Probably no statement of Scripture has excited fiercer criticism, more exultation of enemies and perplexity of friends, than this, that the Lord said, “I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and he shall not let the people go,” and that in consequence of this Divine act Pharaoh sinned and suffered. Just because the words are startling, it is unjust to quote them without careful examination of the context, both in the prediction and in the fulfilment. When all is weighed, compared, and harmonized, it will at last be possible to draw a just conclusion.
1. There are three possible methods of explaining this hardening of Pharaoh's heart. First, it may be attributed entirely to the Divine Sovereignty. It may be said that God, by His own power, directly hardened the heart of the king. But this explanation is opposed to the letter of Scripture. Interpret the frequent statements that God hardened Pharaoh's heart as literally as you please, but do not forget that it is also said more than once that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. “And Pharaoh hardened his heart at this time also, neither would he let the people go.” And again, “When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunders were ceased, he sinned yet more, and hardened his heart.” Do not say, therefore, that the Bible gives us only the one idea. But this explanation is still more opposed to the spirit of Scripture. It overturns the great fact that Moses designed to move the king. He had believed that the Israelites were a race given into his hands by his God to be his slaves. His priests said so. But Moses said, “The righteous Lord is the God of those men, and of you, and of all men.” He was protesting strongly against the doctrine of favouritism. But the theory which ascribes this hardening of Pharaoh to the Divine Sovereignty makes Jehovah like the god of Pharaoh. Secondly, we may attribute it wholly to Pharaoh himself. But the Bible says again and again, “The Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart.” Or, thirdly, we may combine the two statements of Scripture, and we shall thus get at the truth. The way in which the facts are recorded by the writer of this Book is the only way by which the double fact could be expressed, viz., that the messages sent by God to Pharaoh, and resisted, rendered him harder. The messages came to Pharaoh, “Let my people go,” and he refused. They irritated him and made him more stubborn,-thus they hardened him, because he thereby hardened himself. How otherwise could the fact be expressed in the Bible? If I tell an intemperate man that he is ruining himself both in body and in soul, and he grows angry at the truth and resists it, does he not become more hardened in his intemperance? And in expressing the whole facts, would it not be true to say that I hardened him, and that he hardened himself? So when again and again the word of the Lord came by Moses to the king, and he refused to listen to it, it is true that the Lord hardened Pharaoh, and that, because Pharaoh hardened himself.
I expected every wave would have swallowed us up, and that every time the ship fell down, as I thought in the trough or hollow of the sea, we should never rise more; and in this agony of mind I made many vows and resolutions, that if it would please God and spare my life here this one voyage, if ever I got once my foot upon dry land again, I would go directly home to my father, and never set it into a ship again while I lived. These wise and sober thoughts continued all the while the storm continued, and indeed some time after; but the next day the wind was abated and the sea calmer, and I began to be a little inured to it.… In a word, as the sea was returned to its smoothness of surface and settled calmness by the abatement of that storm, so, the fury of my thoughts being over, my fears and apprehensions of being swallowed up by the sea being forgotten, and the current of my former desires returned, I entirely forgot the vows and promises that I made in my distress.1 [Note: Robinson Crusoe.]
2. But do not these words, “the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart,” distinctly describe God as the author of something in man which is pronounced to be utterly wrong? Is He not said to have foreseen Pharaoh's sin, and not only to have foreseen but to have produced it? After pleading for the literal interpretation of Scripture, must we not take refuge in some figurative, unnatural sense of this language, in order to avoid the worse alternative of finding in it a positive denial of God's goodness? Let us reflect upon the previous statements of the historian. The Lord, he said, had seen the affliction of His people, and heard their cry, and knew their sorrows. He determined to deliver them. He commanded Pharaoh, their oppressor, to let them go. What is the effect of that command upon Pharaoh? It irritates and provokes him. And He who sent the command produced the irritation and provocation. But “hardening the heart”! That is so much stronger a phrase than merely “irritating and provoking.” Assuredly it is. The one may point merely to a temporary excitement; the other indicates a continual process. But if you have admitted the possibility and even the propriety of one form of language, let us see whether it does not naturally, inevitably pass into the other. Moses says that God not only sent the command to Pharaoh, but He sent one punishment after another to him for resisting that command. It does not surprise us to be told that some of these punishments shook the heart of the king for a moment, but that presently he relapsed into his previous determination, and that after each new act of remorse and each new effort to throw it off, he became harder and more obstinate. We know enough of ourselves and of our fellow-men to feel that such a statement is reasonable, that it has even a great air of probability. Must we not say then that the punishment itself hardens the heart? And if we have the same strong conviction as Moses had, that the punishment was the deliberate act of a Person, can we help saying that He hardened the heart?
The words are strong, but we shall, I believe, find that these words of Scripture are most necessary to us-for the very purpose of making us understand the awful contradiction which there may be between the will of a man and the will of his Creator; how that contradiction may be aggravated by what seemed to be means for its cure; how it may be effectually cured. The subject is a very profound and awful one. But it is one which we must face in the actual work of life, and which we therefore should not refuse to face when it presents itself to us on the page of Scripture. I find the startling words respecting Pharaoh justifiable, because I do not find that I can describe facts of everyday occurrence in ourselves, if I may not have recourse to them.1 [Note: F. D. Maurice, The Patriarchs and Lawgivers of the Old Testament, 180.]
The hardening effects of sin, which save from pain, are worse judgments than the sharpest suffering. Anguish is, I am more and more sure, corrective; hardness has in it no hope. Which would you choose if you were compelled to make a choice?-the torture of a dividing limb granulating again, and by the very torture giving indications of life, or the painlessness of mortification; the worst throb from the surgeon's knife, or ossification of the heart? In the spiritual world the pangs of the most exquisite sensitiveness cut to the quick by the sense of fault and aching almost hopelessly, but leaving conscience still alive and aspiration still uncrushed, or the death of every remnant of what is good, the ossification of the soul, the painless extinction of the moral being, its very self?2 [Note: Life and Letters of F. W. Robertson, 239.]
Suleiman, a teacher in a school of the Irish Presbyterian Church in Nebk, who made most careful investigations for me during more than two months, interviewing Moslems and Christians, Fellahin and Bedouin, at the suggestion of Rev. J. Stewart Crawford, said, as the result of many interviews with many kinds of people: “Their view is that God is the creator of heaven and earth, the maker of all men, the giver of good to all. He may also lead astray. The ignorant know up to this point.” This is evidently a survival of an ancient Semitic conception, which we find gives colouring to certain Old Testament passages, as for example when the Lord is represented as saying of Pharaoh, “I will harden his heart,” and Isaiah represents God as bidding him, “Make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and smear their eyes, lest they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and perceive with their heart, and should convert and be healed.” I do not, of course, believe that these passages teach that God leads man astray, but they are certainly coloured by this idea. Another passage, read literally, expresses the view that God makes the enemies of His people guilty-I refer to Psa_5:10, where the Psalmist prays, according to the Hebrew idiom, “Make them guilty, O God,” which the Revisers well translate, “Hold them guilty, O God,” or perhaps better, “Declare them guilty, O God”; that is, “Let them suffer the consequences of their guilt.” We have an illustration of this meaning in passages parallel to God's hardening Pharaoh's heart, where it is said: “Pharaoh hardened his heart.” But the thought that God leads man astray is original in the Semitic mind. So ingrained is the ancient idea, through millenniums of oppression, that anyone in power is responsible for the failure of an inferior, that it sometimes appears to-day in a very amusing way. The following incident, which illustrates this point, came under my notice when I was spending five weeks at a Syrian Protestant College in Beirut. A student failed to pass his examination in French. He therefore wrote a very indignant letter to the French professor, in which he asked the question, in Arab-English: “Why did you fail me?” By this he did not mean, “Why did you declare that my examination was a failure?” but “Why did you cause me to fail?” This was evidently his meaning from the tenor of his letter, in which he claimed that he had done excellent work in French.1 [Note: S. I. Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Religion To-day, 69.]
