Exodus 32 • Golden Warning

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(This transcript was prepared using software tools and has not been reviewed for complete accuracy.)

Let me ask that you would look in your Bibles now as we continue our journey of unlimited grace in Exodus 32, a passage whose central theme you'll recognize, the golden calf.



 But when you get into the details, you will not like this chapter.



 There's a reason.



 It is meant to repulse us so that we will repent of where it might take us.



 Genesis, Exodus, excuse me, Exodus 32, I'll ask that you stay seated. We'll read a large portion.



 Verse 1 of Exodus 32, "When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, "Up, make us gods who shall go before us." As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.



 So Aaron said to them, "Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, your daughters, and bring them to me."



 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron and he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf.



 And they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, "Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord."



 And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings, and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.



 And the Lord said to Moses, "Go down, for your people whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt." And the Lord said to Moses, "I have seen this people and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. And therefore let me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them, that I may consume them in order that I may make a great nation of you."



 But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, "O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand?



 Why should the Egyptians say with evil intent did he bring them out to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth?



 Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self and said to them, "I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven in all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring and they shall inherit it forever."



 And the Lord relented from the disaster that He had spoken of bringing on His people. Go to verse 19, "And as soon as He that is Moses came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses' anger burned hot.



 And he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain.



 He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it.



 And Moses said to Aaron, "What did this people do to you that you have brought them such a great sin upon them?"



 And Aaron said, "Let not the anger of my Lord burn hot. You know the people that they are set on evil. For they said to me, "Make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him."



 So I said to them, "Let any who have gold take it off." So they gave it to me and I threw it into the fire and out came this calf.



 And when Moses saw that the people had broken loose, for Aaron had let them break loose to the derision of their enemies, then Moses stood in the gate of the camp and said, "Who is on the Lord's side? Come to me." And all the sons of Levi gathered around him and he said to them, "Thus says the Lord God of Israel, put your sword on your side, each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp and each of you kill."



 His brother and his companion and his neighbor and the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses and that day about 3,000 men of the people fell.



 And Moses said, "Today you have been ordained for the service of the Lord, each one at the cost of his son and his brother, so that he might bestow a blessing upon you this day."



 We'll end there for now.



 Heavenly Father, guide us in Your Word, for today we cannot with honesty but say it is hard.



 Open our hearts as You open our understanding so we would receive what You intend for our salvation and our cure of the evil that would truly hurt us. Grant Your blessing for Christ's sake in whose name we pray. Amen.



 If God sent you a Facebook friend request, how would you respond?



 That's the unlikely question of a new TV series this fall.



 Young man by the name of Miles receives a Facebook friend request from God and you would think, "Well, the answer's obvious. I've got to ask you to be his friend. The answer you should confirm."



 It's not easy for Miles.



 When he was 10, his mother got very ill, went to the hospital, got help.



 Miles's prayers were apparently answered.



 But then on the way home from the hospital, his mother is in an accident and is killed.



 And Miles genuinely questions, "Do I want to friend a God that allows that?"



 It's the question here.



 Yeah, we know the golden calf. We know that.



 We may forget that the Lord asked, "Who's on my side?"



 And then those who respond and say they're on the Lord's side are ordered to kill 3,000



 of their companions and their neighbors and their family.



 And if that's what God wants, you too might question, "Do I want to friend him?"



 This is a hard passage. Pray for me. Pray for those who listen to these broadcasts. This is a hard passage.



 Why would a God who redeems, allow such a passage and allow us such a questioning of his own character? What we're supposed to see, at least initially, is not so hard to understand. There is clear sin put before us and it's nature.



 After all, God has just a few chapters earlier, given the Ten Commandments. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make any graven image. And now here we are just a few days later and right in the backyard, the people are making their idol.



 God is still speaking to Moses up on the mountain. There are still the clouds and the fire and the thunder. And yet while that is happening, the people are making an idol to say, "This God that looks like the Egyptian gods is actually the God that brought us out of the land of bondage." It's not Moses, God. We don't know what's happened to him.



 It's not just that they are breaking the law of God. They are breaking the love of God.



 You remember last week we talked about God's instruction for the tabernacle.



 People make a contribution. Bring your gold and your silver.



 But only according to what your heart wants.



 Let gratitude be your guide. If you think that I have redeemed you, that I've given you manna every morning, water in the wilderness, deliverance from the Egyptians, safety from slavery, let your heart be your guide.



 And now here we are. And the people do bring their gold and they do make a contribution.



 But it's to another God.



 It's to another idol that they are claiming is the one who now has delivered them. What we're seeing is not just the sin of idolatry, but the heart of idolatry. Where does it actually come from? And in so many ways we are made to see that idolatry comes by walking according to sight rather than according to faith. The very first verse when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down the mountain, the people gathered themselves to Aaron and said, "Up, make us gods that shall go before us." As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what's become of him. We can't see God's representative anymore. Our senses don't confirm that God is at work and here and working through His people. And because we can't see something, we are no longer obligated to God.



 It's not a new message and it's not a message that does not continue to apply to us. For so much of the time our idolatry is not absent some faith in a distant God. But we are looking at a person or a ledger account or the approval of others and what we can sense and taste and see seems more important than the God that we can't see. And so we start to walk according to sight rather than according to faith.



 It can be easy to do even for faithful people. I sometimes read to you mission letters from my friends, Rene and Lonnie Kimbo, who serve in the impoverished and Muslim-dominated portions of the Philippines. As we as a nation are recuperating from a hurricane that came across the south, we should be able to understand a part of what happens when a people in the Philippines who live in bamboo and straw huts have a typhoon that comes and destroys entire cities and the worship center of Rene and Lonnie.



 He writes in his recent newsletter, "We encountered a mountain of problems in the person of a local government leader who opposed the rebuilding of our ministry center.



 We were insulted, bad-mouthed, given the runaround. We prayed until our throats hurt. We cried until there were no more tears. We plead with God to give us victory.



 Help us rebuild the center.



 But in time it became clear we would have to look for another place.



 Property became available.



 It's on an elevated area above the storm surge, just 20 meters from the seashore where 1,000 Muslim families are taking up residence in government-provided housing.



 That's where we were able to rebuild.



 Months later one of our members spoke in a meeting and she said, "When we were forced out I had doubts about the power of God. Is He really almighty? How come He lost to those who opposed our presence?"



 And then she said, "But now we can have a cross and we can sing as loud as we want and we are only a stone's throw from the harvest field of the Muslim families.



 We thought we had lost." And then she gestured to the ministry center, "And now we know what victory looks like."



 But it wasn't with their eyes first saw. They saw the destruction. They saw God apparently absent. They couldn't see His timing. They couldn't see His ways.



 It's always that way for us. We tend to evaluate God and His reality by what we can see or touch or calibrate or schedule.



 And to have faith that God may not be touched, His schedule may not be ours, His calendar may not be ours, His timing may not be ours. We may not see in the moment what He is doing and still He is the one to be trusted and anything else is idolatry, trusting in our senses rather than in our God.



 We're celebrating right now as an evangelical church across this nation the release of Andrew Brunson in Turkey.



 And yet you think of the years of captivity surely were not His choice, His family's choice, the church's choice, and yet the worldwide press gets some sense of what it means to live for the Savior, of not compromise for the sake of the Messiah.



 And yet even as He is released, our eyes and our prayers turn toward Asia Bibi, the mother of four jailed in Pakistan since 2010, who is now under a death sentence for saying Jesus is Lord.



 "Blasphemy," says the nation, "and we surely think, will she lose faith? Might we lose faith?" This isn't what my eyes want to see. This isn't what my ears want to hear, but we're not depending on our sight or our touch or the sound that we expect. We're saying, "God is at work, and I will trust Him even when He's not on my schedule or operating within my sight."



 Idolatry is walking by faith, and among other things that means not looking back.



 What is Israel doing? The people in verse 4, do you remember? They said, "These are your gods, O Israel, this calf out of the fire who brought you up out of the land of Egypt."



 We recognize just by our excavations what's happening, this golden calf looks like the bull gods of Egypt. As though the people are looking back to Egypt again saying, "That's where the power was. That's the good life. That's where Satan..." Back there somewhere.



 Even Stephen, remember the New Testament martyr when he is explaining to the Jews who are about to stone him what was the problem in this event.



 He said, "Our fathers looked back to Egypt for their salvation." The reminder of Jesus Himself saying to us, "No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is doing the work of the kingdom." And for us, a church who is celebrating its 150 year of God's blessing, you must recognize the temptation to idolatry to look back.



 Oh, I remember the good location.



 The better person, the better practices, the pattern when things really prospered. Listen, we celebrate the blessings of the past, but the mission is forward.



 And anything else is idolatry. We do not look back and say those were the good old days. Any church is doomed to failure when we begin to say the best days are behind us. We say the mission is ahead of us, and so we unite purpose and resources and faith for the present calling of God. That is what God calls us to do. And that means we are required to keep looking up.



 Not just not looking back, but say, "God, you must help us. We in gospel dependence must do what you call us to do, leaning upon you, asking your blessing, not our strength, not our resources. We keep looking to you." It is so amazing what verse 6 says if you look at it in context. The people rose up early the next day. They offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. Words that are in the original immersed in sexual connotation.



 Think of it. They are beneath the mountain.



 Moses is up there still with God.



 And it is described for us how God is now appearing to His people in smoke, in fire, in thunder, and lightning, so that even Moses will say to us God was in appearance as a devouring fire upon the mountain. But what the people will do is not look up. I'm just going to focus on what's down here. This calf and this person and this revelry, and I'm going to take my satisfaction, my hope, just from what I can see right here and right now and fail to look upward to see does God have a better plan, a better way, a more powerful character than what's here.



 Such idolatry is always available to us. I think without naming any person of those young and old who have identified with this church and are in this very moment engaged in immoral relationships.



 And for them in the moment, there is this sense of satisfaction. This is a better way. This is a better path. And you have to say, you're only looking at the moment and you're only looking down and you are not looking up to the God of eternity. Nor as the writer of Hebrews would say, the great cloud of witnesses that surround you. Those people, those families, for some that I'm talking about who have taken care of you, who have shown you solid marriages, who have shown you what it means to have someone committed to you, someone who would really satisfy you to their own sacrifice.



 And yet for this, this pottage, this brief satisfaction, you would satisfy future and hope and marital health. And God says, you look up at those that I provided you in this church with marriages of 20 and 30 and 40 and 50 and 60 years, they're all around you, saying to you, this is where the deepest satisfaction and the glory of enduring for Christ's sake actually lives. And not to believe that, to fail to look up at what God has saying to you, provided for you, showing you, is just idolatry. The idolatry of the moment that takes your heart away. And the great evidence of how this idolatry has captured people is the fact that they will not eye to eye anymore look to God.



 Do you remember in the confirmation hearings of Justice Kavanaugh, the very last senator to ask the questions in the judicial hearing was John Kennedy of Louisiana.



 And he said to Judge Kavanaugh, "Look me in the eye."



 Do you believe in God?



 I do.



 Did you do this thing?



 I did not.



 We know that that look in the eye means you be dead honest with me.



 At the risk of your own relationship with God, you be honest with me.



 But it is that honesty that is lacking when we see idolatry being described in this passage. People will not be honest with God. What happens? There is blame shifting. Verse 22, as Moses says to Aaron, "What did this people do to you?" And Aaron responds. Verse 22, "Let not the anger of my Lord burn hot." You know the people that they are set on evil.



 They made me do it.



 The word "set" there is a word that's laced with violence. They forced me.



 Who asked them to come and bring their gold?



 Aaron.



 But he's blaming other people. It's the blame shifting that's the form of idolatry. And it's not the old pattern.



 They made me do it. It's your fault that I have sinned.



 It is the chant of every abusive spouse.



 It's your nagging. It's your complaining. You made me do this.



 It is the excuse of every abusive parent.



 He wouldn't stop crying.



 You pushed me to it. You made me go beyond the limit. Your fault.



 It is the chant of every adulterous spouse.



 If you weren't so cold, if you weren't so insensitive, then I wouldn't have done it. It's your fault.



 And that, my friends, is the idolatry of shifting blame because we will not look our God in the eye and say, "God, be merciful to me, a sinner."



 I did this and I say it to you without hesitation, without any sort of insulation from the — I tell you, God, I did this.



 How hard that is to say is verse 24.



 So I, says Aaron, said to the people, "Let any who have gold take it off." So they gave it to me and I threw it in the fire and out came this calf.



 No verse 4 says, "He actually took the engraving tools to make the calf."



 It's a lie. That's not just blame shifting. It's source shifting.



 I'm not responsible. Something else just came.



 I can remember being with a young man in prison one time, a member of our church, who had put six shots into the heart of another man.



 The gun just went off.



 Pretty accurate gun.



 I hear others say, "The money was just there."



 I hear others say, "God just put him in my life.



 God just put her in my life."



 God's fault just happened.



 God, be merciful to me, a sinner.



 Repentance begins when we own the sin.



 Not somebody else's fault. "Lord, against you and you only, have I done this sin, this evil in your sight. I don't look for somebody to blame. I'm not trying to make excuses. I own it."



 And when we own it, we begin to have hope because we recognize God relents when there is repentance.



 But how hard it is to actually move to that point when our idolatry is saying, "I will trust this person, this thing, this provision," rather than God.



 And so in this passage that we struggle with so much, God not only describes the sin of idolatry and its source, but the consequences that come from it.



 Verse 20, the consequences that we struggle with, "Moses took the calf that they had made, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, and scattered on the water, and made the people of Israel drink it."



 Now, I must tell you, I don't know entirely what's happening there.



 But that idol that's supposed to give them satisfaction becomes mixed with ashes and drink and now it becomes grit in their teeth.



 It's the consistent image the prophets will use, Isaiah in chapter 44, to say idolatry is like eating ashes.



 You know? You fire time of year. And you know what it's like when you get that beautiful hot dog all golden and ready on the campfire and then you take a big bite and you find there were ashes on it.



 And you just can't get the grit out of your teeth.



 It was supposed to satisfy, but it just makes me miserable.



 The idolatry so evident in our age might be exemplified, that taste of idolatry, by Washington Post writer Sally Quinn.



 Really a guidepost for many to the social and sexual changes of the last three decades.



 She advocated so much, often at the expense of Bible-believing Christianity, often we were in her target sites.



 That she became living proof of that statement of G.K. Chesterton that when people cease to believe in God, it's not that they will believe in nothing, they will believe anything.



 For Sally Quinn, the intellectual of the Washington Post, she turned to witchcraft.



 What did that mean? For her it meant that she would begin to put hexes on people, three people in particular. She wrote about it. A woman that her boyfriend lusted after. An editor who wrote a negative review of one of her stories. And an astrologer who gave her a bad reading.



 The woman committed suicide.



 The editor lost his job.



 The astrologer had a cerebral hemorrhage.



 And Quinn felt bad about that. And so she wrote, "I thought for a long time about what I could do and came up with the idea that I would devote money to the American Heart Association. But now every day she wears a bracelet with an evil eye on it to ward off hexes that might come against her."



 An intellectual, compassionate, caring. And what does she end up doing?



 Wanting people to die.



 Bringing hexes on them. Trusting in witchcraft and star charts.



 And supposedly being freed from the inhibitions that the religious church puts upon her. When you see what the Apostle Paul was talking about, listen, you will be a slave to somebody. Either the evil that you choose or the Savior who will save you. Choose Jesus. He is better. Instead, what you see is in the life of somebody like Sally Quinn, what evil really does, it doesn't just want to change your habits. It just doesn't want you for a moment. It wants to consume you. Your intellect.



 Your peace of mind. Your relationship with other people. Your relationship with people dearest to you. Here is the great exhibit in Israel itself as they are facing the consequence of their idolatry not only hurting relationship with one another in their sexual revelry, but their relationship with God. And who is this people? These are the covenant people. These are the ones from whom God intends to bring a Messiah for the salvation of the world.



 It's the consequence of the evil one who is saying, "I want to consume not just these people, but I want to consume the saving plan of God."



 And it's that consequence that is so much on display that gives us reason for the portion that we hate to read. Verse 26, "Moses said to the men, "Thus says the Lord God of Israel, put your sword on your side. You go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp, and each of you kill his brother and his companion and his neighbor."



 And they did exactly that so that 3,000 died.



 What is God exhibiting? But that the wages of sin is... What's the word?



 Death. You see, you know it because we learned it, a lot of us as little kids. But it's something just kind of abstract. The wages of sin is death.



 And God says, "You only believe in what you see.



 I'll show you what death looks like as a wage of sin."



 And 3,000 died.



 Now you do you believe me of the consequence of idolatry. And what God is ultimately doing, even as He shows us the consequence, He is showing us in ways that may be surprising a certain discernment, even in the judgment as it comes.



 And if you will read in the 27th verse, "He that is Moses said to the men who are going, thus says, "The Lord God of you, put your sword on your side, each of you, and go to and fro from gate to gate throughout the camp."



 I don't know if that word strikes you as odd because it's showing the discernment of God. "Go from gate to gate, those of you who have traveled with me to Israel." You recognize that when you come to the gate of a city, that was the city hall. That was the command post. That's where the leaders gathered.



 The angel is not going from house to house, as he did at the time of Passover.



 But just gate to gate, as though the ringleaders are being identified, or the leaders who turned a blind eye to the sin to allow it to progress, God is holding accountable those who are supposed to be watching out for the people.



 And they did not or would not.



 And even as God is showing us His willingness to be discerning in His judgment, He is at the same time willing to say, "But I will be impartial."



 We hate reading the words. Let every man kill his brother and his neighbor and his son. We just say the phrase, "equal justice under the law." And yet God is saying here, "I will not show favorites.



 There is sin that has consequence, and for us that means I cannot hide in the shadow of my parents and say, "No, no, no, they were Christians. I come from a good family. I come from a good church. I come from a good background." No, you. What is your standing, your choice before God? And for those of us who are parents or grandparents or aunts or uncles to say, "It is not enough just to say, boys will be boys."



 Oh, isn't that cute what they're doing?



 No, there are consequences to our sin, and sin that is not turned is sin that will ultimately corrupt and damage those that we love. And so God is calling for us to lead others to repentance and away from sin, and He says it in the most stark terms. But even as He speaks of His discerning judgment and limited judgment, He makes it clear that the judgment itself will be limited.



 I know 3,000 die. I cannot soften that. I cannot make it better.



 But if you go to the fourth verse, you will remember that all the people gave their gold.



 That's millions. Between three and six million have sinned. And God says the leaders, the ringleaders, the representatives who did not turn the people, I will exact the price from them.



 In the scope of that, you have to recognize the scope of that is the basis of verse 10.



 God when He sees the revelry and the idolatry, He says to Moses, "Let me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them and that I may consume them in order that I may make a great nation of you, Moses."



 Get out of my way.



 I'm going to waste them.



 And Moses says, "God relent," and He does.



 Remember they have taken a blood oath to honor Him or sacrifice forfeit their own life.



 But God relents.



 And that is the final piece of the puzzle that we must understand to make the passage actually minister to our hearts. For what God is ultimately showing us is not just sin and consequence, but covenant.



 A God who is being faithful to His people on the basis of a prior promise and commitment. That covenant love is exhibited as we simply recognize why is this passage here?



 It is a warning.



 The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 10, looks at this very same historical account and says, "These things happened as warnings to us so that we will not set our hearts on idols as they did, so that we will not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did.



 We must not put Christ to the test as some of them did, nor grumble as some of them did and were destroyed by the destroyer." Paul says, "These things were given as warnings to us." Why?



 I will tell you if God did not love you, He would not warn you.



 As hard as this truth is, as severe as is this mercy, God is saying, "You must face the wages of sin is death, and I love you enough to warn you about consequence." He shows us consequence, He shows us reality, and He says, "But don't go that way.



 If I did not love you, I would not warn you." And the confirmation of that love is not just in the God who relents. He doesn't destroy them all despite blood oath that they have made, but ultimately in what He promises to them. Some of you may remember enough of the account that I did not read. It's toward the end of the chapter. Verse 30, "The next day Moses said to the people, "You've sinned a great sin, and now I will go up to the Lord. Perhaps I can make atonement for your sin." So Moses returned to the Lord and said, "Alas, this people have sinned a great sin. They have made for themselves gods of gold, but now if you will forgive their sin, but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written."



 Justice has to be meted out. Moses gets that. "They have broken the law of a holy God, and God to be holy cannot just bypass it." So Moses said, "All right, take it out on me. Let your judgment come on me. Blot my name out of the book of life."



 God instead says, verse 33, "I will blot out those who have sinned, not you."



 But Moses is offered to be the mediator. Why doesn't that work? It doesn't work. Look at the last verse, verse 35, "The Lord sent a plague on the people because they had made the calf, the one that Aaron made."



 Moses said, "I'll be the mediator."



 Why doesn't that work?



 What did he already do when he came down the mountain and saw the revelry? What did he do in rage? What did he do with those tablets that God had put the Ten Command...what did he do with those Ten Commandments? He smashed them. In the most literal way that you can understand, God says, "Moses is a law breaker.



 He cannot by his rage or by his breaking of my holy standards be a mediator for my wrath."



 And so, Deuteronomy 18, what does God promise through Moses?



 "I will send a greater Moses.



 I will send one who will not be like Moses because he will be the law, O Beyer." Verse 34, "But now Moses, go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you. Behold, my angel shall go before you." Whoa! Covenant's still in effect. People still going into the Promised Land despite their sin. Nevertheless, in the day when I visit, I will visit their sin upon them. Then the Lord sent a plague on the people because they had made the calf the one that Aaron made. Yes, still affliction comes. But did you notice something?



 There are no deaths.



 No one is counted as dead from this plague. Instead, God says, "When I visit the people, I will visit their affliction upon them." Will God ever visit these people?



 In the time of Jesus' visitation, the Lord put the wrath that we deserved and Moses deserved and Aaron deserved and the people deserved on His Son. And the consequence is we live in the covenant still redeemed by the God who has shown us the sin, shown us the consequences, but said, "When you repent, I relent."



 This last week I got a call from a friend because another pastoral friend from my many years had lost his wife to a surprise heart attack.



 And when I called that friend and spoke to him in the context of his son and others in the room, I couldn't help but have the memories rushing back from that early experience. Bill and Diane, this is Ligari.



 I can remember when the father, the pastor, told me of the time that his son was going a bad path. I mean, a path that was going to get him in deep trouble spiritually, physically, self-destructive behavior. And though the boy was too old for it, there came a time that the father bent him over his knee and he spanked him and he spanked him hard.



 But the end of the spanking, the son who had been such a rebel stood up and in tears said, "Dad, I love you." And he threw himself on his neck and hugged him. And the dad said, "I couldn't understand it.



 Scott, why are you hugging me?"



 And the boy said, "Every time in the past that you have hurt me, I have hated you.



 But this time when you spanked me, I was facing the bathroom mirror and I could see your face in the mirror and I saw how much it hurt you to punish me."



 In Christ, we see how much it hurt the father to punish his son for our sin.



 But when we see what he did, warning us, telling us consequence, and then saying, "But I will relent when you repent and put your punishment on my son."



 When we see that and Jesus asks, "Will you friend me?"



 I pray that you will confirm, "Yes, God, you who warned me and sent Jesus for me, would you be my friend?"



 Father, I pray that you would open your word to our hearts as well as our minds.



 We struggle with this passage, but we cannot but perceive a God who continued to lead his people and help his people and send his son for these people.



 They're like us.



 We commit the sin and run from the consequence, but you have given us warning out of a loving heart and you have shown us your son out of an eternal covenant. So draw us close.



 If there's anyone here who needs to say to you in plain words right now, "Father, against you and you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight and I do not deny it,"



 take that confession and put that sin on Jesus and embrace us with your love, that we might know the peace that you intended from the beginning.



 Grant us the power of the peace of Christ in whose name we pray. Amen.