Bring on the Frogs -- Exodus 8:1-7

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh and say to him, ‘Thus says the Lord, “Let My people go, that they may serve Me.  But if you refuse to let them go, behold, I will smite your whole territory with frogs; And the Nile will swarm with frogs, which will come and go into your house and into your bedroom and on your bed, and into the houses of your servants and on your people, and into your ovens and into your kneading bowls.  So the frogs will come up on you and your people and all your servants.”’”  Then the Lord said, to Moses, “Say to Aaron, ‘Stretch out your hand with your staff over the rivers, over the streams and over the pools and make frogs come up on the land of Egypt.’”  So Aaron stretched out his hand over the waters of Egypt, and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt.  And the magicians did the same with their secret arts, making frogs come up on the land of Egypt.

Chapter 7 of Exodus ends with Egypt experiencing the first plague for a whole week.  Its entire surface water had been turned to blood.  But still no change of heart by Pharaoh.  So chapter 8 begins with God giving Moses more instructions.  In those instructions He identifies His next plague to be inflicted on Egypt if His people are not freed to serve Him.  Based on the knowledge of Moses’ former behavior in terms of obedience, we can assume that he did exactly what God told him to do this time – he told Pharaoh what God would do.

God had promised the entire territory would be smitten with frogs.  The River Nile would teem with them.  This diverse and largely carnivorous group of short-bodied, tailless amphibians would get into Pharaoh’s house and impact his daily life.  They would get into his bedroom and his bed and impact his intimacy with his wife as well as his ability to rest.  They would inhabit the houses of his servants and thus symbolic and practically affecting industry and commerce in the land.  And the frogs would be found in Pharaoh’s ovens and in the bowls they used for making bread affecting his ability to gain nourishment.  It is one thing to see a frog or two hop out of the pond in your backyard and visit your porch steps; it is another thing to have frogs simply engulf you, your family, and your servants.  From the instructions God gave Moses to pass on to Aaron, we know that this went way beyond Pharaoh’s own household over the entire land of Egypt.

And the text says that Aaron did exactly what he was told by his brother, which tells us that Moses had done what he was told by God.  And God delivered what He promised to deliver – frogs, the Scripture says, covered the land of Egypt.

The same waters that were turned into blood were now being called upon again, at God’s command, to yield up sufficient frogs to cover Pharaoh’s land.

The last sentence of this passage is, I must admit, puzzling.  At its simplest level, it informs us that Pharaoh’s magicians or sorcerers were able to replicate the miracle or the plague of the frogs.  But just what exactly did they do?  Where did God’s supernatural act end and theirs begin?  Or as some may well ask, “Whose frogs were who’s?”

Again, for the magicians to be able to do this indicates that a supernatural occult power was present.  But alas, it could only make things worse.  It was not able to cause the frogs to retreat to the depths of the Nile River.  As for all of our questions pertaining to what exactly these magicians did, we will have to settle for not knowing for sure.

But what does this passage say to you and me?  I noticed that neither Moses nor Aaron complained about God’s instructions this time.  They had learned to rely on His authority and wisdom and power.  They just did what they were told by God and left the response of man to Him.  Are you and I there yet?

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Pharaoh’s Dogged Determination -- Exodus 7:20-25

So Moses and Aaron did even as the Lord had commanded.  And he lifted up the staff and struck the water that was in the Nile, in the sight of Pharaoh and in the sight of his servants, and all the water that was in the Nile was turned to blood.  And the fish that were in the Nile died, and the Nile became foul, so that the Egyptians could not drink water from the Nile.  And the blood was through all the land of Egypt.  But the magicians of Egypt did the same with their secret arts; and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he did not listen to them, as the Lord had said.  Then Pharaoh turned and went into his house with no concern even for this.  So all the Egyptians dug around the Nile for water to drink, for they could not drink of the water of the Nile.  And seven days passed after the Lord had struck the Nile.

Once again Moses and Aaron right away did as God had commanded them to.  I find the phrase “in the sight of (Pharaoh’s) servants” a type of reminder to us that we are not to hide our dependence on God or our purpose in ministry from the public arena.  What we do with God’s help is not espionage work, trying to convince someone to follow God’s way in secret, “or else”.  No, what we are called to do is to “go in the name of the Lord” and not be ashamed or secretive of what we are doing for Him and with Him.

Interestingly, this whole issue comes up time and time again as various mission organizations deal with “how do we best approach sharing the Gospel with a particular group”.  Do we play it “low key” and “just build relationships” and “when they’re ready, they’ll ask us about Jesus”?  Do we simply “give them the Word of God, tell them what’s in it, and they can take it or leave it as it’s their choice?”  Most people would agree that those are two extremes, neither of which are the preferred approach modeled by Jesus Himself when He shared “the meaning of eternal life” with the woman at the well.  We should never hide whom we are in Christ, or that we have a desire that all should come to know Him as their personal savior.  But having said that, we need to let them know that we love them as people and care about what’s going on in their lives.  From my own personal experience in observing both full-time Christian workers and others, it is most difficult for the majority of those who would witness for Christ to find the right balance in this regard.  I believe the growth of the Church is hindered somewhat as a result.

As Aaron struck the water that was in the Nile, it turned to blood, the fish therein died, the smell of the river became awful, and no one could drink from it.  The text said this blood spread throughout the land of Egypt just as God had said.  God delivers on His Word.

But here is perhaps the most difficult phrase in this passage to explain, namely, “the magicians of Egypt did the same thing with their secret arts.”  What gives?  Literally, these soothsayer priests were able to duplicate the miracle.  Of course, the keen mind would ask, “with what water did they do this?”  Or, you may ask, “why were they able to?”  I am reminded of the lesson I have been learning lately which is that sometimes God allows things to happen which from the Enemy’s perspective have a very different and negative desired result and from God’s perspective are allowed for a very positive end-result for those that love Him.  (We can see this in the New Testament when we read Matthew 4:1.  There we see that both the Spirit of God and the devil himself were actively involved in bringing about a particular situation – the temptation of Jesus.  God allowed it with the ultimate purpose of truly having His Son experience temptation.  He wanted Jesus to fully understand how we are tempted. And He also wanted to make it possible for us to know that our Lord was tempted as we are.  The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews writes in chapter 2, verse 18 – “For since He Himself was tempted in that which He has suffered, He is able to come to the aid of those who are tempted” – you and me.  Amen.

But the devil showed up with other plans at the time.  He tempted Jesus to defeat Him and His claims.  And so it was when the devil showed up in Egypt.  He wanted to work against God.  So God allows the ‘magicians’ to do their thing and succeed.  One commentator (Chuck Smith) suggests that they weren’t helping – they should have used their skills to turn the blood back to water.

David Guzik meanwhile asks the question that we referred to above, “How could the magicians of Egypt find fresh water to turn to blood, if all the water had already become blood?”  Guzik suggests that “all the waters directly associated with the Nile had been turned to blood (including its pools and tributaries, and water in vessels drawn from the Nile). Yet water obtained by wells was not plagued.”  And it is thus that he explains the next part in the passage that indicates the Egyptians dug all around the river for water to drink.  So the magicians had turned “fresh water” into blood.  I am not so sure that this is accurate as the actual text says it was “the blood” that “was through all the land of Egypt”.  However, I suppose Guzik’s explanation is possible if we consider “open water” versus “underground water”.

Most scholars believe the action of the magicians to be a ‘miracle’ from Satan’s hand.  As such, he could only help his magicians do the same, rather than bring about a positive, constructive or as Guzik says, a “cleansing miracle”.  Guzik adds, “he can bring supernatural destruction, but not goodness.”  Satan, he contends, is not in the business of bringing about “alleviation of human suffering” which can only come from God Himself.

Robert Jamieson in addressing this matter of the magicians’ sorcery believes it was on a very small scale using water dug there and then from the sand beside the Nile and then applying some red dye.  We have no evidence of this either.  Whatever happened, we know that Pharaoh used the so-called mirroring of God’s miracle by his magicians as sufficient for him to remain hardened in his heart.  As such, he discounts anything that Moses and Aaron had to say or ask for and returns to his house emotionally untouched and seemingly uncaring for his subjects who now had to work as hard as they could, against all odds, to dig and find fresh water.  Pharaoh’s attitude reminds me a little of what Queen Marie Antoinette is believed (but never proven) to have said when she was told the people had no bread.  She responded, “Let them eat cake.”  In the case of Pharaoh, it seems to be “Let my people find water, obviously there’s some around since my magicians were able to turn it into blood.”  How insensitive and how not that different from the extra work he had placed on Hebrew slaves a little while earlier when he made them gather their own straw to make bricks without reducing the required daily quota.   It is evident that evil men (or women) will go to any extent to get their way even if it means harming their own people.  That is something we have seen time and time again with dictators and it may well be something we will see again in our modern times and even western society.

The chapter ends with the statement that this state of affairs actually went on for seven days before God spoke to Moses again.  Can you imagine what the Egyptians were going through?  What we do not know is how this affected the Israelites.  Nor do we know what was going through the minds of the Pharaoh, Aaron, Moses, and the Israelites as a result.

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God Writes Another Perfect Script - Exodus 2:6-10

When she opened it, she saw the child, and behold, the boy as crying.  And she had pity on him and said, “This is one of the Hebrews’ children.”  Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and call a nurse for you from the Hebrew women, that she may nurse the child for you?”  And Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Go ahead.”  So the girl went and called the child’s mother.  Then Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse him for me and I shall give you your wages.”  So the woman took the child and nursed him.  And the child grew, and she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and he became her son.  And she named him Moses, and said, “Because I drew him out of the water.”

So Pharaoh’s daughter gets the basket that the baby boy had been placed in (in an attempt to save him from getting murdered as was the decree of the Pharaoh) brought to her and sure enough – the baby was crying.  You and I would be too if we were floating by some reeds in the Nile River, hungry or not.  But here’s the interesting thing – we are told that right away she knew it was a child of one of the Hebrew women.  There was no way that this could be hidden – perhaps from the clothing that the baby was wrapped in.  God does not expect us to deceive others or lie about who we are while going about our daily lives for Him even amongst those that may not see things our way.  In the movie, A Night With the King, the story of Queen Esther, there is a scene where Mordecai, when asked who he was by Haman who was on a campaign to kill all Jews, had no qualms in telling him the truth – he was indeed a Jew.  We are to stand up for our spiritual citizenship in all circumstances.  Not doing so and denying our membership in the body of Christ can only be to our shame and possible detriment, and to His great sadness.

The baby’s sister then spoke up.  She had been willing to serve in this urgent need of the family.  She was obedient, she was patient as she waited in hiding by the reeds down a ways from where the basket had been left, and she was fearless in meeting the daughter of the Egyptian ruler.  For those of us who know already who this baby was and what his future role in God’s plan for His people was, we can well ask ourselves – “Had it not been for his older sister, how different might this baby’s path to the very end God had in mind been for him been?”  God would still have used him if that was His plan, but the road to that would have been quite dissimilar.  As we think of Moses’ sister, we must ask ourselves if we’re willing to be used by God to facilitate the spiritual service of someone else without much recognition for our own part?  And it may even go beyond that.  Saying we would is one thing; actively being aware of the need to implement our intentions when God provides the opportunities is another.  Looking for such opportunities of service is yet one step beyond.  Let us hope we are up to being faithful in that way, knowing our reward comes from above.

Now we can assume that the baby’s sister was indeed given some instructions by her mother as to what to say if and when someone, likely the Pharaoh’s daughter who regularly bathed in the area, came to discover the baby.  So she jumps out and asks the Pharaoh’s daughter if she should go and get a nurse from among the Hebrew women to take care of the child for her.  We do not know if the ‘princess’ had already decided to keep the baby, but certainly after this great offer, the option became a possibility and then with her immediate response, a reality.  After all, how difficult was it to agree to keep such a “beautiful” baby especially when it would be taken care of by someone else?  Perhaps this may also speak as to why it was noted in the text so clearly that his own mother had considered him ‘beautiful’ – God’s plans are always so complete, so advanced, so detailed.

Now here’s the bonus.   God arranges for the baby to be given back to its own natural mother for initial upbringing.  And there’s more – the baby’s mother gets reimbursed in wages for taking care of her own child.  God remarkably arranged for the needs or provisions for this family.  God seems to have this incredible ability to take care of our needs as we participate in His plans.  Learning that lesson in our lives can make a world of difference in our service to Him.

For her part, the baby’s mother raised the child in her home and we assume, at an agreed to point in time, she returned the baby to the princess who adopted him formerly and also named him.  Moses, literally means “drawn out/from” for in his case, he was indeed drawn out of the water.

The introduction to life for this infant who was to play a critical role in the history of the Jewish people and ultimately all the children of God, was nothing short of spectacular.  No secular author could have written a more exciting and perfect script!  

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God Intervenes To Protect Whom He Plans To Utilize -- Exodus 2:1-5

Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a daughter of Levi.  And the woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was beautiful, she hid him for three months.  But when she could hide him no longer, she got him a wicker basket and covered it over with tar and pitch.  Then she put the child into it, and set it among the reeds by the bank of the Nile.  And his sister stood at a distance to find out what would happen to him.  Then the daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the Nile, with her maidens walking alongside the Nile; and she saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid, and she brought it to her.

In this day and age when western liberals seem to be pushing so hard for homosexual rights in the world, it is so good to read the first two verses of Exodus chapter 2.  A man marries a woman and they conceive a child.  How refreshing; how just the way it was intended to be.

The man and woman were both from the house of Levi.  By this point in time, the descendants of Levi, one of Jacob’s twelve sons had grown in size.  You will remember back in Genesis 49 Jacob had predicted that they would be too zealous, violent, and associated with wickedness.  Eventually they were to scatter and be given cities among various regions of all or many of the other tribes.  Marrying within a tribe was not a problem given the generations that had come to pass from Levi onward.

And in the midst of an edict by Pharaoh that all Hebrew male babies were to be cast into the Nile, this woman conceives a son.  Can you imagine the mixed emotion of happiness for having a child and at the same time such sorrow knowing that child was to be killed if found out?

Interestingly enough the text comments that the mother hides the baby boy for three months when she realizes that he is so beautiful.  A word structure such as that would understandably give many of us trouble.  Aren’t all, or at least, most babies beautiful?  Does the text imply that if the baby were not beautiful, she would not have tried to hide him?  What is the writer really saying here?  The King James Version actually says, “he was a goodly child”.  The NIV says a “fine child” and the New Living Translation says a “special” baby.  That does help, but not much.   If the mother was a good one, and we can assume by her actions that she was, would she not have hidden the baby even if he was not ‘beautiful, goodly, or fine’?  I think she would have.  The only reasonable explanation I can think of is that she considered the baby to be quite a quiet one, a good baby, one that would not be loudly crying all the time so as to be heard by any passing Egyptian agents of the Pharaoh.

David Guzik, using what we do not learn about until we get to the book of Hebrews, chapter 11, verse 23 in the New Testament, tells us that this baby’s parents hid him until he was three months old out of their faith in God and because they did not fear the Pharaoh’s decree.  It seems reasonable then that we accept once again the fact that “scripture answers scripture” whenever we have a question and we would be foolish not to accept it in this case.

The baby’s parents (we have to wait until we get to Exodus chapter 6 to learn their names) were also reasonable people.  They realized they could not hide the young boy forever and so God provided them with another idea.  They would turn the child over to God by placing him in a wicker basket and allowing him to float on top of the Nile River, rather than be cast into it to drown.  Their God-given wisdom went much further as they applied tar and pitch to the outside of the basket to make it waterproof allowing the baby to survive much longer with the hope of his being rescued by someone outside the decree of Pharaoh.

This very act of the parents is not only very brave, but also well calculated and incredibly faith-based.  Based on observation, the parents knew they had to do something with the baby.  One possible way that he could have survived was if an Egyptian adopted him.  And what better Egyptian to adopt the baby than the Pharaoh’s daughter who was known to regularly come to that part of the Nile River and bathe, along with her entourage.  The act of placing the baby in the Nile, albeit near its reeds by the bank of the river, was also very symbolic as it was the very same Nile that was intended to act as the burial place of the infant in accordance to the Pharaoh’s decree.   Sometimes, to carry out God’s will, we have to go into the Niles of our life, being reliant only on the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to pull us out and lead us onward in His service.  And that is exactly what God intended to do for this Hebrew baby boy.

But are we as parents able to match the fervor with which these parents trusted in their God?  As adults, would you and I be willing to place our own life into that symbolic wicker basket and entrust our future solely on His grace?

More evidence of the wisdom and creativity of the baby’s parents was shown when they assigned the baby’s older sister to go and wait by the reeds, somewhat out of the way due to distance, in order to observe what would happen to the baby and whether or not it would indeed by found by Pharaoh’s daughter or her maidens.

And sure enough, like clockwork in God’s own time Pharaoh’s daughter found the basket.  We don’t know if it was the same hour or day or longer from the time it was placed there, but likely not too long after as the baby would have gotten hungry and cried [which we learn later it was], and likely not have survived without more divine intervention overnight.)  God’s timing in His plan is perfect – it was then; it is now; and it will be tomorrow.  One of my favorite gospel songs is one that became popular in the first decade of the 21^st century.  It was called Four Days Late and originally put out by the “Karen Peck and New River” group.  Here are the lyrics:

The news came that Jesus
Please come fast
Lazarus is sick
And without your help he will not last

Mary and Martha watched their brother die
They waited for Jesus
He did not come
And they wondered why

The dead watch was over
Berried four days
Somebody said
"He'll soon be here, the Lord's on his way"

Martha ran to him and then she cried
"Lord if you had been here
You could have healed him,
He'd still been alive"

But Lord, four days late
And all help is gone
Lord we don't understand
Why you waited so long

But his way is God's way
Not yours or mine
And isn't it great
When he's four days late
He's still on time

Jesus said
"Martha, show me the grave"
But she said
"Lord, you don't understand,
He's been there four days"

The grave stone was rolled back
Then Jesus cried
Lazarus come forward
Then somebody said
"He's alright, he's alive"

You may be fighting a battle of fear
You cry to the Lord
"I need you"
But he has not appeared

Friend don't be discouraged
'Cause he's still the same
He'll soon be here
He'll roll back the stone
And he'll call out your name

But he's four days late
And all help is gone
Lord we don't understand
Why you waited so long

But his way is God's way
Not yours or mine
And isn't it great
When he's four days late
He's still on time

He's still on time
Oh my God ...
When he's four days late
He's still on time
He's still on time

That’s the God we can rely on.  That’s the God we must rely on when life requires us to place our ‘baby’ in this world’s Niles.  That’s the God that has a plan for our baby and us.  We can do nothing about His timing except be patient, living every moment in faith and obedience.  I pray each of us will engage the grace He is willing to expend on us this day.

[Are you looking for a speaker at your church, your club, school, or organization? Ken is available to preach, teach, challenge, and/or motivate. Please contact us.]

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