Exodus chapter 32, you might be thinking, no, wait, I thought we were working through Matthew chapter 23. And we are, as the Lord Jesus rebukes the Pharisees and gives us a warning regarding hypocrisy for spiritual leaders. But today in Exodus chapter 32, from 15 and following, we have a good example of confronting hypocrisy Bad spiritual leadership and hypocrisy in the Old Testament. And I thought it would be very instructional. A good friend of mine asked me to take a look at this chapter, and I'm glad that he did. We've got four points in here. We'll see how far we get with a lot of detail. Allow me to begin the reading. Chapter 32 of Exodus, beginning at verse 15. Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides, on the front and on the back, they were written. The tablets were the work of God. And the writing was the writing of God engraved on the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, there's a noise of war in the camp. But he said, it is not the sound of shouting for victory or the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear. And as soon as he 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 into 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 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, 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 at 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, the 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, 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 of his brother, "'so that he might bestow a blessing upon you this day.' "'The next day Moses said to the people, "'You have sinned a great sin, "'and now I will go up to the Lord "'so perhaps I can make an atonement for your sin.' "'So Moses returned to the Lord and said, "'Alas, this people has 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. But the Lord said to Moses, whoever has sinned against me, I will blot out of my book. But now go, lead the people to the place about which I have spoken to you. Behold, my angel shall go before you. 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 made the calf, the one that Aaron had made. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of the Lord our God abides forever. I love the Bible because it's honest about who we are. It doesn't hold anything back. This is one of the most shocking chapters in all of the Bible. How is it that God's people, God's people who see the miracles of God, the people of God who experience his glory and his power, fall into such an ugly sin as this? But if you pay attention to history, you know very well God's people fall into these patterns again and again. We're going to see this throughout the 40 years in the wilderness. Today's story is indeed ugly because these are not just anyone. Human beings do this kind of thing all the time, but these are the covenant people with God. These are the people who are meeting with Yahweh at the foot of the mountain, and they're afraid. Remember, they're terrified. They tell Moses, Moses, you go up there. We don't want to talk to God. You go up there and talk to him. And so Moses talks to God, of course, fellowships with him for close to 38, 39 days, close to 40 days at this point. And you see their reaction. They wonder if God has destroyed him. They're not sure what to think. But we're going to see something very powerful as a result of their lack of patience or their lack of faith, how we see good spiritual leadership. We see intervention. We see the consequences of sin. And we see bad spiritual leadership. And that's the key thing that I want us to take away from this. What happens when you and I fail and we become hypocrites? and fail in our spiritual leadership of God's people. And there's four things that we're going to be doing in this process as I look at it. First, we're going to look at Moses' reacting to sin and the way that you and I can fail in our reaction. And we're going to look at Moses' confronting sin and confronting Aaron for it. And then also we're going to be looking Where do I have it here? We're gonna be looking at Moses dealing, confronting with sin in the people, and then Moses trying to atone for sin and our desperate need for Christ in our process that we desperately need for him. First thing we do is looking at Moses reacting to sin. Moses is already aware that God's people are sinning. Remember the Lord in verses 1 to 14 in Exodus 32 has spoken to Moses and said, listen, my people are sinning and I want to destroy all of them and start afresh with you. And how does Moses respond? Moses responds like a good spiritual leader. And he says, wait a minute, Lord, Please, if you do that, then the Egyptians will think that you brought your people out in order to destroy them in the wilderness. Let me go down there, let me sort them out. It's a good spiritual leader. He's reacting properly. He says, no, Lord, please, for the sake of your name, for the sake of your glory, let's see if we can deal with this. But Moses has no idea. Moses has fundamentally no idea what he's going to see when he gets down from the mountain. As a good, confident leader, he thinks, okay, whatever it is, we can handle it. Moses has just experienced one of the greatest events in all of human history, that of receiving the very law of God. It's one of the great and wonderful things that sets us apart as the people of God. It is the fundamental thing that identifies what we are to do as God's covenant people. And remember, the emphasis in the language here in verse 15 is it is written by the finger of God. Nobody else does it, God does. That's what makes it such a precious primary gift for you and me. But just as Moses experiences one of the greatest events in all of human history, then he walks down from the mountain and experiences one of the greatest sins in all of human history. Remember, God has just covenanted with him. What is the essence of the covenant? I will be your God and you will be my people. And the point of contact, the point of reference to know this is what God's people do is the law. And then he comes down from the mountain and then what does he see? He's holding tablets of stone that say these are the behaviors that identify us as the covenant people of God. What does he see? Behaviors which absolutely break God's covenant. Why does he throw the stones down, breaks the tablets? Because he believes the covenant has been broken. He's absolutely put into shock. He knows it's bad, but he doesn't think it's gonna be this bad. You will remember that in verses one through 14, if you remember that passage, that they sat down to eat and drink and they rose up to play. That is the way that they're worshiping this pagan god in the old context. And the old ancient world, the way you were to make an environment where you did a spiritual connection with this so-called god, with his power, who is going to lead you and guide you, is you did various things to get yourself excited, to raise your level of awareness, that they would Drink and get drunk and then rise up to fornicate. That's what it means to rise up to play here. Let's not mince words It's ugly sin and they're completely wasting their time. They're not being hard-working. They're not being functional They're not trying to think in terms of how to sort out their problems. They're completely wasting their energies on one large massive party but they did this for a reason thinking that well if Yahweh's not the right God who led us out of Egypt. Maybe we can create a God of our own, or maybe it was Apis. Apis was the Egyptian name given to the great bull who was a source of spiritual power supposedly. But it's a terrible sin. It's an affront to the Lord God to create yourself an excitement thinking that this is how I'm gonna connect with a great power that's gonna lead me through the wilderness into the promised land. No wonder Moses reacts. He's absolutely furious because he thinks, wait a minute. This is impossible. How can we as the covenant people of God react in such a way? How can we redeem the situation? Well, number one, or number two, I should say in my notes, is Moses is going to react. But the first thing that he does, I think is appropriate because he confronts sinful leadership. Because he knows why this was allowed. Aaron, Aaron and the Levitical priesthood are supposed to deal with this, and they didn't. In fact, they made it worse. They participated with this. So how does Moses respond? He says, first he takes the calf, burns it with fire, grinds it into powder, makes everyone drink it, and then he confronts Aaron. So he confronts the people, and then he confronts Aaron. This business of grinding the calf into powder and make everybody drink it is a great symbol. You idiots, you created this God. It came from you, it came from your imagination, and I want you to drink it to prove to yourself it came from you, it goes back to you. It's worthless. It means nothing. This is just a worthless thing. And after he had done that, that's this embarrassing ritual, this embarrassing event to drink your own God, showing that he's absolutely worthless and nothing. Then he confronts Aaron. Very critical thing and application here to Matthew 23 that I want us to see. Where he goes to Aaron, his brother-in-law, and he says, what did these people do to you that you brought such great sin upon them? The answer of Aaron is not even recorded. It's a rhetorical answer. It's like, they didn't do anything. What happened here? Aaron gave in to massive social pressure. Because how does he respond? Well, Moses, don't get so excited here. Don't get so angry. The people, they put a lot of pressure on me and they wanted me to take care of it. They said, make us gods who will go before us. So it's absolutely weak, terrible leadership. He submitted to external pressures and then made a miserable excuse about how they came up with this god. You know, Aaron was supposed to confront all of this pressure. He was supposed to lead. And instead, as opposed to giving some story about being used and abused by the crowd, he lies. He tells a terrible lie, as if, well, there was a great spiritual force that made this calf itself and it just jumped up out of the fire, implying that there might be some other spiritual force in God that can do this other than Yahweh, the one and only true God. What's the application for us? Listen, as spiritual leaders where the Lord may take us, after ABU, It's so critical and important to make an application to this because you will come under massive pressure to compromise. And you might think, well, I've been trained, I've been discipled, I've been mentored well. There's no way I would ever agree to such lunacy and idiocy. There's no way I would submit to that. But look what happens in our churches, all kinds of compromises. All kinds of ugly compromises. I never thought I would exist in a day where so many so-called evangelical churches think that homosexuality is okay. Buy into the political mainstream. Or even become very politicized in the way they handle things. That is all social, proud pressures. And people make excuses. They say, well, a new doctrine and a new revelation from God, poof, it's popped up out of nowhere. And this is now the gospel truth. Really? No, no. But it also demonstrates at the same time why leadership in Christ's church is so critically important. You and I have something precious in our hands. We can either do great good or we can do great harm. That's why we have to be sober and vigilant, as we're told in the book of James. Moses has to confront this, because not only does he see that there's an event that happened, there's a pattern. What does Aaron say? The people put pressure on me to respond like this. Meaning there's quite the ungodly pagan movement going on among and among God's people that has to be confronted. So thirdly, Moses confronts sin. He's confronted Aaron. Now he has to confront the sin directly. Here he says, he's seen in verse 25, he said, now that he had seen that the people had broken loose, meaning no constraints, no self-discipline. What was the result? Not only this horrible pagan sin that they're doing in this massive party, but the derision of their enemies, meaning the Egyptians and other surrounding cultures are pointing fingers at the people of God and saying, good, great. This is crazy. This is idiotic. What are these people doing? They're destroying themselves. They're bringing shame on the name of God, which is awful, which is awful. So Moses is offended at this. He says, this is a sin. How does he react? It's a direct confrontation. He stands in the middle of everybody and says, who is on the Lord's side? That should be the theme of this sermon. Confrontation, say, listen, are you for Yahweh or against him? And the Levites, praise the Lord, the Levites respond, and they say, yes, we will respond. The Levites gather around him. But the Levites probably were also part of the core of the problem. They were supposed to be the spiritual leaders. And I think brave men Courageous people surrounded themselves and went to Moses and said, yes, we're responsible for this. What do we need to do to correct it and make amends? See, a strong spiritual leader knows his people well. Moses also knows who Aaron is, that these people are sinful and stubborn. Remember what Aaron gives? He gives an excuse. Well, you know these people, they like to sin. Well, you're supposed to lead them. That's not an excuse, you can't say that. That's why he asked them who's on the Lord's side. This allows him to know who is willing to repent and change, trust in the Lord, and those who insist that God cannot be trusted. Now, as a result of this confrontation, it's painful to us to read. When we have discipline in our churches, we don't go around killing people. There's something different here. But think about the dynamics and what's going on. This is wretched. This is painful. This is difficult. Because there is a systematic problem within the people of God. And either there's going to be huge tensions within the people of God about what is the way to follow the Lord, or who is the real true God. And if you don't stop it now, you're going to be dealing with it forever. So he says, we are going to stop the ringleaders. We're going to stop the people who did this. So every man grab a sword and kill your son or your brother, meaning those who are going to be put to death are intimate relations. Those who are going to suffer are close to you. Now, we don't kill people in our churches today, but what do we do? We do discipline. Sometimes we have to do excommunication. Sometimes the excommunication that we do, the confrontation of sin, is some of our closest friends, sometimes our own relatives. And that's where the discipline in the church becomes really difficult, because the consequences that flow from this are terrible. I don't have direct evidence for this, but my interpretation of this passage is that the 3,000 people who were killed, the 3,000 men who died at the hands of the Levitical priests who used a sword, were probably those primarily responsible for this rebellion against God, who wanted to bring back pagan worship. But it does demonstrate that if we fail in our leadership, there will be painful consequences. You've heard me say time and again from Titus 1.13 where the elders are supposed to rebuke others sharply that they may be sound in the faith. And I think the death here is applicable for us as leaders is because if we do not lead people well, if we introduce false doctrine into our churches, there's a spiritual death. That's the worst of all things. We do not love the Lord our God. We do not follow him with the right doctrine. We do not know what salvation is. We don't know how to follow Christ. We don't know how to be restored with so many bad ideas out there. And as a result, the worst of all things, much less a physical death, the spiritual death. Notice he says here that there will be a blessing. to the Levites. There would be a blessing this day. What's the blessing? If you deal with sin, if you confront it, and even though you might have to do excommunication, the blessing is there's a restoration of right and proper worship and doctrine in the church, which is terrible. I mean, it's difficult to do, but it's ultimately a blessing. It's very hard to deal with, very hard to go through with. You have a more peaceful community in your church. People will complain. But sin is offensive to a holy and a righteous God, and it needs to be dealt with. Then there's another element here in the last few minutes before I conclude, is atonement. For the first time, Moses uses the word atonement. Let me go talk to Yahweh up in the mountain, because perhaps, he's not even sure. This sin has so disturbed him. He says, I don't even know if I can make atonement for this crazy sin. But he does. And how does he do it? Like a good leader, he says, Lord, if it be possible, blot my name out of the book of life. Remember what Paul says in Romans chapter 9. Even if it were possible that I would be accursed and separated from God so that my people could be restored into fellowship with God, I'd be willing to sacrifice myself. Moses does the same thing here. Moses does the same thing. How does God respond? How does Yahweh respond to Moses' offer of himself in order for atonement? The answer is no. Moses, no. You cannot make atonement. You cannot make atonement for the sins. Those who have sinned, they will suffer the consequences for their own sin. And as a result, you have the plague. I think it's a wonderful point here. You and I as spiritual leaders, we might feel ashamed. For those who may sin in our congregations, for those who may sin in our ministries, we can't atone for their sins. They will suffer the consequences. But we must seek the Lord on their behalf. We must confront them and we must pray. We must ask the Lord for a resolution. We must ask the Lord for guidance to lead people into further faithfulness and righteousness as we confront sin. This is what Moses does here. But of course, it points if Moses could not atone for sin, who could? And who has? Why can God, why can Yahweh say, no, Moses, it doesn't need to be you? It's because the Son, because the Lord Jesus Christ, who did come, who is and was an atonement for sin, the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, He atoned for sin. And of course, the Levitical sacrifices, which are going to come in the farther chapters in numbers. And the Leviticus, those things will be shown that point to Christ. But for now, Moses introduces a very key element for us. A human being cannot atone for sin. Human being cannot. And you and I will suffer the consequences for it. But praise the Lord. There is atonement. When we have sinned, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Sin does not need to remain in the camp. Sin does not need to be tolerated within our churches. But as spiritual leaders, we don't have to be hypocrites. We don't have to say, well, you know, those people do whatever they want. No, you and I can confront it. We're commanded to confront it. The consequences may be harsh, but faithfulness is a blessing. as he's told us this morning. Amen? Hard but true. Let's pray. Father God, we love this passage. It's hard. It's difficult for us to read. We would like to think that we could be perfect spiritual leaders, guiding your people into faithfulness. It is our calling. It is what we're commanded to do, but it's such an intense struggle. Mass pressure will be placed upon us, and we'll be tempted to compromise. Lord Jesus, give us that courage as Moses had to confront sin where we have it, to be willing to do discipline as is right in your church, but do it in a loving way and in the way that you've taught us and the way that is glorifying to you. Help us to be faithful in all of that. Lord Jesus, we're shocked and we're amazed at how your church can be so unfaithful at times. We pray for revival. We pray for a restoration of truth and righteousness in our churches that at least the word of God written by your finger could be honored and glorified and obeyed. That we, your servants, would be faithful to teach it rightly. That we would do the necessary thing when it is required of us. Help us to be faithful. These things we pray are in Jesus' name. Amen.