God's initiative
Commentary
The First Reading for today is a bit hard to take -- few biblical passages are so apparently void of promise or gospel. But, wed to the other lessons, it serves well to highlight the absolute initiative of God in bringing humans to salvation. Jeremiah offers a bleak picture of what the future of humanity could be. If God chose to "uncreate" the world, to let the stupidity of our race have its full effect, who would stand? No one. The "good," if there be any, would be swept away with the "bad." But God's judgment can go the other way. The Second Reading says that God judged Paul to be faithful in spite of the fact that he was (and continued to be) the foremost of sinners! What kind of judgment is that? Then, in the Gospel lesson, Jesus indicates that when God takes the initiative to find one who has been lost, the one who is thus recovered may be said to have repented. What kind of repentance is that?
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
The catastrophe that is about to befall Judah is likened to the sirocco, the hot wind that blows from out of the desert. Not only unpleasant, such a wind does not even seem useful. It does not serve to winnow or cleanse, but will be too strong, too awful for that.
The image of winnowing is often used in the Bible (notably in the preaching of John the Baptist with reference to Jesus). When a normal wind would blow, farmers would literally throw shovelfuls of grain up into the air. The chaff would be caught on the breeze and blown away, while the heads of grain themselves would fall back to earth. The practice, so common in the Ancient Near East, offered a ready-made image for understanding the beneficial purpose of judgment or adversity. The unclean or the halfhearted would be blown away, leaving only those of substance behind. Not so with the sirocco. Like a sandstorm, it could be devastating for agriculture, blowing away grain and chaff alike.
Even so, Jeremiah says, the disaster that is coming upon the people will not discriminate: good and bad alike will be swept away. In verses 23-26 he describes the aftermath of this disaster in terms that summon the sort of apocalyptic imagery depicted in such modern films as The Road Warrior and last year's unsuccessful The Postman. The whole earth has become a wasteland, its cities leveled, its fields barren. Actually, the prophet is drawing on Genesis 1 and describing a reversal of creation: humans, beasts, birds, plants are all gone. The mountains flatten and even light vanishes from the heavens. The earth is being "uncreated." Indeed, the phrase used in the NRSV, "it was waste and void," is a direct quote from Genesis 1:2 describing the earth before creation: "a formless void" (or in the old King James language "without form and void").
The reason given for so cosmic a judgment is the stupidity or foolishness of humankind (v. 22). Again, the point is not necessarily that every individual is to blame. It does not matter -- those who are more perceptive will not be spared. The stupidity of humanity en masse will bring about the destruction of the whole earth. The only line that seems to contradict this verdict, the only little glimmer of hope in this doomsday oracle, is the final third of verse 27: "yet I will not make a full end." In context, the words are parenthetical and mysterious. The prophet does not give any specific content to this smidgen of hope he offers. But with heaven and earth in mourning (v. 28), the only hope can be that God is not done yet, that something else must follow.
1 Timothy 1:12-17
It will come as no shock to most Emphasis readers (I hope) to hear that the majority of scholars do not think the Pastoral epistles were actually written by the apostle Paul. Resolving such matters is beyond my competence (and interest), but if the passage for today was penned by one of the apostle's disciples, then I think that the latter has done his mentor proud. We have here a moving tribute to the gospel, flowing from reflection on Paul's personal life experience.
At the heart of that testimony is the transformation that took place in Paul's life as he moved from being a persecutor of the church to become a faithful servant of that same body. To speak of that change as a "conversion" is anachronistic only if we take that word to mean a complete abandonment of one religion for another. Paul did not utterly renounce Judaism in order to embrace the Christian faith, and he himself speaks of the experience not as a conversion but as a "call" (Galatians 1:15). It was a conversion, however, in that it altered his life and outlook forever. He turned from being a man of violence (v. 13; cf. Galatians 1:13) to become one who recommended love of enemies (Romans 12:20). He looked upon the event as a "revelation" (Galatians 1:16), which fits with the description here of the former Paul as one who acted "ignorantly" in unbelief.
If, as most scholars think, this letter is written twenty years after Paul's death, then two things are amazing. First, the mere fact that the memory of Paul's former life is treasured seems to be significant. We might have expected that a later generation of admirers would have glossed over such matters. Second, the moral of that treasured story is surprising. The story is not remembered, as we may have expected, as an illustration of God's transformative power. That would have been so easy: "If God turned such a villain into a hero, such a sinner into a saint, imagine what God can do for you!" No, the story is remembered as a testimony to the grace and mercy of God. The divine choice and appointment of Paul -- one totally undeserving -- remains a quintessential example of the church's confession: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Note the present tense of Paul's commentary on that confession, as depicted here: "of whom I am foremost."
Luke 15:1-10
Chapter 15 of Luke is sometimes called the "Lost and Found" section of the Bible because it contains the stories of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son. The first two of these are not quite as popular as the third, but they are very important for understanding God's relationship with us. They illustrate what the Bible means by "repentance" and they do so in a rather amazing way. Certainly the picture of repentance presented here is not what most people think of when they use the term. Most people think of repentance as a process through which people "find God." But here, repentance is a process through which God finds us!
What is repentance like? Jesus does not describe it in terms that recall Pilgrim's Progress. He doesn't tell a story about a poor lamb that gets lost but is so sorry that it wandered off and, after a long and arduous journey, makes its way home never to leave again. No, Jesus says, the Shepherd goes out after the sheep that is lost, looks everywhere for it, finds it, picks it up, puts it on his shoulders, carries it home, returns it to the fold, and ... that, Jesus says, is what it's like when a sinner repents. The stupid lamb didn't do anything! It will probably run off and get lost again tomorrow if you give it half a chance. But it's enough, Jesus says. It's enough reason to rejoice.
What about the lost coin? Jesus says, repentance is like when a woman has ten coins, loses one, sweeps the house and searches carefully until she finds it. How is repentance like that? The coin is just an inanimate object. It doesn't make any decisions. It didn't make any bad decisions that caused it to become lost, and it doesn't make any good decisions that help it to become found. It doesn't do anything at all! And that just may be the whole point. For Jesus, repentance is not fundamentally about decisions that humans make. It is not fundamentally about anything that humans do. It is, at a basic level, about something that God does. In a nutshell, it is about restoration to community.
For those who want to argue with me now and insist that there is more to repentance than this, well, of course there is. There is the re-orientation and amendment of life portrayed in the third story Jesus tells, the tale of the lost son(s). But that is a lesson for another time.
Let's concentrate on the stories we have for today. I like to think that while the story of the prodigal son may depict what repentance looks like and feels like on the human plane, these first two parables depict what it looks from the divine perspective. This is what it looks like to the angels in heaven, who see the initiative of God that may remain hidden to us.
When Jesus says he has come to call sinners (Luke 5:32), he does not mean, primarily, that he has come to tell all the bad people to change their ways and become good people. He means that he has come to invite people who are not part of God's community to become part of God's community. When this happens, Jesus says, there is joy among the angels. Because, for Jesus, repentance means restoration to the community. That's why Jesus spends so much time with sinners. It's not primarily because he thinks he can have a good influence on them and get them to stop sinning. The Pharisees wouldn't have had any problem with that (see vv. 1-2). No, Jesus hangs out with the sinners because they are the ones who otherwise have been excluded from the community of God's people. Jesus creates a new community around himself. A community of sinners. "Why do I have fellowship with sinners?" Jesus asks. "Well, why does a poor woman look for a lost coin?" What a silly question. Because it is precious to her, that's why!
When these sinners -- not ex-sinners but current sinners -- have been brought back into the community of God, then, as far as Jesus is concerned, there is great reason to rejoice. We can work on getting them to stop sinning some other time. Next week, maybe. For now, they're here, and that counts as repentance.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
"Now it is I who speak in judgment upon them" (v. 12). Ours is a society that does not accept that as the Word of God. Many people do not believe that God judges anyone. Rather, the Lord is a forgiving God, a kindly deity who overlooks all wrong. As in the gospel lesson for the morning, the Lord searches for the one lost sheep and returns it gently to the fold, or he hunts for the one lost coin until he finds it. God accepts the lost as they are, we think, overlooking Jesus' teaching about repentance and transformation of life.
The reason we discard all notions of God's judgment, moreover, is because we have lost all sense of right and wrong. No one is held responsible for his or her acts anymore. If they do evil, it is just because they are victims of society's structures, or their parents didn't raise them right, or they were under the influence of drugs or other outside forces. Right and wrong have become relative terms, subject to individual circumstances. And responsibility to a sovereign Lord is no longer considered to be applicable. If there is no responsibility, there is no sin, however, and therefore there is no occasion for God's judgment.
The prophets of Israel and our Lord Jesus knew differently. All persons, they knew, were responsible to the God who had made them, and Israel in particular had entered into a covenant with the Lord in which she promised to trust and obey him, just as all Christians renew that covenant every time they sit at the Lord's table. When Israel or we fail in our covenant with God, therefore, we are responsible to him for our thoughts and actions, and when we do not repent and turn our lives around to walk in God's ways, he is justified in his judgment of us.
Our text comes from the early days of Jeremiah's ministry, before 609 B.C., when Judah refused to repent. Instead, she gave her allegiance to the pagan fertility gods of the Baal religion; she denied justice to the poor and oppressed; her prophets and priests were corrupt, seeking only wealth and approval for themselves; her covenant obligations were totally forgotten -- all failings that could be duplicated in our present society. Indeed, Jeremiah tells us in the following chapter 5 that he searched Jerusalem for one righteous person and found none, among either the poor or the rich. And in his famous temple sermon in chapter 7, the prophet proclaims that the people thought their worship in the temple of the Lord was simply a hiding place ("a den of robbers") from the consequences of their sin (Jeremiah 7:8-11).
Our passage therefore sets forth two scenarios of God's judgment upon his faithless people. First, God's punishment is likened to the hot desert sirocco that blew into Judah to wither and dry up everything before it. Secondly, however, Jeremiah envisions an absolute judgment in which God reverses his very act of creation of the world.
Verses 23-28 deliberately parallel Genesis 1 and 2. The prophet sees the universe returned to chaos and void, as it was before God's creation of it (Genesis 1:2). The light is taken away (Genesis 1:3), the mountains and hills quake in the chaotic waters (cf. Psalm 46:2-3) and fall, birds and beasts and human beings disappear, and there is nothing left but the bare desert that can support no life (Genesis 2:4-5). In short, God takes back his creation. He is "sorry that he made man on the earth" (Genesis 6:6). And so earth and humankind are destroyed in God's last apocalyptic judgment.
Our fear is that a nuclear attack will destroy the universe. Perhaps our proper fear is that God, in his judgment on us, will bring it to an end. God made the world in the beginning. He determines its destiny. And he is quite capable of doing away with that which he has made. As Karl Barth once wrote, "The miracle is not that there is a God. The miracle is that there is a world" -- that God decided to create us in the first place and that he has put up with us and our evil as long as he has.
The call for our repentance in the gospel lesson, with its promise of God's mercy, is therefore our only hope of salvation.
Lutheran Option, Exodus 32:7-14
This text forms a vivid account of our sin. Israel is at Mount Sinai. She has entered into covenant with her God (Exodus 24:1-11), and she has twice vowed, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do" (Exodus 19:8; 24:3). In short, she has promised that her life will be ordered according to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17), that she will have no other God besides the Lord. But at the very mount of covenant, almost immediately after she has pledged her heart and her life to her God, she falls into sin and makes for herself a golden calf to worship.
Is that not the way with us also? That we partake of the Lord's Supper, in which we vow our sole trust and obedience to our Lord Jesus, and then before we even get out of the church, we violate his commandments -- gossiping about a neighbor, looking down on some poor soul, seeking our own status, turning our hearts and thoughts to the day's occupations with no thought of our God. Indeed, we leave the church, and it becomes business as usual, the daily preoccupation of seeking our own security and importance. And so we think to save our lives and, in Jesus' words, we will lose them instead.
The Israelites in our text have some remnant of piety. They know that it is the Lord who redeemed them from slavery. They know that forever after, the one true God is to be identified by that act. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:1), just as we know that it is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death. And so the Israelites have to claim that the idol they have made is the one who redeemed them (v. 8). And so often we attribute to Christianity some idol we have constructed for ourselves.
But there is one God alone who redeemed Israel and us from our slavery. And when we attribute that act to other gods, we violate our covenant with the Lord. God therefore is about to destroy Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai, just as he may destroy us.
Moses therefore fulfills the prophetic function of interceding for his sinful people, reminding God of his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses is the intercessor who turns aside God's judgment on his sinful people.
We can thank a merciful God that we too have a mediator, who interceded for us on the cross. "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). By his pleading for us, and by his sinless death, Jesus Christ turned aside the judgment of God on us that we, like faithless Israel, so richly deserve. And indeed, writes Paul, the risen and ascended Christ continues to intercede on our behalf before the Father (Romans 8:34). But it is all for the sake of enabling us to repent and to return in trust and obedience to the one true God, so that we walk in newness of life and in the joy and peace and salvation with the Father that he so much desires for us.
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
The catastrophe that is about to befall Judah is likened to the sirocco, the hot wind that blows from out of the desert. Not only unpleasant, such a wind does not even seem useful. It does not serve to winnow or cleanse, but will be too strong, too awful for that.
The image of winnowing is often used in the Bible (notably in the preaching of John the Baptist with reference to Jesus). When a normal wind would blow, farmers would literally throw shovelfuls of grain up into the air. The chaff would be caught on the breeze and blown away, while the heads of grain themselves would fall back to earth. The practice, so common in the Ancient Near East, offered a ready-made image for understanding the beneficial purpose of judgment or adversity. The unclean or the halfhearted would be blown away, leaving only those of substance behind. Not so with the sirocco. Like a sandstorm, it could be devastating for agriculture, blowing away grain and chaff alike.
Even so, Jeremiah says, the disaster that is coming upon the people will not discriminate: good and bad alike will be swept away. In verses 23-26 he describes the aftermath of this disaster in terms that summon the sort of apocalyptic imagery depicted in such modern films as The Road Warrior and last year's unsuccessful The Postman. The whole earth has become a wasteland, its cities leveled, its fields barren. Actually, the prophet is drawing on Genesis 1 and describing a reversal of creation: humans, beasts, birds, plants are all gone. The mountains flatten and even light vanishes from the heavens. The earth is being "uncreated." Indeed, the phrase used in the NRSV, "it was waste and void," is a direct quote from Genesis 1:2 describing the earth before creation: "a formless void" (or in the old King James language "without form and void").
The reason given for so cosmic a judgment is the stupidity or foolishness of humankind (v. 22). Again, the point is not necessarily that every individual is to blame. It does not matter -- those who are more perceptive will not be spared. The stupidity of humanity en masse will bring about the destruction of the whole earth. The only line that seems to contradict this verdict, the only little glimmer of hope in this doomsday oracle, is the final third of verse 27: "yet I will not make a full end." In context, the words are parenthetical and mysterious. The prophet does not give any specific content to this smidgen of hope he offers. But with heaven and earth in mourning (v. 28), the only hope can be that God is not done yet, that something else must follow.
1 Timothy 1:12-17
It will come as no shock to most Emphasis readers (I hope) to hear that the majority of scholars do not think the Pastoral epistles were actually written by the apostle Paul. Resolving such matters is beyond my competence (and interest), but if the passage for today was penned by one of the apostle's disciples, then I think that the latter has done his mentor proud. We have here a moving tribute to the gospel, flowing from reflection on Paul's personal life experience.
At the heart of that testimony is the transformation that took place in Paul's life as he moved from being a persecutor of the church to become a faithful servant of that same body. To speak of that change as a "conversion" is anachronistic only if we take that word to mean a complete abandonment of one religion for another. Paul did not utterly renounce Judaism in order to embrace the Christian faith, and he himself speaks of the experience not as a conversion but as a "call" (Galatians 1:15). It was a conversion, however, in that it altered his life and outlook forever. He turned from being a man of violence (v. 13; cf. Galatians 1:13) to become one who recommended love of enemies (Romans 12:20). He looked upon the event as a "revelation" (Galatians 1:16), which fits with the description here of the former Paul as one who acted "ignorantly" in unbelief.
If, as most scholars think, this letter is written twenty years after Paul's death, then two things are amazing. First, the mere fact that the memory of Paul's former life is treasured seems to be significant. We might have expected that a later generation of admirers would have glossed over such matters. Second, the moral of that treasured story is surprising. The story is not remembered, as we may have expected, as an illustration of God's transformative power. That would have been so easy: "If God turned such a villain into a hero, such a sinner into a saint, imagine what God can do for you!" No, the story is remembered as a testimony to the grace and mercy of God. The divine choice and appointment of Paul -- one totally undeserving -- remains a quintessential example of the church's confession: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. Note the present tense of Paul's commentary on that confession, as depicted here: "of whom I am foremost."
Luke 15:1-10
Chapter 15 of Luke is sometimes called the "Lost and Found" section of the Bible because it contains the stories of the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin, and the Lost Son. The first two of these are not quite as popular as the third, but they are very important for understanding God's relationship with us. They illustrate what the Bible means by "repentance" and they do so in a rather amazing way. Certainly the picture of repentance presented here is not what most people think of when they use the term. Most people think of repentance as a process through which people "find God." But here, repentance is a process through which God finds us!
What is repentance like? Jesus does not describe it in terms that recall Pilgrim's Progress. He doesn't tell a story about a poor lamb that gets lost but is so sorry that it wandered off and, after a long and arduous journey, makes its way home never to leave again. No, Jesus says, the Shepherd goes out after the sheep that is lost, looks everywhere for it, finds it, picks it up, puts it on his shoulders, carries it home, returns it to the fold, and ... that, Jesus says, is what it's like when a sinner repents. The stupid lamb didn't do anything! It will probably run off and get lost again tomorrow if you give it half a chance. But it's enough, Jesus says. It's enough reason to rejoice.
What about the lost coin? Jesus says, repentance is like when a woman has ten coins, loses one, sweeps the house and searches carefully until she finds it. How is repentance like that? The coin is just an inanimate object. It doesn't make any decisions. It didn't make any bad decisions that caused it to become lost, and it doesn't make any good decisions that help it to become found. It doesn't do anything at all! And that just may be the whole point. For Jesus, repentance is not fundamentally about decisions that humans make. It is not fundamentally about anything that humans do. It is, at a basic level, about something that God does. In a nutshell, it is about restoration to community.
For those who want to argue with me now and insist that there is more to repentance than this, well, of course there is. There is the re-orientation and amendment of life portrayed in the third story Jesus tells, the tale of the lost son(s). But that is a lesson for another time.
Let's concentrate on the stories we have for today. I like to think that while the story of the prodigal son may depict what repentance looks like and feels like on the human plane, these first two parables depict what it looks from the divine perspective. This is what it looks like to the angels in heaven, who see the initiative of God that may remain hidden to us.
When Jesus says he has come to call sinners (Luke 5:32), he does not mean, primarily, that he has come to tell all the bad people to change their ways and become good people. He means that he has come to invite people who are not part of God's community to become part of God's community. When this happens, Jesus says, there is joy among the angels. Because, for Jesus, repentance means restoration to the community. That's why Jesus spends so much time with sinners. It's not primarily because he thinks he can have a good influence on them and get them to stop sinning. The Pharisees wouldn't have had any problem with that (see vv. 1-2). No, Jesus hangs out with the sinners because they are the ones who otherwise have been excluded from the community of God's people. Jesus creates a new community around himself. A community of sinners. "Why do I have fellowship with sinners?" Jesus asks. "Well, why does a poor woman look for a lost coin?" What a silly question. Because it is precious to her, that's why!
When these sinners -- not ex-sinners but current sinners -- have been brought back into the community of God, then, as far as Jesus is concerned, there is great reason to rejoice. We can work on getting them to stop sinning some other time. Next week, maybe. For now, they're here, and that counts as repentance.
FIRST LESSON FOCUS
By Elizabeth Achtemeier
Jeremiah 4:11-12, 22-28
"Now it is I who speak in judgment upon them" (v. 12). Ours is a society that does not accept that as the Word of God. Many people do not believe that God judges anyone. Rather, the Lord is a forgiving God, a kindly deity who overlooks all wrong. As in the gospel lesson for the morning, the Lord searches for the one lost sheep and returns it gently to the fold, or he hunts for the one lost coin until he finds it. God accepts the lost as they are, we think, overlooking Jesus' teaching about repentance and transformation of life.
The reason we discard all notions of God's judgment, moreover, is because we have lost all sense of right and wrong. No one is held responsible for his or her acts anymore. If they do evil, it is just because they are victims of society's structures, or their parents didn't raise them right, or they were under the influence of drugs or other outside forces. Right and wrong have become relative terms, subject to individual circumstances. And responsibility to a sovereign Lord is no longer considered to be applicable. If there is no responsibility, there is no sin, however, and therefore there is no occasion for God's judgment.
The prophets of Israel and our Lord Jesus knew differently. All persons, they knew, were responsible to the God who had made them, and Israel in particular had entered into a covenant with the Lord in which she promised to trust and obey him, just as all Christians renew that covenant every time they sit at the Lord's table. When Israel or we fail in our covenant with God, therefore, we are responsible to him for our thoughts and actions, and when we do not repent and turn our lives around to walk in God's ways, he is justified in his judgment of us.
Our text comes from the early days of Jeremiah's ministry, before 609 B.C., when Judah refused to repent. Instead, she gave her allegiance to the pagan fertility gods of the Baal religion; she denied justice to the poor and oppressed; her prophets and priests were corrupt, seeking only wealth and approval for themselves; her covenant obligations were totally forgotten -- all failings that could be duplicated in our present society. Indeed, Jeremiah tells us in the following chapter 5 that he searched Jerusalem for one righteous person and found none, among either the poor or the rich. And in his famous temple sermon in chapter 7, the prophet proclaims that the people thought their worship in the temple of the Lord was simply a hiding place ("a den of robbers") from the consequences of their sin (Jeremiah 7:8-11).
Our passage therefore sets forth two scenarios of God's judgment upon his faithless people. First, God's punishment is likened to the hot desert sirocco that blew into Judah to wither and dry up everything before it. Secondly, however, Jeremiah envisions an absolute judgment in which God reverses his very act of creation of the world.
Verses 23-28 deliberately parallel Genesis 1 and 2. The prophet sees the universe returned to chaos and void, as it was before God's creation of it (Genesis 1:2). The light is taken away (Genesis 1:3), the mountains and hills quake in the chaotic waters (cf. Psalm 46:2-3) and fall, birds and beasts and human beings disappear, and there is nothing left but the bare desert that can support no life (Genesis 2:4-5). In short, God takes back his creation. He is "sorry that he made man on the earth" (Genesis 6:6). And so earth and humankind are destroyed in God's last apocalyptic judgment.
Our fear is that a nuclear attack will destroy the universe. Perhaps our proper fear is that God, in his judgment on us, will bring it to an end. God made the world in the beginning. He determines its destiny. And he is quite capable of doing away with that which he has made. As Karl Barth once wrote, "The miracle is not that there is a God. The miracle is that there is a world" -- that God decided to create us in the first place and that he has put up with us and our evil as long as he has.
The call for our repentance in the gospel lesson, with its promise of God's mercy, is therefore our only hope of salvation.
Lutheran Option, Exodus 32:7-14
This text forms a vivid account of our sin. Israel is at Mount Sinai. She has entered into covenant with her God (Exodus 24:1-11), and she has twice vowed, "All that the Lord has spoken we will do" (Exodus 19:8; 24:3). In short, she has promised that her life will be ordered according to the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17), that she will have no other God besides the Lord. But at the very mount of covenant, almost immediately after she has pledged her heart and her life to her God, she falls into sin and makes for herself a golden calf to worship.
Is that not the way with us also? That we partake of the Lord's Supper, in which we vow our sole trust and obedience to our Lord Jesus, and then before we even get out of the church, we violate his commandments -- gossiping about a neighbor, looking down on some poor soul, seeking our own status, turning our hearts and thoughts to the day's occupations with no thought of our God. Indeed, we leave the church, and it becomes business as usual, the daily preoccupation of seeking our own security and importance. And so we think to save our lives and, in Jesus' words, we will lose them instead.
The Israelites in our text have some remnant of piety. They know that it is the Lord who redeemed them from slavery. They know that forever after, the one true God is to be identified by that act. "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage" (Exodus 20:1), just as we know that it is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who redeemed us from our bondage to sin and death. And so the Israelites have to claim that the idol they have made is the one who redeemed them (v. 8). And so often we attribute to Christianity some idol we have constructed for ourselves.
But there is one God alone who redeemed Israel and us from our slavery. And when we attribute that act to other gods, we violate our covenant with the Lord. God therefore is about to destroy Israel at the foot of Mount Sinai, just as he may destroy us.
Moses therefore fulfills the prophetic function of interceding for his sinful people, reminding God of his promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Moses is the intercessor who turns aside God's judgment on his sinful people.
We can thank a merciful God that we too have a mediator, who interceded for us on the cross. "Father, forgive them for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). By his pleading for us, and by his sinless death, Jesus Christ turned aside the judgment of God on us that we, like faithless Israel, so richly deserve. And indeed, writes Paul, the risen and ascended Christ continues to intercede on our behalf before the Father (Romans 8:34). But it is all for the sake of enabling us to repent and to return in trust and obedience to the one true God, so that we walk in newness of life and in the joy and peace and salvation with the Father that he so much desires for us.
