Exodus 9:14 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

For I will at this, &c.— The following translation of these verses, which is agreeable to Houbigant, will supersede all criticism, and render them extremely plain and intelligible: Exodus 9:13. Let my people go, that they may serve me; 14. Otherwise, I will at this time send all my plagues upon thy heart, that thou mayest know there is none like me in all the earth. 15. For now I could stretch out my hand, and smite thee and thy people with pestilence, and thou shouldest be cut off from the earth: 16. But, in very deed, for this cause have I made thee subsist [held thee up, preserved thee], that I might shew in thee my power, &c. See the margin of our Bibles. The verb, which we render raised up, has that sense which the margin, and the version here given, assign. It is agreeable also to most of the ancient versions; and St. Paul's word, Romans 9:17. εξηγειρα, rendered, in our translation, raised up, signifies to raise up again from any danger or evil: not, as is generally thought, to raise up or cause to exist; and therefore it must be understood in the sense of raising up Pharaoh from the foregoing sickness, from the miseries of the late punishment of ulcers, &c.; and the word is so used, James 5:15. The meaning therefore of the passage is, that God had caused Pharaoh still to exist, had spared him in the midst of punishment, for the greater exemplification of his glory: not that he had created him solely for this end. Dr. Wall observes, that St. Paul, in the 22nd verse of this 9th chapter to the Romans, explains his own sense of the phrase raised thee up in the 17th: What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and make his power known, endured, with much long-suffering, the vessels of wrath, fitted to destruction.