Exodus 32

It hasn't even been forty days since the Israelites heard God's voice and promised to serve Him and obey His commands - and already they have turned to idolatry. I always shake my head when reading this chapter, as it seems so absurd that people would fall away so quickly... but today I am reminded that I can be speaking to God in prayer one minute and sinning the next. I suppose that makes me no better than those people were; after all, we are all fallen humans.

The lessons here I think are really that God's grace is infinite, and that we need someone interceding on our behalf before Him. For the Israelites that was Moses, for us today it is Jesus. Just because we have a God who is ever-forgiving, though, does not mean that we have carte-blanche to go on sinning intentionally. In the same way that the Levites obeyed Moses and killed over 3,000 of their brethren in the aftermath of this incident, so we too must cut out the parts of ourselves that continually bring us back to wickedness.