Who Hardened Pharaoh’s Heart?
Yesterday morning’s Men’s Fellowship Breakfast left our bellies full of great food from Minister Todd Alexander, left us full of precepts from God’s Word from Bishop Kenneth Harper, and left us full of lively spiritual dialog from the Men of Channel of Grace! However, there was one question that left us with the need to fulfill . . . Who hardened Pharaoh’s heart? During fellowship and Bible Study, I try to listen more than I speak. I find that when I am open to listening more, I am open to learning more. I also find that when I am open to listening more, I am open to evaluating my theological learnings from seminary with real-life interaction and interpretation with my fellow church members. This enables me to gain a well-rounded view of my progress and spiritual growth and learn from how the future leaders of the church around me develop in their faith. Faced with yet another welcome challenge by our Bishop for us to grow, I decided to take a shallow dive into the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. I specifically focused on what came before and what came after Exodus 4:21.
Exodus 4:21 | New Living Translation
21 And the Lord told Moses, “When you arrive back in Egypt, go to Pharaoh and perform all the miracles I have empowered you to do. But I will harden his heart so he will refuse to let the people go.”
The Backstory
In this second book of the Bible, we pick up from the family line of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and reach Jacob’s 11th son Joseph. In short, the circumstances in Exodus are a follow-up to Genesis when humanity forfeited God’s blessing through sin and rebellion, and through the scriptures in Exodus, we are witnessing how God is using Abraham’s family as the vehicle to which he will restore humanity to all the world. The problem that the Egyptian ruler, the Pharaoh commonly associated with the name Ramses, was not only one of the worst characters in the Bible but he was set on destroying Israel. Pharaoh enslaved all the Israelites and ordered all Israelite boys to drown in the Nile River. Given this horrible order, one Israelite mother put her baby boy in a basket and placed him in the Nile River, hoping he would float to safety. Instead, this baby, eventually named Moses, floated right into the hands of Pharaoh’s family. So, let’s fast forward to God’s instruction to Moses and His word in Exodus 4:21, “And the Lord told Moses, “When you arrive back in Egypt, go to Pharaoh and perform all the miracles I have empowered you to do. But I will harden his heart so he will refuse to let the people go.”
The Hardening of the Heart, the How, Why, and Who
Moses told Pharoah that God said, let my people go. Now what?
There is no doubt that Pharoah’s heart was hardened, but we need to look at the WHY, the HOW, and the WHO. Pharaoh was stubborn and stubbornly chose to violate God’s good moral order. Pharaoh’s choice was a deliberate action to show that God was wrong, and Pharaoh was right. This was also Pharoah’s manipulative way of displaying that he had the power to reject God’s direction rightfully. This is the process and the direct actions of hardening Pharaoh’s heart. If we put this into the context of your life today, how many times in the past have you ever rejected God’s direction, ended up creating a mess in your life, and then turned around and blamed it on God? The answer and reality are that YOUR HEART WAS HARDENED when YOU rejected God’s direction.
I read Exodus 4:21 as irony. When irony is used constructively it is communicated to cast a new light on a situation.
We must consider this, God knew the outcome of Pharoah’s response, plague after plague, but He continued to allow Pharoah the opportunities to take heed of God’s moral order. It was Pharoah who deliberately ignored God’s moral order and his resistance turned into straight-up rebellion. Pharoah goes so deep into a rebellion that his heart is hardened by his own doing.
