Reading Exodus: On the Golden Calf… (1)

“…the people…said to (Aaron), ‘Up, makes us gods who shall go before us.’”（Ex 32:1a）

 During their year or so in the wilderness at Sinai, the Israelites went through a number of momentous events, learning again and again what it meant, as the people of the LORD God, to live lives that “obey His voice and keep His covenant”. Of all these events, none was more crucial – or more widely known – than the episode of the golden calf. (See Ex 32:1–34:9.) 

If the exodus from Egypt and the crossing of the Red Sea gave Israel a language for telling, in the years to come, of God’s mighty salvation, then the golden calf became the paradigm for the rebellion that would recur again and again in Israel’s history. It gave the generations that followed a vocabulary for recognising and describing idolatry. (See e.g. 1 Ki 12:28; Ps 106:19–23; Neh 9:16–18; Hos 8:5–6; 10:5; 13:2.)

The whole golden calf episode, in fact, began with the most natural of questions: What has become of Moses? (32:1c)

Before this, the LORD God had come down upon Mount Sinai amid thunder, lightning and thick cloud, and given the Ten Commandments. Then He summoned Moses up to Him once more, this time to entrust to him the tablets of stone. And it was on this occasion that Moses stayed on the mountain for forty days and forty nights, with no sign of coming down. At the foot of the mountain, the Israelites waited and waited, until at last their patience ran out.

By now it was perhaps only a few months since they had come out of Egypt. Every step of the way, Moses had been there – out in front leading them, walking alongside them, or bringing up the rear to make sure no one was left behind. More than that, Moses was the one through whom they had come to meet the God of their fathers. He was the “mediator” between them and the great and awesome LORD, their spokesman before Him. Where Moses was, the LORD was with them. Of that much they were sure.

 

Now more than a month had passed, and still Moses, whom God had called up the mountain, was nowhere to be seen… Who knew what had happened to him? Had he unwittingly offended God, even profaned His holiness, and been punished for it? Or…?

What has become of Moses?

They could speculate all they liked. But a more pressing concern weighing on them at that moment was this: would the God who had brought them out of Egypt through Moses continue going with them? Would He really keep His covenant with their fathers and bring them into the promised land? And so, quite naturally, they turned to Aaron and demanded that he make them an idol to take Moses’ place and go before them.

Rembrandt, Moses Smashing the Tables of the Law, 1659

Make idols? And Aaron agreed so readily? Had they not all seen with their own eyes the ten great wonders the LORD had worked in the land of Egypt? Had they not all crossed into the wilderness on the dry bed of the Red Sea? Were they not still eating, every single day, the manna that fell from heaven?…

We may well be inclined to condemn them for so swift a “defection”. But we forget that until Moses appeared with the LORD’s message, they had lived in a society steeped in idol worship, and had even taken part in it themselves (see Jos 24:14; Ezk 20:7–8). In Egypt, every one of the many gods was represented by a visible image. On the whole journey out of Egypt with Moses, the only things they could see, besides Moses himself, were the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night. These were wholly beyond their control, impossible to grasp, and nothing like as tangible and dependable as the Egyptians’ idols, which could be seen and touched. Isn’t that so? Yes, the LORD had appeared to them on Mount Sinai – but they could only watch from a distance, hemmed in by a whole string of prohibitions: do not touch this, do not cross that… And now even Moses had vanished!

Does all this, then, excuse the Israelites? Of course not. In fact, the very speed with which they could turn to the familiar idols of their past as a substitute shows precisely that they had never truly known the LORD, nor ever committed and devoted themselves to Him wholeheartedly.

Even so, when we reproach them for abandoning Him so easily, we should take care that what we reproach is not merely their outward behaviour, but what was lacking within them. More important still, even as we reproach them, we need the wisdom to look into our own hearts, and the humility to ask: deep within, where no one else can see, are our own knowledge of God and our commitment and devotion to Him really so different from those of the Israelites back then?

The golden calf had hardly been finished, and the Israelites had hardly begun their eating, drinking and revelry, when Moses came down from the mountain bearing God’s judgement. Then it all happened, one thing after another. The tablets written with the finger of God were smashed. The golden calf was ground to powder and the Israelites were made to drink it. And some three thousand Israelites who had worshipped it were struck down by the Levites.

Because of Moses’ urgent and selfless intercession, the LORD set aside His reckoning for the time being. Yet He also made it known that He would no longer go with this people, lest they offend against His holiness once more and bring death upon themselves. He would only send His angel, together with Moses, to lead them on to “the land of which [He] swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…” (Ex 32:30–33:6).

This stretch of the narrative is one of the most pivotal, and most intriguing, in the whole golden calf episode.

First, we see here God’s “diagnosis” of Israel’s rebellion: “for (they) are a stiff-necked people” (Ex 33:3)! The phrase “stiff-necked people” appears four times in the golden calf narrative. The first time, while Moses was still on the mountain, the LORD used it to describe the Israelites below as they turned aside from His way. Here, the LORD sternly pronounces it twice as His verdict upon them. And the fourth time, it is Moses who takes up God’s own words in response, as he pleads with the LORD to relent. (See Ex 32:9; 33:3, 5; 34:9.)

It was not simply because they could not wait for Moses to come down that the Israelites pressed Aaron to make them a golden calf; that was merely the outward circumstance. The decisive inward factor was what they were at heart: stiff-necked. This is a truth worth chewing over slowly, and a reality we must face honestly: the sinfulness within us. Every time we are overcome by sin, or carelessly lose our footing, we can easily lay the blame on our circumstances or on other people. Yet unless we face the problem within, we will in the end only be deceiving ourselves. That is exactly what happened with the Israelites. On hearing the disastrous word that God would not go up with them to the good land He had promised, they mourned deeply and stripped off their ornaments (Ex 33:4–6). Sadly, it was only a very brief response: not long after leaving the wilderness of Sinai, they were complaining against the LORD once again! (See Num 10:33–11:1.)

Faced with such a “stiff-necked people”, the LORD and Moses respond here in ways that seem rather “unreasonable”, yet are deeply moving.

Take Moses first. His selfless prayer for Israel’s forgiveness, brought before the LORD after he had dealt with the rebellion of the golden calf, is familiar to us all. In particular, the Chinese Union Version (along with most of the major English translations) chooses to follow the original and leave the implied thought unspoken. This lets us feel all the more keenly how grievous their sin was. Moses had got as far as “But now, if You will forgive their sin—” (Ex 32:32), and then, it seems, found the sin so deep and so heavy that he did not know how to go on asking. In that broken-off sentence we sense his intense inner conflict and helplessness. And this heart of his is something we would do well to imitate.

Then there is the LORD. Our first impression may simply be of the “disastrous word” God gave Israel. Surely that was His punishment for their rebellion? What is “unreasonable” about that? Yet if we look a little more closely, we may notice the reason the LORD gives for not going with them: “lest I consume you on the way” (Ex 33:3b). Israel’s rebellion was bound to bring disaster upon themselves. And still the LORD cared for them; He did not want to see them provoke His anger through their own stiff-neckedness. His refusal to go with them was a punishment, yes, but it was also a protection. What the Israelites of that day could never have imagined, though, is this: we today, though every bit as stiff-necked as they were, can walk with Him in safety, because of the plan of redemption that God Himself has set in motion in Christ.

Yet in the end, the LORD did go with the Israelites to the promised land. And how this became possible  rests precisely on another vital attribute of the LORD God, which the golden calf episode reveals to us.