God is not the author of evil. There is no suggestion that he violated the freedom of Pharaoh’s will or that he manipulated Pharaoh in order to heap further vengeance on the Egyptian people. God is not opposed to the cooperation of pagan monarchs. Pharaoh could have cooperated with God just as Cyrus did in the Babylonian exile; God was still glorified when that king decided on his own to let Israel return from Babylon. If Pharaoh had acted as King Cyrus would later do, the results of the exodus would have been the same. It is Pharaoh, not God, who is to be blamed for the hardening of his own heart.
This hardening of his own heart was manifested first of all in the fact, that he did not pay attention to the demand of Jehovah addressed to him through Moses, and would not let Israel go; and that not only at the commencement, so long as the Egyptian magicians imitated the signs performed by Moses and Aaron (though at the very first sign the rods of the magicians, when turned into serpents, were swallowed by Aaron’s, 7:12-13), but even when the magicians themselves acknowledged, This is the finger of God (8:19). It was also continued after the fourth and fifth plagues, when a distinction was made between the Egyptians and the Israelites, and the latter were exempted from the plagues,a fact of which the king took care to convince himself (Ex 9:7). And it was exhibited still further in his breaking his promise, that he would let Israel go if Moses and Aaron would obtain from Jehovah the removal of the plague, and in the fact, that even after he had been obliged to confess, I have sinned, Jehovah is the righteous one, I and my people are unrighteous (9:27), he sinned again, as soon as breathing-time was given him, and would not let the people go (9:34-35). Thus Pharaoh would not bend his self-will to the will of God, even after he had discerned the finger of God and the omnipotence of Jehovah in the plagues suspended over him and his nation; he would not withdraw his haughty refusal, notwithstanding the fact that he was obliged to acknowledge that it was sin against Jehovah. Looked at from this side, the hardening was a fruit of sin, a consequence of that self-will, high-mindedness, and pride which flow from sin, and a continuous and ever increasing abuse of that freedom of the will which is innate in all, and which involves the possibility of obstinate resistance to the word and chastisement of God even until death. As the freedom of the will has its fixed limits in the unconditional dependence of the creature upon the Creator, so the sinner may resist the will of God as long as they live.
Rather than letting the work of God soften his heart during these plagues and concluding that Yahweh is the only true God, Pharaoh made this evidence the basis for hardening his heart. Meanwhile, the plagues must have had some impact on the general population of Egypt, for when the Israelites left Egypt, they were accompanied by many other people (Ex 12:38). As I pointed out above, even Pharaoh’s own magicians confessed, This is the finger [the work] of God (Ex 8:19), and they bowed out of the competition with the living God.
Pharaoh made his own heart stubborn against God, Exodus 9:34; and God gave him up to judicial blindness, so that he rushed on stubbornly to his own destruction. From the whole of Pharaoh’s conduct we learn that he was bold, haughty, and cruel; and God chose to permit these dispositions to have their full sway in his heart without check or restraint from Divine influence. The whole procedure was graciously calculated to do endless good to both nations. The Israelites must be satisfied that they had the true God for their protector; and thus their faith was strengthened. The Egyptians must see that their gods could do nothing against the God of Israel; and thus their dependence on them was necessarily shaken.
Also, there is nothing spoken throughout all of this of the eternal state of the Egyptian king; nor does anything in the whole of the subsequent account authorize us to believe that God hardened his heart against the influences of his own grace, that he might cause him to sin that his justice might consign him to hell. This would be such an act of flagrant injustice as we could scarcely attribute to the worst of any individual. Anyone who leads another into an offense that they may have a fairer pretense to punish that person for it, or brings that person into such circumstances that they cannot avoid committing a capital crime, and then punishes them for it, is surely the most execrable of mortals. What then should we make of the God of justice and mercy should we attribute to him a decree, the date of which is lost in eternity, by which he has determined to cut off from the possibility of salvation millions of millions of unborn souls, and leave them under a necessity of sinning, by actually hardening their hearts against the influences of his own grace and Spirit, that he may, on the pretext of justice, consign them to endless perdition? NOT !
The Lord did not keep Pharaoh from responding to Moses. What He did was to use a self-hardened, condemned pagan to provide an opportunity to demonstrate His power and to bring His judgment on this wicked people. God’s decree of judgment on Pharaoh was that he would cause his own destruction.
Here we see the unique dynamic interplay between human freewill and divine sovereignty. Pharaoh retained the freedom to harden his heart, refusing to do what God commanded. In all this, the just and righteous God did not do evil or injustice. Pharaoh remained fully responsible for his refusal to cooperate with God and therefore this refusal was used to achieve God's purposes.
I use the NIV as well.
Respectfully, Paul.
[This message has been edited by Paul, 06-06-2003]
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