Hard Heart

Exodus 7 - 8

How hard our hearts are!  How often do we not listen to the Lord! How often it is that we do not see nor acknowledge the hand of God working in our lives! 

God through Moses with the help of Aaron is releasing the Israelites from bondage.  But, it is being done the hard way... by the hardening of Pharaoh's heart.  The staff turned to a snake that eats the magicians snakes, all of the water in Egypt turned to blood so that all the water in Egypt stank and was unfit for consumption, frogs all over the land and when the Lord destroyed them they stank up the land, gnats - can you even imagine living with so many gnats all over every human and every animal.  Yet, Pharoah's heart is hardened and he will not let the people go.  The fourth plague - the flies that ruined the land - finally begins to soften Pharaoh's heart and he agrees that they might go three days journey into the wilderness to make a sacrifice to God and he asks Moses to pray for him.  But, again Pharaoh's heart is hardened and he would not let the people go.

How hard can a heart be that the water and land can be ruined: that humankind would be thrown into living in the stench of polluted waters and land; that mankind would be made to suffer; and, yet we cannot find it within our hearts to relent (or repent) of the path of self-servitude that we've chosen to follow.

Let my people go... remove them from the shackles of your bondange, so that they may be free to worship me. 

Thus says the Lord.