<\/p>\n
My morning reading turned up an important question about the loving heavenly Father concept (quoting from Exodus 10:16-20, NLT).<\/p>\n
Pharaoh quickly sent for Moses and Aaron. \u201cI confess my sin against the LORD your God and against you,\u201d he said to them. \u201cForgive my sin only this once, and plead with the LORD your God to take away this terrible plague.\u201d<\/p>\n
So Moses left Pharaoh and pleaded with the LORD. The LORD responded by sending a strong west wind that blew the locusts out into the Red Sea. Not a single locust remained in all the land of Egypt. Note\u00a0But the LORD made Pharaoh stubborn once again, and he did not let the people go.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Did God really make it impossible for Pharaoh to change his mind and let the people go? Wouldn’t that be a rather heartless and cruel thing to do–punishing someone (an entire nation, really) for not doing something that you wouldn’t let them do anyway?<\/p>\n
This is a narrative that has turned folks away from Faith. I checked half a dozen Bible and Torah commentaries, but they pretty well just skip around the subject. It’s a tough question, one that begs some thought.<\/p>\n
The Apologetics Press<\/em>, an online resource, tackles the problem by proposing solutions centered on the language–idioms and figures of speech. Here is an excerpt from that site<\/a>:<\/p>\n
In the case of Pharaoh, \u201cGod hardened Pharaoh\u2019s heart\u201d in the sense that God provided the circumstances and the occasion for Pharaoh to be forced to make a decision. God sent Moses to place His demands before Pharaoh. Moses merely announced God\u2019s instructions. God even accompanied His Word with miracles\u2014to confirm the divine origin of the message (cf. Mark 16:20). Pharaoh made up his own mind to resist God\u2019s demands. Of his own accord, he stubbornly refused to comply.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
My own thoughts about the issue took me right back to the Roadturn <\/em>concept, and back to the beginning of my own set of unusual circumstances (some call them “miracles”), in June of 2007.<\/p>\n
It was a pretty tough deal. Like Pharaoh, I was getting hammered by plagues: I had lost (quit) a steady, well-paying job, I was fighting a diagnosis of osteo-arthritis and possible bone cancer, we were on the edge of losing the property that was our primary financial asset, and my relationship with my wife was strained to the edge. One son had broken his arm, we had come way too close to losing our youngest boy from an allergic reaction to cashews, and I was scrambling to replace lost income at a time when layoffs, not hiring, had become the norm.<\/p>\n
Near despair, I came across a quote from Paul Potts, who had just won the Britain’s Got Talent<\/em> contest. Not many words, but just what I needed to hear at the time…<\/p>\n
Take risks–amazing things may come from it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I had taken risks, plenty of them, and the situation I then found myself sitting in the middle of had come from the decisions I had made. Not from your decisions, not from my wife’s decisions… but from my own. It occurred to me that I was focusing on the fear of what could happen and pointing to the bad things (plagues) in my life, but I was closing off my faith and refusing to believe in the amazing possibilities which could be just ahead.<\/p>\n