Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.

Yesterday we saw the first seven plagues God brought on the Egyptians

because Pharaoh wouldn't listen to Moses and set the Israelite slaves free.

Today we dropped in on the rest of the plagues. The first few sentences we read today said,

I have hardened his heart in the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of

mine among them, that you may know that I am the Lord.

This whole paragraph was a weighty paragraph.

It almost sounds like part of God's plan was to harden Pharaoh's art against his plan.

And the reason was that this process would help Israel really know and trust him as God.

He uses the wicked as a tool to advance his plan and bless the children he's adopted into

his family.

We can't cut sentences like this out of the Bible. We have to

wrestle with them and see what they mean and how they fit into the context of

everything else in scripture. I'm not going to tie it up with a pretty bow and

make it look simple. It's hard, it's

mysterious, and it's okay to not have answers about it yet, or maybe ever.

In yesterday's reading, we encountered several places where God hardened Pharaoh's heart.

A few where it just says his heart was hardened and a few that attribute the

hardening to Pharaoh himself. But interestingly, Pharaoh's hardening of his own heart is almost always followed with the statement, as the Lord had said.

It can feel threatening to recognize that God is bigger than your own heart, that he can shape it for his own purposes.

If that's you and you're feeling that way right now, I would encourage you to not let fear

drive that thought.

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