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Welcome to the Cross References podcast on the Book of Ezekiel. In this study, you learn how every small piece of the Bible tells one big story- and most importantly, how they all connect to the cross and Christ.
Whether you’re a newbie Christian or a veteran Bible reader, my goal is that God’s Word will make more sense to you after every episode.
Host: Luke Taylor
Who Hardened Pharaoh’s Heart?
Exodus 4-9
Introduction
Last week I was discussing a weird story about Moses in Exodus 4, I came across another pretty odd verse that generates some confusion among Christians: Exodus 4:21.
Now, I didn’t want to stop and analyze that verse because it would have taken me on a rabbit trail, and I was already trying to talk about a different weird thing, and I would have had to go down a weird-ception of weird-within-a-weird. So I decided to come back to it this week.
And what does Exodus 4:21 say? Well, it’s as Moses is on his way back to Egypt, and God says
(Exodus 4:21)
“When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles that I have put in your power. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.
So that’s strange because it raises the question of whether Pharaoh even had a choice about how everything was going to play out. Because if you know the story, Pharaoh doesn’t want to let the people go, and he pays a pretty steep price for it.
And yet Pharaoh never relents. All throughout the story, his heart is harder than your grandma’s fruit cake at Christmas.
But this claim that God would harden Pharaoh’s heart makes it seem like Pharaoh wasn’t even really able to let the people go if he wanted to. So what gives? Did Pharaoh have free will?
And perhaps more importantly to us: do you and I have free will?
I find this to be weird, and I’d like to explore why it’s in the Bible.
Turn to Exodus 4, and let’s get weird.
[theme music]
What is a Hard-Heart?
Welcome to Weird Stuff in the Bible, where we explore scripture passages that are bizarre, perplexing or just plain weird. This is Luke Taylor, and today we’re going to be talking about the question of who hardened Pharaoh’s heart. Did God harden Pharaoh’s heart? Or did Pharaoh harden his own heart? And if God did it, then should Pharaoh bear any responsibility for how things played out?
First, let’s define what a hard heart is. It’s kind of similar to being what we might call hard-headed, but specifically in a spiritual sense. So, if someone is hard-headed, that means they’re stubborn, perhaps unintelligent, perhaps prideful, and think they know best.
So if you try to convey new information to them, they don’t want to hear it. They don’t want to change. They don’t want to admit they’re wrong, or that there could be a better way to do it.
And they’re usually not very smart because they’re not open to new information.
Now, hard-heartedness is similar to that. If someone is hard-hearted, they don’t want to admit that they’re morally wrong. They don’t want to become closer to God and give Him control of their life. They don’t want to admit they need a savior. They don’t want to admit that they’re a sinner.
Some people will admit that they’re a sinner in a vague or broad sense. They’ll say, “yeah, there are probably some things in my life I’ve done wrong.” But they don’t want to admit that there’s any specific thing they’ve done wrong. They’ll defend every decision they’ve made. They don’t want to admit fault. They don’t want to admit they need God’s forgiveness.
They might intellectually admit that God’s way is best. They may acknowledge that 7 days a week with their mouth. They might go along with God’s ways when it makes sense in their head. But when it comes time to actually DO what God says to do, they want the right to say no.
That’s what it means to have a hard heart. It’s like what Jesus said about some of the people of His day: “This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me.” And that was originally a quote from Isaiah.
And all of this can be an issue for us as well; as Christians, even if you’ve accepted Jesus as your savior, we still need to work to soften our hearts. There are different levels or degrees to which we let God have our hearts. It’s a process of sanctification. We want our hearts to become more tender and receptive to God. And this manifests in our obedience, in our sensitivity to the leading of the Holy Spirit, and in how quickly we acknowledge it and repent when we sin.
A good test for how soft your heart is is this: how quickly do you obey the Lord when you know what the right thing to do is but you don’t want to? Or how long does it take you to ask God’s forgiveness after you’ve done something wrong?
When you’ve mistreated a fellow Christian, your spouse, your kids- how long does it take you to say sorry to them? To admit fault? Do you ever? The longer it takes you to say sorry when you do something wrong speaks to the hardness of your heart. If your heart is soft toward God, it will be soft toward your fellow man. You’ll be quick to apologize and quick to obey God.
So when Moses came to Pharaoh and said “let my people go,” and Pharaoh said “no,” Pharaoh would not relent because of his hard heart. It made him dead to the things of God.
God vs Pharaoh
But the question before us today is whether Pharaoh had any control over that. And if he doesn’t have control, if God is making Pharaoh say no, then why would God be upset with Pharaoh about it? Let’s examine the context of the question, or perhaps we might say, the problem that Exodus 4:21 makes. As we already read, God was taking credit for the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. But I want to take this difficult issue and- before solving it- make it much worse.
Exodus 4:21
And the Lord said to Moses, “When you go back to Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all the miracles that I have put in your power. But I will harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.
So from this verse, it sounds like God is sovereign over all decisions being made here. But then later after the plague of frogs happens and Moses takes the frogs away, it says in
Exodus 8:15
But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them, as the Lord had said.
So now the Bible is telling us that Pharaoh is hardening his own heart. However, then the plague of gnats happens right after that, and it ends with these words in
Exodus 8:19
But Pharaoh's heart was hardened, and he would not listen to them
So now the heart-hardening is something that happened TO Pharaoh. However, after the plague of flies,
Exodus 8:32
But Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also, and did not let the people go.
So he once again hardened his own heart. However, after that is the plague of the livestock dying.
Exodus 9:7
But the heart of Pharaoh was hardened, and he did not let the people go.
By this point, Pharaoh’s heart is harder than trying to open a pickle jar right after bicep day at the gym. And yet we’re still not through. It says it again 5 verses later after the plague of boils
Exodus 9:12
But the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them
But then after the plague of hail, it says this in
Exodus 9:34
But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet again and hardened his heart, he and his servants.
By this point you probably feel like we’ve been on a merry-go-round. And it goes back and forth and back and forth like that, all the way up to the tenth plague, the death of the firstborn. All the way until Pharaoh decides to chase the Israelites to the Red Sea.
That’s why I called this episode, “WHO hardened Pharaoh’s Heart.” Because if it was only God, it wouldn’t be a question. We’d just say it was God, and we’d find some way to sort out the question of free will and God’s sovereignty. If it was just Pharaoh, again, that’d be a simple answer, and much easier to understand. But what we actually observe in all this back-and-forth is that the Bible gives credit to both God and Pharaoh for the hardening of his heart.
God will harden Pharaoh’s heart, but then it seems that God will also get upset with and punish Pharaoh for having a hard heart.
Is anyone at fault?
So, who is at fault for Pharaoh’s disobedience? Let me say the cheesy-but-true thing upfront: the relationship between God’s sovereignty and man’s free will is a mystery that we may never truly, fully understand on this side of heaven. There are verses that some can point to to say that God is completely sovereign over the decisions of man, and that God had already predetermined before the foundations of the earth were laid who would accept Him and who would reject Him. That God made certain people to be “elect” and everyone else is doomed. That anybody who rejects God did not actually have the option of even accepting Him, because they were not part of this group called the elect, and that God did not extend grace to them. God has hardened them and not opened the opportunity of salvation for them. So these verses about God hardening the heart of Pharaoh make perfect sense within that theological framework.
Then there is another view commonly called Arminianism that says that we do have free will, and that anybody who chooses to follow Christ is making that choice of their own volition. So for them, the verses about Pharaoh hardening his own heart make perfect sense within THAT theological framework.
And if we were to talk about the broader issue of the sovereignty of God vs the sovereignty of man, we could perhaps break out a bunch more verses that back up both sides of the issue to make our case one way or the other. We could go to Romans 9 and Ephesians 1 and Joshua 24 and we could go round and round all day.
But we’re just looking at Pharaoh for this episode, and Pharaoh has verses on both sides of the theological divide. So the way I’d square this circle is by saying that there’s a little bit of both going on. Yes, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart throughout this story, because God was using Pharaoh for a purpose, and God was doing something with the story of the ten plagues and the crossing of the Red Sea that brought more glory to God than if Pharaoh had just said yes after the Nile turned to blood.
But also, I’d say that God only hardened Pharaoh’s heart because that’s also what Pharaoh wanted. Pharaoh did not want to let the people go. Pharaoh did not want to submit to God. Pharaoh did not want to give up control. And as the plagues dragged on, Pharaoh did not want to be beaten. And his heart became harder than trying to get a fitted sheet on my five-year-old’s loft bed.
Think of how illogical it was when you had seen your Nile river turned to blood, when you’d seen plagues of frogs and flies and boils, that you would still oppose this God. And yet it was a willful rebellion. Pharaoh did not want to submit, and so in the face of all logic, God gives Pharaoh the hard-heartedness it would take to say “no” again and again and again.
So I still blame Pharaoh. Because yes, God hardened his heart; but also, it was what Pharaoh wanted. And part of God’s abandonment wrath is that God gives us exactly what we want. He abandons us to our own desires.
So what we need to keep in mind, is that God gives us free will, but if we choose to pursue evil and rebel against God, God will make it easier for us to do that. He’ll harden your heart.
Pharaoh is not a special case. Pharaoh is an example of what happens every day when people choose to rebel against God.
Housekeeping/Mailbag
Which makes this a great moment to break in and say: next time on this podcast, I want to explore a similarly themed topic- the question of the “god of this world” in
II Corinthians 4:4
In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
So, who is the god of this world? Is it Satan? And if so, how can it be people’s fault for rejecting the Gospel if they’ve been blindsided by Satan? We’ll get into that next time. Make sure you’re subscribed so you can get it! And we will continue this discussion about the abandonment wrath of God.
Because unlike the other forms of God’s wrath, the abandonment wrath is kinda weird. When we think about God’s wrath, we think about concepts like hell, or fire and brimstone raining down from the sky, or Jerusalem getting decimated in 586 BC. But the abandonment wrath of God is when God just gives us what we want. And that’s kinda weird that God would judge us by giving us what we want. But when we desire evil, we bring a lot of evil upon ourselves.
So we’ll continue that discussion next week.
In the meantime, if you are enjoying this podcast, please consider leaving a quick review on apple or whatever platform you listen on. I’d appreciate you taking just a moment to do that.
Would God harden our hearts?
Perhaps you’ve heard it said that God is in control of who is in control. And I agree with that. This is really the main theme of the book of Daniel. God is in control of who is in control.
So there is a biblical irony to me that people seek to become a president or a great leader because they often want to be the one in control. And yet, the testimony of the Bible is that the higher authority or office that a person has, the less control it seems that that leader has over their own actions.
Proverbs 21:1 says
The king's heart is a stream of water in the hand of the Lord;
he turns it wherever he will.
Kings believe that they control nations and borders and the masses. But in reality, the earth is the Lord’s and nobody gets into authority without God allowing them to be, and God has His ways of making sure that things shake out the way He wants them to. Regardless of what God has to do with that leader to make it happen.
But for you as an individual, your heart’s hardness is your choice. If you choose sin and rebellion, your heart hardens against God. You choose it through your choice to sin, and God hardens it as His response to your sin.
If you reject the obvious fact of creation and the reality of God’s existence, God will harden your heart to reject the obvious truth, but only as a response to your desire to believe something else.
I truly believe that if Pharaoh was repentant and trying to soften his own heart, God wouldn’t have hardened it. I believe God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart was purely as a response to what Pharaoh himself wanted. And it was a downward spiral, but Pharaoh could have gotten off of it anytime he wanted to. Instead, he made his heart harder than trying to remember the passwords to all the streaming services you’re subscribed to.
The same is true for us when we don’t want to make God our Lord because we have a desire for some kind of sin or to do our own thing, that’s why
Hebrews 3 warns us (Verses 12-15)
12 Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. 13 But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. 14 For we have come to share in Christ, if indeed we hold our original confidence firm to the end. 15 As it is said, “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion.”
If you want to reject God, God will give you what you want. That’s God’s abandonment wrath.
So today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.
Like I said on a recent other podcast I do, I want to have a heart that’s like playdoh in God’s hands. When you have a hard-heart, God has to bring the sledgehammer down on it to get anything done with it. That’s what it takes to get through to a hard heart. You gotta come down on it hard.
I believe that’s why Jesus was harsh with the Pharisees. Not because He hated them. Jesus loved everybody, and I believe that Jesus wanted to reach everybody with His ministry. I don’t believe He was just rejecting the Pharisees and trying to drive them away. I believe Jesus was speaking to them in whatever way it took for Him to get through to him.
Like Jesus said in the parable of the sower. Some people are soft soil and receive it easily. Some people are hard soil. And if you’ve ever tried to dig in tough soil, you know you gotta use some force to punch through it.
Some preachers get behind the pulpit and scream and yell. And we don’t always like that, but for some people, that’s the only way the message is going to get through to them. Not saying it’s always a good thing, but often it is.
So I believe that when Jesus raised His voice toward the Pharisees, it was an act of love. Because they weren’t the type of people who were going to respond to a gentle, soft attitude. Jesus has to be hard on the hard-hearted and soft on the soft-hearted.
And the question for you today is, how do you want Jesus to deal with you?
Remember, the Bible is not weird. WE are weird, because we don’t know about how God hardens the heart. But now we do. Thanks for listening, God bless you for sticking around until the end, and we’ll see you next time on Weird Stuff in the Bible