BSF Study Questions The Life of Moses Lesson 11, Day 3: Exodus 32:15-24

Summary of passage: Moses went down Mount Sinai with the Tablets in his hands. Joshua had waited for Moses on the mountain a bit away and he thought there was a war going on. Moses said it was singing. Moses was so angry when he saw the sin of the people that he threw the tablets down and they broke. He burned the calf and made the Israelites drink the powder it made. Moses asks Aaron how he let the people sin. Aaron tells Moses the story, but blaming it on how evil the people are and how a calf just “came out”.

Questions:

6a) “The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.”

b) That both were meaningless and broken without faith. Breaking of the tablets was a powerful visual to what the people had just done. Drinking of the calf showing the people that that god was nothing and could be obliterated and that the gold they had made it from would now be lost forever.

7a) Because Moses left Aaron in charge of the people while he was on Mount Sinai

b) He blamed the people, saying they are prone to evil, and he was just doing what they asked him to do. He says the calf was a miracle and it just happened. How many times have you used this excuse?

c) Personal Question. My answer: I say a lot that I’m working on it and God will forgive me.

Conclusions: Did not get a lot of out of this. Thinking wasn’t stimulated today. I think if the people had sincerely repented God would never have threatened to kill them. But God knew their hearts and it appears no one (not even Aaron) is sorry. I wonder sometimes if we know how close we are to death if we’d act differently.

End Notes: Joshua is correct: there was a war going on down below–a spiritual war.

It is Moses’s anger that will keep him from the Promised Land (Numbers 20:10-12). It is a problem he has all his life.

Aaron has no idea how great his sin was. He tries to calm Moses down and then lies to Moses about his part. He tries to make it seem as if a miracle produced the calf when it reality it was his hands, his workmanship. Why one would lie to the man closest to God ever is beyond me but Moses doesn’t buy Aaron’s excuse at all.

Even now in sin Aaron is defiant. Little did he know how close to death he was (Deuteronomy 9:20).