NOTES for Exo 11:1-10
When reading the chapters of Exodus devoted to the story of the Egyptian plagues, a question involuntarily arises: what, after all, was God's original intention regarding everything that was happening? God says to Moses that Pharaoh did not listen so that "wonders might be multiplied" in Egypt. In many other cases the sacred writer directly indicates that it was God who hardened Pharaoh's heart, in the sense that He made it hard, unyielding, and inflexible. With such a heart, a person becomes stubborn, as Pharaoh proved to be in the story with Moses. Forced requests and appeals to the prophet do not count: sometimes external circumstances can break even a very stubborn person, but that still does not mean he has been freed from his stubbornness.
In other cases, however, in the same chapters it is said that Pharaoh himself hardens his heart. How, then, do things actually stand? The answer to this question is not one-sided; here we are faced with an antinomy that always appears where the matter concerns the meeting of God's will with human freedom. Everyone is free to decide for himself how hard his heart will be, because it is the person who determines the degree of his own stubbornness. God, of course, can always change the situation, for all human hearts are accessible and open to Him.
Whether He changes it or not is a question no one but God can answer. Moreover, even if God explained to us why in a particular case He intervenes or does not intervene, why He melts the hearts of some and does not touch others, we still would not understand anything. To understand such things, one would have to know as much about a particular human heart as God knows about it. None of us human beings can have such knowledge by definition. One thing is clear: if God does not intervene, if He leaves the situation to a person's will, then He has weighty reasons for doing so.
This, however, in no way prevents Him from carrying out His plan without the participation of the one who does not want to participate in carrying it out. In such a case the unwilling person ceases to be a subject of God's providence and becomes its object, and then God's wonders will be manifested, so to speak, at his expense. The one who does not want to live as he should, as God leads, involuntarily and visibly demonstrates to the world how one should not live. The story of Pharaoh and the Exodus became just such a demonstration, by Pharaoh's own will, and not by God's.