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The Prophetic Lens

Our Natural Desire to Worship

January 31

“1 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, ‘Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” (Exodus 32:1)

 

            The issue in the heart of men is not worship; for we know how to worship; as a matter of fact, we were created to worship. There is something in the inside of us that cries out to reverence something far greater than us. In this verse, we see the children of Israel expressing that desire. Their leader, Moses, is now up in the mountain in a deep conversation with God as God is releasing a new way of life totally foreign to the known world. Not knowing what was going to happen next; in the middle of a desert and facing the un-known, they asked Aaron, the priest and brother of Moses, to make them gods that they can follow.

            The people did not have a relationship with God; Moses did. Today, many people, even in the church, have yet to develop a relationship with God and sad enough, at times, not even the pastor has truly developed a relationship with the Lord. People still place the pastor as the Moses that can go before God on their behalf.  The children of Israel’s disconnection with God did not take away their deep desire to worship, but there is a problem, their worship was placed away from God. So Aaron made them a cow made out of gold and they put on a party around it. That was not a good idea; thousands of people died as the result of making this idol. That is the problem with idols; they will always lead to death!

            What do you worship? What do you celebrate? You are, without a doubt, worshipping something…is it the Lord?

 

 

 

One response

  1. Dennis Owen Avatar
    Dennis Owen

    Evidently neither Aaron nor the people believed Moses would ever be seen again. After all, forty days is a long time. What were they to think? That God had abandoned them after all? So now they needed a new god. They were out of Egypt, but Egypt was not out of them. The story tells us Moses’ reaction to their idolatry and unholy actions, but it doesn’t tell us what must have gone on inside of Aaron. How ashamed must he have been to see his brother reflecting the glory of God and he having led the people into giving their gold to produce the idolatrous calf? Was he ashamed before Moses, or before God? Both? The people had been left in his charge and he had failed miserably. Was he horrified at how easily he had lost any and all sense of what He had come to know of God’s power and presence while witnessing Him deliver Israel from Egypt? I can’t even imagine what Moses must have had to say to Aaron in his rage at how he had turned from God and used his God-given leadership to organize their idolatry.

    But maybe that’s what made Aaron the right man for the job. We see enough in the Bible, and know from our own lives, that God is looking for people who know their own sinfulness, who are aware they are not holy and that apart from God’s mercy and forgiveness, they would be destroyed (Exodus 34:6-7). Moral failures, if they bring us to true repentance and deep humility before God, are the very things that may protect us against further sin against God, and prepare us for ministry.

    This episode with the Golden Calf reminds us all of the costliness of sin (1 Cor 10). Sin is always a threat to God’s work in the world. God’s grace is greater, but let us never view God’s grace as a license for sin or laxity in our living out the mission to which God has called us. Indeed, the underlying conviction of Christian worship is that we are all in a state of separation. We are separated from God, from self, from those around us. But God has entered into our history in Jesus Christ to bring restoration. Thus in true worship our relationship to God is established, maintained, repaired, and transformed. Thanks be to God!

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