And Moses returned unto the Lord, and said, Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin-; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.- Exo_32:31-32.
1. Jehovah Himself informed Moses of the apostasy of Israel, and the dialogue between the lawgiver and his God shows how partially even Moses had apprehended the Divine Nature. Jehovah's words were, “I have seen this people, and behold it is a stiffnecked people: now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.” But Moses, singularly destitute of personal ambition, showed no desire to be exalted at the expense of the people whom he had delivered. He prayed Jehovah to remember Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and how He had delivered Israel out of Egypt, adding in remonstrance, “Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, saying, For evil did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?”
(1) As we read the narrative, it would almost appear as though Moses were pressing God to retreat step by step, and yield to his importunity; but, in point of fact, God was only drawing him on to comprehend the love and grace of His character. It is as though the mother, when teaching her nursling to walk, were to retire backward, as if pushed by his tiny hands, whereas, in point of fact, she is teaching him, unconsciously to himself, to walk. Our Father is so intent on leading us to advance that He appears to yield to our importunity.
(2) In his first prayer for backsliding Israel, Moses did not reach that note of supreme sacrifice which gives him a pre-eminent position among the saints of the Old Testament Scriptures. He looks at the threatened extinction of the chosen from the standpoint of the Divine honour, and declares his jealousy for God's glory among the heathen. But when he visits the mount a second time, his soul is possessed by compassion for the ignorant, infatuated crowd. In pleading with the Most High, before leaving His presence to descend to the plain, he uses as his chief argument the Divine Name, whose spotless renown must be upheld.
“The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force.” There are other two instances of this in Scripture. The one, where the God of Abraham appeared to retreat before His servant's fervour for Sodom; the other, where Jesus appeared to yield to the woman of Syrophenicia. In each case the suppliant was led to assume a position of appropriating faith that had never before been reached, like the furthest wave of an advancing tide, flung far forward up the shore. This is the secret of delayed prayer. Prayer is educative. A man who prays grows; and the muscles of the soul swell from thin whipcord to iron bands.1 [Note: F. B. Meyer.]
An outspoken critic, who had absorbed into his blood the genial, humanitarian theology of George MacDonald's novels, after hearing a sermon upon the intercession of Moses, said, “The preacher has succeeded in making me think much more highly of Moses than of God.” For the caustic comment upon the preacher's feat there was perhaps a reason, and yet, at the same time, the preacher's exposition might not have been far astray from the letter of the incident as recorded in the Book of Exodus. At one point in the narrative, God does seem to be on the side of retributive vengeance, and Moses the advocate of gentleness and forgiving compassion. Such narratives, however, must be looked upon in the ultimate truths which emerge from them, and not in the ideas which arise as we tarry in some halfway house of interpretation into which we turn before the end comes.2 [Note: T. G. Selby, The God of the Patriarchs, 190.]
2. Notice Moses' blaze of wrath. In the mount he acted as intercessor. When God told him all that was transpiring in the plain below and showed the glittering sword of justice suspended over the guilty nation by a thread, he pleaded for the people whom he loved. But as he descended the mountain his anger burst forth. Before leaving the Divine presence, he had received the two tables of the testimony, written with the finger of God, and as he descended the mountain with his minister Joshua, they heard the shouts of the people. Joshua said, “There is a noise of war in the camp,” but Moses answered, “It is not the voice of them that shout for mastery, neither is it the voice of them that cry for being overcome: but the noise of them that sing do I hear.” When they came nearer, and saw the people dancing round the calf, Moses in his anger “cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount.” Directly he came to the people Moses had the calf burnt and ground to powder, which he mixed in water, and forced its worshippers to drink. When Moses inquired of his brother “What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought a great sin upon them?” Aaron tried to excuse himself by saying that the people had begged him to make a god for them, and had given him their golden jewels to cast into the furnace, adding, “and there came out this calf.” For so great a sin against Jehovah, vengeance had to be taken; and Moses, when he “saw that the people were broken loose; for Aaron had let them loose for a derision among their enemies,” cried, “Who is on the Lord's side?” His own tribe rallied to his call. Levi, it is recorded in the “Song of Moses,” “said of his father, and of his mother, I have not seen him; neither did he acknowledge his brethren” (Deu_33:9), and attacked the people, slaying no less than three thousand of them.
Only he who loves much knows what it is to feel that anger which is ennobling and Godlike.1 [Note: The Life and Letters of Alfred Ainger, 347.]
The daily affairs of politics and diplomacy were for him the active scene on which good or evil worked out their immemorial war; and he watched on at the conflict with the solemn zeal of a prophet, in whose eyes God's honour was engaged. It was this which explains the heat of his words at a time like that of the Bulgarian massacres. The decision to be taken at that hour by England was felt by him to be charged with all the momentous significance that would belong to a personal choice between right and wrong. At such a public crisis, as in many a private one, a fire of moral indignation would suddenly reveal itself in him which startled the ordinary man. We are used to such passion over personal wrongs; there it gives us no surprise. But a flame of righteous anger that has no trace of personal injury in it, and that leaps up at the sight of public wrong because it is wrong, and for no other reason-this is rare indeed. And it was all the more startling, as it sprang from one so associated with courteous gentleness as the Dean. Yet there it was. No one could mistake it. It was the pure, white anger of an outraged conscience. When once you had caught sight of it, you never forgot it. It was recognized as the typical expression of his personality. I have known people who have said that it was the only human experience which gave them a clue to what was meant by the paradox of St. John, “the wrath of the Lamb.” Certainly, I can imagine no one whose rebuke would be more terrible to undergo. One or two occasions on which I saw him deal with a committed offence remain imprinted on my imagination with unparalleled vividness. His condemnation was a punishment in itself, at which one trembled.2 [Note: Life and Letters of Dean Church, 244.]
3. Then came the great act of intercession. Next day Moses returned to the Lord and interceded for the people, even offering himself as an atonement. To understand his feeling we must remember how close his connexion with this people had been.
(1) They had been the burden of his thoughts during those years in the desert. He had battled for them with Pharaoh. To lead them forth into freedom had been the great purpose of his life. He was one with them in all things; and if in all ages there have been patriotic men, ready to die, if need be, for their people or their land, can we not conceive something of the sublime self-sacrifice of this mighty patriot of old? Moreover, observe how that great sin would affect him. If we ever had a friend or a brother fall into evil, did we not feel as though the sin weighed down our own spirits-not merely the shame of it, but the sin itself? And if so, can we not form some idea of the effect of that people's crime in the great and tender heart of this holy man of God? Would not his revulsion from their sin mingle with his own love for the people? The holiest men ever feel most deeply the sin of their fellows-they see its seeds in themselves, they find its shadow falling across their heaven. A great modern writer has said that he saw in his own heart the germ of every sin. And can we tell the sense of self-abasement which such a man as Moses must have felt in that supreme moment, when, in the presence of the Infinite purity, he was interceding for his sinful people?
(2) Moses must have felt the promise of that people's future. In them might lie the germ of the world's history; through them might be unfolded the glory of Jehovah before the face of all nations. Gathering these together-intense sympathy with the people, intense grief for, and shrinking from, their sin, and belief in their future for the manifestation of the glory of God-may we not in part comprehend the depth of his words, “Yet now, if thou wilt forgive their sin-; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of the book which thou hast written”? He was willing to die, willing for heaven's lightning to fall on himself, if only the people might be spared! Is there not in the sublime self-devotion of this great servant of God in the early time a foreshadowing of that stupendous love which, in the ages to come, was to be shown by the Man Christ Jesus, in the deliverance of the whole Israel of God from a deeper and darker bondage than that of Egypt, who was “made to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him”?
The idea of a suffering God was foolishness to the Greeks, who considered a God as a tyrant gloating over the sufferings of men. But the seeming contradiction is solved if one supposes that a Holy Being deposits itself, so to speak, in humanity, and that humanity then becomes defiled. That is a boundless grief like his who has deposited the best part of his soul and his emotions with a woman. If she then goes and defiles herself, she defiles her husband. Or a father's nature has passed over to his children, and he wishes to see his best impulses continued and multiplied by them, and his likeness ennobled. If the children dishonour themselves, the father suffers; the stem withers when the roots are injured.
Such I imagine to be the feelings of God the Father when the sinfulness of humanity grows noisome and dishonours Him, and perhaps threatens to affect His own holiness. He will be wroth and lament-perhaps even feel Himself defiled-rather than cut off the cancerous limb of humanity. Christ is no more represented as beautiful, but with features distorted by the sins of others; these He has taken on Himself or drawn to Himself, for he who approaches pitch is defiled. In order to be free from the impure element He must die by the destruction of the body. Incarnation involved the greatest suffering of all.1 [Note: A. Strindberg, Zones of the Spirit, 155.]
4. To such imploring devotion the Almighty love which hears prayer cannot accord a grudging or ungracious response. Moses comes to find that God is more merciful than his earlier apprehension of Him implied, and towards these children of Abraham a longsuffering is extended which enfolds the hope of corporate salvation. But such a salvation cannot bar out punishment due to individual offenders. Many who belong to the nation which God consents to spare must yet look for their own dark reckoning-day. The mercy which comes forth from God's presence with its manifold riches, in response to the cry of intercession, cannot repeal personal responsibility. In the Divine government of men there must be no such thing as an indulgence which takes little account of righteousness and glosses over all past outrage and offence. The guiding presence, crowning pledge and expression of the Divine good-will, is not withdrawn, and the children of these transgressors, in due time, are to be brought into the Land of Promise. Intercession, even when it glows with such self-forgetting ardour as that which kindled in the soul of Moses, cannot move the firm foundations of the judgment-throne or arrest the retribution which must, one day, come to the renegade who goes back from God's service; but it can bear aloft the man who pleads into new apprehensions of the Divine goodness, and bring near to a nation the mercy which spares in the midst of grievous misdoing.
This principle is to be upheld. “Whosoever hath sinned against me, him will I blot out of my book,” sounds like a reservation in the answer to this unselfish prayer, but is really a part of the goodness which God caused to light upon Moses, and those with whom he had identified himself. In the ancient world the ruler of the State made the family the unit with which he reckoned, and entered upon no discrimination between the different members, whilst Heaven itself was supposed to count a nation the unit of its reckoning, and to recognize no right of sacrifice and approach other than that possessed by the king as the federal head of the nation. A family was punished for the crime of any one of its separate members, and the King of Heaven was supposed to punish an entire nation for the misdemeanour of a handful of its citizens. It is not difficult to see how harsh were such ideas in their outworking. A new principle is affirmed, that in God's government of His people, neither nation nor family shall be the unit of reckoning, but the individual-a principle pregnant with all the benign changes and ameliorations which have appeared throughout the long Christian centuries. “I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.”
5. In these days of clearer light and larger privilege, how seldom do our prayers deserve the remotest kind of comparison with this memorable overwhelming prayer offered by the founder of the Jewish commonwealth! Perhaps we do not pray at all, or our prayers are dwarfed by the more prominent and absorbing interests which make up the staple of our lives. Among some people, it is to be feared, the habit has died out with the rising belief in the supremacy of natural law, although it is difficult to see how intercessory prayer is prejudiced by scientific interpretations of the order of a physical universe. We study people, and perhaps criticize and despise them, but have not the passionate sympathy Moses felt for the multitude entrusted to his care. We do not feel called to bear the burdens which lie outside our family circles, least of all the burdens of the vicious hordes who haste to a fate they deserve. If we do pray, it is easy to detect a strain of selfish egotism in the petitions. Perhaps we pray with a half belief in the efficacy of the exercise, for causes with which we have cast in our lot, and in the prosperity of which we expect to reach our little meed of honour. If God's glory and our fair fame advance by parallel lines so much the better, but we do not care so deeply for anything which concerns the common good that we should be glad to see it brought about at the cost of our own oblivion. Alas! that such insidious, ignoble, unconfessed egoisms should colour our thoughts when we profess to come before God's mercy-seat. The temper of self-renunciation must not only enter into our lives, but suffuse and energize our prayers, if, in the spirit and by the inspiration of Him who was made a curse for us, we are to mediate between God and man, and through our prayers, in some degree, direct those influences which achieve the true redemption of the race.
Intercessory prayer is in its essence a witness for the holy sovereignty of God in providence and in grace. It is a deeply practical acknowledgment that to Him all hearts are open; that He holds the key of all wills and lives; that He can indeed make “all things work together” for His glory and our blessing in Christ Jesus. And intercessory prayer is of course a tender living testimony to two great and precious facts, which run up into one. It witnesses to the Christian believer's living spiritual union with his brethren in Christ, and indeed with all men as potentially such. And it witnesses to his wonderful and blessed spiritual union with his Lord in new birth and new life, that immediate conjunction with the Head through which he has union with the members.1 [Note: H. C. G. Moule, All in Christ, 101.]
