Hardened Hearts 1 - Exodus 4:18-21

4:19-20 - Having Jethro’s blessing to go back to Egypt, Moses gets ready to take his wife and sons “the rod of God in his hand” to go back to Egypt. There are a couple of conversations that take place next, the first where God tells Moses that “all the men are dead which sought thy life.” A couple of things strike me with this statement, first is that I thought it would have been implied that the people who wanted Moses dead were did not have the power to do so at that point. The second point is that Moses had finally agreed to go back to Egypt fully expecting to face a death sentence when he got there. This is a factor that we didn’t consider yesterday when debating Moses’ motivations for refusing God’s call. We can see his courage in that he finally did accept it fully believing that he would be executed as soon as he showed up there. Think about the faith it would have taken to say, “ok I’ll go back and face execution and if God wants me to do a work, then He’s going to have to get me out of it.

4:21 - Presumably on the journey back to Egypt, God comes to talk to Moses again and they have probably one of the most profound conversations in the Bible, not necessarily because it expounds a great doctrine, but because of what it teaches us about agency and God’s control over it. God urges Moses to go to Egypt and “see that thou do all these wonders before Pharoah, which I have put in thine hand: but I will harden his heart, that he shall not let the people go.” TB really puts the significance of God’s statement into focus here when he says, “here in verse 21, we get a word from God that has troubled the Believer to no end: that God is going to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will not let Israel go. At one point or another many of us have wondered whether this was fair.”

I had always just assumed that this was a mistranslation, because it didn’t make any sense with what we know about free will and personal agency, and then when the JST corrected the mistranslation to say, “and I will prosper thee; but Pharaoh will harden his heart, and he will not let the people go.” When I recognized that I probably never gave this another thought, and it stood for me that this ultimately was a war between God and Satan through the proxies of Moses and Pharaoh. But both TB and the article from gospeldoctrine.com have different suggestions and the IM says almost nothing on this except to cite the JST.

The article from gospeldoctrine.com notes that “the narrative makes different statements as to whether Pharaoh’s obduracy is self-motivated or caused by God.” It goes on to list multiple different references to the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart throughout the next several chapters and asks, even in light of the JST, Could there be a reason for God to harden Pharaoh’s heart?” Likewise, TB notes, “as I prayed and studied about this, it occurred to me that I could not possibly explain the Divine reasons for why this interaction with Pharaoh went the way it did. For one reason, I don’t have the words, and the other is, I don’t know why. But we can draw some practical lessons from this to apply to our lives.”

TB points out that in the Torah, or our Old Testament, “the first time we hear of God declaring His own power is in the hardening of Pharoah’s heart… and for whatever reason, God thinks Moses needs to know it. Apparently, God wanted Moses to not be perplexed or discouraged when the miracles using his staff failed to sway Pharaoh, and later during the first 9 plagues, Pharaoh still didn’t fully give in. God was going to use this rebellious Pharaoh for His purposes, much of which involved showing BOTH Israel AND Egypt the worthlessness of their gods and Yahweh’s own limitless power.” This makes sense as it would have been incredibly frustrating and faith shaking for Moses to do exactly what God told him to do, and then Pharaoh still didn’t comply. After all this work and capitulation to actually get Moses to do what God had called him to do, it might seem discouraging for it not to go the way Moses expected. God was trying to manage Moses’ expectations here. Plus there was still the business of convincing not only Moses but the whole of Israel and Egypt that the God that Moses is representing truly is the most powerful God available. He’s trying to start to unravel thousands of years of misunderstanding and misrepresentations to TRY to finally, maybe just eventually, get a people to know even a smidge of the true gospel and live by it so that the rest of humanity can be blessed. It’s a big job that is going to take more thousands of years, and this is just the beginning.

So we can conclude that even though this was mistranslated in error, God knew that would happen so even though it has been corrected for us, we can learn a lot about agency and the hearts of men as we interact with God and His commandments. This also helps us understand sons of perdition, why some people are too far gone to be saved in this life, the point or no return, and how we ourselves can get to that point. We’ll start with that tomorrow.