With Hardened Hearts

“The LORD said to Moses, “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharoah all the wonder I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go…” – Exodus 4:21

I think most people do a bit of a doubletake when they first read the above passage. God is seemingly going against God’s own plan to free His people and He never really explains why He does what He does. This is not the first time, nor is it the last time, that God will leave His people in the dark about His intentions. Just ask poor Job what good it does to question God. God’s decision to harden Pharoah’s heart leads to countless deaths, not just outright from plagues and His harrowing angels, but from starvation when the crops are devoured by locusts and the firstborn of the livestock are also struck down. If God had not hardened Pharaoh’s heart, it is entirely possible that Pharaoh would not have pursued the fleeing Israelites through the desert and pursued them into the Sea of Reeds, only to lose almost the entirety of his army to the rushing waters let loose by God.

Folks give a variety of reasons for why God does what he does, why He hardens Pharaoh’s heart so that God must use all ten plagues before Pharaoh relents and lets the Israelites go. It could be divine retribution: God punishing Egypt for its crimes against the Israelites, against enslaving them, against the attempted culling of their infants. It could be a demonstration of God’s power, a necessary display to cow the Egyptians and a series of Signs that demonstrates to the Israelites that their God has come to deliver them from captivity. I think it’s more than that. I believe that God’s plan was not just about the immediate present, but the long-term survival of His people.

God’s Ten Plagues don’t just frighten and terrify the Egyptian people and their leaders into freeing their slaves, God’s plagues strike at the economic and military might of Egypt. With the Plague of Blood, God transforms all of the potable water in the kingdom to blood, which kills all of the fish in the Nile as a result. The Plague on Livestock killed all of the livestock of Egypt, “your horses, donkeys and camels and on your cattle, sheep and goats” (Exodus 9:3). With the Plagues of Hail and Locusts, crops and orchards are destroyed. With His final Plague, the Firstborn of every Egyptian would die, not just of the people, but of their livestock, those few that survived through the earlier tribulations. Think of what these plagues would do to the infrastructure of a nation, what it would do to the heart of a nation. They would be starving. They would be desperate. They would be just trying to survive. With the loss of their firstborn sons, they would be worried about the future of their country.

“And I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and he will pursue them. But I will gain glory for myself through Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the LORD.” – Exodus 14:4

It is after this that Pharaoh chooses to pursue the Israelites. His own son had died in the final plague, alongside the firstborn sons of his people. As a ruler, as a father, he had little recourse but to ride after the people he had just released and I doubt it was to bring them back into captivity. But even then, God did not leave that to chance, and hardened Pharaoh’s heart one final time, so that Pharaoh would pursue the Israelites. As a result, a significant portion of his army is lost. When all is said and done, God has broken Egypt, and left it incapable and unwilling to pursue the Israelites any further. Economically and militarily, they could not. Spiritually and emotionally, they would be devastated. With the final plague, God made sure that the army would have fewer men for its ranks. God gave the Israelites years, maybe even decades, to make their escape before the Egyptians could try and pursue them again.

But why? Why does it need to be this way? There is no reason it had to end in bloody death for the Egyptians. With God’s power working through Moses and Aaron, they could have accomplished what needed to be done peacefully, had not God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. So why was this the course God chose to take?

The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, “When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” – Exodus 1:15-16

Then Pharaoh gave this order to all his people: “Every Hebrew boy that is born you must throw into the Nile, but let every girl live.” – Exodus 1:22

God did harden Pharaoh’s heart, but God just drew out what was already growing in the soil of Pharaoh’s heart. It is clear from the outset that Pharaoh is cruel. From the beginning of Exodus, he orders the butchery of Israelite infants. When Moses begins to demand that Pharaoh let his people go, Pharaoh increases their hardships instead, forcing the slaves to work twice as hard with fewer resources, driving them further and further into despair. God saw a nation ruled by hard hearted men. He saw a people ruled by malice and viciousness. He could not just let the people go free while their butchers remained unpunished. God saw cruelty perpetuated by the State and took the side of the helpless, the sojourner, the widow and the orphan.

God is against those with hardened hearts; the brutal leaders who order the deaths of innocents, relentless overseers who break the backs of their workers, the gutless lackeys that follow in the wake of cruel oppressors and profit by it. These are the people that God drowned in plagues and smothered beneath the waves of the sea. God used this moment to show the world what He thought of those hardhearted people and we should always keep that message close to our hearts.

-D-