Hold-Me-Back Mercy

Exodus 32:1-14

Such a powerful text this morning. And I have so many questions. This is one of those moments in Biblical history that either shapes your idea of who God is… or it is one you kind of ignore because it doesn’t fit with your philosophical or theological framework.

And it might come down to this: Is god a What or a Who? Is God a set of theological ideas, is He a philosophical possibility… or is He a Who? Is He a Person, whose actions reveal His abilities and His Character?

Understandable Failure

We are going to be in Exodus 32, an absolutely amazing story, but let me set it up for you. We have been Moses up on the mountain and God is ordering His furniture and decorating His apartment. God is moving in. He is making arrangements.

In the meantime, the people of Israel are camped down the mountain. They had this great moment, this ritual of Covenant with Yahweh, and there was blood sprinkled, and there was feasting, and 70 elders got to eat up a ways on the mountain and got a vision of God eating with them. Mostly they saw His feet and the floor like Sapphire under Him.

Wonderful moment, spiritual high, surely, and then Moses leaves. He leaves for “40 days” which is a Hebrew idiom that could also just mean a very very long time.

And He didn’t say “I am going to be gone for 40 days”, he probably didn’t know how long before-hand, He just left.

So Moses has been gone a very, very long time. No word, no calls, no updates.

So some of the people are getting real uncomfortable, feeling the lack of leadership, feeling the lack of Presence, probably associating the lack of Moses with the lack of the God that Moses has been the front-man for.

Now what they do is going to sound horrible and bizarre to you and I, but it probably seemed pretty reasonable to them. For hundreds of years now, these “Israelites” have been living in Egypt. So they are really Egyptian Israelites much more than they are Yahweh’s Israelites by culture and history and all of those things.

And they probably have very clear ideas about what worship is supposed to look like. They have a strong worship preference. They like Yahweh, He can be top God, but they are going to take the mode of worship, and maybe some other gods that might prove advantageous as well, and they are going to do some worship the way they know and like.

“I know what God said, but I have to do what feels right.” “What works for me.”

Exodus 32:1-6

1 When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go 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.” 2 So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” 6 And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

I always read this and thought “Gasp! They made an idol! Idiots, fools, how could they not know better!”

But this is really understandable in context. They thought they did know better. Or at least, they “preferred better.” Maybe they thought Yahweh would like the new look, the new style, after all the Egyptians had some sweet looking stuff!

And Aaron is in. He didn’t live out in the desert like Moses for 40 years, He was in Egypt the whole time, maybe He thought this whole combination of Egyptian and Yahweh worship could work. Maybe He just felt peer pressure and caved, we don’t know. And probably not all of the people were in on it, but enough people that the text just says “the people.” They did worship “their way” and they sacrificed (that’s a good thing, right?) and they partied.

Totally understandable, totally reasonable.

God’s Reaction

And then there is God’s reaction.

While He is ordering furniture, the people of Israel are selling His place. The ad is out in Craigslist: we want someone or something more like what we had, what we know. Wanted: God that looks more Egyptian, works well with other gods, and doesn’t mind being called Yahweh. We like the name, we like the power, it is just the worship that doesn’t really work for us. The believing without seeing stuff.

He takes it personally. In a profound way. He takes it personally.

Exodus 32:7-10

7 And the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. 8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” 9 And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. 10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.”

WoW!

God takes this personally! He is offended by their idolatry. And He REACTS! He reacts with jealousy, He reacts with “hot wrath” and He reacts with murderous threats!

He reacts. Just sit with that a moment. God of the universe, Creator of the heavens and earth. Creator of time. Alpha and Omega, beginning and end, omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, omni-omni…

He is sitting their one moment calmly describing furniture to Moses.

And then His people start this idolatrous process… and He reacts. To all appearances in the moment, like a…. person. He takes it personally. He reacts emotionally, with jealousy, with burning wrath.

A Personal God

This is a theological mystery.

God is Person. He is the Person. Our person-hood derives from His personhood.

We, each of us, have a little collection of neurons devoted to capturing God in a box. All the things we know and think and have experienced of God. But we must always remember, that is not God. Our perception of God is not God, our understanding of God is not God.

And this is of absolute importance, because we are always trying to systematize our understanding of God in order to understand Him. To make Him make sense to us. And the danger is that He becomes a philosophical principle, a hypothetical idea, a magical ideal.

An unchangeable good, not a person, but a force.

This, and this isn’t the only one, but it is a powerful one, this encounter explodes so many of our tidy theological frameworks.

God is in the midst of moving in. God’s people betray Him. God reacts. He takes it personally.

Hold-Me-Back Mercy

And then He says to Moses, “Leave me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them…”

Why say anything? Why have Moses leave Him alone? Surely God is capable of a little tactical nuke that would just take out the people and leave Moses. Or teleport Moses away. Flood the desert, Moses is on high ground. He has options.

“Leave me alone, I’m going to kill them.”

See, I have heard these words before. I hear these words when I come home and my children have been systematically torturing my wife all day. And she greets me with “I am going to kill a child…”

Now, why is she telling me that? Not so that I can help her plan, but so that I can intercede. So that I can take the childrens’ side before Anna just enough to say “Take a break” and then take Anna’s side before the kids and duct tape them all to the wall for awhile.

The act of sharing her anger with me, her burning rage, is an act of hold-me-back mercy. It is an invitation to intercession. Someone hold-me-back. I have the burning rage that will lead to destruction. That is an authentic emotion. Now, in Anna’s case, the threat is 99% pure hyperbole. All parents know that other little 1%.

In God’s case, I don’t think we can just put this down to pure hyperbole. Just as the emotion is real, I think we have to take the threat as absolutely real. But just as real is the hold-me-back mercy that shares it with Moses, that invites him to intercede.

Moses does intercede, of course, and we are going to dive more into that next week, but this is what fully reveals the complexity, the tension, the authentic emotion, the radical personhood of God in this moment.

Such a sneak peek into the heart and mind of God.

God reacts. He takes it personally. His wrath burns. He threatens.

“Leave me alone, Moses, I’m going to kill ‘em. Let my anger burn.” I hear “Hold me back, Moses, just hold me back, cause I want to kill them. Talk me out of it, but if you leave me alone, we are starting over.”

Moses intercedes, more all about that next week. But then, this:

Exodus 32:14

14 And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.

And the Lord relents. Literally, He changes His mind.

Now if your construct of God had a tough time dealing with God having an authentic emotional response to an event in space and time, what the garbage do we do with God changing His mind. But this word is clearly, unambivalently, a change of mind. Thought one way “I’m going to kill them”, then in response to Moses’ intercession, thought a new way. This isn’t a one-time thing, 4 or 5 times in Scripture, God relents.

How is that possible? There are theological frameworks and ideas and ways of understanding, but the absolute driving, baseline, foundational principle, all through Scripture and every revelation of God is this:

God is Person. He is Personal. He is a Person. Personhood is defined by God, found in God, ours is only a reflection of His. God is Person. Not an idea that fits your system, but He is actually as He is. And you and I discover who He is through His words and actions, through His reactions. Through conversations in which He really responds to His people. To prayer. To intercession.

Our Situation

Now, what does this mean to you and me. It means that we serve a Personal God. It means that we can get to know Him as He actually is, not just an idea, not a what but a Who?

We serve this personal, jealous-and-merciful God.

But like the Israelites, we can slap God’s name on a culture-comfort and expect God to like it.

I prefer my God to look a lot more like me. A lot more like my culture. I prefer my God to talk a lot less about sin and a lot more about kindness. I prefer my God to play it cool on Judgment and heavy on the Love and Mercy.

I prefer my God to not challenge my worship, challenge my comfort, challenge my finances, challenge my relationships, or to challenge me. I can take all of those preferences, dress it up in Bible-sounding terms like a gold covering… and I’ll bring my sacrifices to that and I’ll call it God. I’ll call that Yahweh, I’ll call that Jesus, I’ll call that Christianity, and then I get to have my party and everybody wins.

“I know what God said… I just have to do what feels right for me.”

What if, authentically, every time we engage in this kind of idolatry, every time we dress up our ideas and call it God, every time we hijack God’s name, what if this is the scene that plays out in Heaven?

God reacts. God takes it personally. God’s wrath burns.

Doesn’t that change the picture? It isn’t hypothetical. It isn’t faceless. It isn’t impersonal.

And maybe Jesus throws himself forward like Moses every time, this complex emotional tension, almost a wrestling all within the Being of God… and God Relents…

We can confuse God’s “Relenting” with indifference to our sin.

And in the meantime, God is jealous. Is He not still a Jealous God? Jealous for you, jealous for me. Jealous whenever we replace Him in our lives with some dressed-up nonsense?

He says, “No! I want you to know me! That’s bull. You are missing me!” He is jealous for us to know and to love and to worship and to discover Him.

Let’s discover God as He actually is. Let’s worship Him, pressing into His real Presence. Not our idea of Him, not what “makes sense to us” or what “feels right to us.”

But the true worship, the true sacrifice due, an actual relationship with the actual True Person of Yahweh.