Leaving Egypt: A Perfect Mediator

Exodus 32: 1 - 14

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SPEAKER_01 0:18

Did you now stand for the reading of God's Word? Our passage is Exodus chapter 32, beginning at verse 1. We'd like for everyone to be able to see the passage as it's being preached. Exodus chapter 32, page 78, and you read Pew Bibles.

SPEAKER_00 0:38

When the people saw that Moses was so long and coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses, who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him. Aaron answered them, Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons, and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me. So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt. When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord. So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterwards they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. Then the Lord said to Moses, Go down, because your people whom you brought up out of Egypt have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them, and have themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They bowed down to it and sacrificed to it, and have said, These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt. I have seen these people, the Lord said to Moses, they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone, so that my anger may burn against them, and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation. But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. Lord, he said, Why should your anger burn against your people whom you brought up out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth? Turn from your fierce anger, relent and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, to whom you swore by yourself, I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever. Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened. The word of the Lord.

SPEAKER_01 3:51

Thanks be to God. May be seated. Thank you, Bill. Would you join me once more in prayer as we come to God's word and then to his table in a few moments? Let's pray together. Father, as we come now to your word, we pause and still our hearts, recognizing what you say about your word, that it is living, that it is active, that it is your very presence in our midst. And it is by your word that you remake and renew and awaken and bring new life out of what is dead. Would you come and do that in our hearts this morning? Because, Lord, we need it. We need renewal. We need your power in our life. We need to see Jesus. In Christ's name we pray. Amen. So this morning, as we come to our passage, uh we have been looking here at the book of Exodus. Uh we continue in our series here, and one of the things we've said about the book of Exodus is that it really has three parts that the beginning part is about God's deliverance of his people out of Egypt. And the middle part of Exodus is about God entering into covenant relationship with his people. And what does that mean? What does it mean to be in covenant with God? And then the third part of the book of Exodus is all about worship. And what we learned last week, and what we see from the book as a whole, is that that's really the point of all that he was doing in the story of Exodus. It was rescuing a people for himself in order that he might bring them to himself and make them his worshiping people. And in a way, that's what the whole Bible is about. God rescuing a wayward, sinful people for himself and making them into his worshipful people, a people who would delight in him and live for him and be satisfied in him. In fact, that's what it means to be human. To be made in the image of God, to be a human being, it means that you are created to be a worshiper. We will worship something. That's not really up for debate. The only question that is really before any person in their life is, what or whom will you worship? That's the only question. We will worship. Now we might hear that word worship, and it's kind of a churchy word, and we think, oh, you know, worship is that thing that you do when you gather on a Sunday morning and you sing songs and hymns. That's that's what worship is. And it certainly is that. But the thing to understand about worship is that it is beholding glory. It's delighting in something. It's celebrating. It's not just, uh let me sing through the words here that I know. What time are we going to eat later today? What's on today? What is the golf tournament on this afternoon? What's the football game on today? You know, worship is delighting in something. Worship is the thing that happens in the South on a Saturday in the fall, in an SEC stadium, when you have a hundred thousand people gathered together and they are singing with fullness of joy. That's worship. Maybe you don't resonate with that one. Worship is what happens whenever you have a hundred thousand people gathered, and that artist, that music, it's just being played. Your favorite artist. You're at a concert, and everyone in there, they're singing your favorite song, and everyone in there knows the words, and they're singing with fullness of joy. That's worship. Worship is what happens whenever we are completely eaten up with what we look like and what other people think about us. That's worship. Worship is what's happening in the human heart whenever we're chasing something, something we gotta have, and it's consuming our thoughts, and it's filling us with joy or filling us with terror whenever it's threatened. That is worship. Worship is what we do. But the problem, the fundamental problem with the human heart, and this is at the root of all the problems that we have in our life, the problems in every one of our relationships, the problems that we have throughout the globe today. The fundamental problem is this we were made to worship the living God, and instead we worship created things. It's the fundamental problem of the human heart. All of your problems are traced to that fundamental root. And this is a part of what we see in this passage. You know, it's easy to look at this passage and see the Israelites here, and if you're following the story, it's shocking and jarring and stunning. And it is easy to look at this story of the Israelites caught up like all of a sudden in idolatry. It's the kind of thing that happens in our life, right? Have you ever had a moment in your life where you are locked in with God and you're chasing God and your heart is moved with God, and then out of a sudden, all of a sudden, you do something. And you think, where did that come from? This is what we're looking at here. It's the human heart, it's what pops out in those moments of fear or waiting or uncertainty in our life where we say, What in the world was that that just came out of my heart? Why did I respond in that way? Why did I speak to my children in that way? Why was that thing that I saw posted on the internet, why has it dominated my thoughts for two days? Why was I up all night thinking about work? The answer is this right here. As we look at the Israelites, we're not looking at some foreign reality. We're looking in the mirror. This is us. So let's look at the passage together and jump in here. You know, is just to get a little bit of the scene here, the context here that really brings this story to life. Remember what's happening here. You know, again, God is shaping his people as a worshiping people, and fundamentally how he does that is through the design of the tabernacle. This whole section is about the tabernacle. The tabernacle was this tent, this very special tent that Moses got the pattern from God of how to build this tent. Later it would become permanent in the temple, but it was the meaning place of God. It was the place where God's people would come and encounter God's very presence. They would worship him. But one of the things that we see in all of the details of the tabernacle is that we see that God is holy, like terrifyingly holy for sinful people. And we cannot just enter into God's presence, that the only way for sinful people to enter into the holy presence of God is that we must be made holy. You must be holy to enter safely into the presence of God. And so you see this tension in the tabernacle. God's longing for his people to be near to him, and yet the danger of it. And so everything in the tabernacle is showing us God's people must be made holy in order to come into his presence to worship him. Now, how does that happen? Because they're not holy. There is no delusion of the holiness of Israel in the book of Exodus. In fact, we see over and over and over what these people are broken, right? But the way that they're made holy, and we see that in the tabernacle, is through God's provision of atonement. God purifies his people. How does he do that? He does it through a sacrifice, and lots of them. All of these sacrifices, these animals that are brought before the Lord that take the place of his people, they take the punishment, the guilt, they are becoming the substitute for God's people, and they are sacrificed before the Lord, and is their blood. The blood represents their life, and it is their blood that is sprinkled on the mercy seat, on the people, on everything in the tabernacle that makes it holy, so that a sinful people can enter into God's presence. That's what they are being rooted in in the tabernacle. This whole thing, God's longing for them to be near, but that they must be made holy. And so Moses in this scene is up on the mountain. Now he's been there 40 days and 40 nights. He's come up and down a number of times. He's receiving the law, he's receiving the pattern of the tabernacle. He's going up and down, they're watching him on their behalf, representing them, going up on the mountain into the storm to meet with God, into the very holy presence of God, and they're shaking at the foot of the mountain as they behold his holiness. They're watching all of this. But we're told in our passage, he's been up there a little while. They're waiting on him. Maybe they're getting worried. Maybe they're wondering, is he coming back? Maybe they're worrying, are we okay? All those kinds of things are happening in their hearts that happen in our hearts when we got to wait. Right? Waiting is a hard thing in our life. And waiting is so often what we have to do in this relationship with God. We got to wait. And so often we find ourselves in this broken world, which is the only place that we live. We live in a broken world where things don't work the way that they're supposed to work, where things fall apart, where things don't turn out the way that you want, where things don't make sense. No matter how much money you got or how much effort you put into making your life the way for you to long it to be, that you long for it to be, it is broken. It is broken. Things happen in this world that should not happen. That's where we live. And as we're walking through this life and we face the pain of unmet longings, we face the threat, the threats in our life, and there are many threats. You know, there's a bill's gonna show up in the mail tomorrow. I don't know how I'm gonna pay for it. This thing is happening with my kid at school. I don't know what to do, right? It's the the list is innumerable. That's where we live. And so we're when we're in that place, we are called to trust in and wait on the Lord. That's hard to do, right? That's hard to do, and that's where Israel is. They're in that place, and they're like, I don't even know where he went. Moses. Now, think for a minute, they've watched Moses do some pretty wonderful stuff for them. They've got every reason to trust Moses and to trust the Lord. I mean, remember, they saw the Passover event, they saw the Red Sea, they saw God provide miraculously manna in the desert. They water comes out of the rock. They've seen some amazing stuff. They got every reason to trust and to wait, but they don't. So they're sitting there and in their waiting, and they go to Aaron, who's the great high priest, set apart to represent the people to God and God to the people. He's been set apart, he's been ordained for this. And yet they go to Aaron, and what do they say? It's a stunning statement here. Verse 2, uh, verse, I'm sorry, second part of verse 1. They gathered around Aaron and said, Come make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses, who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what's happened to him. Go and make us gods who will go before us. It's almost like, wait, what? What just happened? What are you doing here? I mean, the whole program is about to collapse right here. Right? The whole, the whole train's going off the tracks right here in this moment. Now, what is happening here? Well, the thing to understand, and we see this is idolatry. This is a breaking of at least the first, the second, and the third commandment that they've just gotten. They're making an idol. They are putting a God before the one true and living God, right? And they're taking God's name in vain because they attribute this in some way. They kind of say, hey, this is right and okay. We're actually just worshiping the Lord through the idol, right? But but we look at this, you know, you look at an idol and you say, Man, what's going on with them? I don't, I don't relate to the making of an idol, right? We don't do those things, right? But why do they do this? Well, it's important to understand what's really at the heart of idolatry. Okay, really in idolatry, it's about control. Because, you know, if you're gonna trust God and you're gonna wait on God, what it means is that you're not in control. That's what's so hard about it, right? You are having, when you're called to trust God in anything that you're facing in your life, anything that you're waiting on, to trust God means I don't see it. I don't see how you're gonna do this, God. I don't see how you're gonna come through. Sometimes in situations in our life, God actually stacks the deck against himself, right? He increases the odds. Sometimes that thing looks like it's going downhill before God ever shows up in your life. And what that requires in that moment, and what we're called to do if you're a follower of Jesus, is to trust God in the face of those things. God, I'm gonna trust you. I don't understand, I don't see it, but I remember who you are, I remember what you've done, you've made promises to me, and in this place I'm gonna cling to those. That's what we're called to do in that place. But it's hard to do, isn't it? Because you're facing the circumstances, you're facing the reality, and you're waiting, and waiting feels so out of control, doesn't it? I mean, I hate to wait, man. I'm like, oh, somebody's got to take charge here. Somebody's got to jump in and make something happen. And sometimes it feels right, and we baptize it, right? But they're in this place, in the most natural reaction of the human heart is to say, I'm gonna find a way to make it happen. That's really what idolatry is all about. Idolatry is all about control. It's all about some way of creating something and saying, this is gonna come through for me. This is gonna be my security, this is gonna satisfy me, this is gonna come through, this is gonna give me meaning or validation or whatever. That's what's happening with idolatry. That's what the Israelites are doing here. They're creating, you know, why a calf? Why a bull? This was a very common idol in the ancient Near East. They've seen the world do it, they've seen it a hundred times. They know how it works. And and and the bull was a common idol of fertility. Now, fertility in the ancient world was huge. Like, how are our crops gonna come in this year? They're actually dependent on stuff like that. The the economy was based on how are our crops gonna do, how's our cattle gonna do. That means we need fertility. We need a lot of those calf births to go well this year, we need our flocks to increase, and also the security of a nation was their size. So we need to be able to have a lot of healthy babies. You know, in the in the ancient world, childbirth, you didn't have women's east in the ancient world, right? Childbirth was it was a rolling of the dice, right? And so the worshiping of these fertility gods were a way to try to make it happen. Yeah, I'm gonna create a God, I'm gonna put my trust in something, and I'm gonna trust this thing to make all this go well. I'm running, I'm creating something for security. I'm creating something to bless me or to satisfy me or come through in my life. Now, do you see that in your own life? There's all kinds of things we run to, right? Now, you might not be out fashioning a calf or a bull, but man, the idols in our life are legion. The things that we look to and that we run to in the in the in the face of fear. What do you run to in fear? Do you run to people? You run to Dr. Google? You know? Do you run to an expert? Do you run to yourself? I'm going to take control. I'm going to bear down. I'm going to make it happen. I'm going to figure it out. I mean, for us, work is a very common idol, right? All the things in our life that we look to for security, for identity, for meaning. That's what the Israelites are doing here. And that's what we do in our life. So they come to Aaron and they're like, make some gods for us, right? We're scared. We need something to see, something to hold on to, and somehow created things that can feel more real than the invisible God who's promised to protect us and take care of us. And so what does Aaron do? He does it. He says, Bring me your gold, bring me your earrings. All right. And so he throws it in the fire, he melts it down, he fashions this bull, takes his tool out, you know, goes. The high priest is building an idol. I mean, you talk about a crisis for Israel. This scene here becomes like the epitome of rebellion throughout the rest of the Bible. I mean, anytime you want to talk about rebellion in God's people, you say, yep, that's a calf, right? There's a golden calf right there, right? This scene. And so he takes it and he fashions it and then he brings it before the people. And they bow down, and what do they say? These, this is the second part of verse four. They say before this idol, these are your gods, Israel, who brought you out of Egypt. I mean, assigning to this idol what only God had really done. And then Aaron sees this, he builds an altar in front of the calf and announced, tomorrow there will be a festival for the Lord. That's ironic, right? You see, what Aaron's trying to do is at some level Aaron knows, whoa, this just went off the rails. And so he does what any good preacher or priest would do. How do we spin this and put a God name on it, right? So this is going to be a festival to the Lord. We're worshiping the Lord here. Yeah, we got idols just shot through the whole thing, but we're worshiping God, right? Because we're putting the name on it, right? We're claiming it. But there's no covering up what's really happening here. And they come and they worship God, and it says in verse 6 the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings, the description of previous times where they've come and worshiped the one true living God. Afterward, they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. Now, the connotation there is sexual immorality. It's an orgy. Why? Because that's what the nations did. That's how you worship a fertility God. Right? This idol had led them into grave and tragic rebellion against God. Now, how does God respond to this? You know, we switch in the scene in verse 7. You go up, and Moses and God are up there, and this, by the way, is like Israel's wedding day. You know, this is the day where God is going to be united to his people. Right? And so they're there, and Moses is up there with God, and all of a sudden you have this. Go down because your people, whom you've brought out of Egypt, have become corrupt. Now just notice God's language here. One of the things that jumps out in God's description of Moses is the pain in his heart, is how this is striking against the very heart of God. First of all, he says, Go down because your people, whom you brought out of Egypt, have become corrupt. God's saying that to Moses. That's the kind of thing you do when you feel deeply betrayed. They're not mine anymore. I reject them. It's broken my heart. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them, what, and have made for themselves an idol, cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it, and have even said, These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt. I did that. And they are attributing it to this idol. God has ripped apart to the core. Verse 9, I've seen these people, and they are a stiff-necked people. You know, stiff-necked means you're you're resistant to turn. It's an image that's used from an agrarian society. You know, you got yourself an ox or a or a mule and it's pulling a load, and you, what you want is one that's responsive. You know, you want to be able to turn their heads so we can move over here. I want to guide you over here. You want to soft neck that's willing to be turned and directed by God. And he says, their necks are stiff. You can't turn them, you can't bend them. They're bent on their own way. And I'm done. Now leave me alone. God anticipating Moses' objection. Leave me alone. Don't even say anything. I'm done. I will make you into a great nation, Moses. We're gonna start over with you. Now, what's gonna happen? I mean, we we see this picture here, and what happens in idolatry is crucial to see is that it is spiritual adultery. It's like the scene of God on his wedding day, and yet his spouse is committing adultery on that very day in another room. That's the sense of betrayal that he wants you to feel in here. And God's heart is ripped apart because of his love for his people, because of his jealousy for their affections. Now, what's gonna happen? Now, what should happen is judgment. We've seen the holiness of God. We've seen it. And what we would expect to happen right here is just terrible judgment to break out. And it is important to know that would have been just. It's what should have happened. When you rebel against the living God, judgment is the only right thing that should happen. But what happens in the scene? It's amazing. Moses steps in the breach. Now, this is stunning. This, in my view, it's one of the high marks of the book of Exodus. You see Moses as a mediator, stepping in between. You know, God, he sees what the people have done. And Moses was, as you find in a few moments, he's angry. Right? But in this moment, he doesn't say, I can't believe they did that. God, you should go through, you should judge them, start over with me, we'll do this thing again. He doesn't do that. He says, No. And he becomes their advocate. He steps into their place. Look at this advocacy, this intercession before God as Moses takes up the case of the people and he steps into their place, and Moses seeks the favor of the Lord, and he reminds the Lord of three things. He does not try to sugarcoat what they've done. He does not try to minimize their sin in any way. That would all be futile. But what he uses to advocate before God is who God is and what he has done and what he loves. You know, first he reminds the Lord, these are your people that you rescued. He reminds them of what God had done in rescuing this people for himself. And then he reminds him of his reputation among the nations. He knows God's great passion is for his glory to cover the earth. And he says, What will the nations think? If you judge them here, what will the Egyptians think? Lord, they won't know who you are. And then finally, he reminds him of his covenant. Remember the promises you made to Abraham. Remember what you promised to do. You see, Moses knows God. He knows who he is. He knows that he is a covenant keeping God. It's in his very character. It's never even a question. He knows that God will act according to his covenant promises. And he sues God with his promises. And ultimately, look in this, we didn't read this in verse 32. Ultimately, Moses puts himself in their very place. Look in verse 31 and 32, again of chapter 32. Jump over, and here's what Moses says. So Moses went back to the Lord and said, Oh, what a great sin these people have committed. They have made themselves gods of gold. But now, please forgive their sin. But if not, then blot me out of the book you've written. Wow. That's Moses stepping in the very place of an undeserving people. He steps into their place and he says, Have mercy, and if you won't, take me instead. Blot me out of your book. You see Moses there? It's just stunning. This picture of Moses as the mediator, as the advocate for a sinful people, is the one that steps in between God and a sinful people and the just judgment that should fall upon them, and Moses stands in the place and says, Me instead. It's stunning. But if you know the story, you know Moses ultimately fails. As glorious as a mediator, as glorious as a high priest, as glorious as an advocate as he is for his people, ultimately it fails. And it does not fail because of God or because of the covenant, but because of the hearts of his people. This is not some isolated event that will never happen again. This is in their bones, just like it's in ours, right? But Moses was always intended to point ahead to a far greater Moses. This isn't about Moses. We need a better Moses. The true Moses, the true advocate, the one who would come into our place and would plead not the blood of a goat or a bull, but his very own blood. The one that would go not into the tabernacle made by human hands, but that would go into heaven itself, the real tabernacle. And he would go before the Father and He would plead our case. It's amazing. First John says in chapter one that Jesus is our advocate. He says, Little children, I write these things so that you will not sin. This is God's desire, is that we would not sin. But if you do sin, you better know this. We have an advocate before the Father. Jesus Christ, the righteous one. Do you see that truth? In the person of Jesus, we have an advocate before the Father. The perfect Moses, the truer Moses, the one who stands on our behalf even now when we sin, when we go our own way, when we find ourselves before our golden calves, that we have an advocate before the Father that steps into our place and says, Father, I've borne their sin and I've borne their judgment. Embrace them as your people. Remember your covenant, and his advocacy is perfectly effective for us. I love this description in this little book. Here, gentle and lowly, if you've seen this book, I commend it to you. A beautiful description of the person and the glory of Jesus and just teasing out the wonders of his work. But on his advocacy, Jesus' advocacy for us before the Father, he says this, an application of it. This is our application. Listen to what he says. Consider your own life. How do you think about Jesus' attitude towards that dark pocket of your life that only you know? What a question. What is his attitude towards the darkest parts of your heart? Because newsflash, we all got them. The overdependence upon alcohol, the lost temper, time and again, the shady business about your finances, the inveterate people-pleasing that looks to others like niceness, maybe even people praise it. Oh, they're so nice, but which you know to be the fear of man in your heart. The entrenched resentment that bursts out in behind-the-back accusations. Why did I say that? I keep saying that. Why do I keep talking about people? Why does this keep happening? The habitual use of pornography. Here's the question: Who is Jesus in those moments of spiritual blankness? Not who is he once you conquer that sin, but who is he in the midst of it? So often we can feel if I've beaten a sin, if I've overcome it, if I've cleaned up from it, then he's for me and he loves me. But what about when you haven't? What about when it's owning you? What about when you're broken? Jesus is our paraclete. There's the Greek word that John uses, paraclete, advocate. This one not only who defends us as if they're a lawyer on our behalf, but one who intimately knows and sympathizes with every single bit of our struggle. He is our paraclete, our comforting defender, the one near them we know, and his heart is such that he stands and speaks in our defense when we sin, not after we get over it. In that sense, his advocacy is itself our conquering of it.

unknown 37:09

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 37:12

Amen. Do you see the beauty and the power of Jesus' advocacy before us? That's what this passage in Exodus is pointing us to. We are just like the Israelites. Our hearts are filled with golden calves. Right? We know the shame of it, the struggle of it. The question, why do I keep doing it? But the joy and the power of freedom is to see that we have a truer and greater Moses, an advocate before the Father who pleads our case and whose advocacy is effective because of the power of his blood. He fills us with his spirit, changes our hearts. Ultimately, that's what the problem with the old covenant was. It was the hearts of the Israelites. And yet Jesus gives us in the new covenant new hearts. I will take out their heart of stone and give them a heart of flesh. I will write my laws on their hearts and upon their minds, and I will move them to obey me. This thing's going internal. God's going to do it through the power and the presence of Jesus' spirit. So this morning we get to come to the table. We get to come, and as the writer of Hebrews says over and over, we get to draw near. We get to come into the very Holy of Holies. We get to encounter Jesus. Communion is not just a memorial. It's certainly that. It reminds us of the shed blood of Jesus, of the truth of the gospel, of what he has done on our behalf, and it points us to that. But it is also an encounter where we come in a very deep and real way by faith to encounter Jesus at this table, to feed upon him, to experience yet again what he's already done, our washing, our cleansing, our being brought into the very presence of the Father. That's what we experience at communion because of the finished work of Jesus. Father, we confess freely before you that the very same thing that was in your people, the Israelites, here, lives in our flesh and in our hearts even now. We confess that if we could only come before you based upon the merits of our own lives and our own conduct and our own choices, Lord, that there is no way that we could ever approach your holy presence. But Lord, we come now solely and completely on the merits of Jesus Christ, on the finished work of our Savior on the cross, and through him and his advocacy alone, we now come to your table. Would you take these common elements of bread and wine and set it apart now for your holy use that you would feed us with Jesus, the bread of life? In Christ's name we pray. Amen.