Exodus 8:12, commentary and pictures

The frogs came up from the river and spread over the land into houses and bedchambers and ovens and kneading-troughs, even into Pharaoh's own palace. The Nile that was revered as divine was polluted and turned into a source of torment, showing power over Egypt's sacred river and that it could not protect its worshipers.

The magicians could imitate the plague by appearing to bring up frogs, but they could not take the frogs away. Their failure was exposed, and that humbling forced Pharaoh himself to ask Moses and Aaron to entreat the Lord for removal. With that humbled request came his promise to let the people go to sacrifice. Moses exposed the failure of the magicians and bade Pharaoh appoint the time for prayer, and Pharaoh set the next day. He did so secretly hoping the frogs would disappear of themselves and spare him the humiliation of submitting to the God of Israel.

Moses and Aaron went out from Pharaoh, and Moses cried unto the Lord because of the frogs brought against Pharaoh. He asked at the appointed time on the next day and at the specified hour. The Lord listened to the entreaty and stayed the plague, so that the frogs died throughout all Egypt where they were.

God could have made the frogs disappear and return to dust in a moment, but He deliberately did not. He left their dead bodies in sight where they died, to be gathered into heaps that polluted and corrupted the atmosphere. The king and all Egypt could see them, and so could not say the removal was sorcery or magic like the work of the magicians. It stood as evidence that their vain philosophy could not explain away, that this was a judgment from the God of heaven.

The rod becoming a serpent and the river turned to blood had only hardened Pharaoh and increased his hatred of Israel, because the magicians led him to credit them to magic. The visible death and stinking heaps of frogs gave abundant evidence that proved the plague and its removal were not magic. The plague lasted until the appointed time, and when the king was relieved of his immediate distress he again stubbornly refused to let Israel go.

Moses worked with no human influence or power over minds, but by the power of God to convince Pharaoh that the great I AM had sent him to command Pharaoh to let Israel go that they might serve Him. Satan was on the ground because he knew Moses was chosen to break the yoke of bondage. He knew that work prefigured the first advent of Christ to break Satan's power over the human family and deliver the captives. He therefore consulted his angels to work through the magicians with enchantments to counterfeit God's true work and destroy its influence, to harden Pharaoh against God's power, to stagger the faith of Moses and Aaron, to keep Israel from serving God, and to reach down through all ages to destroy faith in Christ's mighty miracles. Yet God's work proved superior when His controlling power cut off Satan's channel, so the magicians could do only a few signs and could proceed no further.

The vast multiplying plague of frogs overspreading the land pictures the immense tide of periodicals and books now overspreading the land in the same pervasive way. Much of it is commonplace and idle and enervating, unclean and degrading. It intoxicates and ruins the mind and corrupts and destroys the soul. It finds easy foothold in the indolent and aimless mind.