Do We Have Hard Hearts?

Exo 7:3  But I will harden Pharaoh's heart, and though I multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt,

Exo 8:15  But when Pharaoh saw that there was a respite, he hardened his heart and would not listen to them, as the LORD had said.

Exo 7:14  Then the LORD said to Moses, "Pharaoh's heart is hardened; he refuses to let the people go.

The hardening of our sinful hearts has not always been easy for some to understand and accept.  Without doubt some of this involves the unseen work of God in which we are not privy to but enough is said to be able to draw some important conclusions.  Part of the difficulty is seen in the three verses quoted above.  All through the Exodus account we read sometimes that the Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart, Pharaoh hardened his own heart and sometimes, as in the third verse, it merely states that his heart was hardened in some way. 

The purpose of this article is to make a point about what it means to have a hardened heart but let me briefly try to explain how I believe the above verses all fit together; how can God harden a heart and at the same time the sinner is said to harden his heart.

Since all men and women are born depraved, by default all of our hearts are hardened in our sin.  We call this the doctrine of Totally Depravity.  Notice Paul’s description of all humanity in Rom. 3:

Rom 3:10  as it is written: "None is righteous, no, not one;

Rom 3:11  no one understands; no one seeks for God.

Rom 3:12  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one."

Rom 3:13  "Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive." "The venom of asps is under their lips."

Rom 3:14  "Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness."

Rom 3:15  "Their feet are swift to shed blood;

Rom 3:16  in their paths are ruin and misery,

Rom 3:17  and the way of peace they have not known."

Rom 3:18  "There is no fear of God before their eyes."…

Rom 3:23  for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Being totally depraved speaks to our inability to do any good work before God and to the animosity that exists between us and God, Rom 8:7  For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. Rom 8:8  Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.  But totally depravity doesn’t mean that we are as sinful as we could be.  The Spirit of God works in the world to restrain man’s sin in order that God’s purposes will be accomplished. 

And so man by nature has a hard heart and seeks to continue in his hardness and when confronted with the gospel further hardens his heart by refusing to submit to the righteousness of God.  So what does it mean when God hardens a heart that is already hard?  I think it can best be understood as he stops restraining the sinner from doing what he wants to do by nature but instead allows him to digress even further in his rebellion.  I have illustrated it by holding a book up in the air.  If I let go it will drop because that is all it can do because of the law of gravity.  So the Holy Spirit holds back all men from being as evil as they could but when it suits his purposes he “lets go” and allows them do what they want to do and this can be described as hardening their heart.  He no longer restrains them from their desire to sin.

Pharaoh by default had no desire to let Israel go because he wanted them to worship him. The Lord let him keep Israel until such time as the Lord wanted Israel to go and then he refrained Pharaoh from doing what he wanted to do.  Israel’s worship wasn’t as important as the misery of the death of his son.  But in the whole scenario Pharaoh was only thinking of Pharaoh.  So when God hardens a heart he merely lets it fall further into its hardness.

But the word for hard in the OT means heavy which is interesting for a couple of reasons. It is interesting that these Egyptians believe that the heart was the essence of man and the key to eternal life.  They believed that it would be weighed on the scales of justice.  If it was heavier than the feather of justice, he was damned.  Misdeeds added weight to it.  So even in the Egyptian theology a hard heart was an evil heart but they had no idea how bad things really were.  

It is also interesting that this word for hard or heavy has the same basic meaning as glory.  We know that the word glory has the idea of the weightiness or importance you put on something.  So when we glorify God we are acknowledging his importance or worthiness.  So if I can connect all of this I would say that a hard heart is a heart that has put the worthiness or glory on something other than God.  Sin is at its heart man seeing himself as more important than God.  He has transferred the weightiness or worthiness to himself and robbed God of what he is due which is for us to acknowledge that the Lord alone is worthy to be praised.  

Perhaps this will help us examine our own hearts to see if we have allowed sin to harden our hearts so that we have been dazzled in some way by this world so that the glory of God has been darkened in our minds and we therefore serve the flesh with what is due to our God and Savior because we have put the heaviness or importance on temporal things rather than the eternal.  Our lives betray our hearts that have put too much glory on this world and the awesomeness of God has been forgotten.