Exodus chapter eight, and we're
going to read from verse 16 through to verse 19. So I've got some short readings
today. And the Lord said unto Moses,
say unto Aaron, stretch out thy rod and smite the dust of the
land, that it may become lice throughout all the land of Egypt. And they did so. For Aaron stretched
out his hand with his rod and smote the dust of the earth,
and it became lice in man and in beast. All the dust of the
land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt. And the magicians
did so with their enchantments to bring forth lice, but they
could not. So there were lice upon man and
upon beast. Then the magician said unto Pharaoh,
This is the finger of God. And Pharaoh's heart was hardened,
and he hearkened not unto them, as the Lord had said. Amen. May the Lord bless to us this
reading from his word also. There's only, as we've mentioned,
a few verses here that speak to us of this third plague of
lice. And it's interesting to note
that it comes hard and fast behind the plague of frogs. It's interesting to note that
it comes with no prior warning given to Pharaoh, at least none
that we are informed about. A warning had been given by Moses
to Pharaoh on the two prior occasions of the plagues, the plague of
the water turned to blood and the plague of the frogs, but
no warning is given here. And another thing that we notice
is that the plague consists of a multitude of lice. lice. Now some people have suggested
that these might have been some kind of gnats or even mosquitoes
and both can be very troublesome. But in fact there's no good reason
for us to diverge from what the Bible says in this matter and
these in the scriptures are called lice. Now, whether that means
that they are the same creatures that we know as lice today is
not possible to say, but again, why not? And my favorite encyclopedia
tells me that lice is a group of wingless insects containing
nearly 5,000 species. So I don't know whether this
was one single species of louse that filled the land of Egypt. or whether there were numerous
different species that all came up together. Actually, it's probably
more likely that there were a number of different species because
we're told that there were lice in men and there were lice in
the beasts and ordinarily the lice that you would get in men
and animals would be different. So that might imply that there
are different species here. We might call them ticks, but
they likely sucked the blood of the host. They would certainly
cause illness and they would certainly spread disease. This was a very unpleasant experience. And it shows us that God can
make the tiniest and the weakest and the most disgusting things
do his work. Paul tells us in the book of
Romans that the weakness of God is stronger than men. And here is an example of that.
Ordinarily a man might take one of these little lice or one of
these little louses and just crush it between his fingers.
But here in the volume in which they came and with the ferociousness
of which they came, we find that they were in plague proportions
and they troubled the Egyptians. Another interesting thing about
this plague is that Pharaoh's magicians could not replicate
this miracle. and although they had had some
success it seems in the previous miracles, this causes them to
attribute this particular plague to the hand or actually to the
finger of God. which is interesting, because
often it's called the hand of God or the hand of the Lord,
but on a few occasions we read about the finger of God. It was
the finger of God that wrote the Ten Commandments. But here
the finger of God is given the credit for raising up this miracle,
and perhaps the magicians thought, well, we're not able to deceive
pharaoh anymore by the things that we do. We need to give another
reason for this and we don't want to give Moses and Aaron
the credit, so we'll say that it was God himself that did it. But what we discover is that
Pharaoh's heart is again hardened and he would not listen either
to his magicians or to Moses and Aaron, the request to let
the children of Israel go and worship God. And this shows that
even although Pharaoh was losing the support of his own palace,
his own supporters, his own magicians, He was adamant and he was obstinate
and he was determined not to give in to Moses and Aaron or
to the God of Israel. You might think that such displays
of power and distress, the resulting distress, would convince a man
or a woman that they could not beat God. And they better just
obey. But Pharaoh had a higher opinion
of himself than he ought to have had. And in the end, that would
cost him and his country dearly. There's a couple of little lessons
that I want to draw just from these few verses to leave with
you. And the first one is this. God's
warnings are a blessing. and a call to act. We've read here or we've seen
here that on this occasion there was not a warning given. But
if God gives us a warning, that's a blessed thing and a thing that
we should take note of. Sometimes we hear people say,
well it happened without any warning and there was nothing
that we could do about it. And when they say that, they
imply that if they had had some prior warning, then they would
have taken steps and they would have acted in such a way as to
prevent the incident or the event from happening or mitigating
the trouble that it caused. But the truth is that that isn't
always the case anyway. Sometimes warnings go unheeded. And they had done previously
with Pharaoh. And now there was no warning
given and he found himself suddenly in this country of Egypt plagued
with lice and all the discomfort that they brought. And this didn't
need to happen. But the price and the cost for
Pharaoh to listen to God was too great. It would have meant,
if he had done what God wanted, if he had done what Moses and
Aaron had said, that would have meant financial loss for Pharaoh. All these free workers would
have got to go away. It would have meant a loss of
political esteem. His enemies would have called
him weak. And it would have meant a loss in personal pride. And those were all too much for
him to pay. God has warned us about what
he is going to do. He has told us that he is going
to judge sin. And he has told us that the wages
of sin is death. And we ought to listen and we
ought to act accordingly. And yet we can't, because like
Pharaoh, our hearts are naturally hard and our pride won't let
us. It is the price that we're not
prepared to pay. But if that is the case, let
us not forget that God warned us about this judgment to come
and we chose to ignore it. Someday, like Pharaoh, we will
live to regret that decision. But if God is merciful to us,
If we are enabled to listen to the voice and the word of God,
it will be because God changes our hearts and God shows us mercy. The prophet Isaiah, a little
bit later in the history of Israel, wrote, all we like sheep have
gone astray. We have turned everyone to his
own way. We like our own way better than
God's way. and we will always like our own
way better than God's way until God softens our heart. Therefore
it is our prayer that the Lord will convince us by the greatness
of Christ in the gospel of a better way than our way, of a new and
living way that is found in following the Lord Jesus Christ The letter
to the Hebrew says, how shall we escape if we neglect so great
salvation? And here's another point. The
magicians realised that their trickery could only get them
so far. You know, there are a lot of
magicians in churches today. What do I mean by that? Well,
what I mean by that is that there are a lot of churches that do
not preach the true gospel of Jesus Christ. And they lead people
to think that they are saved and that they are going to heaven
by faking or mistaking God's way of salvation. There are lots
of religions, there's lots of counterfeits, but there's only
one true faith. And that faith is the faith that
will lead a sinner to peace with God. The Lord Jesus Christ says,
I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the
Father but by me. May the grace of God soften our
hearts. May the grace of God bring us
to Christ. May the grace of God show us
that one who is the true and living way of salvation. Amen.