Note: This article is an AI-generated adaptation of a spoken transcript and may not fully capture the nuances of the original presentation.
What happens when we continually ignore God’s warnings? What happens when His patience reaches a limit? Well, that’s what our text today is all about, so let’s go and have a look.
Our text is from Exodus chapter 9 verses 8 through to 12. “And the Lord said to Moses and Aaron, ‘Take handfuls of soot from the kiln, and let Moses throw them in the air in the sight of Pharaoh. It shall become a fine dust over all the land of Egypt, and become boils breaking out in sores on man and beast throughout the land of Egypt.’ So they took soot from the kiln and stood before Pharaoh. And Moses threw it in the air, and it became boils breaking out in sores on man and beast. And the magicians could not stand before Moses because of the boils. And the boils came upon the magicians and upon all the Egyptians. But the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh, and he did not listen to them, as the Lord had spoken to Moses.”
Now this plague marks a turning point. For the first time, the magicians—these are Egypt’s spiritual elites, if you will—they’re not only powerless, but they’re also personally afflicted by this plague. So the soot from the kiln may well have come from the very furnaces where Israel’s bricks were baked. And so that shows us that God is using these instruments by which the Egyptians were oppressing the Israelites to become the judgment upon those who were oppressing him.
The ash is like this symbol of divine justice that shows that God has been aware of and has seen these acts of cruelty that have been done against His people Israel. And so He’s providing His answer in His own time. Now in this story or in this passage we see Pharaoh’s magicians. They were these people who at one point they were so confident in their power, in their magic if you like, and they’re now suffering visibly.
Now all of a sudden they’re unable to stand before Moses. And it just shows us how their human pride has collapsed in the presence of God’s holiness. God had judged what they had done and has made them essentially incapable. Now even still, Pharaoh’s heart remains hardened. This time, Pharaoh’s heart, notice, is being hardened explicitly by God. And so he’s been hardening his own heart and now God continues to allow him to go down that path by reinforcing that hardness of heart. It’s not some arbitrary act by God, it’s part of God’s justice. Pharaoh has persistently rejected God and now God gives him over to the consequences of his own rebellion.
Now this is important for us to recognize because on the one hand God’s patience with us is immense, it’s ongoing, you know, he’s been patient with his people for years, but his patience does reach an end at some point in time. So continuing to persist in our rebellion will eventually lead to a hardened heart that can no longer respond to his grace. Obviously through his Holy Spirit, he can overrule that, and we don’t believe that you can lose your salvation. But our consciences can be seared, as we said also yesterday as well.
So we shouldn’t mistake God’s patience with us for His permission for us to keep sinning. Just because we’re not feeling the judgment today doesn’t mean that He’s not still expecting us to repent and to turn to Him. Secondly, we need to remember that God sees all kinds of injustices that happen, whether we are aware of Him seeing those things or not. As I said, the very same ashes that once represented Israel’s suffering here ultimately becomes God’s tool of divine justice. Nothing escapes his notice and so we should ask God to keep our heart soft, you know, the hardness of heart is not just a Pharaoh problem. It’s a human one. We all suffer from this and so daily, I think this encourages us to come responsibly to God and to pray for a softened heart.
So let’s do that now.
Righteous Father, You are holy and just in all your ways. Thank you for your mercy. Thank you that you wait patiently for us. But we want to pray that you will keep our hearts tender to your word and to your spirit. Help us to never grow comfortable in our sin. Help us to always look to Jesus who bore our judgment so that we may stand blameless before you. And in His name we pray, amen.