An Invitation to Covenant Renewal

Israel’s sin of worshiping the golden calf and the aftermath put the relationship between God and His people in a precarious state. At first, the Lord announced that He would destroy Israel and start over His plan of redemption with Moses, but He relented when Moses interceded. Nevertheless, the impenitent covenant breakers were killed and the people were made to drink water polluted by fragments from the idol. Then Moses prayed to the Lord again when God said that He would not go with them into Canaan, and our Creator said that He would remain with the people and grant the prophet a great vision of His glory (Ex. 32–33). Despite the assurances that Yahweh, the one true God, would remain the covenant Lord of Israel, however, certainly the Israelites felt uneasy about whether they were in a right relationship with the Lord.

Any unease on the part of the Israelites should have been put to rest by the events recorded in today’s passage. Just before Moses went back up Sinai to receive his promised vision of the Lord, God told him to craft two new stone tablets because He was going to write on them a new copy of the Ten Commandments (Ex. 34:1). Recall that there was a previous set of tablets on which the Lord had inscribed the commandments and that Moses’ breaking them—when he saw the golden calf being worshiped—was a sign that the covenant with Israel had been broken (Ex. 32:15–19). That the Lord was willing to provide a new copy of the fundamental laws indicates that His promised forgiveness would achieve the end of renewing and reestablishing the covenant. Although most of the Israelites had abandoned God at Sinai by committing idolatry, the Lord had not abandoned them fully and finally. Indeed, perhaps our greatest covenant hope is that “if we are faithless, [the Lord] remains faithful” (2 Tim. 2:13).

Exodus 34:2–4 records God’s warnings to Moses that he alone come back up the mountain so that the Lord could rewrite the commandments on the tablets. This echoes warnings given in Exodus 19:21–25 that the Israelites not go too near Mount Sinai lest they be destroyed, creating a further parallel between the enactment of the covenant on Sinai before the golden calf incident and its reenactment on Sinai after the episode of idolatry. God was inviting His people back into the relationship He had once established with them, thereby demonstrating that He had truly forgiven them and that they could be His holy people once again.