For Want Of A King

 November 20 2022

1 Samuel 8

         Since our kids are grown we don’t do much for Halloween anymore. For me, now, the best part of Halloween is the commercials that pop up during this time of year. I get a chuckle at the M&M commercial where the one M&M says to his friend, that he is glad that they had made it through another Halloween. The friend though, doesn’t yet know that he has become a ghost apparently not having as good of a Halloween as the first M&M. As they walk along, the second M&M walks through a fence and then as they walk along he begins to float upward the first M&M clueless about what has happened to his friend. Its funny but I guess you just have to see it for yourself. The other commercial that has been around awhile is the Geico ad which is the scene out of a horror movie where a group of young kids come tearing out of a field scared out of their wits, trying to figure out what they should do next. One of the kids suggests that they hide in the attic of the creepy house, the other says that they should hide in the basement. Then, someone pipes up, “Why don’t we just get in the running car?”, which is sitting conveniently near by. Her friend replies, “Are you crazy?!! Then they see a shed with a bunch of chainsaws hanging from the rafters, and the one kid, says, “Let’s hide behind those chainsaws!”, which is approved unanimously by the group. So, they run and hide behind the chainsaws and we see that there with them behind the chainsaws is a suspicious looking guy with a mask. The punchline is that in horror movies you make poor decisions that’s just what you do.

         As I go through the Old Testament it seems as if God’s people are like those kids in the horror movie, they make poor decisions, that’s just what they do. No place is this most evident than here in the eighth chapter of First Samuel where the people of Israel decide that they are in need of a king. In doing so, they have rejected God as being their king.  It is good to pause here and remember that the reason that we are going through the Old Testament is that Jesus tells us that these scriptures are about him. As we prepare our hearts for his coming, we are to listen to what is written here and discover the Jesus who jumps out from the pages of Scripture. Nowhere is it easier to find Jesus in these sacred words than right here in the rejection of God to be their king by the people of Israel. It is not hard to compare this action to what John wrote in the first chapter of his gospel where he tells us that Jesus came to his own people and his own people did not receive him, for they too rejected him as king just like their ancestors had done. Jesus, God who has taken on flesh and dwelt among us, is the God who is rejected by the very people who claim to be his own people. That’s pretty astounding when you stop and think about such an action.

         What makes this turning away from God also so unthinkable is that in the chapter just before we are told of Israel rejecting God as their king, we find that the people of Israel had entered into a time of repentance, a turning back to God. They had rid themselves of their idols and confessed their sins to God. Samuel, God’s appointed High Priest and judge, offered up offerings on their behalf and he also cried out to the Lord for the people of Israel so that they might be saved from their enemy, the Philistines. As Samuel offered up the sacrifices to God, the Philistines drew near to attack the people of Israel as they worshipped God. Suddenly, the Lord thundered with a mighty sound against the Philistines which sent them running for their lives in sheer terror. The army of Israel chased after them and easily defeated them. In response to what God had done that day, Samuel did something very unusual; he set up a stone marker which he called Ebenezer. Ebenezer is a Hebrew word which simply means stone of help and it conveys the truth that God has always been faithful to help his people when they needed it. This stone is a tool of remembrance for God’s people, something that they could see and know that thus far God had been their help in times of trouble.

         Right on the heels of such a profound statement of faith in God’s faithfulness and help we have the tragic rejection by these same people of the kingship of God. Yes, they had concerns over who would follow Samuel to provide leadership and direction for them since his sons were unworthy of the task because of their perversion of justice. Yet, instead of remembering that God had always been there to help them, and in that remembrance, turn to the God who would have assuredly provided someone to follow in the footsteps of Samuel instead they turn to the nations for their answer to their problem. Tragically we will never know what God would have done in this situation. Once again, the people of Israel make a poor decision; it’s just what they do. It was a poor decision because it would have profound consequences for the people of Israel, the decision which would be the very reason why they would end up going into exile at the hands of their enemies.

         This decision of Israel also meant that the hope of God to take these people of Israel and make out of them, a kingdom of priests, a holy nation, was no longer going to be pursued. No longer would the world witness a people who knew that their God sheltered over them with his wings of glory, an Almighty God who is able to bring life out of death, to make exist that which does not exist. The world would not see a people who knew life as being a gift, a gift which called forth praise to the God who had given it. In the mindset that held life as a gift, the people of God would speak of the greatness of their God and in the light of the magnificence of their God they would live in peace and love one another, content with the life their God had given to them. Gone would be the times of blessing where any of God’s people could experience the closeness of God, knowing themselves as the people blessed by God. This kingdom of priests, a kingdom where everyone served one another, blessed people blessing one another, all of this got washed away there in that moment that the people of Israel chose to look to the nations instead of looking to the God who had always been their help.

         When the people of Israel rejected the kingship of God and chose to have a king like all of the other nations, they had to understand that having a king would have a profound effect upon their way of life. As Samuel told the people of Israel, this king would take the sons of the people of Israel and appoint them to be chariot runners. The king would take thousands more to work his ground and harvest his crops. The king would take the daughters of Israel and put them to work to be his cooks and bakers. The king would take the best of the fields, the best vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants to care for. The king would take a tenth of all that the people of Israel produced and use it to provide for all the servants needed.  Instead of a society where each person served one another in equity and justice now their whole world would be consumed with serving the king and his men. Thus, their community would be fractured into those who served the king and the king and his court who were being served. The sense of everyone being equal in the eyes of God would be quickly lost and without this sense of equity, justice and righteousness would be also lost as well. 

         It is easy then, to understand how great of a threat to God’s purposes this notion of his people having a king other than the one, true God really was. Another issue that arises from this office of the king is that this king will have a tendency to solve their problems politically which means that compromise will become rampant. Peace will be sought by establishing a web of foreign alliances which will inevitably mean that all of the idols of these neighboring countries will infiltrate the worship of God’s people. All in all, this choice of a king was one that seemed to be fraught with dangers yet even so, the people would not relent in their pursuit of having a king.

         What was also a concern when the people of Israel decided to have a king just like all of the nations is the promise that God had made to Abraham that through his descendants all of the families on earth would be blessed. This was the glorious future that God had promised was going to happen, a future which was a certainty that could be counted upon.Yet instead of living in and toward that future in the here and now, the people of Israel instead looked back, locked in to what is and what has been, not looking for that which is breaking through into the present, God’s good and glorious future. Yet all is not lost in such a dreary outcome because with the coming of the office of the king there also came the office of the prophet.  The coming of the prophets to Israel was foretold by Moses as we learn in the eighteenth chapter of Deuteronomy, where we read of how God was going to raise up out of the people of Israel one who would be like Moses. This one whom God chooses is one whom God will put his words in their mouth to speak through them all that God commands. The people were to listen to this one who comes in the name of the Lord because what this one speaks is what the Lord God requires them to do. Moses also told the people that a true prophet is one whose spoken word from God is a word which most assuredly will come true. What this is saying is that the Spirit of God is speaking through his prophets from a future vantage point, calling his people ever forward toward that future. So, against a kingship which is ever oriented toward the past, there we find that God places his prophet, the one who is speaking about a future that God has for his people. What God desires is that those who hold the office of the king know that even though the people of Israel have rejected God as their king, he nonetheless is the one, true king over all. And because this is the truth then his prophets are God’s prime minister whose authority is over any earthly king because it is the prophet who speaks for the God who is king over all. We are to make no mistake, that it is prophecy which will be the voice that will prevail in the ultimate decisions by which the future of Israel is decided. 

         The ultimate authority of God is also seen in how a king will come to reign over Israel. The king who reigns is a king only through the decision of God.  This is seen in the anointing of the king as we see in Israels first king, Saul, as told to us in the tenth chapter of First Samuel. There we read how Samuel, the High Priest, judge and prophet, pours oil upon the head of Saul. This anointing of Saul gives him and the people of Israel the assurance that Saul has been chosen by God to be king. The oil represents the Holy Spirit, the giving of God to empower Saul with the authority to act. Following the receiving of the Spirit, the king then is expected to go out and demonstrate that God’s divine power is with him. This Saul does when he led the people of Israel against the Ammonites, an enemy which threatened to destroy Israel.

         What is so amazing about our God is that he is able to take this rejection by his people and use this very idea of kingship and use it for his glory. This sequence of a king being one who is chosen by God, one who has been anointed by the Holy Spirit as a sign of God’s election and their demonstration of power became the hope of the people of Israel after the failure of their kings who ruled over them, a failure marked by compromise, corruption and idolatry. The failure of the kings of Israel led God making good on what he had promised them he would do, as we read in the eighth chapter of Deuteronomy, that he would take and scatter his people to the nations, sending them out in exile to Assyria and later, Babylon. Yet out of this hopeless end came the voice of the prophets, the voice of God speaking of a future to people who thought there was no future for them. This voice spoke of a new king, one who would be known as God’s servant, one whom God had surely chosen. This one would be anointed by the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and might, the Spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord. This is a king who will be a king who will judge with righteousness for the poor and he will decide with equity for the meek. This is the king whose coming lay far ahead in the future yet even so, that God would hold him out as their hope was enough for God’s people. They simply knew him as Messiah, the anointed king. This anointed king’s demonstration of power was not some victory on a battlefield but it was instead a victory which would establish God’s future here in the present forever. We are told that this anointed one would know that he was a king who would bring good news to the poor; he would bind up the broken-hearted; he would proclaim liberty to the captives and open up the prisons for those who are held captive there.This king would announce that with his coming that this at last was the time of God’s favor and grace, now there would be comfort for all those who mourn. At last those under the rule of this king the people of God would know that they are priests of the Lord, people who would speak of themselves as being servants of God. God at last would once again enter into an everlasting covenant with his people and know them as being his children. The demonstration of the power of God’s anointed king is that he alone could bring God’s people to be the bearers of God’s blessing just as God had long ago had spoken to Abraham. This blessing of the nations would not come about because these people served this hoped for king, but rather this transformation would come about because this hoped for anointed king would serve them, speaking to them of good news, healing their broken hearts, releasing them from all that had held them captive for so long. This is a king who would draw close to them, speaking to them of the grace and favor of God, offering comfort to those who cried out in misery.

         You see, God can wait his people out, wait until they discover that there is no hope in looking to past solutions in order to make a new future for yourself. All that is in the past, all that has been done, will only result in what there is; there is no escaping the futility in which we are bound. The only way out of all that is past us is to be seized by the hope of the future that God holds out for us. Only as we come to the end of our future that we attempt to build out of the past will we at last be ready to take hold of the future that God desires for us to take hold of, a future ruled by a king who has come to serve not to be served.

         The long awaited anointed king, this is the one we know as Jesus. He is the one chosen by the Heavenly Father as we hear in his baptism. There as Jesus was washed in the river Jordan a voice was heard saying that this one was indeed God’s beloved with whom he was well pleased. Then the heavens opened and the Holy Spirit came and poured out upon Jesus, anointing him as the long awaited king who would restore his people so that they might be known as people upon whom the blessing of God rests. His kingdom would not come through violence and death for as he said before Pilate as found in the eighteenth chapter of the gospel of John, his kingdom is not of this world, not of the past, therefore his servants did not have to fight to bring it about. No, the kingdom of this king would come about through faith in his Heavenly Father who held safe his future. This we discovered after this king was killed upon the criminal’s cross and was laid in the tomb, a king of seemingly no future. Yet three days later, this king arose victorious, the battle won, his future secure. Alive forever more, this king reigns over all his creation and he calls us to follow him. We are to know that we have been chosen in the Messiah, God’s anointed king; we are to know that we are the ones who have been anointed by the Holy Spirit and our lives are to demonstrate that the very power of God animates our life. This is how our king has made it so that we might reign in life. I pray that you decide today to make Jesus your king so you too might be one upon whom the blessing of God is found! Amen!

The Only Future Is God

 November 2022

Deuteronomy 4:9-31,30:1-14

         It goes without saying that when people experience a great milestone in their life they expect that on that day that people will speak in glowing terms about the future which lays ahead of them. I mean, no one wants to hear a high school graduation speech that tells their audience that if they have chosen to go to college they will incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt probably amassed on a loan which will take years to pay off. Not only that, most likely the degree which they have worked so hard to obtain will no longer interest them when they enter the workplace so they should expect to spend more time and more money trying to figure out just what it is that they really want to do with their life. Even though it may be true, it really can’t be said on graduation day because everyone knows that this is a day of optimism and hope; there will be plenty of time for reality to be dealt with later on.

         We all just seem to understand that there are those times when we all need a little more optimism and a little less reality. I mean, yes, when the pastor who married Jennifer and me told us that we would be lucky to be happy thirty percent of the time, that may have been his reality but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to consume my thoughts on our wedding day. Yes, it seems that everyone seems to understand this need for optimism at the outset of a new venture.  Moses, on the other hand, sure seems to be one of those people who seems to like to rub the noses of the people of Israel in the cold hard reality that awaits them and their descendants as they now get ready to live in the land God had promised to them. They were probably looking for at least a little bit of optimism, after all, they had just spent close to forty years wandering around in circles in the wilderness. It wasn’t that they couldn’t find the exit ramp out of there it rather they had to remain in the wild places until the last of the original generation which had come out of Egypt had at last died. You see, even though they had experienced the hovering over of their God which kept death from ravishing their families and even though  once they had been set free from slavery they had seen their God make a way for them to walk through the Red Sea on dry land, no less, and even though they had watched this same God feed them day by day with the bread from heaven and made water pour from a rock, they still did not believe that this God was able to defeat the giants which lived in the land which had been promised to them. So God told them that since they had no faith in his faithfulness to keep his promises he would just wait them out, allowing them to die in the desert and try anew with the next generation.

         At last then this next generation stands at the threshold of the promised land ready to enter it and watch God bring about the victory which will secure this home for them. Before they can proceed though, they will need to be addressed by Moses because he will not be joining them on the far side of the Jordan. Moses was to die there in the wilderness because when the people had run out of water, God told Moses to speak to a rock because by doing so water would pour forth from the rock. God wanted to demonstrate to his people the power of his word spoken through his chosen one. Instead, Moses was in terror as he stood before the angry mob who thought God had brought them out to the desert to kill them, and in his fear he did not speak to the rock but instead struck the rock with his staff, drawing attention to himself and away from God. The teaching moment God desired was lost and because of this God forbid Moses from entering into the Promised Land.

         So in Deuteronomy we have what can be best described as the final words of Moses as he sends the people of Israel on their way under the care of Joshua. Here in the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy we hear Moses address his people but as I have already pointed out, Moses does so without a lot of optimism and with a heavy dose of reality. At least Moses says, “if” you act corruptly and not , “when” you act corruptly, but still his warning sounds pretty severe. If and when they act corruptly towards God and begin to make carved images, their time in the promised land will not last long. God himself would scatter his people until they would be few in number among the nations in which they would find themselves. There they would serve the gods which were nothing more than the works of human hands, gods which could neither speak to them nor hear them when they cried out in their suffering. So, this entering into this land which God had promised to them was a double-edged sword. It could either be a place of immense blessing if they were diligent in their relationship with God or it could be a short stay if they began worshipping statues and out of this corrupted state they began to do evil against one another.  This corrupted state would come on them as Moses states, when “they have grown old  in the land”, when they have become comfortable and lower their guard, when they began to take for granted what God had given to them, when the grace of God became expected instead of being for them a joyful surprise, this is when they would once again look back, back to the old ways instead of being seized by the new way of life God was speaking into being.

         What God is speaking into being is a new world where the curse which has come upon the earth is defeated, replaced at last by the very blessing of God. This is the future that God promised would come through Abraham and his descendants. This must be always remembered as these descendants of Abraham, the people of Israel, at last come to live in the land which God promised to Abraham. Here in this place was to be a sampling of the blessing of God, a blessing which is a life with God, a life where the very goodness and glory of God was present in a real and powerful way. This is what these people of Israel could not forget, that they had been rescued from slavery in order to be the people on whom the blessing of God rested. To be these people thus meant that they had to be people who were seized by this vision of this majestic and marvelous future God was holding out before them so that they were no longer captured by the false hopes and promises of the past. This future had as its foundation a life which is shielded from death through the overshadowing God, a God under whose wings we were created to live. Just as God called Abraham to have as an anchor for his life this certainty that the God who had called him, was the very God who could bring life out of death, the God who can call into existence those things which do not exist, so too this is what God was calling the descendants of Abraham to do. They were to no longer put any stock in what their flesh, their power, their strength or their wisdom could do because none of these were of any use in the face of death; only God, the hovering Spirit, only he could be for them their salvation when all seemed lost. This is why God knew that time and time again he had to bring his people to the place where all was lost, where all of their striving, all of their lusting after power and prestige, all of their attempts at greatness and glory, when all of it would come to nothing, then there God would be there for them, willing to take their nothing and create something of it.

         You see, the past is a world where the people created their own gods; the future is where the one true God creates something out of the nothingness of us. This is why God is a jealous God because we are his creation, we are a living image of the God who has given us a hope beyond death. God knows that if we continue to be enamored with the past and the ways of the past then when the past passes away we will pass away with it. Only when we realize that this world, this world held under the curse of death, only as we know the utter futility of attempting to find hope and peace apart from God, will we at last be ready for a life with God. Moses tells the people of Israel when they walk away from God and they find themselves in a tight spot, a place where they are afflicted, with no way out of their trouble, this is when, at last, they will return to God. They would turn to their God because as the prophet Isaiah speaks of God in the sixty-third chapter, in all of the affliction that the people of God experiences, God is afflicted too. God is there in the troubles of his people, waiting for them to come to the end of themselves so that they at last might find their future with God. You see, the God who is our future, the God who is our only hope, is a merciful God. God does not wait for his people to turn back to him in order for him to at last turn toward them; no, our God is always with his people, waiting patiently for them to seize a hold of him knowing that he alone is the only future that any of us have. Moses tells his people that the God who loves them, is a God who is never going to leave them, a God who is never going to harm them, a God who is never going to forget the promises that he made with Abraham upon which the certainty of our future rests.

         The way Moses tells his people that they can find this God, who is always present with them, is that they were to search for him with “all of their heart and all of their soul”. These words, heart and soul, describe the love which God expects from his people. The heart is the place where we hold what we treasure. The soul is the sum total of our life. So, to search for God with our heart and soul is to come to a place in our life where God is what we treasure most, the God with whom we are willing to offer up our life in service of this glorious future that he is bringing into existence.  To love God with all of our heart and soul can only come forth from us when we, by our own efforts, have come to nothing, when we know that we face a certain death a part from God, when at last we are convinced that we are able to do nothing to save ourselves. Only as we begin at this point can we then come to realize that God is to be treasured above everything else because he alone is able to bring our life out of the certainty of death. The love we have for God comes from the faith we have in what God alone is able to do. It is only as we know God as our future that we at last can love God here in the present.

         This warning that Moses is giving Israel here in the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy where he pleas for the people of Israel to return back to the God who is their only future is not only found here at the beginning of Moses’ address to the people before they cross the Jordan but is also found again at the end of this work in the thirtieth chapter. So, it is easy to see that this book of Deuteronomy begins and ends with a call to return to God. When the people of Israel forsake God and turn and are once again enamored by the old ways of life, life under the curse, chasing after gods which are nothing but figments of their imaginations, God will chase them out of the land which he has promised to them so that his people might live among the nations. In other words, God is telling them that if they want to live like all of the rest of the nations then they will have to do so in the nations because the promised land is only for those who desire to live out God’s glorious future here in the present. When we get to the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy, there is no expectation that the people of Israel will be faithful to the ways of God because Moses begins this chapter speaking about the people of Israel scattered to the four corners of the world, living there among the nations. It is from there, in places which they might believe are far from God they nonetheless can remember the future God holds out for them to experience and if they return with all their heart and soul then they will still be able to enter into a future of blessing. God promises his people that he will come and gather them from all the places that they have been scattered even if they are in the most remote regions of the highest heavens, even there God will search for them and find them and bring them to himself. So, this imagery of God gathering his people under his glory is an image of his shielding presence, his placing his life between his people and whatever might come against them. This has to be understood in order to make sense of what God means when he says that he is going to circumcise the hearts of his people and the offspring of his people. Through gathering his people under his hovering Spirit and giving them a life that is able to endure beyond death, God will at last abolish the foolishness of his people’s belief that by their own strength, by their own power or wisdom could they ever be able to find a deep and abiding security that their soul craves. God through his mercy and his love will cut away the persistent false hope that somehow apart from God, through our own wherewithal that we can ever be at peace in this world. This circumcision will be of the heart, the cutting away of what we treasure because we have found a greater treasure there under the glory of God.

         Again and again God holds out to his people the hope of a future with him if they would but turn to him with all of their heart and soul. This is the depth of the love that God expects his people will have for him when they no longer rely upon their own abilities and instead find their hope in the God who opens himself up, and welcomes his people back into his arms out of his great mercy for them. This commandment of God that they are to love him with all of their heart and all of their soul, this Moses tells his people is not a hard commandment neither is it out of their reach. This commandment to love God with all of their heart and soul is not a commandment which resides in heaven  as if they have to wonder, “Who is going to go up to heaven and bring this commandment down to us? And Moses continues, this commandment is not somewhere beyond the chaos of the sea as if someone needed to go across the waters in order to bring it back for the people of God to obey it. No, the word, the call of God to love him, was right there with them, it was on their lips because everyday they were to begin their day with the prayer that this new day they lived under the authority of one God and it is this God that they were to love with all of their heart, and all of their soul and all of their strength  So they knew that what God expected was that his people would love him and now that they knew that this God in his mercy was willing to gather to himself anyone who would turn to him in order to find their future in him, in this great act of finding their security under the glory of God, their hearts would be filled with love for God.

         So, in this harsh dose of reality, Moses does tell his people that, yes, this grand experiment God is working out with them is all going to go south sooner or later. Eventually, they will grow old, and turn to the old ways, the ways that are passing away and because they will cling to these ways they too will pass away as well. When they become enchanted by the past instead of being seized by the wonder of the future God is holding out for them to claim as their own, then God will have no choice but to scatter them out into the nations because they will have become no more than just another nation. Yet all is not lost because there in their hopeless state, God would be waiting for them to turn to him, to once again find their future in him, to discover their security in his arms as he gathered them close.

         It should come as no surprise for us as people who follow Jesus, that Paul in searching the scriptures for what it means to place our faith in Jesus, that he would turn to the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy. In the tenth chapter of Romans, Paul writes that the righteousness based on faith says, ‘Do not say who will ascend into heaven?(that is, to bring Christ down) or ‘Who will descend into the abyss? (That is, to bring Christ up from the dead) But what does it say? The “word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”; because 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.” Jesus through his death on the cross has defeated death; he has been raised from the dead and he has ascended as Lord over all and in him we confess that we have found our secure future so that our hearts abound at last with love for God, a love that consumes our hearts, and our souls. I pray that today you turn to Jesus and be welcomed in to the glorious future God has for you!Amen.

         

When Your Past Holds You Captive

 October 30 2022

Exodus 32:1-20, 34:27-34

         Several weeks ago it was reported that the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Liz Truss, resigned after just forty-four days in office which is unprecedented. Her time in office was so shaky that on October 14^th the Daily Star, a tabloid in London, set up a live feed of a head of iceberg lettuce next to a portrait of the Prime Minister with the caption beside it asking, “Which wet lettuce will last longer?” As it turned out, the lettuce won because it outlasted the Prime Minister. You can’t help but feel the shock and the sadness in what has happened to her because she had hopes and dreams for her country that when she attempted to put them in place went over like a lead balloon. What her brief time in office proves though is that the future is much harder to bring about than most people can imagine. It seems that the past always has such a hold on people that they simply cannot step into the future without a lot of hesitation.

         This whole incident with the Prime Minister and her incredible short time in office put me in mind of the length of time that God’s new future, the one he was bringing about with the people of Israel, was able to last before God’s dream was shattered to pieces. As we saw previously, God brought the former slaves down in Egypt to his holy mountain so that through them and with them he might build a new world right in the midst of the old one. God did this by first, speaking to them of their new identity, that they were no longer slaves but were instead God’s greatest treasure.  To God they were precious and deeply valued and God believed in them so much so, that he went on to tell them that they were going to be a new nation, a kingdom of priests. Through them the world was going to experience blessing, the blessing of a life with God, a life where all of the goodness and glory of heaven would be theirs. These former slaves were going to be taken into the hands of God and formed into a holy nation, a nation set apart to be a consecrated vessel for the holy presence of God. These were the people who had witnessed the hovering over presence of God and they knew God as being the one who was fully able to save them from death. Now they understood that the life they had was a life which had been given to them because of the favor of God upon their life. This new understanding that the life they had was a life which had been given to them was to change how they lived. They were to know that this God, was God alone, God almighty, the only God who could save them from death. This meant that when they spoke about this God to others they were to exalt his name, magnifying and glorifying God so that those in ear shot of them might hold in wonder this God of life giving power. 

God also told them that not only was he the one who was speaking to them from heaven but he also promised them that he would come near to them anytime God would stir within their soul and cause them to remember his name, his goodness. All that they needed to do is to mound up some earth and offer up a sacrifice and most assuredly God would be there with them and he would bless them. Where this blessing would occur was in a land that was the very crossroads of the ancient world so that as the peoples of the nations would travel through this land they would witness the very people that God blessed and they would want this blessing for themselves. 

         So, this is the new world, this new future that God had high hopes that he could bring forth from these people who had such a harsh past. Yet these plans would only last about as long as the Prime Ministers time in office because before this plan could even get off the ground tragedy struck in the form of a golden calf. The story of the golden calf is one of the most memorable of Bible stories perhaps because it is easy to sense the catastrophe that has occurred. It is this vague familiarity with the story which blurs the underlying problem of this event, an underlying problem which was to plague the people of Israel even with the coming of their Messiah and his church. This problem had very much to do with being bound by the past to such a degree that the future is forever lost.

         To begin to understand just what was the issue that resulted in a golden calf to appear in the camp of the people of Israel there at the bottom of Sinai, we have to go back to the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus where we read that Moses went up to the mountain, and the cloud covered the mountain. The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai and the cloud covered it for six days. On the seventh day God called to Moses out of the midst of the cloud. The appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire in the sight of the people of Israel who looked up from the foot of the mountain. Moses went into the cloud and went up on the mountain and he remained there for forty days and nights. So, we have to imagine of gazing upon this devouring fire and cloud cover and suddenly there was Moses disappearing into this swirling terror. Then we have the days passing one after the other and still no sign of Moses coming down the mountain. We can begin to feel the uneasiness of the people who waited at the foot of the mountain as the days turned into weeks and the weeks turned into months and still no sign of their leader. It is easy to figure that they may have thought that this terrifying fire and clouds they had seen at the summit of the mountain had simply devoured Moses leaving them there at the base without anyone to lead them to the land that this God assured them would be theirs. So, what were they to do? The elders, the leaders of each respective family, came to Aaron, the brother of Moses because before Moses left he said that it was Aaron who would be in charge. Now, what happens next is commonly thought as being a plain and simple case of idolatry yet as we read the story it begins to be seen that this may not be the case. If it was simply a case for idolatry it is hard to imagine that Aaron, who formed and shaped the golden calf, would have been allowed to hold the office of High Priest in the holy tabernacle. I mean, yes, God could forgive him of this transgression but to allow Aaron to continue on serving God in such a capacity is quite unthinkable. No, what the people wanted, more than anything else, was a way to get directions to the Promised Land. Moses, their fearless leader, was apparently AWOL, so they needed a replacement for him, someone or something that could hear the voice of God and then let them know just what it is that they should do. Now, Aaron would have remembered the legends which told of how the gods of some people rode upon the backs of bulls, so that if there was a statue of a bull perhaps God would come and sit upon this bull made of gold, and out of this place a voice would come and speak to them about how they were to go. Aaron in doing so, was looking to the past, trying to understand the one true living God through the lens of how people had thought gods were supposed to act. The underlying message then was that the God who had delivered them out of the hands of the Egyptians was not that much different from all of the rest of the so called gods that were conjured up. Yet the truth was that the God who had saved the people of Israel from the destroyer of death, the God who had parted the waters for his people, was a God who was drastically different from any other god they have ever met because this God could only allow his image to be borne by and live in human life. When God gave his people instructions of how they were to receive his blessing through the building up of earthen altars on which to offer up sacrifices he insisted that his people not make gods of silver or gold to be with him. God did not need these metal images to be his mouthpiece; he was very capable to come to his people and bless them all on his own. This was a radical new way for a God who dwelled in the highest heaven to be with his earth bound worshippers. This God desired to draw near to his people so that through his being present with them, through his blessing them with the goodness and glory of who he is they might be formed and shaped to be people who reflected his goodness and glory out to a watching world.

         Yet, such a radical concept could not be held in the mind and heart of Aaron so he instead went with ideas out of a false and futile past, taking the gold which the people of Israel had taken from their Egyptian masters and melted it down and formed it into a resemblance of a bull worthy for God to rest upon as they went upon their journey to the land that he had promised them. We know this to be the case because when Aaron had finished his work, he declared that the next day there was to be a feast unto the Lord. This sounds to us a bit strange perhaps, however what Aaron is doing is copying what Moses had done earlier when he and the people of Israel entered in to a covenant with God. In the twenty-fourth chapter of Exodus we are told that after Moses had spoken all that God had commanded him to do, he instructed some young men to build an earthen altar and before this altar Moses placed twelve pillars of stone to represent the twelve tribes of Israel. Aaron also built an altar, we are told, but instead of twelve pillars of stone representing the people of Israel, Aaron instead places his statue of the golden calf before his altar. Can you begin to see how what Aaron has done is a looking back and what Moses did was something new and fresh? Aaron looked back as to how people understood the gods interacted with people, through the fashioning of images capable of being a proper place upon which a god would light. Moses, on the other hand, through his representation of the people of Israel before the altar where God said he would come and be present was saying that this God was going to be present in them and with them, his people, they were where God was going to dwell not in a cold and lifeless lump of metal. No, this God was a living God who was going to be present with in and through his living image bearers. 

         After Moses had offered up offerings to God he took the elders of the people of Israel, living representations of God’s own precious people, up onto the mountain and there we are told, they ate and drank in the very presence of God. This is exactly what Aaron had in mind as well. Now that they had made a suitable seat for God, when they offered up sacrifices upon the altar, they figured that God would come and sit upon this golden calf and they would eat and drink in his presence. Oh, the best laid plans…What happened instead is that when the people sat down to eat and drink things got out of hand in a hurry. The people we are told  “rose up to play” which seems to point to acting like children who had just followed their baser instincts lacking the maturity and wisdom they should have had. They had become more like animals than those created to be the image bearers of God. What this tells us is that they were acting just as they had acted down in Egypt, mimicking the very actions of those who gave no thought to enslaving them. Such is the way of a darkened mind!

         What Aaron had done by looking to the past is to cause the people of Israel to find their comfort there in the past even though it was a past of slavery. With their minds set fast upon the times past they became people who reveled in the ways of the flesh instead of being people inspired by the God who called them to enter into the future. Up on the mountain, the noise of chaos reached the ears of God and he told Moses to go down to the people Moses had brought up out of Egypt because they had corrupted themselves. They had turned aside quickly from the way that God had commanded them. The way God had commanded them was to have lead his people into a great and glorious future, one where they could find security in the God who could bring life out of death, the God who could bring forth something out of nothing. This God of order and life only desired to bring blessing into a world cursed  by sin. This God who spoke from the heavens promised that he would come and bless them if they but remembered him and called on his name.  This was the way God was going to bring about his blessing to the farthest ends of the earth. Now, the very people God had rescued and saved, the very people who were to be his priestly nation, instead of walking God’s way, the way which brings the future into the present day, these same people had abandoned God’s plan because what they knew from their past had taken hold of them. No longer did God say that these people were his special treasure for now they had become nothing to him at all and were instead simply those people that Moses had brought up out of Egypt. They were people that were as God told Moses, “stiff-necked” , a term which meant that they refused to be led like a cow that had planted its feet in the ground refusing to move. God’s answer was that he would move on from these people who had refused the future that he had laid out for them and instead he would begin again with Moses much in the same way that he had done with Abraham.  But Moses pleaded with God and he asked God to first, remember his name. Just what would the Egyptians think when they hear that the God who had delivered his people from slavery took them out to the mountains and wiped them off the face of the earth? Moses asks God, is this who you want to be known as, this kind of God? Secondly, Moses asks God to remember his promise that he had made to Abraham that fateful night when God brought Abraham out under the starry skies and asked Abraham to count the stars because this is how many would be the descendants of Abraham. Moses wanted to know if God had forgotten that he had promised Abraham that the covenant that he had made with Abraham was a covenant that was everlasting, a covenant renewed with every new generation. Did you remember this promise God? God of course remembered and God relented from allowing his anger to scrap his plans for the future. What also happened in this exchange between God and Moses is that Moses was being formed more and more to be like God. A little while later when Moses returns to the summit after dealing with the waywardness of the corrupt people, Moses again speaks with God and he pleads with God to once again consider these people who had rebelled against him as being his people. All God can promise Moses, at first, is that his presence will be with Moses and his presence would give Moses rest. Yet Moses was not satisfied with this answer of God because Moses insists that God bring his presence to be not just with him but also with his people for as Moses tells God, is it not your presence going with your people, isn’t this what makes this nation distinct from every other nation on earth? You see, Moses was a man who was seized by the future that God had laid out. He was in awe that he was part of this people who had the privilege of being known as the people with whom the presence of Almighty God is present with.  God relented from abandoning his people not because his people had suddenly become acceptable in his sight but because in Moses God had someone who would keep his dream of a glorious future for all people alive in his heart. The way that this future was going to happen from this point forward is that God would continue to search for those who refused to look back because this future of God had seized a hold of their hearts. 

         We are told that when Moses came down from the mountain to find the people of Israel in utter chaos, he threw the stone tablets which represented the covenant they had made with God, down upon the ground signifying that the first covenant had become quite literally broken. Yet all was not lost because God made a new covenant with Moses and it was through Moses that God assured his people  his plans for the future were still going forward. This future was one where the glory of God would reside with all people so that they in turn might become people who reflect his glory. This is what the people of Israel were reminded of every time Moses spoke to them, his face shining with the very radiance of God. The future that Moses beheld was the future called Jesus, the Word of God, who became flesh and lived among all of us and we have seen his glory, a glory that was full of grace and truth.  I pray that this glory of Jesus will be radiant in the people who have been seized by the future he has won for us through his death and resurrection. Amen!