“When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt - we don’t know what has happened to him.’” (Exodus 32:1 CSB)
The Israelites had just experienced Passover. I don’t mean the meal, I mean the reality the meal commemorates. They had walked through the Red Sea on dry land and turned and watched The LORD drown their enemies in the very waters they had walked safely between. This was followed by the event that happened just days prior to their apostasy we just read about - They had witnessed God display His power and deliver to them the 10 Commandments from Mt. Sinai. Moses goes up the mountain and he’s been up there for days by the time we get to chapter 32 verse 1 of Exodus; and his delay in returning was the catalyst that turned Israel from The God Who had brought them out of bondage.
We are quick to castigate the children of Israel for their idolatrous unbelief. We like to imagine, had we experienced what they did then we would not be so faithless. Yet the author of Hebrews reminds us that One greater than Moses has come (Hebrews 3:1-6) and yet we still struggle to believe God and live as He intended. Perhaps we should be more like Robert Robinson who penned the words,
“Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it;
Prone to leave the God I love:
Take my heart, oh, take and seal it
With Thy Spirit from above.”
(Come Thou Fount)
The enemy uses delay to dissolve our dependence upon God. This is what happened to the Israelites. It wasn’t an extremely long delay, but a delay nonetheless. The Psalmist tells us that “They forgot God their Savior, who did great things in Egypt.” In such a short time they turned from God because of delay - because things didn’t happen according to a timeline that they thought acceptable. And lest we think the issue is just with those stiff-necked, wilderness wandering Israelites, Peter addressed the tendency to lose hope due to delay in 2 Peter 3:8-10 by reminding us that God is not slipping on His promise, that His “delay” is not truly a delay, rather He is precisely on time according to HIS timeline. It’s easy for us to try to force our timeline on God, and when God doesn’t act in accordance to our plan we tend to forget God and join the Israelites in forming a god we can control. Or perhaps it isn’t a timeline we’re wanting God to conform to, but a plan of action altogether. We imagine God should behave a particular way or come to our aid in a specific manner and when we don’t see Him working the way we think He should we turn on Him.
Recall who is writing the epistle of 2 Peter? This was the man who was ready to fight the Romans alongside Jesus - literally. When Rome rolled up on Jesus in the garden to arrest Him, Peter came out swinging; Jesus rebuked him. This was the man who, when Jesus told him that The Messiah would go to Jerusalem and be killed and raised again on the third day, Peter rebuked The Messiah! Again, Jesus rebuked him, calling him Satan. Talk about having a preconceived plan of what God SHOULD do, Peter was that guy. Yet in his first epistle, he tells us to humble ourselves under the mighty hand of God. The Holy Spirit taught Peter to believe God, and submit to His plan. We must not try to align God with our agenda, rather we are to be aligned with God’s.
There will be times in our life when things aren’t happening on the cadence we believe they need to happen. There will be times when we will want to echo along with the Israelites, “we don’t know what has happened…” and we will be tempted to interpret the seeming delay as God being absent or slack. We will be tempted to try to help God out a bit, like Abraham did when he tried to use Hagar as a means of producing an heir. Don’t let delay dissolve your dependence on God. No matter how long you’ve been praying for whatever it is you’re praying for, No matter what outcome you're longing to see, No matter how much time is passing while the storm rages on; remember that God is not slack concerning His promises.
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