God changes his mind

We are frequently told that God is unchanging and immutable, the same yesterday, today and forever. But that was not Moses’ experience of God that we find in Exodus 32. God was rightly ticked off that the people that he had rescued from Egypt had melted down their jewellery and made a golden calf that they proceeded to worship (and also say that it was this god that had rescued them!)

(It makes me think of the ways that we might do the same. For those of us who are/were well loved and nurtured, who were given opportunities and encouragement in childhood, who have achieved a degree of stability and ‘success’ in society’s eyes, forget all of that and begin to believe that we did it all ourselves. And perhaps also then ‘worship’ – or at least value highly, get distracted by, spend disproportionate time on – those things that we have been able to accumulate.)

I think that God is justly annoyed and asks to be left alone to figure out a punishment. Moses approaches God and reminds him of the promises that he had made in the past to the Israelites. He tells again the story of God’s own faithfulness, to God! Which is interesting because obviously God couldn’t have ‘forgotten’ that, and even the idea that God went off in an angry, vengeful huff is curious.

Nonetheless, the text tells us that God changed his mind, he relented, and did not carry out the punishment on the people that he had considered.

I wonder how we can think about this verse for today. I don’t think that the witness of the whole of Scripture suggests that YHWH is a god who violently punishes his people when they make bad decisions or turn away from him, that is not the image of God that we see in Jesus, so we cannot simply take this verse and apply it directly to our lives. I don’t like the idea that Moses had to remind God to not exact violence on his people, but the fact that Moses apparently helped to change God’s mind is powerful. Perhaps in situations where people’s actions have created painful consequences we can ask God to intervene in how those effects are felt? Perhaps when the decisions and mistakes of those in power and authority brings harm and oppression to those who are marginalised and on the edges, then we can pray that God can change the circumstances?

I’m not sure… but either way, this is a God who apparently, like us, can change his mind. Not so immutable after all.

(Note: Moses later on in the chapter gathers an army of Levites to kill those who had not chosen faithfulness to the Lord. They killed 3000 people. It is interesting that God relented but then Moses organised a massacre. Maybe Moses needed to relent too? Or maybe the story is told from the perspective of a people trying to make sense of themselves and their history, and using God to legitimate their actions?)