“The Lord passed
before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious,
slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping
steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but
Who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on
the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.’”
–Exodus 34:6-7
(ESV).
Contained in these verses in Exodus and
repeated in several places in the Old Testament is a central confessional
passage. It proclaims the name of God
and his character. His anger is slow to
rise against His people; He has steadfast love for them; He is steadfast,
immoveable; He forgives sin. But at the
same time he holds the guilty responsible for their wrongdoings. And, as hard as it may seem to one
generation, their shortcomings and iniquities bear consequences to succeeding
generations. The occasion of this
proclamation from God was when God commanded Moses to go back up on Mt. Sinai
to receive the commandments to be written on stone for the second time. He had broken the tablets after the first
giving of the law when he returned from his mountaintop experience and found
the people together with his brother Aaron participating in worshiping the
golden calf they had fashioned themselves.
They wanted a god like the pagans around them, something they could see
and bow down to, even though the idol could not speak to them out of the fire
or cloud, and even though they knew better than to worship idols. Upon going to the mountain again, taking the
prepared tablets of stone upon which the commandments would be written again,
Moses saw the Lord descend in a cloud and stand with him on the mountain. Then a voice spoke to Moses, declaring what
has been termed this central confessional of the Old Testament. Furthermore, the Lord told Moses about the
new covenant and the new commitment with Israel (Exodus 34:10): “it is an awesome thing that I will do with
you.”
What relevance does this message have
for America today from this declaration given so long ago to Moses? The same God still wants us to see His
steadfastness and unchangeable nature.
He also wants us to see that what we do today affects subsequent
generations. Any nation is dependent
upon survival on the basis of each generation following practical measures in
governmental relations. An example of
irresponsibility in our own country is the “big government” operations that
cannot balance the budget because the outgo is far in excess of the
income. Greed, graft and waste are seen
on every hand, and lack of accountability is rampant. We know this course cannot be pursued
indefinitely. We must come to the point
of reckoning. God is calling us to
beware and set another course. Today I
read a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894). I am taking poetic license and changing in
his fourth line his “nine and twenty mingled years” (which referred to him at
the time he wrote the poem) and changing that phrase to “two hundred thirty-six
years” which tells America’s age as a nation this year since our Declaration of
Independence from Great Britain. I
thought his poem quite thought-provoking and applicable to our situation now in
the United States:
What
Man May Learn, What Man May Do
By
Robert Louis Stevenson
What man may learn, what man may do,
Of right or wrong of false or true,
While, skipper-like, his course he
steers
Through two hundred thirty-six years,
Half misconceived and half forgot,
So much I know and practice not.
Old are the words of wisdom, old
The counsels of the wise and bold:
To close the ears, to check the tongue,
To keep the pining spirit young;
To act the right, to say the true,
And to be kind whate’er you do.
Thus we across the modern stage
Follow the wise of every age;
And, as oaks grow and rivers run
Unchanged in the unchanging sun,
So the eternal march of man
Goes forth on an eternal plan.
Prayer. God, ever-steadfast, never-changing, we come
again asking forgiveness for departing from Your principles of righteousness,
justice and truth. As poet Stevenson so
aptly stated, even though we do not acknowledge this truth as we should, “So
the eternal march of man/Goes forth on an eternal plan.” And You, Lord, hold that plan and coordinate
events according to Your purposes. Help
us seek and know what is right and may we have the stamina and fortitude to
follow righteous paths. In Jesus’ name. Amen.
