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Thoughts from Exodus 7a: Pharaoh
By daniel | February 6, 2007
I'm not sure what the Bible means when it says that God hardens Pharaoh's heart. (The most blatant is in 9:12). I've never heard mentioned in the Bible that the Lord 'took control' of someone, or 'made their decisions for them' in a I-can't-help-myself-I'm-being-controlled sort of way. I've never read it, or seen it myself, or seen evidence that God would operate in such a manner.
But this text seems to get close, and I think it makes people a bit disoriented. If I thought God went around mind-controlling people, I think I'd be a bit disoriented too. But I've got to read this with the rest of the text, and expect it to all bear the same testimony to God.
My best guess is that God allowed Pharaoh to see what he wanted to see, to rationalize away whatever he wanted to. Perhaps even God put some spiritual blinders on him to allow him to go his own way. However God works, I don't think He manipulated Pharaoh. I'm pretty sure Pharaoh thought he was, in fact, 'god'. After all, everyone around him had been telling him that his whole life. The works of God surrounding the Exodus carry Pharaoh and Israel from a place of simple ignorance of God and His power to a place of knowing, for sure, who is in charge, who is God, and who (and what) is not. Each plague 'stuns' an Egyptian god, step by step showing them to be, if they are even real, powerless to the power of the God of Israel, Yahweh. The full range of the display was required. What if everyone witnessed the shaming of the 'frog god', but still wondered whether Yahweh was stronger than Ra, the 'sun god'?
By means not explicitly spelled out, God allowed Pharoah to not listen to the wisdom of Moses and Aaron. The result is a fantastic story that defined the identity of Israel, and gave the new nation a God like no other that Egypt (the superpower of the ancient world) could provide. Here we go…
Topics: The Word |
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