The plague of locusts brings to view a new group of elements. Egypt had known something about locusts before: so when this scourge was announced, Pharaoh’s servants beg him to yield the contest. “How long shall this man” [Moses] “be a snare unto us? Let the men go that they may serve the Lord their God. Knowest thou not yet that Egypt is destroyed”? (10: 7).——Pharaoh yields to their entreaty only so far as to send for Moses and Aaron, and again try his hand upon bantering with them and with God over the conditions. “Go serve the Lord, said he; but who are they that shall go”? Moses answers, Every thing must go; we with our young and with our old; with sons andwith daughters; with flocks and with herds—all, absolutely all must go.——No indeed, replies Pharaoh—with what we must take as his royal oath—with the most fearful threat he could make and the most solemn asseveration—he says, “Not so; go ye that are men and serve the Lord, for that ye did desire.” That was all ye asked at first: it is the utmost I shall give! “And they were driven out of his presence.” Pharaoh is thoroughly mad! This allowing himself to banter them as to the terms of the arrangement helped him to a stronger feeling of his own importance. He seemed to himself to be yet more a king on his throne, and why should not he dictate the conditions?——Soon the plague comes, and for the moment it quite changes the face of affairs. “Pharaoh called for Moses and Aaron in haste, and said” [again]—“I have sinned against the Lord your God and against you. Now, therefore, forgive, I pray thee, my sin only this once, and entreat the Lord your God that he may take away from me this death only.” Apparently he remembers that once before he confessed, and more than once has begged their prayers, and more than once has promised to let the people go. So he labors to give a little more emphasis to his beseechings this time by confessing his sin against Moses, and especially by the limitation—“for this once”—once more do hear me—this time only. But he has been through this very process once before; most of its points, many times before; and it is much more easy for him to turn back upon every promise and break every most solemn vow than it ever has been before. It is safe to predict that any sinner who has broken so many solemn vows of amendment will never do any thing better than break vows when God’s mercy lifts off the plague. So Pharaoh’s heart is hardened yet again. The statement is—“But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart”—yet the way he did it, here as before (9: 34), was by removing the plague; by hearing his prayer for relief and apparently trusting his sacred promise to let the people go. This was the way and these the agencies by which the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.
The plague of darkness is next in order. Again Pharaoh sets himself to negotiate as to the terms. He will consent that not only the men may go, but their wivesand their little ones; but their flocks must be left behind. He must have some hostages—something left in his hands that will bring his bondmen back. Moses says No! we need our flocks for sacrifice; not a hoof is to be left behind! Pharaoh is more mad than ever: he not only drives Moses out from his presence, but adds—“Take heed to thyself; see my face no more; for in the day thou seest my face thou shalt die.” In this case it is said—“The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart”; but these terrible uprisings and outbursts of madness well up from the depths of a depraved sinner’s soul. No supernatural miracle of divine hardening is at all needful to create them. Pharaoh is too proud a king to bear such confrontings of his will. Shall he yield to such a man as Moses, or even to the God of Moses? Not he. It stirs up all the elements of his pride and madness to have his propositions of compromise so peremptorily rejected. It is this in special that works in this present case to the hardening of his heart.
There remains but one more plague—that awful night on Egypt when the wailing cry rang out over all the land, “for there was not a house where there was not one dead”! and that the first-born! Under this, Pharaoh for the time really broke down; he called for Moses and Aaron by night and said—“Go ye and all your people, and take your flocks and herds as ye have said and be gone, and bless me also.” This conceded everything, closing off with begging their blessing upon his consciously guilty soul! The Egyptians too were all astir; they were urgent upon the people to send them out of the land in haste; for they said—“We be all dead men.” And the people of Israel do really go.——But strange as it may seem, when “it was told the king of Egypt that the people had really gone, then the heart of Pharaoh and of his servants was turned against the people and they said—Why have we done this that we have let Israel go from serving us”?——Forthwith armed chariots are made ready and are off in hot pursuit;—till they find themselves battling the mighty waves of the Red Sea, quailing before the awful eye and under the uplifted arm of the Almighty!——This last instance of hardening the heart seems most like pure and simple infatuation. No doubt Pharaoh and his servants had a fresh sense of what they had lost inletting go such a host of hard working bondmen. No doubt they also felt the mortification of having been worsted in the long-fought struggle over this national question of letting the people go; but after all they had seen and felt of God’s power to curse and to plague and to crush them, nothing but the most senseless infatuation can rationally account for this last desperate dash upon Israel with the armed force of the nation. Yet no one will say that such infatuation does not often appear in the history of human sinning. In his own sphere many a poor sinner is just as madly infatuated as Pharaoh and his people were—is altogether as senseless, as void of wisdom, as reckless of the hot thunderbolts of the Almighty! It is an awfully sad fact, a most humiliating confession as to the manner of human sinning; but it is only too true! There is no need of assuming any direct supernatural divine interposition to produce it.
Nothing more seems necessary to complete the argument from the history of the case unless it be to suggest that when we have accounted for the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart satisfactorily on the one principle—the well-known proclivities and activities of a proud, stubborn human heart, it is entirely unphilosophical to bring in another principle, viz. the miraculous, immediate, direct action of Almighty Power. When we have proved the former power adequate to produce all the results, we have virtually precluded the latter. There can be no reason whatever for assuming a joint, co-ordinate action of both the natural laws of the human mind and of the supernatural power of God. If the former suffices, the latter is uncalled for. Miracles are never to be assumed where non-miraculous agency is fully adequate.
If it be still argued that the very words declare, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” the answer is: God is said to do what he foresees will be done by others and done under such arrangements of his providence as make it possible and morally certain that they will do it. Joseph said to his brethren (Gen. 45: 5, 7, 8), “Be not angry with yourselves that ye sold me hither, for God did send me before you to preserve life. So now it was not you that sent me hither but God.” Yet it is simply impious to put the sin of selling Joseph into Egypt overupon God. God did it only in the same sense in which he hardened Pharaoh’s heart. He had a purpose to subserve by means of the sin of Joseph’s brethren; and he did no doubt permit such circumstances to occur in his providence as made that sin possible and as resulted in their sinning and in the remote consequences which God anticipated.
It is of no particular use for us to find fault with the way in which the Scriptures speak of God’s hand in the existence of sin. There is no special mystery about it. It certainly does not involve the least moral obliquity on God’s part; and it is therefore every way prudent and wise to interpret such language in harmony with the common sense of the case and with the well-known character of God.
2. We proceed to notice what is said of God’s purpose in the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. It is the more important to speak of this because an extreme view is sometimes taken of the central passage (Ex. 9: 14–16); “And in very deed for this cause have I raised thee up for to show in thee my power,” etc. The extreme view referred to is that God made Pharaoh a great king, put him on a high throne, for the avowed purpose of displaying his own great power in his sin and punishment.
By consent of Hebrew lexicographers, the verb translated “raised up” means in this case preserved alive—have caused thee to stand or continue among the living. The previous context moreover seems not to be quite accurately put in our English version. It should rather be thus, beginning with v. 14: “For at this very time I am sending [present tense] all my plagues to thine heart and upon thy servants and upon thy people that thou mayest know that there is none like me in all the earth. For I might now have stretched out my hand and smitten thee and thy people with pestilence [i. e. might have smitten you all dead], and thou wouldest have been cut off from the earth. But truly for this very reason have I preserved thee alive to the end that thou mightest show forth [make others see] my power, and for the sake of proclaiming my name in all the earth.” To the same purport are the words (Ex. 14: 17, 18) with reference to the final destruction of Pharaoh’shost; “And I will get me honor upon Pharaoh and upon all his host, etc. And the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I shall have gotten me honor upon Pharaoh and upon his chariots and his horsemen.” The great thought is that God turns to account the sin and madness of Pharaoh for the purpose of making known his power to save his people and to crush their foes. He shapes his ways of providence to this end. He might have swept off Pharaoh and his people with the same pestilence which destroyed so many of their cattle; but he had a wiser purpose. He could make a better use of their sin and of their life; so he spared them till he had wrought all his wonders upon Egypt before all the nations of the earth; and then he let them plunge into the mighty waves of the Red Sea and make their grave there!——Now if wicked men will sin, who shall object against God that he makes the best possible use of it? Why may he not reveal his power thereby and exalt his name as one “mighty to save” or to destroy?
3. It only remains to ask—What has God taught us of his character as bearing on the question before us, and of his agencies in the existence of sin?