On Saturday morning in my year-long journey through the Bible, I came to Exodus 32.
Just before this chapter, Moses has been up on the mountain for forty days and forty nights, receiving the law from God. "He gave Moses the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written by the finger of God." Wow! How awesome is that? Doesn't it make you quake on the inside, imagining such a thing, imagining holding in your arms those tablets?
Unfortunately, down at the foot of the mountain, we discover this:
Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” (Exodus 32:1, NAS)
A few verses later, God tells Moses to go down at once because the people have corrupted themselves. The Lord continues with this:
“They have quickly turned aside from the way which I commanded them. They have made for themselves a molten calf, and have worshiped it and have sacrificed to it and said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!’” (Exodus 32:8, NAS)
Interesting, the different perspectives, God's and the people's. The people saw the time that Moses had been up on the mountain as long, thinking that Moses had been delayed. But God considered those forty days and forty nights as brief, saying the people had quickly turned away.
It is so important to learn to see life (and time and space and trials and joys and mountain tops and valleys, etc.) through God's eyes, through His perspective. Forty days and nights seems a long time to me in my humanness. But God is eternal. He isn't bound by time and space the way we are. Forty days and nights are as nothing to Him.
When I have God's perspective, it changes how I live and how I think. It changes how I face the trials of this life. God's perspective keeps me grounded and comforted and strengthened. It makes me "rejoice always!" (My word for this year.)
Lord, give us Your perspective today.
~robin
