So Moses comes down the mountain “with the two tablets of the Testimony inscribed by God on both sides, front and back,” Exodus 32:15-16, and discovers exactly what God had told him back in verse 8, that the Israelites had crafted “an idol in the shape of a calf” claiming it, not God, had rescued them from Egypt.
And God was so angry he told Moses he was going to wipe the entire Israelite camp out of existence (10). Following Moses’ passionate appeal, however, God “did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened” (14), but irony then strikes when Moses discovers for himself what the Israelites are up to with their golden calf, and he’s so angry “he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them in pieces at the foot of the mountain” (19).
So now Moses, just like God, is blisteringly angry too. Not only does he grind up the golden calf into powder and make the Israelites drink it (20), he has the Levites, on God’s orders, kill off three thousand Israelites (27-28). But then we find out what knowing God had done to Moses, because “The next day Moses said to the people, ‘You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin’” (30).
So that’s what he does, admitting to God how “great a sin the people have committed in making themselves gods of gold” (31), but then in verse 32 he says to God, “please forgive their sin – but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.”
It was a noble thought, offering up his own place among God’s chosen people so that his fellow Israelites wouldn’t lose theirs. But this is what knowing God had done to Moses; it had given him a noble heart, that was so utterly genuine in wanting to see God’s purpose fulfilled through his people, that nothing, not even the loss of his own place in that purpose, could deter Moses from it. So what Moses was offering to God was noble and utterly genuine, yes, but – God immediately jumps in saying, “the only ones I blot out of my book are those who sin against me” (33). And Moses had never done that.
Knowing God had made him that way. No wonder, then, that God set up a “tent of meeting” where “anyone inquiring of the Lord” (33:7) could ask him, “Teach me your ways so I may know you” too….(next blog)
