ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CONCORDIA UNIVERSITY EDUCATION NETWORK EXODUS DR. DAVID ADAMS #54 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> Why did the Israelites return to the worship of the gods of Egypt after seeing what Yahweh had done to Pharaoh and his army at the Red Sea? It seems like an unbelievably foolish choice. They've seen the power of the true God. How could they have turned away? >> I think that's a question, Nick, that probably everybody who reads this text wonders. I think we need to be aware of the context here. Note the intervening material between Chapter 24 where we looked at the end of the last text and now where we pick up the story here at the beginning of Chapter 32. This material in between includes instructions about the building of the tabernacle and associated matters. Now, I mention this because in terms of the narrative, in terms of the things that happen in the story, the first thing that happens after the covenant ceremony in Chapter 24 is the episode of the golden calf in Chapter 32. So you have to kind of picture -- put yourself in the mind set of the story here. We have just sworn three times that everything that God has commanded, we will do and keep perfectly. And the next thing that happens is the episode of the golden calf where Israel not only fails to keep the covenant perfectly, it fails in just about the most spectacular way possible. And not even with any time intervening. So they could sort of forget what happened in the meantime. So your question how they could possibly have done this is I think a very reasonable question here. Well, first, you know, maybe we want to try to figure out exactly what sin it was that Israel committed here. We tend to think that we know that. But let's look at the text and see what the text tells us. It appears that this happens because Moses is up on the mountain for 40 days and the people presume apparently that he's not going to come back. So we read in Chapter 32 Verse 1, "When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain" -- in other words, that he had taken a long time and hadn't come back yet -- "they gathered together with Aaron and said to him 'Make us gods who'll go up before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.'" So apparently at least in the mind of some of the Israelites -- and keep in mind here not all of the people of Israel would think the same way. We know that the Levites and some people didn't because they didn't participate in this ceremony that's to follow. So not everybody in Israel thought exactly the same way. And some people in the group apparently thought that the fact that Moses didn't come back sort of discredited Moses' God. And so they are looking for other gods. "Make us some other gods who'll go before us because apparently this one has failed or abandoned us or something because he's not going to lead" -- "we're stuck here." There's evidence, however, that some of the people in Israel understood what they were doing in a different way. Namely, that they thought they were building this golden calf to worship Yahweh, not to worship some other gods. So let's look at Verse 4. Verse 4 says, "He" -- that is Aaron -- "received the gold from their hands and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they" -- that is the people -- "said, 'These are your gods, oh, Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.'" Now, the Hebrew could also be translated at this point "This is your god, oh, Israel who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." The word for God in Hebrew is always plural in form even when it's used of the singular God of Israel. So the fact that it's plural in form here doesn't really mean anything. Because it's always plural or virtually always plural. I think there were actually three occurrences, if I remember correctly, in the Old Testament where the singular form of the word occurs. But you don't want to know about that. So the point is there's some ambiguity here about whether we should understand this as singular or plural, especially because they say, "This is the god" -- "gods who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." Now, they know the God who brought them up out of the land of Egypt was the God that Moses was associated with. Namely, Yahweh. So there were apparently or -- at least there's some evidence to suggest here that apparently some of the people thought that the golden calf was an image to be used to worship Yahweh. In fact, there's other evidence in the Old Testament that this is the case. If we look to Nehemiah Chapter 9 Verse 18 where this episode on Mount Sinai is being discussed, there we read in Nehemiah when they made for themselves the golden calf and said -- here we do get the singular -- "This is your god who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." We get the singular word for this and the singular verb there instead of the plurals that we get her in Exodus 32. So when Nehemiah is talking about this, it's pretty clear that Nehemiah is referring to the fact that some of the people thought that this golden calf was being used to worship Yahweh. In fact, we have more evidence for this, as well. In I Kings 12 after the division of the kingdom after Solomon's death, the northern king, Jehoboam was troubled by the fact that the citizens in the north were going down to Jerusalem to worship. So after a period of time he decides to build his own altar at Bethel to set up his own temple so his citizens wouldn't be going south and taking their money with them, by the way, and worshipping in Jerusalem. This was a political or economic move but one that has theological implications. So there we read in I Kings 12 Verse 28, "The king took counsel JB MARK and made two calves of gold. And he said to the people 'You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold, your gods, oh, Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.'" And now it's clear in this case that the calves are intended to represent Yahweh. Because they are identified with the gods that the people are going down to Jerusalem for, which is clearly Yahweh. So this is being offered to them not as a way to worship other gods, but yet as a way to worship Yahweh without making the trek down to Jerusalem. Because as he says this, again, I would translate it singular here. "Behold your God, oh, Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." Because clearly that's Jeroboam's intention. We talked about Nehemiah and we talked about Jeroboam in I Kings. But there's evidence even within Chapter 32 here that other people understood this to be a worship of Yahweh. And that's clearly what Aaron understood in Verse 5. We read "When Aaron saw this" -- that is what the people were doing -- "he built an altar before it" -- namely, the golden calf. "He built an altar before the golden calf. And Aaron proclaimed and said, 'Tomorrow will be a feast to Yahweh.'" So clearly in Aaron's mind what they were doing was worshiping Yahweh using this golden calf as part of their worship to do so. So what commandment were the people breaking? Were they breaking the commandment against worshiping other gods or were they breaking the commandment against making images? Well, in the end it doesn't matter I suppose. Both were commandments of God. And the point probably is that God identifies them with one another because the use of an image, you'll recall, is connected to a different understanding of who God is in the Old Testament world than we have in the Bible. An image is the presence of the god in that place as we talked about in our introductory material. And so to use an image in the worship of God, even to use one in the worship of a true God even with good intentions -- and let's say that Aaron's intentions were good ones. I think they probably were. He seems to have been trying to do the right thing. His pastoral leadership may require some judgement evaluation. But at least his intentions appear to be good. He's trying to worship the true God. But in God's mind, worshiping God in such a way that is contrary to the way that God has commanded or that suggests some confusion about who God is is, in effect, tantamount to worshiping another god. And so in the end, from God's perspective, this is -- this is the same as worshiping false gods, even if they weren't intending to worship false gods. Because what they are doing is confusing the very concept of who God is by making this image. And that helps us to understand that also that the making of an image that's prohibited in the Ten Commandments is not just a command about pictures of graphics. But rather, it's a command that's intended to preserve the right understanding of who God is. And so when they worshiped God here, it doesn't really make any difference whether they were worshiping false gods or worshiping Yahweh using an image. They had clearly introduced confusion or falsehood into their understanding of who God was and what he was. And that is probably the best explanation of the sin that God is condemning in their worship of the golden calf. Keeping in mind that some people truly were worshiping other gods. There's a mixed audience here. And in fact, the very fact of lack of clarity in what they were doing is enough to earn God's condemnation in this case. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***