Monday, May 20, 2024
When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt—we don’t know what has happened to him!” Aaron replied to them, “Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the gold rings that were on their ears and brought them to Aaron. He took the gold from them, fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made it into an image of a calf. Then they said, “Israel, these are your gods, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of it and made an announcement: “There will be a festival to the Lord tomorrow.” Early the next morning they arose, offered burnt offerings, and presented fellowship offerings. The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to party. Exodus 32:1-6
The Stronghold of Idolatry
Moses was on the mountain with God and the Israelites were impatient. They had been through so much – hundreds of years of slavery and hundreds of years of silence from God. Then finally God answers their pleas and sends Moses to lead them out of the bondage of slavery. God miraculously opened the Red Sea so they could cross and escape Pharoah’s army, who drowned when the sea came crashing down on them as they tried to catch up with the fleeing Israelites.
Now they were on a journey to the promised land – a land flowing with milk and honey – promised by God. God had laws for this new nation in the making and he called Moses to meet with him on a mountaintop to receive these instructions. Moses was gone for forty days and because it was longer than they thought he should be, the Israelites were restless.
They began to beg the man in charge in the moment – Aaron – to do something. So he did. He gathered all their jewelry and created a golden calf, and idol, the kind of false god they had been worshipping, who had done nothing to save them from their bondage. Aaron listened to the people and not God. He gathered gold jewelry that was to go for building a temple to God and used it to build a false god. And then not only did he construct the idol for them, he built them an altar where they could bow down in worship before the idol.
Idol - "An image of a deity other than God; any person or thing regarded with blind admiration, adoration, or devotion; a mere image or semblance of something, visible but without substance.”
This idol would not be able to do what they were asking it to do – “…they gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt—we don’t know what has happened to him!”” They wanted this idol to take God’s place and lead them. This is a great example of the ridiculous lies that idols tell and we will believe in our desperation for something to happen. In the moment we are so willing to give up everything to get what we thing we need.
Idols put us right back in bondage that our God has freed us from. Idols pop up on the long journeys, bidding us to follow them instead because the journey is long, and the path is hard. When we are restless, they offer an easier path full of everything we could want and need, but it is really just thorns disguised as fulfillment. We look to idols to find a god we can control, a god we can manipulate into making things the way we think they should be. The Israelites forgot the Lord when Moses took longer than they thought he should be taking. They forgot in that moment how God delivered them from the bondage of slavery and saved them from Pharoah’s army.
When God is silent, we will go looking for an answer – any answer – anywhere. Idols draw us, promising us instant gratification that they will never provide. Sometimes we go backwards when we are waiting on God, choosing to go back to an idol that gave us a moment of instant gratification instead of standing in our faith and trusting the God we know that keeps his promises.
If we will hang on to our faith in the silence and in the delay, that thread we are hanging on to will become the lifeline that brings us back to God. Because in the deafening silence, God is with us; in the delay, God is there. It is during those times that we decide if we will stand on our faith and cling to him and his promises or if we will choose something else to fill the void we have when we shut God out.
