Exodus 7 "Instead He Turned" Scott Hoezee

Recently I read a book that was written about forty years ago by a Reformed theologian. In commenting on worship and liturgy in the Reformed tradition, this author made a striking comment about church music. He said that if you wanted to go heresy hunting in the contemporary church, you need look no further than the average hymnal. For, he claimed, there is enough shaky theology in even some of the most traditional hymns to keep a heresy-hunter busy for a lifetime! One hopes he was intentionally exaggerating the case. Still, there are times when you have to admit that some of the lyrics we sing do not represent the best of our theology. At the very least some hymns tell only part of the story. When we sing those songs, therefore, we do well to keep the larger picture in mind. Heresy is nine times out of ten a matter of elevating a partial truth as the final word on everything.

Often it seems that some hymns give the impression that to follow God faithfully will mostly, if not always, issue in some kind of a happy existence. "In fellowship sweet, we will sit at his feet . . . what he says we will do, where he sends we will go -- never fear only trust and obey for there's no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey." Or, "Trusting in the Father, hearts are fully blest, finding as he promised, perfect peace and rest."

We often sing quite optimistically that if we trust in the Lord with all our hearts, our paths will be made straight, our hearts will know nothing but clarity and happiness. And it's not that any of this is false, it's just that there is no simple formula to guarantee that this will always be so, especially in the short run. In fact, there are any number of biblical examples of how complete obedience to God resulted not in any immediate sense of peace, joy, repose, or happiness but rather in frustration. Exodus 7 is an excellent case in point.

As you no doubt detected while I read these verses a few minutes ago, there is a phrase repeated several times throughout this chapter. Referring to Moses and Aaron, we are told over and again that they did "just as Yahweh commanded them." This phrase is tucked into this text so often that it appears the author is making double-sure that we readers know that if there are any negative outcomes in this story, we cannot chalk this up to a failure of obedience on the part of Moses or Aaron. God told them what to do, they did it and they did it very, very well. They did just as Yahweh commanded them.

Moses and Aaron trusted and obeyed, for there's no other way, to be . . . well, in this case to be frustrated! It reminds you of the call to ministry that Isaiah received. God called Isaiah into service, told him to be bold in proclaiming the Word of the Lord, but then also assured Isaiah right up front that the more faithfully he prophesied, the more failure he'd experience. "The louder you preach, Isaiah, the more deaf I am going to make the people to your message. If you do your job really well, you will be completely ignored." I don't know about you, but had I been Isaiah, I would have found this commissioning to be a tad on the discouraging side! But lest we think this was just a one-time oddity, recall that Jesus appropriated the call of Isaiah to describe his own ministry. When the disciples one day asked Jesus why he kept talking in all those oddly confusing parables, Jesus said that it was because he wanted to do what Isaiah did: he wanted the people to hear but not understand.

Again, that's not exactly what we expect to find in the Bible! Yet often it is so. Moses and Aaron did just as the Lord God Yahweh commanded them and it fell completely flat. What's more, God told them up front that if they worked hard, stayed faithful, and repeated God's message with complete accuracy, God would reward their loyal service by hardening Pharaoh's heart against them.

Here is a very great mystery. Sometimes when we are as faithful as faithful can be, the result is, inscrutably enough, outward failure. More mysterious yet, sometimes God appears to be himself the cause of the failure. Or is he? Just about every person here tonight is well familiar with the rhythm of this portion of Exodus. For a long while Moses parlays with the Pharaoh. Moses says, "Let my people go or else!" Pharaoh replies, "Try and make me!" So God then performs a mighty deed, and whether or not Pharaoh is initially moved by this latest miracle, in the end the bottom line is always the same: Pharaoh reneges and returns to square one: the Israelites are going nowhere.

But the whys and wherefores of all this in Exodus are at best difficult to discern. If you study the text of this book carefully, you will discover no less than three different locutions or phrases when it comes to the status of Pharaoh's heart. Some verses claim that God himself hardens Pharaoh's heart. Other verses say that Pharaoh hardens his own heart. And still others claim that Pharaoh's heart hardens itself. Sometimes God appears to be the active cause, sometimes Pharaoh appears to be the active cause, and at other times the expression is more passive as though Pharaoh's heart is under no one's direct control.

Scholars will tell you that these three different phrasings represent the various original sources that fed into the Book of Exodus. We know that long before Exodus was written down in the form we now have, there existed multiple oral traditions as well as up to four written versions of this story, each with its own theological interpretations. At some point later in Israel's history, an editor sat down and tried to draw together all of these various written and oral traditions and combined them into one final book. But as he sewed together these various textual bolts of cloth, sometimes the seams showed.

In this case, maybe the lack of consistency in terms of Pharaoh's heart is the result of at least three different schools of thought all contributing to this one book. By way of analogy, suppose that among the people who have known me in my life there are some who always called me "Scott," others who typically refereed to me only as "Pastor Scott," and still others who usually hailed me as "Scotty." Well, suppose one day someone drew together these various sources in order to write up a brief biography of me. If this writer kept these sources in their original forms, you would expect to see me referred to in all three ways. "Scott," "Scotty," and "Pastor Scott" would all refer to the same person, but which one got used would depend on who was being quoted at any given point.

And maybe something similar explains this oddity in Exodus: one of the writers whose work got poured into the Book of Exodus tended always to say that Yahweh himself was the active agent in making Pharaoh stubborn. A second author perhaps blamed Pharaoh and so always wrote that Pharaoh hardened his own heart against the will of God. And perhaps a third writer yet left it more loose and so tended to write that Pharaoh's heart just was hardened, without attributing this to anyone in particular.

As explanations go, that has some good scholarly credibility. But tonight I don't want to leave it merely at that. Instead I want to suggest that the variety of expressions we find in Exodus is itself a reflection of the way life looks sometimes. Why do things happen the way they do? Why is it sometimes that when we sense we have been faithful to God that nevertheless we suffer, we experience failure, we fall flat on our faces?

Why is it, in short, that sometimes faithfulness and a careful following of God's will result in circumstances that we sense are not what God himself desires? Perhaps Exodus is written the way it is as a way to hint that the answer to such questions is that we cannot always know for sure. Unless the person who finally wrote Exodus was a complete dolt, he must have noticed the inconsistency that surrounded something as central as the hardness of Pharaoh's heart. A good editor notices such things. In books that I have written, I have regularly had editors point out to me just such matters. If in chapter one I refer to a certain writer as "Dr. Beker" but then in chapter two call him just "Beker" and then in yet another place refer to him as "Mr. Beker," then this variation gets flagged by an editor so that the entire book can have a consistent style.

But maybe the author of Exodus allowed this inconsistency to stand because this person sensed that such uncertainty is a lot like life itself. When bad things happen despite our efforts to be obedient, we should not be too quick to blame God. Neither should we be too quick to conclude that this must be our fault--maybe we only thought we were being faithful. On the other hand, neither should we be too quick to say that God is completely uninvolved in the bad thing--maybe the Lord himself did allow, or even contributed to, some unhappy outcome for a larger purpose that we cannot grasp completely.

Of course, not a few Christians past and present would want to reject what I just said as too squishy. There are many people who will assert with great dogmatism that faithful service will always result in outward blessing. God wants you to be healthy, happy, wealthy, and joyful and so if you find you are not in such good circumstances, then the fault is yours not God's. Like the friends of Job, so there are still people who may approach us in our misery only to say, "Wow, what sin did you commit that warranted this?" And when you reply, "I didn't do anything wrong," they will rejoin, "Can't be. Think harder. This is your fault so let's track this thing down. God didn't do this, you did."

Then again, there are also cynics in the world, and sometimes in also the church, who are convinced that if bad things happen, it must be completely God's fault. What's more, many people will say that they refuse to believe in any God who would do such things (or who failed to prevent them from happening in the first place as surely any God worth his salt would be able to do). Bad things aren't your fault but God's. So blame him.

In the same vein, but with an opposite reaction, there are also plenty of believers who likewise think that everything which happens is the direct result of God's work. And so when something goes terribly wrong in their lives, they chalk it up to the will of God and try to accept it. "There had to be a reason" people mutter to each other after some sudden death by accident or disease. But if you approach such people to suggest that maybe in a fallen world things happen that even God grieves, then you will see a flash of fear in their eyes. Somehow comfort is found in the idea that it was God himself who killed seven-year-old Sally Sue because otherwise we inhabit a world that is too uncertain for faith to survive. When bad things happen, it was God's doing all right, but it's for the good.

Exodus 7 is one of many places in the Bible that reminds us that in this crazy world shot-through with sin, neat lines of cause and effect, of why and wherefore, cannot always be drawn. Moses and Aaron must surely have been stymied by the ability of Egypt's magicians to reproduce the divine signs God himself had given them to perform. Surely God could have foiled the efforts of those magicians or at the very least God could have given Moses non-repeatable signs in the first place. But God appears to be working something out in ways we cannot fully understand. Moses and Aaron did their faithful, level best, but the bottom line in this story when it comes to the Pharaoh's reaction is that far from believing in God's power, "instead he turned" and stomped back into the palace.

Of course, you could point out to me (and you'd be right) that in this case Moses and Aaron had an advantage over the rest of us. They at least had been told up front not to get too shook up if Pharaoh refused to listen. God told Moses this would happen. Mostly we don't get that kind of sneak preview. Sometimes when we are faithful things go terribly right and at other times when we are equally faithful our actions fall terribly flat.

Some Christian believers seem to lead "charmed lives" in which so much chugs along smoothly for children and grandchildren, career and retirement. At the same time, in the lives of other equally faithful Christians, nothing goes smoothly, everything is a challenge, the whole lot of kids and grandkids turn their back on the church, and retirement plans go bust because of some terminal illness that tethers life to a series of doctors appointments. And we survey such ups and downs, such high points and low points, and we scratch our heads in wonder. How do we explain this? Who is behind this? Many times we don't know. Faith is all about hanging onto the promises of God in the teeth of a reality that seems, at best, indifferent to whether we maintain faith or not. Simple answers by which we can figure out cause and effect are not always available to us.

Maybe some of this is similar to something that has happened in science over the last century. Once upon a time and not so long ago, everyone assumed that the universe works like a clock. If you open up an old-style clock, you can see all kinds of cogs, gears, and springs. If you observe it long enough, you can see that this cog turns that wheel which then triggers yet another cog which then keeps the second-hand ticking. And science long thought that atoms and molecules were like that: everything that happens in the world is because Atom A bumped into Atom B which then shot off to bounce off of Atom C and so on. Everything is simple cause and effect and if you look at it long enough, you can not only understand why things work the way they do but you may even be able to predict how it will run in the future.

But now science has dumped that whole model. Instead of being like a clock, now science thinks the universe is like a spider's web. We are beginning to understand that everything is interconnected in a way no one thought possible such that if something makes the web vibrate in one corner, it may well reverberate throughout the entire web, yielding results in far-flung places that defy explanation. We now know that sometimes the flapping of a butterfly's wings over the Calder in downtown Grand Rapids may well contribute to a thunderstorm that blows up over Berlin a week later. That's not a silly piece of exaggeration, by the way, but the considered belief of this world's brightest scientists!

Life does not always yield up easy answers as to how things work or why. The good news, however is that we believe in a God who, although his ways are higher than our ways, is nevertheless powerful and wise enough to hold the whole world in his hands. Whether or not we can ever track down the answers to the questions that nag us as to how and why things go the way they do, we confess and believe that no matter what happens, the world and our lives in it remain firmly in the hands of God. Nothing will ever separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus. Nothing can snatch us out of that hand! Nothing!

This morning we talked about how the Christian life is a rhythm of dying and rising. We see something of that in tonight's text too. When, despite our most faithful witness and work, when the world turns its back on us in disbelief even as the Pharaoh did with Moses and Aaron, then we die a little on the inside. It kills us when we see the gospel being rejected. But painful though this is for us, we press on in faith, allowing the Spirit of God to keep our faith alive so that we can rise again to still more gospel service and witness despite the fact that we can't always understand everything that happens or why.

Earlier I said that sometimes the words of songs don't fully capture the best of our theology. But many times they surely do. For instance, when it comes to staying faithful despite the difficulties we encounter, we do well to sing to ourselves words like, "Through many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come. 'Tis grace hath brought me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home." Just so, and Amen.