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Then Moses and Aaron were brought back to Pharaoh. “Go, worship the Lord your God,” he said. “But tell me who will be going.”

9 Moses answered, “We will go with our young and our old, with our sons and our daughters, and with our flocks and herds, because we are to celebrate a festival to the Lord.”

10 Pharaoh said, “The Lord be with you—if I let you go, along with your women and children! Clearly you are bent on evil.11 No! Have only the men go and worship the Lord, since that’s what you have been asking for.” Then Moses and Aaron were driven out of Pharaoh’s presence.

It strikes me that there is something of Pharaoh in many of us. We know what God wants, but we try to strike a bargain; we want to negotiate easier terms. We’ll agree to what God asks, but with our own conditions attached. We’ll water things down. In short, we will attempt to compromise. We want to salve our consciences and say we have done what God asked. But have we?

If Jesus is not Lord of all, He is not Lord at all, and He calls for our unconditional surrender.

Are we prepared to go all the way with God?

G. Campbell Morgan said: “There are hours when the Church must say NO to those who should ask communion with her, in the doing of her work, upon the basis of compromise.”

This verse is very much on my mind at the moment:

“For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear.” 2 Timothy 4:3.

Let’s determine not to be among their ranks. May we be those who hold on to the unadulterated truth.

PRAYER: Lord, keep your church true to truth.

So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, “This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before me? Let my people go, so that they may worship me. 4 If you refuse to let them go, I will bring locusts into your country tomorrow. 5 They will cover the face of the ground so that it cannot be seen. They will devour what little you have left after the hail, including every tree that is growing in your fields. 6 They will fill your houses and those of all your officials and all the Egyptians—something neither your parents nor your ancestors have ever seen from the day they settled in this land till now.’” Then Moses turned and left Pharaoh.

7 Pharaoh’s officials said to him, “How long will this man be a snare to us? Let the people go, so that they may worship the Lord their God. Do you not yet realize that Egypt is ruined?”

Pharaoh’s officials remind me of the unjust judge in Jesus’ parable (Luke 18:1-8) who gave in to the persistent widow because she kept ‘bothering’ him. They were thoroughly fed up with Moses (7a). But it seems they were more willing to face reality than Pharaoh was. Spiritual blindness is a sad, but interesting phenomenon. We might well ask, ‘How could he not see the truth?’

‘Denial of reality accounts for our perpetual blindness to the obvious. Human affairs at every level are affected by it. Denial alone explains why “the rulers of this age” do the things they do – up to the crucifixion of “the Lord of glory” himself (1 Corinthians 2:8, NRSV). Denial of reality is inseparable from our fallen human heart, and its great power comes from not being recognised for what it is. The fact is, in a world apart from God, the power of denial is essential if life is to proceed. The human heart cannot – psychologically cannot – sustain itself for any length of time in the face of reality. We can’t ponder our own death, we can’t examine the conflicted nature of our motives and actions, we can’t face our fears about other people – nor can we live with our own past or face our future – without profound denial.’‘Revolution of character’, pp.47, 48.

As Mark Twain quipped: ‘Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.’

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them 2 that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord.”

This remains an abiding lesson of the Exodus – both for the church and the world.

It is such an epic story that it has been turned into a block-busting film (and more than once).

But in particular, God wants His own people to know that He is the Lord – the great, eternal God.

He wants us to know about Him…

…to know what He did, what He is doing, and what He can do.

Even more, He wants us to know Him. This is not a call to theoretical information but to a personal, intimate relationship (The same word used of Adam ‘knowing’ Eve is also used of God’s people knowing Him – and I believe Eve was more than a ‘concept’ to her husband!)

In a world where there are so many uncertainties, God wants us to be sure of Him.

PRAYER: Lord, help me to hear and respond your call to be still and know that you are God.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them 2 that you may tell your children and grandchildren how I dealt harshly with the Egyptians and how I performed my signs among them, and that you may know that I am the Lord.”

The concept as the home/family being an essential arena for the teaching and modelling of the Christian faith is a thoroughly Biblical one. We find passages like today’s in a number of places in the Bible. We cannot ‘outsource’ discipleship training to the church or the Sunday school. These have important roles to play, to be sure, but they should be supplementary for children from Christian homes. Our young should be able to learn about Christianity in the family, from who their parents are, and from what they say. Instruction and example belong together. In Joyce Huggett’s book, ‘Listening to God’, she says she learned to pray from being very young, because she saw her dad pray every evening before bed. There are things we inhale (good and bad) from the very atmosphere in which we are raised. It will never be perfect. We are all sinners, but is it a God-honouring place, where Jesus is Lord, and church life is appropriately prioritised? Rod Dreher says to parents: your children ‘’need to see that you are serious about the spiritual life.’’

In his book, ‘the Benedict Option’, he has a section headed ‘Turn your home into a Domestic Monastery.’ He goes on to say:

‘’Just as the monastery’s life is ordered toward God, so must the family home be. Every Christian family likes to think they put God first, but this is not always how we live. (I plead guilty). If we are the abbot and abbess of our domestic monastery, we will see to it that our family’s life is structured in such a way as to make the mission of knowing and serving God clear to all its members.” (Pages 124,125)

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his officials so that I may perform these signs of mine among them…

Exodus tells us three things about Pharaoh’s heart: that the Lord hardened it; that Pharaoh hardened his heart (8:15), and that his heart “became hard” (7:13). It is important to keep these statements together in our thinking.

‘In other words, it is possible to tell two stories about Pharaoh’s heart…One is the story of Pharaoh’s moral choices, whereby his heart became increasingly ‘set in its ways’, committed more and more irretrievably to a course of genocide regarding Israel. The other is a mere statement that from the perspective of the Lord as moral ruler of his world, the point of no return had been reached and the hardness of Pharaoh’s heart must now be judgmentally imposed on him as the justly due consequence of what his own choices had made him.’ Alec Motyer, p.122.

Motyer points out that all three elements are brought together in 9:34 – 10:1:

“When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts. So Pharaoh’s heart was hard and he would not let the Israelites go, just as the LORD had said through Moses.

Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh for I have hardened his heart…”

He then adds:

‘With these words we are forcefully reminded that choices are the privilege and price of being human. Our privilege is that of being responsible beings, recognising our moral values, called to make responsible choices, and given the opportunity and obligation to live in the light of the foreseeable consequences of our actions. The price we pay is that every choice, for good or ill, goes to fashioning our characters, and whether in the long or short term – or both – makes us answerable to the Judge of all the earth.’

Someone said, ‘Sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.’

When Pharaoh saw that the rain and hail and thunder had stopped, he sinned again: He and his officials hardened their hearts. 35 So Pharaoh’s heart was hard and he would not let the Israelites go, just as the Lord had said through Moses.

It’s been said that the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.

The heart is deceitful above all things

    and beyond cure.

    Who can understand it? Jeremiah 17:9

Alec Motyer writes helpfully on the subject of Pharaoh hardening his heart in his book on ‘Exodus’, in ‘The Bible speaks today’ series:

‘Humans are so created that the choices they make contribute to forming character, and character thus formed promotes the making of similar choices in the future. Sometimes it takes a very long series of choices to produce a fixed habit, sometimes one choice is enough, sometimes a prolonged series of choices still leaves the issue in question open. Choosing and habit forming are things we all know about. What none of us knows is when the ‘point of no return’ will be reached. None of us can say, ‘I can risk one more choice and still retain freedom to give up this habit.’ Sadly, we can pass the point where freedom to change has been lost and still retain the illusion that ‘I can give it up any time I want!’ Thus the situation in which Pharaoh found himself was not peculiar to him but is intrinsic to the human condition. Only God foresees the decisive, freedom-destroying choice, and only he knows at once when the choice that kills freedom has been made. Indeed, the Bible goes further and claims that because he is God, it is he that fixes that point.’ (Pages 121, 122).

Jeremiah was right to say that the heart is “beyond cure.” That is, it is beyond human help. No psychiatrist or psychoanalyst, no doctor, will be able to fully deal with its impenetrable depths. But there is a heart specialist who can heal. Indeed, He can perform a heart transplant. His Name is Jesus.

Moses replied, “When I have gone out of the city, I will spread out my hands in prayer to the Lord. The thunder will stop and there will be no more hail, so you may know that the earth is the Lord’s. 30 But I know that you and your officials still do not fear the Lord God.”

31 (The flax and barley were destroyed, since the barley had headed and the flax was in bloom. 32 The wheat and spelt, however, were not destroyed, because they ripen later.)

33 Then Moses left Pharaoh and went out of the city. He spread out his hands toward the Lord; the thunder and hail stopped, and the rain no longer poured down on the land.

What an example of power and authority in prayer. Prayer changes things – even in the natural world.

But Moses is also an illustration of the place of the prophetic in prayer. He stood ‘in the counsel of the Lord’, just as Elijah did, who was to appear many years later (James 5:17,18). They did not randomly pray for changes in the weather patterns. They wielded such influence in heaven (and on earth) because they were in tune with what God was doing, and was going to do. They operated with revelation knowledge, and this made them so effective. They had an understanding of what God wanted. Maybe this illustrates the principle of ‘pray until you pray’? Spend time with God until your spirit has insight into how God wants you to pray. For both Moses and Elijah, prayer was not a matter of ‘hit and hope’.

We also see in this section the ultimate purpose of prayer. It is that the Father’s Name should be hallowed (29b). What god does in answer to our prayers is for His glory.

What a text for these times:

“…so you may know that the earth is the Lord’s.”

Sadly, we repeatedly treat it like it is ours and we have raped, rather than stewarded it. May God have mercy.

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Stretch out your hand toward the sky so that hail will fall all over Egypt—on people and animals and on everything growing in the fields of Egypt.” 23 When Moses stretched out his staff toward the sky, the Lord sent thunder and hail, and lightning flashed down to the ground. So the Lord rained hail on the land of Egypt; 24 hail fell and lightning flashed back and forth. It was the worst storm in all the land of Egypt since it had become a nation. 25 Throughout Egypt hail struck everything in the fields—both people and animals; it beat down everything growing in the fields and stripped every tree. 26 The only place it did not hail was the land of Goshen, where the Israelites were.

27 Then Pharaoh summoned Moses and Aaron. “This time I have sinned,” he said to them. “The Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong. 28 Pray to the Lord, for we have had enough thunder and hail. I will let you go; you don’t have to stay any longer.”

Repentance is a change of mind leading to a change of behaviour. It is a turning – to God and away from sin. Pharaoh did not repent. He used repentant sounding language. But as the rest of the story unfolds we will again see that his heart and conduct remained unchanged. He was still the same Pharaoh. He regretted the consequences of his sin. He didn’t like it hailing and thundering, and wanted it to stop. But he didn’t want to stop sinning. Not really. He just wanted to stop suffering. Pharaoh had regret, but he did not repent.

I’ve started to re-read a book I first worked through many years ago: ‘Revolution of Character’, by Dallas Willard and Don Simpson. It was published in 2006. Today I came across these words, and thought them relevant to our passage:

“In our present thought world, the horror of our ruin is hidden from polite  and enlightened conversation. Sin as a condition of the human self is not available philosophically or ethically to explain why life proceeds as it does. For example, why do around half of American marriages fail, or why do we have massive problems with substance addiction and with the “moral failures” of public leaders? The thinkers who are supposed to know such things are lost in speculation about “causes.” Meanwhile, the real source of our failures lies in our choices and the factors at work in them. Choice is where the potential for sin dwells.”

The weather is going to change, and then Pharaoh is going to continue with choosing badly. It will be his ruin. You can’t resist God and win!

Those officials of Pharaoh who feared the word of the Lord hurried to bring their slaves and their livestock inside. 21 But those who ignored the word of the Lord left their slaves and livestock in the field.

This is the story of the progress of the gospel in the world in two verses. There are those who believe and those who don’t; there are those who repent and those who won’t; there are those who turn and those who (seemingly) can’t. Life and death are always in the balance.

Reading verse 21 you might think, ‘Why?’ ‘Why would you do that when you already have such a build up of evidence that the Lord says what He means and means what He says?’ There is always something illogical about the stubborn refusal to believe. But someone observed that the original temptation in the garden of Eden involved doubting the truth of judgment, and we see it played out again in the plague stories. We are seeing it appearing today even among some so-called evangelicals who appear to be losing their nerve around this doctrine.

I seem to remember a couple of quotes from Jim Packer’s excellent book, ‘Knowing God’, which I read in the late 1970’s. As I recall he wrote that Adam and Eve first hid from God before they were removed from the garden. Also, I believe he said that all that God ultimately does in judgment is to underline the choices we have already made.

“My hands have made both heaven and earth; they and everything in them are mine. I, the LORD, have spoken! “I will bless those who have humble and contrite hearts, who tremble at my word.” (Isaiah 66:2: New Living Translation).

Whenever we hear God’s Word, life and death are in the balance. The highway of obedience is the way of life, and the way of disobedience is the road of death. Life and death are not only eternal destinies, they are routes through the world now.