Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - Why We Fall Into Sin | Torah | Exodus 32

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

Why do you commit the same sin over and over? Do you go back to the same patterns you had before you followed Jesus? In today's episode, Keith uses Exodus 32 to explain how the Israelites continued to fall into sin even after being rescued by God. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Exodus 32

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life in the time it takes to get to work. My name is Keith Simon, and right now we're going through the Book of Exodus. Hey, today we get to look at a classic story of the Old Testament. If there were a Bible's greatest hits, this story would for sure be part of it. It's the story of the golden calf, and it's found in Exodus chapter 32. Let me read the opening verses of the chapter, and then we're going to dive in, unpack it, and see what it says to us. So let's just start in verse one. when the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain and they gathered around

Aaron and said come make us gods who will go before us as for this follow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt we don't know what's happened to him Aaron answered them take off your gold earrings that your wives your sons your daughters are wearing and bring them to me so all the people took off their earrings and brought them down to Aaron he took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf fashioning it with a tool then they said these are your gods Israel who brought you up out of Egypt. So Moses had been on the mountain for a while, at least a month. And while he was gone, the Israelites started getting restless.

What was he doing up there? When was he going to come back and lead them out of the wilderness? In their restlessness, they turned to Aaron and asked him to make a golden calf. And then they start worshipping it like it's their god. So you're wondering, why in the world would you make a god out of a golden cow? And it's a pretty simple answer. You see, the Egyptians worshipped a lot of different cow deities. So it turns out that it's easier to get the Israelites out of Egypt than it is to get Egypt out of the Israelites.

At the very first sign of trouble, God's people wanted to run back to Pharaoh. Now it's Pharaoh's gods they were wanting to run back to. Paul says that this story speaks to us directly. It has something to teach us. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul brings up this story and says it has something to teach us. and it also has something to warn us because we are tempted to commit the same sins the Israelites did. We're a lot like the Israelites. Like the Israelites, we're living in the wilderness between our baptism. Think about their crossing of the Red Sea as their baptism and the promised land. When things

get difficult, we often try to return to Egypt or the same pattern of sin that described us before we started following Jesus. So the story of the golden calf tells us more than what happened to the Israelites. It tells us what happens to us. One of the things we see in the story is how we fall into sin. You ever find yourself telling God you'll stop a particular sin? Maybe your struggles with pornography or food or shopping or gossip or pride. Why do we struggle to overcome those patterns of sin? Well, one reason is because the sin is in our heart, not in the refrigerator, not on the web.

All I mean by that is sin is inside of us, not outside of us. The story of the golden calf helps us see this. Why did the Israelites worship a cow? Well, because they'd never completely forsaken the gods of Egypt. They had promised to serve the Lord their God, but in their heart, they still cherished their old idolatries. In Acts 739, it says, in their hearts, they turned back to Egypt. And we do the same thing.

Too often in our struggle against sin, we focus almost exclusively on our actions. We think we can overcome sin just by stopping being. doing this or that. But sin is not so much what we do as who we are. And unless we deal with the root of the problem and put sin to death in our heart, we're going to fall right back into the same old sins doing the very things we swore to God that we would never do again. To break this pattern, we have to identify and eliminate the idols of our heart. Things like money, sex, power, greed, lust, approval, pride. The Apostle John finishes his letter by saying, dear children, keep yourselves from idols. We fall into sin when we don't trust that God knows what

he's doing. Sin is a distrust as well as disobedience. Not trusting God is a sin in of itself, but it also leads to other sins as we come up with our own strategies for making our life work the way we want it to work. The proof that the Israelites did not trust God is that they were not willing to wait for God's instructions. They were too impatient. They knew what they wanted, and they wanted it now. God had not told the Israelites when he was going to lead them out of the wilderness, nor had he told them how long they were going to be in the wilderness or how long Moses would be up on the mountain. All they knew is that they were right where God wanted them to be, at least for that moment. And they needed to trust that when it was time for them to move on, God would show them

the way. The Israelites had every reason to believe that God knew what he was doing. He had brought them out of Egypt. He had saved them in the desert. He had given them his law. Every day he provided bread from heaven, and yet they doubted. As the weeks passed and Moses failed to come down, they started getting anxious. And as they had so often done in the past, they began to grumble against God. And finally they decided that they just couldn't take it any longer. If God was going to abandon them, they complained, then they might as well find some other God to lead them out of the wilderness. As if any other God could lead them out of the wilderness. The golden calf was a symptom of Israel's impatience with God, their unwillingness to trust.

in God's timing. We fall into sin when we failed to trust that God knows what he's doing in our life and try to work things out on our own. Instead of waiting for him to do something according to his perfect timing, we try to speed things up. By setting the agenda, what we're really trying to do is get control from God. What we should be doing is waiting for him to work. The trouble is that just like the Israelites, we're often tempted to be impatient. We get impatient for him to lead us out of our wilderness. But sometimes for our own benefit, God doesn't want to bring us out of the wilderness. He wants us to be in the wilderness, at least for the moment. And if the wilderness is where God wants us, then that's where we need to stay, trusting that in his goodness and in his timing, he will lead us out.

We fall into sin when we do what is popular instead of what is right. Aaron was in charge since Moses was up on the mountain meeting with God, and in verse one it told us that the people crowded around him. They were not there to hear what Aaron had to say, but they were there to tell Aaron what to do. When they spoke, they were giving orders and commands. They said, come, make us gods. We've waited for Moses long enough. Get up and get busy. Now, Aaron knew better, but instead of defending the one true God, he gave into the people. He tried to say he was doing it for God, of course, but the truth is that Aaron was too weak to stand up for what he knew was right. In the end, what mattered to Aaron most was not what God said, but what the people would say. Not what God thought of him,

but what the people thought of them. We do the same thing whenever we let other people pressure us into doing something that we know is wrong. We do it on the playground when kids are talking about something bad. We do it in the office when the numbers don't add up and our boss tells us not to ask any questions. We do it when we're out with friends. We do it in front of screens when we drink in the cultural messages without any discernment. We do it when friends start to gossip and we participate. Whenever we do what is popular instead of what is right, we fall into sin. We fall into sin when we forget what God has done for us. Think about all the Israelites had seen God do. They had witnessed the plagues that God sent against the Egyptians.

They had walked through the Red Sea on dry ground. They had conquered their enemies through the power of prayer. They had eaten manna in the wilderness and had drank water from the rock. They had seen God's glory on the mountain and fire and smoke. The Israelites had seen it all. They had seen the signs. They'd witnessed the wonders. And yet, in a matter of weeks, they forgot everything God had ever done for them and they started worshiping a cow. How quickly we forget. We forget that God gave us life in this world. We forget that he is the source of all gifts and the origin of all our blessings. Every good thing we have in our life came from God. We forget that he sent his own son to die for our sins, we forget that he has given us His Holy Spirit, that His Spirit resides in our heart

and is a guarantee of our relationship with Him, a guarantee of our life with Him forever. And when we forget, we turn back to the same old idolatries. Not a cow, but money, sex, power, things that are just as foolish as worshipping a cow. See, these deities will not do anything more for us than the Golden Calf did for Israel. They are gods that cannot save. So God says in Exodus 32 that he's going to destroy the Israelites. And Moses prays and asks God to have mercy on them. He doesn't defend the Israelites. In other words, he doesn't say, God, what they did wasn't bad.

Instead, what he does is he admits their guilt. He admits that they had rebelled against the God who loved them. And then he asked for mercy. He didn't negotiate. He just asked God to be merciful to them. Moses appealed to God's fatherly affection. He said, remember, Israel is your firstborn son. He appealed to God's past investment in them and said, God, you have done so much in their life already. Don't stop doing good to them now. Moses appealed to God on the basis of his public reputation. He said, God, look, everybody is watching what you do with these people. If you bring them out in the desert only to kill them, then the Egyptians are going to look around and say, that you are not good. Your credibility is on the line. You chose this people. You've saved them.

You brought them through the sea and you fed them in the wilderness. These are your people. If you destroy them, your reputation will suffer. But then he ended by just asking for God's mercy. Psalm 25 says, great is the mercy and love of God. Can you see why Exodus 32 is part of the Bible's greatest hits, why it's a classic story? It has a classic story. It has a so much to teach us. We can learn that we are prone toward idolatry and look in our life and ask God, where am I tempted to worship other things besides you? And then we can pray for ourselves and others, not justifying our behavior, not excusing it or minimizing it, but asking God to finish the good work that he started in our life, asking God to show us his great mercy and love.

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