Exodus 32 reveals a sad interruption after the wonderful communications of God to His servant. Here at least the people are at their work – earnestly at work in dishonoring God – striking at the very foundation of His truth and honor to their own shame and ruin. Poor people! the objects of such countless favors, and of such signal honor on God’s part. They, with Aaron to help them, aimed a blow at the throne of God by making a golden calf. It is needless to linger on the scene of the rebellion.
Jehovah directs the attention of Moses to the camp, saying, “I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let Me alone, that My wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them; and I will make of thee a great nation.”
He wanted to prove and manifest the heart of His servant. He loved the people Himself, and delighted in Moses’ love for them. If the people were under the test of law, Moses was under the test of grace.
“And Moses besought Jehovah his God and said, Jehovah, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand? Wherefore should the Egyptians speak and say, For mischief did He bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and [not merely Jacob, but] Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it forever.”
See the ground Moses took – the unqualified promises of God’s mercy, the grace assured to the fathers. Impossible for Jehovah to set aside such a plea.
Nevertheless Moses comes down with the two tables in his hand, the work of God. He hears the noise, which Joshua could not so well understand, but which his own keener and more practiced ear fails not to interpret aright; and as soon as he came near, and saw the confirmation of his fears – the calf and the dancing – his “anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.”
At once we find him reproaching Aaron, the most responsible man there, who makes a sorry excuse, not without sin. But Moses took his stand in the gate and said, “Who is on Jehovah’s side? Let him come unto me.”
Thus he who rejected every overture for his own advancement at the expense of the people now arms the Levites against their brethren. “And the children of Levi did according to the word of Moses; and there fell of the people that day about three thousand men.” Yet we know on the best authority that Moses loved the people as not another soul in the camp did.
There is hardly a subject on which men are so apt to make mistakes as the true nature and application of love. Moses loved Israel with a love stronger than death; yet he who thus loved them showed unsparingly his horror of the leprosy that had broken out among them. He felt that such evil must at all cost be rooted out, and banished from amongst them. But the same Moses returns to Jehovah with the confession, “Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.”