Why God Provokes the Hardened

SPEAKER 01 : 0:05

So we need to linger a little bit longer in regard to this issue of the hardened heart. You remember we come to Romans chapter 9, and Paul says here, and he seems to throw a curveball with this, therefore he has mercy on whom he wills, and whom he wills he hardens. We talked about this yesterday. We need to talk about it more. Those who believe that God saves some and rejects others, those who believe that God predestines or elects some to be saved and elects the rest to go to hell, find no difficulty in this verse at all. Oh, well, yeah, God hardens people. Can you really seriously take God’s character that way? The God of love, God who is love, that is just unthinkable. Not only is it unthinkable, it’s unbiblical, because we are told that all the families of the nations of the earth will come and worship before God. That is Psalm 22. We are also told that God will reconcile everything in heaven and on earth. and everything under the earth and in the sea to him. That’s Colossians 1 verse 20. We are told that all the universe will worship him. That’s Revelation 5 verse 13. We are told that every knee shall bow and every tongue shall acknowledge that God is their righteousness and strength. That’s Isaiah 45. So what about hardening? Well, you know, years ago, decades ago, when I didn’t understand and believe that God would save all humanity, I was completely heartless towards the Pharisees and the Sadducees, these people who ridiculed everything Jesus declared and who followed him around to trap him and trip him up verbally. I just didn’t take them seriously. I thought they were lost and that was it, and The Gospels would be a lot better without them. Well, that was my hard heart. I was one of the Pharisees, of course, by that kind of attitude. And you may consider yourself also, once you realize it, that you may be a Pharisee in dismissing the Pharisees. Do you not think, do you not recognize that Jesus also loved the Pharisees? God loved the world. so loved the world. That is, loved the world. The word so there is to be translated in a very peculiar way. God loved the world in a very particular way. God so, in this particular fashion, loved the world by giving his Son to die for the sins of humanity. So what was the point of hardening? Why does God harden? Well, remember, it’s not just a few that are hardened. The whole world is. Remember verse, chapter 1 of Romans, where it says that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven and God’s wrath is motivated by love. Remember, God’s wrath, which is motivated by love, is revealed from heaven and against all the godliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. That word suppress, in the Greek it is hold, hold the truth, and the implication is hold down the truth. Like a ball, a football, a soccer ball in a bowl of water, it floats on the top, doesn’t it? And yet, if we try to push it down… and let go of it, it will float back up to the top. Truth wants to float to the top. We were created in truth. And yet there’s something that keeps holding down the truth, and that is our unwillingness to know God. We are suppressing Him because we’ve become afraid of Him, because we are guilty and ashamed and afraid. And that suppression has continued on throughout the ages so that it seems like the norm today psychologically. So everybody’s in a state of suppression. Well, what does God do about it? Well, he could dismiss us and just destroy the planet and forget everything and start all over again. But no, he doesn’t. In his love and his compassion for the world, he will tussle with the human race. He will wrestle with it. Remember Jacob’s wrestle? Jacob thought he could manage his brother’s opposition quite well, Esau. But he realized after a while, no, he was afraid, and he had to go before God. But actually, God went before him. It was God who lunged out of the hedge, as it were, and wrestled with Jacob. And so what we find is that God is plunging humanity in various ways into a wrestle with him because we have suppressed him and don’t want to engage with him. We don’t want to involve ourselves with him. But God makes us do it by our troubles and our trials and our tribulations. Now, we talked about Pharaoh. that Pharaoh suppressed God, Pharaoh was a pagan, Pharaoh didn’t know God, didn’t worship God, had no interest in him, and yet God confronted him, because God, through Moses, told Pharaoh to let the people of Israel go, and Pharaoh refused. And God said, if you don’t, I will send a plague among you. Pharaoh basically said, I don’t care. Well, God sent the plague, and sure enough, Pharaoh did care, and he asked for mercy. And when God gave mercy through Moses, Pharaoh went right back to his old ways and ignored God. That tells us something of what hardening does. Human beings harden themselves first. They are in a resistance. We’re all in a resistance towards God. And so God, instead of lessening the hardening in some way, increases it, because according to what we can see in the book of Exodus, Pharaoh hardens his heart about three times, it mentions that, and then it mentions about another nine times that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. How did he do it? By showing Pharaoh mercy when he wasn’t ready for it. God does that all the time. He makes His Son shine upon the good, the just, and the unjust. He is showing mercy to the unjust every day. And what happens? They harden their hearts. Now, what’s the purpose of that then? Because does it mean that God has had enough of them and He’s just going to throw them into hell? That’s not what it means at all. Hardening of the heart is very difficult psychologically and spiritually to sustain. We become lonely of soul, dark inside, afraid and guilty. And when troubles come, we find we don’t have the resources to cope. And those troubles reveal that our hardness of heart is critical, dangerous and deathly. And what happens then is that the soul very often calls out to God and prays for the first time in its life. And God comes to that soul with mercy. You see, God and Jesus purposely move humanity toward that hardness. You remember, I told you yesterday, the story, well, let’s take the man who was blind. And Jesus took some spit and some mud or some dust of the earth and mixed it with his spit and made mud out of it and put the clay on the man’s eyes and the man could see. What a wonderful, merciful act that Jesus performed. He loved that man. But there’s an inside drama to the story. Jesus did that on the Sabbath day. He healed him. But you see, he did something peculiar. He healed him by making something, by making a sort of little brick or a little bit of mud out of his spit and soil. And that was what sent the Pharisees and the Jewish people apoplectic. They were so mad. He had done this on the Sabbath day and broken the Sabbath. There’s no mystical reason, in my opinion, as to why he used spit and the dust of the ground to make mud. No, the point of that was to do a work on the Sabbath day. What was that for? To provoke the Pharisees, to provoke the Jewish people. Well, what was Jesus doing provoking them? That wasn’t very nice, was it? That is the whole point. God provokes the hardened to harden them all the more, so that they have sleepless nights. Can you not imagine? How would the Pharisees and Sadducees sleep at night, wondering what in the world to do with this man Jesus? Well, of course, you see, that’s the pressure that Jesus puts on us. That’s the pressure that the Holy Spirit puts on us. God loves hardened people. He doesn’t love their hardness. He loves the people who are hardened. He loves all of us who are hardened and pushes us to the wall so that we will find ourselves trapped and somehow fight our way out. And that fight begins the process by which we confront God or God confronts us. That’s what God is doing with the world. God is going to bring the whole world into a state of confrontation. You remember what it says in Revelation chapter 17? There are the ten horns, and all of this is highly symbolic language. Of course, we can’t go into that. But anyway, let’s read it. The ten horns which you saw on the beast, these will hate the harlot. These are prophecies of the last days. Make her desolate and naked. and burn her with fire. Well, man, that’s certainly a massive crisis of the last days, whatever it is. Look at verse 17, the next verse though. For God has put it into their hearts to fulfill his purpose to be of one mind and to give their kingdom to the beast until the words of God are fulfilled. God has put it into their minds. Yes, the chaos, the atheism, the darkness, the idolatry, the rebellion of the world in the last days that will create chaos. God allows that to come into their minds, hedges up their minds, doesn’t stop it so that it’s said that he puts it into their minds because he has a plan for their hardness, which is what? That they come face to face without any escape. into the presence of God. And in that presence, they are faced with the glory and the beauty and the majesty of God and their own broken sins that leave them naked of soul and terrified, and so that they finally call upon the name of the Lord, and God has mercy upon them. That’s what is being done. That is where the world is moving to. Now, let’s get to you. You may listen to this program by accident or by purpose and feel that there’s no more hope for you. You’re hardened. I’ve heard more than one preacher say over the years that if your conscience is seared, if you’re resisting God, your conscience is seared. There’s no hope for you but hell. I say to you that God has brought you to a place where there is no escape. where there is only darkness of soul, where you are spiritually hungry, where you are spiritually starving to death, and you cannot stand it anymore. Well, I’ll tell you, there is an alternative. God opens his hand to the hardened heart. He opens his hands to the heart that has resisted him always and says, you can still come to me. And that is what you must do. Thank you very much. You can also hear it, though, any time of the day or night. On your smartphone, simply download a free app, soundcloud.com or podbean.com, and key in how it happens with Colin Cook when you get there. It’s listener-supported radio, so if you would like to make a donation, it would be so very much appreciated. Send your donation to faithquest.org. P.O. Box 366, Littleton, Colorado, 80160, or you can make your donation online at faithquestradio.com. Thanks so much for all your support. See you next time. Cheerio and God bless.