Verse 20
20. It was of the Lord to harden their hearts It is a Hebraism to ascribe to direct divine agency the results of human perverseness, as in the case of Pharaoh. These nations had filled the cup of their iniquity, (Genesis 15:16,) and their idolatry and crimes demanded punishment. God therefore leaves them to judicial blindness and infatuation, and uses Israel as the rod of his anger to destroy them utterly. So their hardened hearts and consequent destruction were but the certain outcome, according to Divine arrangement, of their own, as of every sinner’s, free and wilful sinning. But we are not to understand, with Calvin, a miraculous operation of God, urging them on to blind fury. Their own self-induced perversity was a sufficient power for this.
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