For by now I could have put out my hand and struck you and your people with pestilence, and you would have been cut off from the earth.
Just before the plague of hail, God sends Moses to Pharaoh with the sharpest message the king had yet heard. It tells him what God could already have done to him — and had not done. The words look back, not forward. Pharaoh stands at the height of his power, yet he is alive only because God has held back His hand.
A life held in God's hand
The point of the words is that Pharaoh's survival was never his own achievement. He had defied God again and again, yet God had not carried out the sentence he deserved.
C. E. StuartGod tells him that his life was completely in God's hands. He could cut him off, but He had not… And why was he kept alive? It was to show him God's power, and to declare God's name throughout all the earth (15-16).
Patience already stretched long
Pharaoh's cruelty did not begin with Moses' visits. He had been crushing Israel for years before God moved to rescue them. Judgment would have been just at any point along the way.
Paul WilsonGod could rightly have cut him off in his sin against Him at that time. Instead He bore with the wicked king. In the end He hardened his heart in His government of the world, so that Pharaoh rushed headlong into the jaws of death in a way designed to show God's power.
Why God left the throne standing
If God did not strike him down, He had a reason. God had raised Pharaoh to that height. The fall of a man so high would carry much further than the fall of an ordinary man.
F. B. HoleGod knew the stubborn self-will and pride of this man. Working behind the scenes, He raised him up to a place where he could keep mistreating His people, and even step it up, and so bring matters to a head. The time was now right for God to deal with him, and in doing so to display His power in such a way that His name would be declared throughout all the earth. A scripture like Joshua 2:8-11 bears witness that the name of Jehovah was declared that way in those days. And even in our day, 3,500 years later, the fame of it has not died away.
Not made wicked, but exposed
That raises an obvious worry. If God kept Pharaoh alive for His own purposes, was Pharaoh's wickedness God's doing? Commentators are firm on this. The evil was already there. God's part was to expose it and at last to seal it.
Paul WilsonGod never makes a man bad. Pharaoh was already a bad man, and he grew worse by resisting God's most striking appeals. What God did was put him on show. He had been raised from among men to such a height that his downfall would strike consciences far and wide throughout the world. He was hard from the start, and at last God sealed him up in a judicial hardening.
That distinction matters. God's patience with a man He could have destroyed does not mean the man was ever chosen for ruin.
The Bible TreasuryThe wicked are not chosen for eternal misery. Far from it. We find that God bears with them — vessels of wrath — with great patience. They are fitted for destruction not by Him, but by their own deeds.
Long patience, certain judgment
Pharaoh read God's restraint as weakness. Each pause looked to him like proof that nothing final would ever come. That mistake is what makes this verse a warning, not a comfort.
L. M. GrantGod showed His power at least in part when His dreadful judgment finally fell on Egypt. It came after much patience and many earlier steps, and through them all Pharaoh clearly told himself that nothing could touch him. God is patient today too, sending warning after warning to a stubborn world. Yet He will show His power, suddenly and terribly, to a world that is startled and still hard.
Summary
- Spared. The verse is God telling a king that he is alive on borrowed time. God could have cut him off already. He chose instead to hold back His hand.
- Purposed. God kept him alive for a reason — to show His power in him and to spread His name through the whole earth. That report has still not died away.
- Endured. Pharaoh's cruelty long predates Moses' mission. What looks like slowness is God's patience with a man He could rightly have destroyed.
- Responsible. God never made Pharaoh bad. He exposed a wickedness already there, and at last sealed it in judicial hardening. Their own deeds, not God's choice, fit those who perish for destruction.
- Warned. Pharaoh mistook the delay for immunity. The same patience runs on today, warning after warning — and it ends the same way, when God shows His power suddenly.