Exodus 8:9, commentary and pictures

Moses gave Pharaoh the honor of appointing the time when intercession would be made to destroy the frogs from him and his servants and his people and their houses, so that they would remain in the river only. That offer of honor over Moses was a rebuke of Pharaoh's former haughty boasting and glorying over Moses because his magicians could copy the signs with their enchantments, asking where that boasting and glorying now was and where was the power of his magicians to stay or remove the plague. Pharaoh set the time for the next day because he secretly hoped the frogs would disappear by themselves in the interval and save him from the bitter humiliation of submitting to the God of Israel.

His plea for prayer showed he was somewhat humbled when he saw the magicians could not remove the frogs, and he was beginning to know something about the God whom he had claimed to know nothing about and professed to be wholly ignorant of. The frogs came not by magic or by any human influence or power possessed by Moses and Aaron, but by the power of the living God to convince Pharaoh that the great I AM sent Moses to command him to let Israel go that they might serve him, and God alone could remove them. The magicians by enchantments could imitate bringing up frogs, but by the power of their god they could do only a few signs and had no power to stop the plague or take the frogs away.

The plague made the Nile, revered by the Egyptians as sacred, a source of nuisance and pollution, exposing the powerlessness of their river idol and turning its worship into disgrace, and demonstrating that Jehovah alone had power over the river and could bring relief from the frogs. Pharaoh had counted the rod becoming a serpent and the river turned to blood as magic because of the work of his magicians, and those signs only hardened his heart and increased his hatred of Israel. The frogs continued until the appointed time, when at the specified hour they died throughout all Egypt and were gathered into heaps where their bodies could be seen and corrupted and polluted the atmosphere.

God deliberately removed the living cause while leaving the effect, for he could have made the frogs disappear and return to dust in a moment but did not, lest the king and the Egyptians say it was magic like the magicians' work; he left their bodies to give Pharaoh and all Egypt evidence their vain philosophy could not explain away or dispose of, proving the work was not magic but a judgment from the God of heaven. Moses in this work prefigured Christ's first advent to break Satan's power over the human family and deliver those made captives by his power. Satan was on the ground working through his agents the magicians and counterfeiting the true work of God to destroy the influence of God's work through Moses, to harden Pharaoh's heart against God's power, to stagger the faith of Moses and Aaron in the divine origin of their mission, to keep Israel from release to serve God, and to reach down through all ages to destroy faith in the mighty miracles and works of Christ; but the work of God was shown superior to the power of Satan, and God's controlling power cut off the channel through which Satan worked. The frogs overspreading the land, unclean and degrading in their spread, picture the flood of commonplace, idle, enervating, unclean periodicals and books now overspreading the land to intoxicate and ruin the mind and to corrupt and destroy the soul.