If you’re familiar with William Goldman’s book The Princess Bride, you know it’s supposedly the “good parts” version of an original text by one S. Morgenstern. If you’re familiar with the lectionary, you might be tempted to think of it as Princess Bride Scripture, since as Emily noted last week, it has a tendency to give us the “good parts” version of the Bible. Thus, from one Sunday to the next, we’ve taken a flying leap from Exodus 20 to Exodus 32. I understand the impulse, since the thought of reading four chapters on the construction of the tabernacle is only slightly more thrilling than that of sixty pages on Prince Humperdinck’s ancestry, but we do lose something important in the gap. The dramatic story of disaster and redemption we read in Exodus 32-34 doesn’t exist on its own, it’s an interruption of a lengthy set of instructions regarding the tabernacle, the priests, and the Sabbath. In other words, what we have here is God telling Moses how to set things up for Israel to worship him in truth, interrupted by the reality of Israel’s false worship. The contrast is important, as we will see.
The other key piece of context here comes from Exodus 24:18, which tells us Moses went back up the mountain and stayed there forty days and forty nights. In other words, he’s been gone for over a month, and they’re getting anxious. For one thing, they had begged him to stand between them and God, and he’s not around to do that—either to connect them to God or to protect them from God. So they’re waiting, hoping nothing bad happens . . . and nothing does, but nothing good happens either. In fact, the other reason for their anxiety, there’s nothing but nothing happening. They’re waiting, and all it’s getting them is more waiting, and how long are they going to have to sit around in this boring camp at the foot of the mountain doing nothing and going nowhere? You can only stand so many card tournaments, you know, and if you play Trivial Pursuit enough times, you end up memorizing all the answers. They don’t know when—or if!—they’ll see Moses again, and until they do, they can’t move on. They’re stuck . . . waiting.
So, finally, a few leaders emerge among the people to vocalize their anxiety and discontent, and they call a congregational meeting. They tell Aaron, “That Moses guy dragged us out here and abandoned us in the desert. You take over and make us a god so we can get back on the road.” What Aaron should do at this point is remind them of the words God has already given them—and the promise they’ve made to God to obey all his commandments—and flatly refuse to condone such a suicidally bad idea. Instead, he doesn’t even try to resist. No doubt he was anxious himself, for all the same reasons they were (and more, since Moses was his little brother), and no doubt the thought of having the entire camp furious at him produced quite a bit more anxiety. Maybe sibling rivalry played into it, as we certainly see that at work later on in the story. Whatever the reason, Aaron responds decisively—not to stop their plan, but to put it in motion.
Now, he only asks for their earrings, so we’re not talking about a huge volume of gold here. For all the times I sat looking at the flannelgraph imagining a big solid-gold statue, there just wasn’t that much metal here, and even if there had been, they would have had no way to melt that much gold, or to cast a statue of any size. The Jewish commentator Nahum Sarna suggests Aaron had a wooden statue of a bull calf carved and then covered it with gold, and that makes sense to me. It’s something they could realistically have done, and done quickly, even in a camp in the middle of the desert. However they did it, though, Exodus doesn’t care about their technical achievement, only about their idolatry.
If you had asked the people of Israel, though, they would have denied committing idolatry—at least at first. That might seem a strange thing to say when they were bowing down to a statue of a cow, but Sarna is helpful here as well: “Often the bull or some other animal served as the pedestal on which the god stood, elevated above human level. The particular animal might be suggestive of the attributes ascribed to the god who was mounted upon it. . . . The young bull would have been the pedestal upon which the invisible God of Israel was popularly believed to be standing. His presence would be left to human imagination.”
Significantly, when the statue is finished, the ringleaders of the whole thing identify it as the God of Israel who brought them out of Egypt. Yes, they literally say, “These are your gods,” but here’s the thing: the name of God which we translate “God,” elohim, is grammatically plural, and occasionally plural words are used with it to refer to the God of Israel. Since Aaron only made one statue and Nehemiah 9 quotes this phrase as “This is your God,” I think it’s clear the Israelites didn’t think they had changed religions. That’s why Aaron declares the next day a festival to the Lord. They would have said they were still worshiping the same god, the one who brought them out of Egypt—they had just upgraded their worship practices.
As Jesus might have said, however, you will know true worship by its fruits, and the fruits of the next day’s “festival to the Lord” are foul indeed. Aaron may have declared the festival, but he was clearly excluded from the service planning. The people sacrifice to the statue, then they feast, and then they . . . well, the NIV tells us they “got up to indulge in revelry,” but it’s being rather too prim and proper. The Hebrew word here can mean “dancing”—that appears to be the sense of it in Judges 16, and we have the reference to dancing in our own passage in verse 19—but in several occurrences in Genesis, it refers to sexual activity. One suspects the word is used here because both were going on.
Most importantly, God sees this as idolatry. He commands Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt.” I think every man who has a wife and children of a certain age recognizes this language. “Do you know what your son did today?” Kid does something praiseworthy, you’re happy to claim him. Kid goes out and starts worshiping a gold cow, all of a sudden he’s my son. I don’t like that, but if even God does it, I guess there’s not much to say. In any case, note the substance of God’s charge: not that they are worshiping other gods, only that they have made themselves a statue and are worshiping it. They still claim to be worshiping him, but they are doing so as pagans, and that’s enough.
His response to their sin is fierce, but not as fierce as it seems on first glance, because it actually has multiple parts. The first part is the obvious one—his wrath at his people’s sin. They are “a stiff-necked people,” stubborn and obstinate; the term is from the language of farming, where it was used of animals which dug in their heels and refused to move. Verse 10 is where it gets interesting: God says to Moses, “Now leave me alone so my anger may burn against them and I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.” First he creates—or at least highlights—the opportunity for Moses to intercede for Israel. Then he practically invites it by invoking the covenant promise. If his true intent had been to destroy Israel, he didn’t need to bargain with Moses about it—he could have just done it. He’s on about something else here.
In part, God is testing Moses. That doesn’t mean he isn’t sure Moses will pass; that’s not the only purpose tests serve. Passing the test matters for its own sake, and you can’t pass a test you aren’t given. Testing brings self-knowledge and self-awareness; when we’re tested, we learn what we’re really capable of doing—and what we’re capable of convincing ourselves to do, whether for good or for ill. Testing also pushes us to stretch our limits, much as exercise does; you might say spiritual testing exercises our soul muscles. When we’re tested, we have to actually do the thing, and whether we succeed or fail, we know where we stand.
Moses, faced with both threat and promise from an angry God, aces the test. As God knew he would, he pushes back, offering three arguments against God destroying Israel. The first is subtle, more implied than stated: he reverses the “your people” language. “Why should your anger burn against your people,” he asks, “whom you brought out of Egypt?” This sets up his second and primary argument: destroying Israel now would completely nullify everything God had done in Egypt. Remember Emily’s point about the crossing of the Red Sea: it was for the Egyptians, so they would know who is truly God. If God kills off his people after leading them into the wilderness, every positive understanding the Egyptians have of God will be inverted. Third, Moses argues that wiping out Israel and starting all over with Moses wouldn’t really be playing fair with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It wouldn’t technically violate God’s promises to them, but it would effectively cut them out. Really, the great nation would come from Moses—they would just be Moses’ ancestors.
In response to Moses’ arguments, verse 14 tells us, “the Lord relented.” Does this mean God changed his mind? That doesn’t square with other parts of Scripture. Malachi 3:6, for instance, says, “I the Lord do not change. That’s why you, the descendants of Jacob, are not destroyed.” In Numbers 23:19, the prophet Balaam tells King Balak, “God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind.” Balaam’s words are echoed in 1 Samuel 15:29 when Samuel declares, “He who is the Glory of Israel does not lie or change his mind; for he is not a human being, that he should change his mind.” We might also consider the promise of Hebrews 13:8 that “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever.” Do these verses contradict Exodus, or does Exodus invalidate them? Or is something else going on?
Of course, the fact that I ask that question tells you my answer. In fact, I think it’s something quite important. Let me suggest that whether or not God ever changes his mind, he has to make up his mind in the first place, and Exodus 32 gives us a window on that process. God’s anger is great enough to destroy Israel, as Moses can clearly see. Moses is granted the opportunity to lay out the reasons why doing so would not be consistent with God’s character and purposes. On the basis of those reasons, God chooses not to destroy Israel.
This all serves two purposes, one immediate and one longer-term. In the immediate, Moses has seen that God is angry enough to destroy Israel, and thus he can tell them the true severity of their sin; he can also tell them why God didn’t destroy them. He didn’t spare his people because their sin wasn’t really all that bad, nor because they were irreplaceable, nor because they were just too wonderful to wipe out. He spared them entirely despite themselves, not because of who they are but because of who he is. Without Moses’ conversation with God, none of this would have been clear; which brings us to the longer-term purpose here, to illustrate that God is not capricious—he doesn’t act for no reason. He usually doesn’t tell us what his reasons are, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have them.
Verses 15-16 give us a brief digression about the tablets of the covenant; in the interests of time, I won’t dive into that, except to say the popular idea that half the Ten Commandments were written on each is false. The tablets are identical; there are two because they are a peace treaty, and when any peace treaty is concluded, both sides get a copy. This is why Moses breaks the tablets when he sees how bad things have gotten in the camp. This isn’t a fit of temper—it’s a legal action declaring the treaty null and void, the covenant broken and no longer valid.
Having smashed the tablets, Moses then comprehensively obliterates the idol. He burns it—which fits with the idea that the statue was gilded wood rather than solid gold, since gold doesn’t burn—then grinds up what remains, leaving a powder of ash, charcoal, and flecks of gold. He dumps the whole mess into the brook running down the mountain that was the water source for the camp and makes the Israelites drink the bitter, polluted water. When he’s done, the golden calf has not only been completely destroyed, it has been consumed.
Once the idol has been dealt with, Moses harshly rebukes his brother. There’s black humor here; you can just see Aaron backing away, hands up, saying, “Whoa, whoa, calm down, bro—it’s not my fault, they’re wicked people,” before uncorking the dumbest attempted excuse in the history of excuses: “They gave me the gold, I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf! Honest, Moses, I didn’t make it, it just happened!” Moses doesn’t even dignify his drivel with a response, and for good reason: the whole mess happened because of a catastrophic failure of leadership on Aaron’s part. Where Moses stood up to God for the sake of his people, Aaron fails to stand up to anybody. The people went astray, yes, but Aaron held the gate open for them.
Note where this happened: in worship. As I said earlier, the context of our passage sets up a critically important contrast between true and false worship. True worship isn’t just about who we worship—or, perhaps, who we claim to be worshiping—it’s also about how we worship. Nothing is value-neutral; remember Marshall McLuhan’s dictum that “the medium is the message.” The tools, techniques, materials, strategies, and so on that we use shape us even as we shape them. It’s easy to convince ourselves that as long as they “work”—i.e., get people to come and keep coming—that’s all that matters, but that isn’t so. As Josh says, “What you catch them with is what you keep them with and what you call them to.”
As well, true worship isn’t just about saying the right words. The Israelites didn’t have a lot of “right words” to say yet, but it seems clear they were saying the ones they did have. The problem was, whatever they might say, their actions showed the reality of their hearts. Having all the right words in the right order means nothing if your heart is false. Sadly, many attend churches regularly whose lips agree with everything in Scripture, but whose hearts are cold and desolate as the surface of the moon.
The Israelites in Exodus 32 exemplify the difficult reality that we are always backsliding into idolatry. In this case, that temptation was rooted in their desire for worship that served their felt needs. They wanted an encounter with God which didn’t terrify them; they wanted an end to the anxiety of waiting; they wanted something they could see and touch which was solid and undemanding. They didn’t want to worship a different god, they just wanted God on their terms. I have to admit, I understand where they were coming from. The problem is, the only way which actually leads to God is the one which he has established. When we try to get to God on our own terms, we end up worshiping a projection of ourselves instead.
In the end, I think there are two things we need to see here. One, to keep our worship true and pleasing to God, we need to keep reorienting our hearts back toward him, both in our planning and in our participation. If we don’t, we will drift—that’s just the human condition; and if we start drifting away from God, there will be those who will be eager to encourage the drift for their own purposes. That was the situation I faced in Winona, though I didn’t see it.
Two, as important as it is that we strive to be faithful, our hope is not in our own striving. Our hope is not in our ability to “do it right” and keep ourselves from drifting. Psalm 23 doesn’t say, “I’m a good sheep and never wander away from the shepherd,” it says, “When I wander, my good shepherd brings me back.” Wandering away is just what sheep do; and God knows we are sheep. Our hope is in his mercy, and in the one who pleads our case. Moses interceded for Israel, and God did not destroy them. Or take the case of Nineveh, wicked city in a vile empire that was Israel’s deadly enemy; God sent them his prophet Jonah, who did the bare minimum, and when they repented anyway, God did not destroy them either. We have our great high priest, Jesus the Messiah who is the same yesterday, today, and forever, standing for us; if Israel and Nineveh could trust the mercy of God, how much more can we?
Nicolas Poussin, The Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633-34; photo ©2022 Alex-David Baldi; image cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic.