“But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he was unwilling to let them go. Pharaoh said to him, ‘Leave me! Make sure you never see my face again, for on the day you see my face, you will die.’ ‘As you have said,’ Moses replied, ‘I will never see your face again.'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We’ve danced around this idea several times now over the course of our talking through the various plagues God unleashed on the Egyptians because of Pharaoh’s refusal to let the Israelites go worship in the wilderness. (Have you noticed that a three-day trip to the wilderness to worship God is still all Moses has been asking for and not total emancipation?) Today, it’s time to tackle it head on. This is a deeply uncomfortable idea, but it has been repeated now several times. What does it mean that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart? Did Pharaoh harden his own heart? What is going on here? Let’s see what kind of sense we can make of out this.

In the last couple of weeks alone we’ve come up against this issue two or three times. Let’s start here by simply laying out the challenge it presents. The implications of a face-value reading of the English text is that Pharaoh’s stubborn refusal to let the Israelites go have their three-day wilderness worship retreat is the result of God’s making him stubborn. That’s what is being conveyed by the phrase “hard heart.” It is a reference to Pharaoh’s stubbornness. He doesn’t want to do what God has told him to do. And he is so committed to his unwillingness to do it that he is willing to endure whatever the consequences for his commitment happen to be.

But the repetition of this phrase “the Lord hardened his heart” forces us to ask an uncomfortable question. Would Pharaoh had let the people go earlier in this ugly process? Was there a point after the second or third plague perhaps that Pharaoh would have been finally willing to do what God wanted had He not gotten involved and turned Pharaoh’s will against it? Or perhaps it was later in the process. When you read through the ten plagues (something I went back and did in preparation for writing this morning), the first half of them have Pharaoh hardening his own heart against what God wanted him to do. God is not mentioned as the one doing the hardening until the sixth plague of boils. The seventh plague switches back to using the language of Pharaoh hardening his own heart. After that, though, Moses only uses the phrase “the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” Incidentally, plagues eight and nine (the locusts and darkness) were the worst of the bunch.

So then, whose fault was Egypt’s misery? God’s or Pharaoh’s? Before we answer that question, we actually have to go back further in the text than the first plague. We need to go all the way back to God’s first call to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3. At the end of that call, God says to Moses, “However, I know that the king of Egypt will not allow you to go, even under force from a strong hand. But when I stretch out my hand and strike Egypt with all my miracles that I will perform in it, after that, he will let you go.” From this, we are given a bit of a confusing picture of who’s to blame for this whole mess. On the one hand, God knows that Pharaoh is going to refuse to play ball. But He also knows that Pharaoh will finally relent after the full slate of what He has planned for Egypt. So is God to blame or is Pharaoh to blame?

When we step forward into chapter 4 and take a fresh look at the odd story about Moses’ trip back to Egypt when God seems to come after him and his wife saves his life by circumcising their son (I talked about that story here), God’s instructions to Moses at the beginning of that trip are these: “When you go back to Egypt, make sure you do before Pharaoh all the wonders that I have put within your power. But I will harden his heart so that he won’t let the people go. And you will say to Pharaoh: This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son. I told you: Let my son go so that he may worship me, but you refused to let him go. Look, I am about to kill your firstborn son!”

We’ll deal more directly with the second part of that again when we talk about the tenth plague starting next week, Lord willing, but here God says explicitly that He is going to harden Pharaoh’s heart. And again, in Exodus 7 when God is giving Moses one final encouragement before the real confrontation kicks off, He tells him, “But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt.” After that, the next several references to the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart don’t mention God’s involvement at all. They only note that his heart was hard or that he hardened his own heart.

What we are left with is this confusing back and forth without any real clarity around which is the right answer. So, which is it?

There are two primary things we have to keep in mind when sorting all of this out. Let’s touch on those briefly and then I’ll offer my thoughts toward a solution. The first thing to keep in mind is that Moses wasn’t writing any of this for us. We were not on his mind in even the slightest amount when he was writing this story down to preserve it for the people of Israel. We were on God’s mind, sure, but not Moses’.

What I’m getting at is this: our culture and the way we think about and process ideas about the world and about God are vastly different from the culture into which Moses was writing. They thought about God’s activity in the world in very different terms than we do. We see the world through a lens of personal autonomy. We think about everything in terms of how it is going to affect me and my ability to accomplish my plans. If anyone or anything – including God – threatens to get in the way of or tinker with that, we consider them a threat indeed; a threat we need to oppose and overcome.

This is not how people saw the world back then. They operated on an intensely communal basis. The community was everything and your job was to play your part in the community no matter what that part happened to be. And you weren’t the one to decided what it was going to be either. That was up to the community. It was up to your family. It was up to God. Speaking of God, the people back then understood themselves as living in a world presided over by various gods and spirits. These divine and otherwise supernatural beings were sovereign over the people of this world. If they wanted to do something to a certain person in a certain way, that was their prerogative, and it wasn’t our place to question them about it. We were simply to take it as a matter of course and get on with our lives. Furthermore, the gods were responsible for everything that happened in the world. If something happened – even if we did it – the gods caused or allowed it (which were really the same thing in their minds).

Here’s the point: Moses’ first audience didn’t struggle with the idea of God’s hardening Pharaoh’s heart the way we do. They would have understood this as two sides of the same coin. Did Pharaoh harden his own heart? Yes. Did God harden his heart? Yes. Case closed. None of this impacted how they understood God’s character in any way, shape, or form. This fact actually presents us with an important question: If it didn’t bother them, should we really let it bother us? If the people who experienced these things personally weren’t phased by it in their understanding of God and His character (and if it actually helped to draw them to Him with greater faithfulness), should we let it completely wreck our understanding of His character? Furthermore, if Jesus took this whole story at face value and it didn’t negatively impact His understanding of God’s character, shouldn’t we trust His opinion? I mean, I don’t know about you, but if a guy can predict and pull off His own death and resurrection, it seems like going with His opinion on the matter is a pretty safe thing to do.

The second thing we have to keep in mind here is exactly what God’s character is. We have to get God’s character right. And we can’t base our assessment of His character on only this story. We can’t base our assessment of His character on only a handful of stories that are generally taken out of context. We have to consider the whole thing. And the whole thing reveals a God who is good and just and loving and holy and righteous. If He does something, that thing was right to do. And this is not simply because He declared it right, nor did He do it because someone else declared it to be right. It is in His nature to do the right thing, and He never acts in ways that are inconsistent with His nature.

If we are engaging with the text with this as our operating principle, then when we come upon hard places like this, our way forward is much easier than it otherwise would be. This operating principle does not mean we will be able to fully understand what we encounter any more than we might without it. What it means is that when we don’t understand something, rather than running away from God or questioning His character or letting our faith fall apart, we trust in His character. We trust that He was acting in a way that was right and good and that would have brought Him the most glory even if we can’t wrap our minds around it. With this trust in place, we take the text at face value, understand it the best we can, and move on for the time being. We trust that when the time is right, He will help us understand it more fully than we do right now. We also remember that no matter how much we might struggle with a particular text (especially in the Old Testament), that text has no bearing on whether or not Jesus rose from the grave. And as long as Jesus rose from the grave, our faith in God is secure.

So then, here’s a possible solution for this particular tension. Pharaoh’s heart was hard to claims of authority greater than his own before Moses even met with him for the first time. Before he even heard the name of Israel’s God, he was already not going to listen to what any other god had to say. He understood himself to be a god, the embodiment in fact of the chief god. His power was absolute. His word was law. That was simply the nature of the world. Of all of this he was absolutely confident. In addition to this, Pharaoh’s personality was such that when he was pressed to do something he didn’t want to do, his resolve not to do it strengthened. This was all simply who Pharaoh was. What the people of Israel understood as God’s hardening his heart, then, was not God doing something active to Pharaoh in order to unleash His wrath on Egypt, it was simply God’s allowing Pharaoh to be himself. In other words, He didn’t have to harden Pharaoh’s heart. He was doing a fine job of that on his own.

Moses and his original audience understood this as God acting actively, but that was simply how they understood the world. And this isn’t me merely staking out a position of chronological snobbery either, suggesting that we simply know more than they did then now. As God came to reveal more and more of Himself and His character and how He operates in the world to us, our understanding of all these things has grown deeper and more robust. We are still very much limited in our perspective in many ways, but we have the whole counsel of Scripture to inform what we can see. This allows us to see more than they could. Thanks be to God that we can and that stories like this one don’t have to ruin our faith.

One final lesson out of all of this: If you run hard enough from God, eventually He’s going to let you keep running. If you resist His will hard enough, eventually He’s going to let you harden your heart against Him. Now, this doesn’t mean there’s some invisible line we can finally cross over which God washes His hands and says, “Good luck to you.” He will keep trying to win us back for the full extent of our lives on earth. But the harder and further we run, the harder a time we will have receiving His work and responding to His efforts. That’s on us, not Him. So, if you are running, stop running. Turn around and receive the life Christ died to make available to you. There’s no time like now for that.