Mini-Pharaohs

It is Father’s Day, but this exhortation is not aimed only at dads, while it does apply to dads. It applies to women and children, though probably it applies to men first.

Eight times in the ESV there is a word combo of stiff and neck. A couple times it’s an adjective: a stiff-necked person, and other times it’s a verb: they stiffened their necks. I bring it up today because of the eight occurrences throughout the Bible, three of them are in the corporate prayer of confession in Nehemiah 9.

The background of this metaphor is an animal that won’t lower its head, like an ox refusing the yoke. He refuses to yield, he won’t be led. For humans, we’d connect it with a lack of humility, a lack of teachability. He could have avoided some pain if he’d just bent his neck and lowered his head rather than running into the overhang.

Wisdom knows that you can’t keep running into things. Something’s going to give.

He who is often reproved, yet stiffens his neck,
will suddenly be broken beyond healing.
(Proverbs 29:1 ESV)

The neck-stiffener knows better. Someone is trying to help the man in Proverbs, but he won’t listen to it. The same generation that walked in the midst of the Red Sea on dry land stiffened their necks. They were a bunch of mini-pharaohs.

So there is a kind of default to defensiveness, a kind of willful ignorance, that isn’t strength, it’s brittle, and it becomes easy to break.