James Nisbet's Church Pulpit Commentary
Exodus 32:24
SHIRKING RESPONSIBILITY
‘So they gave it me; then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf.’
I. There never was a speech, more true to one disposition of our human nature than this of Aaron. We are all ready to lay the blame on the furnaces. ‘The fire did it,’ we are all of us ready enough to say, ‘In better times we might have been better, broader men, but now, behold, God put us into the fire, and we came out thus.’
Our age, our society, is what, with this figure taken out of the old story of Exodus, we have been calling it. It is the furnace. Its fire can set, and fix, and fasten what the man puts into it. But, properly speaking, it can create no character. It can make no truly faithful soul a doubter. It never did. It never can.
II. The subtlety and attractiveness of this excuse extends not only to the results which we see coming forth in ourselves; it covers also the fortunes of those for whom we are responsible. Everywhere there is this cowardly casting off of responsibilities upon the dead circumstances around us. It is a very hard treatment of the poor, dumb, helpless world which cannot answer to defend itself. It takes us as we give ourselves to it. It is our minister, fulfilling our commissions for us upon our own souls.
III. There is delusion and self-deception in this excuse. Very rarely indeed does a man excuse himself to other men and yet remain absolutely unexcused in his own eyes. Often the very way to help ourselves most to a result which we have set before ourselves is just to put ourselves into a current which is sweeping on that way, and then lie still, and let the current do the rest, and in all such cases it is so easy to ignore or to forget the first step, and so to say that it is only the drift of the current which is to blame for the dreary shore on which at last our lives are cast up by the stream.
IV. If the world is thus full of the Aaron spirit, where are we to find its cure? Its source is a vague and defective sense of personality. I cannot look for its cure anywhere short of that great assertion of the human personality which is made when a man personally enters into the power of Jesus Christ.
Bp. Phillips Brooks.
Illustration
(1) ‘Of course, in one sense it was true that the calf had come out of the furnace, hut it was also true that Aaron had been the chief agent in its production.
Yet, how true this is to nature! All of us are inclined to lay the blame of anything that we are, upon the furnace. The sensualist excuses himself to his friends, in a moment of repentance, by saying that he is the child of a drunkard, or that his companions are solely accountable. He got into ‘a bad set.’ The plutocrat, who piles up his fortune regardless of the lies or oppression by which it is amassed, when some searching exposure comes, defends himself by saying: ‘It is really not my fault, it is the way in which I was trained.’ The young man who flings away his faith tells us that the whole drift of his college was against orthodox evangelicalism—and asks what else could be expected of him. We lay the blame on our unhappy circumstances, or our companions, almost on God, that He made us as we are.’
(2) ‘In a recent letter, Rev. Donald Fraser sends a description of what he witnessed in Central Africa, which throws a lurid light on this incident. ‘The moon has risen. The sound of boys and girls singing in chorus, and the clapping of hands, tell of the village sport. You turn out to the village square to see the lads and girls at play. They are dancing; but every act is awful in its shamelessness. You go back to your tent bowed with an awful shame, to hide yourself. But from that village and that other the same choruses are rising, and you know that under the clear moon God is seeing wickedness that cannot be named, and there is no blush in those who practise it.’ This is heathenism; and God’s anger against such sights is as hot to-day as it was in Aaron’s time. Only who is to blame to-day?’