In Exo
32:7-14, we read the following:
And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee
down; for thy people, which thou broughtest out of the land of Egypt, have
corrupted themselves: They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I
commanded them: they have made them a molten calf, and have worshipped it, and
have sacrificed thereunto, and said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which have
brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. And the Lord said unto Moses, I have
seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people: Now therefore let me
alone, that my wrath may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and
I will make of thee a great nation. And Moses besought the Lord his God, and
said, Lord, why doth thy wrath wax hot against thy people, which thou hast
brought forth out of the land of Egypt with great power, and with a mighty
hand? Wherefore should the Egyptians speak, and say, For mischief did he bring
them out, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of
the earth? Turn from thy fierce wrath, and repent of this evil against thy
people. Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, thy servants, to whom thou swarest
by thine own self, and saidst unto them, I will multiply your seed as the stars
of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of will I give unto your seed,
and they shall inherit it for ever. And the Lord repented of the evil which he
thought to do unto his people.
In the above
pericope, as well as the aftermath, as recorded in Exo 32-33, evidences God’s
contingent foreknowledge and the efficacy of prayer. Note what happens:
1. God determines to destroy all of Israel
for worshipping the golden calf.
2. Moses pleads with God to relent,
reiterating the promise to Abraham and the potential mockery from Egypt.
3. God rescinds His threat to destroy all of
Israel, yet punishes the leading perpetrators.
4. Moses spends 40 days prostrate and fasting
to appease God for Israel’s sin.
5. Although temporarily appeased, God refuses
to go with the Israelites through the desert, because they are so
“stiff-necked” he “might destroy them on the way.”
6. Moses pleads again with God to change His
mind.
7. God changes His mind and decides to go
with them.
8. God then remarks on the intimate
relationship He has with Moses as the basis of His decision to change His mind.
9. God confirms this intimate relationship by
showing Moses part of His actual appearance.
Commenting
on this passage, Blake Ostler wrote:
Yahweh told Moses that he intended to destroy
Israel for having made the golden calf. Moses objected and actually argued that
such a course would be unworthy of God. As Childs observed, the key to understanding
the encounter is God’s response to Moses: “Now therefore let me alone, that my
wrath may burn hot against [Israel]” (v. 10) (Brevard S Childs, The Book of Exodus [Philadelphia, PA: Fortress
Press, 1974], 56-7). God had actually formed an intention to execute wrath: it
was something that “he thought to do” (v. 14). This passage shows that while
God had decided to destroy Israel, “the decision had not yet reached an
irretrievable point; Moses could conceivable contribute something to the divine
deliberation that might occasion a future for Israel other than wrath” (Terence
Fretheim, The Suffering of God: An Old
Testament Perspective [Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1984, 50).
Remarkably, Moses persuaded God to recent what he had to decided to do: “And
the Lord repented of the evil he thought to do unto his people” (v. 14). The most
faithful way to understand this passage, it seems to me, is to view Yahweh as
having formed an intention to do one thing—and thus at one time believing that
he would do it—and at a later time changing his mind and coming to believe
something different. Yet if God did not know at the time of his conversation
with Moses whether Israel would be destroyed, then certainly there were a good
many things about the future he did not know.
Some Mormons may point out that when Joseph
Smith revised the Bible, he changed all of the passages suggesting that Go
repented, implying that such changes were made because the Prophet Joseph Smith
believed that repentance could not be appropriate to a being that cannot possibly
be mistaken about any belief or sin in any way. Nevertheless, the Joseph Smith
translation of this passage makes God’s intention to do one thing and then
another even more explicit, an thus recognizes that God changed his mind: “The
Lord said unto Moses, If they will repent of the evil which they have done, I
will spare them . . . Therefore, see thou do this which I have commanded thee,
or I will execute all which I thought to
do unto my people” (JST Ex. 32:13-14). (Blake T. Ostler, Exploring Mormon Thought, Volume 1: The
Attributes of God [Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2001], 306-7)
One should
also compare the above discussion with the following from Lorenzo Snow in a
sermon from 6 May 1882. Commenting on Moses' propitiating God's wrath against
the Israelites, Snow noted:
Moses, for instance, had such power with the
Almighty as to change his purposes on a certain occasion. It will be remembered
that the Lord became angry with the Israelites, and declared to Moses that he
would destroy them, and he would take Moses and make of him a great people, and
would bestow upon him and his posterity what he had promised to Israel. But
this great leader and lawgiver, faithful to his trust, stood in the gap and
there plead with the Lord on behalf of his people; by the power that he could
exercise and did exercise, he was the means of saving the people from
threatened destruction. How noble and glorious Moses must have appeared in the
eyes of the Lord, and what a source of satisfaction it must have been to him to
know that his chosen people, in their obstinate and ignorant condition, had
such a man at their head. (JOD 23:191)
This
incident in the Old Testament provides an exegetically strong case for an “open”
view of the future and the nature and function of prayer.
