And the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron shall be your prophet. You shall speak all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall tell Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go out of his land. But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt, Pharaoh will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and bring my hosts, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgement. The Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them.” Moses and Aaron did so; they did just as the Lord commanded them. Now Moses was eighty years old, and Aaron eighty-three years old, when they spoke to Pharaoh.
Exodus 7:1-7
Now the contest is about to begin, and the Lord is about to multiply His signs and wonders in the land of Egypt (3). F.B. Meyer points out that these signs and wonders were primarily intended to answer the question which Pharaoh had asked of Moses. 'Who is the Lord?' (5:2), and comments: 'By entering into the spheres which were ruled by the gods of Egypt and by overruling them; by predicting exactly what would happen and by causing the prediction to come to pass; by leaving the magicians with all their arts outdistanced and ashamed, Jehovah through His servants answered the question to the full and gave incontestable evidence that He was God of gods'. In this respect, the happenings of this time are a type and symbol of the breaking in of the gospel into human life. The miracles of the gospel era were the evidence that the kingdom of God had come upon men. We should note also that attention is drawn to Moses' age in 7. In Acts 7:23 we are told that he was forty when he left Egypt for his long discipline in the wilderness (Exodus 2: 11, 12). Here, then, the second significant stage of his experience is brought to a close, and the third forty-year period begins, reaching to his death on the borders of the Promised Land (Deuteronomy 34:7). Now the long story of many years' training and preparation is over, and that for which he was destined and brought into the world begins to unfold. It is instructive to see the proportion existing between the years of preparation and those of service and to contrast this with modern ideas. This may provide us with a clue to the relative ineffectiveness of so much in Christian service today. Do we really allow ourselves to be prepared and equipped for the work that needs to be done?