The Finger of God

Transcript

I'd like to ask you to turn with me to Exodus chapter 7 this morning. Exodus chapter 7 will begin in the last verse of chapter 7 verse 25 and will read down through chapter 8 verse 19. Exodus chapter 7 and verse 25. Hear now the word of the Lord. Ten full days passed after the Lord had struck the Nile.

Then the Lord said to Moses, "Go into 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 beds and into the houses of your servants and your people and into your ovens and your kneading bowls. The frogs shall come up on you and on your people and on all your servants.' And the Lord said to Moses, 'Say to Aaron, 'Stretch out your hand with your staff over the rivers, over the canals 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. But the magicians did the same by their secret arts and made frogs come up on the land of Egypt. Then Pharaoh called Moses and Aaron and said, 'Plead with the Lord to take away the frogs from me and from my people, and I will let the people go to sacrifice to the Lord.' 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 be cut off from you and your houses and be left only in the Nile.' And he said, 'Tomorrow.' 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.' So Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh, and Moses cried to the Lord about the frogs, as he had agreed with Pharaoh. And the Lord did according to the word of Moses. The frogs died out in the houses, the courtyards, and the fields, and they gathered them together in heaps, and the land stank. But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them, as the Lord said.

And the Lord said to Moses, 'Say to Aaron, 'Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth, so that it may become gnats in all the land of Egypt.' And they did so. Aaron stretched out his hand with his staff and struck the dust of the earth, and there were gnats on man and beast. All the dust of the earth became gnats in all the land of Egypt. The magicians tried by their secret arts to produce gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on men and beasts.

Then the magicians said to Pharaoh, 'This is the finger of God.' But Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them, as the Lord had said." This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Father I pray that we would see in this text you revealing yourself in judgment, but also revealing yourself by separating your people from the world unto yourself. Let us be that people we pray.

In Christ's name. Amen. You may be seated. Who is the Lord that I should obey his word and let Israel go? That's really the question that is driving the entire plague narrative.

Pharaoh, of course, asked that question as a sort of dismissal, "I don't want to obey this God of yours." But God received it as an invitation. And God sets out in these plagues to answer that question with a series of demonstrations so devastating that as we see in our text this morning, even Pharaoh's own magicians will be forced to recognize that this is the finger of God. We've been working through Exodus over these several months, and we've seen that this book is centered on the redemption of God's people. But as is always true with redemption, God first makes himself known. And that really is the central theme of these first chapters, this first section of the book of Exodus.

God is making himself known. He revealed his name to Moses in the bush. He declared his covenant purposes in chapter 6. And now, beginning in chapter 7, he is demonstrating who he is not with words alone, but with acts of unmistakable power. These plagues are God's answer to Pharaoh's question.

But as we began last week, the plagues, and we'll be working through them over the course of the next several weeks, I'd like to take just a moment to briefly overview the structure of these plagues so that you can see where we're going. It might be helpful to take a few notes or even mark some things in the margins of your Bible so that as we work through these plagues, you'll understand why we are doing what we're doing. These plagues are not random or disorganized. God is doing something very specific with these plagues. In fact, the ten plagues are organized in three cycles of three, followed by the climactic tenth plague that stands on its own.

And we can see these three cycles of three in a couple ways. First, we can see this in the warning pattern. For instance, in plague one, that Pastor Matt covered last week, God tells Moses to meet Pharaoh in the morning at the Nile. In plague two that we saw this morning, God tells Moses to go into Pharaoh in the palace, chapter eight, verse one. And then if you noticed, as we read this morning, in plague three, there is no warning at all.

God just strikes. Well, the same thing happens in the next set of three. In plague four, once again, it is morning, there's a warning in the morning at the Nile, chapter eight, verse 20. Plague five, God commands Moses to go into Pharaoh in the palace, chapter nine, verse one. And plague six, there is no warning, God just strikes.

And the same thing happens. Plague seven, morning at the Nile. Plague eight, go to Pharaoh in the palace. Plague nine, no warning, God just strikes. So with each cycle, morning at the river, in the palace, no warning.

River palace, no warning. River palace, no warning. Three rounds of three. And of course, that's no coincidence. That is God's design.

Also, the part that the magicians play demonstrates a clear progression in these plagues. In plagues one and two, as we saw last week and then this week, the magicians replicate what God does. But, as we saw in plague three, they fail. They try to produce gnats and they can't. By plague six, the magicians are not just failing, they are afflicted.

The boils break out on them and they cannot even stand before Moses. And after that, after plague six, they vanish from the story entirely. Their decline tracks these three cycles. They imitate, they fail, that's cycle one, they suffer, that's cycle two, and they completely disappear in cycle three. And God himself clearly marks the cycles.

At the start of cycle one, in chapter seven, verse 17, he says, "By this you shall know that I am the Lord." At the start of cycle two, in chapter eight, verse 22, he says, "That you may know that I, the Lord, am in the midst of the earth." And at the start of cycle three, in chapter nine, verse 14, he says, "That you may know that there is none like me in all the earth." Three purpose statements, three cycles, one progressive revelation of God in answer to the central question of this book, "Who is Yahweh that I should obey him?" That's Pharaoh's question, that's the central question of this book. But I want to urge us this morning as we move into the rest of cycle two, that this also is the question that each one of us in this room should be asking as we work through these cycles. "Who is Yahweh that I should obey him?" God answers that question really in three primary ways as he works through the cycle of plagues. And we're going to see these this morning, and we're going to continue to see these as we work through the additional two cycles and the final tenth plague. How does God answer that question?

Well, first, and this is one that Pastor Matt mentioned, and this is the one we probably already know, each of the plagues demonstrates God's superiority over one of the gods of Egypt. And we'll see another example of that this morning. But second, the plagues demonstrate God's absolute control over creation. In fact, the plagues are a sort of act of de-creation. They reverse the order of Genesis.

For instance, in Genesis 2, God separates the waters, and in the first plague, those waters become blood and lose their life-sustaining purpose. On day three, God separated the water from the dry land and he brought forth vegetation, and the frogs, as we'll see this morning, violate that boundary. On day five and six, God filled the world with creatures, each according to its kind, and he declared all of those creatures good. But in the plagues, the creatures turn hostile. The frogs without restraint, the gnats without number.

His plagues undo creation itself. Where Pharaoh plays God, the true God shows what happens when his order is rejected. And so as we continue with cycle one this week, we're still answering that same question. Who is the Lord that I should obey him? Last Sunday, Pastor Matt walked through the first plague, the turning of the Nile into blood, and today we come to plagues two and three, frogs and gnats, the completion of cycle one.

And again, this question needs to always be lingering in our minds as we work through these. Who is the Lord? Well, these plagues answer that question very distinctly and in significant ways. First, God is the invading king. God does not act on Egypt from a polite distance.

He marches into Egypt's bedrooms and ovens and temples, and he turns the very gods that Egypt worships into the instruments of Egypt's torment. Notice verse 25, "Seven full days passed after the Lord had struck the Nile." It's interesting that God gives Pharaoh some time to consider that first plague. He gives them seven days to reconsider, seven days to ask whether perhaps the God of these Hebrew slaves is someone that he ought to take seriously. But of course, Pharaoh does not reconsider. And so the second plague comes.

Moses goes into Pharaoh's palace and says, "The Nile shall swarm with frogs and 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 the ovens and your kneading bowls." And then God does exactly what he promised. Imagine for a moment an Egyptian woman rising before dawn to start the morning bread. She lifts the lid of her clay oven and frogs leap at her face, slick and cold and tangling in her hair, dropping onto her bare feet. She stumbles back and the floor is just covered with frogs. She reaches for the kneading bowl where she mixes dough for her children's breakfast and a frog just sits there in the flower, throat pulsing.

She can't cook. Or picture an Egyptian official that same night pulling back his linen sheets and frogs are on the pillow and between the sheets and under the bed and he brushes them off and more come, the wet slapping on the flesh on the stone, croaking not from the distance in the Nile where it should be but in the very room where he is supposed to be safe. The baby cries because the frog is crawling across her face. She can't sleep. I mean the most ordinary acts of family life, feeding and children and resting in one's own bed are completely gone.

This is where understanding the de-creation aspect really helps us understand what God is doing here. In Genesis chapter one, God set boundaries. He separated the water from the dry land. He placed creatures in their proper domains and here the frogs are violating every boundary. Water creatures are covering the land.

They are in the bedrooms and in the kitchens. The created order is coming undone because Pharaoh refuses to acknowledge the one who established that order in the first place. We see here also the superiority over false gods. The Egyptians worshiped a goddess named Hecate who was depicted with the head of a frog. She was the goddess of fertility and childbirth.

Egyptian women wore amulets in the shape of frogs. Midwives were called servants of Hecate. In Egypt the frog was sacred. The frog wasn't just tolerated, the frog was venerated. To harm a frog was to offend a deity and now God floods the land with these sacred frogs turning an object of worship into a source of misery.

The Egyptians couldn't even kill them without committing sacrilege in their religion and they can't live with them without losing their minds. Now notice what the magicians did again, verse 7, the magicians did the same by their sacred arts and made frogs come up on the land of Egypt. Now that might seem to be a win for the magicians of Egypt but think about what is happening here. Egypt is already drowning in frogs. Frogs in the beds and frogs in the bread and the best that Pharaoh's magicians can do is just to make more frogs.

They can imitate but they can't really help the situation. They can replicate the problem but they cannot solve the problem. And of course this is a consistent pattern of false religions and every counterfeit system. They can mimic the forms of divine power but they have no capacity to deliver. The magicians can make frogs but they can't make them leave.

They can create chaos but they can't restore order. Imitation is not power. And so Pharaoh then does something that he's not done before. In verse 8 he says, "plead with the Lord to take the frogs away from me and from my people and I will let the people sacrifice to the Lord." This is the first confession of Pharaoh in the plague narrative. Pharaoh who asked who is the Lord now asks Moses to plead with the Lord on his behalf.

He knows he can't turn to his own gods. He knows his magicians are useless. For the first time Pharaoh acknowledges however grudgingly that the God of Israel has power that his gods do not. But then of course comes a very revealing moment. Moses offers Pharaoh the dignity of setting the time for the frog's removal and Pharaoh says one word, tomorrow.

Can you imagine this? Tomorrow why? Not today, not this afternoon, tomorrow because Pharaoh would rather endure one more sleepless night of croaking and slime and the wet weight of creatures on his chest than to bend the knee right now. Because repentance even when we see its necessity is costly, true repentance is costly. It requires surrender.

It costs us our autonomy and Pharaoh would rather sleep with frogs than bow. This really hints at the fact that this is not true repentance. So Moses prays the Lord answers and the frogs die. And so now picture this verse 13, the frogs died out in the houses and the courtyards and the fields and they gathered them together in heaps and the land stink. God does not make the frogs vanish, he kills them where they are.

And the Egyptians are forced to gather millions of dead, bloating, stinking frogs. The sacred symbol of Hecate, the goddess of fertility and life, lies decomposing in heaps on the ground. This is what the false worship of pagan gods smells like to God. This is the final fragrance of every idol. And the moment of relief comes, the moment the last heap is carted away and the air begins to clear what is Pharaoh's response.

Process of heart. Verse 15, "But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them." The crisis passed, the pressure lifted and the resolve to submit evaporated like morning fog. Who is Yahweh? Yahweh is the invading king. Nothing can escape from the power of Yahweh.

The second, then, Yahweh is not only the invading king, Yahweh is the unrivaled God. He cannot be copied. He cannot be counterfeited. He cannot be domesticated in a category of divinity alongside other gods. And this is communicated in the third plague.

The third plague, as we've already noted, comes without warning. No morning confrontation at the Nile, no visit to the palace, no announcement. God just acts, the Lord says to Moses, "Say to Aaron, 'Stretch out your staff and strike the dust of the earth so that it may become gnats in all the land of Egypt.' And Aaron strikes the dust of the earth and the dust becomes gnats." When we hear that, that phrase should immediately bring something to our minds from the book of Genesis. "Then the Lord God formed the man of the dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living creature." Dust is the raw material of creation. It is the substance from which God made Adam.

God took dust and shaped it with his own hands and breathed his own breath into it and it became a living, breathing man made in his image, the pinnacle of everything that God has made. But now, in a grim reversal of that creative act, the dust of the ground does not become a living man made in God's image. The dust of the ground becomes swarms that torment every living being in the earth. Verse 17, "All the dust of the earth became gnats in all the land of Egypt." This is de-creation at its most pointed. The substance of human origin is turned against humanity and the gnats are everywhere.

On man and beast, they are in your eyes, they are in your nostrils. Every breath that you draw pulls in stinging creatures. They crawl into your ears. They cover the livestock until the animals are frantic, stamping and shaking their heads. They are everywhere.

I mean, can you imagine? It's a little bit like pollen in Georgia. And so, the magicians do what they've done before. Verse 18, "The magicians tried by their secret arts to produce gnats, but they could not." For the first time in the plague narrative, the magicians failed. Staff turned to snake?

Check. They turned the water into blood. They produced frogs. But gnats are beyond them. Their power had reached its limit.

Their imitation hit a wall that they could not climb. You see, what this reveal is that the gap between the God of Israel and the gods of Egypt is not a matter of degree, it is a matter of kind. The Lord is not slightly stronger than Hecate or Thor or Ra. He is not a God among gods. He is God and they are nothing.

He is unrivaled. Their power is not inferior. Their power is borrowed, imitative, and now exposed to be a counterfeit. And amazingly, the magicians confess this, verse 19. This is the climax of this whole first cycle.

When the magicians said to Pharaoh, "This is the finger of God." In the Hebrew, the article is definite, "The finger of God." These magicians recognized a power categorically different from anything in their experience. This is not sorcery on a grander scale. This is the creator of the universe acting in history and He is unrivaled. This third plague has revealed that the Lord is God whose power ultimately cannot be replicated. He is the God before whom every imitation collapses.

He is the God whose finger, not His arm, not His hand, not His whole body, but His finger is sufficient to shatter the pretensions of the most powerful empire on earth. And He used His finger to create gnats, the smallest creatures imaginable, and they are enough. God doesn't need an army. He only needs His little finger. But Pharaoh's heart is hardened.

Even his own advisor's confession does not move him. Even the men he trusts to interpret the spiritual world tell him plainly that this is the work of one true God and he refuses. This is what hardness of heart looks like in its most terrifying form. Not the absence of evidence he had, all the evidence he needed, but the refusal to submit to evidence that is right in front of you. Not ignorance, defiance.

Now I mentioned that the magician's confession here is really the climax of all of cycle one. This phrase, the finger of God, doesn't end here in Exodus chapter 8. The magicians are speaking better than they even know because this phrase appears then again in three critical places in scripture. It appears first here in Exodus chapter 8 verse 19 where the finger of God is a finger of judgment. But it's also going to appear later in Exodus chapter 31 where God uses his finger for a different purpose.

Exodus chapter 31 verse 18 says, "And he gave to Moses when he had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God." The finger that humiliated the gods of Egypt is the finger that wrote the Ten Commandments. The finger that reduced Pharaoh's magicians to stammering confession is the finger that inscribed the moral law of God on tablets of stone. And what this tells us, this helps to interpret for us what is happening in these plagues. Because the God who tears down false worship is the same God who establishes true worship. He is not destroying for destruction's sake in these plagues.

He is tearing down the false in order to write what is true. The finger of judgment is also the finger of revelation. This is important because we need to recognize one key observation about this cycle of plagues that we might not realize and that will become very significant in the next cycle of plagues. This first cycle of plagues, maybe you don't realize it, but this first cycle of plagues affected the Israelites just as much as it affected the Egyptians. That won't always be the case, but in this cycle it's true.

The Israelites had no water because it was blood. The frogs and the gnats invaded their homes just as much as the Egyptians. Why? Here's the key. And this is connected to the Ten Commandments in a moment.

It's because God is not just judging the Egyptians. God is also calling his people out of their idolatry and calling them to himself. Israel had lived in Egypt for 430 years, four centuries. And in those centuries, Israel had absorbed Egypt's gods. Joshua confirms this a generation later when standing at Shechem he tells all of Israel, "Put away the gods that your father served before the river and in Egypt and serve the Lord." Israel worshipped Hecate.

Israel was worshipping the god of the Nile. And so the finger of God is revealing himself to his own people. He is breaking their allegiance to the gods that they had adopted during four centuries of cultural immersion. And then he's going to take those people who he calls out from that idolatry and he's going to take that same finger and reveal himself to them in his law, in the moral requirements for his people. Do you remember what Pharaoh said in his question?

Pharaoh's question was, "Who is the Lord that I should obey him?" Pharaoh knew instinctively that to know God was to obey God. And God is going to use that same finger to write his law that his people must obey. But as the rest of Exodus is going to clearly demonstrate to us, his people are unable to obey his law. This is why Joshua, 40 years later after Sinai, in the Promised Land, is going to have to tell them once again to put away the Egyptian gods and serve the Lord. And this leads us to the third important occurrence of this phrase, the finger of God in scripture.

The finger of God is a finger of judgment. The finger of God is a finger in which God gives his law. The third in Luke 11, verse 20, "The Pharisees have watched Jesus cast out a demon, and rather than acknowledging the obvious, rather than acknowledging the evidence before them, that the power of God is at work in this man, just like Pharaoh, the Pharisees accuse Jesus of operating by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons." Jesus responds to them and says, "But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out demons, then the kingdom of God has come upon you." Same phrase, finger of God, and Jesus applies it to himself. The finger that broke Egypt's gods and wrote the law of Sinai is now present in the person of Jesus Christ casting out demons, destroying the work of the devil, and announcing the arrival of God's kingdom. In Exodus, God does redeem the nation of Israel from bondage with his finger.

That's the whole purpose of this book, to show us that. But God doesn't redeem them so that they can keep serving Egyptian gods. He redeems them to serve him, and he writes his law with his finger so that they will know what that service looks like, but that law is unable to give them the power to obey, and so God sends his finger, his son, Jesus Christ, to complete the redemption of his people. The finger of God that enacts his judgment upon sinners is the same finger of God that redeems his people. The same power that acted in Egypt acts in Christ, and it acts for the same purpose, to reveal God to his people, to reveal us from bondage, and to establish the worship of the one true God.

And that same finger of God that wrote the law on tablets of stone now writes on human hearts. Jeremiah 31, verse 33, "I will put my law within them and I will write it on their hearts." God's powerful finger redeemed you through Christ, and God's powerful finger is at work right now within you, killing your sin, writing his truth on the inside of your soul, conforming you to the image of his son. The finger that shattered Pharaoh is the finger that right now is rewriting your heart. And so this is the purpose of these plagues made clear here in cycle one. God is making himself known.

He is making himself known in judgment to those who reject him, but he is also making himself known in redemption to his chosen people, stripping away their allegiance to false gods and conforming them to his law. And God continues to reveal himself in these same two ways today to these same two kinds of people. If you're here this morning and you do not know God, then I need to ask you the question that Pharaoh was forced to answer. Children, I want you to listen to this question, young people who've grown up in Christian families, listen to this question. Do you know God?

Not just do you know about God, but do you know God? You might say, "Well, I just don't know if he's real. Prove to me that he's real, and maybe I'll obey him." No. God has not left his existence as an open question for you to consider at your leisure. He has revealed himself.

Like Pharaoh, all of the evidence is plainly before you. He has demonstrated who he is in creation. The heavens declare the glory of God. The sky above proclaims his handiwork in your conscience. The moral law is written on your heart and accuses you when you violate it.

In scripture, in the written record of his character, his acts, his commands, and his promises, and supremely he has revealed himself in Christ, who is the image of the invisible God. The Bible teaches that you, even though you might deny it, you know that God is real. The problem is not that God has not revealed himself to you. The problem is not that there is not enough evidence. The problem is not that you don't know if he is real.

You do. You are just suppressing that knowledge, like Pharaoh. God is not waiting for you to decide whether he is real. He has decided that question already. The plagues clearly demonstrate that God does not leave himself without a witness.

He demonstrates. He acts. And when he acts, this is the question you need to ask yourself, when he acts, the only question left is how will you respond? To hear this too, the same finger that struck Egypt is the finger that drew a plan of redemption for his people. The gospel is here, right here in the plagues, a God of devastating power who provides a substitute for those who trust in him.

And so I beg with you, come to him. Do not say tomorrow, Pharaoh said tomorrow, and tomorrow hardened him further. Come today. But if you are in Christ this morning, the question is not whether you know God. You do.

But the question, like for Israel, is whether your allegiance is entirely his. Or have you granted some allegiance to the world? Have you granted some trust to the world's systems? Some devotion to its comforts. The prophet Ezekiel tells us that the Israelites feasted their eyes on the detestable things of Egypt.

They wore the amulets, they bowed at the shrines, and God had to break that allegiance through dramatic revelation before he could lead them out. We live in our own Egypt, don't we? We have spent our lives immersed in a culture that has its own gods, comfort, security, reputation, control, entertainment, autonomy, and those gods do not release their grip easily. We carry them with us into the life of faith in the same way that Israel carried Egyptian amulets into the wilderness. We sit in these pews on Sunday mornings and we worship the living God, and then we go home and give our evenings and our energy and our anxieties and our ambitions to gods that cannot save us and never could.

The plagues are God's pattern. He reveals himself to his people and separates them from competing allegiances. He did that in the frogs and the gnats, and he does that in your life through scripture where his character is displayed and your idols are named. He does it through suffering when the things that you are trusting in and resting in and finding your joy in are stripped away from you, and you discover whether your faith was in him or in his gifts. He does it through the Spirit's conviction, that quiet, persistent pressure on your conscience from his word that will not let you rest with a divided heart.

You shall have no other gods before me. That command written by the finger of God is the rightful claim of God who has revealed himself as an invading king and an unrivaled God. He has shown you who he is, hasn't he, believer? He has demonstrated his power. He has provided you with his finger, his only son, and in the blazing light of that revelation, no other God can stand.

Hecate cannot stand, the Nile God cannot stand, and the small, respectable idols of your comfortable life cannot stand either. God has revealed himself and he will not share his glory. And so this morning, if you do not know him, come, he has revealed himself. The finger of God has come and been slain for the forgiveness of our sins. The way is open, so come.

And if you do know him, examine your allegiances. Put away the gods of Egypt. You cannot serve the God who split the Nile and also bow to the gods who could not keep frogs in the marsh. He has shown you who he is, and so live as though you believe it. Let's pray.

Father, we praise you that you did not just create the universe, expect us to obey you, but leave us without revelation of who you are. You have clearly revealed yourself. You have revealed yourself in creation. You have revealed yourself in our consciences. You have revealed yourself in your word.

You have revealed yourself in judgment. You have revealed yourself in the law. You have revealed yourself in the person of your son. We are without excuse. What a great blessing that you are a self-revealing God.

And so I pray that if there is someone here this morning, like Pharaoh, asking the question, who is this God, when the evidence is right before them, I pray that your spirit by your word would soften their hard hearts and make them confess that truly this is the finger of God. And I pray for those of us who are believers who still hold on to some of those idols of Egypt, that through these various ways that you reveal yourself to us, these various ways that you reveal our idols to us, that we would work again by your spirit through your word to rid ourselves of our allegiance to those false gods and to rest in you and you alone. We pray this in the name of Christ, Amen.