NOTES for Exo 11:1-10

When reading those chapters of Exodus devoted to the account of the plagues of Egypt, one cannot help asking: what, after all, was God's original intention regarding everything that was happening? God says to Moses: 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 unbending. 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 that he has been freed from his stubbornness.

In other cases, however, in the same chapters it is said that Pharaoh himself hardens his heart. So how do things really stand? The answer to this question is not simple; here we face an antinomy that always appears wherever the meeting of God's will and human freedom is involved. Everyone is free to decide for himself how hard his heart will be, since it is the person who determines the degree of his own stubbornness. God, of course, can always change the situation, for every human heart is accessible and open to Him.

Whether to change 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 would still understand nothing. To understand such things, one would have to know about a particular human heart as much as God knows about it. Such knowledge cannot be available to any of us human beings by definition. One thing is clear: if God does not intervene, if He leaves the situation to the human will, then He has weighty reasons for doing so.

This, however, does not prevent Him from carrying out His plan without the participation of the one who does not want to take part in carrying it out. In that case the unwilling person ceases to be a subject of God's providence and becomes its object, and then God's wonders will be shown, so to speak, at his expense. The one who does not want to live as one 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, but by Pharaoh's own will, not God's.