Introduction
Let us start with a look at the structure of Exodus post covenant.
1. Chapters 25-31: Instructions about the tabernacle.
2. Chapters 35-40: the building of the tabernacle with most of the instructions repeated.
3. Chapters 32-34: The episode of the golden calf.
Immediately we can see that the rebellion of the Israelites portrayed in their making of the Golden Calf is central to the second half of this book in more ways than one. The covenant God has made with the Israelites has been confirmed with blood sacrifice in 24:1-7 where the people say, "We will do everything the Lord has said." The bulk of the material in this part of Exodus is about the tabernacle however.
Tabernacle
The reason God wants the tabernacle built is so he can live amongst his people as is evident from chapter 25 verse 8. When we look back to the Garden of Eden and then forward to the New Jerusalem that is heaven, we see that God's plan all along is to have a people for himself and to live with them, in their midst. God is the God of relationship and Exodus is about relationship. When they reach Canaan they are to have no human king, because God is to be their king and it is only after much bickering that God relents and sends them Saul.
Israel’s Apostasy - Verses 1-8
The reason for Israel’s apostasy in verse 1 appears to be a case of simple impatience. Moses is gone six weeks and seemingly might never return. Moses is of course, God’s representative and so the people's impatience is really with God whatever they might say.
In making the golden calf perhaps they are trying to fashion a new god (Hebrew, elohiym) different from Yahweh? Or perhaps another representation of Yahweh – after all they hold a feast to Yahweh once it is made. It is not clear and I think this confusion indicates a certain muddle-headedness in their perception of Yahweh and spiritual activity.
Their action is deeply sinful and is so because they have expressly made a god to 'go before' them (forbidden in commandment 1), and an idol or graven image (forbidden in commandment 3). In effect they are breaking relationship with God and deviating from the path of God’s will. The calf is a potent sign of the animalistic and their "revelry" as the text puts it is literally orgying. They bring worship down to the basest of levels.
Some observations:
Exodus is about God being made known to humanity. God must be revealed for us to know him and he is the only one who can do that. Therefore, we must wait on him to do so. When people don’t wait, like the Israelites, they fill their lives with pagan gods. In this, they copy their previous masters, the Egyptians. That’s who they got the jewellery from that they use for the raw material for the calf!
They have not altogether abandoned Yahweh but are borrowing pagan ways in the absence of direct leadership. When believers become tired of waiting for God to act we are tempted to invent our own religious activity. We have a name for this mix-and-match approach to religion and certainly and that is syncretism. The early Church struggled with it and so do we.
There is a lesson for the Christian in this. A danger for church people in any age is the temptation to bring the world into worship rather than worship into the world. '"We want to be culturally of our age," we say and so we compromise,' says David Jackman of the Cornhill Training Course in London. In some extreme cases we have seen the appearance of drugs and sexual practise into religious ceremonies. I recently heard of someone who would move to Manchester in the North West of England. In looking for a new church with an emphasis on ministry to young people they had discovered at least one fellowship where people were encouraged to take drugs to heighten the experience of 'worship'. And some years ago the British press made much of the errant Minister, Chris Brain, in Sheffield who was reported to have turned youth services into little more than discos and vehicle for self aggrandisement. Allegedly he was having inappropriate sexual relationships with a number of the women.
God and Moses hold a crisis meeting - verses 9-14
We might ask who’s people are the Israelites. In verse 7 God says the Israelites belong to Moses. Notice they are no longer 'my people', meaning God's people, and that Moses is supposedly for one who brought them up out of Egypt. In verse 11, Moses reminds God that it’s really God who did so and that these people belong to Yahweh.
We have a tension in the biblical story now. How will God set about calling a people to be 'my people' again? Not only in the short term but in the long term too. God eventually solves the 'my people / your people' problem through Jesus who is both human and divine but that is a long way down the track still.
The Power of Prayer
In verse 10 God talks of destroying the Israelites as punishment for such flagrant covenant breaking and plans to start all over again with Moses as he did with Abraham, but by verse 14 God relents after the first of three major prayers by Moses in this section. Here is an object lesson in the power of intercession! That is undoubtedly the stress of the writer.
Prayer 1 – ‘Lord, Don’t destroy the Israelites’
What is so effective about the prayer of Moses in 11-13 is that Moses appeals to God’s own character as God himself has revealed it. He tells God such action would go against God’s ‘published’ nature and would bring his name, Yahweh, into disrepute amongst the pagan nations.
Moses appeals on the basis of Scripture and the promises of God. He asks God if he dare break his own divine word, and thereby show himself untrustworthy.
David Jackman describes this as 'biblical praying': here’s your word, Lord, so do as your word says. Moses uses what Philip Hill, a recent speaker at Living Word, called a warrant for prayer.
Observation:
Verse 10 is something of an enigma. Is this not God's declared word in which we put so much faith? Is God’s word actually not consistent after all? I think we should understand this in terms of God expressing an intention or a threat. It’s not clear that he has yet passed sentence, but is expressing to Moses the most obvious sentence.
This prayer does not change the will of God in terms of God achieving his purposes for humankind, but it does change his dealings with those who are already his people in achieving those purposes. The project is still on, the workforce have are revolting, but the boss is persuaded to persevere cut them some slack and not to hire a new workforce.
Chaos verses 15-29
Moses and Joshua return down the mountain holding the tablets of the law in the stone tablets which contain the words that condemn the Israelites’ apostasy. Although Moses tells Joshua the sound emanating up to them are the sounds of revelry rather than the sound of defeat or victory, in some ways it is indeed the sound of defeat, spiritual defeat.
Instead of showing an attitude of repentance and grieving over their action in the light of God’s word, their revelry displays an attitude of 'couldn’t-care-less'. Having left Egypt to hold a festival to the Lord, they have turned the celebration into a grotesque parody of that. It celebrates their own base human nature rather than Yahweh.
Perhaps church fellowships and denominations might look at their traditions and ask where they are doing to same, even if not as flagrantly. Is church a celebration of redemption and of a holy God or a celebration to make us feel good? In these liberal days of the start of the 21st century I fear that the UK and probably much of the USA is gripped by 'feel good religion' that is much too close to the golden calf for comfort.
As God became angry, so Moses in his turn becomes angry. He destroys the tablets of the law and the golden calf so that neither do the people have Yahweh’s covenant gift of the law nor their idol which allows them to write their own law. They cannot escape God’s punishment for law-breaking however, and the Levite firing squad kill three thousand.
Every Drama must have a comedy relief - verses 21-24
Aaron claims to have collected the gold, put it in the fire and, "out came this calf!" he explains. Either this is the classic schoolboy line, "I didn’t do anything, sir, it just fell off and broke all by itself", and he’s too ashamed to own up properly, or there could be another explanation. It might be a claim of a miracle having taken place through the agency of the idol. If so it was rather pathetic in comparison to the incredible miracles that Yahweh had done both in and since Egypt.
Punishment
Not all the Israelites have succumbed to the temptation of revelry. The Levite clan has not – they have overcome and withstood the temptation. They are prepared to be obedient to Yahweh’s leader, Moses even as they undertake this unpleasant task of exacting capital punishment on 3,000 of the guilty. If Moses thought however, that this ‘token gesture’ would appease God, he was badly mistaken as we will see.
God sends a plague which of course reminds us of Egypt. The punishment is fitting because their actions have marked them out as Egyptian in their thinking and loyalties. They are not being a people set apart for a holy God.
Prayer 2 – “Lord, please forgive them” - verses 30-35
Moses tries to appease God also by seemingly offering himself as a substitutionary sacrifice or atonement as he describes it, but that is not acceptable to God. Moses is also a sinful man, and not the blameless upright man that was Jesus Christ. Or perhaps he is blameless in this case and the guilty must bear their own responsibility. It is not altogether clear to me whether the atonement that Moses speaks about is his own self-sacrifice or whether he has another means in mind. The important point however, is that the leader of God's people is the one who seeks to make atonement on the half of the people. This is exactly what Christ has done for the church at the cross.
Despite Moses’ punishment of Israel, God sends a plague as further punishment (verse35). Chillingly, Yahweh says he will blot out of his book (The book of life) all sinners and that includes Moses too.
Isn’t this all getting rather heavy-handed and gory! Perhaps there is an important point to make that requires this kind of crystal clear signal to ensure we understand it. People cannot escape the consequences of their guilt before a holy God. I’m not certain whether God sends the plague as a substitution for blotting out their names from the book. It’s possible given the subject of the conversation, but Moses’ intercession to God in verse 31 seems to imply a gradation of sinfulness, that some are worthy of greater punishment than others. God’s reply shows that every type of sin bears the death penalty by preventing eternal salvation. Without some mechanism to circumvent that the outlook for the Israelites and for humanity subsequently is hopeless.
How different this is from the New Testament covenant. The atoning sacrifice that Jesus made is acceptable in so far as when God looks at his sinning people in the Church he sees only the perfection of Christ, and all of us are forgiven our equally gross transgressions – thank God!
But that’s the New Testament. We are left wondering what God is going to do about the Israelite nation camped at the bottom of Mount Sinai. Apparently he has not forgiven them and as we go into the next chapter we see God’s dilemma expressed and that prompts a third prayer from Moses.