God Forgives

KEY VERSE: “The LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, Longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth.” —Exodus 34:6

SELECTED SCRIPTURE: Exodus 32:15-19, 30-34

WHEN MOSES CAME down from the mountain with the tables of the Law, he heard the shouts and singing of the people, and he beheld them worshiping a golden calf and offering sacrifices and incense to it. Moses was angry. As the Mediator between God and Israel, Moses was the representative of both. He realized that a serious crime against the divine covenant had taken place during his absence.

The next day, Moses told the people that they had committed a great sin, and that he would go up to speak with the Lord in order that perhaps he might be able to secure forgiveness for their sins. He was staking his eternal existence for the benefit of the people when he said to Jehovah, This people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of gold. Yea now, if thou will forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I pray thee, out of thy book which thou hast written.” Moses’ prayer was answered when God assured him that the ones who sinned against him would be punished. Then we read, And the Lord smote the people for worshiping the golden calf which Aaron had made.” He then instructed Moses to continue leading the Israelites on their journey, with the angel of the Lord going before to guide them.—Exod. 32:30-35

Now, the Lord said unto Moses, Hew thee two tables of stone like unto the first: and I will write upon these tables the words that were in the first tables, which thou brakest.” He told him to go up to Mt. Sinai and wait for him there. Moses cut two stone tablets like the first, went up the mountainside with them, and the Lord descended in a cloud. He stood with him there and proclaimed his name, which are the words of our Key Verse. “The Lord … keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and upon the children’s children, unto the third and the fourth generation.”—Exod. 34:6,7, New International Version

“Moses bowed to the ground at once and worshipped. O Lord if I have found favor in your eyes, he said, then let the Lord go with us. Although this is a stiff-necked people, forgive our wickedness and our sin, and take us as your inheritance.” Then the Lord said: “I am making a covenant with you. Before all your people I will do wonders never before done in any nation in all the world. The people you live among will see how awesome is the work that I, the Lord, will do for you.”—Exod. 34:8-19, NIV

In Exodus 32:30, Moses expressed a willingness to lay down his life to make an atonement for the sin of the Israelites. He said, “I will go up unto the Lord; peradventure I shall make an atonement for your sin.” Centuries later, the Apostle Paul was in great heaviness because his brother Israelites were so blind they could not perceive the great favor offered to them, and he said, “I myself was wishing to be accursed [separated] from the anointed one,” [Wilson’s Diaglott] “for my brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh.” Then he said, “They are not all Israel, which are of Israel.”—Rom. 9:3,6

In this account we find Moses pictured as a type of Jesus Christ, who—after his death and resurrection—went before the Lord in heaven to make atonement for all the human race. At that time he placed the value of his ransom sacrifice—a corresponding price paid for the perfect life lost by father Adam—into the hands of God, to satisfy the just death sentence God had imposed upon the father of the race.—Heb. 9:24

Imperfect Moses, however earnest, had nothing worthy to offer God in the way of a perfect, atoning sacrifice. The psalmist wrote of this, saying that none of Adam’s posterity “can by any means redeem his brother, nor give to God a ransom for him.” (Ps. 49:7) Job, however, pointing to a better way in Jesus, said, “I have found a ransom.” And, through the Holy Spirit, Paul elaborated on this fact when writing to Timothy he said, “God our Saviour … will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time.”—I Tim. 2:3-6

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