Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, one thing we have consistently seen throughout Scripture is the authors' creative usage of the number 7. It is the number of perfection. Thus, we have everything from 14 miracles in the book of Acts to 14 mentions of God's throne in Revelation 4 to seven days of creation and a stone with seven eyes representing the seven spirits of God. Well, as we would expect, the seventh plague is also a doozy — not only in its content, which is the worst hailstorm to that point in Egyptian history — but also in its narrations, which is long, involved, and heavily theological. Indeed, as we will see, God gives Pharaoh a four-point theology lesson in the first part of the description of this plague. Then we have another long section in which we see Pharaoh "repent" because the hail plague was so incredibly severe. We will look at that section next week under the heading of "Dealing with Temporary Repentance." Moses' treatment of Pharaoh shows us a lot about how to handle abusive, manipulative, lying people in a godly way. We'll get there. But this week, I want to show you that the seventh plague proclaims God's incomparability by devastating the land of Egypt with hail, and even by convincing some Egyptian officials to begin fearing the word of Yahweh. Basically, the unparalleled power of the hail shows the unparalleled power of Yahweh. Fear His word.

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, we come tonight to the sixth plague. The third in each of the three plague cycles is narrated very tersely, and tonight's text is no exception. What I hope to show you from this text is God's power to punish those who hurt His people, and also His power to strengthen the hearts of those same oppressors so that they stubbornly persist in their self-destructive ways. Learn to fear the God who punishes sin with sin.

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, I was listing to one of you the other day the tangible financial benefits that being part of this congregation has brought to his life. They were really pretty impressive, and by some measures actually kept this fellow out of homelessness. As cool as that is, though, I bring it up not because it's cool but because it points to the same truth that this passage teaches: The blessing that God gives to His people is so overwhelming that it spills over and blesses everyone affiliated with them too. That's the positive side of it, shown by the way that Israel's cattle lived. But the flip side is equally true: The curse on God's enemies is so strong that it too spills over and includes those affiliated with them, right down to their animals. That's why animals die in this world. It's because animals are affiliated with us, subject to us, and so our sin has subjected them to futility, pain, and death. We fill the earth and subdue it, and so it cries out in pain as it tastes the pain of our sin. Don't be hard-hearted and disobedient, and thus bring pain on your animals. Instead, submit yourself to Christ, and you and your beasts will know His blessing.

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, we come this evening to the fourth plague, the plague of flies. We have already seen that in every plague, God is revealing Himself to Pharaoh, and that Pharoah is consistently looking the other way and saying, "Can't you tell I'm ignoring you? Go away and leave me alone." Well, God is not fazed by being ignored. He is not going to give up and say, "Oh, all right, Pharaoh. I guess I'm not getting through to you." Instead, He sends yet another plague, this time to teach Pharaoh the lessons that He, Yahweh, is in the midst of every land and that He sets redemption between His own people and their persecutors.

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the third plague is soon told. It came without warning, stayed for an indeterminate period of time, and, like the other 9, hardened Pharaoh's heart. Yet this plague contains an important lesson for us — not that lice are nasty (for we already knew that), but the truth that even when God's power is unequivocally displayed as greater than any magician's, that testimony alone will not bring hard-hearted sinners to repentance and faith. Again: God's glory in creation and judgment is not enough to save sinners, or even to get them to shape up.

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the ten plagues are the curriculum in the great school of the power of God. Yahweh was going to teach Pharaoh who He was. As we saw, He sent warning after warning through the mouths of Moses and Aaron. He had His messengers present credentials that proved themselves to be greater than the Egyptian magicians. And as we saw last week, He turned the Nile into blood, thus demonstrating at the outset His power over the source of Egypt's entire life. Well, in tonight's plague, God teaches another lesson: That there is no one like Him. God is incomparable, unique, perfect and perfectly different from any human being or set of human characteristics. He is a prayer-hearing God, and He is also a God with a sense of humor. He sent the plague of frogs to pollute the land of Egypt, rendering it unclean, making life a nuisance, and generally deflating the pretensions of Pharaoh to absolute mastery over Egypt and its people. So get to know this God with me, this God of battle as He battles the king of Egypt for the freedom of His people to worship Him.

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, we come tonight to the first plague, or first strike, with which God smote Egypt in the days of Moses and Aaron. That plague, of course, was the one in which water was turned into blood. We will look at Moses' account of what went down on that Egyptian morning, perhaps in late summer. And we will see what the text is interested in showing us. Primarily, its point is to reveal the identity of Yahweh as the one who will not be thwarted or prevented from delivering His people. He is capable of taking Egypt and making its source of life into a realm of pollution and death. He is the one who threatens and carries out His threats. He is Yahweh, and Pharaoh must obey His command and let His people go.

Why did God smite Egypt with all those plagues? The answer, brothers and sisters, was first of all to teach Pharaoh a lesson — and then, by extension, to teach that lesson to the Egyptians and to the rest of the world. God wanted the king of Egypt to know His identity, His location, His uniqueness, His ownership of the earth, and His discrimination between Egypt and His own people — and God wanted this to be clear not just to Pharaoh, not just to Egypt, not just to Israel, but to the whole world. The plague account clarifies who God is, where He is, and how powerful He is on behalf of His people

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, last time we saw God reiterate His promise to reveal Himself through delivering His people from Pharaoh. This time, God dispatches Moses and Aaron into Pharaoh's presence to do a final pre-plague sign. It's one final warning, a final invitation to Pharaoh to turn before he actually feels the weight of Yahweh's heavy hand on him and his nation. So God gives to His prophets one final sign that will vindicate their claim to be messengers of a God superior to all the gods of Egypt. Of course, God knew that this sign would be duplicated and mocked, and He gave it anyway. We'll talk about that. But in terms of what the Holy Spirit is teaching us in this passage, we see that God's respectful and serious approach was rebuffed and disregarded by Pharaoh, whose heart was hard. It's a warning: Don't let your heart get hard. And it's a promise: God will, in general, bend over backwards to give you fair evidence that it's really Him and that you really ought to believe Him.

Dearly beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the dialogue between God and Moses was interrupted by the genealogy in ch. 6 last week. We were reminded that Moses and Aaron were ordinary people in whom God's promise and provision ran rampant. Well, this Sunday, we are reminded once again of just how large God's promise and provision really are. We have a way of forgetting what God has told us He'll do. Correction: I have a way of forgetting the size of His promises. But this text, in which God comes back and repeats all of His promises to Moses again, is here to remind us not only that Moses needed a reminder, but that we do too. Let me put it this way: This is our 21st sermon on Exodus. I have preached nearly 450 sermons from this pulpit, and some of you have been here for pretty much all of them. And yet you keep coming back, and so do I, because we are a forgetful people and we need to be reminded again of just how large Yahweh's promises to us actually are. So let's look at these promises afresh.