PRAYER OF CONSECRATION
Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.
Jesus, I belong to you.
I lift up my heart to you.
I set my mind on you.
I fix my eyes on you.
I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice.
Jesus, we belong to you.
Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.
Exodus 7:1–7
Then the Lord said to Moses, “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and your brother Aaron will be your prophet. You are to say everything I command you, and your brother Aaron is to tell Pharaoh to let the Israelites go out of his country. But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in Egypt, he will not listen to you. Then I will lay my hand on Egypt and with mighty acts of judgment I will bring out my divisions, my people the Israelites. And the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring the Israelites out of it.”
Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord commanded them. Moses was eighty years old and Aaron eighty-three when they spoke to Pharaoh.
CONSIDER THIS
We come today to what we might call a “sticky wicket,” or a conundrum, or at the very least, a quandary. I can’t explain it; hence, I want to avoid it, but it must be dealt with. It comes in verse 3 as follows:
But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.
How is it fair if God punishes Pharaoh for something God does to Pharaoh? In other words, how is Pharaoh responsible for a condition God brought upon him? I can’t explain it. I will point out the following, though.
Ten times we see this reference to God hardening Pharaoh’s heart (see Exodus 4:21; 7:3; 9:12; 10:1, 20, 27; 11:10; 14:4, 8, 17). Here’s the interesting part. Ten times we see references to Pharaoh hardening his own heart (see Exodus 7:13, 14, 22; 8:15, 19, 32; 9:7, 34, 35; 13:15). Can we call it a tie?
Does God predestine every outcome to the nth detail, or does God allow human beings the free will and agency to make their own choices? Just like this tie, the debate between predestination and free will is utterly unresolvable. Depending on which side people take, they can marshal the evidence either way. Though I believe the predestinarians come up short—as a lawyer, I will grant they can make a straight-faced case before the judge.
I am not a predestinarian. I believe God gives people free will and holds them responsible for their choices. Having debated it exhaustively (and exhaustingly), I am also thoroughly uninterested in debating the unresolvable issue any further. I have had too many near-death experiences on that hill too many times to do it again.
In the present case, I look to Pharaoh’s very first response to the Word of God: “Pharaoh said, ‘Who is the Lord, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord and I will not let Israel go’” (Ex. 5:2).
Pharaoh shows us a hard heart from the start. To say that God allows a person to harden their heart to the point of thwarting his word and will does not mean that God hardened their heart. It means God allows people to go their own way and, in the end, to suffer the consequences.
When hard-hearted people go their own way, it creates enormous hardship and suffering for many others. To agree that God willed Pharaoh’s hardened heart seems necessarily to agree that God also willed all of the consequent destruction and losses to many people who were not themselves culpable. To attribute responsibility to Pharaoh for his own hardness of heart means he is also responsible for the far-reaching consequences his ill will wrought on the nation. It seems more just, doesn’t it?
Bottom line: to say God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, in my judgment, means God allowed Pharaoh to harden his own heart. Said another way, God gave Pharaoh over to the hardness of his own heart. Pharaoh was given at least ten chances to reverse course, to repent, and relent from his rebellion.
I see the same general principle operative in Romans 1:24–25, which says:
Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator—who is forever praised. Amen.
One final exhibit: after all the extraordinary deliverance and advantage he would give the Israelites, God would allow his own people to harden their hearts against him.
Psalm 95:7b–10 recounts the story for all the future generations to come—especially ours:
Today, if only you would hear his voice,“Do not harden your hearts as you did at Meribah,as you did that day at Massah in the wilderness,where your ancestors tested me;they tried me, though they had seen what I did.For forty years I was angry with that generation;I said, ‘They are a people whose hearts go astray,and they have not known my ways.’”
He wants our hearts, friends, our soft, pliable, clay-like hearts in his hands, where he can mold them, by the power of the Word and the Spirit, into vessels of his liking, for his purposes, for our good and his glory. Flash-forward to the now fulfilled prophecy of Ezekiel and marvel at the fusion of God’s sovereignty and human freedom in their glorious interplay in fulfilling the will of God:
I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. (Ezek. 36:26–27)
THE PRAYER FOR DELIVERANCE
Lord Jesus, you are my Deliverer.
Thank you for decreeing exodus over me, over my family, over this whole world.
I receive it. And as you decree it, I declare it.
I receive your deliverance from any hardness of heart in me. Break through the outer hardness and heal inner hardness, and restore the fullness of your image in me. I trust you, yet I want to trust you more. Teach me to hear your voice, even your whisper.
Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost.
As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be. World without end, amen! Amen!
THE JOURNAL PROMPTS
How do you relate to this reflection on the issue of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart and Pharaoh hardening his own heart? But before you answer that question, what is the state of your heart?
THE HYMN
Today, we will sing “Go Down, Moses” (hymn 403) from our Seedbed hymnal, Our Great Redeemer’s Praise. Get your copy here.
For the Awakening,
J. D. Walt
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3 Responses
Pondering Sovereignty-Election-Predestination-Free Will only makes me awestruck at the awesomeness of our God who does understand it and my feebleness. I’m happy to leave it in His hands even though visiting it makes me glad God is who He is. I’m reminded of a time 40 some years ago as a young on-fire somewhat new believer in Jesus when in conversation with my Presbyterian pastor and a sage elder I confessed to once having been confused by what predestination meant but I finally understood it. The pastor and elder just smiled at each other, inwardly giggling I’m sure. 40+ years later I still giggle at myself with a slight roll of the eyes. But, oh, to recapture some of that fire I had as a new believer!
I will share the wisdom that was given to me by a preacher friend that dealt with this apparent contradiction between God’s sovereignty and human free will: How we respond to any given external situation is dependent on the pre-existent condition of our heart. For example; take two different substances, an egg and a stick of butter. Place them both on a hot surface (difficult circumstances), one will melt, the other will harden. Both were exposed to the identical external circumstance, but with different outcomes. Both the Israelites and Pharaoh witnessed God’s mighty power demonstrated through the first nine plagues; the Israelites faith towards God was strengthened, while Pharaoh’s heart grew increasingly harder. So, did God actually harden Pharaoh’s heart? Yes, but he (Pharaoh) did it to himself by refusing to acknowledge the truth. That’s how I’m able to reconcile this apparent contradiction between God’s sovereignty and human free will. God’s foreknowledge doesn’t require His sovereign control over the outcome. Therefore, I’m not a Calvinist.
Hard-hearted people create hardship for themselves and others. They wind up shipwrecked within and yet they pretend that all is well.
The source of a hard heart is sin — the prideful human desire to do our own will instead of God’s will. God created the human heart to be intimately surrendered to and submitted to Him. When we shut down the tenderness or our heart and our awareness of God in our daily life, we have been created so that our neglect of God gradually hardens our heart. That’s why we can honor God with our lips while our heart is far from Him.
God doesn’t want human hearts to be hardened by sin. That’s why Jesus, the God-man, came to proclaim the inner government (kingdom) of God and call to people to repentance and full surrender to His will. He died on the Cross as the sacrifice for our sin and rose again so that “whosoever will” can have a new heart that is continually aware of and reliant on “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”
A hard heart refuses to say and do what God commands. A hard heart quenches what God the Holy Spirit has to say because it doesn’t want to hear it, say it, or do it. Pharoah in ancient Egypt is an example of a hardened heart.
Pharoah was a cruel dictator, holding multitudes of people in the terrible bondage of life-long slavery and forced labor without pay — using them to build gigantic monuments to himself. Moses and Arron came to Pharoah and offered him God’s way out of his hardened heart by telling him to set the Hebrew slaves free. Time and again, chance after chance, Pharoah refused to align with God’s will and his refusal led to God’s judgment. Don’t let the same thing happen to you.