Exodus 32
Exodus 32
Patience is a hard virtue to attain. I know that when I ask my husband for help, and he doesn’t help within a minute of me asking, I angrily do it myself, making sure he knows I’m upset. As you would expect, this never leads to peace in our relationship without me asking for forgiveness.
The Israelites had to wait much longer than a minute (40 days) for Moses to come back from the mountain. Although they had seen the signs of God speaking to Moses on top of the mountain (Exodus 20:18), they grew impatient with waiting. They knew and believed that God had saved them from slavery in Egypt and safely got them across the Red Sea, and yet they were willing to allow another god to finish the work that the true God had started.
Instead of trusting that God’s plan was best for them, they believed they could take things into their own hands. Of course, this did not bring them closer to the promised land or benefit them in any way, but it actually brought them further away from God’s design. This stirred God’s heart to anger, and He allowed Moses to have them all wiped out and start fresh as He did with Noah and his family. Although God knew He wouldn’t actually do this (it wasn’t a part of His plan), He gave Moses the option to build compassion in Moses’s heart (Genesis 32:9-10).
God is a just Judge, and through His wrath, He could have justly destroyed all the Israelites and still sustained the genealogy of the coming Messiah, yet He allowed Moses to plead with compassion for their lives. In all fairness, the Israelites didn’t deserve God’s forgiveness. They had rebelled against Him by worshipping a god before Him even after they had experienced God’s salvation and rescue from the Egyptians! In doing so, they denied the world's creator and considered themselves higher. God uses Moses to plead for mercy and ask God to extend grace just as he knew that God had in the past for himself and He could again now for the Israelites.
In the same way, we don’t deserve to stand before a holy God “for all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” Yet, Jesus stepped in to cover us in righteousness (Romans 3:23). Through Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection, we are seen as blameless before God, covered in the righteousness of Jesus. We are offered a new life and a beautiful redemptive relationship with the Father because of what Jesus did on our behalf. Jesus is the mediator between God and us, just as Moses stepped in to beg for forgiveness for something he didn’t even do.
This is a beautiful picture of the Gospel and the way Jesus delivers us from our sins.
This isn’t the only time God’s people had to practice patience. They waited 40 long years to enter into the promised land, then waited for a good king to rule them, then waited for the prophecy of the coming Messiah, and now we wait for Jesus to come again and make all things right and whole again.
Patiently we must wait and trust that the same God who delivered the Israelites from slavery is the same God who is with us now, guiding us with His Spirit as we wait for all things to be made new (Revelation 21:5).
Are you in a season of waiting? If so, do you find yourself running to the Father or to worldly things as you wait?
