L.D. 4, Exodus 34:1-9, 29-35 "Compassionately Serious" Scott Hoezee

In recent years a number of books have been published that attempt to do something that probably no one would have dared to try a couple of generations ago: namely, write biographies about God. Several of these, including Jack Miles' book, God: A Biography, treat God as a literary character in the Bible who develops, grows, matures, and changes over time every bit as much as any human person you find in Scripture. Although I have not read most of these books, a brief survey of them reveals that the impetus for such projects lies not so much in the New Testament as in the Old Testament. It is the Hebrew God of Israel that intrigues those who want to treat the Almighty as a biographical subject.

Probably this unsettles many of us, but if we can briefly set aside our discomfort, maybe we can admit that there are aspects of the Old Testament that are quite curious where the nature of God is concerned. This is, of course a very ancient problem in church history. One of the earliest heresies condemned by the church was the teaching of a man named Marcion. Marcion could not reconcile the God of grace and love whom we meet through Jesus in the New Testament with the God of anger and punishment whom we meet in places like the Book of Exodus. Marcion saw the differences between the two Testaments as so great that his solution was to posit two different gods. The gracious God whom Jesus called Father must be a different God altogether from the law-giving and sin-punishing God whom the Israelites called Yahweh. Two different Testaments, two different Gods.

Marcion simply could not combine justice and mercy. But by rejecting Marcionism, the church has been on record for two millennia that not only can we combine justice and grace in one God, we must do this. Again, however, we can acknowledge the biblical material that gave Marcion fits. It's some of the same material that provides fodder for contemporary writers who claim that the reason the God Jesus calls Father is so gracious by the time you get to the New Testament is because this God grew up and became more mature in the course of the Old Testament.

For instance, some of us may know an older person who was a bit of a hot-head when he was younger. He had precious little patience with his kids and was known to bite people's heads off if the least little thing annoyed him. But over the years he mellowed, matured, graduated perhaps from the school of hard knocks. And so now he is quiet and patient. Bill Cosby jokes about this in his own parents. When Cosby was a kid and asked his Dad for a quarter, his did not usually get the 25 cents but what he got instead was a lecture about how when his father was a boy, why, they had nothing and certainly no money for candy! They walked six miles to school (uphill both ways), wore each other's underwear, and ate mushy hash seven days a week. But years later, Cosby said, whenever his own kids went to visit grandpa, the first thing he'd say would be, "There's my precious little grandkids! Lookee here, grandpa's got a dollar for each of you!" What happened!? Well, if you see something like that, the conclusion everyone draws is that this person changed over the years.

Some today want to make the same claim for God--God changes over the course of Scripture. But that cuts against the grain of our belief that God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Of course, we do allow some changes to occur in God. For instance, the Son of God had not eternally been a human named Jesus but became human at a certain point. That was a change for God, a new experience, if you will. We also believe that because of what happened to Jesus on the cross, God tasted death for us in a way that had never before happened. But saying that is different from saying that the heart of God had to grow up so that he would change from being short-tempered to eternally patient.

In fact, Christian theology has long rejected the teaching captured in the German phrase "die Umstimmung Gottes," which means "God's change of attitude." Most orthodox theologians try to make abundantly clear that the cross of Jesus did not appease a fire-breathing angry God. God did not become loving on account of Jesus' sacrifice but rather it was precisely the eternal love of God that sent Jesus to this world in the first place. Sin was paid for, atonement was made, what had been wrong was set to right again through Jesus, but God himself was as loving after Jesus died as he had been before.

In Lord's Day 4 the Catechism strikes a balance between justice and mercy. Today's three Questions and Answers are the last ones in the section on "Misery" and so set up the next section on "Deliverance." The Catechism will spend a long time detailing how God gets us out of the miserable situation in which our sin landed us. But to heighten the drama, the authors of the Catechism make clear that our salvation looks all the more glorious once you squarely face what we would otherwise have coming to us.

If there was one thing the Reformation wanted to make clear it is that God is gracious and loving. Salvation by grace alone through faith alone was perhaps the single most ringing cry of Martin Luther and John Calvin. But the danger is that an emphasis on grace could make God appear to be just some cosmic big old softy. After all, most of us know that there is a very big difference between saying, "I forgive you for that terrible thing you did to me" as opposed to saying, "Ah, it's no big deal. Just forget about it."

Real forgiveness involves a lot of heavy lifting and hard work because wherever genuine forgiveness is needed, the reason is because real pain is involved. But if someone comes to me to apologize for something that was to my mind so trivial I actually had forgotten about it, then the penitent person might feel lucky or relieved but he won't feel the same joy that comes when you are forgiven for something that was a big deal to begin with. What's more, I won't feel like I accomplished anything terribly moral if I say, "Forget about it, it was no biggee." The stakes just weren't high enough to generate much moral wattage. But forgiving a crime against you is the moral equivalent of launching a rocket into orbit: it takes a lot of lift and tons of explosive fuel to do it. Shrugging something off that was no big deal is the moral equivalent of brushing lint off your jacket: it takes no effort at all.

So before giving us Jesus, full of grace and truth, the Catechism wants to raise the stakes and make clear that without some titanic outside help, the corruption and guilt of sin that we talked about last week would leave us eternally in trouble. Sin is a very big deal indeed! But conveying that requires a balancing act between God's justice and God's mercy. Few biblical passages illustrate that combination better than Exodus 34. But in this passage we may also spy something that will give us an unprecedented peek into the divine heart, telling us something about God that is quite lyric to know.

First of all, let's recall that the setting for Exodus 34 is the immediate aftermath of one of Israel's most glaring failures: worshiping the Golden Calf. As we saw in our recent series on Exodus, there are multiple layers of both absurdity and tragedy in that incident. Granted, Moses had been up on Mount Sinai for nearly six weeks. But for goodness sake, the smoke of God's presence and the flashes of divine lightning were still visible when the people told Aaron, "Moses must not be coming back so let's make a new god!"

As you know, Aaron complied with sickening swiftness. But the problem with a god you make with your own hands is that it will not challenge you. Have you ever noticed that? When people worship something other than the God of the Bible, this God is always so tolerant. When we make our own gods, they tend to turn out to be very friendly to how we think already anyway.

So not long after Aaron sculpted a golden calf, we are told that a kind of drunken orgy broke out. And that's another funny thing about false gods: the first commandment of most false gods seems to be, "Thou shalt party!" And party is just what the people did until the sound of their whooping and drunken laughter wafted clear up to Moses' ears and Yahweh's ears. Yahweh got so mad at what he termed "this stiff-necked people" that he threatened to wipe out every last one of them and just start over with Moses. Moses convinced God not to do that but he then got so mad he took the tablets containing the Ten Commandments and smashed them into a thousand pieces. It was all very ugly and angry.

But now in Exodus 34 the smoke has cleared, the dust has settled, and so Yahweh and Moses start all over with, literally, a clean slate. New tablets are chiseled, and God gives his law all over again. But not before the incredible lines we read in verses 6-7. God passes in front of Moses and says his holier than holy name, not once but twice, adding emphasis and letting us know that whatever God says next, it is going to be a decisive revelation of who God fundamentally is. "Yahweh, Yahweh, the compassionate One, the gracious One, the abundantly forgiving One, the One brimming with lovingkindness."

That last word, translated as "abounding love" is my all-time favorite Hebrew word chesed. As I've said to you more times than anyone would care to count, this word is the Old Testament equivalent of "grace" in the New Testament. It is also the central trait that the Israelites celebrated in God over and over and over. And in Exodus 34, because the name of Yahweh is thundered twice in a row, we see here the definitive declaration of God's most basic nature. Despite all the bluster and divine fury and punishment that had just happened in the wake of Israel's wanton idolatry, even still the very first thing God wants to make clear to Moses is that despite what had just happened, it is grace that will always set the tone of the divine heart.

But what makes that grace, that lovingkindness of God, truly luminous is precisely the fact that grace is not the same thing as moral laxity or softness. God does not and cannot merely shrug off the sin that marred his creation. If redemption and forgiveness come, then they come the hard way via a God who has done the cosmically difficult thing of looking everything that wounds him square in the face and still finding the ability to blot it out.

If God says he forgives you, it is never because to God it was no big deal anyway. No, grace is strong precisely because it co-exists with justice. Grace is lyrically beautiful exactly insofar as grace comes into play in just those places where something so serious has happened that a holy God recoils in horror. But if, despite your sin, you see on God's face a look of love and not horror, it's because God has done something miraculous: he has forgiven that which is at complete odds with his nature as a perfect divine Being.

That's what Moses saw. That's why in verse 9 he dares to speak the exact same phrase that two chapters earlier Yahweh had uttered: "a stiff-necked people." In chapter 32, Yahweh used that line as the reason why he was going to kill of the whole lot of Israel. But now in Exodus 34 Moses is able to call the people stiff-necked but he doesn't worry it will inflame Yahweh all over again. He's seen the lovingkindess of God up close and personal now and so he knows the truth of what we saw Paul write last Sunday morning in Romans 5: where sin abounds, grace hyper-abounds all the more!

It is finally no wonder that when Moses came down from the mountain this second time, his own face was glowing. It was the reflection of grace that the people saw. It actually frightened them at first. Grace can be a bit scary. We don't always realize that, but before grace is so beautiful as to make you weep, grace confronts you with your need for some serious forgiveness. Grace is fierce and it is strong and it penetrates right to the heart of each one of us. So if you end up finding that you want that grace, it is only because you know that right behind the grace is a galactic justice that would wipe you out were it not for the compassion of God that always rises to the top of the divine heart. If you receive God's forgiveness as it finally comes through Jesus, you are not only eternally grateful and joyful, you are mighty relieved, too. Because when you look into God's eyes, you see flickers of both his grand mercy but also of his uncompromising justice.

Many people have a hard time combining law and grace, threats to punish and promises of mercy. But that is a misunderstanding of the grace Jesus displays in the New Testament. If you can see that grace the way Moses saw it on the mountainside, maybe you'll realize that not only can we combine justice and mercy in God, we must combine them or else the grace we hold so dear is reduced to sentimentality or moral mushiness.

In her book Speaking of Sin, Barbara Brown Taylor has a chapter that bears the rather startling title, "Sin Is Our Only Hope." It seems an oddly perverse title and yet Brown Taylor makes a good point. After all, if we look around us in life, we see so much that is painful. We see children abused and spouses cheated on. We see corporate greed and wanton pollution of God's beautiful earth. We see people who have fried their brains with cocaine and drunk drivers who run down children playing hopscotch on a sidewalk. We see suicide bombings that reduce precious human bodies, the very temple of God's Spirit, to so many severed limbs and organs.

If there is no such thing as sin--and what's more, if there is no God who can declare a definitive judgment on what is sinful--then there is no hope that anything can be salvaged. Sin is our only hope because if sin exists, then so does sin's opposite: namely, a moral goodness to which God can restore us. But if there is no sin, then there is nothing to hope for because there never was any better world from which we fell away in the first place. If there was once what John Milton called a "paradise lost," then there is the possibility that a gracious God can make possible a "paradise regained." But if there is no sin, there is no paradise to restore because life turns out to be just a booming, buzzing confusion with no right, no wrong, and no God to tell the difference.

Lord's Day 4 of the Catechism seems a bit harsh. "But isn't God also merciful?" Q&A 11 somewhat plaintively asks. The answer acknowledges that "God is certainly merciful" but then immediately goes on and on about his justice and his punishments. It seems a bit off-putting until you realize that if God cannot punish what he judges as sinful, then there is also no such thing as mercy. A wife who casually waves off her husband's multiple adulteries isn't merciful but soft in the head.

If you refuse to or simply are unable to feel the sting, the pain, and the anger that sin causes, you have nothing to be merciful about. Thankfully we serve a God who is utterly serious, gravely serious, about sin and evil and all that plagues this world and our lives in it. It is out of that seriousness that his abounding compassion and grace flow. Someday we will encounter this God face to face but all of us who love and serve him through Christ Jesus our Savior and Lord will emerge from that fiercely holy encounter with faces that will shine. The radiance of grace will make us shine like the sun in our Father's kingdom. Thanks be to God that he is so compassionately serious about our lives. Amen.