Exodus 8:1­4 (TNIV)

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 send a plague of frogs on your whole country. The Nile will teem with frogs. They will come up into your palace and your bedroom and onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and on your people, and into your ovens and kneading troughs. The frogs will come up on you and your people and all your officials."'


I suspect that the last thing you need, right now, is to be thinking about frogs in your bed! Welcome to the disgusting reality of the battle for total authority between the god-king Pharaoh of Egypt and Almighty God, King of kings.

This was a significant and massive spiritual battle; it inevitably had awful material and physical outcomes. With today's materialistic outlook, the reality of the spiritual is often ignored or regarded as a separate compartment of life that can be investigated by those who are interested. Even Christians are not all convinced that spiritual warfare is a reality.

Yet all around us we see the human cost of rebellion against God: brokenness, despair and heartache revealed in drug taking, child abuse and violence. How much we need the evil one to be forced to 'let my people go'! You will recall that the first plague had been the Nile turning to blood. As we shall see, it was to take blood of a different kind to break the chains of evil--in Egypt, then at Calvary.

Perhaps it was the pollution of the Nile that forced the frogs from their natural habitat. Much scientific thought has been given to the succession of natural disasters that befell the Egyptian land and people, but

Pharaoh knew that they were natural disasters with supernatural dimensions and timing that revealed a spiritual reality.

The Hebrew words translated `plague' mean both a `blow' and a 'sign'.

Pharaoh was discovering that the God he had abused by enslaving his people and refusing to repent was a God who would not allow sin to go unpunished (the 'blow' of judgment) but would also 'signpost' his offer of mercy.


Prayer

Lord God, help us to understand the signs of the times. Amen



Stephen Rand


[from New Daylight September - December 2007]