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GOD IS KEEPING HIS PROMISES WHILE TOLERATING HYPOCRISY (FOR NOW)Exodus 7:25—8:19INTRODUCTION Have you ever said about someone else, “He (or she) is hard to get to know. He is just not a very open person. He keeps to himself and rarely lets anyone into his life.” I think probably all of us have been in relationships where we would like to get to know a person better but the person we’d like to know isn’t interested in letting us know him. God is not like that. He is eager for people to know him. He is not playing “hard to get.” He is not hiding himself but is constantly revealing himself by his creation and by his word. That is what he has repeatedly said throughout these chapters in Exodus. He is in the process of rescuing his people, the nation Israel, out of their slavery in Egypt so that they will know him, so that the Egyptians will know him and so that Pharaoh will know him. In this morning’s passage, Moses says it once again. If you look at vv.9-10, Moses tells Pharaoh that he can set the time that he wants the frogs to be removed from his land so that he will “know that there is no one like Yahweh.” If we are going to know another person, whether that person is God or another human, we must approach that person with a certain amount of humility. What I mean by that is that we must allow the other person to reveal himself or herself to us. We don’t have the right to tell the other person what she is like; she must disclose to us what she is like. It is the height of arrogance and insincerity when we inform others what they are like and do not permit them to make themselves known to us. We’ve all experienced the discomfort of others presuming things about us. You hear about a group of your friends who went hiking and when you ask why they didn’t invite you they say, “We didn’t think you liked hiking.” They presume to know what you like without asking you to tell them. This often happens with first impressions. When we first meet a person, we presume things about them that after we’ve come to know them, we discover were wrong perceptions. Perhaps a friend suddenly begins avoiding you. When you ask why she tells you that she can’t associate with someone who hates golf like you do. When you ask her where she got that idea she says she overheard you complaining about golf one time. Then you inform her that she didn’t hear the whole conversation and misunderstood what you were saying. You then inform her that you love golf and play 18 holes every Friday morning. If it is wrong to presume to know another person without that person telling us about himself, how much worse is it to presume to know what God is like without permitting him to disclose himself? God wants to be known and he has revealed himself in this book. We are not merely reading fun stories about ancient peoples but we are seeking to discover what God has revealed about himself in and through these stories. The God who is a Trinity, who made the heavens and the earth is the subject of this book. We come together each week to listen to what he has to tell us about himself. We are here because we want to know him and we are open to allowing him to reveal himself to us. We are not here to have our prejudices and preconceptions about God reinforced but to have him show us his glory. I trust that as we examine this continuing story of God’s saving his people out of slavery that we will come to know him better and so worship him, as he alone deserves. One of the primary things we discover about God in this passage is his patience. God bears with rebellious and hypocritical people for long periods of time. He patiently works to reveal himself to sinners. Let’s see how he does this in Exodus 8:1-19. MAIN POINT God, in order to make himself known, deals patiently with sinners by… I. Revealing his will and the consequences of disobeying his will (vv. 1-4) As we have seen, God has a message for Pharaoh. He sends Moses and Moses’ “prophet” Aaron to give Pharaoh this message, “Let my people go, that they may serve me.” This is God’s will for Pharaoh. What Pharaoh must do to obey God is not hard to figure out. God wants him to release Israel from their cruel bondage as slaves and to let them leave his country as a free people. God wants Pharaoh to treat the people of Israel the way he wants to be treated. Pharaoh wouldn’t want to be a slave and so he shouldn’t hold Israel in slavery. He is commanding him to love his neighbor, because “love does no harm to its neighbor” and “those who love their fellow man have fulfilled the law.” What God is asking of Pharaoh is not hard to understand and it is not unreasonable. In God’s command is a revelation of the goodness and the righteousness of God. It is God’s will that people treat other people justly because he is a just God. Injustice is an offense to God. When we do not treat others, as we want to be treated we are sinning against God, against his laws of what is just and right. Notice also, God is telling the king of the nation of Egypt what he ought to do. Kings make laws, yet God tells kings what they ought to do. What is ultimately moral, right, good, and just is not open to discussion and is not man made. God, as our Creator and the Sustainer of all things is the only one who has the right to tell us what is just. Human laws are only good laws in as much as they line up with God’s law. I want to make a side point here. This is the reason that homosexual marriage is wrong. It is not wrong primarily because of the potential harm it may bring to the institution of heterosexual marriage or what it might do to children raised in these homes or to the fabric of our culture. It is wrong because God calls homosexual desire and behavior sin. It is the responsibility of government to “reward those who do good and to punish those who do wrong.” Just governments make sure they do not reward those who do wrong, nor punish those who do right. I am not saying that government must criminalize every sin, even homosexual sin. If it did, then we would all be in jail. However, every just law is a criminalizing of some sin. Just government always supports what is good, in this case heterosexual marriage and opposes what is evil, in this case, homosexual marriage.
This is essentially, how God is dealing with Pharaoh. He makes his law known: it is wrong to hold Israel in slavery. You must let them go. Then he makes the consequence of refusing to obey known. Like every impartial lawgiver, God warns Pharaoh of the consequences of disobeying his just laws. He tells him that if he disobeys his command to release Israel, then God will cause the Nile to teem with frogs. The frogs will come up on the entire land of Egypt. There will be frogs everywhere, even in the most intimate and private of places. Frogs will be in their beds and in their ovens and in their cooking utensils. There will be frogs everywhere.
Why does God threaten Pharaoh with an overabundance of frogs as the punishment due to him for not obeying his command to let Israel go? On one hand my response, if I were Pharaoh, would be to laugh. “Oh no, please, not the frogs!!” There are at least three things we learn about God in this punishment. First, God is again going to bring punishment upon Egypt from the primary source of Egypt’s strength. Egypt’s power as a nation comes from the Nile River. Just as making the water of the Nile river undrinkable by turning it to blood, showed his power over the source of Egypt’s greatness, so his causing the Nile to produce an over abundance of frogs shows his power over it. The fertility of Egypt is due to the fertility of the Nile and by causing the Nile to become overly fertile he demonstrates that he has been the source of the Nile River’s fertility all the time. He is able to make the Nile serve the needs of the Egyptians or he can use it to afflict them. He holds their life in his hands. Second, God is being gracious. He is displaying his power and his justice through a plague that is not ultimately destructive, but simply annoying. He warns of the impending doom that will come upon Egypt if they don’t repent gently and progressively. Pharaoh is sinning against God and deserves the ultimate punishment, hell. Yet, God sends something far less than he deserves in order to warn him. Third, God uses his creation to punish men for their sins. The malfunctioning of creation is a sign of God’s displeasure with human sin. There is a day coming, when Christ returns, when creation will never cause harm to us. God will make a new heavens and a new earth. Until that day, God uses this faulty creation as his chastisement upon humanity’s sin. (This is what Genesis 3:14-24 and Romans 8:18-25 say.)
Most of these miraculous plagues God brings upon Egypt are simply creation run amok. We can learn the same things when we see creation gone awry. Most of you have heard our horror stories of the earwig infestation we experience every summer at our home. We hates them, the nasties. The overabundance of earwigs is a plague from God. God is showing us his power over creation. Creation usually serves us but the earwigs are a reminder that he is in charge of how creation will work. Second, the earwigs remind us of his grace in that earwigs climbing in the window are not as bad as being dead and in hell and so the “suffering” of the earwigs serve as a warning to repent of our sins and trust in Christ before it is too late. Finally the earwigs are a portion of his just punishment, his curse upon the world due to human sin. Whenever we witness “natural” calamities we are to remember God’s just laws, his just punishment against lawbreakers and his graciously giving such slight misfortunes rather than what we really deserve as a warning.
God is a just judge who has given us just laws and he threatens us with dreadful and just consequences for breaking his laws. He is not unreasonable or unclear. He patiently reminds us, through his word of his laws and he patiently teaches us of the consequences that will come upon all lawbreakers by his word and by the troubles of this creation.
God, in order to make himself known, deals patiently with sinners by…
II. Relieving the deserved distress of sinners (vv. 5-13a)
Verses 5-8 are one of the most comical scenes in the entire Bible. While it isn’t reported in the text, Pharaoh dismisses Moses’ warning and so Moses commands Aaron to stretch out his hand with the staff in it over the waters of Egypt. Aaron does so and immediately the waters swarm with frogs and they come out of the water and cover the entire land of Egypt. There are frogs everywhere. You can’t walk without stepping on them. You pull back the covers to get into bed and there are frogs in your bed. You go to the outhouse to use the bathroom and there are frogs in your seat. You get out the dishes to prepare supper and there are frogs in the bowls. There are slimy, croaking frogs everywhere. There are so many frogs that even Jerry Ploegert couldn’t take it.
Now, notice what happens in v. 7. The magicians of Egypt do the same thing by their magic arts. They make more frogs come up on the land of Egypt. Here is human stupidity at its height. If they were truly powerful, if they truly had access to divine power they would remove the frogs. Instead, they make more frogs come out of the water of the Nile. In the words of the prophets, “they dig a pit and fall into it themselves.” Can’t you just imagine Pharaoh screaming at these guys? “What do you think you are doing? We need to get rid of the frogs, not have more of them. I don’t care if you can make frogs. I need you to kill frogs.” The ability of the magicians to manufacture more frogs does not affect Pharaoh in the same way that their turning water to blood had on him. He doesn’t see their ability to make more frogs as disproving the power of Moses. God enables him to see the deception of the magicians.
We aren’t told how many days of frogs Pharaoh puts up with but eventually the frogs get on his nerves. It appears that he comes to his senses. The pagan king who has insolently said he doesn’t know Yahweh, calls in Moses and says this, “Pray to Yahweh for me and my people, and I will let your people go to offer sacrifices to the Lord.” Finally, Pharaoh recognizes that Yahweh is the true God. He acknowledges that the frogs are Yahweh’s judgment upon he and his people and that he is obligated to obey Yahweh by letting Israel go to serve the Lord. However, we can see, even in Pharaoh’s request that he is not truly sincere. He has not truly embraced his obligation to obey Yahweh. If he were repentant, what would he have said? He would have come to Moses with a signed emancipation proclamation and having ordered his people to let Israel go and having made provision for them to leave. He would have already set their release in motion.
It’s like the cliché goes, “there are no atheists in foxholes.” It is the natural human response to unrelenting misery, when every other option is gone; we finally turn to God for help. It’s an amazing thing to behold. People who have no interest in God, who are completely indifferent are struck by some great disaster and suddenly become religious. However, humans in misery don’t approach God in repentance and faith, as the powerless people we are. Rather, like Pharaoh we begin to barter with God. We treat God like an employer, rather than as a Savior. We come to him and try to arrange a contract with him. We say to him, “If you’ll get me out of this mess, then I’ll go to church every Sunday. I promise, cross my heart and hope to die.” As if we have something to offer to God! Yes Pharaoh admits that Yahweh is the only one who can help him but he also reveals about himself that he is not in love with Yahweh but with getting rid of the frogs. He comes to Moses in order to use him to get what he loves, a hassle free life. He wants his help to escape a problem not because he wants to obey a command. He is not coming because he knows that knowing Yahweh is the best thing that could happen to him and so he needs to forsake his sin and obey Yahweh by releasing Israel if he is going to know him. He comes to him and seeks to manipulate Yahweh into giving him what he loves, freedom from the frogs.
Verses 9-13a are an astonishing evidence of the grace of God and a picture of the grace of Jesus Christ. What Moses says to Pharaoh in v. 9 is literally, “Glorify yourself over me. When shall I pray for you and your officials and your people that you and your houses may be rid of the frogs, except in the Nile River?” If you will remember that in 7:1 God told Moses that he was going to make him God over Pharaoh. So when Moses says, “glorify yourself over me” he was saying that he, as God, was going to take the place of the servant while Pharaoh, the servant, took the place of master. He, who is God to Pharaoh, willingly laid aside his rights as God and by his intercession served Pharaoh, his enemy. Moses cries out to the Lord on behalf of Pharaoh, asking Yahweh to remove the just curse of frogs from Pharaoh, even while Pharaoh continues to cruelly oppress the people of Israel. Moses asks God to be kind to Pharaoh for his, Moses’ sake and for the sake of his people. Neither Moses nor the Lord requires Pharaoh to act first. Rather, without any action on Pharaoh’s part, with a simple request, Moses intercedes and God removes the frogs. Here is Jesus praying for his enemies, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” Here is Jesus interceding before the father right now on behalf of every Christian, asking the Father, for his sake, to overlook our sins and to help us in our need. Here is the gospel of God’s grace as Paul says in Romans 3, “For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
Why does God permit himself to be used in this fashion? If God is making himself known in these events, what are we to learn about him: that he is gullible and naïve and easily manipulated? Not at all! There are several things that we learn about God in his response to Pharaoh’s prayer through Moses. First, we discover that God delights to show mercy. He is eager to display his kindness to people. God displays his grace by submitting to and serving sinners who merely use him to get what they want. We should never think of God as being tight-fisted and unwilling to forgive or to be gracious to people. He delights in showing off his benevolence. He does it, according to Romans 2:4 that “his kindness would lead us to repentance.”
Second , he loves to respond to the prayers of his people on behalf of others. As far as we know, the Lord never told Moses, “If Pharaoh says he’ll let the people go, then I’ll get rid of the frogs.” Moses knows it is his place, as God’s prophet to not only speak to Pharaoh about God but to speak to God about Pharaoh. He is absolutely confident that God will listen to him because of the promises God has made. God responds to the intercession of his people because of his promises to them, not because of who they are. Third, we learn that we cannot be certain of where we stand with God by how the circumstances of our life are going. It is possible to come to God for the wrong reason and have God graciously give you what you are asking for. However, your receiving the deliverance from your misery may not be an evidence of saving grace. It could be that God is simply permitting you to live in your deceived state and he is not going to trouble you. We must examine our motives for coming to Christ. Are we coming because we believe that knowing Jesus and living in fellowship with him forever is the best thing that could happen to us? Or are we coming to him because we want a better marriage, a healthier body, a more fulfilling life or just to escape hell? Finally, we discover that human treachery and unbelief cannot thwart God’s purposes. Hypocrites can’t fool God. Pharaoh doesn’t have the last word. Notice again at the end of v. 15 that when Pharaoh reneges on his promise and hardens his heart, everything is still going according to plan. It is all happening just as the Lord said it would happen. God has reasons for answering the prayers of unbelieving, hypocritical people.
God, in order to make himself known, deals patiently with sinners by…
III. Reminding sinners of who is in charge (vv. 13b-19)
I want you to notice how it is that the Lord ended the plague of frogs. He killed the frogs right where they were. There were so many dead frogs lying around that they piled them up in heaps. In the original, it says there were bushels of bushels of dead frogs piled into these heaps. Then, we are told that the entire land of Egypt reeked of the stench of dying frogs. While Pharaoh hardens his heart and refuses to listen he does so in sight and smell of the dead frogs. He resists God with the stench of death in his nostrils. God could have eliminated the frogs in lots of ways, why did he choose this way? His power, grace and justice are being displayed in these dead frogs in a way that is impossible to miss. There is an ongoing warning in the stench that pervades the land for many days. God’s word and God’s work continues to have its effect, while Pharaoh breaks his word.
Then, when Pharaoh breaks his promise, without any warning given to Pharaoh, Moses commands Aaron to strike the dust of the land. When he does gnats spring up from the ground and cover all the people and cattle of Egypt. These gnats are some form of parasitic insect. They may have been mosquitoes or ticks or lice or blood sucking gnats. We’re not sure exactly what they were except that they were parasitic on warm-blooded animals, including humans. Shockingly, the magicians set out to mimic this plague as well and thankfully for the Egyptians, they don’t succeed. When they are unable to replicate the gnats, they tell Pharaoh, “This is definitely the finger of God.” God permits them to mimic three of the miracles of Moses but now that it no longer suits his purposes he restrains them from being able to do what Moses has done. Therefore, they now know and Pharaoh knows that God has sent these blood-sucking insects upon them as punishment for their refusal to let Israel go as Pharaoh had promised. However, Pharaoh is unmoved by this admission by the spiritual experts in his kingdom and he continues to hold Israel in captivity and to scorn God’s command. God convincingly demonstrates that he is not only Lord over the river but he is also Lord over the land. Just as he can command water to produce frogs, so can he command dirt to produce gnats. As Calvin says, “…all creatures are ready at God’s lightest command, whenever he chooses to make use of them to chastise his enemies…”
Pharaoh does not ask for mercy in this case and none is given. In other words, the plague of gnats continues in Egypt at least until Israel leaves. Again, we see that God has placed reminders in Egypt that he is still at work. He is not done yet with them. He is in charge of what is happening, not Pharaoh. He may think that he is in control because the frogs are gone and Israel is still in captivity but God has, through the stinking frogs, the plague of gnats and the admission of the magicians given overwhelming evidence that he is in charge and will not be thwarted. We see in the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart in spite of the confession of his magicians that the reason he resists is not because of reason but because of what his heart loves. Thus it is with sinners who refuse to believe what is blazing before their eyes. Men love sin and therefore cannot love God even though God displays his glory before them in such unmistakable ways. Though people give reasons for not obeying God, the reason they don’t obey is not because of lack of evidence but because they love evil and hate good.
I think of a friend, many years ago, who told me that he was going to move in with his girlfriend. I told him that was sin and displeased God. I told him that he was going to bring misery upon himself by doing this. He moved in with her. About six months later she didn’t come home one night and he woke up in the morning to the sound of a motorcycle. He looked out the window to see his “girlfriend” getting off the back of the cycle and giving the guy driving it a long kiss. He was crushed. He lost 30 pounds in a month because he couldn’t eat. During that time he was very willing to listen to the gospel and even began to express interest in Christ. But soon the emotional anguish passed. He found another girlfriend, a great job and got married. He is living the American dream now with a family and a beautiful home and money to spend and no interest in Christ. God relieved his misery and he forgot God. This is in spite of a firsthand experience with the judgment of God and living in the midst of a world that is under God’s judgment, that is full of reminders of God’s threats and warnings.
We live in a world that is pervaded with the stench of death and is obviously under divine curse. Around the earth, people are crying out to God for relief from their misery and God is granting relief and sending help. Yet, humans continue to refuse to respond to God’s grace. We escape our trouble and we go right on sinning. We don’t really change. Yet, we are surrounded on every side by the evidences of God’s displeasure with sin. People are dying all around us. Creation is groaning in decay, all around us. When will we wake up and understand the threats and warnings that God has placed in this creation? When will we take serious that God is serious that we turn from sin and trust in him? All of creation screams out God’s grace and God’s judgment. Don’t harden your hearts like Pharaoh, listen and turn from your sins and flee to Christ.
God, in order to make himself known, deals patiently with sinners by…
Over the past several weeks as we’ve been studying the story of God’s delivering Israel out of their slavery in Egypt we have seen that his ultimate goal is not saving Israel. He is using the process of saving Israel to accomplish his ultimate purpose. He has stated his ultimate purpose in 6:7, that Israel would know that he is Yahweh, in 7:5, that the Egyptians would know that he is the only true and living God and now again in 7:17, that Pharaoh will know that he is the Creator and Sustainer of all things. This is the ultimate reason God does all that he does: to make known, to reveal the greatness, the glory of his own name. He is out to display the splendor of his majesty throughout the entire universe and he is saving Israel from slavery to do so. No human in the story up to this point has had any interest in knowing God. Every person, including Moses, has been interested in something else besides knowing Yahweh. Pharaoh and the Egyptians are interested in maintaining Israel in slavery so that they can enjoy the benefits of their free labor and avoid the negative consequences of their becoming a powerful enemy. The people of Israel are only interested in not being slaves anymore. Moses is only interested in success. He is tired of looking like a fool and having his reputation besmirched. He wants action from God to fulfill his word. His goal is not to know God. It’s hard to blame any of these people for not being interested in God’s ambition to be known. All of them have plenty of pain and plenty to fear to keep them occupied. When you’re a slave it just doesn’t seem very good news to be told that God is at work so you can know him. When you’re terrified that your slaves are going to rebel and murder you and your family in the night, being told that God is working to make himself known is not comforting. When you’re a prophet and nobody will listen to you it’s not encouraging to be told God is working to reveal himself. As human beings, we are just not interested in knowing God as a first priority because it just doesn’t seem very practical. This is especially true when we are in pain or afraid or angry or sad. When you’ve just found out that your newborn child has a profound birth defect, it’s just not very helpful to be told that God is working to make himself known. When your spouse does not show affection to you or respect you, you’re not very interested in the fact that God is at work in the world to display his glory. When you can’t pay the bills, it’s not very practical to learn that God has as his goal that you would know him. Regardless of what you and I think about the nature of the world we live in and what we think is important, the God who made the world and is working right now to sustain it believes that the most important thing in the universe is that he be known. Everything that is going on in the world and in your life is happening for this ultimate purpose, no matter how unreasonable or irrelevant it seems to you. This is what we are seeing in the story of Israel’s salvation from slavery. Everything God does in today’s passage has no effect. Yet we are told twice in the passage that everything is going according to plan (vv. 13 & 22). If you and I were really honest we would have to admit that we frequently think that God is not doing a very good job of taking care of his world or his people. In fact, if you just look at the world, from one point of view it appears that God is doing a really bad job of making himself known. The majority of people in the world do not know the great, triune Creator of the universe. The majority of people do not know that he came into the world in the person of Jesus. Evil appears to be winning on all sides. Good Christians suffer while those who live in perversity enjoy all the pleasures this world has to offer. Deception is rampant. People believe the craziest things about God and the nature of the world we live in. Ungodliness and perversity are extolled as virtues while godliness and moral purity are slandered as great evils. If God’s goal is to make himself known in the salvation of his people from slavery, he sure seems to be going about it in a very weird way. Yet, as I said, we are told that everything that is happening here is happening exactly as God said. This is such good news for us. There is an infinitely wise, powerful, just and loving God at work in all the details of life seeking to make himself known in the salvation of his people. However, there is no way to know that there is a sovereign God working in and through all that happens in the world except by God’s telling us it is so. That is what this passage is about. God tells us, through this story, that the way he makes himself known in the salvation of his people includes many unexpected things. MAIN POINT God’s plan to make himself known by saving his people amazingly includes…I. Giving into rebellious human demands (vv. 8-10) We saw last week that God mercifully, through the power of his promises, gave faith to Moses and Aaron. God enables them to do his impossible to do will. Now look at the first thing he tells them that is going to happen when they do his will. He tells them that Pharaoh is going to demand that they prove that God has appeared to them by performing a sign. He is going to require a supernatural display of power by Moses and Aaron as proof of their claim to come from the “God of the Hebrews.” What is shocking is that God tells Moses and Aaron that they are to comply with the pagan, hardhearted king’s request. He tells them that Aaron should throw the shepherd’s staff of Moses and it will turn into a snake. They’ve already seen this happen two other times and so they have no question that it will happen again. They even know that the staff turning to a snake worked to convince skeptical people on one occasion, when they did this in front of the elders of Israel in 4:29-31. God has given them a method that worked before and so there is no reason to expect it won’t work again. Before we think about how weird this is that God gave into the demand of a pagan king I want to make another point. There is, within the evangelical, bible believing church, a false teaching that is growing in its influence. It is called Open Theism or Free Will Theism. It is more than possible that you have come under its influence without knowing what it is called. Its primary claim is that human beings have free will. They claim that God never interferes with human choice. What this has to mean then, according to this heresy, is that God does not know what humans are going to do. It is impossible to know what humans are going to do until they do it because we are free. If God knows the future choices of free people, then their choices really aren’t free. But, they assert, we know that men are free and therefore God cannot know what men will do before they do it. In short, they claim that God does not know the future. I don’t know if any of you have been influenced by this position but let me make sure that you notice in v. 9 that God knows that Pharaoh is going to ask for a sign, in fact he knows the exact sentence Pharaoh is going to speak. Regardless of how you handle the relationship between God’s will and human will you cannot say that God does not know the future choices of human beings. God’s knowledge of the future is perfect and complete. There is nothing that is going to happen in the world that he does not already fully know. This brutal, proud, hardhearted king and oppressor of God’s people demands that God prove himself and shockingly, God complies with his demand. Aaron throws down the staff and it becomes a snake. Let me ask you a question. What would happen if President Bush commanded Secretary of State Colin Powell to do something and Secretary Powell responded by saying, “Prove you’re smarter and stronger than me by doing something I can’t do and then I’ll think about doing what you say? Do a thousand push ups in 10 minutes and then I’ll call the ambassador to China.” He would be immediately fired. Those under authority do not have the right to demand that their superiors prove they have the authority to give a command. How much more is this the case when it is the Creator and Sustainer of the universe commanding a lowly worm of a man to obey? According to Romans 13, this Pharaoh not only exists as a human being by the will of God but he is king of Egypt by the will of God. You would expect God to respond here the way Jesus responded when the religious teachers demanded a sign from him. “A wicked and adulterous generation asks for a sign but none will be given it except the sign of Jonah.” Why didn’t God just say to this insubordinate man, “the only sign you are going to get is your destruction and Israel going free?” The world is full of insubordinate people who have no interest in knowing God but who have demanded from God that he take care of them and, shockingly, he has taken care of them. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had people who are living in open defiance of God’s laws and of Christ who have told me of the ways that they have demanded God show them his kindness and he has done so. People naturally believe that what they think about God and how they are living are OK. They use the fact that nothing bad is happening to them as evidence that God accepts them. Most people take it as a matter of course that they have the right to demand that God prove himself before they are obligated to trust him and obey him. The fact is that every moment of every day God is revealing his supernatural power in and through creation. Every moment God is giving every belligerent human in the world overwhelming evidence of his power and grace in giving breath and sight and food and sunshine. Every human knows they did not create themselves and they do not decide to go on living and they do not decide to keep the rain falling. Yet, every human being demands these things as their right. We complain when we don’t get the good things of life in the measure we believe we deserve them. After all, we deserve a break today. Astonishingly, God graciously keeps giving into the demand of sinful humans to prove his grace and power. He does it so that everyone will know he is God. However, we see in Pharaoh’s response the typical human response to this gracious revelation of God. God’s plan to make himself known by saving his people amazingly includes…
II. Giving people over to deception (vv. 11-13) God does exactly what Pharaoh asks for. He gives him a sign, a display of supernatural power that is out of the ordinary. Now how does Pharaoh respond to this gracious kindness of God? In asking for a sign he appears willing to give in, if only God proves himself. However, once God does exactly what is demanded, he does what every human does by nature. He seeks to obliterate what is blazing in front of his face because he does not want to know God. What he wants is to enjoy the fruit of Israel’s labor and avoid the retribution of the enslaved people. He loves error, not truth, so he calls for deceivers. He already knows what is true, he knows how to be happy, and so he seeks to cover over the evidence that proves he is wrong. He invites those who are accounted wise and spiritual and who have authority in spiritual matters in his culture to come and do the same thing. He looks for an expert to explain away the miracle. Here is the natural response of every human to God’s revealing himself to him or her. We seek to prove that what we’ve just seen does not prove that God has authority over us and that we must listen to him. When God reveals himself to us and tells us what he requires, it is our instinctual response to run for cover. We talk as though we want to know the truth but when we are told the truth, we look for ways to cover over the truth so we don’t have to obey the truth. Paul told Timothy that this is man’s natural response in 2 Timothy 4:2-4, “Preach the word. Be prepared in season and out of season. Correct, rebuke and encourage with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound instruction. Instead to suit their own desires they will gather around themselves a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and will turn aside to myths.” This is exactly what Pharaoh does here. He doesn’t like the implications of what has just happened and so he looks for a way to justify his ignoring God. He does it by inviting his magicians to come and when they come each of them throw down their staffs and they also become snakes. However, Aaron’s “staff” swallows all the “staffs” of the magicians. God makes plain that while these men have the power to duplicate a staff becoming a snake, it is his power that is ultimate. The struggle between God and Satan, between God and rebellious man is not the struggle between beings coequal in power. God is alone and supreme in his sovereign power and nothing can thwart him. Do you see how astonishing this is? God is the one who decided what “sign” Moses and Aaron should give to Pharaoh. It was God’s idea to have the staff turn into a snake. Yet, he knew that Pharaoh’s magicians were able to do the same thing. He knew that Pharaoh would be able to come up with an explanation as to why he didn’t need to listen to God’s word through Moses and Aaron. If you were trying to convince somebody to listen to your prophet would you pick a miracle that you knew his magicians could duplicate? If you were going to persuade people that the eternal Son of God became a man, would you have him be born to an unwed teenager in a backward country? What we see here again is that God’s primary goal isn’t to convince Pharaoh to listen, it is to make himself known in the world and God thinks this is the best way to do it, contrary to what we would naturally think. God is showing off his glory all the time but he does it in ways that men can easily duplicate or explain away. It takes far more than a miracle to persuade a sinner that God exists. It takes much more than a display of divine power to convince a sinner that the only way to be happy is to depend upon God alone to be happy. God has placed all kinds of ways for us to deceive ourselves close to hand. There is a ready explanation for why I don’t need to change, to not do what God tells me to do, all around me. The famous pastor and reformer, John Calvin, says in his commentary about Pharaoh’s calling for the magicians, “This severe and terrible vengeance upon Pharaoh ought to inspire us with terror, lest, in our hatred of truth, we should seek after deception.” Friends we must be very careful. God is intentionally revealing his grace and power in ways that are easy for fallen humans to explain away. It was no trouble for Pharaoh and his wise men to come up with evidence that justified their ignoring God’s word. They were motivated, not out of a desire to know the truth but out of a desire to deny what they didn’t like. We are all naturally like this. We are looking for ways to excuse our unbelief and disobedience. When you read the Bible or listen to a sermon and you disagree with something you see or hear because of what it might require of you, don’t automatically look for a way to explain it away. When the evidence of God’s grace and his truth don’t seem sufficient to you, be careful that you don’t seek to be deceived. God has placed many opportunities for deception in the world and he is under no obligation to keep sinners from deceiving themselves. We must plead with God for mercy to keep us from seeking deception. We must honestly and humbly seek the truth for ourselves and talk with others in order to ascertain if this is a revelation from God or am I turning aside to myths and away from the truth. God’s plan to make himself known by saving his people amazingly includes…
III. Requiring his people to confront a deceived world with His word (vv. 14-22) In v. 14, God speaks to Moses and tells him the obvious. “Pharaoh’s heart is hard and he refuses to let Israel go.” Moses witnessed this fact and he knows, as the end of v. 13 says, that this is exactly what God wants to happen. It’s like God is saying to Moses, “The plan is working perfectly. You did what I said and Pharaoh did exactly what I told you he would do. He is completely resistant to my commands and refuses to do what I’m telling him to do. Now, because he refuses to listen, I want you to go to him early in the morning and give him another message.” Isn’t this odd? God tells his servant that he wants him to keep preaching and performing his miracles to a man whom he knows is going to refuse to listen. This isn’t the only time God told one of his prophets to do this. In fact, most of the time in the OT, this is exactly what God told his prophets. “I want you to keep telling these people to repent and trust me but they are not going to listen. And it is my will they don’t listen.” This is the story of the OT. God persistently talks to the Israelites through his prophets and they keep on disobeying him. It was the same for Jesus. John 1:10-11 says, “He was in the world and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him.” It is the same for the disciples of Jesus. He sends us into the world and what we discover is that the world hates us because it hates Christ. Yet we are commanded to keep telling the world God’s word. We are to continue presenting the truth of the gospel and showing the glory of God in Christ even though the world is hostile to Christ and continually looking for ways to discount the gospel. God is working to make himself known in the world and his work includes us persistently proclaiming the gospel to hardhearted and deceived people. Now we know that eventually God’s plan to save his people is going to be successful. We know that eventually Pharaoh lets the people go and they escape their slavery. Just as we know one day Christ will return and resurrect all his people into eternal life. However, right now, at this moment, all Moses knows is that God is telling him to command a man to do something that he isn’t going to do. In vv. 20-21 we see that Moses and Aaron say exactly what God tells them to say and they do exactly what God tells them to do. They are 100% faithful. However, they are complete failures—if success is defined as Pharaoh listening to them and obeying what they say. However, if success is being faithful, then they are successful. Every pastor, every parent, every Christian, every church must be so very careful to define “successful” ministry the way God defines it. The fact that your children do not trust Christ or that no one responds to your teaching or that your church is not growing does not mean that you are not being successful. (Neither is it true that if your children believe and your church is growing that you must be doing something wrong.) The response of people to what we do and say is not a sure sign that we are or are not doing God’s will. The question is simply this: am I doing what God has told me to do and saying what God wants me to say? We are not in charge of what happens. God’s plan to make himself known includes our faithfully living out the gospel and teaching the gospel and having no one respond to the gospel. This is what is wrong with books like the “Prayer of Jabez” or “The Purpose Driven Church” or “The Purpose Driven Life”. It is what is wrong with much of American Christianity. There is this underlying assumption that if we live right and believe right and do right, then our influence will grow, our ministries will expand, our families will flourish. Growing influence is not a sure sign that you are being faithful to God. It’s not wrong to want others to trust in Christ and to grow in holiness but whether a person responds or not is not the determinative factor in whether or not I’m doing God’s will. God’s plan to make himself known by saving his people amazingly includes…
IV. Giving men over to worldly concern (vv. 22-24) Again notice that what God told Moses and Aaron to do he knew that the magicians could duplicate, yet he told them to do it. However, again, their duplication was not on the same level as what Moses and Aaron did. Moses and Aaron turned all the water in Egypt, which all came from the Nile river, into blood. Every fish in the river at that moment died. All the water was so foul in all the land of Egypt that it could not be drank. This condition lasted for seven days. When we are told in v. 22 that the Egyptian magicians did the same things by their secret arts we know that what they did was not as extensive because whatever amount of water remained as water was not very great. They did not turn all the water in Egypt to blood and kill all the fish for seven days. What they did was turn some small quantity of water that they obtained from somewhere, into blood. Such is the love of humans for sin and their hatred for God that it takes very little to convince them not to believe the truth. I knew a Christian guy who, while in college, wrote a cartoon strip that he actually had syndicated. I don’t remember what the name of the strip was. I do remember one cartoon that he wrote. Three college students were hanging out and in the first frame one of them asks the other two, “How do you think the resurrection of Jesus took place?” In the next frame each of the two students give their answer. The first one says, “I think that God miraculously raised him from the dead, just like the NT says.” The other student says, “I think that Jesus was a member of an extraterrestrial race of beings and one of their spaceships came and transported his body out of the tomb and onto the mother ship.” In the third frame the two students ask the guy who originally asked the question, “What about you? What do you think happened?” He says, “I think I’ll go with the scientific view.” While that is funny, the fact is that there actually are people who think that it is more rational to believe that Jesus was an alien than to believe the NT record. The fact that many millions of people believe that the assertions of Dan Brown in his book, “The Davinci Code”, are actually true is not surprising. That there are people who would rather believe that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, they had children, and his ancestors are still alive than that Jesus is the Son of God who died on the cross for our sins is not in the least astonishing. That people can actually look at the world we live in and at the complexity of organic life and of living systems and yet believe that this all came into existence through a process of chance is not at all amazing. Sin is irrational. Humans would rather believe anything than believe that there is a God to whom they are accountable and who requires them to undergo a radical reorientation of their loves, their beliefs and their behaviors to please him. The magicians turn a few bowls of water into blood and Pharaoh compares this to all the water in Egypt turning to blood, all the fish dying and all the water being undrinkable for seven days and he decides that this astonishing miracle is no greater than what his gods can do and so he doesn’t need to listen. Notice in vv. 23-24 how he and the Egyptians respond. He goes to his own house and does not concern himself with the nasty water. For seven days he ignores the foul stench and undrinkable water. He has servants to dig his wells and he has wine to drink and he has business to attend to. He is insulated from the effects of the plague and so he pays no attention to it but pays attention to the affairs of his own house and job. The people of Egypt, however, cannot avoid the fact there is no water to drink. They must dig wells for water, something they never had to do in their lives. So they are consumed with survival. Like Pharaoh, they live in sight of the bloody water, the stench of it is in their nostrils but rather than take to heart what is going on they consume themselves with survival. Both the rich and the poor ignore the facts surrounding them out of concern for living on earth. This is the condition of men upon the earth. We are so taken up with the affairs of our lives that we are oblivious to the overwhelming evidence that surrounds us. Our eyes see, our nostrils are full, yet we are preoccupied with the pleasures of life or our jobs or just surviving and so we don’t see, we don’t smell. God is out to make himself known and he has given overwhelming evidence of his glory in creation and in the church. We must not allow ourselves to be so consumed with the practical matters of life that we do not see or hear what is everywhere around us. What we see in Pharaoh and his people is what is natural to us. Do you remember the parable Jesus told of the wedding banquet (Luke 14:15-24)? The king is having a wedding banquet for his son and he invites all the people of his kingdom to come. One after the other they all turn down the invitation. What are their excuses? One is getting married, another has just bought a piece of property, and another just bought a new yoke of oxen. In other words, the things that prevent them from seeing the glory of the invitation to the wedding of the king’s son are not perverted living but the simple pleasures and pursuits of life. More people are going to be in hell because they loved a nice lawn than because they loved alcohol. More people are blind to the glory of God in the gospel because of a love for shopping than because of a love for stealing. More people deny the power of Christ because they have to work two jobs than because they have two wives. The people in this story are human beings, just like us. Their blindness is our blindness. I beg you to not ignore the overwhelming signs of God’s glory because you are so taken up with the affairs of life. God’s plan to make himself known by saving his people amazingly includes…
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2004 John Swanson. |