”Then the Lord said to Moses, “Pay close attention to this. I will make you seem like God to Pharaoh, and your brother, Aaron, will be your prophet. Tell Aaron everything I command you, and Aaron must command Pharaoh to let the people of Israel leave his country. But I will make Pharaoh’s heart stubborn so I can multiply my miraculous signs and wonders in the land of Egypt. Even then Pharaoh will refuse to listen to you. So I will bring down my fist on Egypt. Then I will rescue my forces—my people, the Israelites—from the land of Egypt with great acts of judgment. When I raise my powerful hand and bring out the Israelites, the Egyptians will know that I am the Lord.” So Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord had commanded them. Moses was eighty years old, and Aaron was eighty-three when they made their demands to Pharaoh. Then the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, “Pharaoh will demand, ‘Show me a miracle.’ When he does this, say to Aaron, ‘Take your staff and throw it down in front of Pharaoh, and it will become a serpent.’” So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and did what the Lord had commanded them. Aaron threw down his staff before Pharaoh and his officials, and it became a serpent! Then Pharaoh called in his own wise men and sorcerers, and these Egyptian magicians did the same thing with their magic. They threw down their staffs, which also became serpents! But then Aaron’s staff swallowed up their staffs. Pharaoh’s heart, however, remained hard. He still refused to listen, just as the Lord had predicted.“
Exodus 7:1-13 NLT
God knows everything about every person. It is a strange truth that Pharaoh would not let the Hebrew people leave, considering that he viewed them to be a plague in his land. Yet, Pharaoh was a specific type of man. He was cruel. This is proven by the way in which he instructed the slave drivers to make it impossible to meet their quota, so that he could break the spirit of the Hebrew people. It wasn’t always this way in Egypt for the Jews. It would seem that for a large portion of their 400 years, they flourished and grew. But this man rose to power in the land and despite the presence of God being felt by the working class midwives, he forgot about God entirely. This seemed to inform his cruelty. It is arguably his cruelty which moved God to act. For God, this was entirely predictable. A man of this nature, who was already cruel would only get worse. God knew that his heart would never change. He predicted it to Moses. Even so, it is precisely against this backdrop of cruelty that God would choose to create hope. Pharaoh predictably hardened his heart, but unwittingly made God’s predictable salvation even sweeter for those who would wait upon the Lord. Even the tenacity of Pharaoh’s cruelty could not undo God’s plan. The harder he pushed against God, the more he undid his own plans and condemned himself.
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