Worshipping Creation or Creator?

And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”

Exodus 32:4

Let us imagine a Christian who would say he loves church, Jesus, and God. But if you were to follow him for a week, you would notice something is off. On average, he doesn’t pray and his Bible is collecting dust. He attends his church, but he only goes if something else doesn’t pop up. And when he does attend, he’s an audience member, not a participant. He doesn’t have any friends there, and doesn’t volunteer or give generously for the needs of the church. If you were to ask him if he loves God, he would say, “Absolutely!” But does he really?

Now what is the problem with this person? His words tell one story, “I love God” but his actions tell a different story, “other things are more important to me than God.” This problem can be known as idolatry. Idolatry is “anything we put above God.” It’s anytime we put God second. When you think of idolatry, your first response is to probably think, “That doesn’t apply to me.” I don’t burn incense to a figurine. I don’t give offerings in temples. Idolatry is expressed those ways in many cultures, but at its core, idolatry is putting "me" first.

After Moses received the tablets with the commandments on them, he stayed on the mountain for about 40 days, having an extended conversation with God. During that time, the Israelites who were at the bottom of the mountain began to doubt Moses – which was anything but unusual. After a while they decided that either Moses really wasn’t meeting with God and had run away, or God wasn’t going to let him come back.

Either way, they needed a god to worship. So they talked Moses’ brother Aaron (their priest) into casting a golden calf for them. The golden calf was an Egyptian god and this one was meant to be a visual representation of the God who had delivered them from Egypt, the God they couldn’t understand because they had never seen this God. But there is something else behind the story of the calf, something that has much deeper meaning for us today.

You see, it’s not just the Israelites. We all need a god to worship. Humans are born to worship. Someone has rightly said, “people are born with a hole in them.” This hole is right in the middle of our souls. Every human being has to find something to fill that hole. Some people try to fill it with food or alcohol or drugs. Some become consumed by their work in an effort to ignore, if not fill the hole. Others find variety of different ways to try to respond to the hole. But those who follow the right course discover that, that hole is shaped like God and can only be filled by worshiping the God who created them. Only in worship can they be made complete.

The Israelites in the Exodus story had recently experienced the power and provision of the one true God. After what they had seen and experienced in escaping Egypt and out in the wilderness, they should have been completely convinced of whom they should worship. But they failed to trust that God would continue to provide for and deliver them. Instead of trusting in this God they could not see, they fell back into the idol worship they had learned in Egypt.

And because they had no idol handy, they took their worldly wealth – the gold jewelry they had – and melted it down to make an object of worship. The people failed to trust in and worship the God who created the universe and instead chose to worship the wealth of their previous life, in the form of a small, lifeless calf.

St. Augustine described what the Israelites did as, “disordered love,” or the love of the wrong objects in one’s life. It is significant that Aaron and the people of Israel did not present the golden calf as “another god.” They used it as a symbol of Yahweh: “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.”  In v. 5 they said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to YHWH.” So all this they were doing was supposedly for Yahweh, it just wasn’t how He had taught them that they were to worship him. Their great sin here was not so much worshiping “another” god, as worshiping the Biblical God in an unbiblical way.

We need to beware of the same temptation.  Just because we are doing something in our churches in Jesus’ name doesn’t mean it is right, or acceptable to Him. It could be entirely heretical. We need to make sure that everything we are doing is in accordance with the instructions He has given us in His word. This is where we need to be careful with creativity and innovation. Creativity can be a good thing, but it must always remain within the boundaries of scripture, lest like Israel with unbiblical innovations we tell people “This is your god”, when it is isn’t!

If we are honest with ourselves and don’t try to see ourselves as better or more righteous than we really are, we have to admit that there’s probably never been a more idolatrous generation of people than the one that currently inhabits earth. We’re now in one of the most potentially devastating economic meltdowns in history. It seems to me that this would be a perfect time to reorder our priorities and stop worshiping the system that got us into this mess, and instead begin worshiping the God who provides for our every need, if only we’ll trust that it’s so.

This Lenten Season what are we choosing: Worshiping a golden idol or worshiping the one who created gold. Let us live to worship God and let everything else fall into place.

God Bless You.