“Come on,” they said, “make us some gods who can lead us.  We don’t know what happened to this fellow Moses, who brought us here from the land of Egypt.”                                                                            Exodus 32:1

Some of the saddest words in all of Scripture.

How quickly did they forget.

Forty days prior to the speaking of these words, the Israelites had heard the booming voice of the Lord Himself, descended upon Mt. Sinai.  They had shaken in fear and pleaded with Moses to intercede for them.  (Exodus 19, one of my favorites) Just a few months prior to that, they had seen the Almighty God separate the waters of the Red Sea.  They had seen ‘this fellow Moses,’ God’s chosen agent, stand on the shores of the Sea, raise his arms, and send the waves crashing destruction and death upon their enemies. (Exodus 14:26)  They had followed a cloud and a ball of fire through the desert for weeks.  They resided now at the foot of a mountain cloaked in that cloud and the Holy Presence of their One True God.

And now look at them.

How quickly did they forget.

Their situation, their circumstances made it impossible for them to forget that it was indeed a power outside of their own that had brought them to this place. They just failed to remember whose power it was.

The story gets sadder still.  Aaron, poor foolish Aaron.  He gets so excited that the people are looking to him, are loving what he’s doing.  He was so hungry for their approval.  He wanted them to follow him so desperately.  He built the calf and called for a celebration.  Somewhere in his heart he thought it could actually be ‘to the Lord.’ (Exodus 32:5)

It is so easy to say that they were shortsighted.  So easy to call him duped and needy.  So easy to see that they were wayward and foolish.

Just because their idols were made of gold and accompanied by fires on an altar doesn’t make them any more sinful than our own that hide behind behaviors and political correctness.

It’s easy to spot their idols; they were in the middle of the camp with a big altar erected in front of it.  Our idols are a bit more elusive.  But the worship we offer them is just the same.

What can we learn here?  As we shake our heads in wonder at how they fell so far, what might we see if we turned the looking glass inward instead?  How many days can you go in silence before you hunt the worthless to save and guide you? How profoundly have you seen the Lord at work only to seek out other gods to whom you may give the credit?  When the Lord is working in the background, how patiently do you wait, staring up to the mountain of His Presence in anticipation?  How often do you find yourself somewhere wonderful and turn to the useless to explain how it happened?

And then there’s Aaron.  He compromised the Lord’s holiness in order to gain a following.  He attempted the old bait-and-switch.  He gave them a golden calf and called them to a ‘festival of the Lord.’ He thought that he could dilute the Almighty God of the Universe in order to draw them in.  He even thought it worked.  But if you water down the Impeccable Almighty, you just get a worthless imitation.  He can’t be deluded and doesn’t want us to take Him on our own terms.  He isn’t willing to change His Timeless Perfection because it’s what people would rather hear today.  He is the same yesterday, today, forever.  He doesn’t need a cooler image or a new spin.  He didn’t need for Aaron to make Him look more visible or more fun or more cool or more anything.  He is enough.

We don’t have to spruce up the King of Kings.  People will take Him as He is or they just aren’t going to take Him at all because there is no way on this Earth that we can ever make Him look any better than He already is.

Don’t read about these silly, forgetful, and impetuous Israelites and pity their shortsightedness.  Don’t read the stories and ‘wag your heads’ at their lack of wisdom.  Though our idols may not be of gold, they have certainly set up shop in the center of our lives equally as often as they did in theirs.  Our idols have merely gotten smarter.  And we have merely become more proud.  Be not deceived.   We are the foolish.  We are the Israelites.  We are idolaters.  And we need to remember Who brought us here.