Joe Heschmeyer explores the complex biblical concept of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart. Joe explains how this relates to God’s sovereignty, human free will, and our responsibility for our choices.
Transcript:
We’re going to start a Bible study pretty soon, and we’re going to go through Exodus. And one of the things is God saying, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.” So I want to know about that.
Wonderful. About five minutes before I needed to get on the call for the show, I had just been putting together biblical stuff on this because I’m going to cover this in a podcast in about a week. So I was very excited to think, “Oh, I have all those verses. Right in front of me, that in Exodus, we’re actually given a very complex picture of Pharaoh’s heart being hardened. So if we ask who hardened Pharaoh’s heart, some verses just say in the passage, like Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. Like Exodus 7:13 and Exodus 7:22, Pharaoh’s heart remained hardened. Other verses, as you say, sounds like God is hardening Pharaoh’s heart. For instance, Exodus 9:12, “But the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh.”
But then you also have these same passages, like Exodus 8:32, where it says Pharaoh hardened his heart. So you can find the hardening of the heart of Pharaoh referred to in all three different ways. In fact, so I don’t know if you have a pen, but the one to keep track of is at the end of Exodus 9, beginning of Exodus 10. So as the seventh plague is ending, and right before the 10th plague, there is a series of three verses in a row where we’re told what appear to be three different answers to this question. So in Exodus 9:34, “When Pharaoh saw that the rain in the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned again and hardened his heart, he and his servants.” So it sounds very clearly, okay, this is Pharaoh’s doing.
Verse 35, the very next verse, “So the heart of Pharaoh was hardened.” Okay, so in the passage, so can’t say, the very next verse is actually the next chapter, Exodus 10:1, “The Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart in the heart of his servants.” So it just said two verses prior to that, that Pharaoh and his servants hardened their hearts, their own hearts. And then it sounds like God’s doing it. So how can all of that be true? The Baptist preacher, Charles Spurgeon, gave a beautiful example that I regularly go back to for this, where he said, “The same sun which melts wax hardens clay, and the same gospel which melts some persons to repentance hardens others in their sins.” So it is not that God is hardening Pharaoh’s heart in the way that he’s taking away Pharaoh’s free will. No, Pharaoh is hardening his own heart in response to God’s action.
That’s actually very clear, even in Exodus 9:34, when Pharaoh saw what? That the rain in the hail and the thunder had ceased. So God stops the seventh plague, God acts, and Pharaoh responds to that by refusing to obey. If you’re not going to punish me, I’m going to just go right back to disobedience. That is, on the one hand, Pharaoh freely hardening his own heart. On the other hand, we can talk about that as God hardening Pharaoh’s heart, because it was God’s action, in this case, stopping the plagues. That led Pharaoh to respond in the hateful way that he did. So we can talk about it in both senses. This is one of the things we want to recognize, that God is sovereign, even in the things that he lets us do, even things he doesn’t want us to do, but then permits us to do nevertheless. He’s still in authority. He could have struck you dead before you sinned, so he permits you to sin, but he doesn’t do your sinning for you. So God doesn’t harden Pharaoh’s heart in the sense that God makes Pharaoh be disobedient. It wouldn’t be disobedience if he’s just doing what God wants him to do.
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