40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 101 (Exodus 32:1-6)

Episode Date: November 2, 2017

Chad and Daniel are back in Exodus. Since everyone is religious at heart the people corner Aaron in Moses' absence and demand a God to worship. Gold is pulled off the ears of the people and the most famous idol in the Bible is fashioned. It's an odd yet common thing to have the right God's name but the wrong god altogether. There is a lot to talk about in these 6 verses. Have a listen!

welcome to another episode of 40 minutes in the old testament i'm daniel emery price joined by chad bird chad how's uh the post-conference bird doing the bird's still flying yeah it took me about uh i think a week maybe to to kind of come down from uh from the clouds after after the uh the reformation conference man that was uh that was a blast uh so many so many great speakers just great time hanging out with with people uh some old friends making new friends uh had a lot of fun recording our uh our hundredth podcast uh which uh hopefully uh everybody's listened to by now so anyway yeah it was it was great it was great uh success in every single way yeah man yeah a whole mess of people sold out uh 500 people on the 500th anniversary of the reformation it was

Can't ask for better than that No, you sure can't So we diverted while we were there So for some reason People were like, I don't want to hear these guys live Or whatever We're now picking it back up Where we left it before the conference

Yeah, we did a little A little fast forward We skipped all the way to Isaiah And then we jumped From there to Luke chapter 4 Just to kind of bringing together the old and the new testaments as eric was with us on that on that particular podcast uh so we will uh put it reverse and we will go all the way back to exodus once more and

you know we're at a we're at a pretty critical phase uh today dan uh we uh it's a it's a it's a stopping point for all the tabernacle stuff that we've been talking about over the last few chapters and for the next three chapters exodus 32 33 and 34 uh we're gonna we're kind of right in the middle of a mess again uh it's it's the story of the golden calf and the fallout from that and and trying to kind of pick up the pieces and figure out what in the world is going to happen next so a lot a lot of good stuff to talk about with uh with chapter 32 and uh and the next couple chapters. It's sort of our, it's the in-between section here. So you had 25 through 31 that were the instructions for the making of the tabernacle. You know, all the miscellaneous

stuff that we talked about there. And then 32, 34 is this interval. And then we're going to pick it back up, except we're going to go pretty fast through that last part of Exodus. 35 through 40 is where we go back to the tabernacle but a lot of that is uh is quite honestly just kind of repeating what we've already covered in 25 through 31 just instead of telling us how the tabernacle is to be made those chapters tell us how it was made so we'll get through 25 through 31 at a pretty fast clip but here we are uh in chapter 32 so we're gonna we're gonna see what happens while moses is up on the mountain while he and god have been having this uh this conversation over the last 40 days well i think this text is probably gonna be a struggle it's one of those

weird texts that we just cannot relate to and has no application to how how we operate you know it's gonna be a stretch uh because uh you know the israelites struggle a lot with idolatry which uh We in our elevated sanctity no longer struggle with being fully devoted heart and soul and mind to God 24-7. Yes, the ease of the Christian life in the West has eliminated all idolatry from Christendom. Yeah, monotheism is just rampant now. It's a sign of the times. We'll do what we can. you know uh we'll try and be a creative here and uh and see how possibly exodus 32 and the golden

calf has some relevance to uh our to our lives today all right i'm interested to see how you do it yeah yeah well i'll put my thinking cap on so we'll see how it goes i want to spend a little bit of time with the first verse because there's actually quite a bit packed in here and we will we will begin to unpack it and see what we can come up with so the uh the previous chapter ends with uh god giving moses the two tablets to the testimony tablets of stone written by the finger of god so that's that's the way the chapter ends and the way the next chapter is going to begin is not with the finger of God, but with the hands of man. And what they're going to be up to is no good. So here's how, let me just read the first verse and then we'll talk about it. Now, when the

people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, come, make us a God who will go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we don't know what has become of him. So if those listening were at the conference and you heard David Zoll speak, which by the way was a fantastic presentation, It always is. It always delivers the goods. But I was making mental notes as he spoke because I knew this was coming up and this chapter was coming up. And David actually referred once in his presentation to the episode of the golden calf. And what he said, I thought was very insightful.

So he refers to the fact, David does, that Moses is up on the mountain and he's gone for a long time, 40 days. People don't know what's happened to him. And the point that David made with this story is that people abhor a religious vacuum. So the vacuum, the vacancy that was left was Moses being gone. He had been the spokesman for God to them. He was their leader. He was the one they looked to, to deliver to them the words of God. And so in his vacancy, when he's absent in this vacuum, they need some kind of religion. And so if nature abhors a vacuum, then people abhor a vacuum of religion.

So what they did is they came up basically with their own. Now, David went on to talk about how people are, our problem is not so much today that people aren't religious enough, it's that they are too religious. So we have the religion of parenting, we have the religion of exercise, we have the religion of marriage, we have the religion of work, whatever it is. people are turning to that in order to have some kind of uh higher deeper meaning in life something that they can can understand themselves by something they can live for something that they can get some sort of uh some sort of meaning meaningful uh reason for their existence from you know people do that for various reasons so in in this particular vacuum that's left by the the absence of moses what they do is they uh they're going to create a god who will go who

will go before them you know you know that there's a there's a lot of people will uh make the statement i'm sure you've heard before that they're they're spiritual not religious right which always bothers me because uh and my response is always the same that i'm pretty dang religious but not very spiritual uh which i think is the case with me i'm a really religious person uh and in today's point which was which is really brilliant um another wrong with being religious about the the right thing um the the the the point though is that we're hyper religious and about all the wrong things so we like make everything into a into a religion all of that then of course is idolatry like every every time we make fill a religious vacuum with

some religion that we made up uh we are we are committed idolatry of course if you want to be religious about god i mean jesus extols religion true religion uh he's about as religious as they come right but and tells you what true religion is but uh there's only one way to be religious and not idolatrous and every every other every other way of being religious is uh is idolatry yeah and we see that we do that we want to we reject god constantly and then uh and then fill the void that we've created with any manner of things any any number of different golden calves that could be anything yeah i i was uh i was reading this week uh a quote by uh by robert capon i think it's from the astonished heart and uh he speaks to this as well i'll just it's i put

it on my Facebook page. It's a great quote, and it relates exactly to what we're talking about. So he writes, the world is by no means averse to religion. In fact, it is devoted to it with a passion. It will buy any recipe for salvation as long as that formula leaves the responsibility for cooking up salvation firmly in human hands. The world is drowning in religion, but it is scared out of its wits by any mention of the grace that takes the world home gratis i thought that was a a great quote that speaks directly to this the world is by no means averse to religion in fact uh we before we started recording dan and i were talking about the author james smith and uh some of his books and one of the points that he makes is uh he he doesn't

call us homo sapiens he calls us something like homo liturgicus which just means we are we're liturgical people or another way of saying that we are worshiping people that that's that's who we are i mean that's that's who god has made us to be and so you don't have anyone who's who's who's irreligious who opposed to religion that's like being opposed to being human humans are worshiping creatures it just it's a question of who or what we're going to be worshiping doesn't matter if we're a monotheist or an atheist or agnostic or whatever whatever it is there's always going to be some object of our worship even if it's even if it's the person in the mirror but someone or something is going to be the object of our devotion of our love our trust

of our of our religion yeah there's no such thing as a non-worshipper no yeah there's there's all every activity of our lives in one way or another is oriented toward that uh toward that worship it's just a question of whether it is oriented in the in the right direction or not so that that was israel's issue um they were religious people just like we are and they had been dependent upon moses and he delays you know i was thinking about this uh that that is uh that is a temptation you know when so he says he delayed when the people saw moses delayed to come down from the mountain in other words he wasn't acting on their timetable they thought he was gone too long. They wanted things to happen more quickly. They wanted things to

take place in the order and at the time that they wanted them to take place. You know, this happens a lot in our lives. You know, if things aren't going the way we want them to go, in fact, maybe they're going the exact opposite direction or, you know, we're praying or we're hoping and nothing seems to change and a day goes by and a week goes by and a month or year or years go by and very often the temptation is to finally decide that we need to take matters into our own hands and look elsewhere for help and we saw this in the biblical story we saw this with uh with abraham and sarah right god promised them that they would have a child but they got tired of waiting and so in comes hagar we'll we'll take matters into our own hands or into our own bed and we'll we'll take

care of the matter in a way that's much more uh expeditious than the way uh god's taking care of things. And that's really what the people, people did here. Uh, Moses delayed. And so they acted and, uh, they acted according to their own, own presuppositions of how things, how things should be. So they, uh, they, they assembled about Aaron. I'm reading my trans I'm reading my, uh, from my English Bible, new American standard. I found one translation and I can't remember which what it was but i found really one translation that i think accurately reflects what the hebrew is implying here because it's not the hebrew implies not just the people assembled about aaron like they you know just kind of gathered in a crowd around them and said hey we want a god

really the the hebrew that they assembled against aaron it's uh the same structure grammatical structures used elsewhere in the Pentateuch about like when the people are angry with Moses and Aaron in the desert and they gather together against Moses and Aaron. So there's a negativity and a threat that is suggested about this. Not that I'm letting Aaron off the hook, I'm not by any means, but when they gather around him, they gather around him probably in some sort of a very pushy, possibly threatening way, in such a way that they are going to insist on him doing what they want him to do. So here's what they want him to do.

Come, make us a God who will go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we don't know what has become of him. and we talked before about the hebrew word for god uh not the personal name yahweh this is elohim in the hebrew and and elohim is one of those kind of strange words it all depends on the context as to how you translate it grammatically elohim is a plural so we would translate it gods but when elohim is used in reference to the true god we translate it not as plural of course but as singular we translate it just as god and not gods so there's a little bit of ambiguity here

as because you really have to kind of dive into what the people's intentions might be when they say come make us a god do they really mean elohim in the sense of one god they mean elohim in the sense of multiple gods or or uh what are they suggesting i think we'll get to that as as a story as a story unfolds i just want to make that point now that there's a it's a little bit of uncertainty about how we should translate this. Probably all the English translations rendered with a little G make us a God. So they don't want the God. They want a God who will basically take the place of Moses in a way,

but who also is going to take the place of he of whom Moses is the representative and the spokesman. So here we are, Dan. you know this is this is us let's say we're aaron in this situation uh so big brother uh is uh or brother is up on the mountain and we're we're we're supposed to be in charge down here right uh while he's gone and the people come to us so what are our options what are we going to do well i think one of the things you have to remember is that um I think that we can think about, like, all right, so there's Aaron. And then, like, these five dudes come up to him.

And, like, you know, he caves in. It's not like that. Like, this is a lot of people, man. I mean, like, so this isn't just like, well, you know, the church council really wanted to do this thing. So, you know, I couldn't say no to all ten of them. Like, this is a lot of people. And so what are you going to do? Yeah.

It's kind of a threatening mass. You know, I get the picture here that they've encircled Aaron. He's got nowhere to go. And they're telling him in very, very clear language what they expect of him, right? So the pressure's on. There's no doubt about that. So what are his options? Well, I guess one option is to say no, right?

Sure. Probably the better thing to do at that point. Probably the better thing to do. They might kill him. Yeah. I don't know. Which is very likely, yeah. I mean, many other times they wanted to stone Moses and Aaron.

So that's not just kind of a possible scenario. It becomes very much a probable scenario later on. which of course was the right thing to do. In fact, he could remind them of the first words or the last words, last recorded words that they said. I meant to bring that up earlier. I read this in one of my commentaries. I hadn't actually noticed it myself.

The commentator pointed it out that recorded words before these are back in uh last recorded words of israel are back all the way in chapter 24 so 24 verse 7 covenant is read the people say all that the lord has spoken we will do and we will be obedient all right so that's israel speaking and there are no more recorded words until chapter 32 when israel speaks again and the first thing they say is come make us a god who will go who will go before us so they go from uh you know this pledge of absolute fidelity to a demand for aaron to give in to their to their unfaithful unfaithful desires yeah yeah so it's uh it's all this we will do and the very the very next words are are trying to obliterate the first commandment

exactly yeah which is which is where all sin begins uh if we uh if we have if we fear love and trust in god above all things we will not break into the other commandments if we only have that one god truly have just that one god then we won't take his name in vain or kill or covet or anything else but if we don't then everything else falls to pieces it's it's the uh it's the domino effect of the commandments. So Aaron, I mean, Aaron basically has two choices. It's a yes or no. And as we see in the story, he says yes. In fact, not only does he say yes, but he actually comes up quite rapidly with a plan of action. So he says to them, tear off the gold rings, which are in your ears, which are in the ears of your wives,

your sons and your daughters and bring them to me then all the people tore off the gold rings which were in their ears and brought them to aaron now i've always uh i've always thought there's a little bit of a of an implicit irony in here because they're uh they're taking out their uh their golden earrings uh and they're uh so the the idol comes from that which was around their ears when they should have been using those ears to to give heed to the words that god had had spoken to them in the covenant but instead he said they're they're deaf they're deaf to his words and they they take these emblems from their ears and they use them to uh to uh to make the the golden calf which we'll get to in just a second you know this isn't the only time something

like this happens in the scriptures i'd forgotten about this until this morning and i was looking at the book of judges judges chapter eight you know gideon does the same thing that you know it's one of the things about the bible uh you know they always say to learn you should learn from your mistakes but that that doesn't happen very often the scriptures in fact people seem to repeat the same errors over and over and over again um and that's what happens in the book of judges with gideon uh has everyone throw uh their their golden rings on this uh this blanket and he uses it to fashion this idolatrous ephod so uh he was following the the bad example of aaron when he when he does that all the sin all the sin in the bible is uh fairly redundant uh it's just the same

stuff over and over again yeah that's the thing about the thing about sin there's there's really no creativity to it i mean it's there there is we talk about original sin but sin is really never original in uh in one sense i mean it's always just a repeat one generation doing uh what the what the generation before it did it you know maybe in a slightly different way but uh basically you've got the same 10 commandments being broken in the same way over and over and over uh it's either one generation mimicking another generation or one person doing over and over what, what they've done, what they've done before. Yeah. I mean, when, when,

when Solomon says there's nothing new under the sun, that includes sin. No, I mean, nobody like does something like I've never even, I've never even heard of that. Yeah. Nobody's ever done anything quite like that yet. Well, actually they have lots of times. So here we have them tearing off the golden, rings which are in their ears and they're bringing them to Aaron and he took

this from their hand it says and he fashioned it with a graving tool and made it into a molten calf probably he has some sort of wooden mold that he put this gold around and then that that became the

golden calf and they said so this is the people speaking here this is your God oh Israel who brought you up from the land of Egypt. Now, this raises a very interesting question, which I think is worth talking about for a minute. So what is actually going on here? There's, I think, two or possibly three different scenarios. I mean, like,

What are the people thinking? So if you put yourself in their situation, I mean, they know that by this time, it's patently clear that Yahweh is the one who brought them up out of the land of Egypt. He sent Moses, and through Moses, he brought them out of Egypt. He led them through the Red Sea. He's brought them to Mount Sinai. They saw him come down in the smoke and the fire. They heard him speak the Ten Commandments. They said, all that the Lord has spoken, we will do.

So it's not as if there's some sort of vague notion of some unknown divinity up in the sky who's kind of orchestrating all of this. I mean, it's clear that Yahweh has done this. He's the one who brought them up out of the land of Egypt. So these people are not stupid. I mean, they know what's happened to them. so what are they saying when they when they uh when they reply after the calf is made this is your god oh israel who brought you up from the land of egypt now i of course we could simply say that they have completely switched their allegiance and instead of now worshiping yahweh

they are worshiping this this image that's one possibility the second possibility and the one that I think is is accurate in this case is that what they want is what they want is some sort of of kind of a compromise if you will what we might call today's syncretism it's this idea of a combination of two things so they want to still worship Yahweh the God who brought them up out of the land of egypt but what they want to do now is worship him under the emblem of the golden calf so the golden calf is perceived to be the the image or the icon of yahweh or uh possibly that that he is invisibly present on top of this pedestal of the golden calf a common near near eastern thing to do you had a you'd have a some kind of

bull or calf or ox the the pedestal upon which the god would would sit so maybe that's what they were thinking yeah i mean i think that this is this is one of the the insidious ways we are in idolatrous is that the sneakiest form of idolatry is the idolatry uh or the is the worship of of a god with the same name as the true god i mean so uh there's no shortage of people uh worshiping the wrong jesus i mean you could go up to somebody and say describe your god to me and they would maybe tell you all these things about him and then you're like oh well which god is that and they're like oh it's jesus and you're like oh weird because i i don't recognize that at all that is odd because i also i also worship jesus but uh i would have described that very

differently uh and so that's the sneaky i mean that's just i mean all the cults do this and i mean uh if you go ask a mormon what's your god like they're gonna tell you all they can tell you all kinds of weird stuff and then and then when you're like so what god is that like well the god the bible yeah go uh so i think that like this is the this is the sneakiest form of idolatry that the devil tricks us into is like oh yeah like you could totally name him yahweh you could totally name your savior jesus just as long as it's as long as it's not him i don't care what you i don't care what you call it okay i don't care what you give it credit for like just as long as it's uh as long as it's an idol and not the real not the real thing yeah that really

is the way idolatry works uh you know well i i suppose it's always it's always been that way but certainly certainly today that's the way idolatry works i mean i i don't know of any of any uh true polytheists people who believe in the existence of of multiple gods uh but uh but there's but there's lots of idolaters out there all of us in fact uh me included uh where uh we like to, we like to fashion God in the image that we want God to be in, which ends up being nothing more than a reflection of, of ourselves. So we think this way and therefore God must think way this way we act this way. And therefore we think God must, God must act this way. And so we, uh, we kind of concoct this, this hollow divinity, if you will, and we pour into

him all our own thoughts and desires and wishes and dreams and assumptions and presuppositions and everything and that's what we think that's what we think god is and we might call that god jesus or we might call it just god or whatever our chosen name might be but it is a being nothing more than a uh than than a hollow divinity that's it's an idol infused with our own with our own ideas and that's what that's what israel was doing here i mean they want to continue saying this is yahweh in fact the very next verse aaron says tomorrow shall be a feast to yahweh so whatever the people were thinking certainly aaron assumes that they haven't changed gods he thinks that they're still worshiping yahweh but here's the thing you don't get to worship god

in the way that you see fit you don't get to worship him under the image of golden calf you don't get to to think of him or to worship him according to the way that you think he should be because that's doing nothing more than replacing god's word with our own words and god's will with our own will which is what what idolatry always is so we can say jesus jesus jesus jesus all day long but if the jesus whom we claim to worship is not the jesus of the scriptures then he's nothing more than a golden calf and we end up uh using god's name in vain because we we apply the name jesus to something which is nothing more than our own self-made self-made idol which is which is what israel was was doing at uh the foot of mount sinai yeah i mean i think that i think

that we we read this and we and we're sort of you're sort of shot because they're they're worshiping you know a legit idol it's an it's a golden animal which is like when you think of an idol is what you think of and so we're like i would never i would never try to worship god wrapped in the image of the golden wrapped in the golden image of an animal and it's like yeah no probably not you probably wouldn't do that but you might worship god wrapped in stars and stripes or something like that never never might do that not in america that might never happen might do that uh it's yeah you you worship god wrapped in all kinds of things he hasn't told you to wrap himself in yeah i know we have listeners in other countries australia

and germany and elsewhere i'm wondering if they have the same experience there but uh yeah i mean uh the civic religion of america i mean that's a that's a super popular form of idolatry right oh dude nationalism is just a idolatry on steroids yeah i mean it has its own worship it has its own rituals it has its own sacred spaces it has its own icons like the flag uh we bring yeah we bring we bring that stuff into the into the house of god yeah yeah you talk about confusion taking place big time yeah so yeah nationalism is a is a is a super popular form of religion with with some people and that that's basically the the civic religion uh we all you know claim to believe we we speak of one nation under god or which god are we talking about

uh it's it's kind of the national god right i mean in some ways we're no different now than the the the ancients were every nation had its own god and so you had kind of a national god well that's what nationalism is it's really the deification of our political desires as they are expressed in all sorts of all sorts of rituals and symbols and sacred spaces and this idea of uh of you know us being the kind of the the workers out of our own of our own salvation according to our uh you know acting like civilians and pledging fidelity to the nation everything else that easily devolves into uh into a form of form of idolatry Yeah, I mean, I think here we even make this thing a Trinitarian, I think, in a lot of ways for a lot of people.

I mean, I see this all the time. I think faith, family, and freedom have replaced Father, Son, and Holy Spirit for a great many people. That's the triune God. uh is this sort of uh what we would claim is sort of this you know christian or judeo-christian you know foundation and ethic but the way you hear it spoken of is faith family and freedom that's that's what that's what that's what we're about and uh it's even trinitarian in nature or like these are the things these are the things we worship it just goes to show that um that the most popular forms of idolatry are always good things in and of themselves right you know nothing

wrong with faith nothing wrong with freedom certainly nothing wrong with with family there's nothing wrong with with money there's nothing wrong with children with exercise with work i mean all of these in and of themselves are good things and that those good things are always almost always that toward which we gravitate when we want to come up with our own with our own religion i think partly because these are things that we have quite a bit of control over and if there's anything we want in our religion it's something that we can control uh that we can you know kind of pull the strings on and manipulate so that we feel good about ourselves we have a little bit control over our our salvation in uh this particular religion

so yeah i mean that's that really is that's a sinister part of this is it satan really doesn't throw something that is just you know some kind of rank evil before us and say worship this because that's it's too obvious i mean he's a he's an angel of light he masquerades so he's sneaky in the way that he he comes at us and so he he puts something good in our path and he says hey make a religion out of this and we uh we all too often do do exactly that yeah so here's uh here's israel they've uh they've come up with this golden calf i'm sure it was quite pretty and you know gold nice nothing wrong with gold nothing wrong with a calf but you put those two together and you now you have uh now you have idolatry but aaron tries to save the day as much

as he can uh aaron sees this and so he he builds an altar this isn't just going to be kind of a of a of an image there's going to be an altar and he says tomorrow shall be a feast to yahweh so they uh they have it it says the next day they get up early and they they have a sacrifice they offer burnt offerings they they bring peace offerings and uh if you remember i mentioned this for peace offerings are offerings that are unique in that part goes in the altar, but most comes back to the worshiper to have a sacred barbecue. And that's what happens next. It says the people sat down to eat and to drink. So the whole burnt offerings were completely consumed in the altar before this calf slash Yahweh. And then the peace offerings were offered. They go back to the people.

They have their cookout, and they're eating, and they're drinking. It says they rose up to play. Now, people have talked about this play quite a bit as to what exactly is designated by this. It's too ambiguous, actually, to say the Hebrew verb to sahak that's used here, Isaac. And if you remember, Isaac means laughter, to laugh, but it can also mean to caress, like in a sexually suggestive sort of way. So whatever was going on with this play, some people have suggested that there's some sort of kind of ritual sexual activity that's going on. That might be reading too much into it. But whatever's going on, they're certainly having a lot of fun.

I mean, this is kind of a celebration. You've got everybody being happy. So nobody would have looked on from the outside and seen this and thought, oh, what a bunch of what a depressing sight. So from the outside, everything looked great. They've got worship going on. They had meals going on. They have happiness and celebration going on, Which just goes to show that when you look at things from the outside, it doesn't necessarily mean that what's going on the inside is in accordance with God's will. People may have been having a great time, but everything that they were doing there was a stench that was rising farther and farther up the mountain. And it's about to get into the nostrils of God.

We'll see how he reacts in the next few verses. But we'll have to save those for later because we are just about at the end of our 40 minutes. Ah, man, yeah. I was hoping we were going to get to Moses' response to this whole thing, but that will have to wait until next week. We will save that for next week. Moses, in many ways, steps into the shoes of Christ here. He becomes very much of a mediator in the verses that come after this.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, so we have set up the idolatry. Moses is about to walk down and get an eyeful of this mess. He's not going to think that this is a good, happy time. He's not going to jump right in and participate. I've got thoughts about Moses and what he does. But it'll have to be next week. Chad, we'll see you then.

See you then. Thanks.