THROUGH THE BIBLE - Exodus 3..

Welcome to Cornerstone Reformed Baptist Church. Thank you for using and sharing our resources. What you're about to hear is God's Word from one of our teaching elders. We trust that God's Word will inspire, instruct, and bless you. For further teachings or information on our ministry, please visit us on our website at cornerstonerbc.

com. That's cornerstonerbc.com. Let's read carefully, paying much attention to each one of the words with reverent hearts. I'm going to be reading from the English Standard Version of the Bible, and this is Exodus chapter 32.

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, The people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. So Aaron said to them, Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons and your daughters, and bring them to me. So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graven tool and made him a golden calf.

And they said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord. And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

And the Lord said to Moses, Go down for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshipped it and sacrificed to it and said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. And the Lord said to Moses, I have seen these people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now, therefore, let me alone that my wrath might burn hot against them, and I might consume them, in order that I might make a great nation of you.

But Moses, implored the Lord, his God, and said, O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say with evil intent did he bring them out to kill them in the mountains and to conceive them from the face of the earth? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self and said to them, I will multiply your offering as the start of heaven, your offspring as the start of heaven and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring and they shall inherit forever. And the Lord relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.

Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides, on the front and on the back, they were written. The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God engraved on the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, there is a noise of war in the camp. But he said, it is not the sound of shouting for victory or the sound of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear. And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses' anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.

He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it. And Moses said to Aaron, what did these people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them? And Aaron said, let not the anger of my Lord burn hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, make us gods who shall go before us.

And for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. So I said to them, let any who have gold take it off. So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf. And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose, for Aaron had let them break loose to the derision of their enemies, then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, who is on the Lord's side, come to me.' And all the sons of Levi gathered around him, and he said to them, Thus says the Lord God of Israel, Put your sword on your side, each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor.

And the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And that day about three thousand men of the people fell. And Moses said, Today you have been ordained for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and of his brother, so that he may bestow a blessing upon you on this day. This day, the next day, Moses said to the people, You have seen a great sin, and now I will go up to the Lord. Perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.

So Moses returned to the Lord and said, Alas, these people has seen a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold. But now, if you will, forgive their sin. But if you not, please blot me out of your book that you have written. For the Lord said to Moses, Whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book.

But now go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you. Behold, my angel shall go before you. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin. upon them. Then the Lord sent a plague on the people because they made the calf the one that Aaron made."

Amen. This is the glorious word of the Lord. Brothers and sisters and friends, a very important chapter we have in front of us. This is chapter 32, not only for the book of Exodus, but a very important chapter for the whole story of redemption, for the salvation that we have in Jesus Christ. So if there's something that you should remember about chapter 32 and this very important transition in the book of Exodus, is that this chapter is about the breaking of the covenant that God had given to the people of Israel and the consequences of breaking the covenant.

Again, chapter 32, it is about the breaking or the breaching of God's covenant by the people of Israel and the consequences of breaking that covenant that God had made with the people of Israel. So it is very important for you to understand and remember that when the Lord God of Israel brought the people out of the land of Egypt, out of the bandage, out of slavery, the promise that He gave to Israel was not only that He was going to bring them to a promised land. That was not the only promise. The promise that God gave to the people of Israel is that by taking them from Egypt to the Promised Land, He was going to be their God and they were going to be His people and that God was going to enter in communion or in fellowship. Namely, that He was going to be in the midst of the people of Israel.

This is crucial and this is important. He was not about taking them out of the slavery from Egypt into a better land and into freedom, but rather, by doing so, he was entering into a covenantal relationship in which he was going to have communion and intimacy with the people of Israel. So, in doing so, God gives his covenant. And in giving his covenant, God gives to the people of Israel three very important things. The first thing that we have already studied is the law, the Ten Commandments, and the law in general is given from God to the people of Israel, the things that the people of God were supposed to do.

But not only the things that they were supposed to do were given from God to the people. God, the God of Israel, also gave them a place, namely the tabernacle, or at least the instructions for the tabernacle, in which God was going to have this fellowship, communion. He was going to be among the people by doing what his law says and by meeting him in the meeting place, namely the tabernacle. And on top of those three things, God also allocated a block of time, namely the Sabbath, the Shabbat rest, which was holiness unto the people. As I explained last week, this was a means by which God Not only was taking them from Egypt into the promised land, but he was also having communion through the covenant that he was entering into.

So we arrive to chapter 32 in which I have said to you that this chapter is about the breaking of that covenant. and the consequences of breaking that covenant. Now, remember that Moses had been at the mountain 40 days and 40 nights. He had received all the instructions, the law and the instructions for the Sabbath. What was supposed to happen after he came down from the mountain is that all the instructions that he received for the tabernacle, now they needed to be put into practice, namely to be the tabernacle to be built or constructed.

This has not taken place. By God's grace, we know the story and this is going to take place. But before that takes place, there is this breaking of the covenant. Beloved brothers and sisters, these things have been written for our instruction, the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 10. So much attention we should pay to this chapter for those two things, the breaking of the covenant and the consequences of it.

How was the covenant breached or broken? Well, the text says that the people committed a sin. The people broke that covenant, that they breached that covenant, and they did it through a sin. And that sin was the sin of uncertainty or unbelief. What is that Moses that brought us out of the land of Egypt?

What has become of it? Where is he? They questioned in their mind. When they questioned those things in their mind, unbelief entered into their hearts and everything that they had seen and everything that they had witnessed was now forgotten and only unbelief and uncertainty was in their hearts. to the point that even the high priest-to-be, namely Aaron, was convinced of this uncertainty and unbelief.

This is Aaron, the one that is going to be the high priest, the one that is going to be ordained very soon by Moses. Even Aaron falls into that deception of unbelief and they end up taking all the gold that the Lord had given them providentially out of the land of Egypt. Because remember, the Israelites, they were slaves and they did not have anything. But the people of Egypt gave them all of these earrings and all of this jewelry. And by using those things is that they come and they put together this golden calf that for them was a representation of the Lord.

Because even it says in verse 7 that they will celebrate a feast to the Lord. The commandment or the covenant was not even finished, established by the building of the tabernacle and that they were already breaking the first and the second commandment of the Ten Commandments. You will not have other gods and you will not make any carved image. This is the people of Israel. But the Lord God of Israel is going to give us a little bit more detail into the type of sin that broke the covenant.

If you pay attention in verse 9, the Lord God of Israel is going to use a very important word to define the situation or the sin of these people of Israel. It says in verse 9, And the Lord said to Moses, I have seen these people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. That's going to be a term that is used a lot throughout the Torah, throughout the Pentateuch. The stiff-necked people. Moses used that term seven times in the book of Exodus.

And pay attention to these, brothers and sisters. Four of those times, Moses uses that word stiff-necked to speak about the unbelief and about the disobedience of the people of Israel. But when it was first given, this stiff-necked word or concept speaks of the difficult bondage that the people of Israel were under the Egyptians. So if we were going to define what a stiff-neckedness is, and I hope that that word exists, then we could go and see the relationship between Egypt and Israel and the bondage that they had to them and this would speak of the stiffness of the people of Israel. That is...

that these people are stubborn, that these people are not willing to be led, that these people are not willing to be guided. Rather, they prefer to be under the bondage of their own wisdom. They do not pursue the Lord and His understanding, but rather, going against Proverbs 3, 5-7, they lean in their own understanding. They are wise in their own opinion and because they are wise in their own opinion, verse 7 in chapter 3 of Proverbs says, they do not fear the Lord. Brothers and sisters, these are the people that had seen the plagues and the water being divided and they crossed the water and they saw all the mighty wonders of God, yet, By doing these things, they were fearless of what the Lord could do to them.

Once uncertainty and faithlessness had entered the deceitful heart of these people, then this sin was conceived. For that reason, God says that His wrath is going to explode. It's going to come upon them. The wages of sin is death. The transgression of the perfect law of God deserves death.

So the wrath of God that was going to come upon them was just. That was the righteous judgment of God upon these people who have violated their commandments. But we're told of a very important thing here and in a very Christological work. Moses is going to hold up the wrath of God through his prayer. Moses is going to hold up the judgment of God through his words and his intercessions in a very Christological foreshadowing of our Savior.

He's going to hold the judgment that these people He's going to come before the Lord, and he's going to appeal to his reputation before the Egyptians. What would the Egyptians say about you, Lord, that you brought them out of the land of Egypt to make them die in the midst of the wilderness? And after appealing to the Egyptians, he appeals to the covenant that he made with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Israel. Remember, Lord, remember the covenant that you gave to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Israel. And the Lord hears the intercession of Moses.

And we're told in verse 14 of our chapter that the Lord relented, that the Lord repented, that the Lord changed from the disaster that He was going to give, He was going to bring upon these people. and that He did not bring this destruction, this wrath upon them. He relented from that, just in the same way that in Genesis chapter 6, the Lord had relented and repented of creating humanity because of their wickedness. then the Lord relents of the wrath that he was going to bring upon his people because of their inequity and because of their sin. But the Lord is just and he is a righteous God.

So he's not going to bring the judgment that he had decided to bring upon them and that he relented of, but now he's going to manifest his wrath through the wrath of his intermediary, namely through the wrath of Moses. Moses now is coming down from the mountain, and he hears all the noise. And Joshua said, What is going on? Something is happening there. It's the sound of war.

But he says it's not the sound of war. This is the sound of singing. He knew already that the people had fallen into sin. Now, brothers and sisters, pay attention to this, because here we have the manifestation of the anger of the Lord through his servant Moses. So when he approaches the camp and he sees all of these people, we have amen.

taking in his hands the tablets of stone that God Almighty had written with His holy finger. It was the work of God in instituting these two covenant tablets. And a man comes in his righteous zeal and anger and he's going to break them, representing the breaking and the breaching of the covenant. He's going to take after that, he's going to take the golden calf and he is going to, it says, ground it to powder and he's going to throw that powder in water and he's going to make the people of Israel drink that water. That is a bitter water.

When you have time, read Numbers chapter 5 from verse 11 until the end of the chapter, because the penalty for the unfaithful wife who was caught in adultery was to drink bitter water. And this is, I think, I believe a foreshadow of that which is going to be given in the law. But after that, after making them drink this powder of gold, this bitter water, this bitter water of inequity, if you wish, Moses is going to do something even beyond that, because now he's going to present himself in front of the people and he's going to say, who is on the side of the Lord? And the Levites, that is his brothers, he was a Levite, Moses himself was a Levite. The Levites will come on his side and then Moses is going to instruct.

these people, the Levites, to go and kill all of those neighbors and people who had performed this wicked thing in Israel. We are told that about 3,000 people fell on that particular day. Now, brothers and sisters, the question that we need to ask ourselves is, why did God instruct Moses to kill, through the Levites in this case, those people? And the first thing that may come to our minds is that the reason why he was instructed to kill them through the Levites, it was because of their sin. Right.

And that is true. It was because of their sin. But it's even beyond their sin. It is an unrepentant sin. Brothers and sisters, when Moses spoke to the people and he draw a line, in a sense, and he said, who is on the side of the Lord?

He was given an opportunity to the people to repent and to come on the other side of that line or the side where Moses was and then to be forgiven. But these people decided to remain on the side of their wisdom. They did not come to the side of the Lord. So when the Levites were applying this judgment, they were applying it to people that were unrepentant. from this horrendous and wicked sin.

Brothers and sisters, that is not the difficult thing of this chapter. That is not the major thing that the people of Israel lost on that particular day, because we're even told in the last verse, in verse 35, that 3,000 people died and that the Lord sent a plague to the rest of the people. There's something even worse that was lost on that particular day. I said to you that this chapter is about the breaking of the covenant and the consequences of breaking that particular covenant. If you go and pay attention to verse 26, we are told details of the execution of the judgment that teaches us what are the consequences of the breaking of the covenant.

In verse 26, we're told, Then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me. You see, the tabernacle had not been established or built yet, but they did have a camp and the gate of the camp was the entrance to the camp. So Moses stood in the gate, in the door, in the entrance of the camp. And he said, who is on the Lord's side?

After you have seen all of these things, who is on the Lord's side? And then the Levites came out of the camp through the gate where Moses was. and they were the ones that repented of the sin that they themselves had committed together with Aaron. Brothers, Moses was outside of the camp and the people that came outside of the camp was the ones that repented, but the majority of the people remained inside of the camp. This is the consequence of the breaking of the covenant at this point.

It is that the presence of the Lord is not going to be in the midst of the camp anymore. He is going to go outside of the camp together with Moses and together with the Levites. and because the Levites came outside of the camp, outside of the wickedness of the sin that had been committed, and because they had acted upon the commandment of the Lord by taking the sword and executing the righteous judgment of God, they had been ordained for the service of the Lord, the text says. If you go, let me show just a couple of verses in the next chapter that our brother is going to teach us next week. In chapter 33, in verse 3, it says, once the Lord is just giving Moses new instructions, he says in verse chapter 3, go up to a land flowing with milk and honey, but I will not go up.

among you, lest I consume you on the way, for you are stiff-necked people." The Lord is not going to be among the people anymore. He's going to send an angel, but he's not going to be among the people to the point that from this point onwards until the tabernacle is finally built and constructed, Moses He's not going to meet with the Lord inside of the camp, but he's going to do it outside of the camp. If you go to verse 7 in chapter 33, it says, Now Moses used to take the tent and pitch it outside the camp. This is his tent, far off from the camp.

And he called it the tent of meeting. And everyone who sought the Lord would go out to the tent of meeting, which was outside the camp. The covenant had been broken. And the presence of the Lord and the communion of the Lord from among his people was removed because of the inequity. The Lord in his providence, he is going to bring about the construction of the tabernacle and we will study all of those things.

But brothers and sisters, these things have been written for our exhortation. First Corinthians chapter 10. Do we have a better covenant in Christ Jesus? Yes, we do. It is the new covenant, a better covenant than the obsolete old covenant given to Moses.

Yes, it is. It is Christ Jesus, a better and the best intercessor for us before the Lord. Yes, he's the high priest. He is the prophet. He is the one who gave his life for us.

But the Bible is very clear. If you think that you are firm or that you're standing firm, take heed, lest you may fall. This is what the apostle says in First Corinthians, chapter 10, after he has given the comparison of the things that have taken place here as instruction for the church. If you think that you are firm, take heed, lest you may fall. And the same or the author of Hebrews chapter three, chapter three, verse 12.

He says, take heed, lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief, the same heart that was in the people of Israel, departing from the living God. This is speaking to New Testament believers. How are we going to save our souls? How are we going to endure until the end? Well, doing the opposite that the people of Israel did.

The uncertainty and the lack of faith of the people of Israel was What is this Moses that took us out of the land of Egypt? What is this Moses that brought us from the slavery out of Egypt into this place? The heart of the Christian is, what is Christ, the one that saved me? Because the answer to that question is, He's always there. He doesn't go away.

He doesn't depart. He's always there to provide grace. He's the one that has to be the object and the goal of the eyes of the believer. He's the one that provides the strength of endurance until the end. Not Moses, because Moses departs, but Christ abides in the heart of the believer by grace through faith.

Amen?