“Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may do these miraculous signs of mine among them, and so that you may tell your son and grandson how severely I dealt with the Egyptians and performed miraculous signs among them, and you will know that I am the Lord.” So Moses and Aaron went in to Pharaoh and told him, “This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, that they may worship me. But if you refuse to let my people go, then tomorrow I will bring locusts into your territory.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

C.S. Lewis once wrote that in the end there will only be two kinds of people: those who say to the Lord, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom the Lord will say, “Thy will be done.” It makes for a wonderful and thoughtful bit of prose, but he’s not quite right. His point was that those who finally oppose the Lord will be able to be eternally separated from Him. In other words, their will to be separated will be accomplished. Beyond that, God’s will is what will happen. Pharaoh arrogantly thought he could oppose the Lord’s will and do what He wanted. God wanted him to know that he was going to lose this contest of wills and power. Because he hadn’t listened thus far, God was about to turn up the volume even more.

Other than the plagues of blood and frogs, the plague of locusts is perhaps the most well known of the ten plagues on Egypt. If Pharaoh won’t let the people of Israel go as God has been commanding him, the next plague will be a giant swarm of locusts that will cover the land and consume all the rest of the food the hail didn’t destroy.

Of all the plagues Moses had announced to Pharaoh and his officials, this one brought with it the greatest amount of pre-plague psychological terror. Locust swarms were a regular enough thing in that part of the world (they still are) that people understood what they meant. In a world in which food insecurity was a daily reality in a way we simply don’t understand in this culture, a locust swarm brought with it the very real probability of mass starvation.

The prospect of locusts was terrifying to ancient people. Multiple different nations had deities whose job it was to scare away locusts. They weren’t major gods, but they were important. If they refused or failed in their duties, the people suffered mightily. If the God of Israel could overcome the locust god, He was a real threat indeed. It’s no wonder that when Pharaoh counseled with his officials after the initial threat and as we’ll talk more about tomorrow, Lord willing, this was the first time they meaningfully pushed back against his continuing to refuse to let the Israelites go. Their comments reflected that they still didn’t understand the real nature of the situation, but the mere prospect of locusts pushed them further in that direction than they had gotten before.

Before we can even get to the locusts themselves, though, the setup of this plague thrusts us right back into the midst of the same tension we have been wrestling with for several days now. These four verses actually present us with both sides of the tension in a way that helps us see why we have to learn to live with it rather than forcing upon the text our desire to bring resolution to it.

In the first two verses here, before any conversation happens with Pharaoh, God gives Moses a behind-the-scenes look at what is happening here from a big picture perspective. Pharaoh was going to oppose God because that was what was in his heart. God, for His part, allowed Pharaoh the tragic freedom to continue steadfastly marching in that direction. The net effect was that Pharaoh’s heart became increasingly hardened to God’s command. Because God was actively allowing this to happen rather than subverting Pharaoh’s ability to make this meaningful and consequential choice, He could tell Moses that He was hardening Pharaoh’s heart. The same thing was happening with his officials. Pharaoh was rubbing off on them and God was allowing it to happen. So, He was hardening their hearts too.

The more important question, though, was why was He doing this? The shortest answer is that He was keeping a promise. That’s not what He says here, but we have to keep it in mind. God had promised Abraham that his descendants would become a great nation who would live in the land of Canaan. He was now working through the unfolding of history to guide things steadily in that direction. This new nation He was creating needed to be able to understand who their God was and what He was like. They needed to understand His power. Pharaoh’s opposition gave Him a perfect opportunity to demonstrate it for them.

This wasn’t merely a demonstration of His power for its own sake, though. That is, He wasn’t just showing off so they would be impressed by Him. He was demonstrating for them that He was more powerful than the gods of Egypt. This mattered so much because for more than 400 years, the gods of Egypt were basically the only gods the people knew. Oh, they had stories of the God of their fathers, but they didn’t really know Him at all. They didn’t understand who He was, the kind of God He was. He was using Pharaoh’s resistance to demonstrate in an undeniable way that they would be able to teach to their own children that He was the God of gods and the Lord of kings. There were none who were like Him. No other god could compare with His power and might. There was more they need to understand down the road, but for here and now, this was what mattered most.

Equipped with this understanding, but also of a growing understanding of God’s character of mercy and compassion (not to mention his own compassion for the people who had raised him), Moses went in to Pharaoh to announce this next plague with a question from God: how long are we going to do this? More specifically, “How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me?”

We dare not forget that while God knew what was going to happen from the start because He knows all things, the full set of ten plagues were not a foregone conclusion. At any point along this horrible journey Pharaoh could have stopped the whole thing by simply acknowledging who God was, who he was in light of that, and letting the people go. In other words, if he has simply taken the path of humility rather than the path of pride, this whole journey of misery and humiliation for him and the gods of Egypt would have been cut short.

Pharaoh’s pride was the real issue at hand. This whole story unfolded the way it did because of his deluded belief that he was in charge, that his authority was his own and not something given to him by another. One of the things made clear throughout the Scriptures is that the prideful will be humbled. Pride declares, “I am God and there is no other like me.” Yet this is simply not the case. There is a God who created the world and everything in it and who presides over it at every moment, but He isn’t us. We are not Him. Those who deluded themselves into thinking they are God or who believe their will is strong enough to exist independently of God’s will eventually run into the walls of reality. That’s never pleasant. Yet God not only allows such collisions, He actively encourages them because He loves us far too much to leave us lost in our delusions and separated from the life that is truly life.

The thing about smashing into reality’s firm walls, though, is that we are generally not the only ones hurt by such a crash. All those who we have brought (or forced) along with us on our deluded vessel will experience the pain along with us. Friends, coworkers, family members, children, our spouses, and more will suffer right along with us when we experience the pain of learning what is true when we have long been operating according to a lie. This could be because they’ve bought into it with us, or because our struggles disrupt their lives otherwise, but the suffering our pride causes will rarely be something we face alone. And while misery certainly loves company, knowing that another person’s misery is the result of our failure brings with it little comfort.

In the end, it is always better to choose the path of humility for ourselves rather than being humbled when God allows us the painful grace of discovering what is true through a run-in with reality’s walls. That is, it is better to humble ourselves than to be humbled. It’s better for us, and it’s better for everyone around us. So, take the path of humility. God loves you far too much to leave you heading down a false path for long. He will humble you if you don’t come to it yourself. Learn Pharaoh’s lesson by reading it, not by experiencing it.