No One Like the LORD Our God

The second plague is almost comic. Frogs come up from the Nile and fill the land, the palace, the bedrooms, the beds, the ovens and the kneading troughs. Egypt's magicians, in a display of pointless rivalry, produce more frogs. Pharaoh, who could not be moved by the Nile turning to blood, is moved by frogs in his bed. He calls for Moses and Aaron and asks them to pray that the frogs be removed, and he will let the people go.

What Moses says next is the heart of the passage. He gives Pharaoh the honor of setting the time. Tell me when, he says, so that you may know there is no one like the LORD our God. Pharaoh says tomorrow. Moses agrees, and the next day the frogs die in the houses, courtyards and fields, and are piled into heaps, and the land reeks. Then, as soon as there is relief, Pharaoh hardens his heart and does not listen.

The one idea here is that God's incomparability is shown not merely in the sending of a plague but in its precise removal on request. Anyone might claim credit for a disaster after the fact. Only the God who rules the frogs can end them at an appointed hour named by his enemy. Moses is confident enough in God to let Pharaoh choose the time, and God is faithful enough to Moses to honor it.

That confidence is worth meditating on. Moses is not confident in himself; the last chapters have made that clear. He is confident that when he prays, the God who is unlike anyone will act. And he does not use the moment to humiliate Pharaoh. He simply lets the timing itself be the sermon.

The turn toward life is twofold. First, pray with specific expectation. Vague prayers are safe because they cannot be disappointed, but they also cannot reveal anything. Moses asked for frogs gone tomorrow, and it was so. Second, watch your own heart in the moment of relief. Pharaoh's pattern was to seek God in the crisis and forget him the morning after. It is a familiar pattern for many of us. The frogs are gone; the resolution fades. Let the relief itself become the reason for thanks, so that there is no one like the LORD becomes something you say when the pressure lifts, not only when it bears down.