Satisfying God’s Wrath
Exodus 32:30–35
But now, if you will forgive their sin—but if not, please blot me out of your book that you have written. Exodus 32:32

Moses was offering to take the place of his people as a recipient of God’s judgment, to be separated from God for them. On the preceding day, before Moses had come down the mountain, God had said something that could have been a great temptation. If Moses would agree, God would destroy the people for their sin and would begin again to make a new Jewish nation from Moses (see v. 10). Even then Moses had rejected the offer. But after having been with his people and being reminded of his love for them, his answer, again negative, rises to even greater heights. God had said, “I will destroy them and make a great nation of you.” Moses says, “No, rather destroy me and save them.”

He must have said this in great anguish, for the Hebrew text is uneven and Moses’s second sentence breaks off without ending, indicated by a dash in the middle of verse 32. It is a strangled cry, a sob welling up from the heart of a man who is asking to be damned if that could mean the salvation of the people he had come to love.

Moses lived in the early years of God’s revelation to his people and at that point probably understood very little. Certainly he did not know, as we know, that what he had prayed for could not be. Moses offered to give himself for his people to save them. But Moses could not save even himself, let alone them; for he too was a sinner. He had once even committed murder, thus breaking the sixth commandment. He could not substitute for his people. He could not die for them.

But there is one who could. Thus, “when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons” (Gal. 4:4–5). Jesus’s death was not just for those who believed in Old Testament times, for those who sinned in the wilderness and for their successors. It was also for us who live today, both Jews and Gentiles. On the basis of Christ’s death, in which he himself received the full judicial outpouring of God’s wrath against sin, those who believe now come to experience not wrath (though we richly deserve it) but grace abounding.

Grace does not eliminate wrath; wrath is still stored up against the un-repentant. But grace does eliminate the necessity for everyone to experience it, including you.