WHEN MOUNT SINAI IS IN THE PICTURE

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1 Sermon #1,007: Exodus 32: (3 rd Sunday in Lent), Bethany-Princeton MN WHEN MOUNT SINAI IS IN THE PICTURE Prayer: Lord God, heavenly Father, You have sent Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, to take upon Himself our flesh, that He might overcome the devil, and defend us poor sinners against the adversary: We give thanks to You for Your merciful help, and we beseech You to attend us with Your grace in all temptations, to preserve us from carnal security, and by Your Holy Spirit to keep us in Your Word in Your fear, that we may be delivered from the enemy, and obtain eternal salvation; through the same, Your beloved Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one true God, now and forever. Amen! (Veit Dietrich Collect for the 3 rd Sunday in Lent) Dear fellow redeemed in Christ: When you come to the story of the golden calf, you need to get rid of the close-up view, and pan out to see the bigger picture. If all you see are the idol, the guilty idol worshippers reveling in their immoral activities, and complicit Aaron, you don t get the full picture. For there, in the distance, you see Mount Sinai. A cloud is at the top of the mountain, God is there, and hidden in the cloud is Moses, face to face with God, receiving the two tablets of stone, written with the finger of God (Ex 31:18). Down below they are at the foot of Mount Sinai. When you read through the book of Exodus and come to this chapter, you really feel the Lord s frustration with them, and you think if you were Moses you d really be frustrated. Indeed, a few verses after our reading ends, Moses anger became hot, and he broke the two tablets of the Ten Commandments. But surely you noticed that Moses reaction was quite different in these verses that I read. He is the picture of patience. He pleads for the Lord to be patient, and to forgive. This really is the big picture. Not only does it include Mount Sinai. But it s an even bigger picture: it includes Mount Calvary. Here Moses is a preview of Jesus. He asks for, and obtains, forgiveness for others. 1

2 This is not the overriding impression we have of the golden calf incident. This is not easy to understand. In fact you can t understand it. You cannot, by your own reason and strength, accept this. Because this is the Gospel. To your human reason and your own sinful flesh it can only be about reckless, uncontrolled sinning on one hand, and an angry, angry God and angry, angry Moses on the other. This is what the Law produces. And it is true. Their sinning was willfully disobedient. God was angry, and when he saw it with his own eyes so was Moses. But while this is true, it is not the full picture. The Ten Commandments themselves are not even the starting point. It is part of this whole chain of events in which these children of Israel had seen such wonderful works of the Lord on their behalf. -- The signs and wonders in Egypt. The pillar of cloud and pillar of fire leading them. The crossing of the Red Sea. The bitter water changed into sweet for drinking. Manna and quail from heaven. Water from the rock. God defeating the Amalekites army for them. Then what happened at Mount Sinai: The thunder, the lightning, the trumpet blast, the whole mountain shaking, and then God giving Moses the Ten Commandments, and Moses and the elders of Israel looked upon God and ate and drank in God s presence without being destroyed. Moses sprinkled cleansing blood on the people, and read the words of the Lord, and they said in reply, All that the LORD has spoken we will do, and we will be obedient. At that point in Exodus come four chapters of laws, starting with the Ten Commandments, 112 verses of laws which we consider boring to read, but it s important, because what their own ears heard included such things as, You shall have no other gods, and, You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in the earth, and, You shall not make yourselves gods of gold, and, You shall not commit adultery. 2

3 So now, when these same children of Israel come to Aaron and say, Up, make us gods who shall go before us, and they appear to be racing to contribute their golden earrings, and even Aaron one of those who ate and drank with God face to face is so helpful and accommodating with their idol worship, we wonder, How could they? Hadn t they just heard the Ten Commandments? Didn t they say, We will be obedient? And they re so soon doing what they said they wouldn t? What part of You shall not make yourselves gods of gold don t they understand? Included in this picture is sin against the 6 th commandment, You shall not commit adultery. When it says, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play, this refers to sexually immoral acts that often were committed as part of idol worship. They probably learned this in Egypt, just as the idea to worship as a calf came from the culture they had supposedly escaped. It just doesn t make sense. They knew better. How could they? Yes, how could they. They knew better. Maybe our frustration isn t only with them. Aren t we living at the foot of Mt. Sinai too? We live in a society that knows the Ten Commandments they are featured in our halls of justice but there s such a high disregard for following them. Living in such a society frustrates us. But even worse is what goes on inside the church, where we really should know better. Don t we know the Ten Commandments? We are in a church that actually teaches them. We know them. But doesn t the church in the 21 st century look just like the church of the Old Testament at the foot of Mount Sinai? Sometimes it seems that young people who have learned the Ten Commandments march right out after confirmation determined not to come to church on the Lord s Day, or to be chaste and wait for marriage. Sometimes it seems that church members have forgotten that they are to show honor and esteem to their government leaders and bosses at work, or 3

4 that they are not to use their lips to curse and swear and gossip, or that they are not to envy churches that teach otherwise than the Word of God teaches. Christians lives should look better than those out in the world. We know better! We look around and are disappointed by our fellow Christians. Don t they know better? If only they were more like you. But then you look at yourself in the light of the Ten Commandments. You are living at the foot of Mount Sinai. It looms heavy over your life: your failure to worship from the heart, your self-pity, your laziness, your making excuses, your being hard on everyone else, your neglect of friends, your being selfish or worldly with your time or money, your envy and coveting, your self-promotion, your looking down on and tearing down the reputations of others, the ease with which you give up on some people. If you want to justify yourself by the Law, even by comparing yourself to others and imagining you are somewhat better, go to 1 Corinthians 10, where St. Paul refers to the golden calf story in verse 7 and then declares, Let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall (1 Co 10:12). This means you are guilty of the same idolatry as them. You are the same reckless, uncontrolled sinner, no matter how little you think the sin is, no matter how faithful you think you are. All sins are sins against the First Commandment, which means We should fear, love, and trust in God above all things. The reason you commit a sin against the rest of the commandments, at any time, is that you do not fear and love God enough to resist sinning in that way. You are to fear and love God in your worship life, in the words you speak in His name. You are to fear and love God in how you are with your parents, with your children, or how you think of the government or your school teacher. You are to fear and love God so that you don t hurt others, even in your thoughts. You are to fear and love God in your sexuality and your marriage. You are to fear and love God in your use of money and 4

5 possessions, the computer and cell phone. You are to fear and love God in what you say about others. Where you fall short, it s in how you fear and love God. Mount Sinai looms large over your life, condemning you. We should see, and be afraid, by how the people s sins brought out God s holy anger so that He said, Let Me alone, that My wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them. This is the true picture of what your sins bring out in God. But again, this was not the full picture. Even in these words the Gospel is hidden. God is telling Moses that if he will keep pleading for Israel, then God will not strike them down and His burning anger will not singe them. Then we meet a most important word. Moses asks God to relent from this harm to Your people, and it says the LORD relented from the harm which He said He would do to His people. The word that comes out as relent here is one of the Bible s most beautiful words. Whenever it is used, God is doing it. Sometimes it means that He is grieving over something. Here it means that He is relenting. It is an emotional word. God is not cold or unfeeling. This word is related to the word for comfort in Old Testament verses such as Isaiah 40:1: Comfort ye, comfort ye My people. I love this word. It literally means that you take a breath; you get to breathe again after the weight of the world has been pressing down on you. The pressure comes off. The load comes off. That s what is happening here. Suddenly all the tension, all the pressure that the Law produces is gone. The way your chest tightens up with guilt or fear or grief or apprehension, now you exhale. Here is where you see Christ, ahead of time, in this word relent. This is what He does. He is God s relenting. He is the comfort. When Mount Sinai is looming, crawl to Mount Calvary. Jesus obtained forgiveness for you there. He pleads for you with His blood. 5

6 We are learning that in His Church it is not a matter of knowing in the sense of collecting information and progressing in knowledge, like in school. It s not just that you should know better. The knowledge He gives you, the true knowledge, the true wisdom, is a different kind of knowing. It is knowing Him. Getting to know Him better and better. On this earth you will never progress in this knowledge beyond what He gives you at the cross, and where He locates His cross now is as He gives it to you in His Word, and in the Sacraments. You will always have to crawl back here, to hear His voice forgiving you in the absolution, to hear the promises He made to you in baptism where He speaks to you as His dear child, and to hear once again His simple, clear words in His Supper, especially the words for you. That you need to keep crawling back to Calvary is not a bad thing. This is good. It is good that Mount Sinai looms over you, so that you will know your sins and how much you need a Savior, so you won t succumb to the temptation of thinking that you ve graduated from needing to be at the foot of the cross so much. You need to hear Jesus pleading for you, being your Mediator. You need to hear God forgiving you for Jesus sake. Through this you will find, as it says in Hebrews 12, that you have not come to [Mount Sinai] but to Mount Zion, and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, through Jesus, who as it says is the Mediator of the new covenant, the greater Moses if you will. There is one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus (1 Ti 2:5). Amen! 6