Blot Me Out
Instead

This verse records what may be the most astonishing prayer in the whole Old Testament. Moses went back up the mountain to meet God, confessed the people's sin to Him without minimizing it at all, and then made his plea: forgive them, and if You will not, blot me out of the book that You have written. He was willing to lay down his own place in God's book as the price of theirs.

Let's examine closely how the sentence itself reads. The first half hangs suspended: "Yet now, if You would only forgive their sin...." Moses never finishes the thought, because there was nothing he could offer to complete it. His love for the people ran ahead of his words, and when language failed him, he put himself into the gap: "But if not, please blot me out." He was entreating God for an exchange, his own standing for theirs.

Let's also weigh who he was praying for. These were the same people who had just made the calf, danced and ate around it, and had worn him down for months with their complaining. Moses had every reason to accept God's earlier offer to start over with him alone (Exodus 32:10), but he refused it. A love like this is not natural, and it was not natural to Moses either. He was able to demonstrate this kind of love because he had spent forty days alone with God, and during that time, God's own heart for this people had become his own.

Now observe God's reply: "Whoever has sinned against Me, I will blot out of My book" (Exodus 32:33). Moses' offer was refused. Although he was sincere, Moses could not actually carry another person's sin, because he had his own sin account in that same book. The scene closes without a resolution, and the Old Testament leaves the question open: where is the mediator whose offer God can accept?

This question is answered about fifteen centuries later in the New Testament. Where Moses prayed "blot me out instead" and was turned down, Jesus made the same offer and was taken up on it by the Father. He had no sin of His own in God's book, so He could genuinely stand in for ours, and at the cross He was cut off from the land of the living for the transgression of His people (Isaiah 53:8). What Moses could only ask for, Christ accomplished.

Today's question is one of cost: whose sin am I willing to carry up the mountain at some expense to myself?