Vol. 11 — No. 12 March 22, 1970
Exodus 32:31-32; Deuteronomy 18:15
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. Exodus 32:31-32
I will raise them up a Prophet from among their brethren, like unto thee, and will put my words in his mouth; and he shall speak unto them all that I shall command him. Deuteronomy 18:15
In Christ Jesus, our Intercessor and Prophet, Fellow Redeemed:
When we come to Moses, we come to God’s great hand-picked leader of His Old Testament people. The life of Moses was long and was filled with many and varied labors. The double text chosen for this meditation reveals Moses in two roles. Both of them reveal—
Our text from Exodus reveals Moses—
God did not deal with Israel directly. He dealt with them through His chosen leader, Moses. God never spoke to Israel directly. He gave His message to Moses who in turn proclaimed the word and will of the Lord to the people. In brief Moses was the mediator between God and His people. In that position we find Moses also acting as intercessor, as one who pleads for the people when they stood in desperate need of such pleading.
What made the intercession recorded in this text necessary? You will recall that God had summoned Moses up to Mt. Sinai in order to give to him the two tables of testimony, the two tables of stone, written with the finger of God. Moses was up on the mount for forty days and forty nights. The people grew weary of waiting for him to return. And so they began to put the pressure on Aaron, Moses’ brother, to make them some gods which should go before them, because they said they didn’t know what had become of this man Moses. Aaron was a coward. He yielded to the people, requested them to bring all their golden earrings, put all this jewelry in fire, and fashioned from it a molten calf after the manner of the Egyptians. And when the people saw this golden calf, they proclaimed: “These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.” And the people ate and drank and rose up to play, celebrating the birth of their new gods. Moses was on the mount. He didn’t know what was going on in the camp. But there was someone else up on that mount who did know what was going on. And that was the Lord God. His wrath waxed hot against the people, and He was determined to consume His people and make out of Moses a great nation. Then we read that Moses besought the Lord his God. Moses pleaded for the people. He intereceded for them. He reminded the Lord of His promises made centuries before to Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. “And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.” Then Moses went down into the camp, burned the golden calf with fire, ground it to powder, and made the people drink their own god with their water, thereby revealing unto them the utter folly and helplessness of their god and the guilt and punishment which all of them deserved. The Lord did punish the people through Moses. When this sad chapter in their history was over, Moses returned unto the mount and continued pleading and intereceding for the people, saying, “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.” So sincere and so earnest was Moses in his intercession for the people that he was willing to place his eternal salvation in the balance. If the Lord refused to forgive the people, he would rather share their lot in eternal damnation. And the Lord was moved by the intercession of Moses. He promised to send His Angel before Moses and the people to lead and guide them. That Angel was not a created angel as Gabriel and Michael and the other hosts of angels. That was The Angel of the Lord, the second Person of the Holy Trinity, our Lord Jesus Christ, the one Mediator between God and man, who is even at the right hand of God and maketh intercession for us.
Moses interceded for the people. So the Lord Jesus, our High Priest after the order of Melchisedek, intercedes for us. We see Him so engaged in the passion story. Think of that portion in the passion story when Jesus was walking and talking with His disciples on the way from the upper chamber to the Garden of Gethsemane. St. Luke reports this part of the conversation when Jesus said, “Simon, Simon, behold, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not.” Peter was the most self-confident and bold of all the disciples in his declarations of faithfulness unto death and willingness to die with Jesus. The Lord warned Peter. He revealed that Satan had requested to have Peter, to put him under special temptation, as once he had asked and received permission to tempt Job. He wanted to sift Peter as wheat. That picture brings to mind the modern threshing machine with its violently vibrating sieves to shake the kernels of wheat free from the straw and chaff. So Peter would be shaken violently that night. The point of comparison is the violence of the temptation. Jesus knew that Peter would fail to watch and pray and that he would disobey and walk into danger in the high priest’s court instead of avoiding temptation. And so Jesus prayed especially for Peter that his faith wouldn’t fail. Jesus interceded for Peter with His Heavenly Father. And that the Lord Jesus is still doing for us. He is even now at the right hand of power and is making intercession for us. Possibly in the world to come we will know how often we were rescued from sin and shame and unbelief because our Savior interceded for us. Temptations will come our way from within and without. The flesh will tempt us to give way to it and become drunkards, fornicators and adulterers, cheaters and deceivers. The temptation will come to deny our faith, our Lord and His Word, for earthly advantage and gain. The temptation will come to side track and ignore some Word of God that seems unreasonable to us or that conflicts with our own way of looking at things. There is comfort for us in the knowledge that our Savior maketh intercession for us. He prays that our faith fail not. His prayer for us has great influence before the throne of grace.
On the cross we hear another intercession of our Lord. Imnrediately after He had been crucified, while the sting of the nail wounds in His hands and feet were still pounding His nervous system before numbness set in, while the disgrace of hanging between two malefactors was still fresh, Jesus spoke His first word from the cross—those precious words: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” In the midst of pain and anguish such as we would wish on no one, the Lord Jesus thought not of Himself and His own anguish and pain and torment. He thought rather was for the souls of them who had nailed Him to the cursed tree of the cross. He prayed that His Father would forgive them. We could have expected curses from the lips of Jesus. We could have expected that the Father would have destroyed those who crucified His Son. In our text from Exodus we found the Father determined to destroy His people, the nation of the Jews, because they rejected Him as their God and His promised Son as their Savior and worshipped instead a golden calf. But then Moses lifted up his voice, pleading and interceding for the people. Here on Calvary’s cross we see that scene repeated. The same nation of the Jews was directly responsible. They were again lifting up their voices in the rejection of their God who had sent His Son to be their Savior. We can well imagine that the wrath of the Father was fanned into new fury and anger at that scene, that it increased with each blow of the hammer that drove in the nails—but then there came that cry from the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” And the Father’s wrath was contained.
Do you realize, friend, that that prayer was also prayed for you and me. You and I weren’t there, but our sin and guilt were there. Those Roman soldiers only acted under orders. Your sins and mine gave the orders. We made that scene necessary. While we were weak and without strength, sinful and ungodly, Christ died for us. Before we were born, Christ prayed for us: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” Were it not for that prayer on Calvary’s cross you and I would not be numbered among His own, accepting in faith the forgiveness that our Lord prayed for us. Oh, give thanks unto the Lord for prayings “Father, forgive them.”
Jesus prayed; He also preached. Moses prayed; he also preached. And so we see in Moses a type of Christ—
Our text is an excellent example of Moses’ preaching. When we think of Moses as a preacher, we think of him chiefly as a preacher of the law. And it is true that Moses was the mediator of the old covenant, which was characterized by law. It was the duty of Moses to proclaim unto the people the law of God as he received it from the Lord God Himself on Mt. Sinai. But Moses had something else to proclaim. He also was privileged to proclaim the Gospel of the coming Savior and Messiah. He was permitted to direct the eyes of faith of his people to that Coming One. In our text he does that very thing when he says: “The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a Prophet from the midst of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken.” Moses himself knew and believed that all the laws and regulations that he was proclaiming were not God’s final word. He knew that something was coming in the future that would replace all that law that he proclaimed. And so he directed his people to that great coming Prophet, who would arise from the midst of Israel according to the flesh. Unto him shall ye hearken, says Moses. That same directive of Moses was repeated by the Lord God Himself on the Mount of the Transfiguration when He cried out: “Hear ye Him!” It is the tragedy of the Jewish nation that when their great Prophet did come, they refused to hearken unto Him and to hear. Nonetheless the Lord Jesus Christ, the great Prophet of Israel of whom Moses spoke, continued to preach and proclaim the Word of the Lord unto His people. We hear Him in the passion story.
Think of the word that Jesus spoke to Peter when at the entrance of the Garden of Gethsemane Peter drew His sword in order to defend the Lord Jesus by force, Jesus disavowed Peter’s use of force, saying: “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword.” There is an everlasting word of instruction in those words for the Church of Christ, Jesus Himself tells us that we are not to use force in the Kingdom of God. Our only force and power and strength is the convicting and convincing power of God’s holy law and His precious Gospel. If the law and the Gospel cannot move men’s hearts, then nothing else can. Let us learn to judge trends in the church of our day according to this standard. Most churches have abandoned the power of the Word for the power of demonstrating, political action, and economic sanctions. Thus the churches of today are making themselves guilty of the sin of Peter. They bring down upon themselves the Lord’s rebuke. We don’t force our parents to send their children to Sunday School. We don’t use force to get our members to attend worship services, attend holy communion, contribute to the sup port of missions and the home church. We seek rather to move the hearts of our people through the Word of God so that they will want to do what is right and pleasing in the sight of the Lord. That’s a slow and often a discouraging way of doing things, but it’s the way the Lord would have us do His work.
We think of another preaching of our Prophet during His passion—His last preaching to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, As Jesus was led to Calvary’s hill, we read that a great company of people, and of women followed after him. They had seen and witnessed the injustice of Jesus’ trial before Pilate. They knew of all the good that He had done for His people. And so they sympathized with Jesus. They were sad and tearful because such a good and noble and just man had to suffer and die so unjustly. For these people Jesus had one last sermon. He turned and said unto them, “Daughters of Jerusalem, weep not for me, but weep for your selves and your children.” Those words are also a preaching for you and me. All too frequently the season of Lent is characterized by outward grief and mourning, by sympathy for this man, Jesus, who suffered so bitterly. All too frequently preachers labor and belabor themselves in order to evoke feelings of sympathy for the sorrowful Christ. But Jesus wants no such tears of sympathy. He says to us: “Weep for yourselves and your children.” He bids us weep tears of penitence and repentance. He bids us think of our sins and guilt which caused and made necessary His passion. No one was ever saved by weeping the sympathetic tear for Jesus. But only those who weap in sorrow and grief, who see themselves as the ones who caused this so great suffering, who look for forgiveness and help and salvation from Him who walked thus alone—only those will receive the blessing of His passion. May God grant that we, whenever we mediate upon His passion, be not filled with outward remorse and sympathy but rather with heartfelt penitence and tears over our own sins and with a great and firm faith in Him who alone can and has removed our sins. Amen.
Ministry by Mail is a weekly publication of the Church of the Lutheran Confession. Sermon archives, and subscription and staff information may be found online at www.clclutheran.org/ministrybymail. Audio Sermons are available at: podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ministrybymail
All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the King James Version.