THE GOLDEN CALF.
Exodus 32
While God was thus providing for Israel, what had Israel done
with God? They had grown weary of waiting: had despaired of and
slighted their heroic leader, ("this Moses, the man that brought us
up,") had demanded gods, or a god, at the hand of Aaron, and had so
far carried him with them or coerced him that he thought it a stroke
of policy to save them from breaking the first commandment by
joining them in a breach of the second, and by infecting "a feast to
Jehovah" with the licentious "play" of paganism. At the beginning,
the only fitness attributed to Aaron was that "he can speak well."
But the plastic and impressible temperament of a gifted speaker does
not favour tenacity of will in danger. Demosthenes and Cicero, and
Savonarola, the most eloquent of the reformers, illustrate the
tendency of such genius to be daunted by visible perils.
God now rejects them because the covenant is violated. As Jesus
spoke no longer of "My Father's house," but "your house, left unto
you desolate," so the Lord said to Moses, "thy people which thou
broughtest up."
But what are we to think of the proposal to destroy them, and to
make of Moses a great nation?
We are to learn from it the solemn reality of intercession, the
power of man with God, Who says not that He will destroy them, but
that He will destroy them if left alone. Who can tell, at any
moment, what calamities the intercession of the Church is averting
from the world or from the nation?
The first prayer of Moses is brief and intense; there is
passionate appeal, care for the Divine honour, remembrance of the
saintly dead for whose sake the living might yet be spared, and
absolute forgetfulness of self. Already the family of Aaron had been
preferred to his, but the prospect of monopolising the Divine
predestination has no charm for this faithful and patriotic heart.
No sooner has the immediate destruction been arrested than he
hastens to check the apostates, makes them exhibit the madness of
their idolatry by drinking the water in which the dust of their
pulverised god was strewn; receives the abject apology of Aaron,
thoroughly spirit-broken and demoralised; and finding the sons of
Levi faithful, sends them to the slaughter of three thousand men.
Yet this is he who said "O Lord, why is Thy wrath hot against Thy
people?" He himself felt it needful to cut deep, in mercy, and
doubtless in wrath as well, for true affection is not limp and
nerveless: it is like the ocean in its depth, and also in its
tempests. And the stern action of the Levites appeared to him almost
an omen; it was their "consecration," the beginning of their
priestly service.
Again he returns to intercede; and if his prayer must fail, then
his own part in life is over: let him too perish among the rest. For
this is evidently what he means and says: he has not quite
anticipated the spirit of Christ in Paul willing to be anathema for
his brethren (Rom 9:3), nor has the idea of a vicarious human
sacrifice been suggested to him by the institutions of the
sanctuary. Yet how gladly would he have died for his people, who
made request that he might die among them!
How nobly he foreshadows, not indeed the Christian doctrine, but
the love of Christ Who died for man, Who from the Mount of
Transfiguration, as Moses from Sinai, came down (while Peter would
have lingered) to bear the sins of His brethren! How superior He is
to the Christian hymn which pronounces nothing worth a thought,
except how to make my own election sure.