NOTES for Exo 32:32

In both Yahwism and Judaism, the idea appears quite early that a person's fate is determined by what God has written about him in the book of his life. Many Semitic peoples, and not only Semitic peoples, had ideas of something similar. But in Yahwism, and later in Judaism, these ideas changed somewhat in comparison with the way they existed among other peoples.

Most peoples had the idea of fate, of inexorable destiny, unchangeable precisely because it had been written beforehand on certain heavenly tablets that determine a person's earthly path. This record is made at a person's birth, and nothing in it can be changed. Such fatalism is absolutely foreign to the Bible. The fate of a specific person is not predetermined, if only because God does not have a future that is predetermined beforehand and laid out in detail. Future events are determined in the present, determined depending on the will of God and the free choice of the human person.

What the future will be depends not only on God, but also on us ourselves. At the same time, however, in Yahwism and Judaism there is the idea that the people of God, their appearance and their history, at least its main direction, were conceived by God even before the creation of the world. God needed a special people who would become a people-community of the faithful, worshiping Him. And therefore such a people had to appear without fail, for God's plan cannot fail to be carried out. But exactly who will become part of this people, who will belong to it, depends not only on God, but also on people.

People often ask: what if Abraham, in his time, had not followed God, had said "no" to Him? Would God's plan have collapsed? No, of course not. Someone else would simply have stood in Abraham's place, someone who would have said "yes" to God. But that would already have been a different history of a different people, a history that we would know from a sacred book, perhaps with a completely different title.

After all, God also more than once offered Moses the chance to begin the experiment again, from a clean slate, beginning with him, with Moses, who, like Abraham in his time, could have become the forefather of a new people of God. But Moses refuses. He wants to bring to completion what God began with his help. For him, failure means total collapse, after which his own life is worth nothing. For he understands that God's plan is a chance for the human person, a unique chance given only once. God has eternity ahead, but for Moses and his people there will be no second time. And Moses is ready to go to the end, whatever it costs him. For he knows that God's plan cannot fail.