This little vignette from Exodus 32:9-14 has always fascinated me:
The Lord said to Moses… “Let my fury burn and devour [these people]…”
But Moses pleaded with the Lord his God… “Calm down your fierce anger. Change your mind about doing terrible things to your own people.”
Then the Lord changed his mind about the terrible things he said he would do to his people.
God changing his mind in this passage (and Numbers 14:11-25) has been explained in a variety of ways, because it messes with our conceptions of divinity. God changing in any way flies in the face of the Greek idea of the impassibility, or changelessness, of God. More importantly, I think, the text presents Moses as more compassionate and level-headed than God, which flies in the face of the New Testament’s assertion that Jesus is better than Moses, and the full revelation of God, “the exact imprint of God’s very being” as the Hebrew writer puts it.
So how should we read passages like this? It occurs to me that we can interpret them as pictures of the normative process of wrestling with and revising our ideas about God. Perhaps the way God appears in the text is not necessarily the way God is in reality, but simply the conception of God that the communities that produced the text had.
And yet God works in those stories, from within that distorted vision of God, to speak to us and lead us into the truth of who God is, ultimately revealed in Jesus.
So if you ever find yourself assuming about God or even hearing something from God that doesn’t seem as good as Jesus, feel free to argue with that “God” about how he should change his mind. Perhaps you’ll grow into a fuller picture of who God is, for you and for the world.
