"Thou shalt have no other gods before ME!"
Nothing else in the world nearer and dearer to us than God!
I heard the other day of a terribly injured soldier, who sent this
message to one who had written to sympathize in his great deprivation:
"Don't pity me; the sacrifice has been worth it; for I have found God!"
Oh! What it is to learn that!
Now we come to the Second Commandment—"Thou shalt not make unto thee
any graven image."
[Illustration: Moses cast down the two Tablets which God had written.]
When the Children of Israel stood round that mount, and heard God say
that, if they would obey His voice, they should be a peculiar treasure
to Him, they promised that they would faithfully keep all that the Lord
said.
But I am sorry to tell you that they soon forgot their promises, and
did the very thing God had told them not to do. And this was how it all
happened.
Moses was up on the mount with God for forty days and forty nights,
and God gave Moses the two Tablets of stone, on which God Himself had
written His Ten Commandments.
But forty days and forty nights seemed a long time to the thousands
of people waiting below on the plains; and they "gathered themselves
together unto Aaron, and said, Up! make us gods, which shall go before
us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of
Egypt, we do not know what has become of him!"
Then Aaron bade them bring him gold from their ornaments, and he cast
the gold into the fire, and it melted down into a great piece of gold,
which looked like a calf.
Aaron took a tool and moulded it, and the people said, "These be thy
gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt!"
Then they offered sacrifices to the golden calf, and feasted, and rose
up to dance.
"And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for the people
have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. Now,
therefore . . . let Me alone, that I may consume them!"
But Moses besought the Lord most earnestly to turn from His anger,
and asked Him to remember His servants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and
begged Him to forgive the sin of His people.
So Moses went down the mountain with God's Law in his hands. But when
he and Joshua, who was with him, saw from the mount what had happened,
and that the people had already broken God's two first commandments,
Moses cast down the two Tablets which God had written with His own
Hand, and they fell beneath the mountain and were broken to pieces.
And the Lord sent a sore punishment to the people who had sinned, and
three thousand of them died.
The next day Moses went up to the Lord again, and his words of entreaty
are most touching—
"Oh, this people have sinned a great sin, and have made them gods of
gold. Yet now, if Thou wilt forgive their sin—; and if not, blot me, I
pray thee, out of Thy Book which Thou hast written."
"And the Lord said unto Moses, Whosoever hath sinned against Me, him
will I blot out of My Book."
This is an awfully solemn story. We do not read that the people
themselves repented—if they had, the Holy God would have forgiven them
out and out.