Plague 2: Frogs

Good morning.

Today's scripture is from Exodus 8, 1 through 15.

Then the Lord said to Moses, Go into Pharaoh and say to him, Thus says the Lord, let my people go, that they may serve me.

But if you refuse to let them go, behold, I will plague all your country with frogs.

The Nile shall swarm with frogs that shall come up into your house and into your bedroom and on your bed and into the houses of your servants and your people, and into your ovens and your kneading bowls.

The frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your servants.

And the Lord said to Moses, Say to Aaron, Stretch out your hand with your staff over the rivers, over the canals, and over the pools, and make frogs come up on the land of Egypt.

So Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt, and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.

But the magicians did the same by their secret arts and made frogs come up on the land of Egypt.

Then Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and said, Plead with the Lord to take away the frogs from me and from my people, and I will let the people go to sacrifice to the Lord.

Moses said to Pharaoh, Be pleased to command me when I am to plead for you and for your servants and for your people, that the frogs be cut off from you and your houses and be left only in the Nile.

And he said, Tomorrow.

Moses said, Be is it as you say, so that you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God.

The frogs shall go away from you and your houses and your servants and your people.

They shall be left only in the Nile.

So Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh, and Moses cried to the Lord about the frogs, and he had agreed with as he had agreed with Pharaoh.

And the Lord did according to the word of Moses.

The frogs died out in the houses, the courtyards, and the fields, and they gathered them together in heaps, and the land stank.

But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them, as the Lord had said.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please be seated.

Thanks for joining us this morning.

My name is James Rathman, I'm the pastor here at Redemption Church Denver.

Thanks for gathering with us today as we continue through Exodus and we look at the plague stories this summer and our summer of plagues.

We are at our second plague this morning, which is the plague of frogs.

So before we move into our scripture, let's pray.

Lord Jesus Christ, we praise you for your loving kindness towards us.

We praise you that you are willing to go to the very bottom to rescue us and to raise us sinners up into your glory, Lord.

We praise you for your graciousness, for your kindness, for your patience.

Lord, we thank you that you are the one who is all powerful, that you hold all things together in your hand.

We pray that our hearts would be soft this morning, that we might receive your word, that we might be warned by the hardness of Pharaoh's heart, and that we might draw close to you who holds all things together.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

It's uh a 19th century phenomenon where people started really uh having coordinated digs and uh seeking to translate.

Of course, the translation of hieroglyphs, we had to find the um uh Rosetta.

Well, wow.

Thank you, thank you, everyone.

Honestly, I think you guys can take it from here.

And uh yeah, so the Rosetta Stone.

Thanks, everybody.

And uh that was particularly uh that that was of course necessary for the transit translation of hieroglyphs, and that broke open a lot of ancient Egyptian culture.

And that also means that our study of ancient Egyptian culture as well as other ancient Near Eastern cultures developed at this sort of strange time uh in academia, which is that these ancient cultures are being studied and understood at a depth that they hadn't been understood for millennia, at the same time that the uh the Bible was being interpreted in this strange new way by uh critical scholarship, which was seeking to do things like uh look through the scriptures or beyond or behind the scriptures to discover the Jesus of history, the Jesus that was actually there rather than the mythological Jesus, they would say, that was given to us in the scriptures.

Now, of course, what is actually taking place there is that there is a reigning mythological framework, which was enlightenment materialism, one which is dying off.

Part of what's going on with our culture war is the death of enlightenment materialism.

There you go, tweet that.

And they were taking the dominant mythological framework of the time, which is enlightenment materialism, saying that all that exists in the world is just material reality that operates according to plain cause and effect.

Uh uh that can be uh interpreted and understand plainly through the scientific method.

That is, that is the mythology.

It was a new and recent mythology that the world had operated under until about uh 2020.

And then the world, we don't know what we operate under now.

Uh everybody's trying to race to establish the new framework.

And so they would they were taking the scriptures and they were saying, let's find the Jesus that fits our mythological framework, that everything is purely rational and purely materialist.

And so the Jesus without any miracles, the Jesus who is not God.

Now, of course, that is a mythological Jesus, because the only Jesus that adhered in reality is the one who was God and the one who performed miracles.

So we have this cultural study that's uh uh taking place of ancient Near Eastern cultures, and we have this biblical study that's creating a purely materialist, purely rational materialist Jesus, which is of course mythological.

And the question was, how do we reconcile especially the similarities that we see between these ancient cultures and the Christian narratives?

And the way that was generally accepted is that we would see these ancient stories and the similarities that we would see.

We would say, to use a contemporary phrase, that the Bible, the writers of the Bible had appropriated the cultures that they were in, and in and they had simply aggregated these other gods into a monotheistic God.

And that was their innovation.

The biblical innovation was monotheism, but the way that they did that monotheism was by aggregating and appropriating the gods of the cultures that are around them.

And that's why the scriptures should be thought of as derivative of the cultures that they were around.

And this is a this in academia, even today, is a reigning uh thought of what how to understand the scriptures.

It's almost like a Shibboleth, which is if you understand the scriptures to be inspired by God and it to uh actually be a revelation of the Lord and what he was doing, that's a strange way of thinking.

But if you understand them as as derivations of the culture that they grew up in, then that is that is the accurate way to think.

That's the reigning concept in academia even today.

And so you have these scholars that are interpreting the Bible strangely, and they have these new cultures to which they can lay the Bible against, and all of a sudden they're like a man with two watches, because a man with one watch always knows what time it is.

A man with two watches is never quite sure, and they had one flood story in the Bible, and all of a sudden they have Gilgamesh, and now we have two flood stories.

So what a which one is the flood story?

And the critical scholar's answer was the biblical flood story is a derivation of the Gilgamesh story.

We had one uh god of the storm relayed to us in scriptures, but now we have the Ugaritic texts which explain the storm god of Baal and the cults of worship around him.

We have one creation story in which from the waters the chaos was tamed, and we have an order of creation of separating the firmament from the waters below and the land from the waters.

And we had that story plainly in scripture, but now we have the Enuma Elish, and it describes that very same pattern.

So it isn't must we mustn't we conclude that the Bible is simply derivative from these stories.

Now, of course, what that take fails to recognize is the very way that the Bible itself describes its own interaction with the cultures around it.

So the Bible is not silent on how it understands itself to be interacting with the provenance or the culture in which it is developed and in which it is written.

This, of course, is particularly relevant for the story of Exodus, because as our understanding of ancient Egyptian culture grows and expands with further digs and further translations, it is so evident that the book of Exodus is a deeply Egyptian text, meaning it is it is nested within the culture and the symbols of an ancient Egyptian view.

So the question is, is this sort of Exodus story just the republication of in in Hebrew, the appropriation by the Hebrew people of stories that were already taking place in ancient Egypt?

Or is there something else going on here?

Now, the way the Bible describes what's going on here is not that it is derivative of these ancient cultures and these ancient gods, but that it is adversarial to these ancient gods.

So the Bible describes itself as a polemic, an argument against these other claims to these other gods, showing plainly in the plagues of Exodus are one of the plainest places we can see this, that the God of the Bible is going one by one through these ancient gods and saying, I am God of that one, I am God of that one, I am the God of gods, I am the one who truly holds things together, I am the true God.

And so, of course, when you're conveying to a people that the gods that they worship are false and that there is a true God, then the way that you would do that is you would use their cultural symbols and you would use their images that they would understand and you would make plain there is one true God.

And so the Bible is interacting constantly with these stories.

And critical scholars have become sort of obsessed with the similarities between the stories, but the differences are what's so interesting.

The Enuma Elish begins with a God and primordial waters, and they are both eternal.

The Bible begins with one eternal God who creates from nothing.

So when you are showing that there is a God over everything, then you would say, look at this start.

There's something before it.

Look at what you thought the beginning, there is a God who is over all of that.

And that is the argument of Scripture.

In our text today, Moses will say to Pharaoh that this will take place so that you may know that there is no one like the Lord our God.

You will know it, that there's no one like the Lord our God.

In Numbers, in a recounting of the Exodus, the Exodus events are just especially the plagues, are described as the Lord had also executed judgment on their gods.

That's what the plagues are is God executing judgment on the gods of Egypt.

So the critical scholar reads this and says, look at these plagues look just like the gods of Egypt.

They look like the things that they would be over.

Scripture is derivative from these ancient Egyptian stories.

And the Bible itself is saying, I am making judgment on these gods.

That is, the it's literally the opposite.

What a derivative or being over?

From or over?

Those are the opposite.

So anyway, critical scholars are insane.

Don't trust Germans from the 20th century.

That probably doesn't need, you know, critical scholars, one of many examples of that.

So in Exodus 10.2, God says he is making a mockery of Egypt.

In Exodus 12, 12, God says, against all the gods of Egypt, I will execute my judgment.

So today we see that story continue that God is executing his judgment on the gods of Egypt.

And in that we are having laid plain, God is the Lord.

He is the one who holds the world together.

It is in his hands that we all exist.

So let's go ahead and get into our text today and see how the Lord executes his judgment.

In Exodus 8, 1 through 2.

Then the Lord said to Moses, Go into Pharaoh and say to him, Thus says the Lord, let my people go that they may serve me.

But if you refuse to let them go, behold, I will plague all your country with frogs.

This is the second plague.

The Nile has already turned to blood, and that was about seven days ago.

Not just in our preaching of it, but also in the text.

And there's already this role reversal that's beginning to happen because you remember the first time that Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh, and they said, let the Israelites go so that they might worship the Lord in the wilderness.

And Pharaoh is the one who plagues them for the request.

Now he plagues them within the power that he has and within the scope of dominion that's available to him, but it was an it was an absolute power over the Hebrews because he was able to, by his word, make their lives suffering and misery, as he demanded them fulfill the same quotas of bricks and gave them no straw to do so.

He he trapped them in lives of futility by the word of his power.

He was able to plague them.

But now the roles have reversed.

Moses comes to Pharaoh and he says, If you don't do this, if you don't let my people go, I will, excuse me, the Lord will plague you.

The Lord has the power to make your life a life of futility.

So the roles have already reversed.

In verse 3, which I don't have up here, but Moses threatens that the frogs, I will plague all your country with frogs, he says, and he describes that the swarms of frogs will come up out of the Nile, they will be in your home, they will be in your kneading bowls for your bread, they will be in your ovens, and they will go to all levels of Egyptian society.

They will, it will be a plague for Pharaoh himself.

So unlike when the Nile turned to blood and the story ended, and Pharaoh was able to just walk into his palace, the frogs will now be in the palace.

They will plague Pharaoh's personal servants, and they will plague all the people of Egypt.

So every level of Hebrew societ of Egyptian society will be plagued by these frogs.

And the word that's used to describe what the frogs will do is a word which we translate swarm.

And this word is an interesting choice because it calls us back to Genesis 1.

And in Genesis 1, God commands the creatures, especially the birds and the fish, those creatures who are created on the fifth day to correspond to the ocean and the skies, which is created on the second day, that they would be swarming in the oceans and the skies, that birds and fish would swarm.

This is God saying he has the creative power.

The one who made these things to swarm is, of course, able to call them out and cause them to swarm again.

God is drawing a light onto his own creative power.

But this very same word, Exodus, in that's used in Genesis 1, comes back in Exodus 1, and it's used to refer to the Israelites in the land of Egypt and their multiplication in the land of Egypt.

So to Pharaoh, the Israelites themselves are the ones who have been given this generative power by the Lord to multiply in the world, just as he gave to his creatures and as he blessed them, so he has blessed the Israelites to swarm in the land of Egypt.

And so this generative goodness of the Lord is now a threat, a direct threat to Pharaoh, just as the generative goodness of the Lord in the multiplication of the Israelites is a direct threat to Pharaoh.

He receives it as a direct threat.

So the plague itself is a plague of frogs.

And the Lord said to Moses, Say to Aaron, Stretch out your hand with your staff over the rivers, over the canals, and over the pools, and make frogs come up on the land of Egypt.

So Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt, and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.

Before we talk about the frogs, I know you're all on pins and needles.

Why frogs?

Let's look at the way that the plagues take place.

They take place by a mediated hierarchy.

So God comes to Moses.

The Lord said to Moses, say to Aaron, stretch out your hand.

There is this hierarchy that is in place, which holds the word, which God uses to cause the effectiveness of his word.

He could have just done this, but he's bringing it to a scale to show that he has given his authority to these men, which will stand in a like authority to Pharaoh, and humiliate and unmask the authority that Pharaoh thinks he has derived from his gods.

God is at the top of the hierarchy.

And that is why Aaron's staff is effective to call out a swarm of frogs onto the land of Egypt.

Why frogs?

Well, I think it's best to just quote a scholar that I've been relying on heavily for this series and his several works on ancient Jeep and on ancient Egypt and the Bible.

One book in particular called Ancient Egypt and the Bible.

And he says this regarding the symbolism of frogs.

He says, the Egyptians regarded the frog as a symbol of divine power and a representation of fertility.

One of the major goddesses of Egypt was Haket, who is depicted as a human female with a frog's head.

She was the spouse of the creator god Kanoum.

He was thought to fashion human bodies on his potter's wheel.

And Haket would then blow the breath of life into them.

Haket also had the responsibility, you know, you wear multiple hats on your frog head.

Haket also had the responsibility of controlling the multiplication of frogs in ancient Egypt by protecting the frog eating crocodiles.

So the Egyptians Must have had this sense that the frogs could get out of control.

But we've got crocodiles that sort of maintain this delicate balance that allows for our society to function.

So there's this understanding that there's the fruitfulness in the multiplication which comes from Haket, but Hakette also needs to keep that in check by protecting the crocodiles.

Because if she's just multiplying, then we will be devoured and the whole world will be thrown into chaos and out of order.

But if we if she also protects the frog-eating crocodiles, then this balance will be preserved.

And in this, there's such a wisdom to the Egyptians' understanding of the world.

Because they understood in this sense that there's that this wonder of their civilization, the greatest civilization in the world, was held together by these thin margins at the very bottom of their world.

Frogs are like the most bottom land animal because they start off as fish and then they come off into the land.

They're sort of this boundary or this border creature.

And so if they are not kept in check, then the whole land of Egypt will be swarmed and covered.

On my street right now, if you drive up and down it, they about every 30 feet there's a hole dug in the street because our pipes, it turned out, that went from the water main to our homes had lead in them.

I'm not a doctor.

But they say that it's not great to drink lead.

So the city has been replacing the pipes in our home.

So they just did our home.

We have copper pipes now.

I'm feeling weaker already.

I was just starting to build up my immunity.

And uh now we have we have these copper pipes.

Now, this is uh this is just these, you know, uh small pipes, underground, you walk over them, you don't see them.

And if we had neglected those, these these underground sort of things, then all of Denver could fall apart.

Because all of a sudden it costs this much.

Every new home you buy, it costs this much extra.

This is not a safe place to live because the water is, you you can't drink the water there, the property values decrease, property taxes decrease, schools fall apart, there's no you and all of a sudden all of Denver collapses on this little thing on the bottom that's so easily neglected.

See, the Egyptians understood that there are these thin margins that hold civilization together.

And so, in order to capture the reality of this, they they have a god over these boundaries, one who controls the multiplication of the frogs, because the fr when the Nile floods, that's when the frogs would multiply.

And so they are the symbol of the fertility of the Nile.

But if that multiplies out of control, then our whole civilization could be brought down under this army of frogs.

So God is clearly going to unmask the god Heket and show that this God is unable to hold the world together in an order which will allow Egypt to survive.

And he will show that by frogs he is able to bring down the greatest empire in the world, that their God is unable to hold it together, and he will bring down the greatest empire.

So God does this at the hand at the end of Pharaoh's staff, he multiplies the frogs, and it is unmasked that Heket cannot preserve Egypt.

And so frogs had covered the whole land.

I don't know what that would be like.

It would probably be like the moths this time last year, something like that.

Maybe slightly worse.

And Pharaoh, unlike last time, was unable to retreat into his home.

Now, in verse eight, in chapter eight, verse seven, it says, but the magicians did the same by their secret arts and made frogs come up on the land of Egypt.

Once again, the magicians are able to replicate the plague that God places on them.

But once again, Pharaoh, this this time, I guess I should say, when they replicate the plague, this is not what hardens Pharaoh's heart.

Remember, when the blood, when the Nile turned to blood, and the magicians were able to replicate the water turning into blood, Pharaoh's heart was hardened by seeing the magicians able to execute the same power.

This time, the magicians create more frogs, they cause more frogs to swarm on the land of Egypt, and Pharaoh must have thought, I didn't need I didn't need any more frogs.

This is not this is not particularly helpful, magicians, and they would say, but look, we have the same power, but look at what it exposes.

You can think of it like this we saw the mediated hierarchy that caused the plagues to take place by Aaron's staff.

God speaks to Moses, who speaks to Aaron, and then the frogs plague the land.

Pharaoh might consider I can call down the authority of Heket, and then I can command by that authority that's been given to me to my magicians, and then my magicians will be able to use the authority of Heket.

But they can only multiply the plague.

They cannot cause her to restrain the swarm.

What's being unmasked is there is a God above Heket.

And so when they climb up as high as they are able to the top of their pantheon, what they discover is their God has a God over it, who is willing to unmask the foolishness of their neglecting the true God.

And so the magician's power that's derived from Pharaoh is unmasked.

Pharaoh's power that's derived from Heket is unmasked.

And they all stand foolishly worshiping a God who is impotent to save them.

A goddess of fertility, no less.

So then we see this new interaction in which Pharaoh pleads directly with Moses.

In Exodus 8, 8, he pleads for relief.

Then Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and said, Plead with the Lord to take away the frogs from me and from my people, and I will let the people go to sacrifice to the Lord.

He woke up, probably never thinking he would say that phrase.

But you never know what a day holds.

Pharaoh's forced to come to Moses and plead with him to plead to the Lord by frogs.

God loves to use the lowest and the weakest to demonstrate his power over the strongest.

I often like to say, if we had a weaker God, he would use stronger people.

But our God goes up to the greatest authority in the world, Pharaoh himself.

He says, I am able to bring you to your knees pleading before me with the lowest, these creatures that crawl out from the water.

And so he comes and he pleads, please take this away.

He has been humiliated by God.

You can see there's there's this sense, and this is what we need to grasp with our Lord, is that he is at the top.

He is the King of Kings, Lord of Lords.

He is the absolute highest, the top of the hierarchy from whom all things derive.

But he is also the one that holds together the very bottom.

He is the one through whom all things happen.

So when he's attacking Pharaoh like this, you can see that Pharaoh is like trapped.

Like Pharaoh could not get all the creatures at the very bottom to join him and somehow overthrow the top.

God is at the top and he holds together the very bottom.

He holds all things.

This is the power of the Lord.

Now listen to Moses' gracious response to Pharaoh.

Moses said to Pharaoh, Be pleased to command me when I am to plead for you and for your servants and for your people, that the frogs be cut off from you and your houses and be left only in the Nile.

The language, be pleased to command me.

Notice, Moses doesn't say, If you submit to me as king, then I will remove the frogs.

He instead places himself in a position of submission to Pharaoh, saying, You command me.

So long as you are submitted to the Lord, we ought not to read the Exodus story as a simple revolution in which the bottom tries to overthrow the top so that they can then be the top.

This is not the oppressors, the oppressed overthrowing the oppressors so that they might have the power for themselves.

That's not the narrative of the Exodus.

What Moses is saying is: if you submit to the Lord, you will remain Pharaoh.

I will receive a command from you.

You command me.

But if you are not submitted to the Lord, if you are a Pharaoh with no one above you, then you will not be able to hold on to any of what you have.

The frogs are not the proletariat attacking the bourgeoisie.

This is the nature of all power.

If there is a power, or if you hold a power, that is not submitted to the Lord as ultimate authority, then that power will be utterly humiliated.

Because the Lord is over all things.

But if you have a power that is submitted to the Lord in humility, the Lord is pleased to exalt you.

The Lord humbles the exalted and exalts the humble.

Is it from the Lord?

Does it honor God as the Lord?

If not, it will be humiliated.

And so the Christian has this sort of responsibility to see the tyrannical power that is in the world and not say that simple thing, you know.

I think I've said this before, but you can you can almost always tell, like when, when um I'll say it like this.

Before I had to lead anything myself, I used to think that once you were in charge, you could just do whatever you you would just have the power and authority, and you could just change things.

And so however things were, you would just change them.

And then I would look at bad leaders and think, uh, if I were the one in charge, then things would be different.

And I would be able to change and transform all things.

And would hear stories of bad leaders and consider how awful that people have to live under such under people like that.

I I would never be like that.

Once I was in charge, then things wouldn't be that way.

Now I hear stories of bad leaders and of people in these terrible circumstances, and I'll often hear them and think, I'm sorry that you're in that circumstance, and also I've done stuff like that.

I've led poorly like that.

I've put people in predicaments like that.

I've put people in bad situations like that.

Point is you can almost always tell when somebody hasn't been in charge by their thinking that if they just were, then everything would be great.

And what they neglect to see is that, yeah, but you'd be there.

And then all of your problems and idiosyncrasies and idiosyncrasies and fears and pet projects would rain terror on the people who just trying to do a good job.

So this is not I guess I'm I'm returning to this theme of this is to the Christian, our hope is not that once we get those people out of power, then we will be.

Because we know we'll be there.

And the sin that has corrupted this world reigns in us.

Our hope is like Moses, who says, submit to, don't submit to me, submit to the Lord.

Submit to the Lord, to his ways.

Let him be king and reign humbly as under him.

This is the hope.

Because there is one true Lord, one true king, one true leader, that our hope is really in.

And that one true king, when he looks down and he sees the terrible ways that people lead others, that we lead one another, he doesn't think, I've done that too.

He thinks I do this, I actually do this perfectly.

I am never, I am never swindled by power.

I have it all.

I'm never operating out of fear of the crowds.

I'm of, I'm not of, I made them.

I'm not in fear of any of them.

I never see the rich and think I will give them favors and take advantage of the poor.

I'm not a respecter of persons.

There is one who is truly God, and that is revealed in the plague, in the shape of the way that Moses allows this Pharaoh to say, command me, and I will plead for you, so long as you submit to the Lord.

He's saying, if you submit to the Lord, we'll be you you can you be Pharaoh and I'll be the one who makes requests of you.

If you submit to the Lord, you get to, you can be king.

The one who gives the command, so long as you're submitted to the Lord.

It is.

We could probably take care of this.

Prayers are free.

I could take care of this for you, no problem.

Get rid of all the frogs today.

But Pharaoh says, tomorrow.

That'll be a theme throughout the rest of the plagues.

Pharaoh will consistently say, tomorrow.

But Moses receives the command and he says in Exodus 8, 12 through 13, so Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh, and Moses cried to the Lord about the frogs.

This word cried, the Lord heard the cry of the Israelites under the oppression of the Egyptians.

And now Moses is crying to the Lord about the plague that the Egyptians themselves are experiencing.

The mercy that they pled for themselves are now pleading this mercy for the Egyptians.

You see, this is not an ordinary revolution.

You know the French Revolution guillotines?

So Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh, and Moses cried to the Lord about the frogs as he had agreed with Pharaoh.

And the Lord did according to the word of Moses.

Look at that mediated hierarchy.

In humility to the Lord, it works both ways.

The power of the Lord is shown in the prayer of Moses.

The Lord did according to the word of Moses.

The frogs died out in the houses, the courtyards, and the fields.

Pharaoh, the greatest power and authority in the world, who by the word of his power was able to plague the Israelites and make their lives a terror and feudal.

Moses stands against this highest power and by his prayer is able to bring a relief on the land that Pharaoh could not attain.

The prayers of Christians are more powerful than those, than the kingmakers, than the pillars of the earth that decide how the world will go, that run countries and nations.

The prayers of Christians are more powerful.

Your prayers are more powerful than whoever you will elect.

Your prayers are more powerful.

The institutions that you feel powerless before, your prayers are more powerful.

God loves to use the weak things to shame the strong.

He loves to show that the humble who humble themselves before him are participating in a greater power than the most highly exalted who ignore him.

And in this, the Lord shows he is patient.

He is merciful.

Our God loves to bring mercy and relief.

He is quick to respond with mercy to those who repent and come to him.

He is kind and patient with those who repent.

In verse 15, but when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them as the Lord had said.

All Pharaoh needed to see was the frogs die.

And then he thought, I am the one who has the power.

It's restored.

I certainly can't be imbalanced again.

And right when the pressure relieved, the condition of Pharaoh's heart truly exposes itself.

This is important to know, even just to be like a functioning person in the world, that there are some people that you will deal with.

This is a real experience in the world that you will think have transformed because they find themselves in a position that they can't wriggle their way out of.

But they have not transformed.

Their hearts are hard.

That's just important to know.

I didn't know that for a while as an adult.

And then I'd learned it.

He sees it as weakness.

Something that is able to be exploited.

Romans 2, verses 4 through 5, Paul writes, Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance?

Romans 2:4–5

When the respite of the frogs came, Pharaoh should have said, How kind is your Lord?

That when I just came to him, he freed us from this plague.

The kindness of the Lord is meant to lead to repentance.

In verse 5, but because of your hard and impenitent heart, you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God's righteous judgment will be revealed.

Right now, the land of Egypt stinks with frogs.

Later, the land of Egypt will stink with firstborn sons who will be dead throughout the land of Egypt.

Pharaoh, in his unrepentance at the kindness of the Lord, is storing up a greater wrath for himself than he can imagine right now.

Let the kindness of the Lord draw you to him, not harden you from him.

Moses said that he would pray this so that the Lord.

This is shown plainly.

As the false gods of Egypt are unmasked, and as Pharaoh's power is unmasked before the Lord our God.

The mercy and the kindness of the Lord.

There's none like the Lord our God and in his mercy and kindness either.

Because his mercy and kindness is ultimately shown towards us in that his firstborn son will be sacrificed on behalf of us sinners, the ones who had rebelled against him, so that in the death of Christ we might know the depth of his kindness and forbearance and patience towards us.

So that we might know that he is the true rescuer, the true Lord.

And in his resurrection we might know that the one who went to the very bottom, into death itself, is the one who rules and reigns now with all authority in heaven and on earth.

So we come to him, seeing his kindness and forbearance, and we repent of our rebellion against him and trust in his steadfast love towards us.

Are there any questions today?

Like what kind of frogs or poison dart frogs?

Yeah, poisoned dart frogs.

They were very colorful and dangerous.

For I received from the Lord, Paul writes, what I also delivered to you.

Oh.

Why does God not interact with the physical world in the same way anymore?

Have a Christian leader bring plagues to bring about change.

Well, the sermon's not done.

This is an extraordinary event.

But as we looked at last week, the purpose of the extraordinary events in Scripture are to show us what is happening ordinarily, to rip the scales off of our eyes so that we are able to see the plainness in which the Lord is always working.

When Jesus multiplies the loaves and the fishes, we are to discern that it is always Jesus who has provided all the food.

He is the one who has provided for us.

When Jesus heals the man with the withered hand, we are meant to conclude it is all healing has only come from him.

And so we're meant to stand back and look at a world and say, He is the one who holds all things together.

He is the one who is always performing these things.

Now, God's word is sufficient to cause us to understand how the truth of how he is operating and acting in the world.

And the plagues as a revelation of God are sufficient in the same way, but I want you to notice, it seems like if I gathered a crowd and was like, hey, you know, we need to not celebrate sexual deviancy as a culture.

Because look at all the geese or something.

Something that attacked our God, or even if it were attuned in that same way, well, that was not effective to soften Pharaoh's heart.

The point is that if the if the word doesn't do it, all the plagues in the world wouldn't do it.

We looked at last week how Paul explains that the wrath of God is revealed.

And these plagues are like those miracles of Jesus, but sort of like the like an in the opposite direction.

They show how ordinarily the wrath of God is revealed in the world.

The wrath of God is ordinarily revealed in the world because he gives us up to our own sin.

Is how it's shown.

And so if you have eyes to see, you see that the Lord is driving all of this.

That fits precisely in the way that he describes to us.

I can see it clearly in this sort of extraordinary scale in the Exodus, but what the Exodus teaches me to see, I can see everywhere.

And do you have the story of the Exodus?

That's enough.

I hope that sort of answers your question and sort of stirs your imagination a bit.

In 1 Corinthians 11, 23, Paul writes, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you.

That the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread.

And when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

Lord Jesus Christ took the bread and broke it and said, This is my body which is broken for you.

And he took the cup and he said, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

There is no higher demonstration of his mercy and patience and kindness.

Come to him who bore the wrath of God on your behalf, so that you might be saved from the wrath of God that is to come.

Let's take this freely and celebrate this morning the wonder that He has saved us.

He is like no other.

No one is higher, no one has gone lower, that we might be saved.

He is worthy of all glory and honor and praise.

We invite all of you who have been baptized and who confess Christ as Lord to come to the table this morning and partake with us.

Holy Father, I pray that you would bless this time of communion.

Lord, that we would have our imagination spurred to see how your wrath is revealed and how your mercy and grace are extended.

And Lord, that we might consider the wonder that you would give your son, that we might be saved.

Lord, let our hearts not be hardened to your kindness and patience.

We lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.