When the Children of Israel stood round that mount, and heard God say that, if they would obey His voice, they should be a peculiar treasure to Him, they promised that they would faithfully keep all that the Lord said.
But I am sorry to tell you that they soon forgot their promises, and did the very thing God had told them not to do. And this was how it all happened.
Moses was up on the mount with God for forty days and forty nights, and God gave Moses the two Tablets of stone, on which God Himself had written His Ten Commandments.
But forty days and forty nights seemed a long time to the thousands of people waiting below on the plains; and they "gathered themselves together unto Aaron, and said, Up! make us gods, which shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him!"
Then Aaron bade them bring him gold from their ornaments, and he cast the gold into the fire, and it melted down into a great piece of gold, which looked like a calf.
Aaron took a tool and moulded it, and the people said, "These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt!"
Then they offered sacrifices to the golden calf, and feasted, and rose up to dance.
"And the Lord said unto Moses, Go, get thee down; for the people have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. Now, therefore . . . let Me alone, that I may consume them!"
But Moses besought the Lord most earnestly to turn from His anger, and asked Him to remember His servants, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and begged Him to forgive the sin of His people.
So Moses went down the mountain with God's Law in his hands. But when he and Joshua, who was with him, saw from the mount what had happened, and that the people had already broken God's two first commandments, Moses cast down the two Tablets which God had written with His own Hand, and they fell beneath the mountain and were broken to pieces.