“So they took furnace soot and stood before Pharaoh. Moses threw it toward heaven, and it became festering boils on people and animals. The magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils, for the boils were on the magicians as well as on all the Egyptians. But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he did not listen to them, as the Lord had told Moses.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the most challenging aspects of a healthy, orthodox, biblical theology is getting the balance right between God’s sovereignty and human responsibility. The uncomfortable tension the Scriptures consistently hold is that both positions are entirely correct. Making sense out of that, though, isn’t always easy, especially when we encounter passages like this one. Here we are at another plague that is again worse than the last one. But this time, God is implicated by the language for the ongoing tragedy of the plagues. Let’s talk about what’s happening here.

We talked last week about the connection points among the various plagues. Here we are at the sixth plague, and it fits nicely into the large sequence of events. Like the third and the ninth plagues, this one is unannounced. The trigger for the plague happens where Pharaoh can see it, but there were no instructions for Moses to go and give Pharaoh a more advanced heads up like in plagues four and five. Moses simply grabs a handful of furnace soot and throws it into the air where Pharaoh can see what he is doing.

Perhaps Moses was standing on the opposite side of the Nile from where Pharaoh was going down to the water early in the morning as their meetings often took place, but we don’t know for sure. What we do know is the effect of the soot. At this symbolic gesture, God inflicts the Egyptians with a plague of painful, festering boils. This disease outbreak apparently effects both people and animals. We don’t have any idea on the identity of this particular disease outbreak, but from the descriptions in this section, it was pretty bad. The outcome of this plague, though, is the same as its predecessors: Pharaoh doubled down on his oppositions to the Lord’s command and refused to let the people of Israel go in spite of the pain he and his people were experiencing for his stubbornness.

The theme that has been steadily emerging on the string of plagues the Egyptians suffered through while waiting for the cosmic battle of wills between Pharaoh and the God of the Hebrews to come to an end is that every time something bad happened, Pharaoh’s heart was hard just as God had said it would be. This plague summary, though, changes things up just a bit from the previous ones. This time, Moses is explicit in the text that it was God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart.

I don’t want to dwell on this very long today as we are going to come back to it again in the next few weeks, Lord willing, but I do at least want to ask and offer up some answers to the question. What are we supposed to do with this? If God is actively hardening Pharaoh’s heart throughout this process, does that mean He is really to blame for the misery of the people of Egypt? Was Pharaoh ready to relent this time, but God had a bigger plan and so He stepped in to push him in the direction of resistance? What is going on here?

Well, for starters, we can’t say with confidence anything beyond what the text presents to us. Everything beyond that is speculation. This means theories like that last one where Pharaoh was going to relent, but God prevented him from doing so in order to keep His bigger plans on track have to be thrown out as little more than wildly unhelpful conspiracy theorizing. What we can see from looking at the text carefully is that in most of the times the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart gets mentioned, we are told either that he hardened his own heart or else simply that his heart was hard. It is only on a couple of occasions that the cause of Pharaoh’s hard heart is indicated to be God instead of Pharaoh himself.

There are two main things we can conclude from this. Either God actively stepped in on a couple of occasions to push things in the direction He wanted them to go regardless of what Pharaoh wanted, or this is an example of the tension between divine sovereignty and human responsibility. What I’m getting at is this. Was God responsible for Pharaoh’s hard heart? In the minds of Moses’ original audience, yes, He was. And that wouldn’t have bothered them at all the way it bothers us today with our nearly obsessive commitment to personal autonomy. On the other hand, was Pharaoh responsible for resisting God’s command to the point that he was not going to be willing to follow it even in the face of great pressure to the contrary? The answer here is also yes. Moses’ original audience would have thought as much as well. It’s a both-and, not an either-or. There is indisputably an unresolved tension here, but it is a tension we find held rather than resolved throughout the Scriptures.

Coming back to the question of what we are to do with this, we are first and foremost not to let it bother us too much. This is not a knock against the character of God. It is instead a reflection of this tension. God is fully sovereign over what happens in His creation. Nothing happens that He does not allow in His perfect wisdom. This does not mean He wants all of it to happen, but He allows it because of His commitment to our being able to make meaningful and consequential choices so that we can love Him freely and genuinely. At the same time, we are all fully responsible for the choices we make. Pharaoh chose to resist God. He chose to double and triple and quadruple down on that resistance. The harder God urged him to relent by the various plagues, the more he hardened his own resolve to resist. In other words, Pharaoh is to blame for the ongoing misery of the Egyptian people. Both-and.

Is this a comfortable idea? No. Not at all. But from what we see across this story and across the Scriptures, it is nonetheless a true idea. Given the choice, I’d rather have what’s true than what’s not, even if the truth isn’t very comfortable. All of this is made a bit easier when we get the character of God right – something we’ve talked about several times over the years. But it’s okay to admit that it remains a challenging idea even in spite of that. The thing that is perhaps most important for us to keep firmly in mind when we are considering how to engage skeptical folks asking questions about this or other similar passages in the Old Testament is that none of them present any kind of a meaningful challenge to Jesus’ resurrection from the grave. And if that is still secure, then the rest of what the Christian worldview claims about reality is true as well.

If someone can’t get their mind around this part of the text, that’s okay. They don’t have to in order to accept Jesus for who He is. Start with Jesus and let the rest work itself out from there. Our job is not to make sure people accept without question every hard story in the Scriptures. Our job is to make disciples of Jesus. Everything else comes second to that.