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The First Table of God’s Law, Smashed

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Sermon on Exodus 32:15–26 for Pentecost 4 (Pr 8), June 25, 26 & 28, 2020

There are many things happening in this lesson. First, there are some sad opposites caused by fallen human nature.

  • Moses is on the top of Mount Sinai receiving the commandments from God, and at the foot of the mountain the Israelites are breaking the first of those commandments, “You shall have no other gods.”
  • Another sad opposite is that God who is transcendent (remember that from a few weeks ago?), high and holy and really unknowable is making himself known by revealing his law and his will to his people through Moses. But the people are choosing their own image for God—of all things, the image of a golden calf. God reveals himself, “I am the Lord your God who led you up out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” God tells us who he is by showing us what he does. In the verses before this, Aaron told the people, “Tomorrow will be a festival to the ” That means that this statue of a cow was supposed to represent God. They were probably imitating the animal gods they had seen in Egypt—the Egyptians had a bull god named Apis. Instead of waiting for God to give his revelation to Moses, they invented their own image of God. I grew up on a dairy farm, so I know about calves, heifers and cows. For a while we even had a couple steers. Cows don’t do much. They eat. They produce milk. If you try to talk to them, they stare at you with their glassy black eyes and rechew their hay. In Romans 1, St. Paul said, “[People] exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like a mortal human, or like birds, four-footed animals, and crawling things.” The Israelites’ idolatry was also a sin against the Second Commandment, “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God,” or “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” God’s name is what he reveals to us about himself. They were rejecting God’s revelation about himself before they even got it, and were accepting their own idea of God in its place. A statue of a cow.
  • In Exodus 20, God gave the Ten Commandments. In the eleven chapters that followed, God gave some civil laws, many of them expansions of what he had taught in the commandments about treating servants fairly, dealing with property disputes, and laws against false witness. He also gave instructions on how the people were to worship him, observing a Sabbath day, building the tabernacle, making sacrifices, the priesthood. If we understand the Third Commandment as covering all of Israel’s worship life, they were breaking that by inventing their own festival and setting up their own image and sacrificing to it.

When Moses came down the mountain and saw what the people were doing, he smashed the tablets—showing Israel, “This is what you have done! God establishes his covenant with you—his promise and agreement to be your God and to accept you as his people—and you have rejected it already.”

The Bible tells us that the history in Scripture is there to teach us so that we would learn and have hope (Romans 15:4). So we should look carefully at what is happening in the biblical history and apply it to ourselves.

  • Think of that First Commandment, “You shall have no other gods.” Many of us learned Martin Luther’s explanation: “We should fear, love and trust in God above all things.” I don’t think there’s much danger of you or me worshiping a statue of a cow like the Israelites did. That’s open idolatry. We have a problem of fearing, loving and trusting many things more than we fear, love and trust God. We fear our culture. We are afraid of not being cool or respectable in the eyes of the people. That was Aaron’s problem. He basically said, “The people were about to riot, so I had to make this golden calf for them.” He feared them more than he feared God. We go with the flow, too—sometimes approving what God says is awful because we don’t want to be out of place. Think of God’s views on faith—exclusive faith in Christ alone. God’s views on marriage: a man and a woman, together for a lifetime. God’s views on life: he alone gives it and he alone takes it. It’s counter-cultural, but it’s God’s revealed will to us. We are to fear him above all things.
  • And we are to love him above all things. That means we see him as most important. That goes against our biggest idol—ourselves. I’ve said it before, materialism isn’t the worship of the material—it’s the worship of self. We love making offerings to ourselves—that’s where the ‘material’ in materialism comes from.
  • We are to trust him above all things. That means we look to him for every blessing. This is an election year, and so from both sides we’re hearing “If you elect us, we will solve this or that problem.” “We will start this program that you’ll love, or we’ll stop that program that you hate….” …depending on who is making the promise. God tells us, “Do not trust in princes, in mortal men who cannot save” (Psalm 146:3). We trust in God above all things. That’s the First Commandment for us.
  • The Second Commandment, “Do not misuse the name of the Lord your God,” we learned means “We should fear and love God that we do not use his name to curse, swear, lie or deceive, or use witchcraft, but call upon God’s name in every trouble, pray, praise and give thanks.” Aaron and Israel invented their own God, their own version of Jehovah when they were impatient with the real one. We do that too when we confuse our own feelings with the plain and simple Word of God. We invent our own idea of a God who will give us whatever we want. And then when we don’t get everything we want, we lose patience with this him. “Why is God letting me go through this.” “Why do I have to suffer, or why do I have to see someone else suffer.” God has told us, he works in all things good and bad, for his higher purpose for us (Romans 8:28). Sometimes through loss God is delivering us too. He takes away something we think is good, but it really isn’t good for us. We have a loss and we think it’s the worst thing, but in it he redirects our thoughts to him. When we get impatient, when we confuse our own feelings about God with his own plain word and promise, it’s our own poor substitute—like the statue of the cow was a substitute for the true revelation of God.
  • The Third Commandment for ancient Israel was connected to a day, the Sabbath, Saturday, as a day of rest. For us, it is connected to an activity: “We should fear and love God that we do not despise preaching and his Word, but regard it as holy and gladly hear and learn it.” Where can God be found? In a statue of a cow? No! Out in nature as we enjoy God’s creation? We can appreciate God’s power and beauty, but that’s not where we find the Creator of it all. We find our God in the Word, in what he has revealed about himself.[i] There we see his will and his justice. We also see his solution for all the times we have failed him. Why didn’t God just zap his people with fire from heaven when they worshiped the golden calf? It is because he was merciful. He had made a promise to Abraham to bless Abraham’s descendants. He also had the promise that he would send a Savior from Abraham’s family. That’s why he doesn’t zap us when we have failed him. He has made a promise—a promise about forgiveness in Jesus. He gives us time and opportunity to hear it. And he sets his path of righteousness in before us once again. God is not mystic and mysterious, that is, completely unknowable—instead he comes to us—is immanent, and on  the pages of Scripture says, “Here I am.” In the water of baptism he says, “Here I am. Here I am for you. I put my name on you.” In the Lord’s Supper he says, “Here I am, truly present, with grace and forgiveness.” We won’t find him anywhere else. Not in a statue of a cow. Not in people who make great promises. Not in our own imaginations. We find him where he may be found. Here in his house. Here in his Word.

Amen.

Exodus 32:15–29 (EHV)

Moses turned and went down the mountain, with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hand—tablets that were written on both sides, written on one side and on the other. 16The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. 17When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, “There is the noise of war in the camp.” 18Moses said, “It is not the sound of people who shout for victory; neither is it the sound of people who cry because of defeat. But I do hear the sound of people who are celebrating.” 19As soon as Moses came near the camp, he saw the calf and the dancing, and Moses’ anger burned. So he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. 20He took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, and scattered it on the water. Then he made the people of Israel drink it. 21Moses said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you have brought such a great sin on them?” 22Aaron said, “Do not let the anger of my lord burn. You know these people. They are set on evil, 23so they said to me, ‘Make a god for us, who will go ahead of us, because this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ 24So I said to them, ‘Whoever has any gold, pull it off.’ So they gave it to me. I threw it into the fire and out came this calf.” 25When Moses saw that the people were out of control (for Aaron had let them get so out of control that they were disgraced among their enemies), 26Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, “Whoever is on the Lord’s side, come to me!” All the descendants of Levi gathered themselves together to Moses.

[i] When God gave Moses all the directions for building the Tabernacle and performing the sacrifices, he was giving the people many things that foreshadowed who the Savior would be and what he would be like. A sacrifice, like the Passover, a lamb without blemish. The table of showbread, foreshadowing Jesus and his Word as the bread of life. The lampstand foreshadowing Jesus, the light of the world.

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