The Sixteenth Sunday After Pentecost
September 16, 2007
Text: Exodus 32:10-14
10 Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation."
I’m going to ask you to stretch your mind today. To do some thinking, heaven forbid. Now, you probably didn’t come here today to think. Maybe you are tired of thinking. Maybe you came here to be instructed or inspired. Or told something about Scripture or Jesus. All good things, but not what we’re up to this morning. Sorry.
11 But Moses sought the favor of the LORD his God. "O LORD," he said, "why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, 'It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth'? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: 'I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.' " 14 Then the LORD relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.
Instead, inside of twenty minutes, I’m going to have you think about theodicy. In its classic sense theodicy is the defense of a good God who allows evil to exist. Pretty ambitious inside of twenty minutes I’ve got this morning. But we are going to think about God this morning, in maybe a new way for you. Unfortunately, there will be no easy answers.
I know theodicy is a question that’s on our minds. A couple of weeks ago someone came up to me and announced that he had just finished reading the entire Bible. From cover to cover. But had just one question: Why did God allow evil to exist? I know I ask the question when I think of the horror of the Holocaust, the systematic murder of six million Jews by the Nazis. Or why did God allow so many to die on September 11? Or how does a loving God allow child abuse?
When the innocent suffer, when evil so easily seems to have the upper hand, God loses credibility for lots of folks. The paradox of a loving God who allows suffering just is too much for lots of the people who are not here this morning. They jump the faith express headed to the Promised Land because a loving God and human suffering don’t go together.
In the hymn Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise, God is described as immortal and invisible, but ruling with might. (So why didn’t he stop the Holocaust?) In other hymns God is described as “unceasing” and “unchanging.” We also describe God as omnipotent (all powerful), omnipresent (everywhere), and omniscient (all knowing).
Certainly a God with these attributes, who would be able to see all sorts of suffering and evil coming, could control it. Push it back. Eliminate it. And for God not to do this would be, in a word, cruel.
Let’s turn to Scripture. Especially to Exodus 32. You need the background. Moses has led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt. They are camped at the foot of Mt. Sinai. God summons Moses to the heights of Mt. Sinai, where he gives him a ton of instructions, including how to make the ark of the covenant, how to decorate the portable temple, a tent, how to set up a priesthood, and how to do sacrifices. Then, just before the opening of 32, God gives the tablet, the Commandments, written on stone. As chapter 32 opens, the Hebrews have gotten tired of waiting for Moses, so they created a golden calf and began to worship it. You may remember the scene from The Ten Commandments. Well God sees this going on and gets, well, angry, and he tells Moses to step aside so that he can flatten the stiff-necked upstarts. Wipe them from the face of the earth. Really.
(11) But Moses besought (or implored) the Lord his God and said, O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you (by the way) brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Now if I had been Moses, I would have stepped aside and said something like, “Go God. Stomp on those ingrates.” But not Moses. He not only pleads with God to turn away from the destruction of the nation, but he tries to cajole and embarrass the creator of heaven and earth:
(12) Why should the Egyptians say, It was with evil intent that he brought them out to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth? Turn from your fierce wrath; change your mind and do not bring disaster on your people. Moses says to God that God will look pretty petty if he saves the Hebrews one moment and squashes them then next. In other words, Moses is saying, “You want to look like a fool in the eyes of the Egyptians?” Now, if I were Moses, I’d be worried that I’d be pushing my luck. But not Moses.
(13) Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, how you swore to them by your own self, saying to them, I will multiply your descendants like the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it forever. Moses reminds the all-knowing God that he made a promise to Abraham to give him a nation and a land. And God, in his peevishness, was about to break that promise, if he wiped out the Hebrews. He’s almost taunting God, isn’t he? Can you believe this? Moses should by now be toast.
So next God, the all-wise, not only destroys the Hebrews but Moses as well. Right? Wrong? (14) And the Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people. Can you believe it? God changes his mind. And this is not the only place. In Jeremiah 31:31, God changes his mind about the very concept of the covenant with Israel.
For me, a God which is immortal, invisible, all-wise, and who changes his mind is a huge inconsistency.
Here’s what I want us to think about. In our hurry to make God so unlike us, we have distorted the God of Scripture.
Let’s try this. Let’s think about this. The God of Scripture, while creator of heaven and earth, chooses to limit himself. Or put another way, God is self-limiting. It’s not heresy. Any God that can get angry and then change his mind, very human attributes, is self-limiting. Any God that becomes Jesus of Nazareth, a real human being living 2,000 years ago and not only breathes but suffers, is self-limiting. Get my drift?
But why? And doesn’t all this self-limiting stuff do harm to God? Well, only if you want a distant, all-other, incomprehensible God. But listen to this: there is a reason God is self-limiting. And, again, it comes from Scripture itself. God limits himself because God wants to have a relationship with you and me. God made us to have a voluntary relationship with him. If God is in control of everything, then there is no human freedom. We would simply be robots. Think back to Adam and Eve. God asked them not to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and the knowledge of evil. They chose against God. That not only ruptured their relationship with God but it brought with it death. But what’s important is that God gave them the ability, the freedom, to choose.
Freedom is key here. As Tony Campolo says:
Without freedom, none of us would be able to choose to love God—and loving him is what God wants from us more than anything else. Love is, by its very nature, voluntaristic ... What I am saying is that God deliberately gives up power in order to express his love for us and give us the freedom to choose to love him in return.God did not create robots, but instead you and me. God wills to have a relationship with us and that requires freedom, choice, and the ability to love him as he loves us. God will one day end this arrangement when he returns in Christ Jesus and brings about the New Jerusalem. But until that day, when God will rule all-in-all, God exercises only partial rule so that we can choose him as he has chosen us. And until the return, the world will experience sin, all kinds of mayhem, and evil.