080 - Not in the Oven Too!

You pick up your Bible and wonder, is there more here than meets the eye?

Is there something here for me? I mean, it's just words printed on paper, right? Well, it may look like just print on a page, but it's more than ink.

Join us for the next half hour as we explore God's Word together, as we learn how to explore it on our own, as we ask God to meet us there in its pages. Welcome to More Than Ink. Hey, I love the sound of those little chirping frogs in the spring. Oh, the frogs. We have a marsh across the street. Yeah, we got frogs right near where we live.

There's a lot of them over there. Yeah, and every time I hear them, it makes me think, oh, frogs are cute. They're so sweet, but what would it be like if they came across the street and we found them everywhere in the house?

Well, then frogs would no longer be cute. And that happens today on More Than Ink. Well, good morning. This is Jim. And this is Dorothy. And you have now joined us around our dining room table, figuratively speaking, that is, because I don't see anyone else except you, me.

Well, we're here. And we are continuing to walk our way through Exodus, and we're glad you've come with us. And we get to some actually some really well-known sections of Exodus. I mean, if people talk about Exodus, they talk about the plagues, right? That's the one thing they do know. That's the one thing they do know about.

And not too much of the consequence after that. So that's where we are today, and we're into the, not the first plague, we covered last time the first plague, which was? Turning the Nile, the water of the Nile into blood. The Nile into blood. And that account ends with saying, and the Lord, seven full days passed after the Lord struck the water.

Yeah. So there's a whole completed process of an entire week. Now, whether that means the water stayed blood for a whole week, or whether they just had a week to get their heads around what had just happened. We don't know.

That's a little bit unclear. But it was extraordinarily disruptive to the life in Egypt. I mean, everything came from the water of the Nile. And so to turn it to blood made it totally useless to them. I mean, all the fish died.

It was just a horrible thing. So if there's any one thing that you could point to and say, this is what provides life in Egypt, it's the Nile. It's the Nile.

Yeah. So the very first thing that God did to sort of wake them up and say, you know, I'm actually in control of the universe, so you need to let my people go, was he just totally messed up the Nile. Which, you know, when we talked about it last time, we said that should have really been enough.

Should have gotten your attention. I mean, that was so serious in terms of the scale of these things. That should do it.

Now, we know that the tenth plague is the one that will actually push them over the top. Right. But that should have done it. But it didn't. But, you know, this prefigures that in the water of the Nile turning to blood, prefigures that death of the firstborn in a kind of an interesting way. It does.

Because it's a life or death picture. Right. Right, right. That's exactly right.

And at Passover, you know, they took blood of a lamb and marked the doorposts of their house. Right. So it's sort of like bookends. Yeah. Well, we've got a few weeks before we get to that. Right.

Well, so let's get to the one today. We're talking today in the second plague all about frogs. Frogs.

Why frogs? Yeah. Well, I've got a couple ideas about that.

Well, everybody has ideas about that. But God continues on in this process to try and get Pharaoh to soften his heart. And in every step, every step of every plague, it gets harder and harder and harder.

And it gets harder today in a remarkable way. Yeah. Well, and maybe before we go on, one question that was in my mind as we started into this, and maybe it's in your mind, too, people who are listening, is why these things, why these plagues, and why in this order? And I think there's a lot of thinking out there that says that there was kind of a naturalistic explanation for these plagues, because these were all naturally occurring things in Egypt, except that what God did was amplify them and demonstrate the control at his very word these things would happen and be controlled. So that is one way of thinking about them. I don't incline particularly toward a naturalistic view of these things. Oh, to explain them.

To explain them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But God was utilizing the natural order of things in Egypt. Well, and that sort of makes sense, because the gods that they had in Egypt were all naturally oriented.

Right. And they subdivided the creation, basically. And God here is saying, no, I'm the one to control of all of this. Of everything.

I'm Lord of all the earth. And that's what, you know, at the beginning of this process, Pharaoh, when he's confronted by Moses and Aaron, Pharaoh says, well, I don't know who your God is. Right.

Well, every step along the way, he gets to know him a little bit better. This is the God. The God who is. Yeah. Well, let's get into frogs today. What do you say? All right. Do you want to read for us?

Sure. We're starting at the top of chapter eight, verse one. Start reading in verse one.

Yep. Then the Lord said to Moses, go in 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 plague all your country with frogs. The Nile shall swarm with frogs that shall come up into your house and into your bedroom and on your bed and into the houses of your servants and your people and into your ovens and into your kneading bowls.

The frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your servants. You want to stop there? Yeah, stop there. So there, you know, we talked before about the fact that not all of the plagues have a warning. This one does.

This one does. God says exactly what he's going to do. This is what's going to happen.

And how bad it's going to be. Frogs were common, but not this common. Well, and there was an annual season when the frogs hatched and came out. And that was an unexpected part of the natural order of the world. But here he emphasizes the fact that you had frogs before, but now you're really going to have frogs. And then he takes efforts to tell them just how far spread they're going to be, like everywhere.

We're talking everywhere. But the interesting thing is there is a famous Egyptian god who is depicted as a woman with the head of a frog. That's right.

Yeah, Hecate. And she is the symbol of fertility and related to childbirth. So, you know, it's interesting to me when God says, now these frogs are going to come up everywhere. More frogs than you ever thought you could imagine. In places you've never seen them. They're going to be in your bed.

Now that's significant given that Hecate was associated with childbirth. Yeah, that's right. So, you know, he says there's no part of your life that's not going to be touched by these frogs. You want frogs? I'll give you frogs. But, I mean, it's like you might expect to see frogs if you're walking along the Nile someday.

Right. But to have frogs in your ovens and in your kneading bowls. In other words, they're getting into everything. They're everything.

Absolutely everything. Yeah, I read up on this god Hecate too, you know, this frog-headed kind of god. And this god was also very much associated with the overflow of the Nile, which happened every year.

Right, annually. Yeah, and that's kind of how this god got connected into fertility because once the Nile overflowed, that's how they watered a lot of the corn fields and then the corn would finally sprout as soon as that happened. And since when the Nile overflowed, you saw frogs on the ground. Right. So it seemed kind of natural that all of a sudden the frogs are there after the water overflows and the corn sprouts.

So god of fertility. Right. That also made it illegal to kill them. You could not kill frogs, I found out. I didn't know that before.

I didn't either. Yeah, because Hecate, the frog god, was just such a big, big deal. When you saw a frog and you stepped around it, you did not kill a frog.

Never. So this is a really, really big deal. They could not be killed. Also, there was kind of a mythology that came out of the fact that frogs are one of the few animals that occupy two worlds, both the water world and the dry world. So in a way, they saw Hecate as a god who was part of mankind as well as heaven and stuff like that. So anyway, that's the guy. So we really are, we're talking about, we will talk about this many times, we really are aiming at, in a way, god kind of making fun of their god system.

Right. He's demonstrating his power over whatever their god system is. And while these gods are not specifically named, and there were so many of them, some of their realms overlapped in Egyptian mythology. Yeah, that's right. So the scripture doesn't name them, but it's pretty obvious who some of them are that god has taken down.

Well, here's one that's really a clear connection. So the warning happens up to verse 4, and these frogs will come on your people and all your servants. I mean, they will be everywhere.

Everywhere. So then the Lord instructs Moses, verse 5, the Lord said to Moses, Say to Aaron, stretch out your hand with your staff over the rivers, over the canals, 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.

Covered the land of Egypt. But the magicians, these are the court magicians, but the magicians, they did the same by their secret arts and made frogs come up out of the land of Egypt. Now that's interesting to me, because this, like the snakes, could be produced by sleight of hand. If these guys were magicians in kind of the classic sense, then they had tricks. They had unknown ways by which they could trick you. And that's probably what was happening here. And that's what's going on here. It's kind of a competition between the magic of Moses and the magic of these. And you know, actually, they would have meant something to me that if they could, instead of making more frogs, if they could make less frogs.

Undo the frogs that were there. Now we've got a real thing going on here. But that's not the case. All they do is kind of add to the problem by saying, we can do that. However, the fact that they do that doesn't seem to deter Pharaoh from understanding where this came from. Well, this is a bigger problem. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah, because it says that in verse 8, then Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and said, plead with the Lord. Well, this is the first time he's acknowledged that, you know, talk to your God on behalf of me.

He knows what is behind this. Plead with the Lord. And he uses this proper name of God to take away the frogs from me and from my people. And I will let the people go to sacrifice to the Lord. Hey, good deal.

Really? Yeah, okay. And at that time, Moses said to Pharaoh, be pleased to command me when I am to plead for you and for your servants and for your people, that the frogs may be cut off from you and your houses and be left only in the Nile.

And he said, tomorrow. So Moses said, be it as you say, so that you may know that there is no one like the Lord, our God. The frogs shall go away from you and your houses and your servants and your people. They shall be left only in the Nile. Okay, let's stop there. So yeah, so it looks like, hey, it looks like we've won. Moses says, okay, uncle, uncle, uncle, take away the frogs.

Pharaoh says that. Fair, yeah. So take away the frogs and I'll let your people go.

Yeah, we're done. Yeah. Well. Not so much.

Not so much. Don't read too much into it too quickly. But here, yeah, you're right in verse eight. This is the first time that Pharaoh's actually out loud said, this is coming from your God. Talk to your God for me. So would you plead with your God for me? I mean, you have the connections evidently, so would you do that? Because if you do that, then I'll let your people go sacrifice. Yeah, he doesn't say he'll let the people go. No. He says he'll let them go do their sacrifice.

Go sacrifice. Right. It was the easy thing. Yeah. Yeah. And so Moses says, you know, okay, if you're asking me to do that tomorrow, I'll do that and because it's going to happen, then you'll know there's no one like the Lord.

Right. And he's talking about the God system. There is no one like our God. None of your puny little gods are like this God. Your hecket God, your frog God is not even like that because our God controls the frogs.

Yeah. So again, we're back to Pharaoh coming to a further understanding of who the real God of the universe is. And so Moses says, you're going to get an understanding. Now does it strike you at this point that we're seeing Moses grow?

In what way? Well, because if you think about up to this point prior to this, he had complained, oh, I'm not adequate, I can't talk right, I can't do these things. But by the time of the second plague, God says, go do it. And he just goes and says it. Just does it. And then here, you know, the way he responds to Pharaoh, he says, now, okay, you command me and I'll plead for you. Right.

He's kind of stepping into his role as the, as the intercessor here. You plead for me. Are you, be pleased to tell me when and I'll pray then. Tell me when.

Tell me when and I'll do it. Yeah, in fact, this is the fulfillment of what God told Moses. He said that Pharaoh will kind of treat you like God.

Right, right. And so Pharaoh wants to make a message to God and he goes directly to Moses. So the connection's there. Also, I would happen to think that after the whole Nile blood thing, that Moses' confidence is kind of up now. He sees what's going on.

But he's becoming much more bold. He doesn't question the obedience that God recalls anymore. And he just steps into this role of saying, yes, I will talk to the Lord God for you.

Yeah. Because that's what he's called me to do. That's what he's called me to do. Well, let's see what happens. So where'd we leave off? Well, I want to say one more thing about twice we're told about the frogs being left only in the Nile. Yes. Right. Well, that's the natural order.

That's the expected order. That's where you expect to find frogs. So what God has done here is he's just demonstrated, hey, I am over the natural order and I will cause these frogs to step way out of their natural realm and invade yours. Well, they shouldn't be in your ovens. Right. So we'll put them back to where they're supposed to be.

And I'm the one that will put them back where they belong in the first place. Well, and it's interesting, if you go back to verse 9, he says that the frogs may be cut off from you. Cut off. Which is always a euphemism for dying.

Dying. Yeah. So which is something that they can't do. They can't kill the frogs even though, you know. So that makes that a much more significant statement. Yeah. They'll be cut off.

God is the one who will take their life away. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we pick up where?

12? Is that where we are? I think that's where we left off.

Okay. So Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh and Moses cried to the Lord about the frogs and as he agreed with Pharaoh and the Lord did according to the word of Moses, the frogs. That's fascinating.

The frogs died out in the houses and the courtyards and in the fields and they gathered them together in heaps and the land stank. Can you imagine? Yeah. Let's just leave that there for a second because. You know what just struck me just as you just read it is we always see Moses doing according to the word of the Lord. But here we have the Lord doing according to the word of Moses. Yeah. That's true.

That's a really interesting turn of words there. Yeah. Because I've always wondered, you know, earlier here when he has this dialogue with Pharaoh, he says this is what's going to happen. Well, we don't get a glimpse of God telling Moses tell Pharaoh this is what's going to happen.

Right. Moses just says this is what's going to happen. So in a way I've always wondered whether or not Moses was, his boldness was here to say well, I'll tell you what God's going to do and God will do it. And in a sense God's following Moses' lead in a way here. Or the Lord had made clear to Moses what he intended to do. No, he could have, but he doesn't tell us that. In other places where he has discourse with Pharaoh, he tells us ahead of time that God told Moses, now Moses you tell him. So I've always wondered, we don't know, even if it's not recorded about God telling Moses what to say to Pharaoh, it is kind of interesting about what you just say about God following the word of Moses. It kind of supports me to say, well, maybe Moses in his faith said, well, God will do this.

And here we go. And God does it. Yeah. Well, and as history goes on, you know, Moses is the one who writes down the law and delivers it to the people. And so the word of Moses and the word of the Lord become kind of synonymous. Yeah.

More and more. Yeah, exactly. So that could be what's going on right here. So Moses cries to the Lord about the frogs and they all die out. And it's interesting, he doesn't say all the frogs in the universe die or the frogs in the Nile die, just the ones who are out of place. The ones that, well, it doesn't say they died in the oven or the kneading bowls.

Well, yeah, that's true. They died out in the houses and the courtyards and the fields. The implication is they died out in the house and they're no longer in the oven or the kneading bowls. Let's hope not.

Yeah, let's hope not. So now we have a whole bunch of dead frogs. And something that by law they could not do. They couldn't even kill the frogs. But now God has, that's the miracle. God has killed all these frogs, woof, just like that. In a very short amount of time the frogs are all dead. But the people still have to deal with the carcasses. Yeah, I think that's great. Isn't that interesting?

It's pretty graphic. They swept them up in heaps. And can you imagine big piles of dead frogs? Oh, man. Nope.

They surely did stink. Oh, man. Yeah. And they were able to endure the bloody Nile for a week enduring these piles of frogs for who knows how long is kind of a constant daily reminder of what just took place in their lives.

Yeah. Well, and we don't know exactly the timeframe or how long it took for all of these plagues to unfold. This one seems to have taken place a week after the Nile turning to blood. We're given that seven days. But later on when we'll find one happens when a certain grain was in the crop and another happens when a different grain was in the crop.

So that's a period perhaps of months in between. So this is going to be a drawn out process here. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. The land stink. Well, they don't stink the first day you sweep them up, right?

That happens a day, two, three days, four days later you begin to detect the smell. And you know, it occurs to me since this is such an in your face confrontation with one of the really principle gods of Egypt. You know, in our lives when we invest our trust in something that's not a god, but we invest in it like it is a god, we'd call that modern idolatry, where you invest in it or you look to it and you hope that it'll provide for you money and stuff like that do that. I invest in the money and I'm sure it's going to return back to me life. So you look to it for the essence of life.

That's idolatry. It's isn't it often the case that you do that thinking this will return back to me life. This will bring good into my life. And in the end, all it does is it stinks up the land. All it does is rot in your presence and you realize that the promise is not what you thought it was going to be. And then you have to live with the aftermath of that kind of stuff. And during that aftermath phase, like they are here with the aftermath of the frogs during that whole aftermath stage, you do some deep thinking like maybe I was deceived about what this could really do, what this would really provide for me in life. And maybe with the wreckage of this piled around me like the frogs in piles, maybe I need to reconsider that I put my faith or my trust in the wrong thing. So it just has a very strong corollary to me because God gives consequences to sin and consequences to us investing in God's that are not Him. And He allows us to get hip deep in the repercussions of that as a way for us to kind of get our head straight about what was I thinking kind of thing.

And that's exactly what happens here. The God of fertility is now dead in piles on the ground. Right. And that sets me thinking about Egyptian women who were pregnant or maybe in labor during this time. And what was it communicating to them? And this thing that they regarded as a token of favor of the gods was dying outside the door.

Yeah. In fact, I read somewhere that pregnant women often wore frog amulets just to kind of guarantee the birth. And the birth was always parallel likened to the overflow of the Nile too. So it's like, you know, man, can you imagine wearing a frog amulet, you know, hoping to the gods that your delivery is going to be okay. And now outside the door are these mountains, piles of frogs like, well, but maybe this God is not going to provide for me like I thought. Yeah, maybe.

Yeah, I just I just find it. I find it impressive that God allows us to live with the aftermath of our poor choices for us to kind of think some deep questions. That's all. So as we're kind of coming to the end of the time here, the the repeated thing with every one of these plagues is a statement about the condition of Pharaoh's heart.

Yes. And that's how this passage ends too in verse 15. But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them as the Lord had said.

But wait a second. He promised he'd do it. Well, yeah, you know, so what is it with Pharaoh hardening his heart?

The Lord had said, now, Pharaoh's heart is hard, I will harden it, and he will harden his own heart. Right. So we're not comfortable with that paradox. Yeah. Right.

Who is it? Is it God doing the hardening? Or is it Pharaoh? We are responsible for the condition of our own hearts, although God is also sovereign over the condition of our hearts. And boy, that makes us really uncomfortable to have those conflicting ideas held in tension. And yet the scripture seems to indicate, well, does indicate both are true.

Yeah. Yeah, they are both true. And like you say, we'll continue to see this thing over and over. But how hard a heart can you have when at the front you come to Moses and you say, fix this, plead, plead to God for me.

And Moses does. And then for us says, oh, never mind, I changed my mind. Oh, well, I know people in my own experience who, you know, get caught up in the emotion of their desperation in their circumstances. Oh, plead with God for me and I'll do this. Just relieve my circumstance.

And then the minute the relief comes, they're right back to where they were. Yep. Yep. And you know, maybe that's, I'm describing myself, sometimes that's more versus not always out there.

It's right in here. Well, plot spoiler all the way through the process of hardening Pharaoh's heart, you start to realize that we all have that same affliction. Yeah. But you know that we're told a couple of times now, we'll see it next week too, that the outcome of his hardened heart was he would not listen. Yeah. In response to relief of his immediate pain in his circumstances, he would not listen.

Nothing would convince him. Yep. Yep. Even though God complied with the pleading.

And interestingly enough, when God did comply, God knew that he wasn't going to change his mind. Right. Right. Yeah. But we're just getting a view here to the fact that Pharaoh's hardness is probably worse than we might have ever thought, because here he actually makes the promise to Moses and then just reneges at the end.

Yeah. Well, he's going to do that again. He will. But you know, in verse 10, when Moses said, Now be it as you say, so that you may know there's no one like the Lord our God. Well, in the next chapter, we'll see you next week, he says that you may know that the Lord is Lord in all the earth.

Right? So there's no one like him. He reigns over everything. Yep. He holds the natural world in order. Yep. He's the one that's in charge, not your phony panoply of God. Right. And I'm bringing you through this so that you will know who God is and who you are.

Yep. And that's a good explanation for why there's 10 plagues instead of five or two or none at all is that is Moses is going through a process with Pharaoh where Pharaoh is indeed getting to understand who God is a little bit more every single time. Even here, symbolically speaking, God is not only just more powerful than frogs, but God is more powerful than the God of fertility where life comes from and next generations come from.

Right. And so at this point, we're actually God's actually saying that your hope in your next generation that your fertility God guarantees your hope in your next generation is misplaced. This God will not do it for you. And that really hints toward the 10th plague in all of us in terms of the loss of the first part.

It does. So I mean, like you were saying, you think of a pregnant woman at this time, she's got her frog amulet around her neck. She's hoping that this frog God will make this pregnancy come out fine. And in the end, God's saying that frog God is not what guarantees that fertility or your next generation.

I'm the one who guarantees that. And sure enough, since it's repudiated here in the last plague, that's what goes is the first born of the next generation. Yeah. It's an interesting connection.

And we got some ground to cover between now and then. Yeah. I'm sorry. I just told you what the 10th plague is. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Everybody knows that.

So anyway, we're running short on time again. This was the second plague of the frogs, which to us in Western civilization seems like a crazy thing. But the frog God is a big deal, very big deal.

It was also connected with the Nile and the fertility of their plants as well as the women. I mean, hopes of the future are tied into the fertility God. So when you say that God confronts the fertility God, you're confronting your hope for a future in all of this.

So this is really quite fundamental to their beliefs. So I'm hoping you're hanging with us. Next time we're going to get to some more pests, not just frogs, but actually sort of worse in so many ways as God continues this process of revealing to Pharaoh who he is. So I'm Jim. And I'm Dorothy. And we hope that you're enjoying moving through Exodus. Yeah. Anyway, God's gracious and he knows us. So join us next time on More Than Ink. More Than Ink is a production of Main Street Church of Brigham City and is solely responsible for its content. To contact us with your questions or comments, just go to our website, morethanink.org. That was pretty good. Things are no longer cute.