God v. Pharaoh: Battle of the Heavyweights

Today we will be observing the night to be much observed.

In the spirit of that, in this time of year, God commands us to celebrate all of his marvelous works and his saving power.

So I'd like to ask a question. In the Exodus story, why did God harden Pharaoh's heart?

We've probably all wondered this, growing up reading the Bible.

Why would God help Pharaoh to oppose him?

Today I'd like to approach this question through a particular keyword that helps drive the Exodus story forward. So let's turn over to Exodus 10, verse 1.

To describe Pharaoh's hardened heart, there are actually three words in Hebrew that the Bible uses to do that. But most of our English translations collapse those three words down into the word hardened.

Now, when God hardens his heart, he actually hardens Pharaoh's heart seven times.

But of those seven, just one time, he uses an odd word that would have stood out to the ancient listener. So here in Exodus 10, 1, Now the Lord said to Moses, Go into Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his servants. And this word for hardened comes from the root word kavod.

Kavod. And kavod basically means heavy, but it's actually used more of the time metaphorically, figuratively, for honor, for glory. In fact, the fifth commandment is to kavod your mother and your father. Actually, kaveed your mother and your father. The idea is that you give them weight, that they have a sort of weightiness that they deserve, that they're owed. And this sense sort of survives in English. We talk about people being a light weight or a heavy weight in their field. Or we talk about them having gravitas, gravity, weight.

But the way this word is used in the Exodus is downright weird. It's weird. When we hear Pharaoh hardened his heart, that kind of catches our ear in English. And we think, well, that sounds a little strange. Well, it sounded even stranger in Hebrew to use this word, because this is not the way the Bible uses this word anywhere else. And so it's like a bright blinking sign as you read this story, saying, stay tuned. There's something's going to happen here.

I got turned on to this topic actually some time ago when we made a magnified episode about the Fifth Commandment, honor your father and mother. And we looked up this word, kavod. And we looked at it, we realized in the story that leads up to Sinai, that this word appears five times Pharaoh's hard heart, Pharaoh's heart, Pharaoh's heart, Pharaoh's heart, Pharaoh's heart. And then, five times, God's glory, God's glory, God's glory, God's glory, God's glory. And so there's a way that it is used, along with several other words, to highlight that dramatic hinge point in the story, where God gains his glory over Pharaoh and frees his people from slavery. So you can think of this word as casting the story as the battle of the heavyweights. This is the battle of the heavyweights in Exodus. And I'm going to just fly through part of it that leads up to Exodus 10 here. You could just jot down the the verses that I mentioned if you want. But just to quickly summarize, in Exodus 7.14, God says Pharaoh's heart is kavod. It is heavy, it's immovable. So he sends the first plague, turning waters into blood. In chapter 8.14, after the frogs, Pharaoh's heart is still kavod. It's still heavy, it's weighty. So God sends the lice. But then in 8.14, when God sends the plague of flies, Pharaoh begins to get a taste of his own medicine. God sends kavod swarms of flies. Thick swarms of flies, your Bible might say. Heavy swarms of flies.

But then we find out after that in 8.32, Pharaoh again kavod's his heart, makes it immovable, makes it heavy. So that in chapter 9 verse 3, God delivers another heavyweight punch.

The hand of Yahweh lands on the animals, the Egyptian animals, and sickens them with what God calls a very kavod pestilence. But again, in verse 7, Pharaoh's heart became weighty, kavod, and he did not let the people go. Jumping ahead to the seventh plague in verse 9.18, God sends hail, which is twice described as kavod me'od, or very heavy, very heavy hail.

Yet Pharaoh again responds in verse 34 by kavod'ing his heart, making it immovable.

The battle of the heavyweights would seem to be at an impasse here. And it's here in chapter 10 verse 1. God had already actually hardened Pharaoh's heart using other Hebrew words here.

Now he tells Moses, I have kavod'ed Pharaoh's heart, made it immovable, that I may show these signs of mine before him. It's like he's putting the thumb on Pharaoh's side of the scale now, or he's giving them a free punch. He's saying, just go ahead, have a little more kavod.

You have a free punch here, and then we're going to find out. Then we're going to find out who the heavyweight champion really is. Now some might wonder, why didn't God soften Pharaoh's heart? Why not soften it? Could Pharaoh have repented? Couldn't this have gone better or gone smoother?

And I think it's at that point it's important for us to realize that that's the kind of question that the people who passed the story down to us would never have asked. They were not on the wavelength of psychoanalyzing Pharaoh. This story is easy for us because we've got this bird's-eye view that we can look at it from a comfortable perspective. We can see it as a character sketch of an ancient king. But this story was written by ex-slaves, for ex-slaves, guided by God's inspiration. The words, the pages, they bleed.

You can feel the pain that comes out of them. These people had their humanity erased. Their infant sons were cruelly murdered by drowning. And after all that, they were gaslit by being called lazy after all of that. This is the pain that this story comes out of. And this is their story. So we don't need to go overboard in psychoanalyzing Pharaoh because for them, it was all too real what Pharaoh really stood for.

He embodied the satanic powers of resistance to God which were behind him, which propped him up. The Babylon desire that goes back to Genesis 11, which is actually the first story where we get brickmaking that is the basis that we then have it in this one where it's just like it's seeding it there. Okay, we're going to get a new kind of thing when we get to Exodus. And it's involved in this ambition, the anti-city of God, where the powerful build up their own names on the scourged backs of the weak.

So Pharaoh represented the principalities that are still influencing the world today and will for but a little longer. And so that's why passages like Ezekiel 29 and Revelation chapters 11 through 15 and various ones of the Psalms, they'll take Pharaoh and they'll fuse his identity with Satan's in a way via connecting it to the sea monster in the Nile or Leviathan, the dragon, the sea dragon in Revelation. These things all end up as a way of seeing the true nature of things and the powers behind them.

So that's what Pharaoh represents. God isn't just picking a fight with a man. He's picking a fight with the principalities and powers for whom Pharaoh is a sock puppet. I don't know if you've ever seen sock puppets before, you know, it's just a sock with eyes, you know. This is Pharaoh right here, you know. This is Satan, you know, and that was how they understood it. So Pharaoh seemed like an insurmountable obstacle. He was the biggest bully on the block, the immovable object. But then there's the hinge that happens there where the story quits talking about Pharaoh's kavod and it starts talking about God's kavod, that is God's glory.

In chapter 10 verse 14, God sends locusts that are very kavod, very weighty. Then after the Passover, after the death of Egypt's firstborn, when they go out of the land in chapter 12, the Israelites depart with very kavod animals. And then in chapter 14 verse 4, with Israel up against the Red Sea, God's kavod takes center stage. God says, I will gain kavod, I will gain glory, honor over Pharaoh and over all his army, that the Egyptians may know that I am the Lord.

And then in verses 17 and 18, we get the old one-two punch of kavod right here. We get God says, I will gain glory, I will gain kavod over Pharaoh and all his army, his chariots and his horsemen. Then the Egyptians shall know that I am the Lord when I have gained kavod for myself over Pharaoh. And then a few verses later in verse 25, he took off their chariot wheels so that they drove them with kavod.

He made the chariot wheels heavy so that they would be difficult to drive. That's when they said, let's get out of here. Clearly God is fighting for them. Let's get out of here. But it was too late. Exodus 14, 26 through 28. Then the Lord said to Moses, Stretch out your hand over the sea, that the waters may come back upon the Egyptians, on their chariots and on their horsemen. And Moses stretched out his hand over the sea, and when the morning appeared, the sea returned to its full depth while the Egyptians were fleeing into it.

So the Lord overthrew the Egyptians in the midst of the sea. Then the waters returned, covered the chariots, the horsemen, and all the army of Pharaoh that came into the sea after them. Not so much as one of them remained. You know, there are a lot of people in the Bible whose name they have God's name in their name.

There's Isaiah, there's Jeremiah, there's Yahshua. These are elements of God's name. But you know who the first one is? Actually, does anybody know who the first one is in the Bible who has God's name in it? It's actually Moses' mom. Moses' mother, back in Exodus 6.20, we're told this, and that's a little hint, you know, of where the story's going to go. Her name is Ya'qavot. It's God is weighty.

So let's think about this for a second. You go back 80 years when Moses is born, Pharaoh is going to drown the sons in the waters, but Yahweh is weighty. She takes her son and she puts him through the waters of death into Pharaoh's household, starting this chain of events that's going to lead to Pharaoh losing his own son and his own defeat in the waters of death.

Can you imagine more poetic justice than that? And so what does that tell us? Yahweh is weighty, did that at the very beginning of the story. Well, it tells us this heavyweight battle was over before it began. This heavyweight battle was over before it began. Sometimes we can come into this season feeling burdened, feeling heavy, facing seemingly immovable objects of our frailties, our doubts, our fears, our challenges, but God never asked us to free ourselves by our own power.

And we have to remember that. Jesus Christ is the one stronger who binds the strong man, the unstoppable force, the pillar of cloud and fire that leads us to liberty, and he does it by becoming the lamb who was slain. It's incredible. We're heading into this night to be much observed, a night of watching to the Lord, and we realize in that process that every new generation, what every new generation realizes, which is that we are all living out the Exodus story. In Ephesians 4, Paul tells us that Jesus ascended on high, and by doing that he led captivity captive. We follow him in baptism through the waters of death ourselves to new life and rescue on the other side. I've never had a perfect day in my life, and you haven't either. But here we are, in the family. Here we are. So tonight is not a night of burden. It's not a night of heaviness. It's a night of victory. The strong man has been defeated. God's people are free.