Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 32:11-14

11 And Moses besought the Lord his God, and said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty hand?

12 Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy people.

13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed, and they shall inherit it for ever.

14 And the Lord repented of the evil which he thought to do unto his people.

God had presented legitimate reasons for obliterating the people, now Moses presents legitimate reasons not to. He mentions the mockery that the Egyptians will make if Israel won its freedom in such spectacular fashion, only to be destroyed immediately after.

Moses also mentions the Lord’s promise to the patriarchs that He would raise a mighty people that would inherit the land of Canaan. As mentioned yesterday, God could still do that through Moses, but that would mean delaying the realization of the promise for many more years.

Moses had the opportunity to let God blot out trouble at its root, but instead sought to let it live instead, so that it could be wrestled with and redeemed. He chose the path of upward struggle, which is the story of our entire world. It was the story of Adam after the fall. Bread and children were both made possible, but only by sweat of brow and pain of childbirth. It is the story of Jesus after his condescension. He could defeat death and hell, but only by lowering himself into their jaws. So, too, Israel had just experienced its own collapse, but Moses elected to stay and fight even so. All of us are wicked and go astray, but we are spared because someone better agrees to take on our burden and fight for us.

Perhaps God really would have destroyed all of the Israelites. Perhaps He was giving Moses a chance to rewrite the narrative going forward. It does occur to me, however, that if Moses was going to be the champion for these people that the Lord needed to let him make that decision for himself. Suggesting the path of destruction might have been a clever way to get Moses to throw himself entirely into the cause of mercy instead. When God first called Moses to help these people Moses had hesitated, but now Moses was willing to do it entirely uncompelled.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 32:9-10

9 And the Lord said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people:

10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee a great nation.

These are some interesting verses, showing God with a singular intent, and in the next verses we will hear how Moses dissuaded Him from it. Does this mean that God’s plans were not set in stone? How does this sort of behavior stack up to the Christian teaching that God is always right and can always be trusted? How can He be all-merciful if Moses is showing a greater degree of mercy than He is?

We’ll examine several aspects of these questions over the next couple days as we consider each batch of verses. For today I will address two of these issues, starting with the question of whether or not God’s plans are set in stone. How could His plans and promises be fulfilled if He destroyed the people He had intended to save?

An explanation for this is that there can be multiple acceptable paths by which the Lord is able to accomplish His purposes and promises. Either He could continue to strive with the children of Jacob, or He could cut them off and raise the children of Moses to receive the Promised Land instead. Obviously, either path would fulfill His promises to Abraham and the Israelite people as a whole.

As for the matter of whether God was all-merciful or not, I would say that this story illustrates that God is all-good. Justice is good. Mercy is good. God is able to execute perfect justice, and He is also capable of showing perfect mercy. Many of us are not so versatile. We are either very good at showing mercy, but weak at standing up for justice, or else we are good at maintaining justice, but struggle to show mercy. In the course of these verses, we see God’s openness to both, which is a testament to His full breadth of goodness.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 32:7-8

7 And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves:

8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

From God’s summary of the goings-on down below we can see that His view is perfectly clear, for He gives explicit detail on how the people had corrupted themselves, even reciting the specific words that Aaron said when presenting the golden calf.

I see this conversation as being representative of God’s observance of humanity throughout all time. How many times have there been similar conversations in the halls of heaven as God and His court consider the ways that mankind has gone astray down below? In the time of Noah? Before the coming of Christ? Still yet-to-come before the second coming? It is quite a privilege to us that Moses was elevated to take part in this instance so that we could receive an account of it.

The role that Moses served in this moment is symbolic of the Son of God, communing with the Father above and then being sent down to resolve the sins of the people. The nature of the Israelites, and indeed of all the world, is to go astray. We receive blessings and freedom, we appreciate it for a time, but then we give in to sin and try to find our own way to the promised land. “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way,” (Isaiah 53:6).

For a time, God permits us to run riot, but eventually there must come a time of divine intervention and reckoning. As in the time of Noah, God was just about ready to reset the entire enterprise, as we will see in tomorrow’s verses.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 32:5-6

5 And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the Lord.

6 And they rose up early on the morrow, and offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and to drink, and rose up to play.

The idolatry of the Israelites bore yet another similarity to God’s tabernacle in that both required animal sacrifice. We have already discussed the symbolism of the offerings to be made to the Lord in the tabernacle and how they represented the people giving up their sins, devoting their passions to the Almighty, and submitting their lives to His purpose.

Assuming that the animal offerings to this golden idol carried the same symbolism, then they were giving their passions, their energies, and their very lives to something evil. Anyone that has dabbled in a life of sin knows that you cannot just have it on the side, totally separate from the rest of your life. Many have tried, but to maintain the course of sin we must progressively lay on its altar the very best of ourselves, including the love and energy that we had intended to withhold from it.

It is interesting that the Israelites would be so forward in admitting that this was the aim of their idolatry. I think most of us are caught unawares by the cost of sin, having only entered into vice because we assumed it wouldn’t take so much from us. Not for the first time, it appears to me that the Old Testament takes all that is subtle, invisible, and spiritual today, and makes them immediate, real, and physical.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 32:2-4

2 And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.

3 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.

4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

It does seem a strange thing that Aaron complied with the wishes of the Israelites and would fashion them a golden idol. Based on all the other accounts of him, it seems he was generally obedient to the Lord, so why would he consent to this? And why would the Lord trust him hereafter to serve as a priest after making this infraction?

Perhaps this was a point of failure for him, but one that didn’t destroy his soul. Perhaps he saw himself as a representative of the people, his duty being to execute their will whether for good or ill, regardless of his personal feelings. It does occur to me that Aaron might also have only complied with the people out of spite. Perhaps he saw the people’s insistence on damning themselves, and in his anger was happy to see them do it. Some of the later verses in this chapter might support this theory.

In any case, performing this idolatry was going to require the people to give up their most precious possessions. Their gold, their jewelry, and their heirlooms were all stripped from their families and given up to fashion the pagan idol.

Let us compare and contrast this to the first instruction God gave to Moses for the Israelites in building the tabernacle. Right at the start God told Moses that the Israelites would need to offer their riches if they were to build the holy place. But in those verses, God made it explicitly clear that this was to be a willful offering. They could choose to participate, or they could choose not to. No such freewill election is expressed here with the golden calf. Unlike God, the idol wouldn’t even exist without their gold, so if they insisted upon having it, sacrifice was mandatory.

Either path of worship, whether to the true God or to a false theology will require a cost of that which is most precious. The difference is that God only invites us to make that offering, whereas the false religion demands it of us! If we follow God, we will be taken only so far as we willingly submit to. If we follow evil, we will be taken for everything, whether we choose it or not.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 32:1

1 And when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down out of the mount, the people gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said unto him, Up, make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him.

I mentioned at the end of the last chapter that I see this account of Moses receiving the law and the Israelites degenerating into idolatry as a useful analogy for all mankind. Moses was naturally oriented towards God, and he was learning the rituals and process that would draw every soul nearer to the Lord. Meanwhile, the Israelites were obviously oriented towards the perverse and the carnal. Without Moses there to keep them in line, they naturally deviated towards adulteration of the spiritual.

Moses’s path was one of intentional progression and continual realignment with ultimate good. The Israelite’s path was one of mindless entropy, being absorbed back into the sea of complacency.

The two examples present a choice to us. One is a life of fixed attention upward to the divine, with continual effort and sacrifice to both move forward and remain in proper alignment, and the other is to let the eyes stray downward, relax into our basest instincts, and indulge our appetites.

Posted on by Abe Austin

God’s Body: Worshipping in Spirit

What is God?)

I have spoken of God as a super-entity, one that we are all components of. I have referenced both Paul’s allegory of the Body of Christ and the Hindu notion of universal consciousness.

This sort of aggregate view of God is different from other teachings that I believe, though. I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has one of the most individualized notions of God, about as far away as you can get from viewing the Almighty as an abstract aggregate.

So, is all this talk about God, the super-entity, purely theoretical to me? An interesting thought experiment and nothing more? No. Personally, I don’t have any qualms about believing in both an individual and an abstract God.

Concrete Conceptions)

It is our natural tendency to try and explain something so that it becomes concrete to us. Religions often describes a very specific version of God, because people need a specific, concrete idea of what they are directing their faith towards.

But most religions also teach that God is beyond comprehension. He is not simply a more powerful version of ourselves, but part of an entirely different classification that exceeds the limits of our mortal minds. Thus, the concrete ideas of God may indeed identify true aspects of Him, but there is no way that they can capture the entire thing.

We know that we cannot conceptualize all of God. There are parts of Him that we might know are right, and parts that we think are partly right, and parts that we don’t know one way or the other, but which possibly could be right. And beyond all of those, there are almost certainly other parts that we don’t know anything about at all, but which bind all the other parts together.

In the book Flatland, a square in a two-dimensional world meets a sphere intersecting with the plane of his existence, appearing only as a slice of its original self: a circle. The sphere raises and lowers itself through that two-dimensional slice, becoming a larger and smaller circle. To the square the sphere appears as different, changing beings, but it is all the same sphere in the end.

Could it be that God is the same? As a higher dimensional being, could it be that God is able to be both simultaneously one and many?

Worshipping in Spirit)

Perhaps it was this uncertain and unknowable aspect of God that Jesus alluded to when he said that we “must worship [God] in spirit.” Because God is of a higher order, and is incomprehensible to our minds, at the end of the day we can only direct our fealty in His general direction. We worship the overall spirit of what we perceive Him to be, devoting ourselves to our imperfect conception of Him, waiting for the next life to fully understand Him as a whole.

In either case, I find the questions of what the nature of God is, and what His “body” is, and what it is in relation to us, and what that means for how we ought to view reality to be most intriguing. These questions yield all manner of thoughtful introspection. This will conclude my study in this area for now, though it is an area that is still active in my mind, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I revisit it at some point. Thank you for accompanying me on this journey.

Posted on by Abe Austin

God’s Body: The Beginning and the End

Part of God)

I have spent some time discussing how viewing ourselves as part of God whole allows us to better accept the trials of life that come our way. Yes, those times still hurt, but we understand that since we are a part of God, He isn’t asking us to go through anything that He isn’t willing to face Himself. He is right there experiencing the exact same pain alongside of us, thus able to provide both perfect empathy and healing care.

Of course, exactly what it would mean to be “a part of God” is still open to interpretation. We do know that individual cells are part of the organ, the individual organ is part of the body, the individual body is part of a community, the community is part of a nation, and the nation a part of the human race. Man is both made up of parts and a part of something more. He is in the middle of an order that extends out to places smaller and larger than we know. Could it be that both its root and its end, its smallest origin and its largest aggregate, are one and the same God?

A Divine Struggle)

Considering that such might be the case, that all of us might be from God and for God, then that raises some interesting ideas as to what we are all doing here, and why difficulty and pain are a necessary part of this earthly existence. Consider these verses from Paul in his letter to the Corinthians:

For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.
-1 Corinthians 15:25-26

If we are all a part of God, then the greatest thing that this collective body of God could do is learn how to overcome every ill and affliction, including its own death. This gives a fascinating lens with which to view the increase of corruption and chaos around us. Could it be that this mortal trouble is not contrary to the plan, but exactly in accordance with it? Could it be that the plan is to take on all trouble by degrees, so that the body of God may struggle through every trouble and overcome it? And if that is so, then each of our individual struggles is part of the striving and overcoming of the whole!

Posted on by Abe Austin

God’s Body: Missing the Mark

In my last post I discussed how the Western philosophy of individualism can create a moral dilemma about God allowing pain in this world. I explained that an Eastern philosophy of collectivism can dispel that dilemma, because when one views himself as part of God, then God is actually experiencing the pain personally, enduring it for the greater good.

Human Shortcomings)

Does this mean that Eastern philosophy and collectivism is superior to Western individualism? Maybe in some regards, but I don’t believe in all.

Every philosophy we have has passed through human hands and is therefore corrupted. Even if the philosophy originated from a pure source, such as the word of God, it all passes through the prism of flawed mortal understanding. The pure light is bent and diffracted and we end up with philosophies that might be generally good, but which now have flaws. In time, those flaws will compound until we have a serious divergence from the truth. This is true for any Western philosophy, and any Eastern philosophy, and any other philosophy at any time or place.

We all miss the mark and create confusion. When we do so consistently across our entire culture, then the people of our nations will have inherent problems with God, based upon those flaws. And since that philosophy becomes ingrained at an extremely young age, most won’t even question the premises behind their complaints. They won’t consider, “maybe God isn’t wrong, maybe my fundamental framing of life itself is off.”

A Glass Darkly)

Paul acknowledges this inherent shortcoming in humanity with his famous words, “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known” (1 Corinthians 13:12). He admits to murky vision, though he does at least carry the hope of future clarity.

I believe at the root of most, if not all, moral quandaries is a fundamental misunderstanding of God, Himself. Because our conception of His person, His attributes, and His relationship to us is misaligned, we become misaligned to ourselves, our neighbors, and the world at large.

Being able to recognize this predisposition for error is the first step in seeing past our flaws. So humbled, we can grope forward, taking the light where we can find it. We can understand that any person we listen to for long enough will surely tell us something wrong, but also, they might tell us a new truth we never before had seen. And then, one day, as Paul attests, we shall see face to face and know in full.

Posted on by Abe Austin

God’s Body: Who is Ultimate?

In my last post I suggested that the struggle to reconcile a loving God with the existence of suffering might only be an artifact of our Western Individualism, and that the problem appears to be a non-issue to people of other cultures. Today I shall attempt to explain how this might be the case.

The Ultimate Individual)

Individualism creates the sense that the individual is supreme. The greatest ideal is the empowerment and the well-being of the individual, and there is no tolerance for the harm or deprivation of the individual. Society may flourish, but not at the expense of the individual.

Thus, even a God who hurts the individual is considered unacceptable. If God hurts me, my individualism cries out that this is an injustice, because the highest ideal: my individual well-being, has been thwarted. Anything that thwarts the highest ideal must be evil.

Part of Something Greater)

There are passages of scripture that suggest this view might be flawed, though. Paul speaks at length about the “Body of Christ,” suggesting that we are all but parts within an even greater whole. This suggests some sense of collectivism, instead of pure individualism.

Eastern philosophy has a strong sense of collectivism, informed no doubt by its ancient religions, such as Hinduism. In that theology, ultimate reality is a single, universal consciousness, and the end state that we strive for is to surrender our sense of individual self, being subsumed back into the universal consciousness that we always were.

From either of these “part of something greater” perspectives, the suffering of this world, while still tragic, no longer appears as a violation of morality. Since we are all part of the universal consciousness or God, any suffering we experience is just that supreme essence inflicting that pain upon itself, and who could say that it doesn’t have the right to do that?

An Analogy)

Imagine if I were to fall off a ladder, and in order to prevent greater harm to myself, I threw out my hand to break my fall, resulting in all of my fingers being broken, but the rest of me remaining unharmed.

My fingers, if they had too pronounced a sense of individualism, might say to me, “Why did you hurt me?! My life was going along fine and then you thrust me out in harm’s way and let me take a blow. Why?! What right do you have to hurt me arbitrarily like that?”

To which I might remind the hand, “I didn’t do it to you, I did it to me! You are me. I haven’t asked you to go through anything that I’m not also going through right this very minute! And you could not see it from your local perspective, but I did it to save the greater body, which ultimately is better off for everyone, including you! And now that that’s done, let me tend to your healing, because all of us will be better when you are.”