Sermon Notes: Exodus 32:15-35 - God's Mercy
Exodus 32:15-35
The first sin started its destructive viral infection when the Guardian Cherub, the Day Star, the Serpent Dragon, despised the Lord Jesus and rebelled against his will and order. So, from the beginning of creation there was an evil already at work in it.
The Serpent Dragon, the originator of evil, enticed our parents into joining that distrusting faithless rebellion against Jesus, and the curse of sin began its viral multiplication into every part of the created order.
It takes the death of the unique Son of God, Jesus, his burial, resurrection, and ascension to overcome sin and its fruit of sins and that curse’s defiling of things.
The nature of that original sin is speculative, and it is probably a mash up of multiple faithless thoughts and actions. I think Tolkien’s depiction in the Silmarillion is pretty good, and worth your time if you wish to give that classic a read.
What we know is that sin brought about the spoiling and defiling of creatures and creation.
In Exodus 32 a particularly grievous sin has manifested itself in the people of God. This terrible trifecta of sin is specifically addressed in the covenant God has made with his people and written with his own finger on stone tablets for Moses to take to the people for covenantal record.
The people have broken the first three commandments.
First, they have taken up the worship of another god.
Second, they have made an image of that god.
Third, they have vainly used Yahweh’s name by applying his name to this god and its image.
Exodus 32’s tone is angry, dark, yet hopeful. It is good for us to feel this tone deep in our bones.
God has good for us in his word when he shows us the darkness sin brings. Light and beauty are never brighter and more glorious than when they are beheld after seeing and experiencing dark and ugly. We only really appreciate good when we’ve tasted bad.
So, let’s look at the end of Exodus 32.
Moses witnesses the idolatry of the people and rightly responds with holy anger. V. 15-20
Moses and Joshua see what is going on, and Moses is angry.
Hang with me here. Anger is a tricky emotion. Anger has to be navigated with care, but it is not innately bad because God himself gets angry. To experience anger is to ontologically experience part of what it is to be created in the Holy God’s image. Anger has functional purpose for God and God’s image-bearing ambassadors.
The challenge with our anger is to control it in such a way that what angers God angers us the way it angers God in order to drive us to the purposeful actions of God.
Illustration: If you are angered by child trafficking, you are to channel that anger into the purposeful actions of God to rescue trafficked children in every way from knowledge of the depth of the evil to rescue to rehabilitation to justice for them in exterminating the traffickers.
Moses’ anger accurately represents the Lord’s anger as he is God’s image-bearing representative with the people. Moses is God’s representative to and for the people. We will see God’s anger worked out in gracious justice through the Levites as his representatives.
Moses is the image of God right here as his representative. Image of God is less about abilities and more about status as God’s representative. We are ontologically (in our being) God’s representatives in creation and are to do his will on earth as in heaven. That’s what it means to be an image-bearer of God.
Moses is God’s representative as his image in this moment as he expresses holy anger at the people’s rejection of his love by adulterously worshiping, welcoming, and being a vessel of another god with this golden calf.
Question: Why should God be so bent out of shape about a metal image of a calf? After all, they call it by his name. Yes, they have broken 3 commandments, but why should God be so angry? Isn’t he supposed to be nice?
Today, to answer the question as to why God is so angry about a golden calf, I’m going to have to help you dip your toe in a sea of goodness you may want to continue studying.
I’m going to drop you a can of worms to open at your comfort here in the notes that will take you deeper into that question than I can do in this sermon:
NOTE: There is an explosion of study into spiritual issues related to the Bible. You are going to see and hear more related to the Bible and such issues. I have tried to weave in vocabulary and speak to some of it on the podcast for you. Don’t be surprised and listen to the right folks. I’m giving you a link to the right folks. We are going to do more on the podcast. I have had conversations with our Old Testament faculties in our SBC seminaries on why they don’t do more with these issues that rise from the OT and are assumed and alluded to in the New Testament. The issue is time in an already lengthy master’s degree (mine was 105 hours). So, we are going to have to address them when they come up on the text and leave some issues for the podcast.
Israel has broken 3 of the 10 commandments, but why did God start with the 3 commandments he started with? I’d like to see something in there about thou shalt not have more than one wife or thou shalt not take a slave ever or thou shalt not project your sin onto your friends and make them guilty in your mind of your own sin. Those might be my top 3 commands in the covenant of Jolly. You know what I mean?
Why no other god and no images of that god? Why can’t we do our thing aa long as we call it by God’s name?
Answer? Jesus refers to the “spirits” that he casts out of people as “unclean spirits”, and he sometimes uses the title “demon” interchangeably with “unclean spirit”. These spirits are always looking for someone to inhabit, to animate to that person’s defilement and destruction and for the unclean spirit’s purposes.
Why?
We get enough indications in the Old Testament to make sense of it if we read closely enough, but the most detailed explanations we get on this come from Second Temple Judaism’s writings that sit in the background of the New Testament (most popular between Ezra/Nehemiah and Jesus’ Advent).
The Dead Sea Scrolls gave us the most complete reconstruction of these documents and provided older manuscripts of our Old Testament that proved the reliability of our Old Testament texts.
Some of these “Second Temple” documents that New Testament writers either refer to or directly quote (like Jude and Peter) tell us details of what the Old Testament authors assume you understand because their original audience understood them. As believers of the good news, we join that audience who received the word of God, but we sometimes have to do some work to recapture their worldview we no longer share, but need to.
The author and audience shared a worldview, so the divinely inspired authors drop passing comments in their writing or pen entire sections with a set of beliefs in the background we don’t often know about or presume.
I believe there is enough in the text of Scripture that if you will read it enough and dig in it enough you can piece it together. It’s there, but we just don’t read it enough to catch all the layers to it. If you go dig a little into the references in your side columns, you can have some real fun.
The idolatry Israel is participating in and will still be practiced in the New Testament by many pagans is not simply the worship of some wooden, stone, or metal object.
The idol was a means to welcome a disembodied spirit of the dead Nephilim to inhabit and become the means of them taking over human bodies in order to recapture what they lost in the deluge of Noah to help them carry on the destruction of humans in their ongoing rebellion.
NOTE: When you read some of these second temple Judaism documents, you will find a ton of New Testament language.
Just this little bit of information can help you make sense of Paul’s preaching to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians chapters 8 and 10 regarding food sacrificed to idols. On one had the idol itself was nothing, but on the other hand that idol was connected to a particular demon/unclean spirit and they needed to be aware of the power and freedom of being in Christ and not participating with demons.
These beings are not unfamiliar to the people. They have names, and the unclean spirits have communicated their names in some way in attempts to connect to and inhabit a people. In Egypt the god of the calf idol was called Apis. In Mesopotamia the god of the calf idol’s name was Baal.
These disembodied spirits who are the descendants of the evil of Genesis 6:1-4 explains the nature of Israel’s “play” in Exodus 32:6 being lewd in nature. It was a lewd sin that created these evil creatures, and thus their natural inclination is to lewdness. NOTE: It’s also one of the reasons the porn industry has a multi-billion dollar strangle hold on Christian men and women. It’s not just because we are terrible people, but that we have either on purpose or inadvertently channeled the same evil unclean spirit that led to Israel’s play and invited it to influence our lives. This same unclean spirit and legion of unclean spirits drive the child trafficking industry. Have ears to hear.
We glean from the whole of Exodus 32 they were eating, singing (thus playing music), and involved in sexual misconduct. When our entertainment combines multiple elements that lead to sexual misconduct, I’d venture that what ultimately produced that content is not the human “artists” but the unclean spirits who are inhabiting them that produced it through them.
These same beings who conspired against the Lord Jesus on Mount Hermon in Genesis 6:1-4 in a sexual revolution against God’s boundaries are inhabiting the calf Aaron made for Israel and is animating their actions to bring about this evil we have seen in Exodus 32.
Therefore, the Lord’s anger burns against the evil beings, and against those who welcome the advances of those evil beings. When unclean spirits ruin humans, and when humans degrade the image of God in them, God’s love is rejected, and his anger is kindled.
I want you to understand this because I want you to know God and experience what it is to be known by him, and we can’t enjoy the fullness of that relationship in ignorance.
God is not just angry because he’s a capricious and rebellious little “g” god who is created and who is upset because his days are limited and needs to squeeze as much out of humans as he can.
No! God is angry because evil continues to spoil his image-bearers, and his image-bearers continue to participate in the rebellion of the Watchers as willing rebels. And this rebellion strikes at the heart of God’s nature and will in creation and at the heart of his love for them.
And since Jesus is holy, his emotion of anger is correctly stirred.
God gets angry because he loves. God is not anger. God is love, and love wounded rightfully experiences and expresses anger.
God so loved that he created, and that creation has spurned his love. Yet God so loved that he gave his unique Son to come to us and show us the Father’s glory by taking on flesh, living, dying, rising, ascending, and sending Holy Spirit to inhabit and animate to life whoever believes so they would be saved.
Israel has rejected this in Exodus 32.
Moses holds Aaron accountable for being led into sin by the desires of the people. V. 21-24
Don’t miss the kindness of God in the measured justice of God. V. 25-35
When the Lord made the covenant with Abraham in Genesis 15, God had Abraham half the animals in the “cutting of a covenant”. God himself passed between the halves of the dead animals while he put Abraham in a deep sleep and put a great darkness on him.
In the manner of making covenants, to pass between the halves of the animals is to call down the curse of death on oneself like has happened to the creatures sacrificed if one should break the covenant.
Only God passes between the dead animals because he knows Abraham and his people can’t actually keep the covenant. In Genesis 15, we get a glimpse of the cross where Jesus will have the curses of the covenant brought down on him in our place for our breaking of the covenant so that we get to be counted as faithful to the covenant even though we are not.
In the Exodus, God once again reminds them of what he is going to do for them in the cross in the coming years as the lamb is slaughtered for them while in Egypt. They are set free, and they pass through the baptism waters of judgment freely with no judgment visited on them even though they are guilty.
Israel has made this covenant with the Lord, and they have promised to keep 10 commandments that would define their relationship with the Lord in this covenant. To break these commandments is to forfeit their lives and be willing to receive the same fate as the lamb on that Passover night.
Take note that God does not summarily have everyone executed.
There is zero indication that the nearly 3,000 executed were the only ones participating in this sexual revelry fueled by the channeled unclean spirit of the golden calf. That is assumed to make us feel more just about what God has the Levites do here. Verse 33 does not indicate that only the guilty were killed. The blotting out of God’s book is a statement of fact that unrepentant sinners cannot escape justice unless they repent.
Even if that were the case, the sin of a few spills onto the whole with the still to come plague at the end of the chapter. That’s the nature of sin. Think about the rejection of the spies of God’s call to war and how that led to the death of an entire generation of people over 40 years. Think about Achan’s theft of spoils from Jericho and what it cost the whole nation.
The truth is there is no indication that only a few have participated.
So many are demonized and participating that the lewd party was heard by Joshua and Moses on the mountain, and to Joshua it sounded like war. That’s not a few. It is likely that most if not all of Israel has been led into this evil defilement allowed and led by Aaron.
Rather than be shocked that about 3,000 are killed, we should be amazed that any are allowed to live.
Numbers 1:45-46 (ESV) 45 So all those listed of the people of Israel, by their fathers’ houses, from twenty years old and upward, every man able to go to war in Israel— 46 all those listed were 603,550.
The census numbered all the men able to go to war in Canaan at 603,550. God has 3,000 guilty men executed and not the women they were participating with. 3,000 of 603,550.
That’s 1 out of every 200 or 5 out of 1,000. That’s 99.503% pardoned of the sin. That’s 0.497% held accountable.
The few pays for the guilt of the many.
That’s what will happen at the cross. Jesus, the unique and innocent Son of God, will take the penalty of our sin, the sin of the world, as the one counted guilty even though he is innocent so that we can be pardoned.
How good, kind, and loving of God!
Our love of God and pursuit of holiness must be our priority. V. 29
When the Levites chose the Lord over lewd revelry, it cost them some family.
Jesus told us in Matthew 10:37-38 that he must be our priority. We can’t lead our families to holiness if our family takes the place that belongs to Jesus. Our love for our family has to submit to the higher love for God and his kingdom. That’s the only true north for us as husbands and fathers to lead to.
The Levite’s choice to take the Lord’s side cost them sons and brothers.
Now, in the New Covenant, we are not permitted to wield the sword in this fashion. We are to sometimes take necessary holy steps to make it clear that holiness is not optional. Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5 are not unclear on how the church is to exercise the call to holiness for the good of its members.
We are told that the good news can set family members at odds over allegiances to God’s way versus the world’s way, and sometimes those boundaries cost us relational strain.
Matthew 10:34-39 (ESV) 34 “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. 35 For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. 36 And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household. 37 Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. 38 And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. 39 Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.
When it comes to our allegiance and our purity, there can be no compromise. It is Jesus and his kingdom and the holiness of that kingdom. Anything that defiles that has to be dealt with even if it results in relational strain and loss.
The result of not allowing ongoing and unrepentant sin to rule the day results in the blessing of peace.
The wages of sin is death, and sin’s consequences don’t just evaporate because God satisfies justice. V. 30-35
When Romans 6:23 uses the plural in “wages” with the singular “sin” it is a very profound statement even though awkward. “Wages” serves as a singular collective noun referring to the outcome of singular “sin”. The point is that sin pays out in a multitude of ways too numerous to state, so they are lumped together in a poisonous package grammatically stated in the singular.
Sin is the root issue, and individual “sins” are the fruit of the deeply rooted sin. Sin is the deeply rooted big boy issues God addresses in the Decalogue, and those root issues produce the fruit of a multitude of things that just rot away at humanity and creation. Sin producing death and sins producing rot and decay that lead to death if not repented of.
Here in Exodus 32, we are dealing with root sin that produced the lewd partying behavioral sins Israel was engaging in as downstream fruit, and that root sin pays out in death and the consequential payout of the sins keep on killing.
The sin of idolatry led to the sins of lewd behavior.
The sin of worshiping another “god”, making an idol to channel that unclean spirit, and calling that thing Yahweh was dealt with in death. The sins of lewd revelry as the fruit of the worship of the unclean spirit pay out in lingering consequences.
What are those consequences? The Lord sends a plague.
We are not told if or how many perished. It might not have been deadly. It might have been a plague of sickness. Either way, the ongoing consequences of defiling sins are visited on Israel in the form of some plague.
Lest we think that consequences for defiling what belongs to God are a thing of the past, we should note that 1 Corinthians 11 reminds us that sickness and death have been visited on the Corinthian church for their abuses of the Lord’s supper.
For those in Christ, we are transferred to the kingdom of the Son from the kingdom of darkness. We are justified, sanctified, and glorified. And, if we dabble in the dark kingdom, it might not affect our eternal destination, but it will result in consequences that may be unpleasant.
There is just no room for accepting or coddling sin and sin’s fruit of sins.
Application
What is the implication of the text? The implication of Moses’ account here is that Yahweh is holy. There are none like him. He alone is Creator and ruler and the standard in all things.
So, how do we apply this text and its implication?
1. We need to make sure we don’t dumb idolatry down to enjoying my spouse or girlfriend/boyfriend more than my bible study. Lest you think that is hyperbole, let me illustrate with real stuff.
ILLUSTRATION: In the 90’s, at least in my circle of immature young men following Jesus, we’d tell a girl we believed God wanted us to date and then when the relationship got stale we’d tell them we believed God wanted us to break up because we had put them up in the place of an idol and that’s sin, so the solution is to break up. Gross! Can’t believe we did that garbage.
That’s not idolatry. That’s an excuse because we were children acting like men and football season was upon us.
We have had idolatry passively taught to us for a long time, and I’ve allowed myself to poorly and passively let that go in my own theology and in our church’s theology to the point that what idolatry actually is a bit shocking to the system.
That’s a poor job on my part. As I grow, I often cringe at myself. It’s embarrassing.
We can’t afford to ignore the top three standards of the covenant that wrecks Israel and causes the New Testament authors to visit the subject enough for us to pay attention.
Idolatry is not just an ancient people sin because they were knuckle dragging lesser evolved humanoids who thought the carved wooden statue was a being.
Idolatry is a sophisticated and complex portal to being either demonized as a Christian or outright owned by unseen and very real dark beings who long for another body to continue their Genesis 6:1-4 spoiling of God’s good.
We need to have keen discernment to spot those portals of access to us, our children, our families and our churches so that we can do what John says as his last instruction in his first epistle: 1 John 5:21 (ESV) 21 Little children, keep yourselves from idols.
He would not say that if it were impossible to give yourself to some means of being accessed by dark and powerful beings.
We are truly in a spiritual conflict that is also physical in nature. Have eyes to see.
2. Let God’s word determine our theology rather than assumed atmospheric cultural pop theology or our chosen theological camps.
It is totally necessary for us to wrestle through hard Bible texts because the glory of God is more enjoyable and fascinating and satisfying than trying to bend him into what we want him to be.
Have you ever noticed that we just adopt some theologies and don’t know where it came from except that it has just been said that way ever since we can remember?
Have you also noticed how easy it is to take hard passages of the Bible, or passages we avoid, and try to make them fit our chosen framework rather than adjust our framework?
Just let the Bible say what it says, and work from there.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t work to do in making sense out of things. There is lots of work to do. But we don’t have to force the Bible into our chosen camp. Our camp needs to conform to God’s word.
Don’t make the Bible say what it doesn’t say. Don’t take away from what it says.
3. Make sure we tell the whole story of the Good News because it is God’s will that people be saved.
We must not avoid the whole story of the Bible. If we do that, we are truncating the good news. The good news of the cross is no news if it is not framed by the whole story of who God is in his entire person, who we are, what the mission is, who our enemy is, how God intends us to live and respond, and how he will work with us to see the salvation of the nations and restore all things.
We have to let texts like Exodus 32 sit on our chest to understand the magnitude of the cross, the depth of God’s mercy, and the heights of his love.
Exodus 32 should spark urgency to our gospel proclamation.
4. Since it is God’s will to save, and he saves through the proclaimed Good News, proclaim it every chance you get.
As a seasoned worker in Afghanistan once shared with some of us at a Perspectives training here in Rome a long time ago, every time you get an opportunity: Take the shot!
If we are caught in the conundrum of wondering where the metanarrative of the good news fits in our lives, our organization, or our daily communication, we are already being pushed around and influenced by the principalities and powers over the present darkness, and their camouflage is really good.
The good news is our worldview, it’s our message, it’s our framework all our tools fit within, and it must be quick on our tongues if we want to see the hurting and lost rescued from darkness.
If you have not believed the Good news, would you repent by turning to Jesus? If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
If you are in rebellion against God’s good standard for human flourishing, would you please repent today and find the waiting Father who is there with open arms to receive you home?