The truth is, that, as a wise man says, Custom is the great enemy of Faith, and of Reason likewise; and one of the worst tricks which custom plays us is, making us fancy that miraculous things cease to be miraculous by becoming common.
What do I mean?
This: which every child in this church can understand.
You think it very wonderful that God should cause frogs to come upon the whole land of Egypt in one day. But that God should cause frogs to come up every spring in the ditches does not seem wonderful to you at all. It happens every year; therefore, forsooth, there is nothing wonderful in it.
Ah, my dear friends, it is custom which blinds our eyes to the wisdom of God, and the wonders of God, and the power of God, and the glory of God, and hinders us from believing the message with which he speaks to us from every sunbeam and every shower, every blade of grass and every standing pool. ‘Is anything too hard for the Lord?’
If any man here says that anything is too hard for the Lord, let him go this day to the nearest standing pool, and look at the frog-spawn therein, and consider it till he confesses his blindness and foolishness. That spawn seems to you a foul thing, the produce of mean, ugly, contemptible creatures. Be it so. Yet it is to the eyes of the wise man a yearly miracle; a thing past understanding, past explaining; one which will make him feel the truth of that great 139th Psalm: ‘Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there also.’
That every one of those little black spots should have in it life—What is life? How did it get into that black spot? or, to speak more carefully, is the life in the black spot at all? Is not the life in the Spirit of God, who is working on that spot, as I believe? How has that black spot the power of growing, and of growing on a certain and fixed plan, merely by the quickening power of the sun’s heat, and then of feeding itself, and of changing its shape, as you all know, again and again, till—and if that is not wonderful, what is?—it turns into a frog, exactly like its parent, utterly unlike the black dot at which it began? Is that no miracle? Is it no miracle that not one of those black spots ever turns into anything save a frog? Why should not some of them turn into toads or efts? Why not even into fishes or serpents? Why not? The eggs of all those animals, in their first and earliest stages are exactly alike; the microscope shows no difference. Ay, even the mere animal and the human being, strange and awful as it may be, seem, under the microscope, to have the same beginning. And yet one becomes a mere animal, and the other a member of Christ, a child of God, and an inheritor of the kingdom of heaven. What causes this but the power of God, making of the same clay one vessel to honour and another to dishonour? And yet people will not believe in miracles! Why does each kind turn into its kind? Answer that. Because it is a law of nature? Not so! There are no laws of nature. God is a law to nature. It is his will that things so should be; and when it is his will they will not be so, but otherwise.
Not laws of nature, but the Spirit of God, as the Psalms truly say, gives life and breath to all things. Of him and by him is all. As the greatest chemist of our time says, ‘Causes are the acts of God—creation is the will of God.’
And he that is wise and strong enough to create frogs in one way in every ditch at this moment, is he not wise and strong enough to create frogs by some other way, if he should choose, whether in Egypt of old, or now, here, this very day?
Whatsoever means, or no means at all, God used to produce those vermin, the miracle remains the same. He sent them to do a work, and they did it. He sent them to teach Egyptian and Israelite alike that he was the Maker, and Lord, and Ruler of the world, and all that therein is; that he would have his way, and that he could have his way.