Exodus: Here I Am, Send Someone Else
Part 6
“The Power of Plagues to Harden Hearts”
Exodus 5-10
Now if you open your Bible to Exodus Chapter 4, I am not going to read a passage at the beginning of what I have to say this morning because I am going to cover seven chapters altogether. But don’t let that dishearten you. We will jump in and out, but I want to cover a very important period in this story of the exodus of the Israelites from their years in Egypt. They have been there for 400 years altogether. Many of those years they had been slaves latterly.
And Moses, whose story we have been following, who although a Hebrew child by humanly fluke had been brought up in the royal palace of Pharaoh, had spent the last 40 years on the Midian desert where he had fled after killing an Egyptian.
And one day he met with God when God revealed Himself to him in a burning bush. And in that conversation God sent Moses back to deliver the Israel people from their bondage.
And that encounter at the burning bush takes up most of Chapter 3 and 4. And on completion of that conversation the bush went out, flames died down, Moses went back to Midian, picked up his wife and his children and came back to Egypt to begin the process that God had given him to bring the Israelites out of their bondage.
When he got back to Egypt, his first task was to meet with the elders of Israel. And he had a very successful meeting with them. In Chapter 4 and Verse 29, where it says that Moses and Aaron (Aaron was Moses’ brother who was to accompany him through this whole process),
“Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, and Aaron told them everything the LORD had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, and they believed. And when they heard that the LORD was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshiped.”
They were ecstatic at this news. They had been praying for this for years, decades, maybe for centuries, that God would take them back to the land from which they had come, the land of Canaan, the land where He had promised to bless them and through them, from that position, bless the whole world.
And now they have this message from Moses that God is going to intervene and deliver them. They believe him, they bow down, they worship God; everything so far is fantastic.
The second stage on Moses’ itinerary back in Egypt was to go and visit Pharaoh. Now how he had access right into Pharaoh, I don’t know. The Pharaoh who had been on the throne when he had fled Egypt and who had known him as a boy was probably dead by now. This was probably his successor. But he had access through to Pharaoh somehow.
And in Chapter 5 and Verse 1 it says,
“Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of Israel says, “Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the desert.”’
“Pharaoh said, ‘Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I don’t know the LORD and I will not let Israel go.’”
In other words, said Pharaoh, “I don’t know who you are talking about when you say that, ‘this is what the LORD the God of Israel says’. I don’t know this God and I will not let Israel go.”
So that was a blunt and unambiguous response. No. But not only that, things began to go very wrong for the Israelites because down in Verse 6 of Chapter 5, it says,
“That same day Pharaoh gave this order to the slave drivers and foremen in charge of the people: ‘You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making bricks; let them go and gather their own straw. But require them to make the same number of bricks as before; don’t reduce the quota. They are lazy; that is why they are crying out, “Let us go and sacrifice to our God.” Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.’”
Now of course the building of bricks from the clay (of which there was a lot of Egypt), required this straw to reinforce it and give it some strength so it wouldn’t crumble every time some pressure was placed on it. And they said, “You are no longer to supply straw for the Israelites but they are to make the same quota.”
And the next verses say how the Israelites scattered throughout Egypt finding all kinds of stubble and other things to substitute the straw they had been provided with and yet the same quota of bricks was required. And they exhausted themselves trying to keep up with that.
And eventually they went and protested it later in Chapter 5 Verse 19. And the Israelite foremen realized they were in trouble when they were told, “You not to reduce the number of bricks required of you each day.”
And when they left Pharaoh (because needed it to be reversed, they went to Pharaoh to plead with Pharaoh to provide them with the straw); when they left Pharaoh they found Moses and Aaron waiting to meet them and they said,
“May the LORD look upon you and judge you! You have made us a stench to Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.”
In other words, said the people, “you have made our situation worse than it ever was and made us a stench to Pharaoh.”
You know it is discouraging for Moses. The real enemy was Egypt. Now he is caught up in battling with his own people who didn’t know what God was doing and couldn’t see what God was doing. And Moses went back to speak to the Lord in Verse 22 and it says,
“Moses returned to the LORD and said, ‘O Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people? Is this why you sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble upon this people, and you have not rescued your people at all.’”
Notice how the trouble is spreading now. First Egypt was the problem. Okay, let’s deal with Egypt.
Now the Israelites become the problem. Oh man, now they are in a turmoil saying, “you made us a stench in the nostrils of Pharaoh.”
And now God has become the problem to Moses and Aaron. They say, “God, what are You doing? You have brought trouble upon us. We thought You were going to intervene and liberate us – why all this trouble we are in now?”
This is just an aside, but don’t ever get the idea that serving God means that as you reach problems they fall like dominoes and knock the next one over and the next one and the next one and you just keep walking through Red Seas and all the water parts in front of you. That isn’t how it works. There is warfare.
And you know, the biggest tactic of the devil is to change the enemy from the real enemy to the people of Israel, who actually were not the enemy at all; they were the ones being served, to then turning God Himself to be the enemy. (“God, what are You doing?”)
Be very careful you know. You know why sometimes churches run into trouble, because they change their focus from what the real task is and they begin to in-fight. It’s not new; it’s happening right here. And then they get frustrated with God Himself.
And the next chapters then give us a record of how God began to bring pressure on the heart of Pharaoh. There are six chapters given to ten plagues that were designed to pressure Pharaoh into responding to the requirements of God.
And there are two things in these chapters that mirror each other. And I want to talk about these two things.
There is the progression of plagues, first of all, that God brings, one after another; ten of them in a row. But alongside that story is the real story here, which is the progression in Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh’s heart – I am going to show you this in a moment – becomes the focus of this story.
And now let me look at those two things with you. First of all let’s look at the progression of the plagues. Because of Pharaoh’s refusal to let the people go, God puts pressure that is designed to break the will of Pharaoh.
And there are ten plagues altogether. Some of you are familiar with these, but just to remind you (we haven’t time to look at them all one by one of course).
But there was the first plague when the water of Egypt turned to blood. Beginning with the River Nile, but then the canals and the streams and even the water pots in the homes of the people had turned to blood. The fish of the Nile died. There was a terrible smell and stench across the land. The water became unfit to drink. They had to dig holes to get down to a fresh water level in order to find water in order to keep themselves alive.
Then the second plague that followed that was the plague of frogs where the Nile first was teeming with frogs and then suddenly there were frogs everywhere – frogs in their homes, frogs in their ovens, it says, frogs in their food. You cook a loaf of bread and when it comes to cut it open there are six frogs locked in there. And frogs in the bed - I mean frogs everywhere.
And then when that one finished, the plague of gnats. In between all of these, by the way, there is a bit of a response from Pharaoh. Sometimes it looks promising; sometimes it doesn’t look promising at all. But we’ll leave that out for the moment.
Then the plague of gnats, which came and bit people and itched people and animals, you know, all day and all night. You couldn’t sleep; no mosquito nets would keep them out (they probably hadn’t got them anyway).
And then the plague of flies swarming inside and outside, and of course flies carry disease with them as well, and day and night.
And then there was disease on livestock when it says the horses and the donkeys and the camels and the cattle and sheep and goats – many of them died from the disease that was spreading throughout Egypt.
Then there was a plague of boils, festering boils on people and on the animals that were still alive, just all the time, itching and trying to deal with those.
And then there was a plague of hail, which was so severe and the hailstones so big that it injured or killed anybody who didn’t find shelter, and stripped the trees bare pretty well and killed many of the animals that were still alive and still outside.
And then a plague of locusts, and of course locusts devour everything green. And whatever green was left in Egypt, they just devoured it all until the whole place was just a barren dry desert.
And then there were three days of darkness over the whole land. There is something ominous about that, something brooding; what is happening, what is coming next, just darkness.
And then, finally, the death of every firstborn son in Egypt including Pharaoh’s own heir to the throne.
And these plagues follow one after another. And there are several things just to notice by way of observation: there is a growing sense of intensity with these plagues. They progress from discomfort initially to disease, to danger, to darkness and finally to death.
They move from plagues affecting nature to plagues affecting insects to plagues affecting livestock to plagues affecting people.
Many people hold a very cynical view of these plagues. When I was at school in England – in every state school, religious education was a compulsory subject – and I remember in my school, in our class, we studied the plagues. And we had to get into groups (and this took two or three weeks for us focusing on these plagues). We got into groups and we had to work out alternative possible explanations, natural explanations for these plagues other than the fact that God had somehow supernaturally intervened. And it seemed that most of our religious education classes would try to take the supernatural out of anything in the Bible.
But you know that’s a continuing idea because just very recently a professor of Biology at London University published a paper on what he calls “The Natural Cause of the Plagues of Egypt.
And I read it through – it’s online – I read it through just this week. And he says the rivers of blood could have been caused by heavy rainfall on baked soil flowing into the Nile from tributaries where the underlying soil and rocks are red. And these sediments would also have killed the fish as are described there in the Bible.
He says the plague of frogs could have been the sudden appearance of frog-like, spayed foot toads, which hide in the damp undersoil and after a sudden rainfall they are all out everywhere.
And he says the gnats could have been a sudden hatching of gnats throughout Egypt after rain had followed unusually hot and dry weather, etc. etc. etc. I won’t go through them all.
Well, nice try, Mr. Professor of Biology of London University, because how do you account (he doesn’t mention these) for verses like in Chapter 8 and Verse 2 [22] when there was a plague of flies. God says,
“On that day I will deal differently with the land of Goshen, where my people live; no swarms of flies will be there, so that you will know that I, the LORD, am in this land.”
Now these flies were everywhere except where the Israelites were.
In Chapter 9 Verse 6 with the plague on the livestock,
“All the livestock of the Egyptians died, but not one animal belonging to the Israelites died.”
In fact, in five of the ten plagues it specifically says the Israelites were exempt from that plague and it doesn’t mention the other five. It’s a possibility that they were exempt from all ten of them.
Well, that’s partly to demonstrate the fact this is not just a series of flukes that happened to happen in succession. “I want you to know,” says God in Chapter 8:22, “that I, the LORD, am in the land. And I, the LORD, am putting these pressures upon Egypt.”
Now what is the purpose of these plagues? It is very interesting that they are called signs. They are not called plagues; they are called signs.
Now a sign, by definition, is pointing to something. These are not vindictive acts of God. They are – and I hope you will see this – remarkably merciful acts designed to bring Israel into a knowledge and submission to the true God.
But the growing intensity is matched by a growing resistance, and they don’t get that, as we’ll see in just a few moments.
There is something else that I think is significant. Now I am loathe to move away from the information we have in Scripture itself to make an important point, but I am going to do it this morning, because there are things that we know about Egypt that I think are extremely relevant to what is happening here.
The religion of Egypt was polytheist; that is, they had many gods. In fact, Egypt had over 700 gods. I have been reading some of the traditions of ancient Egypt this week as part of my preparation for this. Over 700 gods, and if you look at their gods, who were all different with different identities and different functions, they were gods who came under direct attack in these plagues.
For instance, there were gods of the Nile. Khnum was the guardian of the Nile. Hapi was the spirit of the Nile and represented that. There was a god Osiris whose bloodstream was believed to be the Nile itself. (Remember the Nile is significant because it is the main water thoroughfare for the whole of the nation – without the Nile it would just be a barren desert.)
And they had gods associated with the Nile. They had animal gods. There was a god called Heqet, who is in the form of a frog – a god of resurrection, interestingly.
They had a goddess called Hathor who was portrayed as a cow. Mnevis was a god portrayed as a bull. Seth was the protector of crops. Nut was a sky goddess who controlled the weather. There are various sun gods who also influenced the weather.
And with over 700 gods in Egypt, most of the details of Egypt’s life were attributed to one or another of their gods and ultimately, Pharaoh himself was said to be divine.
That’s why the bodies of Pharaohs were mummified. The Egyptians had a remarkably advanced form of mummification. Many of you may have seen Egyptians mummies and the bodies that have been mummified, and you can still recognize them.
In fact there is a bit of interesting trivia. There was a museum down at Niagara Falls that closed in 2002 and it was a bit of a strange museum. It had things like shrunken heads and stuffed animals, and it included an Egyptian mummy. This mummy had been bought from Egyptian grave robbers back in 1862 by a Canadian entrepreneur who eventually, it found itself to Niagara, just down the road from here.
And when the museum closed in 2002 they sold off all the artefacts and this mummy was sold to a museum in Atlanta that had an interest in Egyptian artefacts.
And they did extensive examinations along with experts in Egyptology and they identified this mummy as that of Ramses the First. (He used to live just down the road – at least he used to be dead just down the road!)
Ramses wasn’t on the throne very long but he was the founder of the 19th dynasty in which Ramses the Second became the most notable leader. And there is speculation that Ramses the Second was the pharaoh at the time of the exodus. But there is not enough evidence to prove that, but it is highly possible according to those who examine these things.
But the interesting thing is in Exodus Chapter 1 and Verse 11 it says that the Israelites, the slaves, built Ramses as a store city for Pharaoh. And so the Israelites built this city named after Ramses who used to be at Niagara but has now been returned to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which is, in my mind, the most amazing museum in the world.
But they mummified these bodies of the pharaohs and they put them into tombs called pyramids, still standing all over Egypt today – amazing pyramids – because they waited the afterlife of these pharaohs who were being prepared for that afterlife.
Now this was part of the religious structure of Egypt. And the Old Testament doesn’t tell us that detail. But when you know that detail and you read these plagues, you read that with a fresh insight that these plagues were a direct attack on the gods of Egypt.
God is undermining the objects on which Egypt placed their trust. And you know sometimes to get our attention, God strips us of things on which we have learned to depend. Not because He is being vindictive; quite the reverse; He is being merciful to us. He is undermining these things so we might be brought to a point where we move our dependence from these things that are not God in order to place our dependence on God alone.
And it is in His love that He does this - that He undermines things we trusted, because God is love by nature. You can trace His acts – even His acts of judgement – back to His love, because He does not violate His own character. His wrath is an expression of His love; His judgement is an expression of His love.
And His undermining of things that we otherwise want to trust in - sometimes His undermining of our own self-confidence, His undermining of our own self-sufficiency - is not to leave us bereft of confidence but that we might find our confidence in God, and God Himself and God alone.
Let me ask you this morning: are there things in your life that are being undermined right now? Could it be that these are things that you have placed too much trust in? And the measure of your alarm is the measure of your trust in them. Could it be that God in His mercy is turning your attention back to place your trust in Him alone?
There is a hymn I knew when I was a boy and I have tried to find it all week. I actually found it this morning. And the first line of that hymn is:
He giveth more grace, as our burdens grow greater.
But the lines that were coming to my mind earlier this week in preparing this message – there’s a beautiful line at the end of the verses. It says,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources
Our Father’s full giving has only begun.
You run out of your resources and you discover God’s giving has only just begun because His resources are unlimitable.
And these plagues are not just random attacks on Egypt; they are strategically targeted to undermine the gods of the Nile, the gods of the animal kingdom, the gods of the weather and so on until finally Pharaoh’s own heir, own son, dies in his bed one night – a divine act of judgement.
You know something usually has to go before we know God in His fullness. And that is why the issue of this story is not really the plagues. Those are the settings, those are the props, if you like. The real story is Pharaoh’s heart.
And so if there is the progression of plagues, on the other side, there is the progression in Pharaoh’s heart. Let me point some of this out to you. There is what seems to be a rather troubling statement in Exodus Chapter 4 Verse 21. I’ll read it to you. Exodus 4:21:
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.’”
The troublesome statement there is God saying, “I will harden his heart.”
If you go a couple of chapters later to Chapter 7 Verse 3 (this is before the plagues had begun), He says,
“I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt, he will not listen to you.”
Now I have no doubt that most of us are troubled by words like that. Paul reiterates them in Romans 9. He uses Pharaoh as an example and says of God, in His sovereignty hardens whom He wants to harden and He shows mercy on whom He wants to have mercy.
Does God choose arbitrarily to harden or soften one person’s heart over against another person’s heart? If we study the text carefully, you will find that Pharaoh’s heart is described as being hardened fourteen times in these chapters in Exodus.
Now there are ten plagues and after each plague it talks about Pharaoh’s heart because this is the real story here. And if you look very carefully, and because of time I can’t read every verse to you, but you look at it carefully, you will find that the first six plagues Pharaoh hardens his heart. So you will find Chapter 7:13:
“Pharaoh’s heart became hard.”
8:32:
“Pharaoh hardened his heart and would not let the people go.”
Chapter 9:7
“Yet his heart was unyielding and he would not let the people go.”
Chapter 9:33 [34]
“When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts. So Pharaoh’s heart was hard.”
Now I said I wouldn’t read them all to you and I haven’t – I just picked out one or two there. Pharaoh hardened his heart – and there have been six plagues so far.
And then it changes and it says after the sixth plague,
“The LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart. (Chapter 9:12)
After the seventh plague (Chapter 10:1):
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart” etc.
So the first six plagues Pharaoh hardens his heart. The last four plagues God hardens his heart. And here’s the pattern: God hardens the heart of Pharaoh by His actions in bringing these additional plagues against Egypt only after Pharaoh has deliberately and repeatedly hardened his own heart.
You see what it is crucial about Pharaoh – and this is what the heart speaks about – is his disposition; that is, his attitude. And the disposition, the attitude of Pharaoh, is brought to the surface by the acts that are carried out against him. And what comes to the surface is a hardening disposition towards God so that eventually it says that when God brings the seventh plague, the act of bringing that plague hardens the heart of Pharaoh even more because his disposition, his attitude has become set.
You see it is your attitude, your disposition of heart that defines you. It’s never the amount of information you have that defines you; it’s the disposition, the attitude of your heart that defines you.
And Pharaoh’s heart, his disposition, has been one of resistance against God, hardening against God. Hardening again – the second time, hardening the third time, hardening the fourth time, the fifth time, the sixth time, hardened with his officials against God. That the next thing God does, the outcome is totally predictable: He hardens his heart by sending another plague. And He hardens it even more by sending another plague.
But don’t blame God for the heart of Pharaoh. Don’t blame God for the heart of Pharaoh.
You see you have this in the New Testament as well in different language, in Romans 1, when Paul talks about the fact that men are without excuse when it comes to God because God has revealed Himself, His handiwork, shows Himself in creation etc. in conscience, he talks in that same section about. But he says,
“Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and animals and reptiles.”
And he describes the kind of sin that the people became involved in. And in Romans 1:24 it says,
“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts.”
Verse 26 in the same chapter:
“Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.”
“Verse 28:
“He gave them over to a depraved mind.”
He talks there, if you look at it sometime, about sexual immorality, about materialism, where the created things replaces the Creator and about egotism and pride where they claimed to be wise though they were actually fools.
And he says, in these areas of their life and behaviour, God gave them over, meaning, not that God said, “Hey, I am going to push you into a cesspool of sexual immorality”. No, no. “You went into that cesspool yourself and I am giving you over.”
It’s about the judgement of God. In Romans 1 and 2, there are two aspects of the judgement of God – there’s the present tense aspect; He gives you over. God’s judgement is not that you commit adultery; you’ll drive your car into a lamppost on your way home. God’s judgement is He will let you do it and He will let you go down that road.
There is a second judgement – the Day of Judgement; Romans 2 talks about that.
But in the meantime He hands you over. What has happened to Pharaoh is that God has handed him over.
And you know this can happen to you. We are not reading this just for a bit of history. We are reading this because it’s a revelation of the human condition. You can choose that which is wrong before God and He will let you go. And if you then resist His merciful attempt to bring you back and you resist Him, you will get harder and harder and harder and harder.
That’s why the state of our hearts and the state of our conscience (and the conscience and the heart are very closely connected) is crucial.
You don’t just think with your mind. Scripture says,
“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”
As a man thinks with his mind, so does he know, I guess we could say. But as he thinks with his heart, so is he. Because your heart is that disposition, attitude, outlook, perspective, and that is what makes you the person that you are.
That’s why none of us remain neutral coming to a place like this. We don’t remain neutral because every time we expose our minds to the Word of God and we sing these songs that express the nature of God and the character of God and the working of God, we don’t come here and just blow one way one week, one way the next.
You come in here with a heart that is either soft and pliable and receptive and you grow in God or you come with a heart that is hardened and you will like it less and less.
Don’t be surprised when people quit going to church – don’t be surprised. What’s the problem – the church? Well it may be, but probably not; probably their heart becomes hardened and then it becomes bitter.
You know Paul says about his own conscience in 1 Timothy 1 Verse19. He talks about holding on to faith and a good conscience. I think the good conscience is very much akin to this right heart.
“…Holding on to faith and a good conscience. Some have rejected these and so have shipwrecked their faith.”
How are they shipwrecked their faith? Not by what has gone on outside of them; we always blame other people for a shipwrecked faith. “Well because if Christians can behave like that, I am not going to be a Christian.” You wouldn’t believe how many times I have heard that. No, it’s what is going on inside them that is the issue.
And Paul says of himself in Acts 24:16,
“I strive…to keep my conscience clear before God and man.”
“I strive to keep my heart clear.”
That’s why it says in Hebrews 10:22, the writer there says,
“Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience.”
He talks about our hearts and our consciences needing to be cleansed and softened and made pliable again.
You can only draw near to God with a clear conscience because without a clear conscience, without a clean heart, we have barriers. And those barriers thicken every time God engages with us, as they did in Pharaoh’s case.
It is not mere information that causes us to grow in Christ; it’s our disposition towards God that causes us to grow in Christ.
You can sit here week after week, week after week and get further and further away from God. You can do it. Some of you listen to your conscience right now because you know it’s true. There are things that are part of your life today that wouldn’t have been five years ago at all, two years ago, one year ago, but you have allowed your conscience to become hardened before God.
And a hard heart usually becomes a bitter heart and a bitter heart usually becomes a destructive heart, because out of a bitter heart there spits poison and it’s destructive.
That’s why our hearts have to be brought and softened before God.
But how do you cope when God in His acts of mercy is putting you into situations that are making life difficult and you know there is only one solution and that’s to get back to God, to get right with God?
Well let me point you out how Pharaoh responded in a few ways. You see when the pressure was on, Pharaoh’s response was to make a compromise. After the first two plagues: no response. After the third plague, it stays Pharaoh summoned (Chapter 8 Verse 25)
“Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘Go, sacrifice to your God here in the land.’”
Okay, Pharaoh is realizing “this is getting expensive because we are seeing disasters taking place in Egypt here, which are undermining our people and our security. Okay, okay, okay, go and sacrifice to your God but within the land.”
That was a compromise just to get God off his back. And do you know, when God begins to work in our lives, sometimes when we are getting cornered, as Pharaoh is, we respond with, “Okay, I will throw a tidbit out to God somehow. Okay, God, I’ll do this.”
Have you ever heard people say, “I said to God, ‘God if You will do this, I promise I will go to church.’” Have you ever heard people talk like that?
Pharaoh talked like that. “Okay, take the pressure off. Back off God and I’ll let the people worship but in the land, within the borders of Egypt.”
Well that wasn’t acceptable. No more compromise until the seventh plague and the seventh (Chapter 9 Verse 27) it says,
“Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron. ‘This time I have sinned’ he said to them.”
Well that sounds promising doesn’t it? “This time I have sinned.” This is Pharaoh talking.
“The Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong.”
Hallelujah! Pharaoh, you’re getting it.
“Pray to the LORD, for we have had enough thunder and hail. I will let you go; you don’t have to stay any longer.”
Well that sounded very promising until the pressure was off and the moment the pressure was off, Chapter 9 Verse 34:
“When Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts.”
Huh. And then after the eighth plague he was willing to make more compromise and in Chapter 10 Verse 10:
“ ‘The LORD be with you – if I let you go, along with women and children! Clearly you are bent on evil. No! Have only the men go; and worship the LORD, since that is what you have been asking for.’ Then Moses and Aaron were driven out of Pharaoh’s presence.”
“Okay,” he says, “all right, go but just take the men.”
That wasn’t acceptable. Then the locusts came. And then after the locusts you get what seems like a real breakthrough in Chapter 10 Verse 16.
“Pharaoh quickly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘I have sinned against the LORD your God and against you. Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the LORD your God to take this deadly plague away from me.’”
I mean this looks so good. He’s even talking about having his own sins forgiven. But when the pressure is off he changes his mind again.
And after the ninth plague, Chapter 10:24,
“Pharaoh summoned Moses and said, ‘Go, worship the LORD. Even your women and children may go with you; only leave your flocks and your herds behind.’”
Another compromise. “Okay, take all the people but leave all your possessions behind.”
Moses refused that. His heart hardened again and after the tenth plague, Chapter 12 Verse 31 when the firstborn son in every Egyptian family died,
“During the night Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘Up! Leave my people, you and the Israelites! Go, worship the LORD your God as you have requested.’”
“Get out of here,” he says “as quickly as you can.”
And this time they did. But even after they had gone, Chapter 14:5,
“When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, Pharaoh and his officials changed their minds about them and said, ‘What have we done? We have let the Israelites go and have lost their services!’”
And so they sent the army to round them up and this is when they got caught in the Red Sea and the army of Egypt was drowned.
But Pharaoh’s responses are not responses towards God (“what is God’s agenda and purpose here?”). His responses were purely, “I’m in a fix. I’ll present a compromise to get God off my back.”
See don’t believe every response. Sometimes we respond to God not to align our lives with the will of God and the purposes of God, but we respond to God to get our situation changed. We are afraid.
After the infamous 9/11 in 2001, when terrorists flew planes, two planes into the twin towers in New York City and dropped a plane on the Pentagon in Washington, in the immediate aftermath of that people flocked to church.
The Gallup organization shows that church attendance in the United States rose from 41% to 47% in the month of September 2001. That’s an increase of 15%. That would be like an extra 250, 300 people coming to this service now today. We wouldn’t get them all in.
And one well known Christian leader, whose name I won’t give you but his name will be known to probably all of you. He said that the attack was “bringing about one of the greatest spiritual revivals in the history of America. People are turning to God. The churches are full.”
Well that proved to be naïve in the extreme because this great revival lasted for two months. By early November, according to the Gallup Poll, churches had sunk back to 42% and then later sunk again, within two months. This wasn’t revival; this was people who were scared; this was fear.
“We don’t know what’s going on; we don’t know what’s coming next; we don’t know where it’s coming from. What are we going to do? I don’t know. Let’s run to God and hope if we go to church maybe God will help us.”
There was no real change of heart.
In May 1940 World War II was about nine months old. In those nine months Hitler had not only taken Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia, Poland, but he had swung down through the Low Countries and down to France. And all of France and all of Europe except for Switzerland and Spain were under his control.
The British Army, which included Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders, (because the Commonwealth, then known as the Empire, joined together in that war), had been driven out of France – Dunkirk – a remarkable delivery of men but they left behind their equipment.
And King George VI in England called for a National Day of Prayer on the 26th of May 1940 and the churches the length and breadth of Britain were packed. The nation’s back was against the wall. Hitler was left with only one enemy; if he could conquer Britain he has won the war.
And Churchill who had recently become leader knew that Germany was far better equipped, had far more men. The only advantage Britain had was it was an island and it’s harder to attack an island.
But Churchill who spoke so boldly to the crowds went back to his home and talked confidentially to his intimate circle and said, “I have no confidence we will ever come out of this.” People turned to God, people went to church; people packed the prayer meetings.
But when the war was over church attendance went into steep decline until today in Britain, just 2 or 3%.
You see there is a sorrow that says, “We’re in a fix here. God, do something.” Pharaoh reached that three times as far as I can see – three times of saying, “Okay God, You win.” But his heart was not changed.
You see the Bible distinguishes between godly sorrow and other sorrow.
2 Corinthians 7:10 says,
“Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation.”
Repentance means to change the mind; it brings a change of mind, a change of heart.
“Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.”
Worldly sorrow you see is not sorrow before God; it is sorrow for myself because I am caught in this difficult situation. It is sorrow because you have been found out. It is sorrow because you have been overwhelmed. It is sorrow because you don’t know what to do. That’s not godly sorrow.
Now that sorrow can be a means of leading to godly sorrow. In the mercy of God bringing of these plagues against Pharaoh could surely have led to a godly sorrow that recognizes God as God and aligns its mind and heart with God. That’s godly sorrow; it’s repentance. But being sorry for myself, being sorry because life has become difficult may be sorrow but it’s was Paul calls worldly sorrow, not godly sorrow.
And I ask you as I close, how is your heart before God this morning? It is soft and pliable? Does God and the Word of God and the Spirit of God move you and mould you? Are you a better person this week than you were last year? Do you come here, in a place like this, in a spirit of submission to the Word of God? You don’t come neutrally. You either grow forwards or backwards. You become harder or your heart becomes more godly.
And I don’t know how God has taken this story, so familiar with us, and made it a mirror into which you look and see you own heart. But it’s a story of a heart that has gone hard.
Eventually, as the means of deliverance, God sent the angel of death and gave to every Israelite the possibility of a way out from the judgement of God through the blood of a lamb.
And next week we will look at the Passover because this, you see, introduces into Scripture a theme that becomes the scarlet cord that runs all the way through. But the blood and the lamb stands between ourselves and God, enables us to be right with God, is the means of our redemption, of our liberation, of our freedom.
But if your heart is hard that will mean nothing to you. Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea – at least his army did. Whether he was there himself, I don’t know. He never became the beneficiary of God’s relentless pursuit of him.
He is not the first in history to have resisted the pursuit of God and he won’t be the last. And if you are here this morning and you are resisting the pursuit of God in your life, your heart may become so hardened that He will give you over and every work of God in your life will be His hardening what is already your hardened heart.
Or you can bring your heart and break it before Him this morning and say, “God, break the hardness of my heart”, because you know the New Covenant is about – it’s about taking out the heart of stone and replacing it with a heart of flesh. That is a heart that is pliable – not rigid, not fixed, not hard. That’s how the New Covenant is described at one point - a new heart, a heart of flesh, not a heart of stone.
We are going to pray together and I don’t know where you are this morning. I only know that God knows where you are. And perhaps you know where you are. Sometimes we are even blind to our own condition but we need to ask Him to show us where we are before Him. If your heart is hard will you ask Him to soften it, maybe to break it in order to soften it that He can mould you and form you and make you a man or woman or young person of God. Just a moment’s silence response…
Part 6
“The Power of Plagues to Harden Hearts”
Exodus 5-10
Now if you open your Bible to Exodus Chapter 4, I am not going to read a passage at the beginning of what I have to say this morning because I am going to cover seven chapters altogether. But don’t let that dishearten you. We will jump in and out, but I want to cover a very important period in this story of the exodus of the Israelites from their years in Egypt. They have been there for 400 years altogether. Many of those years they had been slaves latterly.
And Moses, whose story we have been following, who although a Hebrew child by humanly fluke had been brought up in the royal palace of Pharaoh, had spent the last 40 years on the Midian desert where he had fled after killing an Egyptian.
And one day he met with God when God revealed Himself to him in a burning bush. And in that conversation God sent Moses back to deliver the Israel people from their bondage.
And that encounter at the burning bush takes up most of Chapter 3 and 4. And on completion of that conversation the bush went out, flames died down, Moses went back to Midian, picked up his wife and his children and came back to Egypt to begin the process that God had given him to bring the Israelites out of their bondage.
When he got back to Egypt, his first task was to meet with the elders of Israel. And he had a very successful meeting with them. In Chapter 4 and Verse 29, where it says that Moses and Aaron (Aaron was Moses’ brother who was to accompany him through this whole process),
“Moses and Aaron brought together all the elders of the Israelites, and Aaron told them everything the LORD had said to Moses. He also performed the signs before the people, and they believed. And when they heard that the LORD was concerned about them and had seen their misery, they bowed down and worshiped.”
They were ecstatic at this news. They had been praying for this for years, decades, maybe for centuries, that God would take them back to the land from which they had come, the land of Canaan, the land where He had promised to bless them and through them, from that position, bless the whole world.
And now they have this message from Moses that God is going to intervene and deliver them. They believe him, they bow down, they worship God; everything so far is fantastic.
The second stage on Moses’ itinerary back in Egypt was to go and visit Pharaoh. Now how he had access right into Pharaoh, I don’t know. The Pharaoh who had been on the throne when he had fled Egypt and who had known him as a boy was probably dead by now. This was probably his successor. But he had access through to Pharaoh somehow.
And in Chapter 5 and Verse 1 it says,
“Afterward Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said, ‘This is what the LORD, the God of Israel says, “Let my people go, so that they may hold a festival to me in the desert.”’
“Pharaoh said, ‘Who is the LORD, that I should obey him and let Israel go? I don’t know the LORD and I will not let Israel go.’”
In other words, said Pharaoh, “I don’t know who you are talking about when you say that, ‘this is what the LORD the God of Israel says’. I don’t know this God and I will not let Israel go.”
So that was a blunt and unambiguous response. No. But not only that, things began to go very wrong for the Israelites because down in Verse 6 of Chapter 5, it says,
“That same day Pharaoh gave this order to the slave drivers and foremen in charge of the people: ‘You are no longer to supply the people with straw for making bricks; let them go and gather their own straw. But require them to make the same number of bricks as before; don’t reduce the quota. They are lazy; that is why they are crying out, “Let us go and sacrifice to our God.” Make the work harder for the men so that they keep working and pay no attention to lies.’”
Now of course the building of bricks from the clay (of which there was a lot of Egypt), required this straw to reinforce it and give it some strength so it wouldn’t crumble every time some pressure was placed on it. And they said, “You are no longer to supply straw for the Israelites but they are to make the same quota.”
And the next verses say how the Israelites scattered throughout Egypt finding all kinds of stubble and other things to substitute the straw they had been provided with and yet the same quota of bricks was required. And they exhausted themselves trying to keep up with that.
And eventually they went and protested it later in Chapter 5 Verse 19. And the Israelite foremen realized they were in trouble when they were told, “You not to reduce the number of bricks required of you each day.”
And when they left Pharaoh (because needed it to be reversed, they went to Pharaoh to plead with Pharaoh to provide them with the straw); when they left Pharaoh they found Moses and Aaron waiting to meet them and they said,
“May the LORD look upon you and judge you! You have made us a stench to Pharaoh and his officials and have put a sword in their hand to kill us.”
In other words, said the people, “you have made our situation worse than it ever was and made us a stench to Pharaoh.”
You know it is discouraging for Moses. The real enemy was Egypt. Now he is caught up in battling with his own people who didn’t know what God was doing and couldn’t see what God was doing. And Moses went back to speak to the Lord in Verse 22 and it says,
“Moses returned to the LORD and said, ‘O Lord, why have you brought trouble upon this people? Is this why you sent me? Ever since I went to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has brought trouble upon this people, and you have not rescued your people at all.’”
Notice how the trouble is spreading now. First Egypt was the problem. Okay, let’s deal with Egypt.
Now the Israelites become the problem. Oh man, now they are in a turmoil saying, “you made us a stench in the nostrils of Pharaoh.”
And now God has become the problem to Moses and Aaron. They say, “God, what are You doing? You have brought trouble upon us. We thought You were going to intervene and liberate us – why all this trouble we are in now?”
This is just an aside, but don’t ever get the idea that serving God means that as you reach problems they fall like dominoes and knock the next one over and the next one and the next one and you just keep walking through Red Seas and all the water parts in front of you. That isn’t how it works. There is warfare.
And you know, the biggest tactic of the devil is to change the enemy from the real enemy to the people of Israel, who actually were not the enemy at all; they were the ones being served, to then turning God Himself to be the enemy. (“God, what are You doing?”)
Be very careful you know. You know why sometimes churches run into trouble, because they change their focus from what the real task is and they begin to in-fight. It’s not new; it’s happening right here. And then they get frustrated with God Himself.
And the next chapters then give us a record of how God began to bring pressure on the heart of Pharaoh. There are six chapters given to ten plagues that were designed to pressure Pharaoh into responding to the requirements of God.
And there are two things in these chapters that mirror each other. And I want to talk about these two things.
There is the progression of plagues, first of all, that God brings, one after another; ten of them in a row. But alongside that story is the real story here, which is the progression in Pharaoh’s heart. Pharaoh’s heart – I am going to show you this in a moment – becomes the focus of this story.
And now let me look at those two things with you. First of all let’s look at the progression of the plagues. Because of Pharaoh’s refusal to let the people go, God puts pressure that is designed to break the will of Pharaoh.
And there are ten plagues altogether. Some of you are familiar with these, but just to remind you (we haven’t time to look at them all one by one of course).
But there was the first plague when the water of Egypt turned to blood. Beginning with the River Nile, but then the canals and the streams and even the water pots in the homes of the people had turned to blood. The fish of the Nile died. There was a terrible smell and stench across the land. The water became unfit to drink. They had to dig holes to get down to a fresh water level in order to find water in order to keep themselves alive.
Then the second plague that followed that was the plague of frogs where the Nile first was teeming with frogs and then suddenly there were frogs everywhere – frogs in their homes, frogs in their ovens, it says, frogs in their food. You cook a loaf of bread and when it comes to cut it open there are six frogs locked in there. And frogs in the bed - I mean frogs everywhere.
And then when that one finished, the plague of gnats. In between all of these, by the way, there is a bit of a response from Pharaoh. Sometimes it looks promising; sometimes it doesn’t look promising at all. But we’ll leave that out for the moment.
Then the plague of gnats, which came and bit people and itched people and animals, you know, all day and all night. You couldn’t sleep; no mosquito nets would keep them out (they probably hadn’t got them anyway).
And then the plague of flies swarming inside and outside, and of course flies carry disease with them as well, and day and night.
And then there was disease on livestock when it says the horses and the donkeys and the camels and the cattle and sheep and goats – many of them died from the disease that was spreading throughout Egypt.
Then there was a plague of boils, festering boils on people and on the animals that were still alive, just all the time, itching and trying to deal with those.
And then there was a plague of hail, which was so severe and the hailstones so big that it injured or killed anybody who didn’t find shelter, and stripped the trees bare pretty well and killed many of the animals that were still alive and still outside.
And then a plague of locusts, and of course locusts devour everything green. And whatever green was left in Egypt, they just devoured it all until the whole place was just a barren dry desert.
And then there were three days of darkness over the whole land. There is something ominous about that, something brooding; what is happening, what is coming next, just darkness.
And then, finally, the death of every firstborn son in Egypt including Pharaoh’s own heir to the throne.
And these plagues follow one after another. And there are several things just to notice by way of observation: there is a growing sense of intensity with these plagues. They progress from discomfort initially to disease, to danger, to darkness and finally to death.
They move from plagues affecting nature to plagues affecting insects to plagues affecting livestock to plagues affecting people.
Many people hold a very cynical view of these plagues. When I was at school in England – in every state school, religious education was a compulsory subject – and I remember in my school, in our class, we studied the plagues. And we had to get into groups (and this took two or three weeks for us focusing on these plagues). We got into groups and we had to work out alternative possible explanations, natural explanations for these plagues other than the fact that God had somehow supernaturally intervened. And it seemed that most of our religious education classes would try to take the supernatural out of anything in the Bible.
But you know that’s a continuing idea because just very recently a professor of Biology at London University published a paper on what he calls “The Natural Cause of the Plagues of Egypt.
And I read it through – it’s online – I read it through just this week. And he says the rivers of blood could have been caused by heavy rainfall on baked soil flowing into the Nile from tributaries where the underlying soil and rocks are red. And these sediments would also have killed the fish as are described there in the Bible.
He says the plague of frogs could have been the sudden appearance of frog-like, spayed foot toads, which hide in the damp undersoil and after a sudden rainfall they are all out everywhere.
And he says the gnats could have been a sudden hatching of gnats throughout Egypt after rain had followed unusually hot and dry weather, etc. etc. etc. I won’t go through them all.
Well, nice try, Mr. Professor of Biology of London University, because how do you account (he doesn’t mention these) for verses like in Chapter 8 and Verse 2 [22] when there was a plague of flies. God says,
“On that day I will deal differently with the land of Goshen, where my people live; no swarms of flies will be there, so that you will know that I, the LORD, am in this land.”
Now these flies were everywhere except where the Israelites were.
In Chapter 9 Verse 6 with the plague on the livestock,
“All the livestock of the Egyptians died, but not one animal belonging to the Israelites died.”
In fact, in five of the ten plagues it specifically says the Israelites were exempt from that plague and it doesn’t mention the other five. It’s a possibility that they were exempt from all ten of them.
Well, that’s partly to demonstrate the fact this is not just a series of flukes that happened to happen in succession. “I want you to know,” says God in Chapter 8:22, “that I, the LORD, am in the land. And I, the LORD, am putting these pressures upon Egypt.”
Now what is the purpose of these plagues? It is very interesting that they are called signs. They are not called plagues; they are called signs.
Now a sign, by definition, is pointing to something. These are not vindictive acts of God. They are – and I hope you will see this – remarkably merciful acts designed to bring Israel into a knowledge and submission to the true God.
But the growing intensity is matched by a growing resistance, and they don’t get that, as we’ll see in just a few moments.
There is something else that I think is significant. Now I am loathe to move away from the information we have in Scripture itself to make an important point, but I am going to do it this morning, because there are things that we know about Egypt that I think are extremely relevant to what is happening here.
The religion of Egypt was polytheist; that is, they had many gods. In fact, Egypt had over 700 gods. I have been reading some of the traditions of ancient Egypt this week as part of my preparation for this. Over 700 gods, and if you look at their gods, who were all different with different identities and different functions, they were gods who came under direct attack in these plagues.
For instance, there were gods of the Nile. Khnum was the guardian of the Nile. Hapi was the spirit of the Nile and represented that. There was a god Osiris whose bloodstream was believed to be the Nile itself. (Remember the Nile is significant because it is the main water thoroughfare for the whole of the nation – without the Nile it would just be a barren desert.)
And they had gods associated with the Nile. They had animal gods. There was a god called Heqet, who is in the form of a frog – a god of resurrection, interestingly.
They had a goddess called Hathor who was portrayed as a cow. Mnevis was a god portrayed as a bull. Seth was the protector of crops. Nut was a sky goddess who controlled the weather. There are various sun gods who also influenced the weather.
And with over 700 gods in Egypt, most of the details of Egypt’s life were attributed to one or another of their gods and ultimately, Pharaoh himself was said to be divine.
That’s why the bodies of Pharaohs were mummified. The Egyptians had a remarkably advanced form of mummification. Many of you may have seen Egyptians mummies and the bodies that have been mummified, and you can still recognize them.
In fact there is a bit of interesting trivia. There was a museum down at Niagara Falls that closed in 2002 and it was a bit of a strange museum. It had things like shrunken heads and stuffed animals, and it included an Egyptian mummy. This mummy had been bought from Egyptian grave robbers back in 1862 by a Canadian entrepreneur who eventually, it found itself to Niagara, just down the road from here.
And when the museum closed in 2002 they sold off all the artefacts and this mummy was sold to a museum in Atlanta that had an interest in Egyptian artefacts.
And they did extensive examinations along with experts in Egyptology and they identified this mummy as that of Ramses the First. (He used to live just down the road – at least he used to be dead just down the road!)
Ramses wasn’t on the throne very long but he was the founder of the 19th dynasty in which Ramses the Second became the most notable leader. And there is speculation that Ramses the Second was the pharaoh at the time of the exodus. But there is not enough evidence to prove that, but it is highly possible according to those who examine these things.
But the interesting thing is in Exodus Chapter 1 and Verse 11 it says that the Israelites, the slaves, built Ramses as a store city for Pharaoh. And so the Israelites built this city named after Ramses who used to be at Niagara but has now been returned to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, which is, in my mind, the most amazing museum in the world.
But they mummified these bodies of the pharaohs and they put them into tombs called pyramids, still standing all over Egypt today – amazing pyramids – because they waited the afterlife of these pharaohs who were being prepared for that afterlife.
Now this was part of the religious structure of Egypt. And the Old Testament doesn’t tell us that detail. But when you know that detail and you read these plagues, you read that with a fresh insight that these plagues were a direct attack on the gods of Egypt.
God is undermining the objects on which Egypt placed their trust. And you know sometimes to get our attention, God strips us of things on which we have learned to depend. Not because He is being vindictive; quite the reverse; He is being merciful to us. He is undermining these things so we might be brought to a point where we move our dependence from these things that are not God in order to place our dependence on God alone.
And it is in His love that He does this - that He undermines things we trusted, because God is love by nature. You can trace His acts – even His acts of judgement – back to His love, because He does not violate His own character. His wrath is an expression of His love; His judgement is an expression of His love.
And His undermining of things that we otherwise want to trust in - sometimes His undermining of our own self-confidence, His undermining of our own self-sufficiency - is not to leave us bereft of confidence but that we might find our confidence in God, and God Himself and God alone.
Let me ask you this morning: are there things in your life that are being undermined right now? Could it be that these are things that you have placed too much trust in? And the measure of your alarm is the measure of your trust in them. Could it be that God in His mercy is turning your attention back to place your trust in Him alone?
There is a hymn I knew when I was a boy and I have tried to find it all week. I actually found it this morning. And the first line of that hymn is:
He giveth more grace, as our burdens grow greater.
But the lines that were coming to my mind earlier this week in preparing this message – there’s a beautiful line at the end of the verses. It says,
When we reach the end of our hoarded resources
Our Father’s full giving has only begun.
You run out of your resources and you discover God’s giving has only just begun because His resources are unlimitable.
And these plagues are not just random attacks on Egypt; they are strategically targeted to undermine the gods of the Nile, the gods of the animal kingdom, the gods of the weather and so on until finally Pharaoh’s own heir, own son, dies in his bed one night – a divine act of judgement.
You know something usually has to go before we know God in His fullness. And that is why the issue of this story is not really the plagues. Those are the settings, those are the props, if you like. The real story is Pharaoh’s heart.
And so if there is the progression of plagues, on the other side, there is the progression in Pharaoh’s heart. Let me point some of this out to you. There is what seems to be a rather troubling statement in Exodus Chapter 4 Verse 21. I’ll read it to you. Exodus 4:21:
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the wonders I have given you the power to do. But I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.’”
The troublesome statement there is God saying, “I will harden his heart.”
If you go a couple of chapters later to Chapter 7 Verse 3 (this is before the plagues had begun), He says,
“I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and though I multiply my miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt, he will not listen to you.”
Now I have no doubt that most of us are troubled by words like that. Paul reiterates them in Romans 9. He uses Pharaoh as an example and says of God, in His sovereignty hardens whom He wants to harden and He shows mercy on whom He wants to have mercy.
Does God choose arbitrarily to harden or soften one person’s heart over against another person’s heart? If we study the text carefully, you will find that Pharaoh’s heart is described as being hardened fourteen times in these chapters in Exodus.
Now there are ten plagues and after each plague it talks about Pharaoh’s heart because this is the real story here. And if you look very carefully, and because of time I can’t read every verse to you, but you look at it carefully, you will find that the first six plagues Pharaoh hardens his heart. So you will find Chapter 7:13:
“Pharaoh’s heart became hard.”
8:32:
“Pharaoh hardened his heart and would not let the people go.”
Chapter 9:7
“Yet his heart was unyielding and he would not let the people go.”
Chapter 9:33 [34]
“When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts. So Pharaoh’s heart was hard.”
Now I said I wouldn’t read them all to you and I haven’t – I just picked out one or two there. Pharaoh hardened his heart – and there have been six plagues so far.
And then it changes and it says after the sixth plague,
“The LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart. (Chapter 9:12)
After the seventh plague (Chapter 10:1):
“The LORD said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart” etc.
So the first six plagues Pharaoh hardens his heart. The last four plagues God hardens his heart. And here’s the pattern: God hardens the heart of Pharaoh by His actions in bringing these additional plagues against Egypt only after Pharaoh has deliberately and repeatedly hardened his own heart.
You see what it is crucial about Pharaoh – and this is what the heart speaks about – is his disposition; that is, his attitude. And the disposition, the attitude of Pharaoh, is brought to the surface by the acts that are carried out against him. And what comes to the surface is a hardening disposition towards God so that eventually it says that when God brings the seventh plague, the act of bringing that plague hardens the heart of Pharaoh even more because his disposition, his attitude has become set.
You see it is your attitude, your disposition of heart that defines you. It’s never the amount of information you have that defines you; it’s the disposition, the attitude of your heart that defines you.
And Pharaoh’s heart, his disposition, has been one of resistance against God, hardening against God. Hardening again – the second time, hardening the third time, hardening the fourth time, the fifth time, the sixth time, hardened with his officials against God. That the next thing God does, the outcome is totally predictable: He hardens his heart by sending another plague. And He hardens it even more by sending another plague.
But don’t blame God for the heart of Pharaoh. Don’t blame God for the heart of Pharaoh.
You see you have this in the New Testament as well in different language, in Romans 1, when Paul talks about the fact that men are without excuse when it comes to God because God has revealed Himself, His handiwork, shows Himself in creation etc. in conscience, he talks in that same section about. But he says,
“Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and animals and reptiles.”
And he describes the kind of sin that the people became involved in. And in Romans 1:24 it says,
“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts.”
Verse 26 in the same chapter:
“Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts.”
“Verse 28:
“He gave them over to a depraved mind.”
He talks there, if you look at it sometime, about sexual immorality, about materialism, where the created things replaces the Creator and about egotism and pride where they claimed to be wise though they were actually fools.
And he says, in these areas of their life and behaviour, God gave them over, meaning, not that God said, “Hey, I am going to push you into a cesspool of sexual immorality”. No, no. “You went into that cesspool yourself and I am giving you over.”
It’s about the judgement of God. In Romans 1 and 2, there are two aspects of the judgement of God – there’s the present tense aspect; He gives you over. God’s judgement is not that you commit adultery; you’ll drive your car into a lamppost on your way home. God’s judgement is He will let you do it and He will let you go down that road.
There is a second judgement – the Day of Judgement; Romans 2 talks about that.
But in the meantime He hands you over. What has happened to Pharaoh is that God has handed him over.
And you know this can happen to you. We are not reading this just for a bit of history. We are reading this because it’s a revelation of the human condition. You can choose that which is wrong before God and He will let you go. And if you then resist His merciful attempt to bring you back and you resist Him, you will get harder and harder and harder and harder.
That’s why the state of our hearts and the state of our conscience (and the conscience and the heart are very closely connected) is crucial.
You don’t just think with your mind. Scripture says,
“As a man thinks in his heart, so is he.”
As a man thinks with his mind, so does he know, I guess we could say. But as he thinks with his heart, so is he. Because your heart is that disposition, attitude, outlook, perspective, and that is what makes you the person that you are.
That’s why none of us remain neutral coming to a place like this. We don’t remain neutral because every time we expose our minds to the Word of God and we sing these songs that express the nature of God and the character of God and the working of God, we don’t come here and just blow one way one week, one way the next.
You come in here with a heart that is either soft and pliable and receptive and you grow in God or you come with a heart that is hardened and you will like it less and less.
Don’t be surprised when people quit going to church – don’t be surprised. What’s the problem – the church? Well it may be, but probably not; probably their heart becomes hardened and then it becomes bitter.
You know Paul says about his own conscience in 1 Timothy 1 Verse19. He talks about holding on to faith and a good conscience. I think the good conscience is very much akin to this right heart.
“…Holding on to faith and a good conscience. Some have rejected these and so have shipwrecked their faith.”
How are they shipwrecked their faith? Not by what has gone on outside of them; we always blame other people for a shipwrecked faith. “Well because if Christians can behave like that, I am not going to be a Christian.” You wouldn’t believe how many times I have heard that. No, it’s what is going on inside them that is the issue.
And Paul says of himself in Acts 24:16,
“I strive…to keep my conscience clear before God and man.”
“I strive to keep my heart clear.”
That’s why it says in Hebrews 10:22, the writer there says,
“Let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience.”
He talks about our hearts and our consciences needing to be cleansed and softened and made pliable again.
You can only draw near to God with a clear conscience because without a clear conscience, without a clean heart, we have barriers. And those barriers thicken every time God engages with us, as they did in Pharaoh’s case.
It is not mere information that causes us to grow in Christ; it’s our disposition towards God that causes us to grow in Christ.
You can sit here week after week, week after week and get further and further away from God. You can do it. Some of you listen to your conscience right now because you know it’s true. There are things that are part of your life today that wouldn’t have been five years ago at all, two years ago, one year ago, but you have allowed your conscience to become hardened before God.
And a hard heart usually becomes a bitter heart and a bitter heart usually becomes a destructive heart, because out of a bitter heart there spits poison and it’s destructive.
That’s why our hearts have to be brought and softened before God.
But how do you cope when God in His acts of mercy is putting you into situations that are making life difficult and you know there is only one solution and that’s to get back to God, to get right with God?
Well let me point you out how Pharaoh responded in a few ways. You see when the pressure was on, Pharaoh’s response was to make a compromise. After the first two plagues: no response. After the third plague, it stays Pharaoh summoned (Chapter 8 Verse 25)
“Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘Go, sacrifice to your God here in the land.’”
Okay, Pharaoh is realizing “this is getting expensive because we are seeing disasters taking place in Egypt here, which are undermining our people and our security. Okay, okay, okay, go and sacrifice to your God but within the land.”
That was a compromise just to get God off his back. And do you know, when God begins to work in our lives, sometimes when we are getting cornered, as Pharaoh is, we respond with, “Okay, I will throw a tidbit out to God somehow. Okay, God, I’ll do this.”
Have you ever heard people say, “I said to God, ‘God if You will do this, I promise I will go to church.’” Have you ever heard people talk like that?
Pharaoh talked like that. “Okay, take the pressure off. Back off God and I’ll let the people worship but in the land, within the borders of Egypt.”
Well that wasn’t acceptable. No more compromise until the seventh plague and the seventh (Chapter 9 Verse 27) it says,
“Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron. ‘This time I have sinned’ he said to them.”
Well that sounds promising doesn’t it? “This time I have sinned.” This is Pharaoh talking.
“The Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong.”
Hallelujah! Pharaoh, you’re getting it.
“Pray to the LORD, for we have had enough thunder and hail. I will let you go; you don’t have to stay any longer.”
Well that sounded very promising until the pressure was off and the moment the pressure was off, Chapter 9 Verse 34:
“When Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts.”
Huh. And then after the eighth plague he was willing to make more compromise and in Chapter 10 Verse 10:
“ ‘The LORD be with you – if I let you go, along with women and children! Clearly you are bent on evil. No! Have only the men go; and worship the LORD, since that is what you have been asking for.’ Then Moses and Aaron were driven out of Pharaoh’s presence.”
“Okay,” he says, “all right, go but just take the men.”
That wasn’t acceptable. Then the locusts came. And then after the locusts you get what seems like a real breakthrough in Chapter 10 Verse 16.
“Pharaoh quickly summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘I have sinned against the LORD your God and against you. Now forgive my sin once more and pray to the LORD your God to take this deadly plague away from me.’”
I mean this looks so good. He’s even talking about having his own sins forgiven. But when the pressure is off he changes his mind again.
And after the ninth plague, Chapter 10:24,
“Pharaoh summoned Moses and said, ‘Go, worship the LORD. Even your women and children may go with you; only leave your flocks and your herds behind.’”
Another compromise. “Okay, take all the people but leave all your possessions behind.”
Moses refused that. His heart hardened again and after the tenth plague, Chapter 12 Verse 31 when the firstborn son in every Egyptian family died,
“During the night Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron and said, ‘Up! Leave my people, you and the Israelites! Go, worship the LORD your God as you have requested.’”
“Get out of here,” he says “as quickly as you can.”
And this time they did. But even after they had gone, Chapter 14:5,
“When the king of Egypt was told that the people had fled, Pharaoh and his officials changed their minds about them and said, ‘What have we done? We have let the Israelites go and have lost their services!’”
And so they sent the army to round them up and this is when they got caught in the Red Sea and the army of Egypt was drowned.
But Pharaoh’s responses are not responses towards God (“what is God’s agenda and purpose here?”). His responses were purely, “I’m in a fix. I’ll present a compromise to get God off my back.”
See don’t believe every response. Sometimes we respond to God not to align our lives with the will of God and the purposes of God, but we respond to God to get our situation changed. We are afraid.
After the infamous 9/11 in 2001, when terrorists flew planes, two planes into the twin towers in New York City and dropped a plane on the Pentagon in Washington, in the immediate aftermath of that people flocked to church.
The Gallup organization shows that church attendance in the United States rose from 41% to 47% in the month of September 2001. That’s an increase of 15%. That would be like an extra 250, 300 people coming to this service now today. We wouldn’t get them all in.
And one well known Christian leader, whose name I won’t give you but his name will be known to probably all of you. He said that the attack was “bringing about one of the greatest spiritual revivals in the history of America. People are turning to God. The churches are full.”
Well that proved to be naïve in the extreme because this great revival lasted for two months. By early November, according to the Gallup Poll, churches had sunk back to 42% and then later sunk again, within two months. This wasn’t revival; this was people who were scared; this was fear.
“We don’t know what’s going on; we don’t know what’s coming next; we don’t know where it’s coming from. What are we going to do? I don’t know. Let’s run to God and hope if we go to church maybe God will help us.”
There was no real change of heart.
In May 1940 World War II was about nine months old. In those nine months Hitler had not only taken Eastern Europe, Czechoslovakia, Poland, but he had swung down through the Low Countries and down to France. And all of France and all of Europe except for Switzerland and Spain were under his control.
The British Army, which included Canadians and Australians and New Zealanders, (because the Commonwealth, then known as the Empire, joined together in that war), had been driven out of France – Dunkirk – a remarkable delivery of men but they left behind their equipment.
And King George VI in England called for a National Day of Prayer on the 26th of May 1940 and the churches the length and breadth of Britain were packed. The nation’s back was against the wall. Hitler was left with only one enemy; if he could conquer Britain he has won the war.
And Churchill who had recently become leader knew that Germany was far better equipped, had far more men. The only advantage Britain had was it was an island and it’s harder to attack an island.
But Churchill who spoke so boldly to the crowds went back to his home and talked confidentially to his intimate circle and said, “I have no confidence we will ever come out of this.” People turned to God, people went to church; people packed the prayer meetings.
But when the war was over church attendance went into steep decline until today in Britain, just 2 or 3%.
You see there is a sorrow that says, “We’re in a fix here. God, do something.” Pharaoh reached that three times as far as I can see – three times of saying, “Okay God, You win.” But his heart was not changed.
You see the Bible distinguishes between godly sorrow and other sorrow.
2 Corinthians 7:10 says,
“Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation.”
Repentance means to change the mind; it brings a change of mind, a change of heart.
“Godly sorrow brings repentance that leads to salvation and leaves no regret, but worldly sorrow brings death.”
Worldly sorrow you see is not sorrow before God; it is sorrow for myself because I am caught in this difficult situation. It is sorrow because you have been found out. It is sorrow because you have been overwhelmed. It is sorrow because you don’t know what to do. That’s not godly sorrow.
Now that sorrow can be a means of leading to godly sorrow. In the mercy of God bringing of these plagues against Pharaoh could surely have led to a godly sorrow that recognizes God as God and aligns its mind and heart with God. That’s godly sorrow; it’s repentance. But being sorry for myself, being sorry because life has become difficult may be sorrow but it’s was Paul calls worldly sorrow, not godly sorrow.
And I ask you as I close, how is your heart before God this morning? It is soft and pliable? Does God and the Word of God and the Spirit of God move you and mould you? Are you a better person this week than you were last year? Do you come here, in a place like this, in a spirit of submission to the Word of God? You don’t come neutrally. You either grow forwards or backwards. You become harder or your heart becomes more godly.
And I don’t know how God has taken this story, so familiar with us, and made it a mirror into which you look and see you own heart. But it’s a story of a heart that has gone hard.
Eventually, as the means of deliverance, God sent the angel of death and gave to every Israelite the possibility of a way out from the judgement of God through the blood of a lamb.
And next week we will look at the Passover because this, you see, introduces into Scripture a theme that becomes the scarlet cord that runs all the way through. But the blood and the lamb stands between ourselves and God, enables us to be right with God, is the means of our redemption, of our liberation, of our freedom.
But if your heart is hard that will mean nothing to you. Pharaoh drowned in the Red Sea – at least his army did. Whether he was there himself, I don’t know. He never became the beneficiary of God’s relentless pursuit of him.
He is not the first in history to have resisted the pursuit of God and he won’t be the last. And if you are here this morning and you are resisting the pursuit of God in your life, your heart may become so hardened that He will give you over and every work of God in your life will be His hardening what is already your hardened heart.
Or you can bring your heart and break it before Him this morning and say, “God, break the hardness of my heart”, because you know the New Covenant is about – it’s about taking out the heart of stone and replacing it with a heart of flesh. That is a heart that is pliable – not rigid, not fixed, not hard. That’s how the New Covenant is described at one point - a new heart, a heart of flesh, not a heart of stone.
We are going to pray together and I don’t know where you are this morning. I only know that God knows where you are. And perhaps you know where you are. Sometimes we are even blind to our own condition but we need to ask Him to show us where we are before Him. If your heart is hard will you ask Him to soften it, maybe to break it in order to soften it that He can mould you and form you and make you a man or woman or young person of God. Just a moment’s silence response…