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.

20 And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it.

At the start of this chapter I mentioned that Moses up in the mountain with God and the Israelites down in the valley with their idol was an allegory for all mankind. Today, we see those two opposites meeting again. The elevated and transcendent has touched back to the fallen earth.

The first thing that Moses does is break in pieces the Lord’s invitation to Israel to build Him a holy house. The people were not worthy of it. They had not only violated the principles etched upon the tablets, but also the earlier law that was the prerequisite to receiving the latter tablets. Of course, we know that ultimately Israel would build the tabernacle as planned, but only because God would restore that privilege. First the people had to lose everything. They had to be condemned before they could be redeemed.

Next, Moses similarly broke the people’s sin. He took their perverse calf and destroyed it in the most complete way imaginable. First burned, then ground into powder, then poured into water, then drunk. It’s hard to think of a way he could have decimated it any further!

Also, there is an obvious symbolism in Moses having the people drink the very essence of their sin. They were drinking the consequences of their own wrongs. No one can pervert the ways of the Lord and not be soiled within. Many the man has tried to have his secret vice on the side while still maintaining that he is a “good” person, but it never works. The sin does not live outside of the man. It begins external, as the influence of temptation, but by engaging with it the man ingests its evil, and then it churns within him.