Day 88 — Signs and Stubbornness
When God's Power Meets a Hardened Heart
However you can engage today, we’re here. Read, listen or both.
The written portion gives an overview, with verses broken down into smaller bites, and journaling/prayer prompts for reflection. In the podcast, Steve Traylor reflects on today’s passage with Scripture reading, a deeper pastoral teaching, and prayer (about 15 minutes). Perfect for morning coffee, commutes, or when your eyes need a rest.
📖 Resources: Printable Bible Book Guides (Genesis & Job) · Through the Wilderness: A Lenten Prayer Guide · Hard Questions, Honest Answers
Exodus 7
Take a slow breath as you step into this day.
For six chapters now, Exodus has been building toward this moment. Moses objected. Aaron was provided. The people believed, then despaired. Pharaoh refused, then doubled the burden. God renewed His covenant and made promises that Israel was too crushed to receive. Moses told Pharaoh: Let my people go. And the answer was no—harder, meaner, louder than before.
Today, everything changes. Today God stops asking and starts acting.
Before the first plague falls, God says something worth sitting with: “See, I have made you like God to Pharaoh, and Aaron your brother will be your prophet.” Not because Moses earned it—but because that is what God has decided to make of an unwilling, stuttering shepherd from Midian.
Today we see that God’s power is not limited by human refusal, and His purposes are not thwarted by the hardness of hearts He has already accounted for.
1. Authority and Assignment
Exodus 7:1-7
Yahweh said to Moses, “Behold, I have made you as God to Pharaoh; and Aaron your brother shall be your prophet. 2 You shall speak all that I command you; and Aaron your brother shall speak to Pharaoh, that he let the children of Israel go out of his land. 3 I will harden Pharaoh’s heart, and multiply my signs and my wonders in the land of Egypt. 4 But Pharaoh will not listen to you, so I will lay my hand on Egypt, and bring out my armies, my people the children of Israel, out of the land of Egypt by great judgments. 5 The Egyptians shall know that I am Yahweh when I stretch out my hand on Egypt, and bring the children of Israel out from among them.”
6 Moses and Aaron did so. As Yahweh commanded them, so they did. 7 Moses was eighty years old, and Aaron eighty-three years old, when they spoke to Pharaoh.
Moses is eighty. Aaron is eighty-three. This is not decorative. God’s deliverers are not young men at the peak of their powers—they are two old men, one of them still convinced he has the wrong voice for the job.
God has made Moses “as God to Pharaoh.” This is not deification. It is authorization. Moses stands before the most powerful man on earth carrying the full authority of the God who made that man.
Then God says something readers of Exodus have wrestled with for centuries: I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.
Scripture does not resolve the tension this creates. Pharaoh hardens his own heart throughout these chapters—the text says so clearly. Yet God also declares He will harden it. Both are true. The mystery is not an error; it is the text’s honest testimony that human will and divine sovereignty are both real, and that God’s purposes are not thwarted by the resistance He has already foreknown.
The purpose of what follows is not punishment for its own sake. It is revelation: “The Egyptians shall know that I am Yahweh.” Every plague is a declaration.
And notice what God calls Israel: “my army, my people.” Not a refugee population barely escaping—God’s army, moving on God’s timetable.
Journaling/Prayer: Has God ever assigned you something you did not feel authorized for—when you felt too old, too slow, too uncertain, too ordinary?
If so, read verse 1 again: I have made you as God to Pharaoh. The authority does not originate in Moses. It comes from the One who sends him. There is no age at which God stops calling.
2. Staffs and Serpents
Exodus 7:8-13
8 Yahweh spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, 9 “When Pharaoh speaks to you, saying, ‘Perform a miracle!’ then you shall tell Aaron, ‘Take your rod, and cast it down before Pharaoh, and it will become a serpent.’”
10 Moses and Aaron went in to Pharaoh, and they did so, as Yahweh had commanded. Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh and before his servants, and it became a serpent. 11 Then Pharaoh also called for the wise men and the sorcerers. They also, the magicians of Egypt, did the same thing with their enchantments. 12 For they each cast down their rods, and they became serpents; but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods. 13 Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he didn’t listen to them, as Yahweh had spoken.
The word translated “serpent”—tanniyn in Hebrew—carries weight the English misses. The cobra was the symbol of Egyptian royal and divine power; the uraeus, a rearing cobra, sat on Pharaoh’s crown as the mark of his divine authority. When Aaron’s staff becomes a serpent, it is a direct theological challenge: The God of these slaves has just picked up your symbol and transformed it.
Pharaoh calls his magicians. The counterfeits were real. Egypt’s hartumim—scribal-priestly practitioners—performed what appeared to be the same miracle. Pharaoh had reason to tell himself: Nothing exceptional here. My men can do it too.
But Aaron’s staff swallows theirs.
One serpent remains, and it is Aaron’s. And yet—Pharaoh’s heart hardened. He looked at the outcome and turned away.
Signs do not produce faith in a heart that has already decided. Jesus healed and raised the dead, and the religious leaders plotted His arrest. Evidence can confirm faith, but it cannot create it apart from God’s grace.
For readers who have prayed for someone to see what seems obvious—this passage does not explain that mystery. But it names it. Pharaoh saw and still refused. You are not wrong to have been confused by it in your own life.
Journaling/Prayer: Have you prayed for someone whose heart seemed closed to what appeared obvious?
Bring that to God honestly—not to demand an explanation, but to name the weight of it. You are not alone in encountering it.
If you can’t go there today, rest in this: Aaron’s staff swallowed the counterfeits. The final verdict was not in doubt.
3. The Nile and Its God
Exodus 7:14-21
14 Yahweh said to Moses, “Pharaoh’s heart is stubborn. He refuses to let the people go. 15 Go to Pharaoh in the morning. Behold, he is going out to the water. You shall stand by the river’s bank to meet him. You shall take the rod which was turned to a serpent in your hand. 16 You shall tell him, ‘Yahweh, the God of the Hebrews, has sent me to you, saying, “Let my people go, that they may serve me in the wilderness. Behold, until now you haven’t listened.” 17 Yahweh says, “In this you shall know that I am Yahweh. Behold: I will strike with the rod that is in my hand on the waters which are in the river, and they shall be turned to blood. 18 The fish that are in the river will die and the river will become foul. The Egyptians will loathe to drink water from the river.”’” 19 Yahweh said to Moses, “Tell Aaron, ‘Take your rod, and stretch out your hand over the waters of Egypt, over their rivers, over their streams, and over their pools, and over all their ponds of water, that they may become blood. There will be blood throughout all the land of Egypt, both in vessels of wood and in vessels of stone.’”
20 Moses and Aaron did so, as Yahweh commanded; and he lifted up the rod, and struck the waters that were in the river, in the sight of Pharaoh, and in the sight of his servants; and all the waters that were in the river were turned to blood. 21 The fish that were in the river died. The river became foul. The Egyptians couldn’t drink water from the river. The blood was throughout all the land of Egypt.
God tells Moses where to find Pharaoh in the morning: at the river. The Nile was Hapi, one of Egypt’s central deities—the god whose annual flood made civilization possible in the desert. Egypt did not exist without the Nile.
God did not begin with a small sign. He struck at the center of Egypt’s worship.
The Nile turns to blood. Every water source—rivers, pools, even water stored in containers of wood and stone—is corrupted. There is no corner of Egypt where the water remains clean.
The theological pattern is precise: the plagues target what Egypt worshiped. You trusted the river. I made the river. You called the river a god. Watch what I do with it.
Journaling/Prayer: What has functioned as a “Nile” in your own life—a source you have trusted more than God, something so woven into your daily existence that its absence would feel like the end of everything?
If that is too much today, hold this: God’s deepest aim in all of it was that people would know who He is—“By this you shall know that I am Yahweh” (v. 17). Even through what disrupts. Even through what stinks.
4. Imitation and Indifference
Exodus 7:22-25
22 The magicians of Egypt did the same thing with their enchantments. So Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he didn’t listen to them, as Yahweh had spoken. 23 Pharaoh turned and went into his house, and he didn’t even take this to heart. 24 All the Egyptians dug around the river for water to drink; for they couldn’t drink the river water. 25 Seven days were fulfilled, after Yahweh had struck the river.
The magicians replicate the plague. Egypt’s water is already undrinkable—and they produce more blood. The logic of counterfeit power is not to fix what is broken. It is to demonstrate that it exists. Pharaoh uses that demonstration to tell himself: Nothing here requires my response.
Verse 23 is quietly devastating: Pharaoh turned and went into his house, and didn’t even take this to heart.
This is what a fully hardened heart looks like. Not dramatic defiance. Indifference. The person who turns away, not in rage, but in a kind of flat refusal—who shuts the door and does not let any of it in.
Seven days passed. The judgment held for a full week. And on the eighth day, the frogs come.
God does not stop when a heart refuses. “The Egyptians shall know that I am Yahweh”—not only Israel. The whole world.
Journaling/Prayer: Is there something God has been pressing upon your heart that you have been turning away from? Not violent resistance—just quiet avoidance: going inside, shutting the door, not letting it in?
If you recognize something, bring it to God. Not with self-condemnation, but with openness. The most dangerous response to what God is doing is not argument. It is indifference.
If you can’t go there today: God held the judgment for seven days. He was patient. He is patient still.
Summary
God was not surprised by Pharaoh’s resistance. He told Moses exactly what would happen before Moses stood in the throne room. The refusals, the magicians, the hardened heart—none of it altered His plan.
The plagues were not merely punishments. They were proclamations: I am the LORD. Every judgment declared what Pharaoh refused to acknowledge.
Counterfeit power was real—but it was never sovereign. Aaron’s staff swallowed theirs. By the time of the gnats, even the magicians would say: “This is the finger of God” (Exodus 8:19).
There is no corner of your life where God is not already sovereign. The Nile—Egypt’s most sacred power—fell under His word. Whatever has felt most immovable in your life is not beyond His reach.
Action/Attitude for Today
Walk through today holding this quietly: God has already accounted for every refusal you are carrying.
If you have very little today, read only verse 5: “The Egyptians shall know that I am Yahweh.” That is enough.
If you can do a little more, bring to God one place where you have recognized a pattern of turning away. Not violent resistance—just avoidance. Just going inside and shutting the door. You do not have to have a solution. Just bring it, open-handed.
If someone you love has seemed closed to God in ways that have grieved or confused you, release them today into the hands of the God who held the plagues for seven days, who kept pursuing Pharaoh through ten judgments, who never stopped declaring I am Yahweh.
Say this prayer, as much of it as you mean: “Lord, You are not surprised by what I am seeing. You told Moses what would happen before it happened, and Your purposes held. Hold Your purposes in what I can’t control. Let me know that You are the LORD—not because everything is fixed, but because You are still acting, still moving. Amen.”
The Bible for the Broken is published by Aurion Press LLC. © Aurion Press LLC. All rights reserved.