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.