SPEAKER_00: God, we give you thanks this morning for your presence here, your presence of life.
SPEAKER_00: And uh, we do ask God that you would give us hearts of flesh in all the ways that our hearts have grown hardened.
SPEAKER_00: God, would you redeem us from the brink of destruction in our own lives, which is often self-inflicted?
SPEAKER_00: And I pray that God you would come and and uh save us through the waters of baptism, through forgiveness, uh life and salvation once again.
SPEAKER_00: God, would you come and save us in Jesus' name?
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: Well, good morning again.
SPEAKER_00: Um this morning my sermon is titled The Hardening of Pharaoh's Hearts.
SPEAKER_00: Now, maybe you aren't familiar with the story.
SPEAKER_00: I'll kind of go through it as we unpack it.
SPEAKER_00: But basically, this is an Old Testament passage in the book of Exodus.
SPEAKER_00: So the Bible begins in Genesis, then there's Exodus.
SPEAKER_00: The people of God, Israel, are enslaved under the Pharaoh, which I'll explain in a minute too, and they're living in this oppressive for 400 years, some scholars believe, and it's not good.
SPEAKER_00: And so God sends Moses to rescue them after years of them crying out to be free.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, this is where the Bible really does endorse, uh, or it's like it's sort of anti-slavery in the very narrative.
SPEAKER_00: It's beautiful.
SPEAKER_00: And uh, but the the Pharaoh hardens his own heart, or his heart is hardened, or God hardens Pharaoh's heart, which raises many questions.
SPEAKER_00: It's a troubling text for many people who know the story.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're gonna unpack it a bit this morning.
SPEAKER_00: This is, of course, we're in our series that we're calling uh Reading in the Dark, uh, trying to unpack troubling texts in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: There are lots of texts in the Bible stories, scriptures that are kind of troubling, they're disturbing, they're hard to understand.
SPEAKER_00: And so we're gonna unpack as many as we can between now and come lent.
SPEAKER_00: And this is one of them.
SPEAKER_00: So last week we talked about Abraham, who was commanded by God to sacrifice his own son, which is a crazy story.
SPEAKER_00: And this one, does God harden people's hearts?
SPEAKER_00: Does God remove agency and make people sin?
SPEAKER_00: Is that what God is doing in this story here?
SPEAKER_00: And so remember, here are some questions I want to encourage you to ask when you're reading any text in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: These are interpretive questions.
SPEAKER_00: So if you want to pull out your phone and take a photo, you can.
SPEAKER_00: But uh, we'll probably pose these every week.
SPEAKER_00: So when you're reading any text, ask yourselves, hey, why do people write this down?
SPEAKER_00: Why do they find it important enough to tell the story around campfires, walking on roads, and hanging out?
SPEAKER_00: Why'd they write it down?
SPEAKER_00: Why'd they include it?
SPEAKER_00: Why is this story in there?
SPEAKER_00: You know, thousands of years ago, why this one?
SPEAKER_00: Many stories didn't get included.
SPEAKER_00: Why is this one in there?
SPEAKER_00: What do we make of that?
SPEAKER_00: Uh secondly, yeah, same kind of question.
SPEAKER_00: Why has this passage endured?
SPEAKER_00: What is it about this story that people still resonate with or find compelling?
SPEAKER_00: Number three, why does this passage, or what does it tell us, about how people understood who they were and who God was at this time?
SPEAKER_00: This, by the way, is number three is an important one for this text today.
SPEAKER_00: And then lastly, also true today, or also an important one for this sermon, is what is true back then, or what was true, that's also true today.
SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna ask these kind of on your own, and I might even pose them myself, but those last two will really help us unpack this story today.
SPEAKER_00: Does that sound all right?
SPEAKER_00: Are you with me?
SPEAKER_00: If you're with me, say I'm with you.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's good.
SPEAKER_00: I like that.
SPEAKER_00: I feel good about that.
SPEAKER_00: I got some confidence all of a sudden.
SPEAKER_00: When God creates the world, he creates life.
SPEAKER_00: He makes room for life, makes spaces for things, then he fills those spaces with things, life.
SPEAKER_00: And these things, this life, somehow is granted the capacity to make more of itself.
SPEAKER_00: So trees have seeds in them.
SPEAKER_00: And when these seeds fall into the ground, they can actually grow more trees.
SPEAKER_00: It isn't like God creates every single tree with some kind of magic wand.
SPEAKER_00: He lets these things that he creates have the capacity to create more of themselves.
SPEAKER_00: So trees, fish, even human beings.
SPEAKER_00: He tells the human beings this then as well.
SPEAKER_00: This is what I uh I love about it.
SPEAKER_00: He tells the human beings, hey, uh, God blesses them.
SPEAKER_00: This is in the garden.
SPEAKER_00: And he tells them, hey, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, hey, now that I've created you, go and create more.
SPEAKER_00: You could say the purpose of this whole thing, the creation project, was for life to flourish and to be in abundance, to have life that creates more life.
SPEAKER_00: So he tells the humans, be fruitful and multiply.
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, be fruitful and multiply is not a command to do math homework.
SPEAKER_00: Are you with me?
SPEAKER_00: God pulls Adam aside.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, Adam, just trust me on this one, young man.
SPEAKER_00: Here's some roses, a gift card to pour, bistro not cego, and some cologne.
SPEAKER_00: You'll figure it out.
SPEAKER_00: Be fruitful.
SPEAKER_00: That joke was funnier in my head.
SPEAKER_00: I thought it would work.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe you're too nervous to laugh, but it's okay.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have some fun this one.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, make more of yourselves.
SPEAKER_00: You'll figure it out.
SPEAKER_00: And uh that's what they do.
SPEAKER_00: They begin to fill the earth.
SPEAKER_00: And so God sort of gives this project humanity, this goal or plans and purposes to create more of itself.
SPEAKER_00: Now, there's an inherent risk in this though, because God seemingly gives humans agency.
SPEAKER_00: He gives them say so, the capacity to do that, to create more life, to be abundant, to multiply, and be fruitful, or to not do that.
SPEAKER_00: They can choose either A or B.
SPEAKER_00: It's like sort of baked into the cake.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know how much human agency, but at least some.
SPEAKER_00: And if there's 0.01% of free will, you might call it, there's 0.01% of free will.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, because for example, some things you didn't get to choose.
SPEAKER_00: You didn't choose where you were born or what color your hair would be, at least the original hair color.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, you didn't choose how tall you'd be.
SPEAKER_00: These are things you didn't, you didn't have any agency or free will.
SPEAKER_00: But if there's any amount of it, it changes everything.
SPEAKER_00: And so if there's true human agency, then it's a risk.
SPEAKER_00: Because you can, in fact, do the opposite.
SPEAKER_00: You can be a creator of life or you can be a taker of life.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, we read in the next, the very next chapter, Genesis 4, that Cain kills his brother.
SPEAKER_00: He begins to behave in this way that's like anti-creation, anti-life.
SPEAKER_00: He's a life taker.
SPEAKER_00: So it's as though in the story, there's these two ways, not explicit but implicit, of being in the world.
SPEAKER_00: You can be a person who uh who creates, who multiplies, who flourishes, or someone who divides and takes and stifles life.
SPEAKER_00: Remember when my kid was little, my son Gavin, he loved Legos, and one day he was probably like four or five, I don't remember, little guy.
SPEAKER_00: He's building some Legos, and then him and his brother got into a fight, and Gavin just walloped his brother Logan.
SPEAKER_00: I was like, yay! I was like, hey, wait, wait, wait, wait.
SPEAKER_00: So I was trying to figure out what to say.
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, hey, Gavin! I grabbed him and I go, look at your hands.
SPEAKER_00: And he looked at his hands and I go, hey, these hands, like in the moment of I don't know, I thought it was wise, maybe it wasn't.
SPEAKER_00: I go, your hands can be used, of course, to punch your brother.
SPEAKER_00: Which I get it.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes you want to do it, maybe, you know.
SPEAKER_00: Or it can be used, and I saw the Legos, I go, or it can be used to build Legos, you know?
SPEAKER_00: Use your hands to build Legos.
SPEAKER_00: Now, before you laugh at me, zoom that up a little bit, or or uh sort of you know expedite that idea on a grand global scale.
SPEAKER_00: There's a reason why folks think that violence can solve problems.
SPEAKER_00: We live in a world right now, especially where we think that shooting somebody and killing them will solve problems, or bad mouthing them on online, or whatever.
SPEAKER_00: We we think that these things will still solve our problems.
SPEAKER_00: But there are two ways to live life.
SPEAKER_00: You can create more and flourish, multiply, or you can take, you can stifle, and you can oppress.
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the deal: what is God to do?
SPEAKER_00: Because already this creation humanity, this project is not going so well.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the crime rate is 25%.
SPEAKER_00: One in four people that are on earth are murderers.
SPEAKER_00: Right?
SPEAKER_00: It's not, this is not good, technically speaking, right?
SPEAKER_00: This is a bad idea.
SPEAKER_00: You could say the creation itself is at stake here.
SPEAKER_00: The whole thing is like hanging by a very thin thread.
SPEAKER_00: What will God do?
SPEAKER_00: Well, God comes, it takes a bit, but God comes to this man and this woman.
SPEAKER_00: Their names are Abraham and Sarah.
SPEAKER_00: I talked about them last week.
SPEAKER_00: And God tells them, hey, you guys, I'm gonna make you into a great family.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna bless you, I'm gonna teach you how to live in my ways, ways of life, creation, multiplication, uh, life, flourishing of life.
SPEAKER_00: This way that the garden was into, I'm gonna make you, I'm gonna teach you how to do that.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna have you do that.
SPEAKER_00: You're gonna grow into this big family, by the way.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, the family will be so big, you'll be you'll have more kids in the stars in the sky.
SPEAKER_00: He's using hyperbole, of course.
SPEAKER_00: But how do you do that?
SPEAKER_00: How can they grow into a big family?
SPEAKER_00: Well, you be fruitful and you multiply, you know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00: That's how you do it.
SPEAKER_00: He's hearkening back.
SPEAKER_00: This time, though, God pulls Sarah aside.
SPEAKER_00: Says, hey, Sarah, come here for a second.
SPEAKER_00: Um, he gives her some tools.
SPEAKER_00: Hey, here's some grilled steak, uh, some instructions for how to do a campfire, and one hour of permission for your husband to not share his feelings.
SPEAKER_00: He'll figure it out.
SPEAKER_00: Trust me.
SPEAKER_00: Just go, Sarah, go.
SPEAKER_00: And be fruitful.
SPEAKER_00: That joke was a little better.
SPEAKER_00: Thank you for that.
SPEAKER_00: Be fruitful and multiply.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, this is the plan of the creation, the cosmos.
SPEAKER_00: Flourish.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, do what I'm asking.
SPEAKER_00: And by the way, they do it.
SPEAKER_00: This family gets huge and they're blessed.
SPEAKER_00: Later, generations later, you read in Exodus, and now we're into Exodus, the second book of the Bible, says that the Israelites, these are the people of Abraham and Sarah.
SPEAKER_00: They have lots of kids, they grow into a large nation, they're called the Israelites.
SPEAKER_00: So the Israelites, they were fruitful, they were prolific.
SPEAKER_00: They were about life and creation, the original intent and purposes and plans of God in the world.
SPEAKER_00: And they multiplied and they grew exceedingly strong.
SPEAKER_00: So the land was filled with them.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, they do it.
SPEAKER_00: They fulfill the plans and purposes of God for the world.
SPEAKER_00: They're all about flourishing, creating of life.
SPEAKER_00: It's wonderful.
SPEAKER_00: This is what God's plan was to redeem everything.
SPEAKER_00: And they do it.
SPEAKER_00: They're about life.
SPEAKER_00: They're living in tune with God's purposes and plans for the world.
SPEAKER_00: The ongoing creation, the ongoing generativity of the world.
SPEAKER_00: It's sort of woven into the fabric of the world.
SPEAKER_00: But this also gets threatened pretty quickly because there seems to be people that have agency.
SPEAKER_00: They have say so.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a man called the Pharaoh.
SPEAKER_00: So the Israelites at this point are living, they go to Egypt and they're living in Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: Things are good.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharaoh that was in charge gave them favor, like them, but then he dies, and a new pharaoh takes over.
SPEAKER_00: And this pharaoh doesn't like them.
SPEAKER_00: Here's how I know it says, by the way, this is the Pharaoh, uh, at least an image of the Pharaoh, which I'll come back to.
SPEAKER_00: But it tells us, uh, actually, no, maybe I don't have it in there.
SPEAKER_00: Oh, I don't know if it got added.
SPEAKER_00: Well, I'll tell you uh the Pharaoh is so threatened by the number of Israelites that are growing in number.
SPEAKER_00: He's that he sees, oh, this is a problem because they might grow so big because they're fulfilling God's plans and purposes, they'll become so numerous, they'll take over.
SPEAKER_00: And I can't have my power threatened.
SPEAKER_00: So he begins to oppress them and make them into slaves.
SPEAKER_00: And he begins to kill all the young male babies of the Israelites.
SPEAKER_00: Does that sound familiar?
SPEAKER_00: Uh, a maniacal king whose power is threatened, who kills little innocent babies.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, years and years and years and years later, Herod does the same thing for the same exact reasons.
SPEAKER_00: Boy, have we not learned anything.
SPEAKER_00: So this Pharaoh, uh, he's oppressing the Israelites, he makes them to slaves, that's how they become slaves, because he's afraid of them.
SPEAKER_00: And he's just killing all the babies in this land.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, there's these two like strong, tough Hebrew midwives.
SPEAKER_00: They're dope.
SPEAKER_00: They're like called uh Shipra and Pua, like the original, you know, uh rebellious uh punk rockers in the ancient world.
SPEAKER_00: And they refuse to do it.
SPEAKER_00: And they set one baby free.
SPEAKER_00: His name is Moe, they call him Moses later on, and they saved Moses' life.
SPEAKER_00: They refused to kill the babies because those women are just uh they're tough.
SPEAKER_00: So anyway, so the Pharaoh though, it's trying to kill him.
SPEAKER_00: And the Pharaoh was uh believe right, he was a bad dude.
SPEAKER_00: He's one of the most evil men, he's actually the most evil person we've met so far in the narrative.
SPEAKER_00: He's a horrible guy, evil guy.
SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh literally means um uh it's like it's like the name of a great house or great palace.
SPEAKER_00: So he's named after the palace in which he inhabits.
SPEAKER_00: It's like calling the president the White House.
SPEAKER_00: They're sort of synonymous.
SPEAKER_00: So his name is Pharaoh, because it which means the great house is sort of synonymous with the palace in which he lives.
SPEAKER_00: And he was considered divine.
SPEAKER_00: People worshiped the pharaoh, but he was evil, a sick man who did all kinds of things to oppress.
SPEAKER_00: He was violent, vindictive.
SPEAKER_00: He's a horrible person.
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the deal about the text the text never tells us which pharaoh he was.
SPEAKER_00: There are many pharaohs in ancient Egypt.
SPEAKER_00: Now, many scholars believe it was Ramses II, Ramses II, but it could have been Thutmos I, Thutmos II, Ramses the first, maybe it was Ramses II.
SPEAKER_00: The text never names him.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's kind of funny because like Ramses the that's a strong name, Ramses.
SPEAKER_00: That dude conquers lands, you know.
SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh sounds like he's just in the corner of his office doing TPS reports.
SPEAKER_00: It's like not a very strong name, if you ask me.
SPEAKER_00: But the Bible doesn't name him.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe that's intentional.
SPEAKER_00: Because that isn't the point.
SPEAKER_00: The point isn't which Pharaoh.
SPEAKER_00: The point is like that the Pharaoh is sort of this embodiment, this archetype of evil itself, rebellion against God.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharaoh sort of symbolizes all kinds of evil acts.
SPEAKER_00: It's sort of this anti, it's like sort of like anti-life, anti-creation.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible portrays the pharaohs like some sort of anti-creational monster who takes life and doesn't give life.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, maybe it doesn't matter which pharaoh it even was.
SPEAKER_00: I love it though.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible refuses to give this Pharaoh what maybe he wanted the most, which is to be remembered.
SPEAKER_00: No one knows which pharaoh even was.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter, we don't care.
SPEAKER_00: The important thing is the role, the office of the Pharaoh was like it was like this space that sort of did evil, vindictive, malicious things.
SPEAKER_00: And the Pharaoh, all of them were embodiments of this anti-creational destructive forces in the world.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like in Revelation, we heard about the Antichrist.
SPEAKER_00: And many Christians are like, which one person is the Antichrist?
SPEAKER_00: Is it that president?
SPEAKER_00: Is it that CEO?
SPEAKER_00: You guys, I'm just telling you, that isn't that important.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_00: It's the one who embodies those qualities and traits.
SPEAKER_00: That's the dangerous one.
SPEAKER_00: Do you hear me?
SPEAKER_00: The Pharaoh, it doesn't matter which Pharaoh, they all were like this embodied, this archetype of evil and anti-creational forces in the world.
SPEAKER_00: So the Israelites are impressed.
SPEAKER_00: Again, the question is, what is God to do?
SPEAKER_00: Well, God sends Moses, the one drawn out of the weeds, and it says, uh, he goes to the Pharaoh and asks him to let the people go so they can continue to be fruitful and multiply.
SPEAKER_00: What does the Pharaoh say?
SPEAKER_00: No.
SPEAKER_00: To sum up, he says, no.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: This sentence when we hear this phrase where his heart is hardened.
SPEAKER_00: So what happens in Exodus is like it's just sort of madness and chaos.
SPEAKER_00: Read the whole story.
SPEAKER_00: It's an Exodus.
SPEAKER_00: The Pharaoh's like, no, you're not leaving.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna keep you as slaves.
SPEAKER_00: And Moses is like, okay.
SPEAKER_00: And then somehow God and Moses and Miriam and the people of Israel, like, they're in this sort of like uh battle with the Pharaoh and his Egyptian armies, and there's this moment where God sends, it seems like it's God sends ten plagues that sort of ravage the whole land in order to kind of like bend Pharaoh's will to what God's will is.
SPEAKER_00: It's absolute madness.
SPEAKER_00: And there's lots of questions in that as well, but it's in that text that you read that God hardens Pharaoh's heart.
SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh's heart is hardened.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, maybe Pharaoh hardens his own heart.
SPEAKER_00: It's not always clear.
SPEAKER_00: But we read that there's this hardening of Pharaoh's heart during the plagues.
SPEAKER_00: But this motif is mentioned 20 times or more in this section of scripture.
SPEAKER_00: 20 times.
SPEAKER_00: Now, here's the deal.
SPEAKER_00: Many of us think of the heart is like, oh, just our emotions and our feelings.
SPEAKER_00: That is not how the ancients thought about the heart.
SPEAKER_00: The heart in the ancient world was like the center of sort of, yeah, your feelings as well, but really it was like the center of your thinking and your choosing and your decisions and your moral life.
SPEAKER_00: It was like the psychology mixed with emotions and will and and uh sort of how you were in the world.
SPEAKER_00: So it was like it was the place where your intellect, even though that was, we know now it's kind of our brain, but in the ancient world, it was like all of it, the center, like where your intellect and and your will and your spirituality all came together.
SPEAKER_00: And that that sort of shaped how you lived in the world.
SPEAKER_00: So be careful what you give your heart to, your mind, your intellect, your decisions, your will, your spiritual life.
SPEAKER_00: These are all encompassed in the heart.
SPEAKER_00: And uh, a person whose heart has been hardened is a person whose inner life has become closed off to life, who's become resistant to wisdom and love and forgiveness and grace and mercy, a person who's sort of uh set against the things that are right.
SPEAKER_00: Does that make sense?
SPEAKER_00: I'm just telling you, the temptation in today's culture is to let your heart become hardened, to become resistant to being soft towards people, especially those we don't like, those who don't vote the way that we vote, those who don't agree with our rhetoric or our ideas or our ideologies.
SPEAKER_00: The temptation it can become easy.
SPEAKER_00: It's really easy to become closed off to wisdom and life and mercy.
SPEAKER_00: It's so easy to go the other way and just become hardened.
SPEAKER_00: I'm asking you, don't let it happen.
SPEAKER_00: Don't.
SPEAKER_00: May God rescue you and me from our own hard hearts.
SPEAKER_00: May He give us hearts of flesh.
SPEAKER_00: Because in today's world, many of the folks around us have lost their minds and have left a soft heart behind.
SPEAKER_00: And these are folks who are often leading us, and we must have a different way.
SPEAKER_00: There are two ways of being in the world.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna oversimplify, but life and creation, fruitful and multiply, or those who oppress and stifle and take life.
SPEAKER_00: And God over and over again says, Hey, choose life.
SPEAKER_00: Choose life.
SPEAKER_00: So that's the heart.
SPEAKER_00: And the text sort of says that in this story with the plagues and God and the and the Israelites against the Pharaoh, that God hardens Pharaoh's heart.
SPEAKER_00: Why would God do that?
SPEAKER_00: Why would God make someone's heart against the things that are good and right?
SPEAKER_00: Why would God close them off to wisdom and love and life?
SPEAKER_00: It raises these questions for me, if you ask me.
SPEAKER_00: Is God's response is God responsible for Pharaoh's rebellion?
SPEAKER_00: And also, is God revoking his free will?
SPEAKER_00: Is he taking back the human agency or the say so?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, I'm gonna offer you three ideas, and then I'm gonna offer a close, and we'll get out of here and go uh pray.
SPEAKER_00: So, first, here's the here's where you see it.
SPEAKER_00: Just uh this is actually not point one, this I just want you to notice this.
SPEAKER_00: These are the ten plagues.
SPEAKER_00: Go read them on your own, I don't have time.
SPEAKER_00: But notice this.
SPEAKER_00: The first plague, it says that Pharaoh's heart just becomes hardened.
SPEAKER_00: So there's the plague of the blood.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't say who's responsible, it just says that Pharaoh's heart became hardened.
SPEAKER_00: Notice the second one.
SPEAKER_00: Same thing with the frogs.
SPEAKER_00: Actually, this one, Pharaoh hardens his own heart.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so so far so good.
SPEAKER_00: God is not really at fault yet.
SPEAKER_00: Plague number three at the gnats, Pharaoh's heart was hard in the original Hebrew.
SPEAKER_00: So again, God not really involved in the first three at all.
SPEAKER_00: Number four, uh the flies.
SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh hardens his own heart.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so there you go.
SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh did it himself.
SPEAKER_00: Number five, the livestock that die.
SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh's heart was hard.
SPEAKER_00: We don't really know who did it, but it doesn't seem to explicitly name God.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, number six, uh the boils.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord, finally for the first time now, God is sort of at work.
SPEAKER_00: The Lord hardens Pharaoh's heart.
SPEAKER_00: The hail, plague, Pharaoh hardens again his own heart.
SPEAKER_00: The locusts, God announces that he has hardened Pharaoh's heart.
SPEAKER_00: So now there's God again.
SPEAKER_00: And uh number nine, with the darkness, God hardens Pharaoh's heart.
SPEAKER_00: And number 10, God hardened Pharaoh's heart.
SPEAKER_00: Notice the progression.
SPEAKER_00: The first five, God doesn't really seem to be a part of them at all.
SPEAKER_00: We don't know who does it.
SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh hardens it his own self half the time.
SPEAKER_00: The other half is sort of like this is hardened, we don't really know.
SPEAKER_00: And then God has sort of indicted in the last few there.
SPEAKER_00: But perhaps the writers do this on purpose.
SPEAKER_00: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, now, number one, here's one way to think about this text.
SPEAKER_00: Why would God do this?
SPEAKER_00: Number one, here's how you can read it.
SPEAKER_00: You could read it like this that God simply lets Pharaoh have his own way.
SPEAKER_00: That God doesn't reach into Pharaoh's heart and like make it hard.
SPEAKER_00: Rather, God's like, okay, you want it that way, Pharaoh?
SPEAKER_00: Your heart is already hard.
SPEAKER_00: You want to be a hard-hearted guy?
SPEAKER_00: Fine, I will let you have your own way.
SPEAKER_00: Which is actually kind of terrifying.
SPEAKER_00: God turns Pharaoh over to his own devices.
SPEAKER_00: He's not overriding his will, he's permitting his will.
SPEAKER_00: You want to have agency?
SPEAKER_00: Go ahead, Pharaoh, and watch what happens.
SPEAKER_00: And he turns himself over, or turns Pharaoh over to what he already wanted.
SPEAKER_00: He already had a hard heart.
SPEAKER_00: He lets him just have it even more.
SPEAKER_00: You can say it this way that God withdraws restraint and lets Pharaoh's heart solidify in its rebellion, becoming unresponsive, like the lifeless idols that Pharaoh worships.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, God allows the Pharaoh to do what he's already been doing.
SPEAKER_00: It reminds me kind of, I know it's different, but just bear with me, okay?
SPEAKER_00: When your kids are little and you're like, I'm tired of all these rules.
SPEAKER_00: I want to stay up all night, eat whatever I want to.
SPEAKER_00: And maybe if you got, you know, if you're a radical parent, you're like, fine, I'll let you do it.
SPEAKER_00: And you let them that one night, you know, remember that night you saw them stay up all night, and you go to bed, and you're like, oh dear God help us all.
SPEAKER_00: And the next morning you go down the stairs, you kind of tiptoe down there, you're so afraid, and you open the door to the basement and you see like this crime scene.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a kid like face down, asleep, in a pile of crumbled up goldfish crackers.
SPEAKER_00: They've got one sock on on, a Superman cape, pancake stuck to their hair.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00: They made a sandwich without not with bread and meat, like a normal human being would make.
SPEAKER_00: They made a sandwich with two Pop Tarts and a smear of peanut butter.
SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's just me.
SPEAKER_00: The fire alarm's going off.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I have no idea why the fire alarm's going off.
SPEAKER_00: They got Mexican pesos in one hand, a passport in the other hand.
SPEAKER_00: Like, where did you go last night?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, like God turns them over to their own ways.
SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, go ahead and watch what happens.
SPEAKER_00: And I'm gonna tell you the ending of the story.
SPEAKER_00: Here's how it ends.
SPEAKER_00: Not well, the Pharaoh dies.
SPEAKER_00: All of his armies are destroyed.
SPEAKER_00: Pharaoh's hard heart, his own ways, leads to destruction.
SPEAKER_00: It's not good.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, there's this great symbolism in the ancient world.
SPEAKER_00: It's the waters that come together and crash over the Pharaoh and his armies.
SPEAKER_00: In the ancient world, the waters symbolize chaos and evil.
SPEAKER_00: So you could say, oh, this story is about how the Pharaoh is destroyed by his own evil and his own chaos that he brought to bear on the world.
SPEAKER_00: That is profound because sometimes we, in our own decisions of being evil or vindictive or unforgiving, we reap the benefits, which are actually, we sort of suffer from our own destructive ways.
SPEAKER_00: And Pharaoh's undone with the thing that he promoted in the world.
SPEAKER_00: It's a great story.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's number one, that God turns himself over to what he wants and it ends horribly.
SPEAKER_00: Number two, you could say this that God simply intensifies one's own heart.
SPEAKER_00: The presence of God, just God's presence, it's just being there, sort of, uh, sort of intensifies which direction the heart is going already.
SPEAKER_00: So you could say like this um I love, I love Chipotle.
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
SPEAKER_00: Like my heart just sings when I'm around.
SPEAKER_00: I love it.
SPEAKER_00: And I'll be walking down the street someday, and I will see someone across the road, and they'll have a bag of Taco Bell.
SPEAKER_00: Do you know what that does to my heart?
SPEAKER_00: The presence of that bag hardens my heart.
SPEAKER_00: I can't be around, I cannot believe that you would eat Taco Bell.
SPEAKER_00: What is wrong with you?
SPEAKER_00: You get what I'm saying, right?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, maybe how about this one?
SPEAKER_00: Uh maybe you're a Vikings fan.
SPEAKER_00: And you see a Packer jersey go by.
SPEAKER_00: And your heart becomes hardened.
SPEAKER_00: Are you with me?
SPEAKER_00: The mere presence of that thing like just hardens my heart.
SPEAKER_00: For me, it was a Raiders jersey, I'm just telling you.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, or maybe like you're an old hippie and you'd see a suit and tie walk by, like, the man's not to get us.
SPEAKER_00: Or a BMW with capitalism, you know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, sometimes people's presence is like judgment in your own, like just their presence, like just and it's like when someone's not very nice to you, your response could be just to be like when they're mean to you, just to be nice back to them.
SPEAKER_00: And if you do it, which I encourage you to do that, it some of them are like softening like, oh that man, okay, I'm sorry for you.
SPEAKER_00: Some of them, though, double down and get even meaner.
SPEAKER_00: Why?
SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes that presence of goodness and justice and mercy and love that is God intensifies the way your heart is already going.
SPEAKER_00: So Pharaoh's heart was already hard, and God's presence just simply intensifies the way he was going, and he keeps on going.
SPEAKER_00: Okay, number three.
SPEAKER_00: Uh the word chazak.
SPEAKER_00: Everyone say chazak.
SPEAKER_00: This is the word for hardened.
SPEAKER_00: It could also mean just strengthened.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it could mean this, that God doesn't like cause the Pharaoh to sin.
SPEAKER_00: Rather, he strengthens his resolve to do what he's already gonna do.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, it's kind of similar, but but God sees that Pharaoh's heart is hard.
SPEAKER_00: He's like, okay, fine, I will weave this evil into my sovereign plan for good in the world.
SPEAKER_00: And I will just strengthen you in your resolve, let you do again, kind of like let you do what you do, you know, it's kind of similar, let you do what you're already gonna do, and strengthen you, give you strength to do it.
SPEAKER_00: Go ahead, and I will use it for good in the world ultimately.
SPEAKER_00: It'll lead to your destruction because you have a hard heart and you hardened it, but I will just strengthen what you've already doing and I will let and let it let it take its course.
SPEAKER_00: That's a good one, too.
SPEAKER_00: I like that one.
SPEAKER_00: By the way, these may not be mutually exclusive, they all could be sort of similar.
SPEAKER_00: But here's the final one.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, this is an ancient story, so we need to read it with an ancient Near Eastern understanding.
SPEAKER_00: This story comes about not long after the Abrahamic story, so it's like it's kind of like around the end of the Bronze Age as well.
SPEAKER_00: The Bronze Age was a long time ago.
SPEAKER_00: Remember, I told you last week that this is when the wheel was invented.
SPEAKER_00: It's an old story.
SPEAKER_00: The he the Hebrew people, the Israelites, they saw God as the cause of all things.
SPEAKER_00: It's just how they thought about God.
SPEAKER_00: Remember question four?
SPEAKER_00: What does the story tell us about God and how they saw God in themselves?
SPEAKER_00: They thought God was in control of everything.
SPEAKER_00: They said, Oh yeah, the gods did this.
SPEAKER_00: So God must have hardened Pharaoh's heart.
SPEAKER_00: It's just sort of like what it's like, sort of their depiction of what happened.
SPEAKER_00: And God lets them tell the story.
SPEAKER_00: So God's like, yeah, okay, yeah, if you want, if you guess what's happening, but they believe that everything that happened in the ancient world was because of the will of the sovereign God.
SPEAKER_00: These people, by the way, just so you know, they were not metaphysicians who were waxing philosophic about human free will.
SPEAKER_00: That is not what that's a very modern problem.
SPEAKER_00: They were not like, I wonder if God has removed our free will.
SPEAKER_00: No, that no, they didn't, they just were depicting how they thought God was interacting with them.
SPEAKER_00: They were nomadic slaves.
SPEAKER_00: They didn't really know what was, they weren't waxing theologically.
SPEAKER_00: So many of us have simply over-interpreted this story in a theological way that back then they would have never thought about it.
SPEAKER_00: It's like this when you're in high school and you go to poetry class, you know, and you read that poem about a tree, and you're like, oh, this is a nice poem about a tree.
SPEAKER_00: And the professor's like, no, no, no, no, no.
SPEAKER_00: This poem has many layers.
SPEAKER_00: When they mentioned oak, the the author didn't just mean oak, it meant authority, the patriarchy, and the burden of being a tall tree in a small world.
SPEAKER_00: It's anti-capitalism.
SPEAKER_00: And you're like, uh, I think it's just about a tree.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00: That's probably what's happening here.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't know if they were like intending to give us a treatise on whether or not humans have free will.
SPEAKER_00: They were just telling us what they thought God was up to in the world.
SPEAKER_00: Fair enough.
SPEAKER_00: Here's what I want to say, though.
SPEAKER_00: Without moralizing the story, I want to tell you a couple things I think that the story would warn us against and encourage us towards.
SPEAKER_00: Number one, the story is saying, hey, uh, don't be like Pharaoh.
SPEAKER_00: It's obvious.
SPEAKER_00: He ends in death, destruction.
SPEAKER_00: The anti-creational monster who limits and takes life dies himself a horrific and tragic death.
SPEAKER_00: Don't be like the Pharaoh.
SPEAKER_00: Don't be about non-life, anti-creation, in other words, sin.
SPEAKER_00: Resist it wherever and whenever you can.
SPEAKER_00: Don't be about things that bring non-life.
SPEAKER_00: Because the longer you go in that road, the more difficult it is to turn around.
SPEAKER_00: Sin is cumulative, it builds, and it's harder to go the other way.
SPEAKER_00: When you're 80 and you've been doing the same sinful thing, it's harder to stop because you're now 80 doing the same things.
SPEAKER_00: So allow the spirit to come in and make you soft and give you hearts of flesh earlier.
SPEAKER_00: Don't be like the Pharaoh.
SPEAKER_00: Second thing.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, rebellion against God and God's plans always, always, always, always, always, always end in catastrophe.
SPEAKER_00: Enough said.
SPEAKER_00: Number three, I got four of these.
SPEAKER_00: Even the most heinous and absurd forms of human uh evil are not a threat to God's purposes.
SPEAKER_00: Here's our night.
SPEAKER_00: The end of the Bible says that God overcomes evil once and for all.
SPEAKER_00: He ends suffering, pain, death, he fixes all of it, makes a new heavens, a new earth.
SPEAKER_00: Not even the most heinous form of evil can thwart God's plans and purposes for life and flourishing of life.
SPEAKER_00: Are you with me?
SPEAKER_00: Okay, a couple of you are.
SPEAKER_00: I lost everybody else, but fair enough.
SPEAKER_00: Lastly, and if you hear nothing else, please hear this.
SPEAKER_00: Please.
SPEAKER_00: Central, be about life.
SPEAKER_00: Hear the command, be fruitful and multiply.
SPEAKER_00: In every way.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus in John 10, 10, said, Hey, I the thief has come to steal and kill and destroy.
SPEAKER_00: The anti-creational monster is the pharaohs at it again.
SPEAKER_00: But I've come to give life and life abundant to the full, overflowing, be about life.
SPEAKER_00: Resist evil.
SPEAKER_00: Resist the pharaohs, the ways of the pharaohs, the anti-creational monsters who suck life from everything we do.
SPEAKER_00: And be about life.
SPEAKER_00: Central Lutheran Church.
SPEAKER_00: This morning, tomorrow, the next day, when someone cuts you off in traffic, when the the person in front of you at Trader Joe's is taking their time and you gotta go somewhere, and you're in a big rush, when your bank account is dwindling down.
SPEAKER_00: Be about life.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.