In my commentaries so far, like most people, I skipped over the breaking of the Ten Commandments. God wrote them on stone for perpetuity. They were never to be broken, neither literally nor spiritually.
God had forgiven the Israelites for their sins. Moses went up onto the mountain to find God and grace for his people. When God “repented” (Exod 32:12) on their behalf (that is grace), then Moses and Joshua came back down the mountain.
Now consider for a moment their anticipation: they would have thought, The Israelites have sinned in about every way that anyone can sin; they did nothing to deserve it, but God repented on their behalf. We can hardly wait to tell them the good news!
God repented for them since they were too stiff-necked to do so themselves. During the exodus was the first time that repentance is mentioned in scripture. It was the Israelites who were to repent, but God knew that it would not be for sin but for fleeing from Pharoah (Exod 13:17). Essentially, their hearts were so hardened that they would repent from the salvation that God had wrought with the parting of the Red Sea.
The countenance of Moses was exuberant, but he did not shine as he would with the second set of commandments (Exod 34:29:35). God did not glow within Moses because only God knew what Moses and Joshua would see. Just what did they encounter when they came down from the mountain?
Singing. That seems to be okay. After all, singing to God is a way to praise Him. But they were singing to themselves and the grandeur of the golden calf that had been engraved by them.
They saw dancing. Dancing is okay is it not? It is okay when dancing to the Lord God as David did when he was communing with the Lord. (2 Sam 6:14-22). So, dancing can be good, and it can be for evil; it is for whom they danced that matter. Even without a golden calf, they would have been dancing for pleasure as God was forgetting their sins.
Aaron told Moses as Joshua was the witness: “Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief” (Exod 32:22). Aaron was worried about what Moses would think; not about what God would think! Moses was the “lord” to them and not God.
Moses had not witnessed the original sin; in the absence of Moses and Joshua, they had told Aaron, “Make us gods” (Exod 32:23). The golden calf would be their idol to themselves. The gods they sought were themselves. Then Aaron engraved for them an image at the same time the Lord God on the Holy Mountain was engraving the tablets of stone.
Imagine the horror of Moses. He had just seen God engrave His Will on two tablets, one tablet for Himself and one tablet for the people, while below Aaron was engraving a golden calf in honor of Apis, the Egyptian cow God. No wonder the sacrifice would include a bullock (cow)!
The Israelites had sacrificed their gold to make a lifeless god. Although, the root of all evil is money (1 Tim 6:10); they valued themselves more than money. They paid a high price for their pagan “concert” and gave it little thought so long as they could party — party all the while that God was repenting for them. God was not only “forgetting” their immorality all the while knowing their immorality but knowing that they had not repented themselves.
Aaron had said to them, “tomorrow is a feast to the lord” (Exod 32:5). The translators capitalized it, meaning for the LORD GOD. However, was it for their new “lord” — the image they had made? Where has that been seen before? When Eve as much as worshiped the “Image” (translated “Serpent”) by doing the will of Lucifer, she made the Image her new lord (Gen 4:1).
God knew their sin. They credited themselves and the lifeless calf for doing what God Himself had done. For them, it was not God that had parted the waters, but Apis did so to destroy Pharoah who was a god in himself. It was a war between god Apis and god Pharoah and Apis won out. To them, the Lord God had nothing to do with it.
All that they did was sinful. Moses even saw them naked, and it was Aaron who beguiled them to nakedness (Exod 32:25). Aaron, as it turned out listened to their guile, and he was beguiled, just as Adam had listened to Eve.
Moses saw essentially the same decadence as in the days of Noah. In the Book of Enoch, those days were described as much like the Woodstock concert of the 1960s; the people were having a naked rock concert with “heavy metal,” hard liquor, nudity, and coupling, not in Holy Matrimony but sexual intercourse. Certainly, Moses saw what Noah had seen long before. He saw what Abraham saw in Sodom and Gomorrah. Nowadays, that is what is seen nearly every moment of the day, and like the Israelites, no matter what the Law says, it is still okay for sinners to do their own will.
Moses was expecting to see a repented people, but he saw arrogant people with another god in God’s face. To that time, God had not revealed His face to anyone. Literally, the First Commandment was to have no other gods in God’s Face. The Israelites had demanded that their god have a face, and Aaron complied.
Aaron actually gave the miraculous power to the golden calf when he told Moses that he had only said, “’Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off.” So, they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.” (Exod 32:24). Aaron gave Apis the calf the power that only God has — the power to create beings. But this “god” did not give life, but only form. The real God gave form and endowed it with life (Gen 2:7).
In some manner, Moses and Joshua saw all the metrics of the “two tables of the testimony” (Exod 32:15) before they were even presented to the people. As He wrote the testimonies, God was witnessing what His people were doing. The people were actually writing their own laws by breaking them, and the “Finger of God” was the “Scribe” who was only recording the will of the people and judging it wrong as it occurred.
“Because the law worketh wrath; for where there is no law, there is no transgression” (Rom 4:15). The Israelites were dictating the need for the Law as they transgressed. In some manner, they broke all the Laws that God had just written, knowing exactly what they were doing down when they thought that with Moses gone, the Lord God was not present. They replaced Moses as “god” with Apis. Moses was horrified, maybe not so much that God was diminished but that He was. Joshua, on the other hand seemed not to be surprised.
Because the people had broken all the commandments, Moses
literally broke them all as is written:
16 And the tables were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, graven upon the tables. 17 And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said unto Moses, “There is a noise of war in the camp.” 18 And he said, “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.” 19 And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses' anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. (Exod 32:16-19)
The tables were the work of God; not Moses. They were not Mosaic Law, but the Law of God of which Paul spoke (Rom 7:25). The “Law of the Flesh” was more in all the regulations that Moses wrote with his hand.
God demonstrated to Christians and to Jews that Moses is not “God,” and the Law is not for Moses to write. Moses had not seen what sins they were doing below, but God had. The Tablets of Testimony were not Mosaic Law that the pharisees enforced, but the statutes that people are to self-enforce, not for salvation but in gratitude for God repenting of their sins for them.
They were not so much “commandments,” but it is written “tables of testimony” throughout scripture and specifically in chapter 32.
Testimony in the Hebrew is “‘eduwth” – what God “witnessed” (Strong’s Dictionary). God wrote what He was seeing and was judging it the same time. Compare that to legal judicial proceedings: God witnessed the crimes against Him and testified against the Israelites what He was seeing. Rather than writing what He saw, He wrote what He wished not to see!
While He was writing, the term “repent” is used. He wrote against what He was seeing and was able to repent (forget) what He was writing. He erased sin from His memory but left it for a testimony so that people will never forget… and it was on stone so that it would endure to the end. It was even kept, after a rewriting, in the Ark of the Covenant. It was written in the same words the second time without revision.
God did not cut any slack when the Law was written on stone the second time. He remembered long enough to write them again even without revision, then they were put in the “vault” out of His view from the Mercy Seat.
As such, people are to remember them but not to dot every ‘i” and cross every “t.” God already did that but because He wrote it Himself.
The Man who wrote it said this about it: “For verily I say unto you, “Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled” (Mat 5:18). A jot is the Greek letter iota. Not one letter of the Law will be passed over. A tittle is keraia, or point. There are ten points to the Law and they all shall prevail until the Omega (ending).
Without sin, God would not have witnessed anything, and the tablets would have been blank. He saw the Israelites break all ten Laws, so He wrote them down because of what He was seeing. The people testified against themselves and in any court of law, they would be deemed guilty.
The Law was for the people to recognize their guilt and without sin there would be no law. “For until the law sin was in the world: but sin is not imputed when there is no law” (Rom 5:13). God was saying, I saw what you did last summer, just like in the movie of the same name. He wrote it down for posterity but erased their sins that day from memory. But they remembered what they did that summer, and the Law is a reminder that we are not gods, and neither are things.
Ironically, or was it significant, Joshua witnessed the testimony of God that was written on those tables of stone. Joshua, like Jesus long after, is the Name of God. Joshua was the proxy for his namesake, and his signature is there invisibly: “Thou shalt not take the Name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain” (Exod 20:7).
The testimony of God was witnessed by the name of “Jesus.” What Joshua witnessed was the Will of God, and that is not to be taken lightly.
They had broken all the Laws, so by grace, Moses broke them all literally. Then he would return to the Holy Mountain and get reprieve for them a second time.
God continues to this day granting reprieve after reprieve because we just cannot diminish ourselves as gods. He will keep overlooking the Law and putting it out of mind until after the heaven and the Earth pass away, and then the tablets and what is written on them can pass away with the heaven and Earth. No laws are needed in heaven; they are only for the world to follow Him to the heavens.
By the way, Joshua (the proxy for Jesus) witnessed the will of God and Jesus Himself would execute it when He provided the inheritance to those who do the Will of God.
(picture credit: legalzoom.com)
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