Pick up the reading of God's word with Exodus chapter 8. After the first plague upon Egypt, we read these words. 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 to 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 may be cut off from you and your houses and be left only in the Nile. And he said, tomorrow, Moses said, Be 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, 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. Then 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 in all the land of Egypt. And they did. Aaron stretched out his hand with his staff and struck the dust of the earth. And there were gnats on man and beast. All the dust of the earth became gnats in all the land of Egypt. The magicians tried by their secret arts to produce gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on man and beast. Then the magician said to Pharaoh, this is the finger of God. But Pharaoh's heart was hardened and he would not listen to them as the Lord had said. Well now, finally, the action begins to heat up. We've had several chapters of introduction, kind of setting the stage for the battle between Moses and Pharaoh, the gods of Egypt and the god of Israel. And now things start to happen very fast, very furiously. Remember what we had said is the purpose of this whole series of plagues. We looked at it last week. A good summary is in chapter 7, verse 5. As God says, the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them. What's God up to? Well, He's letting His people go, setting them free. But it's more than just setting them free. He's also doing it in such a way that Egypt will know that He is the Lord. And God, in the process, will bring judgment against them. So setting the people free, God glorifying His name, and God judging the Egyptians. And we see that here in these series of ten plagues. They seem to be divided into sets of three. Three sets of three plagues with a final climactic plague. There's some parallels in the structure there. What we're going to do tonight is look at the first three. Lord willing, next week we'll look at four to nine and then look at the tenth plague the week after that. And we'll start as we go through to see some patterns emerging, some themes that come up again and again throughout these plagues. We'll see what God is up to. These aren't just random signs. These aren't just coming up with, well, what's the biggest, flashiest thing? Oh, we'll do that. As if you could do some other big, flashy thing in its place. You know, oh, frogs sounds really neat. Or in its place, well, maybe Moses could have, instead of that, could have made the pyramids disappear or something like that. No, they're not just random tricks that are designed to just be impressive. They have very specific meaning to the Egyptians and to who the Lord is. And we'll see the patterns that emerge. Three particular patterns that seem to come up over and over again. The plagues are, first, a polemic against Egypt and her gods. Secondly, a fitting punishment for their sin. And third, a series of creation reversals. A polemic against Egypt and her gods. Actually, polemic is kind of a, almost a wimpy kind of academic sounding word for it. This is much more powerful than that. Probably if you were to put it in today's language, you would say it's not really a polemic against Egypt and her gods, it's kind of more like a smackdown. That's exactly what God is doing. God is smacking down Egypt and her gods. You see how these are very carefully targeted to take on this people and the gods that they are trusting in and prove that they are weak, powerless, indeed nothing, and the Lord, He is God. We'll see that again and again. Secondly, we'll see that these plagues are a fitting punishment for the sins that Egypt and Pharaoh has committed. They've sinned against the Lord and His people. And so God brings judgment upon them. And the third pattern, which we're going to talk about next week, is that these plagues, almost all of them, are creation reversals, where God seems to be undoing creation, turning the creation of Egypt upside down. And we'll talk more about that and its significance next week. But let's take a look at these first three plagues and see how the patterns begin to emerge. First plague, water turned to blood. Now, it's very hard to underestimate the importance of the Nile to Egypt. If you go back to your high school days and remember world history, you remember that all the ancient civilizations started around rivers. That's what enabled people to settle down into agrarian communities, rivers. Because the rivers provided with their regular source of water and their regular flooding, they provided water for crops, water for people, for animals. The flooding of the rivers provided the depositing of rich soil so that you could grow crops. And here you have the Nile, the greatest of rivers that gives birth to the greatest of ancient civilizations. But of course, we know what sinners always do with good gifts. Instead of thanking the Creator, they worship the creation. And that's exactly what the Egyptians do. The Nile, instead of the Egyptians taking it and thanking God for this great gift, the Egyptians worship the Nile. Here's an ancient hymn. from Egypt. Hail to thee, O Nile, that issues from the earth and comes to keep Egypt alive. The Nile did, and humanly speaking, keep them alive, but their response was to deify it, to worship it. At least three Egyptian gods were worshipped in connection with the river. There was Osiris, the god of the Nile proper. There was Nu, who was the god of the life in the river. And then there was Happy, who was the god of the flood, a fertility god, because it was the flooding of the Nile that deposited the soil, and therefore the image was that Happy was the god who gave life to Egypt and nursed her into strength. And so these were the gods that were worshipped because this is what came from the Nile. And here comes this first plague. and takes on these ideas right directly. Enter Moses, servant of Yahweh, the true God, and it's time for Egypt to be smacked down. And that's exactly what happens. Instead of the Nile giving life to Egypt, now all of a sudden, very quickly, at the Lord's command, the Nile becomes a source of death. The life-giving waters turn to blood, and the result is death. and the gods of Egypt are powerless to stop it. Now it's at this point that Liberal scholars like to like to look at this passage and talk about all the the different possibilities of why this really couldn't be a river turning into blood and they come up with these interesting theories about how there was this Probably this big rainstorm upriver which caused red sediment to get into the river and wash downstream and the very sudden flooding of red sediment into the river looked like blood and the oxygen imbalance caused all the fish to die and and Well, clearly Moses thinks it's blood. So that either makes Moses writing this a liar, because he talks about it as blood, or it makes him pretty stupid that he can't tell the difference between blood and red earth. I would say that neither are the case, and that the Lord who made heaven and earth can actually turn a river to blood. I'll just assume you agree and we can move on. But the real significance here, the real power here, Is again how this miracle goes right strikes right at the heart of Egypt the very source of their life the very thing that gave birth to their civilization and the thing that they trusted in indeed worshipped And here it turns on The God of the Israelites can at his command turn the life-giving Nile into death and the gods of Egypt are powerless to stop the destruction now they're nothing and And the Lord, well, he is God. Also, you can see how this particular plague is a fitting punishment for the crime that the Egyptians had committed, that Pharaoh had committed. Remember back in chapter 1, as Pharaoh is seeking to snuff out this people, seeking to destroy them, what does he use to try to kill the Israelites who are swarming in his mind out of control? He tries to kill the baby boys by throwing them into the Nile. Well, here you have that sin, that horror coming back on Pharaoh. The blood that he shed is now coming back to haunt him. It is God's Giving the just deserts for his sin now at the Lord's command The Nile is turning on Pharaoh. He's confronted with the blood that he himself Shed what he used for death now is bringing death back to his doorstep. So you see what God is doing now poking his finger exactly at Egypt at her gods at her sin and pointing out that the Lord is God and Well, then we get to the frogs. And, well, this is probably one of the most humorous of the plagues. This picture that's given to us of this little army of creatures hopping out of the river in vast numbers and, you know, little heads popping out of ovens and scaring housewives and things like this. It seems funny to us, but of course, if you actually lived through this and you thought about what it would be like to live through this, this wouldn't be funny at all. um this would be quite horrible even just think about the sound of it you've been around and heard the sound of one frog croaking at night imagine what it would sound like hundreds of thousands of frogs all around you all croaking at the same time even that would be horrifying let alone them getting into everything water and food and and just the sanitary issues and the smell that they create as they as they die off particularly a Powerful here is what Moses and God seems to harp on is that they are going to come and touch Pharaoh Now, like most leaders, you know, you don't touch them. That's dishonoring to their status. Even today, you're not supposed to go meet the Queen of England. You're not supposed to touch her as a sign of respect and honor. How much more, the king of Egypt, who was supposed to be a god, he didn't touch Pharaoh. And here, God, at his command, is going to order an army of frogs and they're going to crawl all over Pharaoh. It's a very much in-his-face kind of plague. First of several of the plagues where you get the animal kingdom turning on humanity. And we're going to talk next week about how that's creation turned upside down. But particularly here, one of the things that's powerful is to know that the Egyptians worshipped a god by the name of Hecate. And Hecate was always pictured as a goddess with the head of a frog. The head of a frog. And this frog goddess had two jobs that the Egyptians trusted in her to accomplish. And the two jobs were, one, she was supposed to care for the frogs and control the population. Apparently used crocodiles to control the frog population. So apparently, she doesn't do a very good job here. She's powerless to control when the Lord says frogs will come upon the land. Second thing she was supposed to do is that she was involved in childbirth. She was worshipped. Women in labor used to wear amulets of Hecate with the frog face on as they gave birth because Hecate was supposed to ease pain and childbearing and was supposed to breathe life into the child as it was born. And so you start to see the connection with the sin of Pharaoh, who went after the childbearing of the Israelites. That was his great sin. He was trying to snuff out the people by killing the babies at conception. He went after the childbearing Israelites. And now God goes after the frog goddess, the one who was supposed to watch over childbearing and proves that she's an absolute fraud. She's nothing. That he is the Lord. At His command, the invasion comes. And they don't stop until God says, stop. You can get this very humorous thing that Moses says to Pharaoh. Okay, when do you want them to stop? Tomorrow. Okay, we'll do it tomorrow. And you get the explanation so that you know that the Lord is God. Your gods are nothing. Finally, the gnats. If you have a King James or New King James in front of you, you probably see the word lice. We're really not 100% sure what kind of little creature this was. Was it lice, was it gnats, was it mosquitoes or fleas? Something small, something annoying. I don't know if any of us have really a favorite among those. Probably, if you had to take a guess, probably lice is probably a better option, because it seems to emphasize them crawling on the Egyptians, where gnats just kind of fly about, where lice or perhaps mosquitoes are more on you. Either way, it doesn't sound good. This is the shortest of all the plague narratives, but it does add something very interesting to note, and that's verse 18 and 19. The magicians tried by their secret arts to produce that, but they could not. Verse 19, the magician said to Pharaoh, this is the finger of God. Remember in the first and second plague, the magicians, by their sorcery, by their magic, were able to mimic the plagues. And we talked about last week with the staff turning into snakes. I think this was a real work. I think using demonic power to do that. We're not surprised that there is power that opposes God. Although you even see in what they were able to do, even in these first two plagues, they were able to mimic the plague. You'd think if they had real power, they would stop the plague, right? If they really and truly were servants of Pharaoh with great power, could call upon these great gods who ruled the river and ruled over the frogs and ruled over the creatures of the land, that they could actually reverse and stop the plagues. But they can't. They can just mimic it, just bring a little more. So what power they have is very limited. But we get here to the third plague, and they can't do it at all. They can't do it at all. And in fact, from here on out, we don't really read about the magicians at all trying to mimic it again. They're done. They're out of the picture. And they make the right conclusion, saying to Pharaoh, this is the finger of God. This is bigger than us. There's something real. There's real divine power here. You should submit to it. Of course, Pharaoh doesn't. But they get it. They begin to get it. And that really is it. The power of the Lord being displayed here. It's not even a battle. It's not even fair to call it a fight because the Lord is so overwhelmingly powerful. The resistance is nothing. Easily defeated, the powers of Egypt, their gods, their sorcery, their leader, their people, easily, at the command of the God of Israel, destroyed. And so the Lord is displayed as the true God and Egypt and her power humiliated. exposed and the power of God on display. This whole scene of Yahweh versus the gods of Egypt might remind us of other similar scenes throughout scripture where God, the true God, takes on those who oppose him. You might think, for example, Elijah and Mount Carmel, where there's this great showdown between Elijah representing the Lord and the prophets of Baal and the challenges which God will answer by fire and, of course, from Baal there's nothing, silence. But the Lord displays himself to be the all-powerful one and humiliates those who oppose him. You might think of the great showdown between Jesus and Satan, even there in the wilderness. It seems like a powerful fight, but of course Jesus is faithful to the very end, even against the one who opposes him, even with real power. Of course, the greatest showdown we know in Scripture takes place there at Calvary. At the cross, there is Jesus, opposed by all the powers of the world, political rulers, religious rulers conspired against Him, taken on by the powers of darkness, and at their moment, a seeming moment of victory, it is the Lord who triumphs through the cross. Not only triumphing through that cross and resurrection, but humiliating them, putting them to shame, the Scriptures teach. Christ bringing about the greatest victory at that great battle. So you see, God doesn't mind showdowns. He proves in the midst of those battles that He is the true God. He is the one who is real. Everything else is powerless in comparison. So what do we do? What's our response to this? The response is faith and praise I might think of the the Israelites. How do they respond to this whole series of? Miracles. Well, we'll find them later on chapter 15 Going out of the land of Egypt. They're singing They're singing praise to God. That's the right response That's the right response. A song of praise. They see how big their God is, how real He is, how powerful He is, and they praise Him. And that should be our response. Do you see how big this God is? Praise Him. In song and in your life. See how big He is. That's often where our biggest struggles come in. When we fail to see how big God is. Some of you know Ed Welch's book, When People are Big and God is Small. I love that title because it really captures the heart of our struggle. Ed Welch, counselor and teacher, taking on the issue of the fear of man, our temptation to be afraid of other people, afraid of what they might think, Embarrassed about our when we mess up. We're trying to look good in front of other people trying being obsessed with with impressing people That idea even he even gets in his title that people become big, but that's not it Not just that people are big in our mind, but it's in our minds in those moments that God looks very small Well, that's the problem when it comes, whether it's the fear of man or any other thing we struggle with. God, in practical terms, in our minds, becomes very small to us. So fill in the blanks. It could be any other struggle. When worry is big and God is small. When unpaid bills are big and God is small. When sickness is big and God is small. When bosses are big and God is small. Whatever it might be. So what's the solution? The solution is to look at passages like Exodus 7 and 8 and see just how big this God really is. When he becomes small in our minds, we are out of our minds. We're missing it. What we need to go back to is to go back to these great victories of Scripture. See how great and big this God is, that the powers of this world are nothing before him. And that he uses this power on behalf of his people. to set us free. Because of Christ, He uses that bigness, that power and that glory to shed love upon us and to set us free. This God is big. And so as you go into this week, and other things start slowly to look big, maybe it's worries, maybe it's unpaid bills, whatever it might be, meditate on frogs this week. Meditate on gnats. Think about rivers of blood. Think how big your God is. And keep meditating on it until you see Him as big and everything else as small. And then, well, sing. Sing praise to Him. Let's pray. Father, we ask that you would indeed fill our minds with your power. Lord, with pictures of your greatness and glory, even as we see your great deeds long ago. Lord, your power displayed at the cross and your power continuing to be displayed around us and in us. Father, give us faith. Where where we struggle. Lord, go before us this week, fill our minds with holy thoughts. We might walk in your ways, we pray in Jesus name. Amen. Why don't you go ahead and take your...