Oooh.. big doggie!!

Who remembers the scene in The Sandlot, where the dog escapes and starts running all around the town? The dog is chasing Benny, and at one point they're at the local swimming pool. A little kid shrieks, "Look mommy!! A doggie!" The dog comes closer. "Ooooh.. big doggie!" he says, right as mother scoops him to safety.

This scene came to mind when talking with a student about God. She was reading a certain book of the Bible and admitted to not liking it.

"Why not?" I had asked.

Well.. because.. Because God just seems so angry!"

"Is He justified in his anger?"

"Well, yeah. But.."

I recently finished the book of Exodus. While visions of the Easter classic The Ten Commandments danced in my head, I couldn't help but notice how much the film misses the mark of the real story. Then again, how can you ever capture the magnitude of God's power with a sound stage? Answer: you can't.

The most fascinating part to me was when Moses and God are chatting on the top of the mountain. God is passing down the rules for His people. These rules would establish the Israelites as His, just as the Constitution is what establishes us as Americans (sorry Canadians). God is writing out the plans for the royal line of priesthood, as well as how His temporary dwelling place is to be built. But in the midst of this conversation, something is a-brewing at base camp.

The Israelites, once again, have gotten restless, and decide to make their own god. Why would they pick a wimpy calf of all animals, beats me, but that's what they did. They then spend time in worship to this idol, and "indulge in revelry"--I'll leave that for your interpretation. God knows what's happening, and stops the conversation with Moses to say that He's angry. "Let me just destroy them real quick," He says. "Then we can start from scratch."

Moses pleads, "Don't do that God! Then all the Egyptians will make fun of you. They'll say that you brought them out of Egypt just to kill them. That wouldn't look too good. Besides, remember all of those promises you made to my great-great-great-great-grandfathers?"

So God relented.

Next, Moses goes down the mountain with the laws and regulations in hand. When he sees for himself all that the Israelites are doing, he follows it up with what I call a Hulk-like anger. All the work put into the tablets with the rules, gone, as Moses throws them to the ground and they shatter. He races to the golden calf and burns it. And if that weren't enough, he grinds the idol to dust, puts it in the water and makes the Israelites drink it. Sounds like a good hazing experience if you ask me.

He calls the people who still desire God to come to him. Turns out most of these guys are from the tribe of Levi, which God had decided would be the members of the royal priesthood that I had mentioned earlier (He knows what He's doing, eh?). Then Moses has all of these guys take a sword and go throughout the camp and destroy the Israelites--brothers and friends and neighbors. Three thousand are killed.

And this is where The Sandlot scene came to mind. "Look mommy! It's Moses!!.. Oooh! Angry Moses!!!"
I am captivated by how Moses experiences a God-like anger here. The very anger he pleaded with God not to show, he shows himself. To me, this is proof of how close the relationship was between Moses and God. The same heartbreak over sin God experienced, Moses experienced.

Maybe that's why it's so hard to accept the anger God shows in other parts of the Bible; because we have a long way to go. The wrath of God is justified by our sin. We deserve death. We deserve separation from God because of all that we've done (which, when we search our minds and hearts, we know is a lot!). The doggie is much bigger than we imagined. And as we come closer to a holy God, we recognize again how wretched we truly are.

It's like we forget the darkness of Good Friday. I'm not God, but I can imagine that the separation Jesus experienced on the cross and in the tomb those three days was not a fun experience. Not by a long shot. But that's what it took to satisfy the wrath of God towards the world's sin. It would take the blood (gross) of Jesus to cover us, before God could even look at us again.

While it is good, even great, to focus on how much God loves us, perhaps we also need a dose of understanding God's wrath toward sin. After all, even Peter in the beginning of Acts, preaches about the fact that YOU, with the help of wicked men, were the ones who killed Jesus. If you're offended by that, I don't know what to tell you except that it's true.

That's why this guy named Isaiah, who being in the presence of the holy God, had to immediate confess his sin. God can't stand the sight of it!

The next verses after Moses' anger burns against the people are very hard to swallow:

"The LORD said to Moses, 'Leave this place. You and the people you brought out of Egypt... But I will not go with you, because you are a stiff-necked people, and I might destroy you on the way.'" (Exodus 33:1, 3b)

First of all, while we had previously spent chapters on the rules that would set the Israelites apart, now we see God disowning them. The rules usually ended with something along the lines of, "You do this so that you will be my people, so that I will be your God." But what God is saying feels like divorce. He can't even go with them. What Moses had done was weak sauce compared to what God might do.

How does THAT make you feel?

If it doesn't sit right with you, I'd ask you to pray about it. Maybe in your own life, you've been getting away with sin that was the very hammer and nail to Jesus' death. Remember that our God does not take sin lightly, but Satan will do all he can to make it appear so!