When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, "Up, 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 Aaron said to them, "Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me." So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!" When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, "Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD." And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. And the LORD said to Moses, "Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, 'These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!'" And the LORD said to Moses, "I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you." But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, "O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, 'With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth'? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, 'I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.'" And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people. 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 is a noise of war in the camp." But he said, "It is not the sound of shouting for victory, or the sound of 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 to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it.
Exodus 32:1-20
It is impressive to realise that before ever Moses went down to the people or they were aware of the Lord's anger against them the effectual intercession of their leader had been made on their behalf, and the divine sentence against them annulled. 'As for this Moses ...' they had said in contempt, and this was the stature and calibre of the man they had so basely maligned. And now we see him down among the people, first crashing to the ground the tablets of stone with the law of God written on them - was this a gesture of despair on his part, or of anger, or are we to see in it a symbol of the law Israel had broken and spurned? - then taking the golden calf and grinding it to powder, scattering it on the water and making them drink of it. Two thoughts are prompted by this, one that the gold that had been earmarked for the work of the tabernacle was ground to powder and scattered, lost to them and lost to God, in the same way the gold in some lives is permanently lost to God. The other point is that, in making Israel drink of the dust-strewn water, Moses obliged them to partake of the bitterness of their sin, as if to write the memory of it indelibly on their hearts. One further point should be mentioned, that of the contrast between Joshua's uncomprehending hearing of the noise of Israel's orgy and Moses' instant realisation of what was going on. What kind of noise rises from the Church to the ears of God today? Is it the voice of them that shout for mastery, as praying men and women storm the ramparts of heaven for victory in the battles of the kingdom?