“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 is probably the most well-known and detailed instance of idolatry in the Bible. It is an incredible chapter, and has so many elements in it that you either don’t hear at Sunday School, or somehow quickly forget. I wish I had a lot of time to analyse it verse by verse, because I think it has broad implications for us today.
What I want to focus on briefly however is verse 4. There seems to be two “kinds” of idolatry in the Bible. They amount to the same thing of course, but they take different shapes. The obvious one is to build an idol whom you consciously maintain is not God. This applies to Baal and Ashtoreth and all the pagan gods for example. They are gods of other nations and are never supposed to be the True God. They are obvious substitutes, denials of the true God. This type of idolatry is encoded by the first commandment – “You shall have no other gods before Me”.
But the second type is possibly a bit harder to spot, at least when you’re in the middle of it. This type occurs when the attributes of the true God are corrupted or replaced, when His character is modified to suit our needs. We still believe in “God”. We think we’re worshiping the one true God, when we have actually unconsciously replaced Him with something of our own making. This type is really encoded by all of the rest of the commandments. They reveal God’s true character, and as soon as we dispense with one, we are dealing with a different god.
In the instance of the golden calf, there is a lot of this second type of idolatry. The Israelites still believed it was “God” who brought them out of Egypt. They were still awed by this, and thankful for this. But they made a graven image, presumably their representation of who God was. In doing so they necessarily corrupted the true invisible, spirit nature of God and thus were not worshiping the true God, but their own creation. Not surprisingly, God gets very angry, and so does Moses!
How often do we commit this horrific sin? I pray that we search our hearts and ask the Holy Spirit to convict us of this. Let’s not make God who we want Him to be. He defines Himself.
Bread From A Beggar 