Bible Commentaries

Aaron's Idolatry

Exodus 32:1).

Were they then dependent upon one man? Yes, to a large extent. I thought every man was one? Not at all. We are dependent upon our elder brother, our strongest Exodus 32:30-35

Let us look at the historical picture which has now been almost completed. Moses had been summoned to meet the Lord upon Mount Sinai. There he had tarried forty days and forty nights. On coming down the mountain, it was discovered that Aaron and the people had fashioned and worshipped a golden calf. On descending to the plain Moses broke the two tables of stone, and inflicted humiliation and punishment upon the idolaters. And strange to say—yet not strange to those who know the wondrous ways of the human heart—no sooner had Moses expended his righteous indignation than he began to pray for the very people on whom he had uttered his denunciation and his wrath. Here a very curious expression occurs:

"And Moses took the tabernacle, and pitched it without the camp, afar off from the camp, and called it the Tabernacle of the congregation" ( Exodus 33:7).

But he had been in the mountain for the express purpose of receiving a specification for the building of the tabernacle; how conies it, then, that we read of the tabernacle before it was built? We have been expecting the erection of this glorious edifice, and, behold, in the very agony of our expectation, we read that "Moses took the tabernacle, and pitched it without the camp, afar off from the camp, and called it the Tabernacle of the congregation." This was a temporary tabernacle. Probably it was the tent which belonged exclusively to Moses himself, and in the urgency of his sacred passion, he anticipated the building of the edifice which had been sketched to him in the mount, and extemporised an altar. There is no mystery about this. We are forced by sadness and painful surprises into new postures of supplication and new eloquence of intercession. Moses was preeminently the man to do this very thing. Now and again, though known as the meekest of men, there flamed up out of him a hidden fire, that burned and showed him to be just the man to see the flaming bush where he learned his first lesson of leadership and saw what was truly his first revelation of the God of the living. A lesson lies here. Moses will not wait for the consecration of Aaron: he himself becomes priest before God on behalf of the people, and pours out his soul in passionate intercession. He was priest before the anointed one; he built a tabernacle of his own, before he had time to erect the specified structure. These are the actions of a burning life, the eccentricities and exaggerations of men who cannot proceed by cold rule and adapt themselves to intricate, pedantic, and slow-moving mechanism.

In this high temper he utters the boldest prayer ever uttered up to that time by human lips:

"I beseech thee, shew me thy glory" ( Exodus 33:18).

"And it came to pass, when Moses came down from Mount Sinai" [the second time], "with the two tables of testimony in Moses" hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him" ( Exodus 34:29).

What do we know about our best selves? Men have qualities of which they are not cognisant. We may be nearer heaven than we suppose. We may be nearer God than we fully realise. Sometimes there may be between us and him but a thin film, less than a vail in thickness. We know not where sometimes we stand.

Then Moses, returning, delivered the instructions to the people. He told them what God told him; and the people, having heard what Moses communicated to them, "did according to all that the Lord commanded." For the time being they were converted. Their conversion was not a momentary and final act. They went through a kind of process of conversion—one conversion succeeding another, repentance following upon sin with quickness and certainty.

This is the historical position in which we now stand—what are its sacred and eternal lessons? Do we not see how God's purposes are thwarted and deferred by human perversity? God's purpose was far advanced in the cloud, but the people at the foot of the mountain could not wait. At the very time when God had determined upon the election and consecration of Aaron to the priesthood Aaron was spending his time in moulding and chiselling the golden calf. Time is thus wasted. Just as the revelation was about to appear, the radiant cloud was turned aside by the wickedness of the idolatrous mob at the base of the hill. We do not know how often God has just been on the threshold, coming into the house, and has been affrighted by the overhearing of some idolatrous or blasphemous noise. We might have been crowned fifty years ago, but just as the coronation was about to take place, we were discovered in the manufacture of an idol. Your sins have kept good things from you.

It is most instructive to keep the two scenes vividly before the eye of the mind. The first scene is that of God with Moses in the cloud speaking about the consecration of Aaron, setting apart Aaron and his sons to the priestly office for ever. There the Lord detailed the mystic and symbolic garments by which the priest was to be clothed. That is the one scene. At the very moment when that scene is taking place in the cloud, Aaron is listening to the foolish clamour which insists upon having a god made, or is at that instant himself employing the graving tool upon the calf, that he may make an idol for Israel. What a solemn view this gives one of life! When we are thinking least of God, God is thinking most of us; or when God is thinking most of us, purposing for us great office and honour and service, we are farthest away in thought and love from the altar where he intended to meet us. Why is the vision delayed?—Because of the idolatry of the people for whom it was intended. Why tarry the chariot wheels of the King?—Because the people towards whom he was hastening in his golden chariot have prostituted their affections and turned their prayers to forbidden and helpless gods. Why should we blame Providence for slowness when the answer is in our own conduct? It may suit us in some of the lower moods of our mind and heart to think of God as very slow in his action and as keeping back revelation for inscrutable reasons. On one side of life that may be true, on another side of life it is not only untrue in fact, but it is unjust in principle. Who stopped the revelation?—Aaron. Why were forty days and forty nights wasted?—Because of the sin of the people. Christ might have been here yesterday, but for our making of the golden calf; fifty years ago he might have had the whole country as his own, but for perfidy, selfishness, and practical atheism. We might now see some great figure in the sun, and hear some voice supernatural, in music heavenly, but that we have filled our ears with riotous noise and deafened ourselves with the thunders of our own idolatry. Do not blame God for waste of history and waste of time, and repetition of events which we thought had been accomplished. Speaking reverently, God himself might have thought that the tabernacle was just about to be begun, and Aaron in a few minutes would be called to priestly office and honour, but (still accommodating human language to Divine mysteries) he was surprised and grieved by an action on Aaron's part, which suspended the Divine revelation and held back the honour that was prepared. What we might have been this day but for the calf-making, the idolatry, the disobedience, and the sins of various names! The Lord was just ready to make kings of us, when we made fools of ourselves. God was signing the decree that was to have given us solidity, influence, high position, and noble honour, and ere he laid down the pen of signature we smote him in the face by some new sin. Then we spoke about the mysteries of Providence, and wondered why God was so slow in his manifestations and Exodus 32:32).

He could not survive an unpardoned nation; account for it as we may, he had come so to identify himself with the people that their pardon involved his, and his heaven was involved in theirs, and to be without them was an issue not to be borne by his noble and sensitive nature. What a hold his work had upon him! He was not priest, minister, or ambassador, who could stand aside from his people and let them be divided, sundered, smitten, and accursed, saying, "I am free; take you, who deserve it, the judgment of God." We already begin to feel the formation of that spiritual fellowship which cannot be dissolved. Here is a family within a family, a life within a life, a tenderness more sensitive than all the tenderness of perishable relationship. We now begin to see what is meant by the society of souls, the masonry of hearts, the oneness of the innermost nature of man. Moses could not bear to be left whilst Israel was lost. Who could be? Can the shepherd come home at night without his flock, and be merry in the house whilst the flock is being torn by the wolf? If he could be so happy, he would be no shepherd, but a selfish hireling. Can the general return, saying, "The army is broken, slain; it was no blame of mine, and I have come to enjoy the feast and the dance, and forget the bones that whiten on the field"? If he made a speech so base he would dispossess himself of every title to be called a soldier of the true blood. A minister standing before God to receive a solitary crown, saying, "The people are lost, but I did my duty; not a man has come with me; still, I claim the heaven due to virtue"! Could he make a speech so vile, no heaven could God shape for his residence and welcome. In all our higher moods we are one. We cannot be at rest whilst there is one vacant chair at the table which might be filled. Paul rose to the same magnanimity when he said he could wish himself accursed ratter than Israel should not be saved; he would be prepared to be lost if the people could be saved. We do not come into that sacred passion in any way conceived by the human mind, or invented by human selfishness. It is the inspiration of Christ—yes, it is the very mystery and the glory of the Cross. Whilst the people, with Aaron at their head, were content with their idol, Moses said, "Show me thy glory." Some sights must be purged out of our vision, for they dim the whole outview and aspect of things. To have seen sin in the right way, and yet not to have suffered in feeling, but to have risen up into a tender and truer appreciation of holiness, is really to suggest an inspired prayer. "Show me thy glory." There is logic in this passion; there is rational sequence in all this tide of feeling, though it rolls billow upon billow, as if in a great confusion and tumult. When for a moment you have perused some debasing book, or even some feeble and inane composition, or have seen how the noble language of the fatherland can be debased into the utterance of things so jejune, so juiceless, and mean, how you have longed to take up some grand old author whose every word was a burning fire, every sentence the beginning of a revelation, every page the work of a master, that you might forget what you have passed through; and have it obliterated from the receptive memory! It is but a feeble picture of what Moses felt, and what we may feel, when we have seen the calf we are called to worship. We long to forget the miserable spectacle in some burst of glory worthy of a vision opened by the Almighty wisdom. So Moses was the better for this most ludicrous as well as mischievous and iniquitous event. He did not fall into the temptation. We need men of that mould and temper, who, coming down a hill of prayer and high communion, and seeing our folly, look upon it with the right eyes and burn it with their anger, and scorch it with their jealousy for God. Let us pray for such men. They are the angels of God amongst us. The Aarons of the race would fall into all snares and traps, and yield to all tumultuous clamour for new policies and new programmes. We need the stern, iron, burning man, the incorruptible patriot, the theologian whose soul is fastened upon central truths, the suppliant who never can lower the tone of his intercession, to keep us right, to call us back—a man so terrible that he can smite us with judgment and, ere the thunder dies, turn his very anger into prayer.