As you can see the more God showed grace to Pharaoh (now remember God could wipe Pharaoh out at anytime and just take his people instead he sent 10 plagues) the more Pharaoh rejected and hated him and basically said F U God I WILL NOT LET your people go.

To me after reading the other passages from the bible I understand the meaning to be, (I water everyting down so that I can understand it)

God "Look I sent the first plague and his heart hardened due to my action (because he wont accept me his heart hardened the more plagues I send the more his heart will harden), he will not accept me as the one true God and let my people go Go to Pharaoh again and warn him of a second plague "

God "Look I sent the second plague and his heart hardened MORE due to my action, he STILL will not accept me (using his free will based on what he has seen) as the one true God and let my people go even after what I have shown him and anyone else who has heard"

this goes on down to the last plague,

God "What most I do now, surley if I said to Pharoah that I will kill the first born of each family in Egypt that he would let my people go"

No he didnt, these passages in the bible clearly show the sin nature in man this type of thinking still goes on today. They reject God at every corner no matter what you say, no matter what you do, no matter if you say look at what God created, he created the heavens and the earth the sin nature inside of them says "sure Sciencetist and great thinkers of men have proven that the Big Bang created everything you and your God is totally BS" even if I say to you know that if you do not believe in God you will go to hell! I am not going to force you to, God will not force you to, you have to accept this by faith and by faith alone using your free will.

The Devil is reasonable and god is not. The conclusion any sane man should make is to deal with the Devil and turn his back on god.

you are just twisting/reinterpreting the bible to make it mean what you want it to mean. The issue of God hardening pharaohs heart was never a problem until recently, because it was never pointed out as a problem. Why is it that suddenly the interpretation must be changed?

Regardless:
does not sound like an omni-benevolent God, nor a God that gives free will. You can't expect people to read this and *not* come to the obvious conclusions that are stated very clearly, the same conclusions that Christians have made about this verse for hundreds of years.

They how do you explain the above, clearly it says that Pharaoh seen the plague and then he sinned yet more and hardened his heart.

And this passage only backs this up,

I will harden Pharaoh's heart? HOW?

How will God do that? (remember he wont take away Pharaohs free will)

How - simple, God says "I will multiply my miraculous signs and wonders (plagues) in Egypt and he will CHOOSE not to accept them, he will CHOOSE not to listen to you and he will sin yet more and hardened his heart.

The pharaoh like any true man feels anger and wrath against those who hurt his people and property. Yet the hero of the hour is the man who deceives his best friend.

It's not God's "grace" to cause pain and suffering for 9 days, then kill off all the first borns when he *knew* that either:

1. He Himself would harden pharoah's heart.
2. Pharoah's heart would be harden because of intervention by God in the natural world.

I'm not sure why you can't understand this.

This is the sin nature that I am talking about,

now the natural reaction to people who get hurt us is to hurt them back, the bible clearly states to turn the other cheek.

Yes, the God of the OT definitely could learn a lesson or 2 about "turning the other cheek"

The only way I can describe God actions towards us is that he sees us as his little childern now as childern we are going to sin, God knows that we are going to sin but he stills gives us the free will to choose right or wrong, now when we sin God will show us grace and if we accept God into our hearts and ask forgiveness for our sins God will forgive us, but if will continue to reject God, God will punish us in just like any good mother or father would do if they had a child that was doing wrong.

dknightx we will have to agree to disagree about this matter. We just see that passage in the bible differently. I enjoyed this debate.

*** ALERT ***

Christians, you may not notice it, but you are now attempting to defend the killings of over 2,000,000 people for your magical sky daddy. This comes a week after you were previously defending people being sold into slavery for their entire lives.

It is truly sad to me that your blind faith and defense of something with no shred of evidence now entails minimizing human suffering and death. Explain to me, how exactly you are better than Muslims at this point?

Is it that you are incapable of understanding the arguments being used or is it that you just don't really care to?

It's that they aren't arguments.

Only when you limit it to the finite instead of the infinite, the biological instead of the spiritual, the human instead of the divine.

That misses the entire point of the Bible in the first place.

So basically I have to believe all of your bull**** before all of the bull**** becomes true in my mind. Interesting logic.

Good answer!

Also, killing someone "going to heaven" before he lives a "full life" will likely
reduce his "reward" in "heaven".

Even better scenarios can be envisioned: suppose that instead of being
killed, this person X is able to "convert" persons X[1], X[2], ..., X[N] and
some of these persons X[j] are able to "convert" others. [ I don't really
like the word "convert", but this is the word used in the post cited. ]

No the bible states that you should turn the other cheek. God and those holy enough to speak for him gets to call down all the anger and wrath they want. When the men of the cloth are busy filling their coffers and making sure the followers heed their every word then feelings such as distrust, anger, envy or revenge best be supressed.

Above all, Satan covets the church. It's a plan that's working quite well.

This whole issue is a non-starter and quite tired. Assume for a moment God exists and the Bible is true. Per the book of Revelation, God is going to kill BILLIONS of people in the future. Trifling over a past few million is ridiculous.

If God created the universe then everything in it is His property. He is free to dispose of His property as he sees fit. Is that not logical? I just don't see the big issue here. God gives no guarantees of a worry free life. If he did not exempt HIS OWN SON from torment and execution on this earth, who are we to expect the same?

So? If nobody is "righteous", numbers don't matter. Besides, Hashem is the
Sovereign LORD.

What if I were to tell you that if Hashem (God) "wiped out mankind...from the
face of the earth" (NIV, Gen 6:7) at some time in history, that would be
perfectly fine if not one human being was "righteous" (and there is no human
being that is completely "righteous" excluding Yeshua).

We're simply fortunate that there is a "remnant":

Gen 6:5-8 (NASB)
=============

5 Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth,
and that (D)every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil
continually.

6 (E)The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was
(F)grieved in His heart.

7 The LORD said, "(G)I will blot out man whom I have created from the face
of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky;
for (H)I am sorry that I have made them."

8 But (I)Noah (J)found favor in the eyes of the LORD.

I'm not sure that the Antichrist and his minions aren't going to be responsible for this, but God is certainly not going to stop it.

In any case, the events of Revelation appear to give people both evidence of the spiritual realm along with a last opportunity for redemption alongside a pressure-cooker of immediacy.

All these people now are demanding signs and evidence. Sometimes, punishment is the best thing that can happen to a kid. Adults are no different. But, for those who wish to explain away the signs, there will likely be some ready-made explanations.

Well, then **** him. And the Bible he rode in on. He's a prick, it's evident from his first contact with Adam and Eve. Eternity in hell for being wrong in my beliefs? This strikes you as the actions of being to be worshipped? This strikes you as a rational being at all? He's a Stalinist: you don't accept me I send you to Siberia. Forever.

I know it wasn't the Jews that killed the non-Jews' children, it was their God.

Fine. Just don't say that this is a God we should be comfortable worshiping, and DEFINITELY don't tell us he's omnibenevolent.

You are skipping over some major stuff here. The first four verses have a lot of bearing on the situation:

When men began to increase in number on the earth and daughters were born to them, the sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they married any of them they chose. Then the LORD said, "My Spirit will not contend with man forever, for he is mortal; his days will be a hundred and twenty years."
The Nephilim were on the earth in those days - and also afterward - when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

It is clear that the Nephilim were causing some problems. The Nephilim are very obscure, and this is one of the topics that can get very, very strange.

Notice that they were on the earth after the flood, too...even though humanity was destroyed. It is likely that they were both biological (and capable of engaging in sex with humans) as well as not human.

There's a whole lot more to this than meets the eye. We don't have all of the answers, either.

You do understand that I just showed you that it appears that there were hybrid humans running around at the time, right?

What were they hybrids with?

Who built those pyramids out there?

What do all of those hieroglyphs mean?

You do realize that this knowledge is being withheld from us, right? By somebody or something?

I am telling you that he is omnibenevolent. What do you say to that?