When God recommissioned Isaiah, why did He give the prophet such a strange message to take to His people (Isa. 6:9, 10)?
 Lest we should think that Isaiah heard wrong or that this message is unimportant, Jesus cited this passage to explain why He taught in parables (Matt. 13:13-15).
 God does not want any to perish (2 Pet. 3:9), which explains why He sent Isaiah to the people of Judah—and Jesus to the world. God's desire is not to destroy but to save eternally. But while some people respond positively to His appeals, others become firmer in their resistance. Nevertheless, God keeps on appealing to them in order to give them more and more opportunities to repent. Yet, the more they resist, the harder they become. So, in that sense, what God does to them results in the hardening of their hearts, even though He would rather that these actions soften them. God’s love toward us is unchanging; our individual response to His love is the crucial variable.
 The role of a minister, such as Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, or even Christ, is to keep on appealing, even if people reject the message. God said to Ezekiel: “Whether they hear or refuse to hear (for they are a rebellious house), they shall know that there has been a prophet among them” (Ezek. 2:5, NRSV). God’s role and that of His servants is to give people a fair choice, so that they will have adequate warning (compare Ezek. 3:16-21), even if they end up choosing destruction and exile (Isa. 6:11-13).
 With these ideas in mind, how do we understand God’s role in hardening Pharaoh’s heart?
 In Exodus 4:21, God says, “but I will harden his heart” (NRSV). This is the first of nine times when God said He would harden Pharaoh's heart. But there were also nine times when Pharaoh hardened his own heart (for example, see Exod. 8:15, 32; Exod. 9:34).
 Clearly Pharaoh possessed some kind of free will, or he would not have been able to harden his own heart. But the fact that God also hardened Pharaoh’s heart indicates that God initiated the circumstances to which Pharaoh reacted when he made his choices, choices to reject the signs God had given him. Had Pharaoh been open to those signs, his heart would have been softened, not hardened, by them.
 In your own experience with the Lord, have you ever felt a hardening of your heart to the Holy Spirit? Think through what caused it. If you didn’t find that concept frightening then (after all, that’s part of what having a hard heart is all about), how do you view it now? What is the way of escape? See 1 Cor. 10:13.