Hardening Hearts
The latest study is on Isaiah 6:9-10, which commands Isaiah to harden people to the Word of God. How does hardening happen? This is the only text I know that gives a prophet the mission of hardening people. Usually people are said to harden themselves, or God is said to harden them. (A fourth option, satanic blinding, is mentioned once, in 2 Cor 4:4). Since the prophet is the agent of God, prophetic hardening may illustrate what Scripture means elsewhere when it says that God hardens people. We explore this idea by discussing the nature of Isaiah’s ministry and comparing it with the most detailed account of hardening in the Bible, the experience of Pharaoh in Exodus chapters 4-14. The conclusion is that God hardens people by confronting them with clear, unmistakeably authoritative revelations of himself that their existing sin will not allow them to accept. In Exodus, these revelations are the clear demand to let Israel go and the evidence provided by the plagues (often relieved at Pharaoh’s express demand). In Isaiah, they are his prophecies, which are among the clearest and most direct in the OT, and which include events fulfilled during the course of his ministry.
Methodologically, this study draws on thematic similarities as well as on verbal repetitions. To collect the passages that form the basis for the study, I not only searched on expressions such as “hard heart” (using the BibleWorks query “.hard* heart*”, with the asterisks to be sure that I got “harden” and “hearts” as well as “hard heart”), but also relied heavily on the Treasury of Scripture Knowledge.
