Bu oldhermit
Chapter Thirty-two
I. The Golden Calf, 1-10
A. The circumstances – Moses has not returned after 40 days, 24:18
1. Impatience - The people feel a need to respond to their circumstances even though the circumstances require no response. "We don't know what to do but, we need to do something" seems to be the attitude. They are in no danger from enemies, they have plenty of food and water, yet there seems to be a feeling of restlessness.
2. Uncertainty - "As for this Moses...we do not know what has become of him."
3. Apprehension - They feel they should be moving on yet no one has given the command to move on. They feel they need someone else to "go before them."
4. Perhaps the feeling of vulnerability - The cloud and pillar of fire is no longer before them but is resting on the mountain, 24:15. With both Moses and the cloud no longer before them they feel abandoned. They do not seem to believe Moses will return. They have now convinced themselves they need another leader and another god.
B. The importance of visible representations - Moses, their visible representation of God, is gone and they do not know what has become of him.
1. Israel has not yet learned to trust the invisible. They feel they must have something they can experience at the sensory level on which they can depend. They must have something going before them they can see and touch. They do not feel they can depend on what they cannot see so they choose to abandon both God and Moses whom they can no longer see.
2. Their solution - This is only about 40 days after God has relayed them the commandments in chapter 20 and in 24:3, the people all declared, "All the words which the Lord has spoken we will do!" Consider the absurdity of the request they now make."Make us a god who will go before us."
a. Someone has to "make" the god.
b. This god cannot "go before" them. It would have to be carried by the people.
3. The nature of Israel's idolatry
In their own minds Israel is still worshiping Jehovah, not a golden calf of Egypt. "Tomorrow, there shall be a feast unto Jehovah," 5. Having never seen Jehovah, how do they know what form to attribute to him?
When we talk about God, our mind is unable to formulate an accurate image since we have no experience with God at the sensory level. We simply have no point of reference from which to envision God. Every individual, despite cultural or religious exposure, will envision God in their own mind according to his or her concept of God, which is invariably formed out of one’s exposure to various religious teachings and cultural experiences. We do this because our mind must have some frame of reference to which to connect language. This is precisely what Israel did when they came to Mt. Sinai. Moses had been their only visible iconic connection with the invisible God.
4. Why the image of the golden calf? Familiarity
Since their only visible representation had disappeared, they replaced him with another. Being unable to connect their senses to the unseen world, they connected what was unseen to the natural world. They could only create a mental image of God according to their points of reference. Israel decided to adopt a familiar image that they could corporately associate as god. What they did was create a familiar frame of reference. They turned to the natural world to create something they felt would give them a sense of continuity. They created a god in the form of something with which they all had experience, either Apis the bull of Egypt or a different type of golden calf figure.
It seems that when visible representations are taken away, man will attempt to replace them in order to maintain some sense of connection with their idea of the unseen. In the Hebrew camp, there is a sense of abandonment and uncertainty. Apart from a revelation from God about himself, man will always fall into some form of idolatry. The farther away man gets from revelation the more naturalistic and perverted his image of God will become, Deuteronomy 4:15-19 - “So watch yourselves carefully, since you did not see any form on the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire (Ex. 20), so that you do not act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water below the earth. “And beware not to lift up your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, and be drawn away and worship them and serve them, those which the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven."
C. Aaron's idolatry, 2-5
1. There is no indication that Aaron offered any resistance or that he even so much as disagreed with their suggestion. In fact, he takes the lead in the matter.
2. He solicits the gold ear rings of the people.
3. He goes through the process of making an idol.
a. He melts down the gold.
b. He then takes the raw gold and fashions it, and shapes it. The shape of the calf is a deliberate, premeditated choice. Aaron decided the form their god was to be given and he fashioned it accordingly.
c. He presented it to the people saying, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” Attributing the works of God to the works of the hands of man has to be the greatest offense that man can extend toward God. The example of Mark 3:20-30 and Matthew 23:22-37 offers a very similar parallel with regard to the seriousness of attributing the works of God to someone else. Understanding the nature of Jesus condemnation of those in Mark 3 will help us appreciate the severity of Israel's sin in Exodus 32.
"And he came home, and the crowd gathered again, to such an extent that they could not even eat a meal. When his own people heard of this, they went out to take custody of him; for they were saying, he has lost His senses. The scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, 'He is possessed by Beelzebul, and He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons'."
"He called them to himself and began speaking to them in parables, 'How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he is finished! But no one can enter the strong man’s house and plunder his property unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house. Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin because they were saying, He has an unclean spirit'.”
The blasphemy lay in the fact that they had attributed the work of the Holy Spirit to that of demons and calling the Holy Spirit unclean.
d. Aaron builds an altar for their new god.
e. He declares the following day to be a “feast to Jehovah.”
Jehovah was the one who regulated the worship of Israel and he had declared his own feast days. In idolatry it is man who must assume that role.
D. The people's idolatry, 6
1. Aaron offers the burnt offerings that belong to Jehovah and presents them before this golden calf. In this, Aaron is consecrating the people to their new idol. Their consecration to Jehovah is forgotten.
2. Aaron offers the Lord's peace offerings before this god and the people sat down to eat and to drink. They have now joined themselves in communion with this god of gold. God's consecration and fellowship is now abandoned in favor of their new god. They use the fellowship of the Lord's peace offering to unite themselves to their new god.
3. And they rose up to play - צָחַק - According to Strong, to laugh, play, mock, or to make sport of. This same word is used in Genesis 39:14 when Potipher's wife accused Joseph of attempted rape. The context of Exodus 32 is not simply that of harmless frivolity but of the uncontrolled sexual orgy associated with idolatry.
E. God's anger against the people, 7-10
1. “Go down at once."
a. This is a matter that requited immediate intervention on the part of Moses. God stops his discourse with Moses and commands him to tend to the conduct of the people.
b. “For your people, whom you brought up from the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves." Corrupted themselves - שִׁחֵ֣ת - destroyed, corrupted.
2. “They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and have sacrificed to it and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!’” This certainlybetrays an air of fickleness and ingratitude toward the Lord. These are a people who are quickly and easily misled.
3. “I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people. Obstinate - קְשֵׁה – stiff-necked, one who refuses to bow.
4. “Now then let me alone, that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation.” This is a test of the character of Moses. Moses is told by God that he will now become the father of a great nation but at the cost of the destruction of the people. This would perhaps have been a hard choice for many to make because this appeals to one's sense of vanity. God has now entrusted the fate of the people into Moses' hands. Will he simply allow them to be destroyed and accept God's proposal or will he intervene? This is actually a win, win situation for Moses. There is no doubt their destruction is both warranted and justified and had Moses chosen to do so he could have simply kept silent at the Lord's request to "Let me alone," and left Israel to their fate and would have been justified in doing so. Or, he could stand between the wrath of God and the people. This has to be Moses' greatest moment. He stands between God and the people and argues his case before God on their behalf. He stands in the apex position of this triadic structure fulfilling his divinely appointed function as the mediator between God and man. "Therefore he said that he would destroy them had not Moses his chosen one stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them," Psalms 106:23. This typology is fulfilled in the function of Jesus as the Mediator between God and man, "For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus," 1 Timothy 2:5.
II. Moses Argues the Case of the People Before the Lord, 11-14 – Intercession is mediatorial function.
A. Moses presents four arguments
1. The argument of ownership – These are your people.
2. The argument of God's involvement – You brought them up out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand. Moses could not have done this.
3. The argument of false perception – Egyptians would have misrepresented the act as one of malicious and evil intent. "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, ‘With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth’?"
4. The argument of divine promise – “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom you swore by yourself, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’”
B. God changed his mind. God's change of mind was not due to the force of Moses' arguments. God a;ready knew these things. It was for the simple fact that Moses was willing to intercede.
1. The fact that they were God's people and that he had delivered them does not make God unjust in his willingness to destroy them.
2. Do you really think God is concerned with how Egypt or anyone else may or may not perceive of his actions toward his own people? No. God will not be judged by Egypt.
3. If God had made a great nation out of Moses, his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would have still been fulfilled because Moses was also of the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
III. Moses Destroys the Golden Calf, 15-20
A. Moses and Joshua return to the camp.
B. Moses destroys the tablets in his anger.
1. This is in direct response to their involvement with the golden calf. I can only imagine the indignation Moses must have felt toward the people after having spent 40 days in the presence of the living God only to return to camp and find the people worshiping a chunk of gold.
2. His breaking of the stone commandments was symbolic of the fact that Israel had already broken them in actuality.
C. Moses melts down the golden calf and grinds it into powder. He then spreads it across the water and forces the people to drink it. He makes them devour their own god.
Chapter Thirty-two
I. The Golden Calf, 1-10
A. The circumstances – Moses has not returned after 40 days, 24:18
1. Impatience - The people feel a need to respond to their circumstances even though the circumstances require no response. "We don't know what to do but, we need to do something" seems to be the attitude. They are in no danger from enemies, they have plenty of food and water, yet there seems to be a feeling of restlessness.
2. Uncertainty - "As for this Moses...we do not know what has become of him."
3. Apprehension - They feel they should be moving on yet no one has given the command to move on. They feel they need someone else to "go before them."
4. Perhaps the feeling of vulnerability - The cloud and pillar of fire is no longer before them but is resting on the mountain, 24:15. With both Moses and the cloud no longer before them they feel abandoned. They do not seem to believe Moses will return. They have now convinced themselves they need another leader and another god.
B. The importance of visible representations - Moses, their visible representation of God, is gone and they do not know what has become of him.
1. Israel has not yet learned to trust the invisible. They feel they must have something they can experience at the sensory level on which they can depend. They must have something going before them they can see and touch. They do not feel they can depend on what they cannot see so they choose to abandon both God and Moses whom they can no longer see.
2. Their solution - This is only about 40 days after God has relayed them the commandments in chapter 20 and in 24:3, the people all declared, "All the words which the Lord has spoken we will do!" Consider the absurdity of the request they now make."Make us a god who will go before us."
a. Someone has to "make" the god.
b. This god cannot "go before" them. It would have to be carried by the people.
3. The nature of Israel's idolatry
In their own minds Israel is still worshiping Jehovah, not a golden calf of Egypt. "Tomorrow, there shall be a feast unto Jehovah," 5. Having never seen Jehovah, how do they know what form to attribute to him?
When we talk about God, our mind is unable to formulate an accurate image since we have no experience with God at the sensory level. We simply have no point of reference from which to envision God. Every individual, despite cultural or religious exposure, will envision God in their own mind according to his or her concept of God, which is invariably formed out of one’s exposure to various religious teachings and cultural experiences. We do this because our mind must have some frame of reference to which to connect language. This is precisely what Israel did when they came to Mt. Sinai. Moses had been their only visible iconic connection with the invisible God.
4. Why the image of the golden calf? Familiarity
Since their only visible representation had disappeared, they replaced him with another. Being unable to connect their senses to the unseen world, they connected what was unseen to the natural world. They could only create a mental image of God according to their points of reference. Israel decided to adopt a familiar image that they could corporately associate as god. What they did was create a familiar frame of reference. They turned to the natural world to create something they felt would give them a sense of continuity. They created a god in the form of something with which they all had experience, either Apis the bull of Egypt or a different type of golden calf figure.
It seems that when visible representations are taken away, man will attempt to replace them in order to maintain some sense of connection with their idea of the unseen. In the Hebrew camp, there is a sense of abandonment and uncertainty. Apart from a revelation from God about himself, man will always fall into some form of idolatry. The farther away man gets from revelation the more naturalistic and perverted his image of God will become, Deuteronomy 4:15-19 - “So watch yourselves carefully, since you did not see any form on the day the LORD spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire (Ex. 20), so that you do not act corruptly and make a graven image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the sky, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water below the earth. “And beware not to lift up your eyes to heaven and see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, and be drawn away and worship them and serve them, those which the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven."
C. Aaron's idolatry, 2-5
1. There is no indication that Aaron offered any resistance or that he even so much as disagreed with their suggestion. In fact, he takes the lead in the matter.
2. He solicits the gold ear rings of the people.
3. He goes through the process of making an idol.
a. He melts down the gold.
b. He then takes the raw gold and fashions it, and shapes it. The shape of the calf is a deliberate, premeditated choice. Aaron decided the form their god was to be given and he fashioned it accordingly.
c. He presented it to the people saying, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.” Attributing the works of God to the works of the hands of man has to be the greatest offense that man can extend toward God. The example of Mark 3:20-30 and Matthew 23:22-37 offers a very similar parallel with regard to the seriousness of attributing the works of God to someone else. Understanding the nature of Jesus condemnation of those in Mark 3 will help us appreciate the severity of Israel's sin in Exodus 32.
"And he came home, and the crowd gathered again, to such an extent that they could not even eat a meal. When his own people heard of this, they went out to take custody of him; for they were saying, he has lost His senses. The scribes who came down from Jerusalem were saying, 'He is possessed by Beelzebul, and He casts out the demons by the ruler of the demons'."
"He called them to himself and began speaking to them in parables, 'How can Satan cast out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. If a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. If Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand, but he is finished! But no one can enter the strong man’s house and plunder his property unless he first binds the strong man, and then he will plunder his house. Truly I say to you, all sins shall be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin because they were saying, He has an unclean spirit'.”
The blasphemy lay in the fact that they had attributed the work of the Holy Spirit to that of demons and calling the Holy Spirit unclean.
d. Aaron builds an altar for their new god.
e. He declares the following day to be a “feast to Jehovah.”
Jehovah was the one who regulated the worship of Israel and he had declared his own feast days. In idolatry it is man who must assume that role.
D. The people's idolatry, 6
1. Aaron offers the burnt offerings that belong to Jehovah and presents them before this golden calf. In this, Aaron is consecrating the people to their new idol. Their consecration to Jehovah is forgotten.
2. Aaron offers the Lord's peace offerings before this god and the people sat down to eat and to drink. They have now joined themselves in communion with this god of gold. God's consecration and fellowship is now abandoned in favor of their new god. They use the fellowship of the Lord's peace offering to unite themselves to their new god.
3. And they rose up to play - צָחַק - According to Strong, to laugh, play, mock, or to make sport of. This same word is used in Genesis 39:14 when Potipher's wife accused Joseph of attempted rape. The context of Exodus 32 is not simply that of harmless frivolity but of the uncontrolled sexual orgy associated with idolatry.
E. God's anger against the people, 7-10
1. “Go down at once."
a. This is a matter that requited immediate intervention on the part of Moses. God stops his discourse with Moses and commands him to tend to the conduct of the people.
b. “For your people, whom you brought up from the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves." Corrupted themselves - שִׁחֵ֣ת - destroyed, corrupted.
2. “They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and have sacrificed to it and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!’” This certainlybetrays an air of fickleness and ingratitude toward the Lord. These are a people who are quickly and easily misled.
3. “I have seen this people, and behold, they are an obstinate people. Obstinate - קְשֵׁה – stiff-necked, one who refuses to bow.
4. “Now then let me alone, that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them; and I will make of you a great nation.” This is a test of the character of Moses. Moses is told by God that he will now become the father of a great nation but at the cost of the destruction of the people. This would perhaps have been a hard choice for many to make because this appeals to one's sense of vanity. God has now entrusted the fate of the people into Moses' hands. Will he simply allow them to be destroyed and accept God's proposal or will he intervene? This is actually a win, win situation for Moses. There is no doubt their destruction is both warranted and justified and had Moses chosen to do so he could have simply kept silent at the Lord's request to "Let me alone," and left Israel to their fate and would have been justified in doing so. Or, he could stand between the wrath of God and the people. This has to be Moses' greatest moment. He stands between God and the people and argues his case before God on their behalf. He stands in the apex position of this triadic structure fulfilling his divinely appointed function as the mediator between God and man. "Therefore he said that he would destroy them had not Moses his chosen one stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them," Psalms 106:23. This typology is fulfilled in the function of Jesus as the Mediator between God and man, "For there is one God, and one mediator also between God and men, the man Christ Jesus," 1 Timothy 2:5.
II. Moses Argues the Case of the People Before the Lord, 11-14 – Intercession is mediatorial function.
A. Moses presents four arguments
1. The argument of ownership – These are your people.
2. The argument of God's involvement – You brought them up out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand. Moses could not have done this.
3. The argument of false perception – Egyptians would have misrepresented the act as one of malicious and evil intent. "Why should the Egyptians speak, saying, ‘With evil intent He brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to destroy them from the face of the earth’?"
4. The argument of divine promise – “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, Your servants to whom you swore by yourself, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your descendants as the stars of the heavens, and all this land of which I have spoken I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever.’”
B. God changed his mind. God's change of mind was not due to the force of Moses' arguments. God a;ready knew these things. It was for the simple fact that Moses was willing to intercede.
1. The fact that they were God's people and that he had delivered them does not make God unjust in his willingness to destroy them.
2. Do you really think God is concerned with how Egypt or anyone else may or may not perceive of his actions toward his own people? No. God will not be judged by Egypt.
3. If God had made a great nation out of Moses, his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob would have still been fulfilled because Moses was also of the seed of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
III. Moses Destroys the Golden Calf, 15-20
A. Moses and Joshua return to the camp.
B. Moses destroys the tablets in his anger.
1. This is in direct response to their involvement with the golden calf. I can only imagine the indignation Moses must have felt toward the people after having spent 40 days in the presence of the living God only to return to camp and find the people worshiping a chunk of gold.
2. His breaking of the stone commandments was symbolic of the fact that Israel had already broken them in actuality.
C. Moses melts down the golden calf and grinds it into powder. He then spreads it across the water and forces the people to drink it. He makes them devour their own god.