So I thought that God is patient with us, that he loves us and would not help us to harden our hearts toward Him.
The only heart that God ever hard
ENS is
one that was ALREADY solid concrete! There is a point in which one's rebellion and rejection of God has become so entrenched that, for them, it has become an irreversible and ongoing act of the will. And so as God is ALL knowing and can search the depths of the human heart, He knows when this has happened - in fact, He knew this before such a person was ever born. It's not as if God hardens those who might eventually have a change of heart, that would one day be receptive and repentant.
The story of Exodus and the hardening of Pharaoh's heart is so often mentioned. But it was not as if God hardened someone who might yet repent. Pharaoh was an incredibly blood thirsty, cruel and feared man - and one who actually presented himself as a living god. He had continued the enslavement of God's covenant people and as their numbers had grown, even had ordered the midwives to kill the Hebrews' sons. No, the hardening of Pharaoh's heart started with Pharaoh's own hardness of heart. But also God's hardening had much to do with steeling Pharaoh's will to not let Israel go until Egypt had been decimated with the various plague miracles, so that by the time the Egyptian's first-borns were killed, NO ONE could miss that Israel's God was immensely powerful, and that the self-proclaimed god in their midst (Pharaoh) had been exposed as a defeated, bumbling fraud. And the miracles were so spectacular, so effective, etc, that we're still talking about them and marveling at them, even today - and to God's great glory!
