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!