8th April 2024

8th April 2024


Pray (ACts)


Read (Exodus 8:1-19)


Message (Alan Burke) 


The French eat frogs, actually there are many countries in this world that eat frogs legs and in Indonesia you can get them battered. Go to Scotland and you can get most things battered but in Indonesians outdo the Scotts when it comes to battering frogs legs. I’d be up for giving them a try, battered, curried, in Slovenian a specialty is fried frog legs žabji kraki with lemon and tartar sauce which sounds good to me. I say that but know that there are many of you trying not to wretch because you don’t want to see your breakfast again. That’s just an aside to where were are today or rather this week and that is the plagues that befell on Egypt. I decided to do something a little different with the plagues and rather than go through them all individually I’d focus on one  by itself then two-six then seven-nine and finally ten. Maybe it’s not different but I just didn’t want to make the same application for ten weeks in a row. Today’s devotion then deals with the second plague ‘Frogs’ and the third plague ‘Gnats’ and I want to leave you with one application for each plague. 


Frogs, having a plate of frogs legs versus a plague of frogs legs is something entirely different. While a plague of frogs doesn’t sound too bad but it would sound bad. That’s a wee pun, doesn’t sound bad but it would sound bad because of the croaking, constantly, during the night, the soundtrack to this plague was going to be unrelenting the ear plugs wouldn’t make much of a difference. Frogs in your bed, in your wardrobe, in your toilet, this wasn’t going to be fun.  The plague came, the magicians of pharaoh were just as with the first plague by their secret arts were able to reproduce it. Why on earth they would want to I have no idea, surely they had enough frogs but again the magicians did the same things by their secret arts.


Moses does so, and notice what he says in v10, “It will be as you say, so that you may know there is no one like the Lord our God.


What we miss in all of this is that once more God was showing his power over the gods of Egypt. The futility of worship another one of their god’s known as Hekt. The goddess Hekt had the head and sometimes the body of a frog, the frog was sacred in Egypt, it could not be killed, Hekt was the goddess of child birth, in effect the Egyptians were overrun with frogs that they would do nothing about and their gods were shown to be nothing but idols. The Lord is the only living and true God, he is the one and only God and as such he is omnipotent meaning that he is all powerful, it means that our God is the unique all powerful God. Pharaoh was blinded to this truth, he saw the second display of the power of the only living and true God and refused to see and hear. He had asked Moses to intercede for him and the Lord had answered and yet Pharaoh reneged on his promises once again. There Is But One Living And True God. 


Plague three was Gnats. In truth we don’t know if these were Gnats, lice, flees, midges, sand flies, mosquitoes for the Hebrew word is ambiguous. Either way there was a plague of these wee blighters. While pharaoh’s magicians were able to reproduce the first two plagues they came up empty handed with this one, look to verse 18, when the magicians tried to produce gnats by their secret arts they could not. Pharaoh and his magicians whether they realised that they were serving Satan or not they were, they were controlled by “the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms” (Eph. 6:12), evil forces that had at least enough power to perform a few miracles but they could not produce all that God had done, the magicians could not reproduce it because there is only one God and Satan’s power has its limits. While he can produce all sorts of displays of power through signs and wonders (2 Thes 2:9) he is limited. 


In the end the magicians had to admit to pharaoh that “This is the finger of God”, the word that they use for God is the most generic of all names of God they had come to know the power of the living and true God who rules over all and they were forced to admit that before him they could do nothing, the God of the Israelites was more powerful than any god of Egypt, he ruled over them even though they did not call him Lord for while they knew his power they did not know him personally. The Living And True God Rules Over All even over the evil of this world and Satan. I know this devotion is a little longer than usual today but we come before the only living and true God who rules over all. While false gods remain in this world the day is coming when all will bow down before him, all will confess that Jesus is Lord to the Glory of God the Father (Rom 14:11, Phil 2:10-11).


Pray (acTS)


Sing


WSC
Q7 What are the decrees of God?
The decrees of God are his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will, whereby, for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass. (Eph. 1:4,11, Rom. 9:22–23)
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