Here Are Your Gods

Exodus 32:1-8

April 24, 2022 • Mount Pleasant UMC

I'm going to start this morning with a shameless plug: you should come with me to Israel next January. This will be my sixth trip to the Holy Land, and every time I see and experience new things. Ten years ago, the first time Rachel went with me, we went to the territory of Dan in the far northern part of the country. I knew Dan was one of the twelve tribes of Israel and that the place we were going to visit was their ancient capital, but other than that I had no idea what we were going to see. What I discovered was, for one, Dan is a very lush area. I know I show you a lot of pictures from Israel, and much of it is desert, but in the north, where the headwaters of the Jordan River are, it’s really very green. Another thing I got to see was an ancient city gate, probably a gate that was there when Abraham in the book of Genesis was traveling through. But the thing that made the biggest impression on me, the thing I remember the most, is the altar. Right in the middle of the nature preserve that is Dan today are the remains of an ancient sacrificial site with a mock-up of the altar that once stood there. The platform that remains is sixty by twenty-five feet, and it’s not hard to imagine people walking up the steps to offer their sacrifices. But whose altar was it? Archaeologists differ on that, and the debate goes on (Davis in Holy Land Illustrated Bible, pgs. 466-467).

What we do know is that King Jeroboam of the nation of Israel, established a center for worship along with an altar at Dan in 1 Kings 12. After the death of King Solomon, the kingdom divided into two pieces. The southern part, including Jerusalem, was called Judah or Judea, and the northern part kept the name Israel. Like all siblings, sometimes the two got along and sometimes they went to war with each other, but both of them were, at least on paper, committed to worshipping the one true God, the God of their ancestors Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Jeroboam, however, pretty soon realized he had a potential problem on his hands. Jerusalem, the place for worship, was in Judah, not Israel. That meant that several times a year, when the big festivals took place, people were going to travel south to Jerusalem, where not only would they be tempted to “give their allegiance” back to Israel, they also would spend their money there. Jeroboam and Israel would not benefit from their travel to Jerusalem. Even back then, leaders understood the benefit of having a designated destination. My uncle lives in Orlando; he’s been there most of his life, and he says no one would come to Orlando if Walt Disney had not come there first. Some people even build casinos and convention centers to try to attract people and get their money. But I digress. So what was Jeroboam’s solution? He went one better than Jerusalem. Jerusalem had one Temple. Jeroboam built two, one in the south at Bethel (oddly, only twelve miles north of Jerusalem) and the other in the north at Dan. Then he had golden calf statues built and installed at each sanctuary and he told the people it was out of concern for them. “It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem,” he said. “Here are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” And the king thinks he’s done a good thing. But the writer of 1 Kings says, “This thing became a sin” (1 Kings 12:25-30). It always does when you try to worship something other than God.

Several years ago, Chris Tomlin released a catchy song—in fact, I think we’ve even sung it here—called “Made to Worship.” The chorus began with the declaration: “You and I were made to worship.” Regardless of what you might think of the song, that statement is true: we were made to worship. There is something within us that longs to worship, to look up to something or someone greater than ourselves. We long for someone or something that will meet our deepest needs—our need for security, pleasure, comfort, and power (cf. Oswalt, “Exodus,” Cornerstone Biblical Commentary, Vol. 1, pg. 518). More often than not, though, we as a people tend to look everywhere to satisfy those needs except in the place—in the person—who really can. Because we think God expects too much from us, we go looking for other, less demanding gods. We were made to worship, and what or who we worship will determine the sort of person we become. Think of it this way: our bodies are made to be nourished. What we put in them determines whether or not they function well. If you have a solid diet of Twinkies and Ding Dongs, you will not do well. You’ll be temporarily happy, but your health will suffer long-term. However, if you eat healthy food, your body will thrive. It’s the same thing for our spirit. Worship is nourishment for our soul, and what we put into our soul will determine the people we become. We were made for worship; so what or who will you or do you worship?

Centuries ago, a group of escaped or rescued slaves were in the process of becoming a people, a nation, and they had gathered around the base of a mountain to await instructions from the God who had rescued them. God’s representative, Moses, had gone up the mountain to receive said instructions and had been gone a long time by now. He had, from what they could tell, been up there for forty days without food and water. Not to mention the fact that the top of the mountain, where Moses was, seemed to be surrounded by a “consuming fire.” Maybe Moses hadn’t survived. Or at the least, maybe he had gotten so wrapped up in his experience with God that he had forgotten about the people down below. Here they are, stuck in the wilderness with nothing to do and no idea what is supposed to happen next (cf. Oswalt 517; Goldingay, Exodus & Leviticus for Everyone, pg. 114). Maybe they need to take charge, make something happen, create the next steps themselves. By the way, any time you see that attitude begin to show up in the Bible, it’s never a good thing. What happens next is never positive. Think about Abraham and Sarah, who decide they’ve waited long enough for God to give them a child, and they make their own way—a path that has led to millennia of conflict between Jews and Muslims. Forging our own path, seeking a way to provide for our own needs by manipulating the world never leads to a happy end (cf. Oswalt 516).

Anyway, the people come to Aaron, Moses’ second-in-command, and they say in a coarse way, “We don’t know what has happened to” Moses (32:1), so let’s make our own gods. Or, rather, they tell Aaron, “Make us gods.” Aaron is the political leader, trying to find a way to make the people happy while not compromising too much what he believes. (I’m certainly glad politicians and leaders don’t act like that today.) “Make us gods,” they ask, and I’m amazed they can make this request after all that they have seen so far. They’ve seen the plagues God sent on Egypt that eventually convinced Pharaoh to let them go. They’ve seen God open the sea so that they could cross over on dry land and then close it again so the Egyptians could not capture them. They’ve seen the fire and heard the thunder that indicated God’s presence on the mountain. All of that, and they still say, “Make us gods. The one we have is not sufficient. We want a god who will give us security, pleasure, comfort, and power.” Make us gods.

So we watch as the compromise begins. Aaron compels the people to donate their gold jewelry; even though our English translations says he tells them to “take off” their earrings (32:2), the Hebrew literally means “tear off” (cf. Kaiser, “Exodus,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 2, pg. 478; Oswalt 516). This is not off to a good start. Then we’re told he “cast” an idol in the shape of a calf, “fashioning it with a tool” (32:4). Here’s another interesting tidbit: when he has to explain to Moses what he has done after Moses comes down from the mountain angry, Aaron says, “They gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” (32:24). Pro tip: when you have to lie about what you have done, there’s a problem. The first sign of an unhealthy addiction, whether to a person or a substance, is lying about it. Not off to a good start, and getting worse. Then Aaron brings the idol to the people and announces, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt” (32:4). Now, aside from the grammatical issue of announcing that one calf is their “gods” (plural), how could anyone who has been through what they have been through say what he says? This “god” did not even exist until a few hours ago. How could he say and they believe that this is what rescued them from slavery?

Not to mention they have just broken the first two commandments, commandments which were given to them such a short time ago, in chapter 20. Let’s go back to that list and check on it. Commandment one: “You shall have no other gods before me.” Broken the moment they asked Aaron to make them gods. Commandment two: “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them…” (20:3-5). And look what happens as soon as Aaron presents the golden calf to them and invites them to a “festival to the Lord”: “The next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry” (32:5-6). By the way, that last part is Bible-code for “they got really drunk and had sex with people they shouldn’t have” (cf. Kaiser 478; Oswalt 516). If it was bad before, it’s worse now. They are doing things God has forbidden and they are offering the sacrifices meant for him to an idol. They are claiming what they are doing is for God, but it looks nothing like what God expects.

But, pastor, we don’t bow at the feet of golden calves. We don’t engage in immoral parties and call it worship. That’s true, but a lot of things we claim are “for God” are really about our own security, pleasure, comfort or power. We indulge in the worst of the world’s ways Monday through Saturday and then put on a front for worship on Sunday. I was a fairly new pastor when I had a young lady ask me, “If I just ask for forgiveness, then I can sleep with anyone I want and God has to forgive me, right?” Honestly, I was taken aback by her honesty and bluntness, and I don’t remember what I said, but if I had a chance now, I’d tell her: you don’t understand forgiveness and you don’t really know God and all that Jesus has done for you. You’re treating Jesus’ sacrifice lightly. But then that’s what we see all the time. We have celebrities who “thank God” when they win an award, and live like the devil the rest of the time. We do things to enhance our own power, to make sure we are comfortable, and we claim God has blessed us. But let one bad thing come into our lives and we are ready to curse and blame God. Idolatry is about rejecting the authority of the one true God and finding something or someone else to put in his place. And though there are no golden calves, idolatry is everywhere today (cf. Wright, Here Are Your Gods, pg. 31).

A few weeks ago, I came across an article online whose headline caught my attention. It was titled, “This Nine-Question Quiz Will Ruin Your Day” (https://churchleaders.com/worship/worship-articles/370855-this-nine-question-quiz-will-ruin-your-day.html). I knew it was click-bait. So of course I clicked on it, because who doesn’t want their day ruined by a nine-question quiz, right? Turns out, it was actually an article about the nature of idolatry, which this author defined as anything in your life that steals worship from God. And, he said (as an ancient Biblical prophet might have said) that idolatry is at the heart of all our sin; the biggest problem in our life is a “worship disorder.” The nine questions constituted what he called an “idolatry detection test,” and I decided since it ruined my day, I might as well ruin yours, too. Sound fair? So, here are the questions along with some of my commentary. There is a place on your outline paper to write down the answers, and you don’t have to share your answers with anyone else.

Question number one. Fill in the blank: The thing I’d be most worried about losing is _____________. Now, you can’t put “God” in the blank; that’s cheating. What is it? Your family? Money? Respect? The really cool car you just bought? Your technology? Your comfortable life? The thing I’d be most worried about losing is…write that down. Question number two. (You didn’t know there was a pop quiz today, did you?) Number two is another fill in the blank. The thing I’d be most worried about never attaining is __________. What dream or plan do you worry you will never achieve? Sometimes we have dreams we aren’t even aware of until they are broken. Maybe it’s a certain level of success in your field of work, or maybe it’s just being a good mom or dad. For some, we live out our dreams through our kids. You know, the parent who wanted to achieve in a certain sport but didn’t, so the idol becomes success for the child in that sport. The thing I’d be most worried about never attaining is…

Question number three. What would you change right now about yourself if you could? Your looks? Your weight? Your job? Your economic situation? If you had a magic wand and could change anything about yourself, what would it be? Are we getting uncomfortable yet? Question number four. What have you been most willing to sacrifice for? There’s a reason worship is often described in the Bible as sacrifice, because we will give up most anything for the benefit of something or someone who is important to us. This is the dad who wants to achieve success in his job and is told that such success looks like 80-hour work weeks minimum. I remember talking with a dad who was never home and he didn’t understand why his family was so upset. He was doing it for them. Or was he? What his kids most wanted was his presence. Or maybe it’s the mom who is afraid her children will “miss out.” FOMO: fear of missing out. It’s a real thing. So she spends every day of the week running kids from one activity to another club to the next sports practice. And while the kids may be considered “well-rounded,” they are also exhausted and have no real relationship with their parents. We sacrifice for what we worship. Am I meddling yet? Have I ruined your day yet?

Question number five. (We’re at the halfway point!) What has made you the most bitter in life? This may sound like a strange question, but think about it. Sometimes we hold onto bitterness and it becomes the center of our world; bitterness itself becomes the thing we worship. Did someone betray your confidence? Did you get passed over for a promotion at work? Did he leave you? Did she walk out? What has made you the most bitter in life? And that leads naturally to the next question, number six. What can’t you forgive? “The inability to forgive is almost always connected to an idol you think someone robbed you of.” We serve a savior who prayed while being nailed to a Roman cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). I know it’s hard; there are things in my life that have been a challenge to forgive, and just when I think I have gotten past it, it comes rushing back. Forgiveness is not allowing that thing, whatever happened, to control your life any longer, and no one ever said it would be easy. But it’s necessary if we’re going to live the life God intended for us to live. So, what can’t you forgive?

Question number seven gets us back to the story of Aaron in Exodus 32. What are you willing to lie for? What are you trying to protect by lying? As I said earlier, Aaron does one thing but tells Moses something else happened. He’s lying to protect himself, so that Moses (and, by connection, God) doesn’t think poorly of him or worse. So Aaron lies: “I threw [the gold] into the fire, and out came this calf!” (32:24). It doesn’t matter if he thinks Moses believed him or not; he is lying to protect his reputation, his position in the community, maybe even his life. Does he think God doesn’t know the truth? Does he think Moses doesn’t? What are you willing to lie for? Question number eight. Where do you turn for comfort? To put it another way: when things go wrong, where do you turn to tell yourself you’re okay? Maybe it’s your family or your friend group. Maybe it’s food (there’s a reason they call it “comfort food”) or shopping. That link to Amazon is oh so easy to click. Or maybe comfort comes in more destructive forms, like over-indulging in alcohol, or drugs, or pornography. Whether we admit it or not, the person or the thing we turn to for comfort is a god to us. There’s a reason the one true God is called “the God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3), but we prefer to find our own things that give comfort (at least temporarily) and demand so little of us. Now, am I meddling yet?

Okay, one more question—number nine. Whose approval do you seek? Who do you want to hear say, “Well done”? You know, when you no longer have kids at home, you have to tell stories about your pets, so here’s another Barney analogy. When he does something, whether a trick or something he knows he’s not supposed to do, he turns and looks at me to see if I approve or disapprove. Pets learn to read our faces and the sound of our voices so they know if they have pleased you or not. And they want to please you. Because he has attached himself to me, he wants my approval. So whose approve do you seek? You know it as well as I do: you can have 99 people saying you’ve done a good job, but if that one person disapproves, the other 99 really don’t matter. And sometimes that person whose approval you are seeking is a good choice and other times it’s not. There have been times in my life where I was constantly waiting on the approval of someone who I now realize was never going to give it. No matter what happened, it would never be good enough. Whose approval do you seek?

Now, look over your answers to these nine questions. The author of this quiz that will ruin your day suggests if you have written the same or similar answers down at least three times, that is probably a god or an idol to you. Then he writes this: “There’s likely nothing wrong with any of the things you wrote down. But when those things have ultimate worth and weight in your life—in other words, when they displace God—they lead to misery.” You might as well put them in the middle of your life and declare, “Here are my gods.”

But here’s the important point: we’ve taken the first step this morning in dethroning those gods. We’ve named them. We’ve recognized the power these gods have in our lives. What we name we bring into the light and we can confront. It’s when those gods, those idols, lurk in the background, the dark places of our lives, that they exert inordinate, maybe even ultimate, control. When they are named and brought into the light, the truth becomes obvious. We cannot put ultimate trust in things and people that will never truly deliver ultimate security. Here is the bedrock truth: “False gods never fail to fail” (Wright 38). Biblical scholar Christopher Wright has a way with words when he describes idolatry this way: “The worship of false gods is the fellowship of futility, the grand delusion whose only destiny is disappointment” (48).

So Moses is still up on the mountain while the people are engaging in “revelry” down below. He has no idea what is going on among his people, but God knows. And God interrupts his lessons to Moses so Moses can go down to put a stop to the revelry. “Go down,” God tells Moses, “because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt” (32:7). Notice the change in the pronouns. The people have become Moses’ people, not God’s, but it’s not because God has rejected them. It’s because they have chosen to reject God. It’s sort of like when one of our kids would misbehave, and Cathy would tell me, “Your son did this” or “Your daughter did that.” Yeah, it’s like that. “Your people, Moses.” In fact, just a couple of verses down, God threatens to disown, even destroy, the people because of their idolatry. God says to Moses, “These people…are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation” (32:10). Did you catch that? God’s going to get rid of Israel and offers Moses the opportunity to become the start of the next “great people.” What man wouldn't take God up on that offer?

Moses. Moses won’t. In the conversation that follows, Moses basically tells God that the Egyptians will think he only brought the people out to the wilderness to kill them. Moses doesn’t want to become a new nation; he wants God to save this nation. And I don’t have time this late in the sermon to deal with all the issues around the statement that God “relented” (32:14), but suffice it to say, God does not destroy Israel. Moses, however, does go on down the mountain, and when he gets there, he takes the tablets that contain the very handwriting of God (wouldn’t that be a great font on your computer—“handwriting of God”? I'd use that for everything!) and he breaks the tablets. He destroys them, letting the people know in dramatic fashion that their relationship with God is broken. Unlike the tablets, it’s not broken beyond repair, but it is broken. They will need to re-learn who is truly God.

Several years ago, following a horrific incident where two children murdered a toddler, an editorial in a British newspaper declared, “All our gods have failed.” And whether they knew it or not, that’s the truth. All the gods we create always fail. Again, the words of Christopher Wright: “Those things we thought could deliver us from evil, and in which we invested great amounts of intellectual, financial, and emotional capital in the hope that they would deliver us, have instead spectacularly disappointed us” (48). They always do. In the midst of a broken relationship with the one true God, standing in the rubble of the broken tablets, what choice will we make? Will we keep pursuing the gods we have made or will we pursue the God who made us? Let’s pray.