second commandment of the covenant words (Exo 20:4), whereby Israel had broken the covenant with the Lord, and fallen back to the heathen customs of Egypt. Aaron also shared the guilt of this transgression, although it was merely out of sinful weakness that he had assented to the proposals of the people and gratified their wishes (cf. Deu 9:20). He also fell with the people, and denied the God who had chosen him, though he himself was unconscious of it, to be His priest, to bear the sins of the people, and to expiate them before Jehovah. The apostasy of the nation became a temptation to him, in which the unfitness of his nature for the office was to be made manifest, in order that he might ever remember this, and not excuse himself from the office, to which the Lord had not called him because of his own worthiness, but purely as an act of unmerited grace.
Before Moses left the mountain, God told him of the apostasy of the people (Exo 32:7, Exo 32:8). “Thy people, which thou hast brought out of Egypt:” God says this not in the sense of an “obliqua exprobratio,” or “Mosen quodammodo vocare in partem criminis quo examinetur ejus tolerantia et plus etiam maeroris ex rei indignitate concipiat” (Calvin), or even because the Israelites, who had broken the covenant, were no longer the people of Jehovah; but the transgression of the people concerned Moses as the mediator of the covenant.
Verse 8
“They have turned aside quickly (lit., hurriedly):” this had increased their guilt, and made their ingratitude to Jehovah, their Redeemer, all the more glaring.
verses 9-10
“Behold, it is a stiff-necked people (a people with a hard neck, that will not bend to the commandment of God; cf. Exo 33:3, Exo 33:5; Exo 34:9; Deu 9:6, etc.): now therefore suffer Me, that My wrath may burn against them, and I may consume them, and I will make of thee a great nation.” Jehovah, as the unchangeably true and faithful God, would not, and could not, retract the promises which He had given to the patriarchs, or leave them unfulfilled; and therefore if in His wrath He should destroy the nation, which had shown the obduracy of its nature in its speedy apostasy, He would still fulfil His promise in the person of Moses, and make of him a great nation, as He had promised Abraham in Gen 12:2. When God says to Moses, “Leave Me, allow Me, that My wrath may burn,” this is only done, as Gregory the Great expresses it,
