Aaron's Failure of Nerve

0 · Opening housekeeping and invitation to the congregation to open their Bibles to Exodus 32

You're listening to a sermon recorded at Providence Community Church. Truth and Beauty in Community. If you are in the Kansas City area, please consider joining us in person next Sunday. We meet in Lenexa, Kansas at 10:00am every Lord's Day. Until then, we pray that as you open your Bibles, the Lord will open your heart to receive his word. You can be seated. Will dismiss our kids to children's ministry. And if you'll open your Bibles to the book of Exodus, we'll be in chapter 34 today. Sorry, Exodus 32 today.

1 · Challenges the instinctive reading of the golden calf story as primarily about idolatry

The story of the golden calf is probably not mostly about idolatry, though that might be what you'd think initially. The only reason I say that is that even throughout all of their idolatrous worship in that passage, they seem to be intent on worshiping the Lord. It's a little bit of a not ideal passage. There are better passages, I suppose you might say, if you wanted to talk about idolatry. What is the main point of this particular passage? You know, I think it's leadership.

2 · Direct engagement with the text to establish that Moses holds Aaron uniquely responsible for the people's sin

We won't go into all of the examples of leadership in this passage, but we will see that really the whole point of this is the different interactions that Moses has with the Lord and the interactions that Aaron has with the people. Everything pivots around the inaction or action of these two men. And while this passage is obviously showing us that people have their own responsibility for their sin, the focus of responsibility in this passage is to show that Aaron has a unique responsibility as a leader. In verse 21, Moses said to Aaron, what did this people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them? And look at how Moses sees this. He sees this primarily as something that Aaron is responsible for. And in verse 24, when Moses saw that the people had broken loose, and in the text, parenthetically for Aaron had let them break loose to the derision of their enemies.

3 · Direct address to the congregation calling them to recognize their own leadership roles — positional and relational

So I think that what this passage is mostly about is about leadership. And of course, if you study the Old Testament and the New Testament, you see that for a very long time the people of God have been plagued by poor leadership. This sort of thing shows up on just about every other page. Why does that matter to you? I just think that it's time for each one of you to acknowledge the extent to which you are leaders in various ways, in various roles, and so on and so forth. This is not the time for false humility, which we'll talk about here in a moment. Now, some of you are positional leaders. You have a title Husband, father, mother, household manager, a leader at work, or a leader in the church. But I would say that all of you are relational leaders. All of you have influence in the lives of others. Pastor Jonathan Lehman, a guy who's been very kind to me over the years, tells his church the day that tells the members that join the day they join. He says this to them, friend, by joining this church, you will become jointly responsible for whether or not this congregation continues to faithfully proclaim the gospel. That means you will become jointly responsible both for what the church teaches as well as whether or not its members lives remain faithful.

4 · Establishes the ecclesiological framework: the local church is a system of discipleship where all members exercise mutual influence

It's essential to understand that as a local church, we are a system of discipleship. Discipleship doesn't simply happen in the pulpit. Discipleship happens in the fire pits. Well, not in the fire pits, around the fire pits, around conversations with fellow ladies and so on and so forth. Our whole point is to spend time together and to direct one another, to lead one another up to Jesus. And so I think that this sermon on leadership is relevant to each one of you. And if you're still going to be stubborn and say, chris, I promise I'm not leading anything. Well, okay, I'll tell you this. Everything we're talking about today has a lot to do with the fear of man. And I've never once preached a sermon on the fear of man that didn't land on almost everyone who listened to it. It's something we all struggle with. So even if you're going to tell me I'm not a leader in any way, I would tell you, well, this is all about the fear of man. And that's something that each one of us struggles with. The Bible says it's a snare, and then my experience says it's a very common snare.

5 · Introduces the controlling diagnostic category for Aaron's failure: 'effeminate slackness' (Milton) or 'failure of nerve' (Friedman)

So let's get into this passage. What is the basic problem that Aaron has succumbed to? Well, this is something that the poet Milton in Paradise Lost referred to as effeminate slackness. That's Aaron's problem, effeminate slackness. Somebody much a rabbi many, many, many years after Milton said that it was a problem of failure to nerve. That would be Edwin Freeman.