“Then the Lord spoke to Moses: ‘Tell the Israelites to turn back and camp in front of Pi-hahiroth, between Migdol and the sea; you must camp in front of Baal-zephon, facing it by the sea. Pharaoh will say of the Israelites: They are wandering around the land in confusion; the wilderness has boxed them in. I will harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will pursue them. Then I will receive glory by means of Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord.’ So the Israelites did this.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

As I shared with you a few weeks ago, in the last few months I have rewatched or watched for the first time the first six Mission Impossible movies. One of the regularly used tools in Ethan Hunt’s toolkit is to impersonate another character in such a way that he is able to get a third character to reveal vital information to accomplish a mission. I think that happens at least once in all six films including the very first scene of the first one. He’ll create situations that are designed to set up targeted characters to give him the information or perform some action that he wants them to do, but to do so entirely of their own free will. That feels a little like what God is doing to Pharaoh here…which isn’t nearly so entertaining of a thought as when Hunt does it. Let’s talk about what’s going on here, what God’s plans are, and what this all reveals about Him.

As I told you yesterday, chapter 14 here is one of the most exciting, but also the most challenging we have yet encountered. And, given that we have come through God’s judgment against the firstborn males of Egypt, I recognize that’s saying something. This is the part of the story when God parts the Red Sea for the Israelites to cross on dry ground in order to escape the pursuing Egyptian army. That’s really exciting. Hollywood couldn’t have written a better script. It’s also the part where it seems like God tricks Pharaoh into pursuing Israel across the dry sea bed in order to destroy him and his army by literally dropping the sea on them. That makes for an exciting conclusion to the story, but it’s also a really uncomfortable one. And it all starts, yet again, with Pharaoh’s hard heart.

As Israel headed off into the wilderness, God’s instructions to Moses were to have them take a route that made it appear they had run out into the desert, gotten lost, and now didn’t know what to do. When Pharaoh finally let the Israelites go in the aftermath of the final plague, that was an emotional decision. In the wake of the shock and awe he and the rest of Egypt felt after they discovered their deceased loved ones, Pharaoh told Moses to get out. He was to take all of the people and all of their stuff and leave immediately. He didn’t ever want to see them again.

Now, though, it had been a few days. The grief had turned to anger and regret. I remember getting bullied a bit in junior high. There was one kid in gym (because of course it happened in junior high gym class), who liked to pick on me because I was small and a bit mousy. He was a fair bit bigger than me, carried himself with a great deal more swagger than I ever had, and I had zero interest in conflict or confrontation, so I tended to wilt back when he challenged me. It went on for a little while, until I hit my limit. Sitting in another class I didn’t share with him, I ran my mouth to my benchmate that I thought I could probably take the bully in a fight as long as one of his posse didn’t join in. This third kid apparently thought that would be entertaining, because he promptly went and reported this to the bully, who graciously gave me the opportunity in the next gym class. That was fun. Happily, I only got pushed once and talked my way out of the rest of what might have happened. Later, I made an incredible play during a game of dodgeball (yes, we were still able to play dodgeball then) that allowed my team, which included the bully, to win, and earned his respect by it for the rest of the year.

Pharaoh was where I was sitting in the class where I decided to run my mouth. Without Moses and Israel’s God looming over him, he began to not only regret his decision to let Israel go, but also to imagine that in spite of everything he and the Egyptian people had learned about Israel’s God he would be able to overcome them to enslave them once again.

Well, that’s all how history played itself out. What’s challenging here is that God knew it was going to play out this way. He knew Pharaoh was going to react this way. He knew all of that and in light of it, gave Moses the instructions for the route Israel was supposed to take. He set the whole situation up from the start. Now, again, if this were just something Moses came up with on his own (including figuring out a way to hold back the waters of the Red Sea), we’d be okay with that. In fact, we’d cheer it. This would go down as one of the greatest, most genius military victories in history. But that’s not what happened. God did it. He planned it. He set up the Egyptian army to be the means by which He would receive glory (namely, as we will see, through their destruction) and give the rest of the Egyptian people yet another reason to believe He really was who Moses had long been claiming Him to be.

And that’s all really uncomfortable to think about. Or maybe it’s not for you. Maybe you’re someone who has been following Jesus for such a long time that you’ve worked out all your issues and struggles with the Scriptures. Perhaps you were just taught to never question the Bible. That’s fine. But there are a whole lot of other folks for whom passages like this one are tough. They represent insurmountable obstacles to giving their hearts and minds fully and freely to God in Christ. They just can’t bring themselves to bend the knee to a God who would sanction something like this. Never mind the fact that had the Egyptian army caught up with the Israelites they would have likely butchered most of them, taking the few who remained back to Egypt where they would have been pressed back into a brutal slavery that might have lasted another 400 years. Their existence as a nation would have been ended. All the folks who struggle with passages like this one can see is what God did right here. And right here, God used Pharaoh’s hard heart to wipe out his army.

Over the next couple of weeks, Lord willing, we’ll wrestle more with some of those issues. I don’t want to dwell on them any longer today and take away from that. For now, I just want to set the stage for where we’re going. God is going to use the fact that Pharaoh still hasn’t really gotten over himself and reached a place of being willing to acknowledge Him as God to bring about yet another major defeat for the crippled nation. Moses uses the language here of God’s hardening Pharaoh’s heart, but as we have talked about several times on this journey, that just means God was allowing Pharaoh to lean into the stubbornness he brought to the table. This was simply who Pharaoh was. God didn’t have to do anything but get out of his way and let him run at full tilt right into the wall. In the process, He was going to give the Israelites yet another reason to trust Him as their God. They were going to see His power. They were going to see just how much He was for them. Then they were going to forget all about that at the first sign of trouble, but we’ll get there in a few weeks.

As for what we are supposed to do with all of this, I think there are two things worth our seeing. First, when God deals with sin, He deals with it thoroughly, and He keeps dealing with it until it is gone. That happens when either we finally and fully submit ourselves to Him, letting go completely of the sin to which we were clinging, or else we embrace our sin to its fullest and experience the deadly consequences it brings. There is a day coming when God will deal with sin once and for all. Before then, God is patient far beyond what we deserve. But He does sometimes step in to put a stop to certain things. When and why He does this is a matter of His perfect wisdom and justice and not something we’re likely to understand. In those moments, though, our best bet is always going to be to submit to Him.

The second thing is this: God wants to be known. He wants us to know Him. He wants for everybody to know Him. To this end, He seeks to reveal Himself in ways we can understand and accept. In the ancient world, He did this in ways that seem incredible and weird and even offensive to us. But these were ways that made sense to them. They were acceptable to them. They revealed Him as the kind of God they wanted to follow and claim as their own. As much as we might struggle with those, though, they were always consistent with His character of righteousness and holiness and love. He doesn’t reveal Himself in those kinds of ways any longer because we don’t think like they did anymore. For us, He has revealed Himself most fully in the person of Jesus Christ, a revelation preserved for us in the Scriptures and demonstrated for the world by the church. We don’t need more than that. We only need to take Him as He is. When we do that, life will always be our reward.