Selections from Testimonies to the Managers and Workers in our Institutions

How Hearts Become Hardened

There has been a sad departure from right principles. The Word of God declares that God hardened the heart of Pharaoh. This was done when, giving Pharaoh warnings and revealing God's miraculous power before him, he braced himself up to resist the light, and refused to acknowledge the Monarch of heaven and yield to His requirements. Every time that Pharaoh resisted the Spirit of God his heart grew harder and more difficult to impress, until the restraining influence of the Spirit of God was removed. Pharaoh sowed continually the seeds of obstinacy, and he reaped obstinacy, and he kept up his determined spirit of obstinacy till he perished in the Red Sea. PH149 35.1

God did not compel Pharaoh to be lost. Every man who is lost destroys himself. When a man turns from the light given of God, and refuses to walk in it, that light becomes darkness to him. When the light comes before him again, it is so dim that he scarcely recognizes it. When the words of reproof come from God to the wrongdoer, there is a stirring of heart, an arousing of conscience. The hearts of the hearers are convicted and Satan trembles for his power. Individuals go from the house of God determined to resist pride, mortify lust, and overcome avarice. But they do not humble their souls before God and repent, and make right the wrongs of the past. They do not make a decided change and plead with God for help, relying on His strength, and the impression soon wears away. They feel for a time the sense of their condition, but realize not the heinous character of sin. They become indifferent and the old defects of character appear, whether it is pride and vanity, worldliness and selfishness, or petty dishonesty, overreaching in trade, sensuality, or lust for gain. They go forward as eagerly as though they had lost time during the little arousing of conscience. They may, after this relapse, listen to the denunciations against sin and the works of ungodliness, the Spirit of God may rest upon the speaker with unusual fervor, and the power of God be in every word, but they are not much moved; they have been hardened by the stifling of their convictions. PH149 35.2