A Healthy Heart Series

So let’s start with: What Makes a Heart Unhealthy? Most of us have heard of Hardening of the Arteries but there is also a hardening of the heart and it happens as a result of the walls of the heart thickening. Eventually as the cardiac wall becomes thicker the heart muscles in effect become hard and unable to pump blood the way they are supposed to.

In the scriptures we read of people having a hard heart and that means that they are not responsive to God and his will. You might recall way back in the book of Exodus when Moses went to Pharaoh and demanded that the Israelites be set free from the slavery of Egypt that we are told that Pharaoh’s heart was hardened and he refused. Exodus 7:13 Pharaoh’s heart, however, remained hard. He still refused to listen, just as the LORD had predicted. Actually that is one of the stories that has confused me and I’m sure others have been confused as well because when the story begins God tells Moses Exodus 4:21 And the LORD told Moses, “When you arrive back in Egypt, go to Pharaoh and perform all the miracles I have empowered you to do. But I will harden his heart so he will refuse to let the people go.”

And when I first read that, way back when I thought: “That’s not fair, God hardened his heart.” But then I went back further in the story and discovered God didn’t have to do much hardening. Listen to the beginning of the story Exodus 1:8-11 Eventually, a new king came to power in Egypt who knew nothing about Joseph or what he had done. He said to his people, “Look, the people of Israel now outnumber us and are stronger than we are. We must make a plan to keep them from growing even more. If we don’t, and if war breaks out, they will join our enemies and fight against us. Then they will escape from the country.” So the Egyptians made the Israelites their slaves. They appointed brutal slave drivers over them, hoping to wear them down with crushing labour. They forced them to build the cities of Pithom and Rameses as supply centers for the king.

And the story continues in Exodus 1:13-16 So the Egyptians worked the people of Israel without mercy. They made their lives bitter, forcing them to mix mortar and make bricks and do all the work in the fields. They were ruthless in all their demands. Then Pharaoh, the king of Egypt, gave this order to the Hebrew midwives: “When you help the Hebrew women as they give birth, watch as they deliver. If the baby is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.”

Not a nice guy. Augustine wrote “God does not harden men by infusing malice into them, but by not imparting mercy to them.” In other words Pharaoh had done so much wrong for so long and had rejected God for so long that the grace that would have soften his heart was not offered to him, and that is scary. But Pharaoh wasn’t the only one who is referenced as having a hard heart in the Bible.

When we think of Jesus and attributes used to describe him we think: gentle, caring, forgiving and loving. But very seldom do we think of the term angry, if we do it’s when he cleared out the temple of the money changers. But there is another time as well and that is in Mark 3:5 He (Jesus) looked around at them angrily and was deeply saddened by their hard hearts. And that wasn’t the only case, throughout the gospels Jesus criticized people for having hard hearts.