“The Lord said to Moses, ‘Pharaoh will not listen to you, so that my wonders may be multiplied in the land of Egypt.’ Moses and Aaron did all these wonders before Pharaoh, but the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go out of his land.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Let me give you a bit of a peek behind the curtain this morning. I often write the introductions for these posts several weeks before I write the rest of them. These introductions serve as placeholders so that when I come back to actually write the full post I have a bit of a reminder of what I was thinking when I was first studying through a particular passage. As a result, I’m often studying one part of the text while writing about another a few chapters back. On occasion this lets me see connections between two different parts that I might otherwise miss. Way back at the beginning of chapter 7, just before God set Moses loose on Pharaoh, He told him (again) what was going to happen. The words He used then were remarkably similar to these words right here. Let’s come back to them again and touch yet again on this theme of Pharaoh’s hard heart. From that, we’ll spend a moment reflecting on why all of the repetition we find in this story is so important.

I feel like perhaps we’ve just almost beaten the idea of Pharaoh’s hard-heartedness into the ground on this journey. This is not necessarily because that’s what I’ve wanted to talk about over and over again, but rather because it’s what Moses keeps coming back to over and over again. Pharaoh’s heart was hard. He was stubborn. He was incorrigibly resistant to God’s command to let the people go (or, generally, to being told to do anything He didn’t want to do). And God was using his stubbornness to accomplish a whole variety of things.

He used it as the vehicle by which He would bring judgment to the people of Egypt for their sinfulness as a nation just like He had long before told Abraham He would do. God would yet do the same thing with several more nations over the course of the still unfolding history of the Old Testament. Sticking with His character, though, God brought the ultimate judgment of death to only a fraction of the nation rather than striking them with total destruction. Some of this came by way of the final plague which we will talk about again over the next three weeks, Lord willing. Some of this came by way of the destruction of Pharaoh’s army in chapter 14 which I am studying currently and we will get to in a couple of months, again, Lord willing.

God used Pharaoh’s hard heart to reveal His power and might and glory to the world in a way the world had not yet experienced in this particular era. He had acted powerfully and on a global scale in the flood, but that was so long before this time that it was outside the collective memory of anyone and existed only as legend and rumor. His actions on behalf of Abraham and his family had mostly been behind the scenes as far as anyone unfamiliar with Him was concerned. Here, though, God made Himself known in a way that was utterly undeniable. The stories of this episode would spread far and wide such that more than 40 years later, when the people were preparing to finally enter the Promised Land, the stories of what their God did more than a generation before in Egypt still frightened their enemies.

A third thing He accomplished by Pharaoh’s stubbornness was to reintroduce Himself to His own people, the Israelites. They didn’t know who He was beyond stories from their ancestors. They didn’t know what He was like. They didn’t trust Him or understand why they should even consider doing such a thing. This series of events solved all of that. Well, “solved” may be too strong a word here. It gave them reason to trust Him. Whether or not they did depended on their present circumstances and if they happened to be facing anything dangerous or threatening in the moment. Through the lens of hindsight, they were a remarkably cowardly people as it would turn out.

Yet what the story of the Exodus has made abundantly clear by the repetition of these themes is that God was fully in charge of the whole affair. Everything was unfolding according to His preordained plan. This doesn’t mean He was forcing any particular character into any particular decision. Rather, in His perfect divine foreknowledge, He knew how the various characters involved were going to freely respond to the situations they were in, and He used that knowledge to direct the events to the outcome of His choosing.

As a case in point right here, listen again to what the Lord said to Moses a few months before this point, back before the real action had gotten started. These words were themselves a repetition of something He had told Moses a few weeks (or even months) before this appearance. The fact that God had to repeat Himself so often to Moses and the people is a sobering reminder of just how forgetful we are as a people, but that’s another conversation for another time.

In any event, way back in Exodus 7:2 and following, God said this: “You must say whatever I command you; then Aaron your brother must declare it to Pharaoh so that he will let the Israelites go from his land. But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. Pharaoh will not listen to you, but I will put my hand into Egypt and bring the military divisions of my people the Israelites out of the land of Egypt by great acts of judgment. The Egyptians will know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the Israelites from among them.”

See all the repeated ideas? God tells us what He is going to do. He reminds us of that again before He does it. He tells what He’s doing while He’s doing it. And then He tells us what He did once He’s finished doing it. It’s like He’s covered human history in reminder sticky notes, pasting them in all kinds of places so that we don’t forget who is He and what He’s planned. We don’t ever have to be in the dark about God’s plans for us. Now, I’m not talking about the nit-picky details of our lives like what shirt you decided to put on when you got up this morning. I’m talking about the big picture plans for us as His people. These things are all revealed in the Scriptures.

For instance, we know that His intention is to save us by the sacrifice of His Son. He plans for us to follow Him by faith and on the basis of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. We know because He told us a long, long time ago that following Him like this will be for our good in the end, but it will bring all kinds of challenges and hardships now as the world comes after us because of our association with Him. We know that the world is not only broken, but is going to lean harder and harder into that brokenness the further down the path of human history we travel. But we also know that there is no force the world can assemble that will be able to overcome Jesus’ body, the church. And in the end, God will make all things right, bringing His just judgment to bear on the world. Then, those who placed their faith in Him will enjoy eternal life in His glorious kingdom.

We know all of that. Nothing about it should ever be a surprise to us any more than anything about the Exodus journey should have been a surprise to Moses or the people of Israel. The trouble is that our hearts are often as hard as Pharaoh’s, and the only way we learn is the hard way. We try with all our might to resist God’s plans resulting in disaster and failure time and time again. Yet He is patient with us now just as He was patient then. He will deal with our sin decisively when the time is right. Actually, that’s not quite true. He has already dealt with our sin decisively in Jesus’ sacrifice. He is patient now so that we can have all the time we need to get our hearts and minds around what He has done on our behalf, accept it by accepting Him, and adjust our lives accordingly. Yet the time He has made available for this is not infinite. There will be a moment of decision beyond which our choices will be final. Let’s make sure we’ve made the right one before that day arrives.