The physicists used to speak of the hypothetical question: what happens when an irresistible force meets an immoveable object? What happens when a force defined as beyond the capacity of anything to resist it comes into collision with an object so firmly fixed, so deeply rooted, that it can, by definition, be said to be immoveable? Well, I don't suppose physics has an answer to that question, since it's really a word game, a logic game; but I'll tell you this much, when the irresistible force meets the immoveable object, I don't want to be there to clean up the mess afterwards!
Nonetheless I've seen some folks who seem to be on both ends of that equation, haven't you? I’ve seen some irresistible force kinds of people, who are going to do what they are going to do, and that's it. And I've seen – well, to tell the truth, I've known – well, to tell the real truth, I can sometimes be the other kind of folks, whose favorite gospel chorus goes, "I shall, I shall, I shall not be moved." I know this tendency, because I've seen it in me; I am going to hang in there, I am going to stay put, and woe be he who tries to change my mind.
Irresistible force, immoveable object, bang. And in many ways, that's positive, that's good. People who know where they are going are certainly better than those who haven't the foggiest notion what to do with their lives. And people who know what they believe and where they stand are certainly more to be admired than those who scarcely know how to ask the questions, much less state the answers. Admirable, solid qualities, those.
But would you agree with me this morning that the very same traits of personality that give substance to these folks also can give them tough times? Would you agree with me that the very same steely character that creates irresistible forces, that sets down immoveable objects – that very same steely character can also be at the base of some deep spiritual issues?
Let me give you a metaphor for what I'm about to say. This week I went to a conference in New York, and I went by my favorite means of transportation – at least it's my favorite for getting to New York. I took the train. The train: it's comfortable, it's relatively cheap, it arrives in the city instead of somewhere out at the edge of a swamp, and, best of all, it's fast. Let me tell you it is fast, roaring through the Maryland countryside, rocking over bridges and pushing through New Jersey so quickly you don't have to look at it if you don't want to. Trains are fast, effective forms of transportation. And do you know why? Why is the train superior to the automobile for speed? Well, for one thing, it runs on rails: rigid, steel rails that are predetermined set in place. Somebody has to set the switches at the right place, and off we go. No traffic jams, no red lights, no losing track of the highway; trains run like the irresistible force because they have clear and precise guidelines, and off they go.
But now what did I say a minute ago? I said that exactly the same traits of personality, exactly the same marks of character that give strength and tenacity to some people also bring them spiritual disaster and personal tragedy, moral tragedy. So what if somebody does make a mistake on the railroad and what if they switch another train on those same tracks, maybe headed in the opposite direction? Well, you know the sad answer to that; when these two powerful giants are on a collision course, and when neither of them can stop in time -- since the rails are fixed, they can't get out of one another's way. No swerving, no dodging, no quick turnoff: the result is a terrible head-on collision and death and injury and terror. On a collision course, set in their patterns, and no apparent escape.
Now let's get out of the Amtrak northeast corridor and settle down to what we're really going to think about this morning. We're going to think together about what it means to be on a collision course with God. We're going to reflect for a few moments on what it might be like, what it is like, to be running smack up against the will of God -- an immoveable object, most of us would think – but you find yourself an irresistible force. You find yourself rolling down those rigid rails, and you just cannot stop yourself. Right up against the will of God, and neither you nor the Lord is going to give an inch. What then? What happens?
About 1300 years before Christ a new king arose in Egypt, a new Pharaoh, as he was called. This Pharaoh, Rameses II, had great plans. He had a mighty vision of what his empire could become. Never fully secure against the possibility of rebellion from within, and certainly not all that well defended against conquest from without, Rameses determined that he would take the Kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt which had come into his hands, and he would create a glory the likes of which the world had not seen. There would be fortresses and imperial cities and temples and palaces; there would be great burial tombs and religious statuary of truly enormous proportions and of great beauty, and the world would know and fear the name of Rameses.
And so this task he set himself, driven by ambition, yes, but driven and impelled also by faith. Rameses was a religious man by the standards of his day; he knew and respected the gods of his ancestors, and he knew that it was his destiny indeed to join them. And so he built with a sense of purpose and of rightness and of authority. Rameses was building for the ages.
Now of course in those days there was only one way to build this sort of city, this kind of monument. It had to be done with slave labor. No free man would ever undertake tasks of such impossible proportions, nor could the kingdom have paid them to do it. Use slaves, extract labor from the backs of the foreigners in our midst; and for that the Hebrews were readymade. Let the children of Israel work; let these sons of Abraham and of Isaac bend their backs under the relentless broiling sun. Rameses knew nothing of Joseph, cared nothing for the memory of Joseph; all he saw were a foreign people with customs and manners all their own. Enslave them. Let them pile brick on brick and so shape the destiny of Rameses' vision.
It went well enough, this slave camp, until into their midst walked the one they called Moses, raised in the royal household, fed at the palace tables, but now asserting himself as the leader of a slave revolt. Moses, demanding that the Hebrews be freed, and crying at the top of his voice that God, their God, the God was name Yahweh means "He who causes to be" – that their God willed it, demanded it. What was Rameses to do? Without slaves the dream of a great name lies dormant in the desert sands. But to go against God? To fight the will of this terrifying desert spirit? What to do? Which way to go?
Well, for whatever reasons, the Pharaoh got himself at this point on to a collision course with God. Somehow we could not let go of his plans, his dreams, his hopes; but neither could he ignore the will of God. He was on a collision course, he was riding the rails, set up for a head-on crash; he was immoveable object standing astride the path of that irresistible divine force that Moses seemed able to unleash, and the result was tragedy and triumph both. Tragedy for the king and his soldiers; triumph for Moses and Israel.
What does it mean for us and how can we learn from it? What happens when you are on a collision course with God?
Well, the Scripture uses some fascinating language to talk about Pharaoh's state of mind and soul. It says that his heart was hardened – his heart was hardened. In fact, during the next several chapters some 19 times it says that Pharaoh's heart was hardened. If the statistics mean anything to you: 11 times the text reports that the Lord hardened Pharaoh's heart, 8 times that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Today we will not argue the case about how it got hardened. My point will be the same in either case, that Pharaoh, in the face of the demise of his great dreams, watching his hopes for glory crumble around him, got a bad, bad case, if you'll pardon my pun drawn from modern medical language -- Pharaoh got a case of hardening of the hearteries!
Pharaoh got hardening of the hearteries; over and over again the text tells us that the king almost yielded to God's will, almost let the slaves go free, but time and again his heart was hardened, and he enslaved them again. Why? What's going on?
This may be the first sermon you've ever heard with a degree of sympathy in it for old Pharaoh. He doesn't come off too well the way we usually tell the story. He is roundly put down in all the spirituals we sing. But, you know, I recognize old Pharaoh, don't you? I recognize myself in Pharaoh, because I too have grand plans that I'd rather not give up. I too have fond desires that run counter to the will of God, and I find it hard to choke those down and set them aside in order to do what God wants done.
Who knows what Pharaoh faced in addition to his own ambition? Maybe there were political pressures, maybe there were those influential folks sitting at his ear saying, "Oh come on, don't be a fanatic, God doesn’t mean it, God doesn't care that much. Yeah, we got frogs in the river and frogs in the bed and even frogs on Pharaoh's throne, but they're all gone now, aren’t they? [ribit] Well, almost all of them. And sure we had lice and locusts and dead cattle and itchy boils, but they're all gone. Come on, Pharaoh, what can it hurt?" I say, I have at least a little sympathy for Rameses, because I sense a man who is insecure. I sense a man who vacillates, who doesn't know his own heart. And so he allows it to harden, harden, harden, over and over again. He wants to please the crowd, but he also has to do God's will. He wants the world's way, but he has to come to grips with God's way. I hear him saying as Paul would say thirteen hundred years later, "Wretched man that I am, who will deliver me?!"
That’s what hardening of the hearteries will do to you; back and forth you go, seeing what you could do with God, for God, out there, and running off to do it, only to be pulled back, hardened and calloused by the call of ambition, caught up in the power of peer pressure. On a collision course with God, digging the hole a little deeper each time, each time more and more torn between following the instincts of the heart and relenting to the twisted logic of the hardened heart.
You see, the hardened heart can never quite bring itself to do the radical thing. The hardened heart, Pharaoh’s kind of heart, can never quite say an unreserved yes to God. There is always something held back, something less than a radical commitment.
What a chance the King had to do something radical! He might have freed a nation and become known as Egypt's merciful Pharaoh. But hardening of the hearteries froze him up every time he thought of doing that, and he turned around and did the conventional thing, the usual thing, the ordinary thing. That's hardening of the hearteries, to settle for the merely ordinary.
Thirteen centuries later a young man would stand in front of the teacher of Galilee and would say, "Good master, what must I do to inherit eternal life?" And the answer would come shooting back to him quick as lightning, "Go, sell all you have, and give to the poor." And the Gospel says that the young man want away sorrowing, with hardened heart, and that the Lord Jesus loved him and yearned for him, but could do nothing more for him. Hardening of the hearteries, you see, after a time is an irreversible heart disease.
Pharaoh might have done the radical thing, the compassionate thing, but in the end he would not, and the price he paid was tragedy for him and his nation. The sea drowned more than horses and riders; it drowned the possibility of a good king's becoming a great king.
Today, unless my instincts betray me, we moderns have an advanced case of hardening of the hearteries.
We get stubborn and rigid about our patterns of life; we call that having solid principles. But the Lord says we have hardened our hearts.
We become proud, too proud to humble ourselves and weep before Christ and repent and beg his forgiveness. Our pride we have called being consistent, being together; but the Lord says, in the book of Hebrews, "Today, harden not your hearts."
We have, even Christians among us, become arrogant and closed; we have said, "I know it all, there’s nothing more for me to learn. I defy you to teach me anything new." That we have styled intelligence and being well-trained, that we have seen as having a solid foundation. But do you hear the Lord saying "Today, if you would be my child, do not as they did in the wilderness, harden not your heart?"
Today you and I hear the call of the Lord to give of ourselves in compassion and in mercy, today you and I unmistakably know the Lord is leading us to give time and energy to his church; we can make no mistake about it, he is asking us to give of our money in sacrificial ways so that wellsprings of compassion can be loosed, so that his people can be liberated from their sin. And we are Pharaoh, sitting on the thrones of our own lives, grasping our pocketbooks and our pleasures, and saying, "Well, I had something else in mind." Hear again the admonition of the Scripture, "Harden not your hearts."
And most of all, deepest of all, someone is sitting out here this morning hearing the call of Christ, the claim of Christ, "Come be my follower. Come go with me through these deep waters and let me lift you up out of this miry clay." Someone is listening to the will of God saying to you, "You must, you must march with the people of Israel or else you will drown with the army of Pharaoh." Will you now harden your heart against him? How long, how long, how long will you be the immoveable object opposed to his irresistible grace? Whatever you do, do not die from a terminal case of hardening of the hearteries.
