Raymond: "...it is he who must take the initiative and save his chosen people if they were to be saved at all, because they were incapable of saving themselves."

 

During the events leading up to the exodus from Egypt God represented himself as the One who makes man “dumb or deaf, or seeing or blind” (Exod. 4:11). 

He also arranged every detail of the exodus event to highlight the great salvific truth that it is he who must take the initiative and save his chosen people if they were to be saved at all, because they were incapable of saving themselves. 

During his conversation with Moses before Israel’s exodus from Egypt, God declared that he would harden Pharaoh’s heart throughout the course of the ten plagues precisely in order to (see the לְמַעַן, lema˓an, “in order to,” in Exod. 10:1; 11:9) “multiply” his signs so that he might place his sovereign power in the boldest possible relief, so that both Egypt and Israel would learn that he is God. This repeated demonstration of God’s sovereign power, the text of Exodus 3–14 informs us, God accomplished through the means of his repeatedly hardening Pharaoh’s heart.

In order to claim that God’s hardening activity in this story is to be viewed only as a reactionary, conditional, and judicial hardening rather than a more ultimate, discriminating, and distinguishing hardening, some theologians have argued that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart only after Pharaoh had already hardened his own heart. A careful assessment of the biblical data will show, however, that there is nothing in the entire Exodus context to suggest that this is the proper approach to this crux interpretum. 

It is true, of course, that Pharaoh would already have had a sinner’s heart prior to the event, and it is also true that three times we are informed that Pharaoh hardened his heart,18 but these facts alone do not require that we must say that Pharaoh would necessarily have hardened his heart against Israel after the first confrontation (Exod. 7:6–13). He could just as easily and readily, in God’s providence, have been convinced by the first confrontation that the better part of wisdom dictated his letting Israel go. 

A careful examination of the biblical text will show not only that ten times is it said that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, but also that God twice declared to Moses, even before the series of confrontations between Moses and Pharaoh began, that he would harden Pharaoh’s heart “and [thereby] multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt” (Exod. 4:21; 7:3). 

The first time then that it is said that Pharaoh’s heart was hard, the text expressly declares that it was so “just as the LORD had spoken” (Exod. 7:13), clearly indicating that Pharaoh’s hardness of heart had came about due to God’s previous promise to harden it. And the first time it is said that Pharaoh “made his heart hard,” again we are informed that it was so “just as the LORD had spoken” (8:15; see also 8:19; 9:12, 35). 

Paul would later declare in Romans 9 that in his hardening activity God was merely exercising his sovereign right as the Potter to do with his own as he pleased (Rom. 9:17–18, 21). 

Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville: T. Nelson, 1998), 358–359.