Name: James Mercer

Date: July 4, 2006

Subject: Article: How Does God "Harden" A Heart?

Message: I believe that G-d created us out of love and gave us the Freedom to choose to accept Him or deny Him.

Queston: If G-d in fact did harden Pharoah's heart wouldn't He be violating Pharoah's freedom to choose?

Curious of your thoughts on this matter.

Thanks,
James

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Dear James Mercer,

Thank you for your correspondence. My apologies for not responding sooner but some inquiries require a substantial time commitment that I am not always able to afford.

The scripture clearly states that God did this thing [i.e. made Pharaoh’s heart "foolishly aggressive"], therefore it is not a question of whether He would do something like this or not, He did it. It is important for us to not examine scripture from our perceived definition of what we believe God's nature should be, but we must identify what God's nature is as He has defined it to us through the scripture, so let's look at the scripture.

We know that God is full of mercy, longsuffering, patient, etc. and the Holy Spirit empowers us to manifest these attributes [Galatians 5:22]. We can also see that God exercised that mercy toward Egypt [and Pharaoh] for some time, for there was well established social degeneracy evident in the works of the magicians [Exodus 7 & 8]. God's judgment was on Egypt and their god's, one of which was Pharaoh himself. Being made "foolishly aggressive" simply hastened the time frame of his judgment [that means that after a lifetime of mercy and the wooing of the Holy Spirit in his life, Pharaoh's option for "choosing life" had passed]. Each of the plagues destroyed a god of Egypt. At any time Egypt could have repented. Surely by the end of the ninth plague Egypt was virtually destroyed, but as a nation she did not repent. Exodus 12:38 identifies that, as Israel was finally leaving Egypt [according to God's terms] that "a mixed multitude also went up with them." It seems evident to me that statement is referring to God-fearing Egyptians who chose to leave Egypt and be grafted into Israel [repented]. We could say that their circumstances caused them to see truth, but for many of those who did not repent, surely those circumstances were what they used to blame God for their destruction.

Blessings from the Tzemach Institute for Biblical Studies,

Jim Wingerter
Director of Multimedia Communications