to Exodus chapter 7 and we're
going to be reading from verse 14. Verse 14 through to verse
25. And the Lord said unto Moses,
Pharaoh's heart is hardened. He refuses to let the people
go. Get thee unto Pharaoh in the
morning, lo he goeth out unto the water, and thou shalt stand
by the river's brink against he come. And the rod which was
turned into a serpent shalt thou take in thine hand. And thou
shalt say unto him, The Lord God of the Hebrews hath sent
me unto thee, saying, Let my people go, that they may serve
me in the wilderness. and behold, hitherto thou wouldst
not hear. Thus saith the Lord, in this
thou shalt know that I am the Lord. Behold, I will smite with
the rod that is in mine hand upon the waters which are in
the river, and they shall be turned to blood. and the fish
that is in the river shall die, and the river shall stink, and
the Egyptians shall loathe to drink of the water of the river. And the Lord spake unto Moses,
Say unto Aaron, Take thy rod and stretch out thine hand upon
the waters of Egypt, upon their streams, upon their rivers, and
upon their ponds, and upon all their pools of water, that they
may become blood, and that there may be blood throughout all the
land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone. And Moses and Aaron did so, as
the Lord commanded. And he lifted up the rod and
smote the waters that were in the river in the sight of Pharaoh
and in the sight of his servants. And all the waters that were
in the river were turned to blood. And the fish that was in the
river died, and the river stank, and the Egyptians could not drink
of the water of the river. and there was blood throughout
all the land of Egypt. And the magicians of Egypt did
so with their enchantments, and Pharaoh's heart was hardened,
neither did he hearken unto them, as the Lord had said. And Pharaoh
turned and went into his house, neither did he set his heart
to this also. And all the Egyptians digged
round about the river for water to drink, for they could not
drink of the water of the river, and seven days were fulfilled
after that the Lord had smitten the river. Amen. May the Lord bless this
reading. Pharaoh's heart was hardened
against God and against Moses and against Aaron. And now, therefore,
the Lord begins the signs and wonders, the great judgments
by which he would accomplish the liberty of his people. And this first sign was wonderful
indeed because the water of the river Nile and all its connecting
channels and canals were turned to blood. Together with the reservoirs
and even water that was in containers of wood and of stone was changed
to blood. And the Lord calls this series
of plagues that are about to come upon Egypt, deliverance
by a mighty hand, because that is the purpose of these plagues,
the deliverance of the people of God and the judgment of their
captors. They're also called great terrors. And it is noticeable that sure
it was Moses and Aaron were agents and ambassadors of God to Pharaoh. But this great terror was the
work of God and Pharaoh would be broken so that he would know
it. After the incident of the serpents
and Aaron's rod devouring the rods of the magicians in Egypt,
God tells Moses to go and to encounter Pharaoh again at the
River Nile and to repeat the demand for the release of the
people of God that they might worship in the wilderness. and
instructions are given, as we've read them, for what Moses is
to say and what he is to do. But Pharaoh will have none of
it. And despite a warning again being provided that might have
prevented this disaster of the judgment, he refuses to let the
people go. so that when the water was changed
to blood, it became undrinkable and all the fish in the river
died. It also began to stink, both
with the congealing blood and the rotting fish in the midst
of all that heat and sand. It caused the people to dig around
about the river edges for fresh water but we're not told that
they found any. And the plague lasted seven days
and we can only imagine the horror and the terror of that. Many
people must have suffered and many people must have died. Perhaps the wealthy people were
able to drink wine But the nation in general would have been brought
to its knees by this event. Now we're not told about the
land of the children of Israel, the land of Goshen, and it is
perhaps likely that they did not suffer this same plague,
but they're not actually mentioned. Let me just bring to your attention
a few interesting points from this little passage here, which
I hope will do us good. One noticeable point, I think,
is that the magicians again appear to manage to replicate this plague
by some means, trickery or otherwise. In a sense, it's not a very great
achievement that they perform. It would have been much more
impressive for Pharaoh and his servants if they had been able
to change the blood in the river back into water. Then they would
have earned their keep and their reputation. What they were able
to do was to turn water into blood in some way. And maybe
you wonder where they got the water to change into blood. If the water in all Egypt was
turned to blood by Moses and Aaron, where did they get the
water that they were able to change into blood? Well, I wondered
that too. And I don't know the answer.
Because we're not actually told. Maybe when the people dug around
the Nile for water, they did find some, and that was the water
that was used by the magicians. Perhaps it was that when Aaron
stretched his rod out over the rivers and the water of Egypt,
that it changed gradually into blood, and that they had some
that still hadn't changed yet. Maybe they had a bucket full
of water and it changed at Aaron's command while they were holding
it and they claimed that they had done it. I don't know. But the interesting point is
this, that the fact that these magicians were there and able
to do what they did, reinforced the hardness of Pharaoh's heart
and his opposition to God. It hardened his heart some more. And these magicians were like
false teachers of false religion. They pretended to be able to
do what only God could do. It wasn't even Moses and Aaron
that was doing this. It was God who was doing it.
It was God who was bringing these signs and wonders. And false
teachers, teachers of false religion, they teach people that They can
change things. That they can become something
that they're not. That they can, as it were, get
rid of the stink that is in their lives by their own free will. They can make themselves better.
They can make themselves pure by their own works and their
own actions and their own self-righteousness. And just like these magicians
in Egypt, they are wrong, these false teachers. Because it takes
God to do a miracle of grace. And it takes God to make a Christian. And it takes God to change a
man and a woman and a boy and a girl. And to give the grace
by which we can be saved. And another thing that we can
learn from these verses is that Pharaoh's hard heart and the
hardening of his heart is a picture of a sinner's heart towards God. We sometimes call that being
dead in sin. Because a sinner is said to have
a heart of stone rather than a heart of flesh. And sometimes you might hear
a preacher talking about, or using the phrase, total depravity. And it's used to describe our
complete opposition to God in our nature, in our nature state,
when our heart is hardened against God. And just like Pharaoh, all
the signs and wonders that we might imagine They will not change
our heart. No matter what we see, we can
see all the wonderful things of this world. We can experience
all the wonderful things of this world. We can taste, we can enjoy,
we can benefit from them. All the wonders of this world
cannot change a sinful heart. There is only one way that that
change can happen. And that is if God gives us a
new heart. If he takes away the heart of
stone and creates in us a heart of flesh that he has renewed
and that he has created. And we need a new heart in order
to seek forgiveness for our sin, in order to desire peace with
God. And that new heart is a work
of God alone. It's a work of grace and mercy. And God is very clear in this.
He tells the prophet Ezekiel about what he does to bring a
sinner to see his need or her need of salvation. In Ezekiel
chapter 36 and verse 26, the Lord says this, A new heart also will I give
you, and a new spirit will I put within you, and I will take away
the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you a heart of
flesh. That was my second little application. Here's my third one and my last
one, and it's really a question. Was the blood in the River Nile
real blood? Or was it just some red discolouring? Maybe some algae that was growing
in there, or some chemical, or some dust that got into the water? Well, I think it was real blood.
I think it was real blood and that's what the Bible says that
it was. And it was that that caused the
fish to die. The death of the fish in itself
was a great tragedy for Egypt because the people ate the fish
that were in the river. So not only was there no water
to drink, there was no food to eat. And if it had just been
discoloured water, the people would still have drunk it. and I think the fact that it
was changed to blood is very significant. Do you remember
that it was into the River Nile that the boy children of the
Israelites had been thrown and where they were drowned? And
that crime that the Egyptians perpetrated against the little
children of the people of Israel, was marked by God and it was
marked by the Israelites and it was marked by the Egyptians
as the water changed from water to blood. Many years before this,
God had told Noah that he would require justice for the shedding
of blood, whether it was by man or whether it was by beast. And
God told Noah this, surely your blood of your lives will I require. At the hand of every beast will
I require it and at the hand of man. And the cries of the
Israelite children were coming back to haunt their persecutors
and their murderers. And the Lord God says, vengeance
is mine, I will repay. And there's an interesting little
parallel here, which I think will do us good to think about. Do you remember the very first
miracle that the Lord Jesus Christ performed? I'll pause to see
if you can remember it. Do you remember the first miracle
that the Lord Jesus Christ performed? Well, it was at a wedding, and
he changed the water into wine. Now that miracle of changing
water into wine did two things. It brought great relief to the
person who had arranged the wedding, and it also brought great joy
to those who were able to drink the wine and enjoy the wine that
Jesus created there. The first plague that Moses performed
was to change water into blood. And that brought great suffering
and great fear. And that is a picture of law
and grace. of judgment and gospel. John chapter 1 and verse 17 tells
us, for the law, that is the justice and the judgment of God,
was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. Moses turned water into blood. The Lord Jesus Christ turned
water into wine. God's grace brings blessing. and his law brings condemnation. May the Lord God Almighty bring
us to a knowledge and experience of his grace and truth through
the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ today. Amen.