The Hardening of Pharaoh’s Heart

In Exodus chapter 9, we're told that God hardened Pharaoh's heart. It almost seems as if God is in a merciless way playing with Pharaoh as a puppet in His hand, hardening his heart and then judging him for the actions that he takes as a result of this hardened heart that was given to him by God. Now, how are we to deal with this difficult concept here in Scripture? Has that passage caused you confusion? Did God really cause Pharaoh to do evil?

And if so, does that make God the author of evil? Today on Renewing Your Mind, we return to Dr. R.C. Sproul's series, Hard Sayings of the Bible and the hardening of Pharaoh's heart in the book of Exodus, certainly qualifies.

Here's R.C. As we continue now with our study of some of the hard sayings of the Bible, we're going to give our attention today to one that is debated constantly in the life of the church, and that is the one that has to do with the biblical reference to God's hardening Pharaoh's heart. That raises all kinds of questions about God's relationship to evil and human responsibility. Let's look at one of the references to this that we find in the Old Testament in chapter 7 of the book of Exodus. Exodus chapter 7 beginning at verse 1. So the Lord said to Moses, See, I have made you as God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet. You shall speak all that I command you, and Aaron your brother shall tell Pharaoh to send the children of Israel out of his land. And I will harden Pharaoh's heart and multiply my signs and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. But Pharaoh will not heed you, so that I may lay my hand on Egypt and bring my armies and my people, the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments.

And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I stretch out my hand on Egypt and bring out the children of Israel from among them. Now, of course, this is not the only reference in the book of Exodus to God's hardening the heart of Pharaoh. We see following chapter 7 the chronicle narrative of the succession of plagues that God sends via Moses on the land of the Egyptians, the frogs and the lice and so on, the river turning to blood. And what happens is a kind of oscillation here whereby after one plague comes upon the people of Egypt, Pharaoh will relent for a season and say, okay, you can leave. And just whenever it looks like the Israelites are going to be liberated, then we read again the refrain, then God hardened the heart of Pharaoh. Pharaoh changes his mind and said, no, you can't go out into the wilderness to serve your God.

And he continues to enslave them until another plague is sent upon them. And he now begins to melt and to be inclined to allow the Israelites to leave. And then we read again that God hardens Pharaoh's heart. And at first glance, it almost seems as if God is in a merciless way playing with Pharaoh as a puppet in His hand, hardening his heart and then judging him for the actions that he takes as a result of this hardened heart that was given to him by God.

Now, how are we to deal with this difficult concept here in Scripture? In the first place, we have to see that the Scriptures explicitly ascribe the hardening of Pharaoh's heart to God, not only in terms of a description of what takes place, Syriatum, through these various plagues, but initially before the plagues even begin, God announces to Moses that that's exactly what He's going to do. He said, I want you to be as God to Pharaoh.

You're my spokesman. I've empowered you with miracles and so on. And Aaron is the one who will deliver the message to Pharaoh, and I want you to know that he is not going to listen to you because I will harden his heart. Now, usually we dance around this sort of thing and say that, well, what really happened was that Pharaoh hardened his own heart, and God had nothing really to do with it because far be it from the judge of all of the earth to do anything evil, and for God to coerce a human being to do evil and then punish that human being whom He has coerced would be a gross injustice and would be the occasion for evil within God Himself.

So, we can see, I hope, and feel the intensity of this dilemma that we face as a result of these descriptive terms. Well, again, point one, the thing we have to understand and look squarely in the eye is that the Scriptures make it clear that the ultimate causal agent for the hardening of Pharaoh's heart is Almighty God. Now, the first thing that we have to understand about this is that whatever the text means by God's hardening Pharaoh's heart, we know that God is not hardening the heart of a holy, righteous, innocent man. That the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, however it is accomplished, is already a judgment of God upon a person who's already recalcitrant in his soul and at enmity against his Creator.

He's already living as a despot, as a tyrant, enslaving people cruelly and unjustly and living a daily life of radical disobedience to the heavenly King to whom Pharaoh himself is always accountable. And so, Pharaoh, in a word, is a sinner and a sinner who is behaving in a very sinful manner. Sinful manner before there's any discussion about God's hardening his heart. Now, what that means is this, that when God hardens Pharaoh's heart, the act of divine hardening, whatever it means, is a judgment of God upon someone who is already sinful. And it is a judgment that is completely consistent to what the Scripture says throughout about the manner by which God will judge the wicked. In the final scenario of the last judgment that we read in the book of Revelation, the judgment upon the sinners who are impenitent is simply this, let him who is wicked be wicked still. And elsewhere, the Scriptures describe one way of God's judging people is to give them up or give them over to Satan.

In addition to that, we read in the New Testament that one of the ways in which God distributes His common grace upon the world is by restraining human sin. God puts restraints upon the wicked. Now, we may look later on at the passage in the New Testament in the Thessalonica correspondence where Paul talks about the coming manifestation of the man of lawlessness in this period of unparalleled wickedness when the restrainer or the one who restrains is taken out of the way.

And again, that's another controversy. What is the specific reference that Paul has there in Thessalonians to the restrainer? Who is the restrainer or what is the restrainer is a matter of ongoing debate.

But one thing is clear. Under the divine government of world history, there is restraint that ultimately is set forth by God. God does not allow us to be as wicked as we possibly could be if He were to remove all of His restraint. Now, we've talked about this in other circumstances, and I've asked people the question, if we would make a list of people, write their names down on the blackboard, who you would regard as being the most diabolical, the most wicked people ever to ever to walk on the stage of history. When I ask people to give their rogues gallery of the great evil persons of history, the same names come up over and over and over again. People will talk about Nero, for example, or they will talk about Pharaoh and so on. But there's one name that occurs every time. It just makes everybody's list of bad guys.

Who is it? Hitler, Adolf Hitler. Another one that ranks high in the twentieth-century catalog of evil is Stalin. Now, let me just take these three figures, Nero, Hitler, and Stalin, and ask, what do they have in common? I mean, obviously, one was Roman, one was Russian, and one was a Bavarian corporal paper-hanger, Hitler. Okay, so we have these three from different times, different places, different forms of government, in fact. But they were all the head of a nation. They all had virtually supreme authority vested in the role that they had, the office they held, and the virtually unlimited power that they exhibited. Who was able to restrict Nero in his wickedness?

Who was able to restrain Hitler from the unmitigated evil he perpetrated on the world? And Stalin's slaughter of millions of people in the Ukraine and elsewhere came about through his plenipotentiary authority and power as the premier of the Soviet Union. Now, in our country, in America, we've had some rogues who have ruled over us on more than one occasion, but our system of government initially was designed to have a check-and-balance system so that there could not be too much power or too much authority invested in one single individual. From the lesson of history, the aphorism emerged that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. That statement is not true absolutely.

It's only true relatively. It is only true when applied to human beings because God and God alone has absolute power and there's no corruption in Him whatsoever. But in any case, we have with these earthly figures an enormous level of power and authority by which these guys could do pretty much what they wanted without the fear of restraint. The ones who restrained Hitler in our aid were the leaders of other nations.

He ran into the restraining influence of Churchill and of Roosevelt and of the allied forces who finally did defeat him in his desires to expand his own wickedness. So, all I'm saying simply is that when we give a catalog of the great villains of history, they tend to include people who had enormous levels of political power and authority, which means they had very, very little, if any, human restraint upon them. Now, keep in mind that when we're talking about Pharaoh, we are talking about such a person who is the most powerful man on the face of the earth in his day. The song of the Egyptians was rule Egypt, Egypt rules the world.

That was their song unless they were singing Egypt, Egypt, Uber, or Aulus. But in any case, they had this kind of authority, and Pharaoh was the one in whom it was all vested. So that really, the only significant restraint on Pharaoh was God. The only one more powerful than Pharaoh was God. And the only reason why the Israelites who were enslaved had not suffered even worse crimes and atrocities at the hands of Pharaoh was the restraining hand of God. Now, when we study the doctrine of divine providence, we see that God in His power and in His government rules over all earthly kingdoms and over all earthly individuals, He raises nations up and He brings nations down so that Pharaoh in reality couldn't rule for five seconds in Egypt were it not for the sustaining governing power of the providence of God. So that in an ultimate sense, Pharaoh can only do what is permitted him to do by the sovereign governor of the universe. Now God, it is said, is the one who hardens Pharaoh's heart, and we are told in these chapters of Exodus that He does it for a reason. And it's plain throughout the Exodus account that the principal reason why God hardens the heart of Pharaoh is so that the people He is redeeming, this people that He is liberating and gathering to Himself to be His chosen people, to be a holy nation, might understand unambiguously that salvation is of the Lord and only of the Lord, lest they think that they've accomplished their redemption through their own efforts or through their own power or even through the good graces of Pharaoh. God is going to make it abundantly clear to the Israelites and to the Egyptians that it is God who is performing this miraculous work of redemption. So we see the reason why God does this. I'm going to show you, He says to His people, all of the resistance of the power of Pharaoh to be brought against your deliverance, and I'm going to deliver you anyway so that you may know that I am the Lord your God. So we still say, well, okay, God's purpose and God's intent in all of this may have been a good intent and a good purpose and a redemptive end in view. But still we ask the question, how can it justify God's forcing Pharaoh to commit evil and then punishing Pharaoh for committing that evil? Well, the key word in that little question is the word force. Now, we have to ask, and the bottom line is, what does the Bible mean when it says that God hardens the heart of Pharaoh?

How does He do it? There are at least two distinct possible ways that God could harden the heart of Pharaoh, one of which would be utterly inconsistent with what the Scriptures teach us about the character of God, and the other one would be perfectly consistent with what the Scripture elsewhere teaches us about the character of God. Let's look at the one that would not be consistent with the character of God, and that is this, that God could harden Pharaoh's heart by intervening in his soul, in his spirit, and creating fresh evil out of good in his heart and then punishing him for doing what comes naturally.

That raises all kinds of problems. I have to say, just as an aside, even that view could theoretically be validated if we go into some very deep discussions about God's sovereign judgment on people. But as Luther described it, Luther argued this way, that in the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, God did not come in and directly and immediately create fresh evil in Pharaoh's heart. But the way God hardened Pharaoh was to remove his common grace, to take the leash off, to remove the restraints, because the only thing that had kept that heart from being any harder than it already was, was the tender grace of God. And for God to make Pharaoh's heart harder, he doesn't have to create fresh evil in that heart.

All he has to do is take his mercy away, remove the restraints, take the leash off, step aside, and let him do whatever he wants to do. And as I said, this is consistent with what the Scripture speaks elsewhere about the awful judgment of God when he gives people over to their sin. Which, incidentally, is what is indicated in the final act of church discipline when a person is excommunicated.

They are delivered to Satan and exposed to the temptation of the evil one, the hedge of divine protection such as that which had surrounded Job before Satan was given the permission to have at Job. This is what happens every time someone is excommunicated. And this makes excommunication such a dreadful thing to comprehend. But it is consistent with God throughout biblical history to speak to sinners who want to sin, who want the restraints removed, who want the leash untied. And they're begging to be ultimately free to express the wickedness that is stored up in their hearts. And when God judges them, He said, Okay, if you want evil without reservation, I'll let you have it.

I'll remove my restraints. I'll remove my common grace and abandon you to your own evil inclinations and dispositions. I personally think that's exactly what God did with Pharaoh.

He let Pharaoh be Pharaoh. I once had a conversation with a person who was involved in a serious fall into evil who was involved in the process of church discipline in her life. And the process of church discipline follows several steps, the last of which is excommunication.

And each step is designed to encourage the person to repent of their sin, and if they repent of their sin, they enjoy restoration of full fellowship within the church. And I talked to this woman and said, Do you realize that you're now facing the last step and that if you don't change this course of action, you will, of course, be excommunicated? And she said, Well, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to just be excommunicated. And she said, Well, I don't want to be excommunicated, but I don't want to change my course of direction either. And she knew very well that if she persisted in her behavior and was excommunicated, she could go right down the street to the next church on the block and be welcomed into their fellowship. And I said to her, Do you realize what excommunication is? The church is abandoning you, turning you over to Satan, who will sift you like wheat to remove the means of grace from your life that so protects you from godlessness. Think twice before you open yourself to this kind of abandonment of the means of grace. And I'd like to say that she listened to me and repented, but she didn't. She went right ahead, and I hate to think of what the ultimate consequences of that will be, but this is what God did to Pharaoh, ultimately excommunicating him. That's a sobering message, isn't it, with an application that all of us as Christians should consider.

God didn't create evil in Pharaoh's heart, but He did turn Pharaoh over to the evil that was already in his heart. We're glad you've joined us for Renewing Your Mind on this Saturday. I'm Lee Webb, and in just a minute, we'll hear from Ligonier teaching fellow Dr. Burke Parsons about some more hard sayings that we read in Scripture.

I hope you'll stay with us. Each Saturday, we feature Dr. R.C. Sproul's examination of some of the most difficult texts in the Bible. We'd like to send you a digital download of this series, 15 messages in all, for your donation of any amount to Ligonier Ministries. The title of the series again is Hard Sayings of the Bible, and you can reach us online at renewingyourmind.org, or you can call us with your gift at 800-435-4343. Well, as I mentioned, Dr. Burke Parsons joins me here in the studio.

He is the pastor of St. Andrew's Chapel, our chief publishing officer here at Ligonier Ministries, and the editor of Table Talk magazine. And, Burke, can we tackle another of these misunderstood sayings? How about Matthew 7? Yeah, Matthew 7, 1, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, Judge not that you be not judged.

And that is a verse that is taken and used and maligned throughout the world. People both outside the church and even those who are inside the church, who would claim to be Christian, say, well, we can't be judgmental. We can't judge. Now, of course, we don't want to have a spirit of judgmentalism. We don't want to have a spirit of being judgmental.

That is clear. Yet we are taught in Scripture that we are to discern, and we are to make wise decisions. We are to discern not only between truth and falsehood, truth and error, but truth and partial truth. We are called to judge false teachers and false prophets by their fruits. We are called to discern those who are repentant and those who are impenitent and unrepentant, those that need to be admonished, those that may need to be disciplined by the church. We are called to make judgments. We are called by God to call sin, sin. And we are called by God to discern what is right from what is wrong. And so when Jesus says, judge not that you be not judged, He's not saying that we should not make judgments, or we should not be discerning, or we should not call what is right, right, and what is wrong, wrong.

The point there is that we should not be hypocritical, that we must be very careful in how we make judgments, because at the same measure that we judge others, that same measure will be used with us both on earth and in some sense before God. That is a helpful word of caution, and thank you for sharing that with us, Dr. Parsons. By the way, Table Talk magazine often deals with commonly misunderstood passages in Scripture.

Table Talk is a great companion in your own Bible study, and if you've never subscribed before, you can receive a free three-month trial subscription when you go to tritabletalk.com. And again, Dr. Parsons, thank you for being with us. Well, next week, Dr. Sproul will address the hard saying we find in Joshua chapter 2. Does God actually honor Rahab for lying? We hope you'll join us next Saturday for Renewing Your Mind. you