The Grass-Eating Glory and the Man in the Breach Text: Psalm 106:19-23
Introduction: The Astonishing Velocity of Apostasy
One of the most sobering realities we encounter in the Scriptures is the sheer speed with which a people can abandon God. It is not a slow drift, a gentle erosion over centuries. It can happen in a flash. It can happen while the mountain is still smoking from the very presence of God. While the thunder of His voice still echoes in the valleys, the people can be down below, demanding a god they can see, a god they can manage, a god that looks like a cow.
We like to think of ourselves as more sophisticated than that. We have two thousand years of church history, systematic theologies, and leather-bound Bibles. We would never trade the glory of the Almighty for a farm animal. But this is the height of pride. The human heart is an idol factory, as Calvin said, and it is always open for business. Our idols are simply more refined. We don't melt down our jewelry to make a calf; we melt down our convictions to make a career. We don't bow to a molten image; we bow to public opinion, to sexual autonomy, to political power, or to the god of self-esteem.
Psalm 106 is a national confession. It is a painful, unvarnished history of Israel's covenant unfaithfulness. The psalmist is not gloating over the sins of his ancestors; he is identifying with them. "We have sinned with our fathers," he says earlier in the psalm. This is a corporate recognition that the same sinful rot that led them to Horeb is present in every generation. This passage, then, is not a museum piece for us to observe with detached curiosity. It is a mirror. It shows us the anatomy of idolatry, the tragedy of divine forgetfulness, the reality of God's holy wrath, and the desperate need for a mediator.
The incident at Horeb is not just a historical blunder. It is a paradigm of rebellion. It demonstrates a fundamental choice that every human being must make: will we worship the Creator, who is glorious, transcendent, and invisible? Or will we worship the creature, something tangible, something we can control, something, at the end of the day, that eats grass? And when we make the wrong choice, which we inevitably do, our only hope is that someone stands in the breach for us.
The Text
They made a calf in Horeb And worshiped a molten image. Thus they exchanged their glory For the image of an ox that eats grass. They forgot God their Savior, Who had done great things in Egypt, Wondrous deeds in the land of Ham And awesome things by the Red Sea. Therefore He said that He would destroy them, Had not Moses His chosen one stood in the breach before Him, To turn away His wrath from eradicating them.
(Psalm 106:19-23 LSB)
The Horeb Abomination (v. 19)
The psalmist begins by recounting the great apostasy at the foot of Sinai.
"They made a calf in Horeb And worshiped a molten image." (Psalm 106:19)
Notice the location: Horeb. This is another name for Mount Sinai. This is not just any piece of real estate. This is the very mountain where God had descended in fire, where the Ten Commandments were being given, where the terms of the covenant were being laid down. Their rebellion was not committed in some far-off, pagan land, influenced by foreign customs. It was a home-grown apostasy, committed in the very shadow of God's manifest presence. This is high-handed, audacious sin.
They "made" a calf. This was not an accident. It was a deliberate, calculated act of manufacturing a god. They took the gold that God had provided them from the Egyptians, a sign of His favor and deliverance, and they perverted it into an object of worship. This is what sin always does. It takes the good gifts of God, His blessings, and twists them into instruments of rebellion. They wanted a god they could fashion with their own hands, a god indebted to them, a god they could lead, rather than a God who would lead them.
And they "worshiped" it. The worship of the true God is spiritual, governed by His Word. The worship of a false god is sensual, governed by our appetites. As the account in Exodus tells us, "they sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play" (Ex. 32:6). This was a pagan revel, a festival of self-indulgence masquerading as worship. When you invent your own god, you get to invent your own rules. This is the great appeal of all idolatry. It offers a way to be "religious" without the inconvenient demand of submission to the true and living God.
A Bad Trade (v. 20)
Verse 20 lays out the sheer stupidity of their transaction. It is perhaps the worst deal in the history of the world.
"Thus they exchanged their glory For the image of an ox that eats grass." (Psalm 106:20)
What was "their glory"? Their glory was God Himself. The glory of Israel was that the living God, the Creator of heaven and earth, had condescended to dwell among them, to be their God. The Shekinah glory filled the tabernacle. God's presence was their unique inheritance, their defining feature among all the nations. They had the real thing. They had the source of all glory, beauty, and power in their midst.
And they traded it. They exchanged it. For what? "For the image of an ox that eats grass." The psalmist heaps contempt on their idol. It's not just an ox, a symbol of power and fertility in the ancient world. It is an ox that eats grass. It is a dependent creature. It is a beast of the field, whose entire existence is consumed with filling its belly with vegetation. They traded the transcendent, self-existent God for a graven image of a dumb animal preoccupied with its next meal. This is the essence of idolatry. It is always a downgrade. It is always an exchange of the glorious for the mundane, the eternal for the perishable, the Creator for the creature. The Apostle Paul riffs on this very theme in Romans 1, where he says that sinful men "exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling things" (Rom. 1:23). This is not progress; it is a pathetic and tragic devolution.
Covenant Amnesia (v. 21-22)
What is the root cause of such a foolish exchange? The psalmist diagnoses it as a catastrophic failure of memory.
"They forgot God their Savior, Who had done great things in Egypt, Wondrous deeds in the land of Ham And awesome things by the Red Sea." (Psalm 106:21-22)
Forgetfulness is not a passive mental lapse here. In the Bible, to "forget" God is a willful act of disobedience. It is a deliberate setting aside of His claims and His history with them. They didn't just have a momentary memory slip; they actively suppressed the truth of their own story. And what a story it was.
He was "God their Savior." He had rescued them. Their very existence as a free people was a testimony to His saving power. The psalmist then piles up the descriptions of God's work. He had done "great things," "wondrous deeds," and "awesome things." He is referring to the ten plagues that humbled the most powerful nation on earth, the supernatural pillar of cloud and fire, and the climactic, nation-defining miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. These were not subtle hints of God's power. These were earth-shattering, history-altering demonstrations of His sovereignty and love for them.
And yet, they forgot. The memory of the water standing up like walls on either side was erased by the desire for a golden calf. This shows us that gratitude is the foundation of faithfulness. When we forget to thank God for what He has done, we are just a few steps away from fashioning a new god to serve our present lusts. A people who lose their history will lose their God. This is why the Scriptures are filled with commands to "remember." We are to remember the Sabbath, remember the covenant, remember all His benefits. Anamnesis, remembering, is central to covenant life.
Wrath Averted by Mediation (v. 23)
The consequence of this treasonous idolatry is swift and severe. God's holiness demands a response.
"Therefore He said that He would destroy them, Had not Moses His chosen one stood in the breach before Him, To turn away His wrath from eradicating them." (Psalm 106:23)
God's wrath is not a petty temper tantrum. It is the settled, holy, and righteous opposition of a perfectly just God to all that is evil. For God to overlook this kind of blatant rebellion would be for Him to deny His own character. He is not a celestial grandfather who just winks at sin. He is a consuming fire. And so, the sentence was just: destruction. He threatened to wipe them out and start over with Moses.
But then we see the glorious intrusion of grace, operating through a mediator. "Had not Moses His chosen one stood in the breach before Him." The image is of a city wall that has been broken down by an enemy attack. The breach is the point of vulnerability, where destruction will pour in. To stand in the breach is to place oneself in that gap, to absorb the onslaught, to shield the people from the coming judgment. It is an act of substitutionary courage.
Moses, God's chosen one, did this. As we read in Exodus 32, he pleaded with God on the basis of God's own reputation and His promises to the patriarchs. He identified with the people, even offering to have his own name blotted out of God's book. He was a true intercessor. His intervention was effective: it served "to turn away His wrath." This is a stunning picture. God's wrath is real, it is moving, and it can be turned back by the prayers of a righteous mediator.
The Greater Moses
This entire episode is a profound object lesson that points us forward. As great as Moses was, he was a flawed man. He himself would later be barred from the promised land for his own sin. He was a type, a foreshadowing, of a greater Mediator to come.
We too have exchanged the glory of God for cheap idols. We have forgotten our Savior and the wondrous deeds He accomplished for us, not at the Red Sea, but at the cross. We have taken the good gifts of creation and fashioned them into gods. And because of this, the righteous wrath of God stands against us. The wall of our righteousness is breached, and we stand exposed to utter destruction.
But God, in His mercy, has provided a Mediator. Jesus Christ is our chosen one. He did not just stand in the breach; He became the breach. On the cross, He stood in the gap between a holy God and a sinful people. He did not simply pray to turn away God's wrath; He absorbed the full, undiluted fury of that wrath in His own body. He took the damnation we deserved so that we might receive the blessing He deserved.
Moses argued on the basis of God's promises. Christ is the fulfillment of all God's promises. Moses offered to be blotted out of the book. Christ was actually cut off from the land of the living for our transgressions. Moses turned away wrath for a time. Christ exhausted the wrath of God against His people for all time.
Therefore, our response should not be to congratulate ourselves that we don't worship golden calves. Our response should be to flee from our sophisticated, modern idolatries and run to the only Mediator who can save. We must confess our covenant amnesia, our wicked exchanges, and our profound tendency to worship the creature rather than the Creator. And we must cling to the one who stood in the breach for us, the Lord Jesus, who is our only hope of glory.