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 Israelites 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 and 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. The enemy of

your soul wants you to view God's power through a lens that pushes you away from him instead of drawing you in.

So instead, try to stop and acknowledge how comforting it is that we serve a God who is that powerful.

For instance, think about the people that you know and love who are the furthest from God.

People you've prayed for and cried for, people who have told you

that they never want to hear you say another word about God again. God can soften their hearts and

...