From: Dawsonzhu@aol.com
Date: Wed Oct 02 2002 - 14:10:43 EDT
<<
My thought is this -- how do we know God does not -- sometimes --
deliberately deceive? It seems that He did so at least once (actually
several times) in the story of the plagues of Egypt. Over and over
God tells
Moses to lie to Pharaoh, to tell him the people want only to go
three days
march into the desert to sacrifice -- rather than tell Pharaoh their real
plan is to keep on going.
>>
I'm not so convinced that there was any deception. First _we_
know the result as observers, and _we_ know where the story is
going, but it is quite typical that us poor players who strut
and fret our lives on the stage have little idea what is going
on in our own play.
Second, here again is a place where it would probably
help to study a lot more. This is _one_ view, but I
still feel it does a pretty good job of addressing
the matter.
...Man's thoughts, his intellectual activity, the cognitive,
conative, and affective aspects of his personality, are all
regarded as issuing from the heart. The state of the heart
defines, then the essential character of a person. Its
"hardening" connotes the willful suppression of the capacity
for reflection, for self-examination, for unbiased judgments
about good and evil. In short, the "hardening of the heart"
becomes synonymous with the numbing of the soul, a condition
of moral atrophy.
The motif of the hardening of the pharaoh's heart occurs precisely
twenty times in one form or another within the scope of the Exodus
story between Chapters 4 and 14. Intriguingly, the distribution of
the motif is exactly equally divided between the pharaoh and God as
the direct cause of the hardening. Ten times it is said that the
pharaoh hardened his own heart, and ten times the hardening is
attributed to God. Furthermore, it is not until the advent of
the sixth plague that divine intervention begins. For the first
five plagues the pharaoh's obduracy is the product of his own
volition. This is crucial to the theological issue, for it stamps
the king as a callous, evil-minded minded person who must bear full
responsibility for his iniquitous acts freely and knowingly
perpetrated.
The pharaoh's culpability is established beyond doubt. He is not an
innocent, blameless individual whose integrity is compromised, and
finally subverted, by the intervention of Providence. He exhibits
an obvious and willing predisposition to cruelty. Accordingly, the
king's continued intransigence from the sixth plague on cannot be
said to be involuntary, a point that is carefully made in the
narrative by its twice stressing that the pharaoh's obstinacy
after the seventh plague was again self-willed. He was not one
to be constrained by moral principles, and he cannot be excused
from criminal liability. In brief, the idea of God's hardening
the pharaoh's heart is that He utilizes a man's natural proclivity
toward evil: He accentuates the process furtherance of His own
historical purposes.
There is one other point to be made in this connection. The
theology
and political theory of ancient Egypt stressed the literal divinity
of the living pharaoh. His will was law, his word absolute. By
reinforcing the pharaoh's stubbornness, thereby making him a
prisoner
of his own irrationality, God deprives the "god" of his freedom of
action. The pharaoh can no longer control his own will and his
so-called divinity is mocked.
[Nahum Sarna. Exploring the Exodus: The Origins of Biblical Israel.
(Schocken Books, NY 1996) pp 64-5.]
The Pharoah was an arrogant cluck who had his magicians and jesters
all singing praises to him. If God outwitted him, isn't that the
same for God's divine teaching when we also are headed on the
wrong road?
We are given the chance to listen, and I gather that the pharaoh also
had his chance where God _could_ have changed His mind, but the pharaoh
lived up to his ways --- like most of us when we're determined to screw
up --- and he received the lesson he greatly deserved (God's way of
making it clear, plain, and undeniable who has ultimate sovereignty
over reality).
Again, I find sometimes skeptics have made a big deal of "how terrible
this God is for hardening the _poor_, _innocent_, unassuming, and
_helpless_ pharaoh's heart. What kind of God could do such a
_terrible_ thing?" .... and so on. Maybe it is just not so simple.
By Grace alone we proceed,
Wayne
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