I don’t know if you’ve ever given any thought to our hard hearts, but I’m sensing that, as a whole, we’re a lot less compassionate than we used to be.
Mean, even.
God seems to treat people very differently.
That’s problematic, isn’t it? If God is fair and just, shouldn’t we all find favor? Do our hard hearts come from God or from within ourselves?
I’m a novice at theology, and I’m really hesitant about saying things that aren’t sound. But I’ll take a swipe at this anyway, because I think it’ll help you.
First, some background.
This past weekend we kept our grandkids, Katherine and Levi. Katherine’s four. Levi’s two. We love them so so much, but they can make you tired.
Katherine was looking at the account of Moses and the Ten Commandments in a little illustrated Bible. She was intrigued. So, in the interest of broadening her horizons, I decided to show her a movie version of the story. We ended up watching parts of three of them.
We started out with the 1956 Cecil B. DeMille version of The Ten Commandments starring Charlton Heston. Big, loud, splashy, and reverential. And some killer dialogue; at one point, Nefertiti says to Moses, “Oh Moses, Moses, you stubborn, splendid, adorable fool!” You just can’t get any better than that.
Then we watched the appropriate section of The Bible, the miniseries from 2013 produced by Roma Downey and Mark Burnett. It was certainly more gritty, and the parting of the Red Sea looked terrific.
We wrapped up our session with The Prince of Egypt, the animated version from 1998. To me, it’s the best of the bunch. It’s some potent stuff.
Katherine had tons of questions, but she fixated on Pharaoh. (She’s always partial to villains in movies – she has this thing about Darth Vader, for instance.)
So I tried to explain the whole Israelites being slaves, Moses being sent to deliver them, and Pharaoh saying, uh-uh, nope.
This was an interesting conversation with a four-year-old.
I don’t know if she picked up on the nuances of the story, but she did understand who the good guys and bad guys were. And she was all about the parting of the Red Sea.
What we didn’t get into was the whole business of Pharaoh being so bad.
That’s not a bad question – why does God harden some people’s hearts? More specifically, is He responsible for our hard hearts?
Ancient script says this, in Exodus 11:3:
The Lord made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people, and Moses himself was highly regarded in Egypt by Pharaoh’s officials and by the people. (Emphasis mine.)
On the other hand, here’s this, found in Exodus 10:27 and 11:10:
27 But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he was not willing to let them go.
10 Moses and Aaron performed all these wonders before Pharaoh, but the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let the Israelites go out of his country.
So. There’s that. But what does that have to do with our hard hearts?
There’s no question that this is a mystery.
Why the difference? I’d say, on one hand, only God knows. I have to be at peace with that. Paul says, in Romans 9:18, God has mercy on whom He wants to have mercy, and he hardens whom He wants to harden.
Yowza.
But back to Exodus: from our limited human view, there are all sorts of reasons in the differences between the Egyptians and Pharaoh. Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites because they were free labor and he could do with them as he pleased. The Egyptians were likely to be more sympathetic. So there are some human factors at work.
That’s not a totally satisfactory view, though.
Making it personal, and in attempting to understand our hard hearts, check this out.
We really don’t know where our deepest feelings come from, do we? Think about it: we are all full of motivations, desires, prejudices, and preferences. Are those due to genetics? Biochemistry? Environment? There isn’t much we can do about those. Or – big one! – are they consciously chosen? Do we decide to engineer our own hard hearts? Is that out of our hands?
My contention is that sin affects everything about us – who we are as well as what we know and do. It can explain our hard hearts.
That could explain a lot about us – why we get so agitated by some people, why we are unwilling to tolerate differing viewpoints, and how we view our world.
Where it gets even messier is when we realize that God controls the universe. No argument there, right? That’s what the Bible teaches. The Bible also teaches that people can obey or disobey God’s commands.
The question hanging out there is this: How does God’s control relate to how you make choices?
If you are free to choose your own attitude and biases – in other words, to accept or reject your hard heart – then it seems to reduce God’s absolute power to something you can override. But – and it’s a big but – if God causes you to have a hard heart against Him and other things and people, then it makes God come across as unfair.
What I grapple with personally as well as corporately is how it seems sometimes that God brings about events and attitudes that clearly oppose His nature.
Rock and roll.
See the implications? This gets to the core of why there are pandemics, why certain elected officials come to power, and how we respond to others and the world and those around us.
As I write this, I’m trying to land this plane safely.
Wheels down:
The connection between God’s sovereignty and human freedom is a big, big mystery from where I sit. People a lot smarter than me (and probably you) have grappled with this for literally thousands of years. It’s still a mystery, and I’m not gonna solve this here at my MacBook on a Tuesday morning.
What I am certain of, though, is that God, by definition, is completely good in His actions. If we think about our hard hearts, and how they came about, we have to acknowledge that we have a big responsibility.
We are responsible to trust Him in all His work and ways. We are never called to solve or even figure out the difficulties that only God understands.
Be at peace with that. And be well. Comments are, as always, welcome.