The God Who Relents | Exodus 32:1-14
Shame and Guilt
Peter grew up in the church his whole life. As long as he can remember, he has believed God’s Word. His faith in Jesus has grown and matured. He enjoys reading and discussing theology. But he has carried secret shame ever since he gave in to temptation with his girlfriend.
Amanda first heard the gospel and trusted Jesus in college. Her life was dramatically transformed—relationships, priorities, habits. But one thing hasn’t changed: her relationship with food. She’s able to hide it pretty well because she seems to eat normally with others. But behind the scenes, she is counting every calorie, watching the scale obsessively, and purging religiously, terrified of gaining weight. These thoughts consume her, and she feels like she can’t get free.
Both Peter and Amanda feel like hypocrites. One fell in a moment; the other battles daily with an ongoing eating disorder. But both feel like frauds. They believe in Jesus. They go to church. They participate in gospel community. But behind the smiles and the raised hands, there is shame, guilt, and condemnation.
How can you enjoy God’s favor when you know you deserve God’s wrath? Maybe you can’t seem to get your temper under control with your kids. Or maybe you’re secretly addicted to pornography and terrified to tell. Or some major sin in your past haunts you relentlessly. Whatever it is for you, pay attention to Exodus 32:1–14.
Exodus 32:1–14
1 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.” 2 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.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” 5 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.” 6 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.
7 And the LORD said to Moses, “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. 8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ ” 9 And the LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. 10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.”
11 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? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ”
14 And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.
Wrath and Mercy
Exodus 32:1–14 is a tragic story with a joyous message. Even though you deserve God’s wrath, God deals mercifully with you in Jesus. Here at Mount Sinai, human depravity is on full display. But that display only magnifies the mercy of God.
The story unfolds in four scenes: Idolatry (vv. 1–6), Wrath (vv. 7–10), Intercession (vv. 11–13), and Mercy (v. 14)
Idolatry
If the description of the tabernacle in Exodus 25–31 evoked images of Eden and renewed humanity’s hope that God would dwell again with man, Exodus 32 echoes the Fall. Exodus 19–31 was the ultimate “mountain top experience,” complete with thunder and lightning, smoke and fire, the audible voice of God, and a visible display of the glory of the LORD. But all of that hope and anticipation comes crashing down in Exodus 32:1.
At this point, Moses had been on the mountain for nearly 40 days. The people grew anxious and impatient, so they took matters into their own hands. One commentator translates v. 1, “The people ganged up on Aaron.” The scene begins with an angry mob and tense opposition. Their demand is shocking, especially in light of the preceding events: “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” (Exodus 32:1). Aaron complied and made a golden calf, which the people worshiped passionately.
There is a lot of debate about whether the people broke the first commandment (“You shall have no other gods before me”) or the second (“You shall not make for yourself a carved image.”)
On the one hand, the people speak of gods, plural. “Make us gods who shall go before us” (v. 1). After Aaron makes the calf, they declare triumphantly, “These are your gods, O Israel” (v. 4).
On the other hand, it seems like they wanted a visible representation of the LORD. They say in verse 4, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” And v. 5 says, “Aaron made a proclamation and said, ‘Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.’” It might sound strange to you that the image they made was a calf. It seems like naming a baseball team the Canaries. But in Egypt, there were numerous deities represented by cows and bulls. And a young bull symbolized power and strength. So the image of a young bull was supposed to represent Yahweh.
Whether the primary motivation was to reject the True God with other deities or to visibly represent the LORD in the image of a bull doesn’t make much difference. The point is the same: the people who had been redeemed from slavery by God’s power, who crossed the Red Sea, who ate manna from heaven, who received God’s Law at Sinai, and who agreed to God’s covenant—those people immediately and overtly violated the foundation of the entire Law.
The covenant at Sinai was like a wedding ceremony. God took Israel to be his bride; Israel swore to be faithful to God. But before the tabernacle was yet built, where God would dwell with his Bride, Israel had already broken the covenant. The timing and the nature of Israel’s sin is appalling. Israel’s idolatry is like a new bride committing adultery during the honeymoon, before the newlyweds have even moved into their new home together.
At the root of this disobedience toward God was dissatisfaction with God. The people wanted a god they could see. John Calvin writes, “The example of the Israelites shows the origin of idolatry to be that men do not believe God is with them unless he shows himself physically present.”
Exodus 32:1 says, “When the people saw that Moses delayed ….” So they acted on what their eyes saw rather than what they had heard from God. This is what they did at the Red Sea: “When Pharaoh drew near, the people of Israel lifted up their eyes, and behold, the Egyptians were marching after them, and they feared greatly. And the people of Israel cried out to the LORD” (Exodus 14:10). And this is what Eve did in the Garden: “So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, … she took of its fruit and ate” (Genesis 3:6).
Living by faith means trusting what God has said no matter what you see or feel. Invisibility is one of God’s attributes. The fact that God is Spirit and too glorious to be perceived by our physical senses is not a flaw or a limitation in God. There are light waves we cannot see, sound waves we cannot hear. Our senses are limited; God is not. But, as John Calvin said, the human heart is “a perpetual factory of idols.”
The nature of idolatry is to choose a god of our own making over the True and Living God. Psalm 106:19–22 recounts these events: “They made a calf in Horeb and worshiped a metal image. They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass. They forgot God, their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt, wondrous works in the land of Ham, and awesome deeds by the Red Sea.” Scripture always presents idolatry as idiotic.
But a great danger in reading the Bible is to read about the sins of others and think, “I would never be so stupid!” It’s tempting to scoff at the idolatry of the ancients. They worshiped a calf made out of gold? How stupid! But John Calvin writes, “We must not think the heathen so stupid that they did not understand God to be something other than stocks and stones.” The ancients didn’t believe that a golden object was God, but that divine power resided in the image. People felt closer to God when they had something tangible to look at and pray to.
Aren’t we the same way? Just because we don’t make carved idols doesn’t mean we aren’t prone to idolatry. Exodus 32 is a paradigm for the sinful condition of all humans. Paul universalizes the golden calf and Exodus 32 when he writes, “Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things. … They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen” (Romans 1:22–23, 25). We prefer that which we can see and touch to the glory of the God we can’t see. We chose lies that make us feel comfortable instead of the truth of God that convicts and corrects us. We seek our satisfaction and security in created things rather than the Creator.
This is the human condition—your condition and mine. And the scene in Exodus 32, immediately following the giving of the Law on Mount Sinai, demonstrates that God’s Law is completely powerless to change idolatrous hearts.
Wrath
In verse 7, the scene changes to the top of the mountain, where God informs Moses of the idolatrous incident happening down below. “And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves’” (Exodus 32:7).
Notice those pronouns: “your people, whom you brought up.” Israel’s sin has broken fellowship with God. One commentator says the word corrupt “indicates depraved moral conduct which renders them offensive in the sight of God. … Their actions had rendered them unfit to be recognised as the LORD’s people.”
In verse 8, God expresses displeasure at how quickly they have disobeyed his commands. And in verse 9 he says, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.” Stiff-necked was a word used to describe an animal that was worthless for working the land because it refused to bend its neck to wear a yoke. From this point on, it becomes one of Scripture’s common ways to describe Israel. God’s assessment is devastating: the people are disqualified and useless for God’s purposes because they have violated God’s covenant.
Next, God communicates to Moses his holy response to this particular situation. “Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you” (Exodus 32:10). This sounds like the days of Noah, when God dealt with humanity’s moral corruption by wiping out all flesh and preserving Noah and his family. God’s righteous wrath burns against sin to consume it completely from his presence. Violating God’s covenant deserves complete destruction. This is God’s just judgment against sin.
And this is, again, our human condition—the very predicament we find ourselves in. Paul writes in Romans 1:18 that “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.” And he adds, “Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:32). In Ephesians 2:3 he says, “We all once lived in the passions of our flesh, carrying out the desires of the body and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath.”
Exodus 32 presents the greatest dilemma in history. How can a holy and just God fulfill his promise to bless his redeemed people who have violated his law, provoked his wrath, and earned his judgment? Exodus 32 prompts every one of us to ask, “How can God be favorable to me when my sin deserves his wrath?”
God’s response to Israel’s sin makes it clear that God is not like us. Those who fashion a god in their own image tend to assume that God deals with sin the way we do. We minimize sin. We downplay it. We talk about our “mistakes” instead of our immorality, our “struggles” instead of our sin, our “weaknesses” instead of our wickedness.So we expect a god in our image to overlook sin, sweep it under the rug, turn a blind eye, and ignore it.
But that is not what a holy God does. God’s response to Israel’s idolatry leaves no hope that sin will be excused. God made this clear in the second commandment, which forbids idolatry: “You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:5–6).
When God expresses his displeasure to Moses, he is upholding his own word.
Intercession
A glimmer of hope emerges in verse 11: “But Moses implored the LORD his God.” As the mediator who stood between God and Israel, Moses began to intercede for his people. Pay careful attention to the logic of Moses’ prayer.
First, Moses appealed to God’s past work of salvation. “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?” (Exodus 32:11). God distanced himself from the people and their sin when he called them “your people” to Moses. Now Moses calls them “your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt.” They are the people Moses represents before the LORD, but they are the people God had redeemed to be his people. And this was the foundation of the Law, before a single commandment had been given: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Exodus 20:2).
Next, Moses appealed to God’s passion for his own glory. “Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’?” (Exodus 32:12a). Once again, Moses is praying God’s Word back to God, who had said, “The Egyptians shall know that I am the LORD, when I stretch out my hand against Egypt and bring out the people of Israel from among them” (Exodus 7:5, cf. 14:18). Now Moses appeals to God’s commitment to uphold the honor of his name. There is nothing worthy or deserving about the people to which Moses can appeal, so he appeals to the glory of God’s name. And the glory of God’s name is connected to the preservation of these people. Ezekiel 20:13–14 confirms that God’s motive for showing mercy to ill-deserving people is his passion for his own glory: “Then I said I would pour out my wrath upon them in the wilderness, to make a full end of them. But I acted for the sake of my name, that it should not be profaned in the sight of the nations, in whose sight I had brought them out.”
Third, Moses pleaded for mercy. “Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people” (Exodus 32:12b). The word translated relent is found in this same form in only one other place in Scripture. Psalm 90 is called “A prayer of Moses, the man of God,” and verse 13 says, “Return, O LORD! How long? Have pity on your servants!” (Psalm 90:13). Moses did not argue that God’s anger was unjust or undeserved. Moses simply asked God for undeserved mercy. And in asking for mercy, Moses acknowledged Israel’s guilt.
Finally, Moses appealed to God’s covenant promises. “Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever’” (Exodus 32:13). Moses expressed faith in God’s promises on behalf of God’s people.
Every one of Moses’ reasons was rooted in God—his character, his works, his mercy, his passion for his glory, his promises.
Mercy
Verse 14 says, “And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.”
“And the LORD relented.”
Those are among the sweetest words in Scripture.
Exodus 32 is not just a paradigm for humanity’s disobedience and idolatry. It is a revelation of the God who relents. Throughout Exodus God has revealed himself as the Great I Am, the Sovereign King who rules the nations, Redeemer, Provider, Sustainer, and Lawgiver. Here we see that the holy God of Sinai who burns with righteous wrath against sin is also a God who is willing to relent from bringing on sinners the disaster we deserve. He is the Merciful God.
But don’t think God overreacted, while Moses calmed him down. This is a common misunderstanding of the gospel. People think of God the Father as angry, while God the Son softened him.
In God’s interaction with Moses, it was God who invited Moses to intercede. God said to Moses, “Let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them” (v. 10). Thus, God implies that mercy is available and judgment may be averted if Moses stays. When God called Israel “your people,” he dealt with Moses as their representative. And by expressing his holy anger, God gave Moses the opportunity to seek mercy.
Neither should you think that God is fickle or capricious, changing his mood suddenly. God’s character is unchanging. God is always wrathful toward sin. And God is always merciful toward the humble and contrite. Think of it like the sun, which appears to rise and set from our perspective. Of course, it’s not the sun that changes position; we orbit the sun.
From man’s perspective, it appears that God changed from wrath to mercy. But the change was in man. When Moses, acting as the mediator, interceded for Israel and expressed repentance for sin and faith in God’s promises, God relented. As Psalm 106:23 says, “Therefore he said he would destroy them—had not Moses, his chosen one, stood in the breach before him, to turn away his wrath from destroying them.” (Psalm 106:23).
Moses stood in the breach before him. Here we see the answer to our dilemma. How can a holy and just God fulfill his promise to bless his redeemed people who have violated his law, provoked his wrath, and earned his judgment? God deals mercifully with his people through an intercessor. Only a sinless mediator could turn away God’s righteous wrath.
This is gospel—good news for you! Like Israel, you have relied on what your eyes can see instead of what God has said. You have broken your resolutions to be better. Your efforts to try harder have failed. The good you want to do, you often fail to do.
So how can you enjoy God’s favor when you know you deserve God’s wrath? You can enjoy God’s mercy by trusting in God’s mediator, Jesus Christ. “Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us” (Romans 8:34). Like Moses, Jesus stands in the breach and intercedes for you. And he pleads his case based on his righteous life and his wrath-absorbing death.
So confess your sin to the Lord and to anyone you have sinned against. Forsake every idol your heart devises and trust in Christ alone. When you come before the Lord, aware that your sin makes you ill-deserving, rest in the hope that God deals mercifully with all who have Jesus as their mediator. “Whoever conceals his transgressions will not prosper, but he who confesses and forsakes them will obtain mercy.” (Proverbs 28:13).