Today’s Reading: Exodus 10, 11 & 12

The Bible tells us that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart as he was experiencing all of these horrific plagues. But my question is this: Where is Pharaoh’s head? This guy’s so stuck on himself that he no longer cares if he loses everything – he just wants to win some kind of philosophical argument with Moses and Aaron.

When I was in High School, I discovered that I had a knack for seeing both sides of just about any argument. Later, in a college debate course, I learned to effectively articulate even a position that I completely disagreed with. In essence, we played an age-old debate game. The object was to convince your peers that your point of view was correct – regardless of whether you actually believed it. I was a champ. I could become red hot about almost any subject. I could spout facts and figures and make convincing arguments for even the most ridiculous of positions. I was good at winning. But it was winning for the sake of winning – arguing for the sake of arguing. It was a game and it didn’t really matter who was right. All that mattered was who won.

This is the state the we see Pharaoh in here. Remember, God is still hardening his heart, even as the consequences get worse and worse. But by now, Pharaoh is too far into the game to give in. He’s got too much invested. In fact, even without the God-initiated heart-hardening, Pharaoh would have probably still refused Moses’ requests. He would have refused, not because he didn’t believe that the God of Israel was real and powerful or didn’t believe that they did, in fact, want to go worship that God, but because he wanted to win.

Some of us would do good to heed the lesson that Pharaoh learned the hard way through this experience: There are some battles you are not going to win, some foes too strong to overpower and some arguments too solid to defeat. We know this on some level. Most of us have been in situations where we knew or suspected that the position we were taking was not the “correct” one, but found our selves too deep into the argument to bow out gracefully. And so, we fought on – all the while taking blow after punishing blow – clinging to the hope that maybe the other person would just give up and we could win.

Well, it didn’t work for Pharaoh and it probably won’t work for you or me. Sometimes, we’re just on the wrong side of “right.”