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But Pharaoh hardened his heart this time also and did not let the people go. [Exodus 8:32 HCSB]
But the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he did not listen to them, as the Lord had told Moses. [Exodus 9:12 HCSB]
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I recently taught on the fascinating juxtaposition in Exodus regarding Pharaoh’s hard heart. 10 times the text declares that Pharaoh hardened his own heart while 10 times Exodus reveals that God hardened Pharaoh. Many of us were astounded by this bi-partite truth, wowed that scripture shows complete human responsibility at the same time it displays God’s utter control of all.
We simply cannot reconcile these into a tidy system without violating one or the other. To illustrate the useful and necessary tension in this kind of biblical truth, my old teacher Stan Toussaint draws a house with a pitched roof so steep that it cannot be seen except one side at a time. One side is a tin roof. The other is tile. The human observer can only see one at a time and is convinced that the surface he perceives is the whole. As Dr. Toussaint said to me, “Only God who is above it understands how the true roof is both at the same time.”
Interestingly, much of my mail after the lesson came from dear Christians wrestling with God’s sovereignty. To help those who struggle seeing this “tile” side of God’s roof, here are a couple of logical distillations of scripture from John Piper’s book Doctrine Matters.
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