Day 16: September 19, 2025: Exodus 7-13

We go from being introduced to Moses and him receiving a pretty weighty command of the Lord, to go set my people free, to him once again being commanded by God and given his brother Aaron as a sidekick with all of the necessary equipment needed to convince a Pharaoh, not the least of which is a staff that can do all sorts of things. These chapters contain all 10 of the plagues that fall upon the Israelites each of which is followed by the unfortunately and quixotical phrase of: “Then the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” This phrase is often used as an attempt to strip Pharaoh of any responsibility because, after all, it was God who hardened his heart against his will.

The sin which we commit is a direct hardening of our heart. God has given us free choice to be willing to follow him and to choose him, or to choose that which would be in what we understand our best interest and our selfish desires. Pharaoh did not want to let the people go because he was, after all, Pharaoh. The hardening of hearts is often associated with a desire and an innate need to pursue that which we want and that which we feel is in our best interest. The Bible is scattered with reminders of what is the most important commandment if not to love God and to love our neighbor. When our desires creep both neighbor and God lose our attention and our focus.

God’s commandments vis a vis the nation of Israel was pretty clear back in that day. These are my people and I will do everything in my power, which by the way is saying everything, to free them and to get them back into this land flowing with milk and honey that I had promised them many generation ago. They were in Egypt for over 400 years so it would have been easy to forget the promises of God and the initial covenant(s) that God had made with Abraham. Our nation is almost 150 years old and we have forgotten so much in regards to mistakes that we have made that have put us in a terrible disadvantage to carrying out God’s commandments. The truism that if we forget history we are bound to repeat it finds itself playing out every single day.