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Returning to the Book of Exodus,
chapter 9. We'll start reading towards the
end of the chapter. It's verse 27. And we'll read
into chapter 10 only as far as verse 2. Book of Exodus, chapter 9, verse
27. And Pharaoh sent and called for
Moses and Aaron, and said unto them, I have sinned this time. The Lord is righteous, and I
and my people are wicked. Entreat the Lord, for it is enough
that there be no more mighty thunderings and hail, and I will
let you go, and ye shall stay no longer. And Moses said unto
him, As soon as I am gone out of the city, I will spread abroad
my hands unto the Lord. And the thunder shall cease,
neither shall there be any more hail, that thou mayest know how
that the earth is the Lord's. But as for thee and thy servants,
I know that ye will not yet fear the Lord God. And the flax and
the barley was smitten, for the barley was in the ear, and the
flax was bold. But the wheat and the rye were
not smitten, for they were not grown up. And Moses went out
of the city from Pharaoh, and spread abroad his hands unto
the LORD, and the thunders and hail ceased, and the rain was
not poured upon the earth. And when Pharaoh saw that the
rain, and the hail, and the thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more,
and hardened his heart, he and his servants. And the heart of
Pharaoh was hardened, neither would he let the children of
Israel go, as the LORD had spoken by Moses. 10 And the LORD said
unto Moses, Go in unto Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart,
and the heart of his servants, that I might show my signs before
him. 11 And that thou mayest tell
in the ears of thy son, and of thy son's son, what things I
have wrought in Egypt, and my signs which I have done among
them. that ye may know that I am the Lord. Amen. So what we have essentially here
is, as my title will be, Jehovah versus the Gods of Egypt. And whenever we look over the
plagues and we see the various plagues coming in, for example,
lice and locusts and frogs and flies and fire, We need to ask,
well what governed God's choice of the particular plagues that
he sent upon the land of Egypt? Why did he send lice at the time
he did, and locusts, and frogs, or flies, or even fire? And why
at the end of it all did he smite the firstborn? Was God just determining
whatever will inflict the most pain, and misery, and damage,
and suffering? Then that's what I'll do. Was
it a kind of a will-o'-wisp shot-in-the-dark, bow-drawn adventure kind of thing? Or was all of this a carefully
calculated, meticulously planned operation by the Lord our God? Well, I'm sure we can all agree
it was certainly the last suggestion. Because God makes no mistakes.
He takes no rash decisions. He doesn't launch out upon some
hastily conceived plan. Every one, therefore, of the
plagues that cascaded down in the land of Egypt was a part
of God's carefully executed plan. In Exodus chapter 20, the verse
3 through 6, the Lord gave his people his law. And he wrote
that law in Exodus 20 on stone. It had already, of course, been
written on their hearts. But that law said, thou shalt
have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee
any graven image. Thou shalt not bow down thyself
unto them, nor serve them. And from the time that God gave
us law in this respect, no other gods before me, he kept reminding
us people because we're so forgetful and so were they, and he kept
prompting them, remember? you shall have no other gods
before me and right through into Isaiah and beyond for example
Isaiah 46 and 9 the Lord is saying there is one God there is one
only and his name is Jehovah now back in the land of Egypt
we have Pharaoh and he's a stubborn king and he's great difficulty
with that and when Moses and Aaron come up to Pharaoh's front
door if we want to put it like that and told him that Jehovah
the Lord of the whole earth had demanded that Pharaoh you open
the gates and allow every Hebrew to get out of your land so that
they can worship the Lord Pharaoh banged his foot against the base
of his throne and he cried who is the Lord that I should let
Israel go I know not the Lord neither will I let Israel go
and that's in Exodus 5 and 2 now what essentially he was saying
to Moses was this Who is this God Jehovah that you are bringing
to me? I do not, I refuse to recognise him. Now he says, I
know Ra, the hawk-headed God, I know Asiris, I know Isis, I
know Apis. These are my gods. But who is
this imposter that you are talking about, Jehovah, that I should
bow down to his demands? And Pharaoh was saying very obstinately,
I refuse to hear him. And this idea of the one God
who ruled supreme, who was eternal, transcendent, uncreated, was
alien to a people like the Egyptians. Look around the Egyptian families
of the day, into the households, and you'd have found that they're
worshipping everything from the sun in the sky right down to
the bugs on the ground. And they had around 200 different
gods and goddesses that they were prostrating themselves before.
It was actually a very highly complex and highly developed
theological system. Of course it was false and pagan
to the core, but they had spent some time in this, but it was
sheer and rampant idolatry. But they couldn't get their mind
onto this wavelength of one God whose name was Jehovah. but Pharaoh
is being sent back by God to theological nursery school here
and God saying I'm going to teach you and all of Egypt with you
the ABC of true theology so that you will find out the answer
to your question who is the Lord and you'll be left in no doubt
when I am finished with this land of yours and with you as
a person that there is only one true and living God. So If you can picture God taking
Pharaoh, putting him in this theological nursery class, and
he puts a book in his hand, and he says, Pharaoh, I'm going to
take you through page by page. and that book that he placed
in Pharaoh's hand as he's sitting there in his theological school
learning the ABCs of true divinity that book has a title The Ten
Plagues and by means of these plagues the omnipotent power
of Jehovah on the one side and the embarrassing impotence of
all the gods and the goddesses of Egypt on the other side are
made known to Pharaoh and they were pretty gripping and dramatic
lessons A lot of people ask, did the plagues really happen?
I think we can move right over that. Some say they were purely
fanciful, others say they were just natural occurrences. You
can explain them away by events that would have happened ordinarily
anyway. Frogs, lice, flies, murine boils, they happened all the
time. There was nothing unusual about what the Bible's recording
as run-of-the-mill kind of stuff. But the Bible doesn't present
them like that. The Bible presents them as separate
and distinct acts of God. And although it's true that plagues
and infestations did happen in Egypt regularly throughout their
history, the plagues that we have described in the book of
Exodus are far from natural events. And if somebody were to push
you and say, well, how do you discriminate between the ordinary
run-of-the-mill plague and what the Bible talks about? Well,
you could give them six reasons. We'll only fly through them here.
They're greatly intensified. They're on a scale that they've
not ever seen before. The time that the plague would
begin is predicted. And they couldn't have done that
before. And also God was telling through Moses, Pharaoh, He was
telling them when the plague was going to end each time. And
they couldn't do that before. Some of the plagues, as we get
into them, they only affected the Egyptians. And the Israelites,
the Hebrews were shielded from them. That is not natural. Pharaoh
and the Egyptians themselves became convinced, and they were
slow learners as we can see here in the passages, but they became
convinced this was out of the ordinary. Because his soothsayers
and magicians came knocking on Pharaoh's door and more or less
said to him, Pharaoh you need to wise up. And the words he
used was this, this is the finger of God. It's Jehovah at work,
we haven't seen this before. We can't rationalize it, explain
it away, or say it's something that we know about through our
own gods and goddesses. This is Jehovah. And then another
reason, and the fifth reason, is why they were miraculous.
There's a gradual severity to the plagues. They build up in
their seriousness, right up till we reach the awesome pitch of
the death of the firstborn. And then, a sixth reason, Behind
every plague there is a moral purpose. God was teaching a lesson. So why did God send the plagues? For two main reasons. He sent
these ten plagues to demonstrate who God is. His people needed
to know again, needed to be reminded, needed to be prompted. Those
Israelites needed to be told again and they needed to be shown
the God whom you serve or are meant to be serving. He is all-powerful. They'd been enslaved for 400
years. They were living as an oppressed minority within the
greatest and most sophisticated multiple God culture of their
day in the land of Egypt and they needed to see their God
rise up tall and strong above the level of all of those goddesses
and gods of Egypt around them and they needed God to show how
great he really was, what he was capable of doing and that's
exactly what God tells him here in the Bible reading tonight
in Exodus 10 and 2 that thou mayest tell in the ears of thy
son and of thy son's son what things I have wrought in Egypt
and my signs which I have done among them, that ye may know,"
here's why they came, "...that ye may know how that I am the
Lord." And as the people of God, oftentimes we lose sight of God,
we lose sight of His power, we forget what He's capable of doing.
And we need to be prompted and reminded. And so, God is demonstrating
through the plagues who He is. First of all to His own people,
the Israelites, and then again to the Egyptians. I find a very
interesting quotation over in Romans 9 and 17 when God is telling
us there in the New Testament why he sent the plagues into
Egypt and he said he did it to show his power and that his name
might be declared throughout all the earth in other words
I let Egypt know but those Egyptians in fear will tell others too
And there was a fear, and we will find it as we read through,
and we're not doing it of course tonight, but as you read through
Israel's journey in through the wilderness, right into the land
of Canaan, there was a fear of God that came upon the Canaanites,
all the tribes, the Hittites, the Jebusites, everybody in the
land, and that was because they had heard what God had done in
Egypt. So he's showing to the Israelites,
to the Egyptians, to the whole earth, demonstrating who he is.
And the second reason he sent the plagues was to devastate
the gods of Egypt. So what we have in 10 plagues,
if we can picture a boxing match, we have God going 10 rounds with
the gods and the goddesses of Egypt. and he brings the boxing
ring right into the middle of the land of Egypt into the territory
that was supposedly governed by all of those little gods and
goddesses of Egypt. He takes it right into their
own backyard and he devastates the gods of Egypt. He was targeting
them with judgment and we were not just imagining that because
in Exodus 12 and 12 we read against all the gods of Egypt I will
execute judgment. I am the Lord. They're going
down but the Lord Jehovah will stand upright. We'll work very
quickly through the plagues here. Plague number one for example
we have in Exodus 7, 14-25 we know how the Nile water, that
river, was turned into blood. The Nile was essential for life
in Egypt. It was a vast desert country. The water was a source
of life to the people. They not only got drinking water
out of the Nile, they got fish from the Nile as well. And those
Egyptians, with the Nile being so vital a supply line for them,
they believed that several gods and goddesses guarded the Nile
River. There was a god called Qunun,
originally a water god. He was the guardian of the source
of the Nile. Sometimes Qanum was shown on
temple jars and you've probably seen it in Egyptian reliefs and
he's holding a jar and the precious fluid, the water, is pouring
out of the jar. That's the god Qanum that they
felt is defending the source of our life, the water of the
Nile. Then we had a god called Hapai
in Egypt. He was the spirit of the Nile
and its divine essence. And then there was Osiris, a
famous Egyptian god, the god of fertility, the god of the
underworld, and it was said by the Egyptians, Osiris had the
waters of the Nile as his very bloodstream. Now whenever Moses
got Aaron to lift up his rod and turn the water into blood,
it must have been very nice for Osiris to get good blood in his
veins for the first time if the water of the Nile was meant to
be his bloodstream. And if he was Osiris, the god
of fertility, as he claimed, who had the force to produce
corn, make trees grow out of the earth, how ironic that the
first plague from the hand of Jehovah turned the Nile water
into blood, bringing death, not life. And other gods that were
caring for the Nile, because they had a whole pantheon of
gods that were guarding this Nile river so vital it was to
them, you had Enuchet, That was a goddess distinctive because
she wore a feathered headdress whenever she's depicted and drawn
by them. She was associated with the Nile
cataracts, especially the Aswan, and we know the Aswan Dam. Then
you had Hatmehet, who was a fish goddess, worshipped right up
at the delta of the Nile. And that name of Hamuhet means
she who was in front of the fishes. But if you think of that, she
who was in front of the fishes. She showed no power over the
fish. no pre-eminence among the fish whenever the hand of Jehovah
struck that river because we read in Exodus 7 21 and the fish
that was in the river died and the river stank and the Egyptians
could not drink of the water of the river and there was blood
throughout all the land of Egypt so when God turns this Nile water
into blood he's clearly showing the Pharaoh the total inability
of his gods and goddesses to guard that river and in a stunning
reversal he turns that very source of life for the country into
a supply of death. Plague 2. We've got frogs. Exodus 8 verse 1 through 15.
Another warning sent, if you don't obey the whole country
will be overrun with frogs and the frogs were everywhere in
the fields, in the homes, in the ovens, in the bedrooms, even
in the palace we're told. On this occasion, Pharaoh asks
Moses and Aaron, remove the frogs. And he promises that if you do,
I'll let the people go. But of course, once the crisis,
albeit so the promise, blows in the wind as well, it's much
like the promises of people who say, Lord, if you get me out
of this situation, I'll be in church every Sunday. But as soon
as the trouble blows over, then the promise is forgotten. Osiris,
one of their major deities, who have mentioned that god already,
he had a frog face. They had their special frog goddess
named Hecate. She had the body of a woman,
the head of a frog, and she was meant to be the goddess of creation,
of birth, of the germination of corn. And here Jehovah showed
up, Osiris is powerless, Hecate is powerless, when I'm sending
swarms of frogs uncontrollably over the land of Egypt. Plague
3, Lice. Exodus 8, verse 16 through 19. And we find that Moses stretches
out his staff, he struck it off the dust of the ground, and the
dust was transformed into lice that crawled all over Egypt.
And so you'd laugh, and you'd naps, and you'd fleas, and they
were everywhere. Now we should stop and consider
that this third play came without warning. The first two, there
was a warning given. But here God is showing, I don't
have to announce my judgment. ahead of time they can simply
fall upon you without warning at all and this is the first
plague as well that the magicians of Egypt because they were coming
along and they were saying this is nothing don't worry about
it we can do the same and they were doing the same but this
is the first plague the third plague that they could not duplicate
and what it underlines is the power of the devil is vast but
the power of the devil is limited he can only go so far and this
particular plague of lice targeted the Egyptian god Geb who was
the god of the earth and you'll see him in pictures of the gods
of Egypt as a green-skinned man with leaves all over his body
and you'll really pick him out because he has a goose on his
head. Sometimes he's lying on his side underneath his wife
who's the sky goddess Nut But Geb was credited with the health
and the planting in the annual crop return in the land of Egypt. But here, with the plague of
lice, instead of lush crops sprouting up out of the earth, thick swarms
of disease-carrying insects rose out of the dust to torment the
people. Plague 4, we come to flies. And we're in Exodus 8,
20-32. The Hebrew word for flies literally
means mixture. Probably means there's a vast
array of insects involved in this plague. Mosquitoes, dragonflies
probably, bees, wasps and more including beetles and we'll know
how the scarab beetle that was sacred to the Egyptians and the
tombs of the pharaohs and the pyramids are littered with these
scarab beetles are representations of these beetles. But this time
there's no place you can go to escape the flies outside in the
homes everywhere except one place where God's people were in the
land of Goshen the Israelites living there for the first time
plague 4 God makes a distinction between the Egyptians and the
Hebrews and from this moment on all of the other plagues from
plague 4 on happened only to the Egyptians and the Hebrews
were spared each and every time Now it was a miracle that the
insects came first on command, but just as much a miracle, even
more so of a miracle, that they did not go into the land of Goshen. When the flies came in, the Egyptians
had an earth god named Acre. Apparently they were told a prayer
to Acre will cure a snake bite, but he was also the god to turn
to if you accidentally swallowed a fly. So they had a god for
everything, this was Acre. They must have been turning to
him rather rapidly and regularly with a plague of flies about
and them being everywhere, people swallowing flies every second
they were breathing. So this god would have been overworked
on that day. They also worshipped Nechabit
who was the guardian goddess of Upper Egypt, looked after
children, mothers in particular, but Nechabit would have been
shown hovering over Pharaoh in vulture form. So it was pictured
here as a vulture holding above all things a fly whisk and a
seal. And she protected and she suckled
the royal children. And I can only imagine that that
arm must have been worn out at the end of this day as she was
whisking away any flies that came near her. God again is showing
you're not in control. I am. Your efforts are puerile
and foolish. In plague number 5, Exodus 9,
1-7 we have the death of the livestock, we have ureum. Scholars
believe it could have been an anthrax outbreak, but whatever
its nature, the plague was highly contagious and deadly and all
of the Egyptian livestock was affected. Livestock with the
Egyptians would have been very important, gave food, labour,
transportation as Exodus 47, 6 and 17 would underline, and
so the economic devastation brought about by this fifth plague, the
death of the livestock, must have been enormous. But that
happened right under the noses of the Egyptian gods and goddesses.
How could livestock be wiped out? If they were protected,
as we'd have been told they were, in the south of the country by
the Egyptian god Hathorne, who had a cow head, who was referred
to as the heavenly cow, and if they were protected up in the
north by Bat, who was the cow goddess of Upper Egypt, how could
they perish if they were all being looked after by that famous
Egyptian cow god called Apis, who was a symbol of fertility
with a special eye upon the cattle? Egypt had other cow goddesses,
and surely they could have been expected to do something. Hezat,
for example, was a cow goddess who gave birth to the king in
the form of a golden calf. We had another odd-sounding goddess,
Mehet-Weret, who was the cow goddess of the sky that God was
saying, Come on, do your best. What can you do? Hathor, Hesod,
Mehadwerod, Bacchus, Aphus, you're all false gods and goddesses
and to expose the utter absurdity of worshipping beasts. Plague
6 was boils, we read about it in Exodus 9 verse 8 through 12
and here we're told that Moses and Aaron, and I find this so
significant, they're told to take handfuls of ashes out of
a furnace and toss that handful or handfuls of ashes up into
the air. The result is going to be a devastating
plague of boils or ulcers on the men and on the animals of
Egypt. It was a violepless skin condition. painful and repulsive
but think of it take handfuls of ashes out of the furnace the
furnace was one of the places where the bricks were heated
therefore it was a symbol of the bondage of the Israelites
for 400 years they'd been at these furnaces slaving in these
furnaces probably some of them had died at these furnaces I'm
sure many of them had and it's surely significant that God caused
this plague to spawn out of the very place that symbolised the
bondage and the burden that had been borne by his people and
this plague was so devastatingly painful that we find even the
Egyptian magicians or the priests as they were couldn't stand up
before Moses. This is the one plague, the boils
coming out of the furnace that we are specifically told it affected
the priests in Egypt Exodus 9 verse 11 and the magicians could not
stand before Moses because of the boils for the boil was upon
the magicians and upon all the Egyptians now to be an Egyptian
priest you have to be without physical defect you have to bathe
and be dressed in white Egyptian linen and a priest that would
have been covered with repulsive running sores as he now would
have been with his outbreak of boils could not stand and serve
the gods. So God's taking the whole line
of gods and goddesses out and their closest worshippers and
dispensers of their so-called benefits, the priests, out as
well. Now there was a goddess here,
Sekhmet, known as the Lady of Life She was believed to have
power of both creating epidemics and ending epidemics and she
has proven to be impotent as this plague rages on affecting
even her own group of specialized medical priests called the Sun
Yu. The boys took them all out. Plague
7, Exodus 9, 13-35 we have thunder, hail and fire. Now we know, and you'll know
better than I do, the kind of damage that hail storms can cause
in this part of the world. But it's nothing compared to
this hail storm in Egypt. This plague of hail, combined
with thunder and with fire, destroys what's left of the Egyptian economy.
It breaks the crops, it burns the fields as lightning is racing
along the ground, Exodus 9.25, and it should be noted, this
time, God in mercy delivers a warning to the Egyptians take cover Exodus
9 18 to 21 and the fact that some did take cover when they
got that warning indicates there were those in Egypt who at this
stage were now coming to fear the Lord they were convinced
by his word they'd seen it displayed they were becoming convinced
our own gods cannot protect us they were convinced of his power
maybe even becoming grateful for his grace, and they took
their livestock and their families and they sought cover. Now in
sending this seventh plague of heel and thunder and fire to
wipe out the Egyptians' crops, Jehovah is once again showing
how several gods and goddesses worshipped by the Egyptians were
not able to do what they said they could do. control the storms
in the sky and prevent crop failure. In particular you had the sky
goddess Nut who brought blessing from the sun to the crops, didn't
do it here. Then we have Set, and Set was
the god of storms and Set couldn't do a thing here, couldn't control
this storm of thunder, hail and fire. Plague 8, we're in Exodus
10 verse 1 through 20, we're thinking of the plague of locusts.
They were the scourge of the ancient world, as the book of
Joel chapter 1 would underline. A devastating brought about by
locusts for me, because we're not afflicted by them in Northern
Ireland, is very hard to imagine. But I'm told that one square
mile of a swarm could contain 100 million to 200 million locusts,
and they can cover maybe 400 square miles, 800 trillion locusts,
each locust eating its own body weight daily, stripping a country
bare, leaving millions of people in famine without food for years
and Pharaoh by this stage must have been seized with terror
and despair and his officials hardly exaggerate because they
look around and at this plague of locusts they say in Exodus
10 and 7 the land is destroyed that's the word they use, it's
completely ruined Exodus 10 and 7 and again The Egyptian gods
are just bystanders, as the power of the hand of the Lord is revealed.
So much for Min, who was, among other things, the god of crops.
The first sheaf of wheat was offered by Pharaoh to Min each
year at harvest time. So much for Osiris, already mentioned,
the god of crop fertility. So much for Neper, who was the
god of grain. None of these could do anything.
second last plague is plague nine. Exodus 10 verse 21 to 29
it's that of darkness and for three days through this darkness
the people could see nothing and no one and yet the contrast
will draw it again while it was completely dark in all the land
of Egypt in the land of Goshen where God's people were living
it was all light and that's how it is when a child of God is
redeemed and his eyes are opened by God's grace He is brought
out of darkness into God's marvellous light. But this plague of darkness
strikes at the very heart of Egyptian worship because it humbled
the greatest of the Egyptian gods. We haven't yet mentioned
him right through the plagues. We mentioned him at the beginning.
But he's the god Ra. He's the sun god. Hold on a minute. The sun is out here. It's obscured. It's total darkness. Where is
the greatest God they have? Whenever God sends in the plague
of darkness, Ra is looked upon as their greatest treasure, bringing
light and bringing warmth to their land, regulating the days
and the seasons. His faithfulness, they believe,
was never failing. But not anymore. And what of
it occurs? The Egyptians believed that Acre
guarded the gates of dawn and sunset, through which the sun
rose and set each morning and evening. How was Jehovah able
to command the darkness if this was the very realm as well that
was controlled, the realm of darkness, controlled by the Egyptian
deities Kek and Kokhet? But for three days in Egypt,
Jehovah took them on, as we've said at the beginning, in their
own backyard, at their own game, at the points that they said
they were strongest. He didn't look out their weak
points, he took them head on where they were most virulent
and strong, and he comprehensively defeated them. Plague time, final
one exodus, chapter 11 and chapter 12, the death of the firstborn. But one of the leading goddesses,
Isis, was supposedly protecting children. She was the strongest
deity in the Egyptian pantheon of gods and goddesses but she
was incapable of preventing the death of the firstborn child
in each and every Egyptian home. Nechabit, guardian goddess of
the Upper Egypt, looked after children, looked after mothers,
had a particular interest we're told in the pharaoh because she
protected and suckled the royal children but Nechabit could do
nothing. to shield Pharaoh's house and
protect his firstborn from this plague because in Exodus 12 and
29 we have the words recorded and it came to pass that at midnight
the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt from He
starts off at the strongest point again. The most protected household
in all the land from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne
unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon and all
the firstborn of cattle. So what we have when we bring
the ten plagues together are these showdowns between Jehovah
and the false gods of Egypt. And the message that kept coming
through, plague 1, plague 2, 3, right through to 10, the message
that was announced every time was this, The Lord God Omnipotent
reigneth. On each occasion, these plagues
were trumpeting, as with one unified voice, God is on the
throne. He rules, He reigns, and nobody
else does. and so sitting in that divinity
school that God had built for Pharaoh the Lord was underlining
again and again and we teach by the art of repetition and
God is repeating the lesson to Pharaoh I am the Lord that is
my name and my glory will I not give to another neither my praise
to graven images what we have in Isaiah 42 and 8 what we have
in Matthew 4 and 10 God is saying I alone will be worshipped and
I will hold my honour high and work for my glory we could give
lessons but we don't have time I'll just mention five lessons
just the titles not go into them we learn here the folly of idolatry
the emptiness and futility of following false gods. They only
provoke God to anger, it's a road to disaster, it separates from
true blessing. We see as well not only the folly
of idolatry, we see in all of this the foulness of sin. How
amazing is it that Pharaoh, when God was working so powerfully,
hardened his heart all the more. It chose the folly of sin, its
deep-seated nature. Some people believe these plagues
went on for eight weeks, others say they went on for the best
part of a year, from June through to the next April. And so Pharaoh
was being hammered by God again and again and again and refuses
to give in. How did he, or how does anyone
become so hardened? And this word hardened is an
agricultural term, it means a really heavy yoke. lay it on top of
an ox, brings out the rebellious nature of that ox when that terribly,
inordinately heavy yoke is put upon him. And Furrow's saying,
I'm accountable to nobody. Then he rationalises his behaviour
and he says, well, these plagues are just simple tricks, my magicians
can do the same. Then he justifies his behaviour
and he says, I can't let Israel go, we just can't let, nobody
can allow their workforce to just walk off site they're not
going and then he's swallowed up with pride because he starts
to negotiate to try and see a face but he's still not willing to
repent how deep and how dreadful sin is we learn as well thirdly
about the firmness of God the unacceptable nature indeed of
negotiating with God God does not allow us to negotiate with
him and Pharaoh was looking for all these ways for example when
the flies come in he suggests well yes Israel can go and make
a sacrifice but you need to stay in Egypt you can't go outside
the boundaries of the land and then in Exodus 10 verse 11 after
the heel storm right before the locusts he says I'll just let
the men go but the woman and the children can't go so he's
softening a bit and trying to negotiate then in Exodus 10 and
24 he says well the people can all go men women and children
but the flocks and the herds have to stay behind so he's negotiating
from a lower level but he found God will not negotiate I will
tell you this little cartoon that I got in my emails on one
occasion. It featured a highly opinionated
little girl. And you get those in life. And
she was debating with her friend. And the friend said, my mum says,
if God gives you lemons, make lemonade. The girl says, really? Well I say, and this opinionated
girl had her taken at well if God gives you lemons whine on
and whine on and on about it until he finally realizes the
injustice and caves in just for some peace and quiet the friend
answers back hmm God doesn't cave in Agnes and that's what
Pharaoh was trying to do trying to negotiate with God see if
he could get him to cave in and he discovered as we discover
there is firmness about God he does not cave in we cannot negotiate
with him and we see fourthly the fury of God because the plagues
falling upon Egypt again and again they bring in the thought
clearly of divine judgment we can't sin and get away with it
the penalty for sin must be borne either by us or borne for us
by Christ and In the book of Revelation, we see a startling
parallel to the plagues in Egypt. In Revelation 11, 3-6, God sends
two witnesses to work miracles before his enemies, just like
Moses and Aaron. In Revelation 13, 13-15, their
enemies of the two witnesses will perform counterfeit miracles,
just like for a time. the priests and wizards in Egypt
did. In Revelation 7 and 4, Revelation
12 and 6, Revelation 12 and 14 and 16, God will protect his
own people from the judgment as he did with the Hebrews. In
Revelation 8 and 8, water will be turned into blood. In Revelation
16 and 13, satanic frogs will appear. In Revelation 9, 2 to
11, a plague of locusts will be sent, all sounding very familiar. In Revelation 16 and 2, ugly
and painful sores will break out upon the people. In Revelation
8 and 7, terrible hailstones and fire mixed with blood will
descend from heaven. In Revelation 16 and 10, there
will be awful darkness. In Revelation 9, verse 20 and
21, the hearts of the people will be hardened. And in Revelation
9.15, death will consume multitudes, one third of the inhabitants
of earth. And so as we read the plagues
of Egypt, let's not just think this is something in the past.
It's something we should pay attention to, because if we resist
God, then we're headed for trouble. But fifthly and finally, we see
the faithfulness of God here. The persistent nature of God's
love. When we read this story, the plagues in Egypt, of these
horrible things God did, we could miss, we could miss one thing
the great lengths to which God is doing and going to which God
is going to set his people Israel free are we not glad that God
is just as persistent in his love as he is in his judgment
and that message is played out again and again in Exodus and
the people go on even being set free from Egypt and they grumble
and they rebel and God could have inflicted a plague upon
his own people but he didn't he continued to show us love
and God has shown faithfulness and love to us I mean what would
have happened to us if he had written us off and wiped us out
the first time we resisted him we'd have been taken out long
ago but in love he continued to call What if He gave us up
the first time we had failed Him after He saved us? But we
have failed Him again and again. And He has continued in love
and in faithfulness towards us. And so with all of these lessons
we can underline this final one as well. The faithfulness of
God. The persistent nature of His
love to His people. That's history.
Jehovah versus the gods of Egypt
| Sermon ID | 112914181361 |
| Duration | 41:52 |
| Date | |
| Category | Prayer Meeting |
| Bible Text | Exodus 9:27 |
| Language | English |
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