The Difference Between Moses and Pharaoh

Have you ever thought about how two people raised in the same family and raised as brothers could be so different?  There are two characters in the Bible I would like to talk about: Moses and Pharaoh.  They were both raised in the same house.  Two people raised in the same house, but their hearts were in two totally different places.  I would like to take you on a journey to show you some revelations God showed me about these two men.

Exodus 4:21

“And the Lord said to Moses, when you return into Egypt, see that you do before Pharaoh all those miracles and wonders which I have put in our hand; but I will make him stubborn and harden his heart, so that he will not let the people go.”

Exodus 10:27

“But Jehovah hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and he would not let them go.”

What was in Pharaoh’s heart?  When God hardened his heart, what was in Pharaoh’s heart?  The Hebrew word for hardened is chazaq,meaning to strengthen, to press.  I would like to propose that when the glory of God falls on us, what is within us is strengthened. This can be a serious problem when we refuse to let God have our heart 100%.

 I know God says He has given us free will and He will not force His will on us.  We are free to choose to follow Him. We choose to be obedient to Him. We also choose to allow Him into our hearts fully, half-heartedly, or not at all.  All of this is our own choice due to free will.

My heart is that I want to continue to run the race God has for me. That means laying down everything and anything that He shows me that will hinder my walk, especially what is not of Him.  We need to ask God to search our hearts to reveal anything and everything not of Him so we can allow His fullness to abide in us.  He can only abide in areas we give up!   I know for me it has been a process and I am still being processed every day.

James 1:13

“When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does He tempt anyone;”

If that is the case, God may use what is inside of us to work it out of us as we go through trials, but God Himself is not tempting you.  What if God already knew the heart of Pharaoh and had already tried to pour out over him?  We don’t know!  What if God decided to pour out one more time and He knew the outcome and would use that outcome to set the stage to free the captives.  Pharaoh wasn’t willing to lose all the Israelites. They were his workers who got the job done because he had control over them!  Who would do the work if they lost their slaves?

Let’s take these scriptures into our culture today and see what that might look like in our lives.  We can see this in many businesses in the world where people control their workforce through fear and use their power and authority to force their employees into working harder and harder, being a slave (in a sense) to their every command.  These people really have no say and the harder they work, the more work is required of them. It is a never ending battle where they  find themselves at the bottom of the pile of work that is placed on top of them.  You fear speaking out because you need the income!  You fear taking a stand, because you could lose your job!  You fret and worry striving to get more work done that you even start to take it home with you! It starts to consume your every thought and if you don’t bring it home physically, you do emotionally.  You are bound by your work, by your employer, and it spiritually starts to kill you.  We become slaves in our own lives!

I was there once and it actually drove me to suicide. I was so riddled with pain, especially in the years immediately prior to my suicide attempt.  I wanted to be loved and accepted and I set out to succeed at my career. I soon found I couldn’t please my boss or the company because I was in a field that involved computers and part of my job was removing viruses from the computers.  It was a time when you would fix them one day and the same virus would show up the next day and it seemed you felt you were finding yourself chasing your own tail.  No solutions to the viruses worked long term!  No happy co-workers; no happy Boss; no happy company.  It was especially tough when you work in several different offices and you are a person who needs approval from others to feel good about yourself.

In looking at Pharaoh’s life, was he mean and controlling and used to using force to get his kingdom running his way? What kind of person would hold people against their will to be beaten down and belittled?  Slavery is holding and forcing people against their will even by force. Was it done through love, honor, or respect? Not likely. Look at the man who Moses killed because of the way the Israelite was being beaten by him. Seeing this mistreatment of a slave angered Moses to the point where he killed the man and then had to flee.

God says we are responsible for what we are given!  Do different ingredients create different products when going through the fire?  What about Clay and Concrete?  Clay would melt and concrete would harden!

The Israelites finally started to cry out to God because they finally got tired of the place where the enemy had them. So they started to pray!  They cried out to God and He knew that Pharaoh’s heart would not free them and so His mighty hand was needed to remove their bondage, setting the captives free.

Are there parts of your heart that you haven’t given up to God yet? Ask God to search it every day and to show you the areas you have not yet surrendered to him and where the strongholds are that hinder your freedom.  God will show you and guide you as you ask Him. My heart is not to be the person who is sitting on the couch someday wondering “what if” questions about my life, never having moved anywhere and never having stepped into my destiny.

God spoke to me about two years ago as I was traveling across the country to attend a leadership school.  I had already dove into ministry full time for several years at this point and couldn’t understand what God was doing sending me to a leadership school.  Sometimes we feel know better than God in our own lives (NOT)!  As I was talking with God on my long journey, I heard God clearly say these words to me: “I am building character in you to sustain the dream so the dream doesn’t crush you”.  That will get you to thinking!

I want to end this book on this note.  We think we know because we see something or dream about it.  Really!  God shows us stuff and it usually is only a tip of the iceberg to what He has for our lives because we would really screw it up or run like a little school girl scared to death.  Either way, we probably would not fulfill our destiny if it was only in our hands.  God knows there are areas of my life I need to give Him fully before He would give me the open doors for the dreams of my life to fully manifest.  One key component was a meeting with an overseer of the school.  He was helping me to walk through some stuff I was dealing with and it took me back to the deliverance I had in 2015 and my wholeness process where God gave me a dream.  In the dream God gave me, He showed me my Dad yelling at my Mom when I was the little tiny baby in the crib off to my right.  I remember the room all too well: it was my parents’ bedroom in the house I grew up in.  My Dad was yelling to my Mom to please shut me up.  I remember my Mom telling me that I came home from the hospital sick for the first 3 months of my life with a staph ear infection that the doctors could not find.  I was really sick with high fevers and they would rub me down with alcohol to try to bring the fevers down.  The fevers eventually effected the enamel on my secondary teeth.  I didn’t see what my Mom did when my Dad yelled at her to please shut me up but I remembered that scene all too well.  I know that in that moment, the enemy (not my parents) attacked a little defenseless baby girl who just needed to be loved and for the pain to go away.  Nothing more and nothing less. But my parents were unable to help because they too had no answers in the heat of the summer with no help from the doctors and a father who worked hard outside to put food on the table for his family of 7.  Any father would have a breaking point.  Any father would be at a loss for lack of sleep and rest.  In those moments, the enemy, not my parents attacked a little defenseless baby girl and created yet another wound that this time medicine would not be able to fix.  This time the wound would go deep into her spirit and cause her to believe she was unloved.  The term “unloved” means that you once felt loved and I came from an amazing loving family. They may or may not have dealt with life always in love, but did everything because of love.  In those moments, a little baby started to understand the lie of being unloved.  During my inner healing meeting while at the leadership school, I gained a greater understanding that in that moment I also learned that I could not trust my Mom to protect me and ultimately learned that I couldn’t trust my Dad and because of that I was unable to fully trust God.  Trust issues surfaced and slapped me in the face when I was asked “what was my relationship with my Mom?”  I had an awesome friendship with my Mom and we had been best friends since my Dad had died when I was 15.  When I heard the words “you could be best friends with your mom, but I bet you were unable to receive from her” touch my ears, I was undone by uncontrollable tears.  I loved my Mom the best way I knew how, but there really was always a wall between us and at times it was a love/hate relationship.  Through the process, I learned I didn’t trust very well and I have been on a journey ever since, learning how to trust God with every aspect of my life.  That little girl grew up to be a very independent women and the enemy used leader after leader to hold me back or destroy me in different ways to reinforce my lack of trust issue. Most times they didn’t do anything directly to cause me to not trust, but the enemy always directed my eyes to see where they had failed. However, I learned through the lies that I could not trust leaders to protect me or even the people close to me.  That is not a good place to walk; It can get very lonely to walk that place out, because you ultimately don’t even trust the one you think you trust and that is God.  I have had incredible healing since that meeting and still to this day am learning how to walk out trust when I don’t feel trusting.  Ultimately, do we trust God even if we don’t trust the people around us?  That is the actual issue!  If we trust God, we will not care if others protect us or have our best interest at heart.  If we fully trust God, we will know He has our best interest at heart and He is our protector.  That year was an incredible learning curve for me and it happened quickly.

The school was a 9 month school and it was with a well known ministry.  Of course you want to finish it, especially when you have incredible friends and family members sowing into your education.  My next challenge was about to unfold.  If God says leave school early and leave unoffendable, will you walk out obedience?  I was tested to my very core.  I learned early on that God sees things different than we do and that what God does is not always seen as wisdom by the world. Look at Moses and how he had to walk out his test of faith.  In the obedience of my faith, I walked out leaving school 7 weeks early without graduating, however, it actually set me up to be used in an incredible way.  I had the opportunity to join up with another friend to pour into an amazing Brazilian friend where three friends ventured all across the USA on a 7 week journey.   The journey was not always easy and we didn’t always know what it looked like financially.  However, the end result was us raising the money for our Brazilian friend to attend another amazing ministry school for 3 weeks where she actually met her husband and was married a short period of time later.  My graduation day from the leadership school I left early was the first day of my Brazilian friend’s school registration over 3,000 miles away.  You do the math!  Would you have left a well known ministry leadership school out of obedience to God not knowing why?  I am so glad I left when I did and was available to help my friend when she was actually in desperate need of help.  When you walk out obedience, it may or may not look like God.  You need to have a relationship with God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit the Comforter in order to know when it is God and when it isn’t God.  Yes, they are all the same God, but they all operate differently in and through our lives.

As you walk out your destiny there are several things to make note of in your life:

            •           Am I open to being taught by God and others?

            •           Will I allow God to open up my heart and fillet it so He can remove the roots of the lies I have been believing all my life, even from the womb?

            •           Will you lay down your life as Jesus gave His life to be fully possessed by God to see the full manifestation of Jesus in your life where you will see the Father and you will know where the Father is at all times because He becomes one inside of you as Jesus is one with the Father (John 17)?

And my last point: will you let God take you places you never dreamed of or do things in and through your life you never thought of to reach just one person?  Your life could be to just reach one person!  Are you ok to be used to reach just one person, because if you are in that place to be used by God as that quarter in His pocket to spend you anyway He wants, you will be undone by the relationship you will have with God more than anything else in your life.  Really, nothing else matters but to love God and be loved by God and out of that love you will be able to love the hell out of others and stomp Hell!

Will you be a deliverer as Moses was or will you be delivered into the waves of the enemy like Pharaoh?  Your choice!

Are you ready to be “unleashed and ready to reign” with Jesus?