Exodus 7:1-13 • Snakes that Eat gods

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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)

 We're in Exodus 7, Exodus 7, as the story continues. We began in bull rushes with Moses floating on the Nile as an infant, from bull rushes to burning bush to bricks without straw.



 It's a great story, but it's much more than a story.



 Here is actually a diagram of how God is rescuing hardened sinners from their slavery to sin. Let's look at it together, Exodus chapter 7. I'll ask that you stand as we honor God's Word. I'll read the first 13 verses of Exodus chapter 7. "And the Lord said to Moses, "See, I've made you like a God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet. You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go out of his hand.



 But I will harden Pharaoh's heart.



 And though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you.



 Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my host, my people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment.



 The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them." Moses and Aaron did so. They did just as the Lord commanded them. Now Moses was 80 years old, and Aaron, 83 years old, when they spoke to Pharaoh.



 Then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, "When Pharaoh says to you, "Prove yourselves by working a miracle," then you shall say to Aaron, "Take your staff and cast it down before Pharaoh that it may become a serpent." So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded. Aaron cast down his staff before Pharaoh and his servants, and it became a serpent.



 Then Pharaoh summoned the wise men and the sorcerers, and they, the magicians of Egypt, also did the same by their secret arts.



 For each man cast down his staff and they became serpents.



 But Aaron's staff swallowed up their staffs. Still Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them as the Lord said. Let's pray together.



 Heavenly Father, this is Your Word that we might hear Your voice.



 But we remember the words of the New Testament writer who even picked up from this count.



 Now if you hear his voice, harden not your heart.



 May it be true of us this day, Father, that we have been made sensitive to Your Word, our hearts tender to Your purposes. Grant it that we might honor You, in Jesus' name. Amen.



 Please be seated.



 The gingham dog and the calico cat, side by side on the table sat, was half past twelve, and what do you think?



 Not one or the other had slept awake.



 The old Dutch clock and the Chinese plate appeared to know as sure as fate there was going to be a terrible spat.



 The gingham dog said, "Bow, wow, wow!" and the calico cat, "Meow!" They wallowed this way and tumbled that, employing every tooth and claw in the awfulest way you ever saw, and oh, how the gingham and calico flew.



 This morning, where the two had sat, they found no trace of dog or cat.



 And some folks think until this day that burglar stole that pair away, but the truth about the cat and pup is this.



 They ate each other up.



 Now what do you think of that?



 And what do you think about Exodus 7?



 There's this delightful account of a staff becoming a serpent, and then more staffs becoming a serpent, and then the one eats up all the others. It's what the movie makers love and the storytellers love to talk about. It's delightful to think about until you consider what is actually happening in the heart of Moses and his people. God does something amazing. He gives Moses the staff that becomes a serpent, and then the Egyptian magicians can do the same thing.



 And seeing that they can, Pharaoh, whose heart is supposed to be made tender by the miracles,



 actually becomes harder against the purposes of God, and not just harder, but madder and meaner, even when the staff of Aaron eats up the serpents.



 Pharaoh just thinks another trick, another parlor game, a little magic show combined with a zoo act.



 And so he does not listen. The consequence for the people of Israel, and surely Moses, is that they will just get more and more frightened of the condition they're in. After all, the very first time that Moses threw down his staff at God's order and it turned into a snake, Moses is a snake and he runs away from it.



 And then when the magicians can produce snakes as well, not only do they know Pharaoh won't care about us, but he is bound to have more and more consequence toward us in terms of his anger.



 It is a lesson for us, a reminder that we sometimes, when God begins to work, can lose heart because it doesn't seem he's accomplishing everything that he should in the very first round. We look at a boss who's not been changed because of our testimony, a child who continues to be wayward despite the way we raise them, or what we try to say in the phone calls long distance now.



 We look at family members that we love, even a spouse who will not listen to the things that we are saying out of faithfulness to the Lord.



 What Exodus is saying is, the first round is not the end of the fight. There are ten plagues coming, and God is saying, "I'm in for all ten rounds."



 And for that reason, we do not lose heart, even when we face hard hearts.



 What after are we supposed to be learning from Exodus 7? What is God teaching us first? That God Himself can harden hard hearts.



 It's a simple message, verse 3, "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you." We know that God can do that. Our question, if we're being honest, is, is that fair?



 I mean, is it right for God to harden a person's heart? And it's been a question that Christians have struggled with through centuries, not just in this moment.



 I can remember my very first class in seminary, and we had the privilege of having Arler and Harris, one of the great theologians of the last century, and we were just going straight through the Bible, lesson by lesson.



 Arler and Harris was the author of the theological word book of the Bible, a textbook that's going across the world. In early life, he was actually a chemical engineer, and then the Lord called him out of engineering and into ministry, and yet he still had that very fine mind, a very particular mind. And yet at the same time, he was such a humble spirit. I mean, as sophisticated and knowledgeable as he was, if you ever sat in this class, you would say, "There is just very simple faith here and honest."



 So when we got to this chapter, he just said to us, "I struggle with this too."



 God hardening a man's heart. He said, "I struggled for years to try to figure out how this could be and how it could be right." And then he said, "I came to this conclusion, and it's just stuck with me."



 God only hardened a heart that was already hard.



 To think about the fairness of that, you have to look both backward and forward in the account. What do you know about Pharaoh already? This is not exactly an innocent.



 He has put the people of God under slavery. He has tried to practice ethnic cleansing. Kill all the baby boys.



 Let the girls live.



 He has ordered bricks without straw.



 His oppression becomes harder and harder. And now God says, "I'm going to harden his heart, and he will not listen." We have to say, what is the purpose of that? I mean, if God sees this hard heart, isn't it his obligation to break it?



 The evidence of Pharaoh's hardness, of course, and the consequence of it are both in those opening verses. "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and he will not listen."



 We know he won't listen, despite the fact that Moses does miracles. And you might say, "Well, Pharaoh had a reason not to listen." After all, his hardworking magicians keep up with the very work that Moses does.



 Moses makes a serpent. They make a serpent.



 Why would you change your opinion if you were Pharaoh?



 It's not just something that's mystery and magic in the Bible. Some of you use the Good News book for your daily devotionals, and there was actually a commentary on that a little while back in which there were those who were identifying what many of the art pieces in ancient Egypt signify. They actually show serpents in the shape of a cane.



 And the reasoning is that the Egyptian sorcerers learned how to put a crick in the neck of a serpent so that it became paralyzed and straight. And then they would know how to throw it to the ground, and it would become an active serpent again, and the people were awed and amazed by that. Is that what's happening here?



 Well, maybe.



 It is possible that it's plain demonic power, that God simply has let people proceed in such a way that they are going to face the consequences of their own sorcery. I mean, recognize that even Jesus in Matthew 24 tells us that in the final days there will be false Christ and prophets who come who will do great signs and wonders so that if it were possible, even the elect would believe.



 We begin to understand that there is great power and wonder that can be on display, but that does not necessarily prove it is godly. We are urged as the people of God not just to watch for the signs and the miracles, say, "Well, it must be of God," but to listen.



 If even Satan can appear as an angel of light, then evaluate what is being said according to the Word of God. And as a consequence, we recognize when people do not do that, their hardened hearts are actually what is causing them not to listen to the Word of God. A hardened heart is making them hard of hearing to what God Himself is saying. And that's more what is unfolding here, that we see Pharaoh's hard heart, meaning that he will not even listen to the God of Moses who is over and over again tapping on his door and saying, "Listen, listen, listen." And it's actually those plagues that are the way in which God is trying to wake him up to break his heart at the right moment and at the right time. There are people who say, "Well, it's no wonder that Pharaoh didn't listen." I mean, these are just natural phenomena. And by the way, for a while, his magicians can keep up with it. They keep doing whatever Moses for a while.



 And the natural phenomena has some explanation.



 First plague, Nile turns to blood. People say, "Well, that's just an algae bloom, red tide."



 And then there's frogs that begin to go across the land. Well, the frogs are getting out of the red tide.



 And then flies everywhere because the fish die and the frogs die. It makes perfect sense. It's just natural phenomena, is it? What should Pharaoh actually have noted and seen?



 There's an intensification of the natural phenomena. What is actually happening as God by Moses is showing, "I'm the God above all your gods. You have gods of river and land and life." And what is God ultimately saying is He intensifies the plagues.



 "I'm the God of the river.



 I'm the God of the land.



 And ultimately, I'm the God of life itself. And your magicians cannot overcome me." This first little step of the serpent that comes from the staff of Aaron and each all the other serpents is supposed to be indication to Pharaoh and the people of God that the God of Israel is going to consume all of your gods. No one stands a chance against Him. No one can stand up to Him. There's not merely intensification. There is prediction. Yes, was there some degree of natural phenomena? I don't know, but the miracle surely was that Moses begins to predict it before it happens.



 And not only does Moses predict it, it does not affect the people of Israel, only the Egyptians.



 Something more than natural phenomena is happening, something supernatural is happening, and ultimately there is this orderliness that the Egyptians would have known. The weaker gods of the river, oh, they've been overcome.



 The land gods that affect the crops, they've been overcome.



 And ultimately the gods that are supposed to protect our lives and our firstborn, they have been overcome too.



 Pharaoh should listen, but he does not. Why?



 Because his heart is hard, and when your heart is hard, you become hard of hearing to God. That's not just for Pharaoh.



 That's why the writer of Hebrews will pick it up later and say, "Today, if you hear His voice, harden not your hearts." I recognize the consequence you do too. There are times when there have been some avenue of my life that I want to seal off and say, "I don't want to listen to the Lord in that. I've got reason, or I've got upset enough that I don't want to hear the Lord on that just now."



 And I recognize if there have been critics or those who have been on attack against me or my family, that I want to, as it were, defend my bitterness, allow my unforgiveness,



 and then not recognize how that being hard of hearing to the Word of God hardens my heart



 when my family needs forgiveness, when there are close ones to me who have not met my expectations, and I allow the hard-heartedness to grow.



 It's what happens when you're hard of hearing to God's Word. The hardness of heart just increases.



 It happens in so many dimensions of our lives. The man who ignores the Word of God turns a deaf ear to his standards and so continues in an affair.



 And as a consequence, does not even hear the cries of his children and the consequences for his family long-term and perhaps for generations.



 The hard heart has made him hard of hearing and made life even harder for others. A woman so concerned for the idolatry of keeping up appearances with peers that she does not hear her husband's frustration and desperation to say, "Honey, I just can't keep up with you in what you require to be happy."



 A church so accustomed to its own interests that it does not hear the cries of the poor and the refugees, so that ultimately when there are the cries of children in our nation separated from their families, we don't even hear it, though the First Lady in the White House does.



 A young person so callous, hardened to God's standards for purity, that entertainments and dating practices get sealed off in their hearts and they no longer hear the Word of God saying, "The reason I have called you to purity is because of the wonder of love that you will have in its expression in marriage if you have not spoiled it."



 But we don't want to hear that.



 And so we seal off that dimension of God's Word, become hard of hearing to it, not recognizing it just makes us harder and harder and harder, not only to hearing the Word of God, but to being sensitive to those that God intends for us to influence.



 It's actually what is happening here. We're learning not only that God can harden a human heart, but He does so for a purpose. In Pharaoh we recognize the purpose. It's ultimately God hardening Pharaoh's heart so much over the course of the plagues that it finally becomes brittle and breaks.



 Okay, just go.



 And they only ask for three days. He says, "Go forever and not as slaves. Take whatever you need from Egypt. Plunder us if you must. Just get out of here." And Israel leaves no longer slaves, but rich in the resources they will need to establish the land and the people to which God has called them. God is using Pharaoh's hardness beyond what He could have imagined. If you think about Pharaoh's hardening, we know the reasons, verse 5. God is explaining to Pharaoh, "The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord." If after the very first round of the fight, the duel between God and Pharaoh, Pharaoh had somebody, "Okay, go fine. You can go."



 No one would have heard.



 There'd been no impact upon him or the nations, but there's a progress in what is happening here. Verse 5, Pharaoh, I want you to know. Verse 10, "So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did just as the Lord commanded Aaron cast down his staff before Pharaoh and his servants."



 Not just Pharaoh sees, others see.



 By the time you get to chapter 9, God actually says to Pharaoh, "The reason that I've appeared before you with these great acts of judgment is so that the earth may know that I am the Lord." Israel is about to leave. God knows that. He also knows they are going to face great opposition in the nations and the armies that are between them and the Promised Land. But now the reputation begins to precede them. These are the people that conquered Pharaoh. This is the God that overcame all the gods of Egypt.



 And as a consequence, you recognize many simply try to negotiate rather than fight with Israel. There are some fights, we know that, but they are fights from people already afraid of the God of Moses. You think of the words of Jeremiah as he is saying, "What is actually happening with the heart, heart of Pharaoh?" Jeremiah said, "Speaking for the Lord is not my word like a hammer."



 That breaks a heart in pieces.



 Pharaoh's heart becomes hard so that ultimately God can break it. What God is doing through Pharaoh is he is showing God's power.



 But as much as we focus on the life of Pharaoh, you must recognize there's another hard-hearted man on display in this chapter.



 Who is the other hard-hearted man?



 That's Moses.



 What do you remember about Moses?



 Murderer raised his children in pagan customs before he goes back to Egypt.



 When God calls him out of the burning bush, his response, "Hear my Lord, send Aaron."



 He's a coward.



 And when it does not go very well in the opening minutes of the battle, it is Moses who says, "God, you are evil."



 He blasphemes God himself though he is the called deliverer.



 Moses himself is demonstrating hardness, but in a very different way. Ultimately what we begin to understand is while Moses has had hardness in his heart and life, he's listening and changing and being transformed. Verse 6, "Moses and Aaron did as God said, they did just as the Lord commanded them."



 He's listening.



 And as he's listening, his heart is changing. So many things he's done wrong, but now he's starting down a better path, starting down a better course. He'll say it over and over again. The writer will.



 Moses listened.



 Pharaoh's hard-hearted, he won't listen. Moses is a murderer, a coward, a blasphemer, a pagan practicer, but he listened.



 What is God showing us here? Not only that he has power to overcome, but he has mercy to claim.



 Moses is being mercifully claimed by God. And God is going to keep that message going for his people through all the ages. I have power to warn. I have power to judge.



 But remember, I also have the mercy to claim.



 In just a little bit we will celebrate the Lord's Supper. And we read words so consistently about what is happening that we may not recognize what God is saying again and again in the celebration of the Lord's Supper.



 I have the power to warn you.



 And I have the mercy to claim you.



 What after all of the words that we will read in 1 Corinthians 11, "Whoever therefore eats the bread or drinks the cup of the Lord in an unworthy manner will be guilty concerning the body and blood of the Lord.



 Not a person examine himself then and so eat of the bread and drink of the cup for anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment on himself."



 That is why many among you are weak and ill, and some of you have died.



 This is not just ritual. This is not magic. This is not a game that we play.



 The Apostle is reminding us of the reality of a God who speaks from heaven, of the reality of sin and its consequences, and is saying to us, "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts by coming forward and saying, "I'm just going to do this again," as though it does not matter. This is spiritual reality being displayed, and there are spiritual consequences to saying, "I don't need the blood of Christ. I just trample in the blood of Christ by going through the words, going through the motions, but not acknowledging what I must acknowledge. I am not worthy of this. Christ has made me worthy." That's why I partake in the elements, to indicate it's his provision, not my ability that makes me right before God. And I say that over and over again to a God who I recognize that I have the power to warn you. You do this with a hard heart.



 Seal off from your hearing the reality of the Word of God for your life, and there are still consequences.



 If not for you, if not for your health, the lives of people that you love and influence.



 So today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart.



 But it's not just the power to warn.



 It is the mercy to claim. The following verse in Paul's instructions to the Corinthians, "But if we judged ourselves truly, we would not be judged.



 If we judged ourselves truly, Lord, you say I have to be worthy to receive this, but I'm not worthy." Oh, you discern what the Lord's body is about. You examined yourself. You are not coming to this table based on your worthiness, but upon his. You have judged truly. And you're standing before the Lord, not on the basis of your goodness, your righteousness, or even this ritual. What you have done is you say, "God, I claim Jesus. I claim that He has made me right, that what your Word was doing, as it was reminding me over and over again of your power to warn, but at the same time of your mercy to claim me, it's that mercy that I claim. Not my goodness, not my righteousness, not my doing. Lord, you know my own heart, how hard I have been at times so that I was not listening to your Word and not obeying it either.



 But I confess that to you, Lord, because in that confession is claiming the mercy that claims us and is represented in these elements.



 Warning is here, but at the same time, great mercy on display. And it's an understanding of what God is doing as He's taking our hearts to the point of brittleness so they break and actually concede that we need the Lord's help, that this is what is being signified even in Exodus 7. It may surprise you where the account goes because God is not just saying that He can use hard-hearted people, but ultimately that He can help the hard-hearted people.



 Yes, Pharaoh keeps not letting the people go.



 But as the plagues come, by the time you get to chapter 9 and verse 27, this is what Pharaoh says. Hear that? This is what Pharaoh says.



 This time I have sinned. The Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong.



 That's not Moses.



 That's Pharaoh.



 I have sinned. I and my people are in the wrong. God is in the right. And you say, "Well, that ought to fix everything then." He feels really bad about what He did.



 But He does not let the people go.



 It's really stark an important message for us that when we come to the Lord's table, simply feeling bad is not the point.



 I feel really guilty now, not the point.



 This is what God has done for the guilty so that their lives, recognizing His great grace toward them, would respond in worship. "God, I want to devote my life to You now. I want my heart and my life and my family to give You worship." The purpose of the Lord's Supper, the purpose of the warnings is not to make us feel worse.



 It's to move us into worship in every dimension of our lives, not just that I feel bad, but I profoundly and deeply believe that the Creator of the universe sent His Son to die for my sin, and now I have the privilege of living for Him. That is my belief. That is my profound profession. After all, if all it was about was say, "Well, you know, I really feel guilty now. I really did a good job at this Lord's Supper," say, "What was the Supper supposed to do for you?" Not just to convict you of sin, yes, that.



 But ultimately, if we are not convinced of grace, we have not understood what this is all about. I recognize my need of God's supply. And He says, "Here it is, and as a consequence, I am transformed."



 Biblical repentance is not simply that we feel bad, but that our belief come into heart and mind and consciousness in renewed devotion and worship and joy.



 It's what God intends.



 It's what He's working through Moses.



 Dwight Al-Moody once said, "Moses spent the first 40 years of his life in Pharaoh's court



 thinking he was somebody.



 Then he spent the next 40 years in the desert believing he was nobody, and he spent the last 40 years leading God's people, showing that somebody who thinks he's nobody can be well used of God."



 Last two. "Lord, I don't have a right to come here. I don't have a right to participate in it. But if we say that, I've been made right by what God has done, then the Lord can do these profound things of making our hearts tender toward Him by the great provision of His grace. And we are changed, and our lives begin to affect others around us in different ways. I love it so much that we are told in this passage, verse 7, "Moses was 80 years old. Then was 83 when they began to do the Lord's bidding."



 You know, sometimes you get less sinful as you get older because you're just getting too old for the sin.



 Sometimes as you get older, you just get crustier.



 And here is Moses in senior years getting more and more tender to the things of God. It doesn't happen overnight, but here is Moses even in advanced years being used of God to touch God's people, to teach us even today about a heart being made more and more tender if we hear God's voice and do not harden our hearts at any stage of life.



 God can and does use us. The writer Roy Atwood writes of his own father, "My father's illusions of independence and self-sufficiency were shattered when he fell off the roof of his home while cleaning the gutters in the rain."



 Some of you have done that.



 "He landed on the corner of a concrete sidewalk and he broke his spine between his shoulder blades.



 The fall almost killed him.



 In a split second, his pride and dreams and many of the things he loved were gone. He never walked or worked or sailed again.



 He struggled with depression. He never wanted to be a burden to his wife or his children, but his self-sufficiency was gone in an instant, gone forever.



 But in his state of almost complete physical and spiritual dependency, God turned my hard father to Jesus Christ and his sufficiency. We will not soon forget how dramatic and obvious was the change in his life. His anger was replaced by joy, his bitterness by tenderness, his hardness by a gentleness of spirit.



 His final years as a faithful Christian man, husband, father, and grandfather were his finest.



 My father's legacy to his children's children will be that God's grace and covenant faithfulness were sufficient even for a hard man who turned to and trusted in Jesus Christ."



 Today if you hear his voice and harden not your heart, then the tenderness of God tenders your heart and transforms your life.