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In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.
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."
Aaron answered them, "Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me."
So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.
Then they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt."
When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, "Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord."
So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.
Exodus 32:1-6
This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
There was an old cliché used years ago during shows that depicted life in the Old West.
A cowboy would be away from home either performing some duty or facing a challenge and then the scene would shift back to where they lived. When this happened, you would often hear a narrator say:
"Meanwhile, back at the ranch."
The saying found its way into mainstream culture as people would say it often to refer to things that were happening at home while they were in the midst of things that were happening elsewhere.
Well in today’s scripture, we have an Old Testament "back at the ranch" scene. As we studied yesterday, Moses wrapped things up with God on Mount Sinai after a long stay of 40 days and nights. Right before he departed to head back down the mountain and deliver God’s direction to the Israelites, the scriptures tell us that he received the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20) that had been written by God’s finger “on two stone tablets”.
Meanwhile, “back at the ranch”, we see where God’s chosen people decide to make a terrible mistake, giving Moses’ brother Aaron a sinful request, one that he was complicit with. Look again at these opening six verses of Exodus, chapter 32:
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."
Aaron answered them, "Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me."
So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.
Then they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt."
When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, "Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord."
So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.
At the start of this chapter, we find the Israelites in a state of impatience and boredom. There’s a saying that an idle mind can be the devil’s playground and in this account, we see that to be true. For the people who had sworn obedience to their God, vowing to do everything He had told them to do, suddenly decide that they want to have other gods to worship, much like they had seen the Egyptians have when they lived in that land.
And so they go to Aaron, yes the same Aaron that God told Moses would be the high priest of the Israelite people, and say this to him:
"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."
I think we can all agree that forty days and nights would be a long time to wait for someone to return if they left with no indication when they would come back but this is where faith comes in, faith that can feed perseverance and patience. Unfortunately, the faith of the Israelites was very weak and they get tired of waiting for Moses, the one who had brought them “up out of Egypt”. Not knowing what may have happened to him, the people of God decide to abandon their Lord and go chase after ghosts, gods that only existed in their minds who would “go before” them.
It’s important to note that Aaron could have stopped the foolishness immediately, taking a stand for his God and rebuking the people. After all, he had witnessed God’s power first hand when he accompanied Moses to challenge Egypt’s Pharaoh on multiple occasions. If anyone fully knew that the God of Israel was real and the only true God, it should have been him. Further, he was already aware of the Ten Commandments that Moses was soon to be carrying down the mountain, inscribed on the stone tablets.
Now what Aaron didn’t know was what his brother had learned during his extended mountain stay. Because in his conversation with Moses, we saw where the Lord had great expectations for Aaron, obviously seeing something special in his character that led Him to believe he (Aaron) could represent Him well as the people’s spiritual leader. Part of those great expectations would have involved obedience and the ability to help others from doing what was wrong in God’s eyes.
In other words, God saw that Aaron could guide the Israelites toward fulfilling all of His commandments, commandments that both Aaron and the people knew already. For you’ll remember that Moses had sealed the covenant between God and His people before he ascended Mount Sinai.
So now Aaron was faced with a dilemma as the people of Israel asked him to clearly defy two of God’s first commandments:
“You shall have no other gods before Me.” Exodus 20:3
and
“You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in Heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them.” Exodus 20:4
What Aaron should have done is to correct the Israelites, quoting God’s commands while preaching and teaching them the importance of patience and waiting on the same God who had delivered them from Egypt. After all, was this almighty, infinitely powerful God not worth waiting for?
But Aaron didn’t stand firm at all, did he?
In fact, there is nothing in scripture that leads us to believe he offered even an ounce of resistance. Instead, he gave the following instructions to the people:
"Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me."
And once he had all the gold in hand, he did this:
So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.
How did the Israelites respond to this golden calf idol?
We read where they proclaimed:
"These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt."
With this, we see where Aaron had two strikes against him already.
First, he went along with the sinful request of the people of God and formed an idol with his own hands.
Second, he didn’t speak out against the Israelites desire to now follow the false gods that they believed had brought them “out of Egypt”.
This left Aaron with only strike left before he struck out before God and unfortunately, he didn’t take long before he used it.
For the scriptures tell us that Aaron "built an altar in front of the calf” before announcing this:
“Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.”
And so it wasn’t bad enough that Aaron actually made the idol for the Israelites to worship but he doubled down on this sinfulness by constructing an altar and then encouraging the people to have a worship festival directed toward a god that they were using to replace the one true God.
You can’t get much more pagan than that.
And so we read where this happened on the next day:
“...the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry."
Yes, without Moses, the Israelite people were having an abundantly sinful time “back at the ranch” with the person at the middle of things being the one who should have known better, the one who God had the highest spiritual expectations for.
We need to pause here a moment for some self reflection. For as believers, we need to know that God has high spiritual expectations for us all just as He did Moses, Aaron, and all other figures in the Bible. And unfortunately, we will see that we are too often just like them if we’re truly honest, failing to be obedient to Him and in doing so, not meeting His expectations. Left to our own devices and wisdom, we can easily mess things up royally, allowing our decisions to be based on peer pressure and/or our own wisdom instead of God’s will.
Friends, in the end translation, we need to see ourselves as ordinary people that God wishes to use in extraordinary ways and truly, there is no limit to what He can do in and through any of us as long as we stay in good standing with Him. We can’t afford to let our guard down for a moment and lose our commitment to absolute obedience. We also have to remain connected to our Lord through the Holy Spirit, building a deep and intimate relationship, every second of every minute of every hour of ever day.
Going back to our message for today, we need to see how things could have turned out so differently if Aaron would have just dedicated himself to do what was right, standing firm in the face of the people and refusing to support their sinful proposition. Had he just turned to God, he would have been given immediate guidance and the strength to stand against the Israelite wishes. As stated earlier, he had a prior established relationship with the Lord but didn’t honor it when the chips were down.
We need to avoid making the same mistake in our own lives today and stand firm in the face of adversity and opposition, especially those who would seek to violate what the Lord has commanded. For disobedience is a serious matter and one that God won’t stand for. If you don’t believe this, tune in to tomorrow’s message where we're going to see God let Moses know what was happening down below, sharing just how He feels about the sinful, disrespectful actions of Aaron and the Israelites.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.
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