Getting rid of the frogs

Exodus chapter 8, we actually pick up the reading from verse 25 of the previous chapter. Seven days passed after the Lord struck the Nile. Then the Lord said to Moses, go to Pharaoh and say to him, this is what the Lord says, let my people go, so that they may worship me.

If you refuse to let them go, I will plague your whole country with frogs. The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the house of your officials and on your people and into your ovens and kneading troughs.

The frogs will go up on you and your people and all your officials. Then the Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron, stretch out your hand with your staff over the streams and ponds 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.

But the magicians did the same things by their secret arts. They also made frogs come up on the land of Egypt. Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, pray to the Lord to take the frogs away from me and my people and I will let your people go to offer sacrifices to the Lord.

Moses said to Pharaoh, I leave to you the honor of setting the time for me to pray for you and your officials and your people, that you and your houses may be rid of the frogs except for those that remain in the Nile tomorrow, Pharaoh said. Moses replied, it will be as you say, so that you may know that there is no one like the Lord, our God. The frogs will leave you and your houses, your officials and your people.

They will remain only in the Nile. After Moses and Aaron left Pharaoh, Moses cried out to the Lord about the frogs he had brought on Pharaoh. And the Lord did what Moses asked.

The frogs died in the houses, in the courtyards and in the fields. They were piled high, they were piled into heaps and the land reeked of them. But when Pharaoh saw that there was relief, he hardened his heart and would not listen to Moses and Aaron, just as the Lord had said.

When I came back from Pakistan, I preached on grasshoppers, and having only recently come back from Africa, I now preach on frogs. This is not the beginning of a series on all the insects and animals of the Bible. It just happens that this particular passage of Scripture struck me very forcefully earlier on, on this last week, and it seems to me that encapsulated here is the gospel.

We can learn a lot about God and how to approach God, and indeed the meaning of the table that we're going to go to in a little while from this statement in Scripture of the problems that Moses had with Pharaoh. Frogs, they're slimy creatures, aren't they? I was driving from Washington, the village of Washington here, over to Bamber the other day, and there was a sign up, Beware Frogs Crossing. Apparently, it was the natural path of the frogs to a local pond, and they were concerned because, well, it seemed as though the human inhabitants around there had a policy of genocide towards the frogs.

You can learn a lot from frogs, can't you? I mean, there must be, and I admit it, many an intermediate school, a middle school teacher, or an infant school teacher who's thanked God for tadpoles. I mean, the nature lessons, do you remember them in your own school days? The tadpoles, and they spawn and so on and so forth, and after a while you got the frog, and well, it was highly delightful for you as a teacher and even more so for the pupils to learn from your great wisdom as to the miracles of nature. Tailless, amphibious animals develop from a tadpole.

That's an authoritative statement because I plucked it from the Oxford dictionary about ten minutes ago. And in reasonable numbers, well, they're acceptable, but when you get too many of them, they can become a pest. Isn't it interesting how God uses the most extreme ways, the most unusual methods in arresting the attention of people, of humbling them? Maybe He's going to do that with some of us this evening and you'll discover increasingly as the time goes by that my address on frogs is not just to arrest your attention, though I hope it will do that.

God once spoke to a man through a donkey, humbled him through a donkey. God once called or caused one of the leaders of the church to have a vision of animals and unclean insects in order to teach him a spiritual lesson. God can use His scythe to cripple a man who's proud in order to show him something of the delicate situation in which the man is unless he sorts out what the priorities are in his life and he gets right with God.

You can never enter the kingdom of God if you're a proud man. That's why the majority of people in Worthing stumble. Because the gospel that we preach here in the tab, the gospel preached in many Bible-believing churches in this town, is the gospel that addresses man and says, you are a hopeless person, you are a wretch, and without the intervention of God, God moving first, it is impossible for you to be saved.

And there is nothing that robs a man of pride more than the gospel of Jesus Christ. Pharaoh is an obdurate fellow. That means to say he's hard of heart.

He's got two basic problems. One is philosophical and the other is psychological. I've already unearthed the latter.

He's proud. The former is he's got a wrong conception of God. And actually the philosophical and the psychological there are interrelated because if you're proud then you will have a wrong conception of God.

And if you've got a wrong conception of God then the possibility, the probability is that you will be proud. You may laugh at the early Egyptians when I tell you that they used to worship the Nile, thought that Mother Nile, after all, bringing its water and therefore its life to the country was more than just ordinary, she was divine. She was the home of frogs.

Frogs of course live in rivers. And the Egyptians were almost outdoing the more modern Hindu by the largeness of their pantheon. Pantheon is the word that we use to describe a collection of gods.

And amongst the Egyptian gods, if you went into their catacombs or in their temples, you would find obeisance offered to the frogs. Pharaoh is on a collision course with Moses, or to put it perhaps more biblically, he's on a collision course with the God of Moses because he is trying to prevent the purposes of God as far as the Hebrews are concerned. The Hebrews, you remember, were locked into Egypt some century or so ago in much happier circumstances, but now a new Pharaoh has arisen who did not know Joseph.

He's scared for the well-being of his own people. The Hebrews were always pretty cute in terms of ingenuity and enterprise, and the thought was that this Jewish community within Egypt could overthrow Egypt, and so Pharaoh has a policy of genocide towards the Hebrews. And the people pray to the Lord, and the Lord sends them Moses, and Moses comes to Pharaoh and says, let my people go.

Not just because I'm asking, but because the God whom we serve, who brought us here in the days of Joseph, is saying it's time for us to depart. Pharaoh says no, and he's defying not Moses so much as the God of Moses. And he has these substitute gods on which he's depending, on which he places his hope.

And if you laugh at him, then let me remind you that there are many substitute gods that people have today in the twentieth century. May not be the Nile or the frogs, but there are things that in effect we give divine honors to. Anything that comes between you and the true God, anything that helps to form your opinions, that shapes your lifestyle, that is anti-God, and it brings the displeasure of God upon you.

There is only one God who is omnipresent, and that means He is everywhere. All right, you worship frogs. Let's give you a taste of the seeming omnipresence of frogs.

Let them come out, Moses, from the Nile, from the canals. Hop on into every home. Go into every nook and cranny.

Let Pharaoh realize the absurdity of giving divine honors to frogs. Let him see that if frogs did rule supreme that he and the Egyptians would be discomforted, not only with the noise of the frogs, but the smell of the frogs and the excrement of the frogs and so on and so forth. God has many ways of humbling a people.

Ah, you say, but it's not just the miraculous activity of Moses and Aaron which is brought into the forefront of the biblical stage here, because we are told that also the Egyptians were able to bring by their magical arts frogs from the rivers and onto the land of Egypt. My friend, the Bible never denies the reality of the occult. Did you hear that? What it denies is the validity.

The Bible does not say there aren't such things as magicians and sorcerers and the whole bag of tricks of the occult, that it's all a load of hooey. The Bible says that once you start to dabble in those things you may be arresting the attention of forces that you cannot control. And the Egyptians who are able to duplicate the number of frogs at one level cannot staunch the plague of frogs that come out of those canals.

And when the situation has got so grievous, so difficult that nobody in Egypt can cope, then and only then, Pharaoh comes to Moses and Aaron, pray to the Lord to take the frogs away. Now, you're an intelligent bunch of people, I don't say that patronizingly, but I can't think of anyone who will come to church who doesn't have a degree of intelligence. After all, the church is the only place where you can find some of the great answers to life's ponderous questions.

And you know that when I'm talking about frogs I'm only using that illustratively. There are things that God may allow in your life to happen, to humble you, to humiliate you, to bring you to an extreme so that in your extremity you will call out for the help of someone, some deity the like of which you do not know in terms of His character and His nature. And as a result of the extreme situation in which you find yourself, you begin on the course of wisdom that will lead you to the knowledge of God.

God will sometimes bring you to the end of your resources so that you might discover that that's where He wants to start a relationship with you. So, here is Pharaoh and he's humbled and the rest of the Egyptian people by these croaking, smelly, unlovable animals. So, Herod's in difficulty.

For whom does he send? John the Baptist. Herod's problems are moral. You see, there were frogs and frogs and there were frogs that were croaking in Herod's palace.

They were the frogs of immorality, the frogs of debauchery. The whole place was stinking and he's in trouble. And so he sends for John.

Agrippa and Felix are concerned about ultimate issues and they've got a man who's incarcerated in their jail by the name of Paul. And Paul is sprung out of jail temporally to address the questions that they cannot answer. But you can listen to Paul and you can listen to Herod and you can listen to Moses and you can listen to Aaron.

And provided you will not act on what they tell you to do, then listening to them in itself is of no eternal value to you. And you can come to the tabernacle and listen to me or Tim Soanes or Hugh Hill or if we could get him even Billy Graham. And you could give a mental assent to all that he said and yet unless that is applied to your heart and life and it changes your attitude, then listening will do you no good at all.

You'll still go back to the frogs. And this I tell you is the situation for Pharaoh. It seems as though his wisdom in approaching Moses and Aaron, which is commendable, is now advanced a stage further as he says, pray to the Lord to take the frogs away from me and my people and I will let your people go.

I mean here is the man asking for prayer. Surely you have to commend him. Sometimes perhaps you engage in prayer but do you know that there is such a thing as invalid prayer as well as valid prayer? Bad prayer as well as good prayer? You see, when Pharaoh comes before Moses and asks him for prayer, he asks him to address the difficulty which isn't the most important one.

There is an immediate difficulty and an ultimate difficulty. There is an original difficulty which is the cause of the symptoms of the immediate difficulty. You say, I don't understand you.

All right, let's think it back. Frogs were not the problem for Pharaoh. The problem for Pharaoh was his own heart.

I don't know too much of the distinction between a frog and a toad. The only knowledge I've got of toads is from reading Wind in the Willows and that's going back a few years. And the lovable toad was also a very boastful creature, you remember? And it's this boastfulness, this arrogance, this pride that you find featured in Pharaoh and in a thousand Pharaohs that there are in our own country, if not ten thousand Pharaohs.

And when Pharaoh asks for prayer, he's asking for prayer for the symptoms. He's not asking prayer for the cause. And so many of us come to the Lord and we're more concerned about the periphery of our problem than the heart of our problem, and God will not deal with you on that basis.

God will not answer that prayer. It is not a proper prayer. Pharaoh says to Moses, pray to the Lord to take the frogs from me.

It's not the frogs that he needs taking from him. It's his stubbornness. It's his hard attitude.

It's, in a word, his pride. Unthinking people sometimes pray. Prayer can be used in a superstitious form.

I remember in the World Cup sometimes, when it was, where was it last? Latin America? Come on, some of you, help me. Italy. All right, Italy, thank you.

Just shows how interested I am in football. But I do remember watching some of them try and take a penalty. Did you see that? They did the sign of the cross as they were taking a penalty.

Maybe they were scared that they'd be assassinated if they missed, and maybe at that level we can understand. But actually, it's a superstitious, symbolic way of using prayer. There's good prayer and bad prayer.

There's valid prayer and invalid prayer. Behind the problem of the frogs is Pharaoh and his attitude. Don't you see that it was God who allowed the frogs, as it was God who allowed the boils to come on Job to test him, as it was God who, in His sovereignty, uses the tragic domestic situation of Hosea, the infidelity of his wife, without approving the latter, in order to teach Hosea something of His mercy and His compassion and His goodness.

God allows mental instability to afflict Nebuchadnezzar and brings him down to the level of an animal so that Nebuchadnezzar will never vaunt himself up again as being one who has amassed the pride, the power of deity. Pharaoh, it's not the frogs, the frogs that you need praying against. It's yourself and your pride.

Pray to the Lord for me. Do you see a tear in Pharaoh's eye? Do you not know that prayer like this is as lifeless as a fallen autumn leaf that is spent of all life force whatsoever? Dead prayer, stillborn prayer, no tears, no throbbing with remorse, no saying I'm sorry for what I have done that is wrong, no apology on His behalf or on behalf of the people. You cannot come to God like that.

There are many folk who feel that you can. Tip your hat to God, go to church occasionally, you know He's alright, you can keep Him happy. That's not the God of the Bible.

The God of the Bible is an awesome God. He's a majestic God. He's a God who brings fear and terror into the hearts of people.

And sometimes we adulterate the biblical conception of God as we adjust it to fit our own philosophical presuppositions. How do you come to God? You come with a broken heart. You come in your penury.

You come in your beggarliness. You come in your creatureliness. Nothing in my hand I bring.

Simply to His cross I cling. Lord, I've heard the croaking of the frogs. I know that there are things in my life which are wrong, things that I have allowed, things that I have put my trust in.

Lord, I know that is an offence to you and I come and I apologise. I repent. Who told you that being a Christian was an easy thing? It is not.

If there is not an element of pain in becoming a Christian, I very much doubt whether you've ever become one. Because one of the stages in conversion is conviction. It's a hatred of sin.

And that's what Herod, and that's what Agrippa, and Felix, and Pharaoh never had. And when you haven't got that, it's impossible to go through to the experience of salvation. What you do is you promise more than you're able to deliver, which is precisely what Pharaoh did.

Pray to the Lord to take the people go to offer sacrifices to the Lord. There may have been a fleeting sincerity, but it was very cosmetic. The spur of the moment, but it wasn't the conviction of the heart.

And when the frogs have gone, Pharaoh is still in this same stubborn position. Heaping up judgment against the day of judgment. Because every time you come under the sound of the gospel, every time Moses and Aaron or their equivalents stand before you and point out the right road and you turn back from it, then you make your hardness that much more culpable.

You see, this God is not a God to be trifled with. To lie to one another is awful. To lie to God is obscene.

Two people in the New Testament lost their lives through lying to God. Sometimes in a very judgmental and a very dramatic fashion, He shows His hostility towards subterfuge and deceit. How do you deal with frogs? How do you deal with your sin? You come to the Lord and you say, Lord God, I believe that in the person of Jesus Christ you have made it possible for all the wrong that I have done to be relieved.

I believe that your shed blood can deal with all that has infested my life. I believe that your Spirit can so enter me that I can become a new person, a man or a woman after your heart who brings you joy, who brings you pleasure. You can only deal with frogs by being humbled and coming to the Lord who offers salvation to the humble and to the contrite.

Pharaoh never did it. My address has no happy ending as far as he is concerned, but there are many people who have seen the light, turned back on their ways and embraced the salvation which Almighty God has to offer. Will you? A moment of prayer.

Let's turn to 184 in Hymns of Faith. We're going to sing it to the tune of Amazing Grace. Alas, and did my Saviour bleed, and did my Sovereign die? Would He devote that sacred head for such a worm as I? Let's sing this sensitively, sensibly.

Probably our friends will be able to join us at this point. I'm sorry I was a little late in the pulpit this evening, but it was because of greeting them. And let's together enjoy a time around the Lord's table and then hearing a little bit, maybe hearing some of the songs from Romania, of which we'll have a sing.

I love you, Lord. I will proclaim. Hallelujah.

I bless your name. It's number 90, the white supplement. As we sing this, the elements will be distributed.

The Apostle Paul makes it very clear that before you participate in the Lord's supper, taking bread and drinking wine, you have to examine yourself. I'm going to ask the musicians to play softly and suggest that this would be the appropriate moment for you to bring quietly before the Lord those things that you're not too happy about, the sins that have disturbed you. And now is the time to ask forgiveness, to clear your heart before Him in preparation of what you will be doing in a few minutes' time.

It's Thursday evening and Jesus has seen the sun set for the last time. In about 15 hours, this 33-year-old man from Nazareth, a carpenter by trade, a preacher by profession, knows that before the sun sets again, he would be dead and buried. You know, at his age, most people would say that the best years lie ahead.

Muhammad was 60 when he died. Plato and Buddha will reach their 80s. And you would expect the knowledge of what was about to happen to plunge Jesus into gloom and despondency, but it didn't.

Why? Well, because he didn't see his death as the end, but as a necessary act to accomplish his life's mission. Remember, it was only seconds before he died that he shouted, it is finished. So, although it was his last evening, Jesus was not looking back but forward.

And in the upper room, at some point during the meal, he took a loaf of bread, he gave thanks, he broke it into pieces and he handed it around saying, this is my body which is given for you to do this in remembrance of me. And after supper had ended, he took a cup of wine, he gave thanks, he passed it around his disciples and he said, this cup is the new covenant in my blood which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this when you drink it in remembrance of me.

Now, this is incredible. Six hundred years before that time, the prophet Jeremiah, writing what God had given him to say, wrote that the time is coming when I will make a new covenant. I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts, for I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sin no more.

And now, Jesus of Nazareth was declaring that the new covenant prophesied by Jeremiah was about to be established, and the sacrifice to seal this covenant was to be the shedding of his blood in his death. Brothers and sisters, we have here the very thinking in Jesus' mind. He's telling us that he is the divinely appointed sacrifice by which the new covenant, with its promises of sin forgiven, will be ratified.

He's saying that he is going to die in order to bring to his people, that's you and me, into the new covenant, into that new relationship with God. But it's not a spectator event. The disciples then, like us now, they had to participate.

It's not enough to watch. You have to eat and to drink. And this was and still is an acted parable of receiving Christ as our crucified Savior and on feeding him in our hearts by faith.

I tell you the truth, unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. Lamb of God, Holy One, Jesus Christ, Son of God, lifted up willingly to die, that I, the guilty one, may know the blood once shed, still freely flowing, still cleansing, still healing.

I exalt you, Jesus, my sacrifice. I exalt you, my Redeemer and my Lord. It's number 185 in the supplement.

Let's just stand and sing. I believe in Jesus. I believe in Jesus.

I believe in Jesus. I believe in Jesus. Thank you for the cross, the price you paid for us, how you gave yourself so completely, precious Lord.

Now our sins are gone, all forgiven, covered by your blood, all forgotten. Thank you, Lord. Oh, I love you, Lord.

Really love you, Lord. It's number 180.