Pharaoh Also Repented
He named his sin. He meant it. Then the hail stopped.
Some other dads and I are reading through the first twelve chapters of Exodus with our teenagers, working through it the way I like to work through Scripture: slowly, out loud, arguing about it, letting it push back on us. Passover is coming, so it’s a good opportunity to dive back into this part of God’s Story.
Something stood out to me this time through it that I hadn’t really wrestled with before: Pharaoh confesses his sin. Twice. And it looks real. He doesn’t just cave under pressure.
Then Pharaoh sent and called Moses and Aaron and said to them, “This time I have sinned; the LORD is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong.” - Exodus 9:27
Then Pharaoh hastily called Moses and Aaron and said, “I have sinned against the LORD your God, and against you. Now therefore, forgive my sin, please, only this once, and plead with the LORD your God only to remove this death from me.” - Exodus 10:16–17
“I have sinned this time,” he tells Moses after the hail. “The Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong.” I mean, that’s not nothing. That’s a man who appears to be broken open. You could read that moment and think something has actually shifted in him.
Then the hail stops, but then so does the repentance. And he didn’t harden alone. The Story says His servants hardened with him.
As I’ve been sitting with this for a few weeks now, the thing that keeps coming up for me is that his confession sounds exactly like what we’ve trained people to do in the church. “Just say these words.” They mean them in the moment. The plague lifts. And then their hearts harden again.
“Jesus is Lord” doesn’t mean much today
…if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. - Romans 10:9
Today, “Jesus is Lord,” is so thoroughly domesticated that it barely registers anymore. It’s the thing you say at the end of a sinner’s prayer. It goes on billboards and celebrity music albums.
But in the first century, when you must confess that Caesar is Lord or be put to death, this wasn’t a trite statement. Confessing that Jesus is Lord was an act of treason. It was a public declaration that your ultimate allegiance was elsewhere, that you were living under a different King, by different rules, toward a different Kingdom. This confession cost you everything.
We’ve lost that weight. And I wonder if that loss is part of why so many Christian men can confess sin freely on Sunday and return to the same patterns by Thursday. The confession costs them nothing more than a renewed effort to try harder for a few days.
Pharaoh’s confessions cost him nothing either. The pressure lifted, the hail stopped, and he went back to being Pharaoh.
The deadly kind of sorrow
Paul goes on in 2 Corinthians 7:
For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death. - 2 Corinthians 7:10
This seems pretty straightforward to me. He’s describing two different responses to conviction: one that clears your conscience, and one that changes how you live.
Pharaoh had worldly sorrow. He felt real pressure and named real sin, but his sorrow was about the pain he was feeling, not the transformation God wanted from him. When the pressure was gone, he went back to his old self. The hail stopped, the hardness came back, and whatever had opened in him closed again.
This is not only a Pharaoh problem. This is a human problem. It’s a Tim problem. I’ve lived in that same cycle for decades, even as a pastor in churches.
There have been seasons where I’ve been quick to confess, but slow to actually change. The confession was real, but I was using repentance language to alleviate my own discomfort rather than genuinely changing how I lived.
That’s not repentance. True repentance, Godly sorrow, is fundamentally about direction, not about declaration. The Greek word is metanoia: a change of mind so complete that it produces a change in how you live. It’s not primarily about what you say. It’s entirely about what you do next.
The difference between godly grief and worldly grief is literally a life-or-death issue. One leads to salvation. The other leads to death, as it did for Pharaoh.
I don’t think most of us can make that turn alone, which is exactly what Pharaoh’s story shows us.
Pharaoh was surrounded by “yes men,” too
I wrote a few months ago about what I called recruiting people to tell me I’m wrong. Since then, a few men have taken me up on the invitation. One guy sat me down privately and said, “Tim, I’ve been warning you about your family busyness, but you didn’t listen to me. Now, here you are, tired, worn out, and having to disconnect from good, healthy things. Why don’t you listen?”
None of the conversations were fun, but I know they were good because Hebrews 3:12-13 says that, without it, my heart can be hardened just like Pharaoh’s:
Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God. But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called “today,” that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin. — Hebrews 3:12-13
Receiving exhortation in humility is the antidote to worldly sorrow that leads to death. Having men who will do this for you is critical, not optional. The man who sat me down didn’t give me new information. I already knew our family was overcommitted. What he gave me was the moment where worldly grief became godly grief, where “I feel bad about this” became, “I’m going to repent.”
Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. - James 5:16
Confession in community isn’t just a spiritual activity that makes us look good. It’s how we experience restoration and healing. It’s how men who are going in one direction turn around to go in the other direction.
The difference isn’t just feeling worse
The difference between Pharaoh and the kind of man I want to become is not that I’m better at feeling sorry. It’s that I want to have men around me who will lead me to godly grief. Pharaoh was surrounded by “yes men” and it ended in death across the entire nation.
But when Pharaoh saw that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he sinned yet again and hardened his heart, he and his servants. - Exodus 9:34
Pharaoh stopped at confession. He said the right words and waited for the pressure to lift.
I don’t want to be Pharaoh.
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