I'll bring up peculiar personal experiences to put my slant on the question of Pharaoh's free will.
First of all, I make the peculiar claim that on the night my father died, he appeared in my room. As it turned out his body wasn't found for four more days, so I didn't hear about his death in the normal human fashion till four days later.
Anyway we talked and argued. At the end he gave this absolutely terrifying scream and then just disappeared. But during the discussion, as one point he exclaimed "I always was doomed! I didn't really have any choice!" I argued back (and I was an atheist at the time) saying "That can't be right!"
He replied, "Oh, it's right, all right. You can see that from here!" Yet later in the same discussion, he said "I was WILLING!" (to do the cruel stupid things that got him condemned, and to keep it up for 20 years).
If that peculiar episode was bona fide, and I think it was, then free will and predestination both operate in some fashion.
Now I'll relate another person's peculiar experience. When I was still Presbyterian, probably 30 years ago now, we had one Fred Nile at our church as a guest speaker over the weekend. Link refers -
Fred Nile - Wikipedia
Based in Sydney, he's not much liked by the homosexual community. However one of the people who came with him was a former homosexual, who gave a personal testimony.
To cut a long story short, he'd become Christian, but had "fallen". In despair he tried to commit suicide twice, and the second time he was dead serious. In his own words, he had it all set up and was ready to go.
But just as he was about to take the final step, he claimed that Christ materialised in the opposite corner of the room, moved towards him, and somehow merged with him.
He said that from that time on, he never even had to struggle with homosexual urges, and had married a woman who accepted his past (his wife and couple of young sons were in the audience with us). It was obvious he wasn't proud of his past, but he'd been miraculously delivered from a serious suicide attempt.
Now, most serious suicides DON'T get a miraculous deliverance, whether they're homosexual or not. As a matter of fact, I'd only been a Christian for about six months when the pastor's eldest son committed suicide (he had manic depression pretty badly).
So why was this particular bloke delivered, almost against his free will, and why did I happen to witness what I think was my father's terror as damnation approached, and hear his admission that he "always was doomed" but "was willing". Most people
don't have family members materialise in their bedroom on the night they die.
Like Pharaoh, my father persisted in his cruel behaviour for years. If anything he got worse over the years.
So when God ultimately determines that He's had enough of someone, and as far as He's concerned, they're finished(!), it's not usually after a few isolated incidents of personal misbehaviour - it takes place after a person has persisted in their evil, cruel and wilful behaviour for quite some time.
Pharaoh's cruelty was hardly an overnight thing - he or his predecessors had commanded the Jewish babies should be killed, that the work load should ever increase, while refusing to give them the straw they needed to make viable bricks etc. And it went on for a long time.
It got to the point when God thought - "Enough is enough! Now he's going to pay for it!"
But as for the mystery of free will and predestination, there's a former homosexual in Sydney somewhere (presuming he still lives there and is still alive) who is a witness to God's personal intervention, when so many other people in the same circumstance have simply died, and not been delivered miraculously from their own obsessive behaviour.
I don't know the answer to the dichotomy of predestination and free will, but I think the time can come when if someone persists in their evil behaviour, God writes them off. Adolf Hitler was probably always doomed in God's eyes, but it wasn't till he became involved in murderous Nazi politics, and persisted in it, that he set out on the path of unavoidable perdition. Before that there was possibly a chance he could have been saved.
But that's just my opinion. Was Judas Iscariot always doomed?
John 17:12 NIV
While I was with them, I protected them and kept them safe by that name you gave me. None has been lost except the one doomed to destruction so that Scripture would be fulfilled.
Did Judas really have any choice? Your guess is as good as mine.