The Bible employs all kinds of literary
devices to tell its story – narrative, parable, proverb, metaphors,
similes, poetry and things called chiasms, and hyperbole (as in, “If
your right hand offend thee, cut it off and cast it from thee...”),
only to name a few. In Exodus 31-32 the Biblical author uses
juxtaposition by placing two events side by side to great affect.
As soon as the Covenant has been
ratified and Moses, Aaron and the 70 elders finish their amazing meal
in the Lord's presence at which they “see God” ( Exodus 24:10),
Moses is invited to go further up the mountain to receive “the
tablets of stone” on which will be placed the terms that the people
have agreed to. So Moses goes up and Aaron and the rest of the
leaders return to the plain below. As chapter 24 closes we're told
that Moses enters the thick cloud that lays upon the heights and
disappears from view for “forty days and forty nights” (the exact
time that Noah and his family were in the ark). From the plains
below, however, it looks like he enters the doors of an immense blast
furnace.
Within the cloud, time becomes
meaningless and over the next seven chapters, Yahweh reveals to Moses
the design of the Place wherein he will dwell in the camp, the
specifications of the furniture that will be set within the Tent as
well as in the adjoining courtyard, the design of the priests'
garments, the mixture of the incense that will burn before the Ark
that will contain the tablets of the Covenant, even how they will pay
for it as well as who will oversee the project and ensure that all is
done according to plan. These aren't just blueprints he's receiving;
everything will have a purpose in revealing the character and the
heart of the God who has redeemed them from a life of slavery in
Egypt. The very structure of the Tabernacle will be a sermon in
physical form that will speak of God's majesty and power.
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| Moses will always look like this to me |
What glories Moses must have seen while
within the Cloud. What mysteries that were impossible to speak of
later. And when it was all over, as he leaves the cloud the tablets
of Testimony - “inscribed by the finger of God” (31:18) – are
placed within his arms. Talk about a mountaintop experience! I can't
help but think of Charlton Heston's version of Moses in Cecil B.
DeMille's The Ten Commandments emerging from the cloud with
that ethereal, far-away look, his face singed by glory. Even if the
Biblical author doesn't tell us that his face glowed like it would
later, Moses must have been on Cloud Nine. Think of all that had
transpired in such a short time. Six months ago – more? less? - he
had been an octogenarian shepherd too afraid to heed the summons that
Yahweh was commanding him to do. But he returned to Egypt and a
mighty kingdom was driven to its knees in a demonstrative way. And
here he was now in a personal face-to-face encounter with the Creator
of all the earth receiving the revelation that will shape a nation
and the world for ages to come.
The tablets are then placed in his
hands, the Cloud withdraws and then God speaks: “Go! Get
down there! Your people whom you
brought up from the land of Egypt have fallen to pieces. In no time
at all they’ve turned away from the way I commanded them...”
(32:7, Msg) After a knock-your-literal-socks-off encounter atop the
mountain you would expect something like the “Hallelujah Chorus”
as a benediction but instead we hear a commanding voice of rebuke and
Yahweh sounding like he has already disowned his people. While he's
been in Glory, the people – or, at least some of them – have
fallen apart. In the interim while Moses has been gone, the nation
has fallen away. In fact, an argument could be made that in his
absence they have broken all Ten Words that capture the essence of
the Covenant.
While
the chapter designations in the Bible are a human convention to help
us distill the epic the “Story of stories” is, the demarcation
between heavenly revelation (Exodus 25-31) and human invention
(Exodus 32:1-5) could not be more stark: atop the mountain, there is
purpose and design that communicates the holy from the unholy;
beneath the people essentially return to a default setting of their
life in Egypt and rip-off a form of Egyptian worship. As Thomas
Cahill puts it:
Exodus
calls it a “molten calf,” though this is by way of denigrating
the idol. It was actually a bull, probably rampant and in rut, the
aboriginal symbol of potency. This, cries Aharon,
“This is your God, O Israel,
who brought you up from the land of Egypt!”
What follows is an orgy of prostrations, animal
slaughter, feasting, drinking, and, as the Book of Exodus puts it
discreetly, “reveling” - that is, sexual indulgence in the manner
of a pagan liturgy. The bull...was a common image of divinity in
Mesopotamia, as it was in Egypt.; and though we cannot be certain
that the people thought they were worshiping a bull-god (they may
only have meant to worship YHWH as the invisible God who stands on
the bull at his
I wonder if this moment in his people's history is what
inspired the writer of Proverbs 29 to conclude:
“Where there is no revelation, the people cast off
restraint;
but blessed is he who keeps the law.” 29:18
(NIV)
While
Aaron and the elders anxiously waited for Moses they caved to the
mounting pressure “to do
something”, to appease the need of a nation to have something to
bow down to and connect with (see Exodus 32:1-6). It's like King Saul
who breaks with custom and performs the sacrifice himself before the
army goes into battle because Samuel is late and the troops are
beginning to slip away and the ones who remain are “quaking with
fear” (1 Sam 13:9, NIV). What he does is expedient from a worldly
point of view but from a heavenly perspective it reveals that
whatever else he is he lacks the kind of faith a godly king is
required to yield and it costs him the kingdom.
Admittedly,
I don't always know what God is doing nor saying as far as Refuge is
concerned. I'm not good at discerning “the times” because in so
many ways it feels like trying to focus on the tip of your nose –
you get all cross-eyed and blurry while you do it. While having
“vision” or discernment as to what God is saying right now to the
fellowship we serve is a good and needed thing, the “revelation”
referred to in the proverb is that which begins with a capital R, as
in the word of the Lord already revealed in Scripture. As in, Jesus
is Lord and Master and Savior and calls us to deny ourselves and
follow him even if it means to a foreign land or a smaller house or a
poorer neighborhood. When the people of God lose sight of his
authority over our lives, we begin “to cast off restraint” and
reshape our lives and seek to conform them to whatever are the
accepted norms of the culture we live in. We see this force at work
in our own society in real time now. More and more moral confusion,
more and more righteous ambiguity.
Even
though Moses has been forewarned, when he sees with his own eyes how
“the people were simply running wild” (v. 25) he is galvanized
into action. With his nostrils flaring with holy zeal, he
deliberately smashes the tablets at the foot of the mountain, melts
the golden idol and pulverizes it to powder. Then with a loud shout,
he commands the people to make a choice - “whoever is for the Lord,
come
to me!” (v. 26, NAS) – and then to radically deal with the spirit of
rebellion at work in the camp -
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| This only makes sense if God hates sin like a doctor hates disease |
“God’s
orders, the God of Israel: ‘Strap on your swords and go to work.
Crisscross the camp from one end to the other: Kill brother, friend,
neighbor.’”
“The
Levites carried out Moses’ orders. Three thousand of the people
were killed that day.” (v. 27,
Msg)
This
is one of those passages that offends every person who has ever been
perplexed about what appears to be the “angry Old Man” God of the
Old Testament and the “loving and meek” Jesus of the New. And yet
this same Jesus said some pretty stark things himself:
“If anyone comes to Me, and does
not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers
and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.”
(Luke 14:26, NAS)
“Don't run from suffering; embrace
it. Follow me and I'll show you how. Self-help is no help at all.
Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to finding yourself, your true
self.” (Matthew 16:25, Msg)
And
the aforementioned hyperbolic statement:
“Yes, if your right hand leads you
astray cut it off and throw it away; it is better for you to lose one
of your members than that your whole body should go to the
rubbish-heap.” (Matthew 5:30,
PHILLIPS)
The
long and short of it is, God - the Lord of Old and New Testaments
together - is grieved by the presence of sin in our lives as well as
in our Christian community and the way out is not in denial or
forbearance but in brutal, decisive action though it look like a
Klingon bezerker running through the camp. Honestly, it makes me
squeamish but can a holy God ask any less of us than our undivided
love and loyalty? When we lose sight of Who He is and how He has
commanded us to live, all kinds of trouble can find us and threaten
the health of our spiritual life.
