MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Exodus 32:15-20
THE TRUTH GIVEN AND LOST
We contemplate—
I. The truth given, Exodus 31 :
1. The highest truth was given to man. That truth could not be divined by the genius of men. It was a revelation from God.
2. The fulness of the truth is intimated. “Two tables, and they were written on both their sides.” The whole truth needed to teach us our duty to God and man. Ten commandments seem few, but in them we have the great laws of the moral universe, and one such law properly understood explains a wide range of life, as the knowledge of one of the great laws of nature explains much phenomena.
3. The authority of the truth, Exodus 32:16. “Written with the finger of God.” This gift of the tables of testimony was God’s grandest gift to Israel. The source of light and purity and gladness (Psalms 19:7-9; Romans 3:1-2). The truth is God’s grandest gift to the world. And when Christ declared unto us more fully the grand truths of the spiritual universe, He imparted to us the choicest blessings of heaven. What the sunshine is to the natural world—that is the law of Moses, and the exposition of that law in Christ, to the moral world.
II. The truth lost, Exodus 32:19. Moses brake the tables of the law, because of the sin of the people. His was a righteous anger, and his action forcibly pictures the fact that in unbelief and sin we lose the truth.
1. Sin sometimes leads God to take away from a people the revelation of Himself. There is a famine of the word of God.
2. Sin always blinds men to the knowledge of the highest truth. Let us open the windows of our soul to the light of God’s truth, and let us carefully preserve that truth. We see nations who have lost the truth; we see Churches; we see individuals. That the truth may not be lost to us, let us live in purity, let us obey all its directions. If we lose the tables of the law we lose the foundation stones of empire, of Churches, of character.
ILLUSTRATIONS
BY
REV. WILLIAM ADAMSON
Idol-Idiosyncrasy. Exodus 32:1-35.
(1.) Material idolatry has passed away among civilised nations in its literal import. As Macmillan says, the old worship of stocks and stones is now impossible among a professedly Christian people. But although the outward mode has passed away, the essence of the temptation remains the same. Human society is changed, but human nature is unchanged. The impulse which led Israel to seek the golden calf is as strong as ever, and images are set up and worshipped now as fantastic as any pagan fetish or joss. For what is idolatry! Is it not in its essence the lowering of the idea of God and of God’s nature, and the exaltation of a dead image above a man’s own living spirit! Is not an idol whatever is loved more than God, whatever is depended upon for happiness and help independent of God?
(2.) Sooner or later, as Moses pounded the calf and gave the Israelites the dust to drink in punishment of their idolatry, will all such moral idolaters have to drink the dust of their idols. Our sin will become our punishment, our idols our scourges. God is a jealous God, and every soul that turns aside from His love to the lying vanities of the world must drink the bitter water of jealousy, filled with the dust of the bruised and mutilated idols of spiritual idolatry: “This shall ye have at My hand, ye shall lie down in sorrow.”
“Thou art the man within whose heart’s deep cell
All evil sleeping lies;
Lust, in a dark hour waking, breaks the spell,
And straightway there arise
Monsters of evil thoughts and base desire.”
—Greok.
Apis-Adoration! Exodus 32:20. The Egyptian Apis was attended by a retinue of priests, and sacrifices of red oxen were offered to him. All his changes of appetite, his movements, and choice of places were watched as oracular. He was not allowed to live longer than twenty-five years. If he died a natural death before that age, his body was embalmed as a mummy, and interred in the subterranean tombs. Otherwise, he was secretly put to death, and buried by the priests in a sacred well. A new animal was then sought for. It was necessary that he should be marked with a white square on his forehead, an eagle on his back, and a knot like a cantharus under his tongue. When found, he was conveyed with great pomp to Nicopolis, where he remained for forty days, attended by naked women. He was then removed to Memphis.
“The general world, unconscious pietists
Of falsest creeds and errors, God allowed
To live on, unreproved, till came the time
When all the mysteries of heaven and earth
Were put in evolution.”
Calf-Carved! Exodus 32:20.
(1.) Most of the large idols of antiquity had a wooden centre; the metal being, by way of preparation, cast into a flat sheet which the goldsmith hammered and spread out. No doubt, this calf was made of wood, and then overlaid with gold. This explains the destruction by Moses. Being burnt, the wood was converted into charcoal, while the gold would be crushed to pieces.
(2.) In a French Bible appears the ridiculous gloss that the ashes of the calf which Moses caused to be burnt and mixed with the water that was drunk by the Israelites stuck to the beards of such as had fallen down before it, by which they appeared with gilt beards, as a peculiar mark to distinguish those who had worshipped the graven image.
“Man’s a poor deluded bubble,
Wand’ring in a mist of lies;
Seeing false, or seeing double;
Who would trust to such weak eyes?”
—Dodsley.
Idol-Impotency! Exodus 32:20.
(1.) After the defeat of the Persian army in the Libyan desert, Cambyses returned to Memphis. On his arrival, he found its inhabitants rejoicing at the discovery of a calf marked with the mystic characters which declared it to be a divine bull. Ignorant of this fact, and supposing the public joy to be over his defeat, Cambyses summoned the magistrates. They endeavoured to pacify him by explaining about the bull; but he ordered them to be executed as liars. The bull and priests were then brought into his presence, when, drawing his dagger, he stabbed the calf.
(2.) Was Moses by this act desirous of showing the utter impotency of their newly adopted god? He certainly took the most effectual way to do so. When the English officer struck the Brahmin bull amid its crowd of worshippers, these deluded devotees looked for his immediate destruction. But when no harm came to him, when he seized a rough branch, and drove it with many lusty, sacrilegious blows about the market-place, the people then ridiculed their priests and animal god. The merciless grinding and pounding of the Apis or Mnevis calf may have been a design to convince Israel of their folly.
“What, Dagon up again! I thought we had hurled him
Down on the threshold, never more to rise.
Bring wedge and axe; and neighbours, lend your hands,
And rive the idol into winter faggots.”
—Athelstane.
Dust-Drink! Exodus 32:20.
(1.) She was his idol, his only daughter! A fairy, sylphlike form was hers; and fondly his eye watched her flitting hither and thither. In his love, the proud peer and father forgot the suffering world around—its sorrows and its woes. In his idol-worship, he lost sight of God, who had given him that living soul. He placed the human form, overlaid with the gold of sweetness and fairy charms, upon the throne in his being, which rightly was Jehovah’s only. One day the pony shied, and the idol fell—fell on a rude stone by the pathway. She lived, but became a decrepit form, with distorted face. He had to drink of the bitter water with the dust of his idol, as from day to day he saw her nerveless form, and marked her twitching, pinched features.
(2.) The observed of all observers! What queenly grace was hers! What exquisitely chiselled features! Women envied her surpassing loveliness; while men thirsted for her smiles. And she knew it all. Her beauty became her idol—wood overlaid with gold. She learned to adore her own charms. She worshipped her image reflected in the boudoir mirror. God was forgotten in her idolatry of self-beauty. An evening came, when the flashing jewels lay untouched—when the princely saloon felt not the witchery of her presence. It was small-pox; and she rose from her bed with disfigured features. The powdered dust of marred and charred loveliness was mingled with the bitter water, as she gazed in the now hateful mirror. Therefore—
“Seek not the world!
’Tis a vain show at best;
Bow not before its idol-shrine; in God
Find thou thy DAY and REST.”
—Bonar.