really a titan.
He becomes smaller,
he becomes more isolated as the story continues.
And that’s part of what makes this so interesting.
I think the story—you know,
from a storytelling perspective,
Michael, I think this is really well
done.
We had these kind of extraneous characters.
We’ve had the magicians.
We’ve had the
sorcerers.
They’ve now kind of dropped out of the picture.
We have reference to the officials, but
they’ll have a role in a little bit,
but for the most part,
they’re kind of in the background.
And the storytelling has done a really nice job of setting in the front of the scene God and Pharaoh.
Now, they talk to one another through Moses and Aaron.
There are these mediators,
but Moses and Aaron are not really the point of the story.
They’re fascinating the way the
characters here.
This is very much a brawl between God and the Pharaoh,
God who brings
plague and destruction and threat,
and Pharaoh who now has to try and deal with his own ego
when even those closest to him say, “You’re overmatched.
This is not something we can win.
You should relent.” And those two characters,
both as types and as literal characters in the story,
I think make this fascinating part.
You know,
again, I don’t know that this is anybody’s
favorite part of the Old Testament.
I mean, it’s kind of messy.
It does raise some hard questions.
The language can be difficult,
but I think the way the story is told where everyone
else kind of falls by and you’re really left with,
Titans is too strong a word,
but with the idea of God and
Pharaoh locked in this epic struggle with full knowledge of where it’s going.
So it’s really a study in how does the Pharaoh respond.
At this point, we know he loses,
but we get to watch
what it looks like for him to come to terms with God.
And I think that’s just very good storytelling.
Yeah, and we’re going to engage this more next week as we continue with this story.
I’m just going to
put this note in here that we’re going to come back to,
and that is that note how much of this
part of the story revolves around not taking the people out of Egypt permanently,
but rather making a time and space for these people to go worship God.
I think there’s a really interesting
implication that while this is a battle between these two people,
like we’ve talked about so much,
there’s also a kind of evangelistic note in this story as the people are learning to worship
their God.
I mean, there’s a,
as God reveals himself to Moses,
God is also somewhat simultaneously
revealing himself to the people of Israel,
and that theme is going to now begin to be fleshed
out more as well.
I think my point in saying that is not to explain that theme,
rather than to say
there are many themes masterfully woven together in this,
and some are going to be highlighted in some plagues,
some are going to be highlighted more in others,
and it’s all going somewhere as a narrative,
and I think that’s what makes it quite frankly so memorable,
why so many people
know of these 10 plagues,
Clint. Yeah, and while they know the story,
Michael, I think this is like
an interesting landscape, like maybe a mountain or a canyon,
that if you see it from a distance and you think,
“Yeah, I know that story,” I think it’s very different when you take a path and you get
down in it and you begin to dig your way into these stories,
and you find these layers and this
richness and these wrinkles in the landscape,
that if you knew,
you had kind of forgotten since
last time you visited,
and I think these stories have a lot of those places where we can get a
foothold and really dig into some stuff that we may not always remember is in there.
Hey, friends, thanks for being with us here today.
Next week, we’re going to kick off with the fourth
plague.
I hope that you have a blessed weekend,
and we look forward to carrying on the study
with you next week.
Thanks, guys.