The road out of Egypt is not a pleasant drive. It boggles my mind to think about walking it with a million refugees. I set out one morning in a borrowed Volkswagen to drive from Cairo to the Suez Canal. My wife was with me, as was a lady we intended to baptize in, of all places, the Red Sea. It is a desolate wilderness across there. Once you leave the Nile Valley, there is, well, nothing. The only thing we passed on the road was a downed Russian aircraft in the desert.

According to the book of Exodus, 600,000 men (plus women and children) set out across that desert to freedom led by Charlton Hes…excuse me…I mean, led by Moses. You don’t have to be very perceptive to realize that this gaggle of refugees, under the best of conditions, would be nothing but trouble. And these were not the best of conditions. But they were free, and it is hard for us to imagine what that meant to them. It is just that they had no idea yet what it was going to mean.

At any point in history, men have to make decisions about what freedom is worth. Again and again in history, men have given up freedom for safety and comfort. And the road to slavery is not always seen for what it is. The road from slavery has its own share of difficulties, as well. We begin following the children of Israel along that road in Exodus, chapter 12.

The story of the Exodus is a tremendous story: a wonderful story of liberty, freedom, and an end to slavery for an entire people. It is a story of triumph—and it is also a story of great tragedy. Yes, it involves the birth of a great nation, but it also involves the destruction of a great nation and of one of the world’s most powerful rulers.

And because the Bible is such a big story, people often see only part of it at one time and fail to realize the implications of what they read. Some people see only the joy of freedom for the Israelites. Others see the destruction of the Egyptian economy and society and the killing of the firstborn children of all the Egyptian families. It was one of the greatest crises in all of history—and not necessarily the best understood.

I knew a fellow once who just couldn’t accept the Passover story. How can we celebrate the death of Egypt’s firstborn children?, he wondered. But the part of the story that is not so often told is the brutal subjugation of the Israelites by the Egyptians (all of the Egyptians were involved) and the killing of a whole generation of Israelite babies by the Egyptians—all of the Egyptians. If you think of God as just, how could God not take some form of justice on the Egyptians for their cruelty? We begin the story of this fateful night in Exodus, chapter 12.

Nearly everyone knows the story of the Exodus. Between Charlton Heston playing Moses in the movie The Ten Commandments and the animated Prince of Egypt the story has been thoroughly told to the masses. But there is an aspect of it that continues to trouble a lot of people who read the Bible. Pharaoh had no choice. God hardened his heart again and again. It would be one thing if Pharaoh were Hitler: a thoroughly bad man who himself was hard-hearted, started hard-hearted, and stayed that way. But the scriptures don’t say that. There is little doubt Pharaoh was a bad actor, but the Scriptures say categorically that God hardened his heart so he would not let Israel go.

I can still remember the first time that I ever encountered this idea. It was in Paul’s writings, and I was just a teenager. I read in Romans 19, verse 17:

For the scripture says unto Pharaoh, Even for this same purpose have I raised you up, that I might show my power in you, and that my name might be declared throughout all the earth. Therefore has he mercy on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardens. You will say then unto me, Why does he yet find fault? For who has resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who are you that replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why have you made me thus? Has not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honor, and another unto dishonor? What if God, willing to show his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction[.]

Now, that’s a clear reference to Pharaoh and the Egyptians. But I’ll tell you, it was chilling to me as a young man reading the Bible to consider the possibility, however remote, that I might be a vessel of wrath: someone actually created to dishonor. And there is no question about it when you read the story in Exodus–God hardened Pharaoh’s heart. But there is an aspect of that story that rarely gets told. Nothing I have ever seen in the movies about this event accurately portrays what the Egyptians did to the Israelites, and over what period of time they did it.