Have you ever wondered what the Bible meant when it says that “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart”? In this message, we take a look at what that important phrase means in the Exodus story and how we can avoid having hard, stubborn hearts like Pharaoh.
The Message
Today we come to a slow-down in the action in the book of Exodus. Between where we ended last week (Exodus 6:12) and where we will pick up next week (Exodus 7:8), we read a genealogy, a restating of God’s plan for His people, the Israelites. We learn that Moses is 80 years old and Aaron is 83.
Today I want us to focus on only one verse in this section:
But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in Egypt, he will not listen to you.
Exodus 7:3
In fact, I want us to concentrate on only one phrase of this verse: “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” This is not the first time we’ve read this phrase in the Exodus story, and it is repeated over and over in the story of Israel in Egypt. But have you ever wondered what it means? And if God is causing Pharaoh to act this way, does He ever cause other people to do bad things? These are common questions that need some unpacking.
A hard heart denotes a stubborn person! Several different Hebrew phrases all get translated as “hardening the heart” in the Bible. It’s like a preacher using different words to explain the same idea so he doesn’t sound monotonous, repetitive, unvaried and tedious. All the Hebrew phrases have “stubbornness” as their root. Stubbornness is an unwillingness to do something asked or demanded of you.
At its core, stubbornness has to do with control. When your heart is hard and you are being stubborn, you are unyielding and unwilling to give someone else control of your life. You are trying to take control for yourself.
From what we know about God and Pharaoh up to this point, it makes sense that their conflict would involve control – an unwillingness of either to submit to the other. Here’s the problem for Pharaoh, though: God is ultimately the One in control of everything! This total control is a primary Christian doctrine called Sovereignty.
God’s Sovereignty Explained
All Christians believe that God is Sovereign. What we disagree about is how that plays out in our day-to-day lives. Today we will look at what God’s sovereignty means, using the book of Exodus to help us understand.
The word sovereign means “possessing ultimate power and authority.” In order to understand the term, we must focus on three big “church words” that describe the scope of God’s total power.
- Omniscience – All Knowing. In all the passages we have looked at in Exodus, God clearly describes what He knows will happen in the future. He tells Moses repeatedly that He will harden Pharaoh’s heart, that he will use signs and powers, and that eventually Pharaoh will “drive them from his country.”
He knows our past; our secrets, our sin, the number of our days, and how this whole world is going to end up. He is never surprised. - Omnipotence – All Powerful. Proof of God’s omnipotence is first displayed in the creation story in Genesis. In Exodus, the account of the ten plagues in Egypt shows again that God has power over all of creation, from the water to the weather, from the pestilence on the livestock to the boils on their own skin.
God still has the power to intervene in any way He wants. That’s why we pray; that’s why we look for miracles. The fact that He CAN move in powerful ways doesn’t mean that He HAS TO, but we can’t diminish His power and neglect to ask Him. - Omnipresence – All Places at All Times. This is a little harder to decipher from the story we have read so far, but it basically means He can be with me at my house and with you at your house at the same time. I think God was able to hear the cries and groanings of His people because of His presence with all of them through all the years of his captivity. Today, by His Holy Spirit, we trust that God’s presence is with all believers everywhere at all times forever.
So, when we talk about God as sovereign, we are saying He is all knowing, all powerful and present everywhere at the same time.
This entire Exodus story that we have read has occurred because of God’s ultimate power over all of creation. While nowhere have we read the words “God is sovereign” in these stories, we see it clearly in each chapter of Exodus.
- Chapter 1 – God allows the Israelites to multiply even more in their oppression.
- Chapter 2 – God deliberately places Moses in the home of Pharaoh himself for protection and development.
- Chapter 3 – God appears in a miraculous burning bush that never burns up, and He speaks to Moses from the bush.
- Chapter 4 – Moses performs the miracles God told him to do for Israel’s leaders.
But there’s a challenge involved. In spite of all the places we see God doing what He wants, in any way He chooses, we also see places where people seemingly defy God’s sovereignty.
- Moses initially tells God he does not want to go to Pharaoh.
- Pharaoh begins drowning Hebrew baby boys in the Nile, and God doesn’t stop him.
- Pharaoh refuses to accept the request to let the Israelites go worship God in the wilderness.
How do these situations fit with God’s sovereignty?
While God has ultimate control, He also ALLOWS each person to be an agent of free will, which is necessary for relationship, for love, and for dependence on Him. Without it we cannot be in a loving relationship with God, and that loving relationship was the reason He created us.
God allows humans a degree of sovereignty over our own lives and choices. We can choose whom to obey and whom to love. Our personal sovereignty, however, is much more limited and restricted than God’s. We can’t defy gravity. We can’t make things out of thin air like God did at creation. We can’t be in multiple places at the same time.
Pharaoh’s Hard Heart
I’ve talked about the differences between God’s total sovereignty, our limited sovereignty, and our free will because we have to understand both sides of the coin if we are to grasp what is going on with Pharaoh’s heart.
Some people look at a verse like Exodus 7:3 and say that God is not being fair to Pharaoh – that by hardening Pharaoh’s heart God is culpable for the ruler’s unwillingness to let the Israelites go. But is that really true? Is God culpable for Pharaoh’s hard heart?
- In all the verses pertaining to Pharaoh’s hard heart, we find that twelve times the text says God is the cause if Pharaoh’s stubbornness, while five times Pharaoh hardens his own heart.
- Interestingly, in the progression of what happens to Pharaoh’s heart as the plagues are unleashed on Egypt, God does not actively harden Pharaoh’s heart until the sixth plague. In the first five, Pharaoh hardens his own heart. He stubbornly will not yield to the control of God; but God’s strong, sovereign hand is pushing Pharaoh’s heart in the direction it is naturally inclined to go.
- Occasionally I come to a tree in the woods that has been pushed by the wind and is leaning into another tree. With one small cut of my chainsaw, the entire tree topples down. Did I make the tree fall down, or did I just help it finish what was already going to happen?
We don’t see Pharaoh wanting to repent and support the Israelites. He’s not signing up to submit to God and recognize God’s sovereign control. After all, this is Pharaoh’s own land, where his people view him as a god! As the plagues continue to ravage Egypt, a power struggle unfolds between Pharaoh and God. While Pharaoh can’t to anything to stop the plagues except submit to God and allow the Israelites to go, he stubbornly refuses to do so.
Then, as the plagues continue, there comes a point at which God does join in; and the Bible says God actively hardens Pharaoh’s heart. God will use this man’s evil stubbornness to bring justice for the death of so many Israelite children.
So – is God culpable? No. God uses the stubbornness of this evil ruler to accomplish His purpose.
Hard Hearts Continue
Pharaoh is not the only person in the Bible who was said to have a hard heart. Jesus accused the religious Pharisees of that very thing.
Jesus, like Moses, came to tell the people He was bringing God’s kingdom. He said they should submit to His ways, yield to His authority, and follow His commands. The Jews, however, were unwilling to do these things. Like Pharaoh, they had hard hearts and a stubborn resistance to the gospel.
This is the story Paul describes in Romans 11:25
Israel has experienced a hardening in part until the full number of the Gentiles has come in.
Do you see what the second part of that verse shows? It shows that there is a purpose for God’s hardening the hearts of the Jews of Jesus’s day. He used their sin to fulfill the prophecies of a beaten and battered Savior, of the blood of a spotless lamb being shed for the forgiveness of us all. God didn’t make the Jews kill Jesus, but He allowed their sin to bring to fruition His perfect plan.
We must recognize that that is still the case today. God is still in control, even though the events of the world seem out of control. Sometimes we see evil moving forward and wonder why God doesn’t instantly stop it. We don’t understand the larger path toward which God is pulling everything.
For instance, many people in the world are probably wondering why God is allowing Putin to do what he is doing in Ukraine. There is no way for us to know right now, but what we do know is that God is sovereign. He is still in control, He is good, He is just, and somehow He will use this evil for His good.
Is this part of the end times, and is God allowing evil to reign to bring His larger purposes together? Possibly; but we won’t know until we hear a trumpet blast. Also, this may not be part of the story of Revelation. In fact, we may never understand how it all works together; and we have to accept the mystery and still trust God in the mess.
The mothers whose babies Pharaoh had drowned 80 years earlier died before Moses came and rescued the Israelites from Egypt. Those mothers never saw God’s justice and faithfulness. But that doesn’t make God less faithful; it simply means we sometimes don’t see the whole picture.
It’s not just “Those People” who have hard hearts! Isn’t that our story with God, too? We love to read the Bible stories and shame the bad guys, but how often are we like Pharaoh and the Pharisees? Think about it. Remember those times you felt like God wanted you to stop a behavior but you kept on doing it, knowing it was wrong? You didn’t even fight against the sin, but stubbornly chose to live how you wanted under your own authority rather than the authority of God.
Or maybe you felt God wanted you to do something. You felt a prod from the Holy Spirit, but you ignored it. And you felt it again. And ignored it again. And eventually you stopped feeling the prodding. Why? Because your heart grew hard.
Soft Hearts
God wants us to have soft hearts that yield to His leading, giving up the facade of control we like to think we have, and submitting to His Lordship in our lives. He isn’t trying to be a control monster and force us to do exactly what He wants. In fact, He gave us more freedom than we ever deserved. He points us in the right direction. He lays down principles for how to live. He gives us the Holy Spirit to lead and direct us.
With all of that, we have a choice: to submit, to follow, and to have a tender heart that connects us with Him; or to try to hang on to our own control, just like Pharaoh. Regardless of the consequences and the pain points in our lives, we can go all the way to Hell singing, “I did it MY way.”
God wants better than that for each one of us! That’s why He sent His son Jesus to die on the cross for us. We deserved death, and He paid that penalty for us. He canceled our debt, and He offers us the grace and forgiveness we could never earn. The only catch is, we have to recognize that HE DID IT – that He reigns supreme, and that because of His great love we submit our lives to Him.
Some people don’t see that as a worthwhile exchange. Their hearts are hard, and they like control. We already know how that story ends! My hope for each of us is that we choose God’s path and that we celebrate His sovereignty and recognize Him as the perfect One to be in total control. Really – who else is worthy of that title? You?
I hope I’ve given you some foundations to build upon. God has ultimate control, but He also gives us limited free will; and most of the time He allows that to play out, evil and all. Also, because God is sovereign and has ultimate control, it’s best not to get into a power struggle with Him! Pharaoh learned that the hard way. While he thought he was a god, he was proven wrong as his country and his own heart were upended.
We, too, should avoid power struggles with God. We know how they will end. Our stubbornness never looks good when we look back on our past. Instead, we should strive for soft and responsive hearts that follow the voice of the Holy Spirit within us instead of fighting against it. Rather than trying to push against an immovable rock, we should cling to Him and trust in His strength rather than our own.
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