February 24
Exodus 7: Pharoah's Hardened Heart and Our Free Will
Exodus 7; Luke 10; Job 24; 1 Corinthians 11
Whatever we say about free will, most people say this arrangement comes from God. Yet what God gives, God can take away.
This Pharoah had forgotten about Joseph, and he was treating the people of Jacob poorly. Moreover, he claims for himself the role of G/god. So God judges him, in the form of his heart being hardened (3). God sovereignly changed Pharoah’s heart, so that he would not listen to Moses or respond the way he should respond to God’s words and actions.
This is not a one-off in Scripture. In Romans 1:18, Paul says that God’s wrath is already being poured out on mankind. It’s doesn’t just arrive at the end. How?
Romans 1:24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves . . .
Pride Month and hook-up culture are because God handed us over to that. Why would He do this? Because of an upstream sin, that Pharoah too committed:
21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools, 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.
Thus it is no coincidence that Moses’s first sign before Pharoah is with a “creeping thing” (10-13). Pharoah - and all of us - know that God exists, but we suppress that truth and instead hallow the created things, beginning with ourselves.
So God pours out His judgment upon us by essentially saying, “Ok. Have it your way,” which is the worst thing anyone can hear from God. The de-godding of God has always been the devil’s game plan, and the result is that, in our “free will,” we are left to ourselves to grope around in dark, christless chaos. Our free will, it turns out, is our greatest liability, because our hearts bend away from God.
This is why Paul says in Ephesians 2:1-2 that, before God, we were “dead in our trespasses and sins” - spiritual corpses, walking like the living dead in the way of the dragon.
Thus salvation is not God giving us the choice to choose Him but new hearts, finally enabled and willing to choose Him at all. God loves us too much to leave it to us. Thus even our faith is a gift from God, that no one may boast (Ephesians 2:8-9).
Now we better understand the last request of the Lord’s Prayer: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” (Matthew 6:13).