Exodus 10:1 The Lord said to Moses: "Come before Pharaoh. For I have made his heart and the hearts of his servants steadfast, that I may perform these my signs in their midst.2 And thou shalt be able to tell thy sons and thy grandsons of the things which I have done in Egypt, and of the signs which I have wrought among them, that ye may know that I am the LORD."
God hardens Pharaoh's heart to perform his signs: this place evokes an unpleasant feeling of "bullying". Something like a father commanding a child, "Give me the book," but holding him down and not allowing him to carry out the order. And then he punished the child exemplarily for not obeying the order.
I can think of these possible explanations:
Let's imagine an axis with two points:
ZLO, ĎÁBEL_______________________B_________________________A_________________________________DOBRO, BůH
On the far left lies absolute evil, on the far right absolute good. Somewhere in the middle is a point A, which we'll call the point of free decision, to the left of it is a point B = point, which is the point of forfeiture of evil, the "point of no return", the point beyond which "there is no return"1.
Everyone is somewhere on this axis. If his position is to the left of point A, he progresses progressively to the left until he finally ends up in hell, the region of absence of good. If he is to the right of point A, he progresses to the right until he finally ends up in the arms of God.2
Most people believe that people are primarily at point A, where everyone chooses whether to choose God or the Devil, good or evil. But that is not the case3.
All people are not primarily somewhere between A and B: they are naturally inclined to evil from birth and are incapable of making a free choice for God. Without God's intervention, they would irrevocably end up in hell.
But God in His grace sends His Spirit to work on people. At least sometime in the course of life, the Holy Spirit will "touch" each person4 to point A, and man can make his choice for or against God5.
One always makes this choice by faithnot based on a vision. For God remains permanently Invisible.
The invisibility of God is an important fact in this context. If people could see God, the decision would be easy - only a fool would not decide for God if he saw his greatness, goodness and power6.
The important thing is that this intervention of the Holy Spirit is by the pure grace of God: he wouldn't have to do it and it would be completely Fair. But Christ won for us on the cross this superior Gracious God's attitude.
So Pharaoh, like every man, was somewhere between points A and B. Then Moses comes and says to Pharaoh: Let my people go. Pharaoh refuses. What followed was the plagues of Egypt, which was a supernatural miraculous intervention of God on behalf of the Israelites. God made Himself partially "visible" by these miracles.
Pharaoh, influenced by this "visibility", was "shifted" to the right of A on our axis. That is, to a situation where to decide against God is foolishness.
But the situation was not fair: Pharaoh was given an unfair advantage over the rest of the people. Whether or not he wanted to obey God, he was not really free to decide - he was influenced by God's greatness and power.
Now, when it speaks of hardening Pharaoh's heart, it is really just "setting things back to normal": Pharaoh is "moved" by God to where he belongs, that is, to the point of free choice or to the left of it.
Similarly, there have been and are people who experience some unquestionable miracle, such as being supernaturally healed.7. We know that far from everyone who has been healed or otherwise affected by the power of God has become or is becoming a follower of Jesus. We can also attribute this to God's intervention when, in an effort to make their decisions truly free, He moved them to the left, to "normal."
It should be noted that there are other explanations.
For the true God has every right (it is perfectly just) to leave every person left from point A and not to intervene. Some he raises to salvation, some to damnation. This is what the extreme Calvinists. In this case, to harden Pharaoh's heart would be to maintain the status quo. God would merely do nothing against Pharaoh (as before). Rather, the text implies that God did something active toward Pharaoh. And I personally don't like hard Calvinism.
Second, it is possible that Pharaoh, long "before Moses", had so hardened his heart against the Spirit of God that Moses found him already "far to the left" beyond point B, the area of no return (where repentance is no longer possible).
But the first explanation seems to me the most probable.
- I am convinced that it is still possible to get to the state of being unreachable by God, i.e. left from point B, during a human lifetime. It is difficult, but possible (cf. Esau) ↩︎
- Mt 25:29 To him that hath shall be given. He who has not, from him shall be taken away even that which he has.
2 Cor. 3:18 We all, beholding with unveiled face the glory of the Lord as in a mirror, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord. ↩︎ - at this point, only Adam and Eve were at this point in their free will regarding the fruit on the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ↩︎
- this action of God, i.e., acting on man to get to point A, is pure grace, i.e., unmerited favor. God would not "have" to do it, and if He did not do it, it would be perfectly just. ↩︎
- and at point A, this choice is truly free - man is not influenced either by his genetic propensity to sin or by seeing with his own eyes the greatness and power of God. ↩︎
- on God's invisibility, see the sermon section Why God is invisible ↩︎
- sometimes God uses miracles to move people to point A, sometimes it's that "unfair advantage" that gets them to the right of point A ↩︎