In Scripture, we can read true stories of real people. We can learn about their lives, their relationships, the responses they made to God.

By the Spirit, we can see much more. As we read and seek, Christ in us takes those stories from the distant past and lifts and turns them – like a many-faceted jewel under a clear light. He points out what he wants to show us today, that is eternal and precious and true.

In Scripture, we can read about Moses’ seven treks up Mount Sinai. We can reflect on the ways real people responded to the God who had delivered them.

As we open ourselves to the Word and the Spirit, may we see and receive much more.

Come, make us gods

Why did God deliver the Israelites from Egypt? Most of my life I would have answered, “To bring them out of bondage, into the Promised Land.”

And that’s true. But there’s more.

During and between Moses’ visits with God on Sinai, the Lord revealed his purpose behind the purpose: To bring his people to himself.

In that barren wilderness, God was working:

• To show a previously enslaved people who he is and who he had created them to be.
• To invite them to choose to be his people, to choose him as their God.
• To show and tell them what that commitment would involve.

And if they said yes:

• To enter a covenant relationship with them. And also,
• To make a way where there was none to dwell in their midst.

The people did say yes. Hours later, Moses climbed Sinai for the sixth time. He stayed on the mountain for 40 days. But while their leader remained before God on their behalf, the people ran amuck.

While their Lord planned a place to live among them – a place from which he would guide and guard them – they approached Aaron, whom Moses had left in charge. Gathering around him, they said:

“Come, make us gods who will go before us.”

While Moses pressed in to receive every word of God’s message for them, they wrote him off too:

“As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” (Ex. 32:1)

And then: While Moses remained absent on a fiery mountain, Aaron betrayed his brother. And while the Lord was naming Aaron to serve him as high priest, Aaron betrayed his God.

Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.”

So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.

Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD.” (Ex. 32:2-5)

It took a lot of earrings, a lot of fashioning, a lot of colluding in wrongdoing, to make that golden cow. Standing before their new idol, the people worshiped many gods. “These gods delivered us from bondage!” they cried.

Aaron’s lie was even worse. Using God’s covenant name – the name no one today knows how to fully spell, or to pronounce – their spiritual leader declared, “Go for it, guys! Let’s bow before this cow, and worship any gods we choose! That will honor the LORD!”

How could he and they be so self-deceived? They had just said yes when God spoke aloud to tell them all, “I expect an exclusive relationship, if you make covenant with me.”

I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt where you were slaves. You must not have any other gods except me.

You must not make for yourselves an idol …

You must not use the name of the LORD your God thoughtlessly; the LORD will punish anyone who misuses his name.¹

While the Lord wrote those same words on stone tablets, a people who had just committed themselves to be his people reveled in breaking their vows.

I have been watching

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’” (Ex. 32:7-8)

He added:

“I have been watching these people.” (Ex. 32:9 CJB)

So if God had been watching the people, why didn’t he send Moses down earlier? Why didn’t he stop his detailed description of the tabernacle somewhere in mid-sentence and say, “Go down, Moses. Your people are about to do something really stupid”?

Why did he wait until the deed was done, then tell Moses, “Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation” (Ex. 32:10)?

Why did the Lord, just as quickly, change his mind?

But Moses begged the Lord his God and said, “Lord, don’t let your anger destroy your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with your great power and strength. Don’t let the people of Egypt say, ‘The Lord brought the Israelites out of Egypt for an evil purpose. He planned to kill them in the mountains and destroy them from the earth.’ So stop being angry, and don’t destroy your people.

“Remember the men who served you – Abraham, Isaac, and Israel. You promised with an oath to them and said, ‘I will make your descendants as many as the stars in the sky. I will give your descendants all this land that I have promised them, and it will be theirs forever.’”

So the Lord changed his mind and did not destroy the people as he had said he might. (Ex. 32:11-14 NCV)

Why, then, after Moses returned down the mountain, did 3,000 people die by the sword and an unknown number succumb to plague?

Is the God who met with Moses easily offended, temperamental and capricious – or is he merciful and just?

Lord, you are just … have mercy

In Exodus 32, God’s people were speeding the wrong direction down a one-way street. They were sleeping around on their wedding night. They were selling themselves into a worse bondage than the one from which they had just escaped.

The Lord caught them in the act. To have stopped the people before they made the idol would not have changed their hearts. The sin was accomplished, and the penalty demanded, as soon as they made up their minds to do it. But only when they had carried out their plan would the truth of their divided hearts be evident, to those with eyes to see.

Still, we might think God over-reacted, and in his anger, named a penalty that far exceeded the crime. But that’s because we cannot fathom the gravity of the people’s offense. By their own choice, they had entered blood covenant with the Lord God himself. Then, in the most hurtful and blatant way possible, they had abandoned and betrayed him. They had profaned his name.

To continue in that path would gut their souls, and would sabotage the lives of their children, grandchildren and generations still to come.

Deeply grieved, deeply angered, the Lord bared his heart to Moses. He announced what justice required.

Moses responded as one who knew the people. He did not deny how resistant and rebellious they were.

Moses responded as one who knew the Lord – and knew him to be merciful, as well as just.

Moses responded as one who loved his people and his Lord.

Refusing selfishness, he cried out on the people’s behalf. He implored the Lord to act for the sake of his covenant and his name. Two cries in Psalm 51 capture the essence of Moses’ words and actions that day:

Against you, you only, have [we] sinned and done what is evil in your sight; so you are right in your verdict and justified when you judge. (v. 4)

Have mercy … O God, according to your unfailing love.” (v. 1)

As soon as Moses cried out, the Lord “relented.” In the days that followed, he announced what he would do to show mercy, while also remaining just.

Deeply grieved, Moses descended the mountain. When he heard, then saw, the riotous revolt against God that Aaron had dubbed “a feast to the LORD,” Moses was deeply angered too. He took strong measures to address the people’s sin. Even then, so many persisted in unrestrained evil so extreme that it took more than 3,000 deaths to restore order and spare the nation.

And so 40 days of glory ended in tragedy. The stone tablets with the writing of God lay shattered. Some of the rebuked Israelites grieved over, and turned from, their sin. Others grieved the consequences it had brought.

Outside the camp, Moses lay on his face before God, continuing to plead for mercy. Would the Lord – could he – go forward with his plan to dwell in the midst of this people? Would he even remain with them at all?

The Lord will judge his people

Today, the same unchanging Lord has invited us into a better covenant. His purpose remains: to draw his people to himself.

The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this.

First he says: “This is the covenant I will make with them after that time, says the Lord. I will put my laws in their hearts, and I will write them on their minds.” 

Then he adds: “Their sins and lawless acts I will remember no more.” (Heb. 10:15-17; quoting Jer. 31:33-34)

Revel in the wonder of it! The Spirit of Christ lives in us, to reveal the Word to us, to fill us with desire and power to live it out. And in Christ, full forgiveness is available when we fall short.²

Recognize the weightiness of it!

Great gifts mean great responsibilities; greater gifts, greater responsibilities! (Luke 12:48 MSG)

It is an offense more serious than we can imagine when we freely enter the new covenant in Christ, and then allow anything to rival our Lord’s place in our lives. Indeed, the same chapter in Hebrews that announces the wonder of the new covenant also issues one of the strongest warnings in the Word:

If we deliberately keep on sinning after we have received the knowledge of the truth, no sacrifice for sins is left, but only a fearful expectation of judgment and of raging fire that will consume the enemies of God.

Anyone who rejected the law of Moses died without mercy on the testimony of two or three witnesses. How much more severely do you think someone deserves to be punished who has trampled the Son of God underfoot, who has treated as an unholy thing the blood of the covenant that sanctified them, and who has insulted the Spirit of grace?

For we know him who said, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” and again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Heb. 10:26-31)

“We could spend hours debating the theological implications of that last passage. But what if, instead, we simply receive the warning? What if we recognize the perilous position of those who treat as a cheap thing the blood of God’s covenant that sanctified them?”³

When we who are called by Christ’s name trample and insult the Son of God and the Spirit of grace, our deeply grieved, deeply angered Lord announces what his justice demands.

He also stands ready to respond in mercy even to these most grievous of sins.

He always lives to intercede

This Lord initiated a lengthy sixth mountain rendezvous with Moses for a reason we haven’t yet explored: Knowing his people would quickly turn aside from him, God had prepared one man to stand in the gap and turn aside judgment from them.

Moses’ act of intercession began the day he answered God’s call to lead his people out of Egypt. It continued as Moses poured himself out day by day for his people and his Lord – going where God said to go, doing what God said to do, saying what God said to say, staying where God said to stay.

When the people profoundly rebelled, Moses had authority to plead for the release of God’s mercy and grace.

Jesus has been found worthy of greater honor than Moses. (Heb. 3:3)

Therefore he is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them. (Heb. 7:25)

As with Moses, even more so with Christ. His intercession does not free us from all responsibility. It opens the way for us to choose not to “deliberately keep on sinning,” but instead …

To receive the Lord as our Lord.

To love him with all our heart and soul and strength.

And also: To return to him with our whole heart, and be fully forgiven, when our words and deeds have denied him and our heart has turned away.

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Image by MaxAce from Pixabay

Seven Encounters with God series

Moses’ encounters with God on Sinai reveal remarkable things about who God is, how he relates to his people and how to cultivate intimacy with him. Lord, give us eyes to see.

• “Come be with me” – Seven encounters with God
• 1: The purpose of the wilderness
• 2: Prepare to meet with God
• 3: God who loves fiercely
• 4: When your world has changed
• 5: Mystery and life: The covenant meal
• 6, part 1: The place his glory dwells
• 6, part 2: One who stands in the gap
• 7: Radiant! A glory story

Footnotes

1. Exodus 20:1-4, 7 NCV. Wherever in Scripture you see “the LORD” (all caps), what appears in the original text is an abbreviation for God’s covenant name. ↩︎
2. See 1 John 1:9. ↩︎
3. Quoted from my book, We Confess! The Civil War, the South and the Church, 139. ↩︎