DAY TWENTY-TWO: 

The Golden Calf 

Exodus 32:1-34:35 

Before we begin with today's reading I'd like to touch on something I skipped over yesterday. God tells us in the second commandment not to make a carved (graven) image that represents Him. Exodus 20:5-6 says, "You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments." At first glance this sounds unfair. God punishes children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren for the sins of the parents? John Piper, the pastor of the Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, is one of the preachers I listen to for my Sabbath. He explains it well in a blog post entitled "How God Visits Sins on the Third and Fourth Generation." It's a short article and I commend it to you. In a nutshell, Piper says "The sins of the fathers are punished in the children through becoming the sins of the children." Parents who hate God and despise the Bible will, by the example they set, pass that attitude on to their children. Piper goes on to point out "Because of God’s grace, which is finally secured by Christ, the children can confess their own sins and the sins of their fathers and be forgiven and accepted by God." This warning is not an irreversible decree dooming the following generations no matter what they do.

Now, back to the Children of Israel in the wilderness. After the Lord spoke to all the people at Mt. Sinai, God called Moses to come nearer and He gave to him some more laws to pass on to the people. Then in Exodus 24:1-2, "Then he said to Moses, 'Come up to the Lord, you and Aaron, Nadab, and Abihu, and seventy of the elders of Israel, and worship from afar. Moses alone shall come near to the Lord, but the others shall not come near, and the people shall not come up with him.'" Moses went up on the mountain and was there for forty days and nights. In the meantime Moses' young assistant Joshua waited for Moses at the foot of the mountain while Aaron went back to lead the people in Moses' absence.

After Moses had been gone a good while the people started to worry. "Where is he? We don't know what's going on. We'd better do something!" Panic-induced decisions like this one are never good ones. They came to Aaron and said, "Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him." Aaron should have calmed the crowd and assured them that Moses would return and that the God of their fathers would not desert you. But he didn't do that. Instead he asked the people to bring him their gold jewelry. He melted it down and turned it into the statue of a bull calf. Bulls were a symbol of strength and were revered in nearly every pagan culture of the time. Above is a statue of the Egyptian god Apis, whom the Israelites would have recognized.

What was Aaron thinking? Was Moses' brother and right-hand man, who had been with Moses from that very first visit to Pharaoh and had seen every miracle up close, giving up on God? I don't think so. Notice what Aaron said to the people when he revealed the statue: "When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, 'Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.'" Aaron was not violating the first commandment, but rather the second. He was afraid the people would kill him and scatter. He sought to comfort and reassure them with a visual representation of the God who had delivered them, to calm them down until Moses came back.

It didn't work that way. We read "And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play." This feast to the Lord quickly turned into a raucous party. Aaron had intended the golden calf to represent the God whose name is I Am. The people, however, reverted to the sensual paganism they had seen all around them. The worship of other nations' gods would always be a temptation for Israel. Why? I see two reasons. First, as we've seen today, they had trouble keeping their faith in an unseen God. And second, pagan worship is fun! Drunkenness and uninhibited sex were hallmarks of the feasts to gods like Baal and Asherah. God's law is such a buzz kill.

God told Moses what was going on down in the camp. God said, "I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you." Stiff-necked means stubborn, unwilling to learn or obey. God is ready to wipe them out and start over with Moses. He made the same promise to Moses that He made to Abraham. What an offer! Those people had been trouble for Moses from day one. He could watch them burn! But notice what Moses said in reply. He gave God two reasons not to destroy His people: First, think of the Egyptians. They and all the other nations of the earth will wonder why You brought them out here just to kill them; and second, remember the promise to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. If you kill these people You've broken Your word. God heard Moses and relented.

But now Moses was mad, and he was coming down to deal with the situation. God had given him stone tablets with the Ten Commandments and other laws. Moses threw them down and broke them to pieces! Some have joked that Moses was the first man to break all ten commandments at once. But this is no joking matter! Moses took that golden calf, ground it up into dust, threw it into the water and made the people drink that bitter draught.

What follows just might be the funniest passage in the Bible. Moses asked Aaron, "What did this people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them?" Did they tie you up and pull your fingernails out? Did they tickle you? Just what did they do that was so bad that you brought them to the edge of annihilation? Aaron replied, "Let not the anger of my lord burn hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, 'Make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.' So I said to them, 'Let any who have gold take it off.' So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.'" Out came this calf?!?!?!?! I don't think I need to explain just how stupid that is!

Moses saw that the people had "broken loose." They had lost all sense of restraint and propriety. That word can also be translated as naked, and that is how the King James Version renders it. Remember how Adam and Eve felt shame when they realized that they were naked? The people of Israel had in essence taken of the righteous covering of the Lord. Moses rallied those who still loved the Lord and his fellow Levites came out in force. He ordered them to bring order again. They went through the camp and killed around 3,000 people to bring the people back into control. This may seem extreme, but think of how extreme this situation is. They're in the middle of the wilderness. If they won't follow God's leadership through Moses they will all die.

Moses then went back up the mountain with a heavy heart to intercede for the people. God's heart was broken, and so was his. He prayed to God to forgive the people, and the Lord did. But the Lord also said that He would no longer hang around the camp because of the peoples' proneness to sin. Instead, Moses pitched a tent a good distance away from the camp. He called it the Tent of Meeting. He would go there to speak with God, and the cloud that led them would settle over the tent. Moses had such wonderful fellowship with God that his face would glow after he had been in His presence. Moses was unaware of it, but it scared the people who saw it, so he wore a veil when he was outside of the Tent of Meeting.

God had not given up on His people, but they weren't on the best of terms either. We'll pick up the story tomorrow.

I want to take a few moments to consider this man Moses. Remember how his life divides into three parts? First he thought he was somebody when he was a member of Egypt's royal family. Then he learned that he was really nobody during those years as a shepherd in the wilderness. Then he learned how God can use a nobody. Moses learned this last lesson really well. Numbers 12:3 says, "Now the man Moses was very meek, more than all people who were on the face of the earth." And the postscript of Deuteronomy, which Joshua probably added, says of Moses "And there has not arisen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and the wonders that the Lord sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel." (Deut. 34:10-12) The secret of Moses' strength was in that Tent of Meeting, where he met with God. Jesus, the Son of God, likewise rose early and went off to spend time in prayer. Can we expect to do much for Christ if we ignore prayer? I've found that when I hurry my prayer time or skip it that I don't accomplish all that I thought I would. One of the best books on prayer is With Christ in the School of Prayer, by Andrew Murray. The link is to the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, where you can download it for free in several formats, including audio. I listened to the audio book last fall while driving back and forth to Cambridge.

I'll leave you with a song from Keith Green that sums up Israel's time in the wilderness with some humor: