God and the Golden Calf
Bible Passage: Exodus 32-33
Recently, I saw a little girl throwing her tantrums in a shopping mall. She wanted to buy a toy but her mother told her that she would get it for her birthday, if she behaved well. So she started to cry, stamping her foot and yelling, “I want it now!”
We live in a world of instant gratification, where everything has to move as fast as possible. It’s a world that is characterized by impatience. Impatience is a type of restlessness, initiated due to our unwillingness to wait for something to come about. Why are we unwilling to wait? Because we want things to happen in our way, in our time.
When the Israelites suggested to make a god for themselves, they were in fact impatient. Their impatience was also linked to their lack of faith. Moses had been away for days without telling them people when he would return from the mountain of God. So they started to doubt that he would ever return. Maybe they also started to panic because Moses had not come back. What if he never returned to them? Who would lead them out of the desert?
Quite often, we are like the Israelites at that time. In a moment of weakness, we may start to try solving our problems on our own. We may have been praying to God, but we haven’t seen Him acting yet. So we may grow very impatient. We start to rely more on our own understanding than on God. Eventually, we end up creating our own ‘golden calf’ – after all, seeing is easier than believing.
We know that an idol in the spiritual sense is anything that is more important than God. So, if we always want things to happen our way, we are exalting our personal opinion and wishes over God’s will. Admittedly this can be a very subtle trap – and most of us, including myself, keep falling into this trap.
Unfortunately, this can happen to us both in our daily life as well as in our service to God. Quite often, we insist on doing church work in a way, which we personally think is best. But have we really prayed about it? Have we tried to listen to God’s opinion in that matter, be it in our prayers or through the Scriptures? Have we really examined ourselves, whether our decision is driven by personal preferences? Do we insist too much on our own opinion?
In our daily lives, we may be so entangled by our careers, studies and family matters or pleasures of life that we keep pursuing for secular things, without even realizing it. What is the content of our daily prayers? Is it a peaceful life? A blissful family? A better job or better grades? Health? Relief from our financial problems? Do we only pray abou these things? Or are our prayers centered around interceding for those who are sick, those who are weak in faith and the matters of the church? Are we asking the Holy Spirit regularly to purify our hearts and to give us strength to do God’s will and humble ourselves?
After Israel had sinned against God by worshipping the golden calf, about 3000 men were killed (Ex 32:27) as a punishment. The Bible does not say how the Levites chose their “victims” but it seems that they went through the camp and simply killed all those who had not hid in their tents, even after Moses had announced that the Levites would go around to kill all idolaters. Maybe these people did not think that they had done any wrong, or they were still indulging in their eating, drinking and partying (cf. Ex 32:6, 18) – in short, they must have been unrepentant.
The rest of God’s people were punished with a plague (Ex 32:35). In addition, God told them to “take off [their] ornaments” (Ex 33:5). In those days, this seemed to be a way to show one’s grief, and, in this case, the people were to grieve over their own sins (cf. Ex 33:4). In other words, God wanted them to sincerely repent.
What about us today? Yes, we are weak human beings, prone to sin and to repeating the same mistakes. But the question is, are we willing to repent and change? Have we put in effort to improve our spirituality? Or are we stiffnecked, just like the Israelites?