“Then the magicians said unto Pharaoh, This is the finger of God: and Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he hearkened not unto them; as the Lord had said.”
But Pharaoh's heart was hard and he would not listen, just as the Lord had predicted. The magicians' own confession — this is the finger of God — does not penetrate Pharaoh's hardness. He has now had testimony from Moses and Aaron, evidence from three plagues, and the witness of his own religious specialists, and still he will not listen. Romans 1:18–20 describes those who suppress the truth in unrighteousness, though what may be known about God is plain to them. Pharaoh is the extreme case of this suppression: the evidence mounts, the witnesses multiply, and the hardness persists. The prediction that he would not listen, repeated at every stage, is not predestination to damnation but the honest forecast of what a will consistently bent toward self-preservation will produce when confronted with inconvenient truth. God knows Pharaoh because He knows all hearts (Psalm 44:21).
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