March 30 – Exodus Week 13

Main Focus: As we follow God, we will have moments of unfaithfulness. In those moments, his grace and mercy cover us.

This is the second-to-last week of our Exodus series, and we’ve arrived at the infamous Golden Calf episode (which makes it sound like a TV show; tune in next week for the season finale). We’ll read most of Exodus 32 and hit almost all the painful points of Israel’s covenant breach, then we’ll jump to Exodus 34 to see Israel’s faithful covenant Lord. As usual, we’ll find in Israel a parallel for ourselves, and we’ll conclude with how God’s mercy informs our daily lives.

Based on Exodus 24:18, the golden calf was made sometime towards the end of Moses’s forty days on the mountain. In flagrant disregard for all that God had done for them in recent months, the people requested gods to go before them (literally, statues to carry at the front as they march into battle), gods like they had seen and perhaps even worshipped in Egypt (cf. Acts 7:39). And Aaron, who put up no fight at all (and afterward blamed it on the fire, 32:24), consented. Note that he asks for their gold jewelry, some if not all of which was given to them by the Egyptians when their actual God liberated them (12:35-36). This he made into a golden calf, a common deity image in the ancient Near East, and went so far as to build an altar for it so the people could make offerings like they’d done to ratify their covenant with Yahweh (24:4-5). At every possible turn the Israelites disdain God’s covenantal, loving relationship with them. In discussion, we’ll ask about why they gave up on God so quickly, in part so that we can start to see that they are us; we are prone to the same thing.

Now, two things might trip you up in the passage. The first is a confusing plural in verse 4; Aaron made them one calf but the people said “These are your gods!” There’s a chance Israel wasn’t replacing Yahweh with the calf god so much as putting it alongside him; you’ll see Aaron still uses God’s covenantal name, the LORD, in verse 5. Regardless, God’s prohibitions against worshipping other gods were violated. The second trip hazard is the strange bit about Moses’s intercession, which we’ll look at directly in discussion.

God’s anger rightfully burns hot against the people’s faithlessness, and he divulges a plan to smite them and create a new nation out of Moses as he did with Noah and Abraham. Moses, however, intercedes for Israel by calling God to remember his promises. At first glance it reads as if God is a hothead with a loaded gun and Moses is trying to get him to calm down. In actuality, notice that God vocalizes all of this to Moses; he didn’t have to let Moses in on his plan. Also, think back to the rest of Exodus; from what we’ve seen thus far, God is always the one to set the terms and do what he says. This is not to say that God was just play acting, or wasn’t actually mad, but merely to suggest that God, righteous in his anger, was open to extend mercy through the intercession of a mediator. Looking ahead towards Jesus, this is to say that God has always done it this way, and all of this was intentionally carried out with Moses and recorded for our benefit to reveal a God who is rightly wrathful towards sin but has mercy towards his people.

We’ll see even more of that when we turn to Exodus 34:1-9. There Moses has asked to see God, and God lets Moses see his backside while proclaiming his covenant name, “The LORD, the LORD!” Don’t miss that all this is after the golden calf episode; God has literally proven his mercy towards those who fear before him. We’ll ask how this picture of God challenges our understanding of him, and it’ll likely hit many of us differently; some of us perpetually struggle to see God as truly merciful, while others of us will struggle to accept that a good God can have wrath towards sin. The task of the Christian is always to receive God as he presents himself, not as we wish he was.

We’ll conclude by discussing when we are most prone to disbelieve God’s mercy towards us before trying to integrate God’s mercy with our daily life. What does it mean for us to live as those who once had not received mercy but now have received it (1 Pet 2:10)? Surely God’s mercy brings us to a point of worship like Moses in Exodus 34, and surely his mercy draws us to covenant faithfulness now that our covenant faithlessness has been covered by the blood of Jesus. But we can also imagine the ways we might relate to God differently knowing that his heart harbors infinite love and mercy towards us, and to have this love do its work within and through us.