By Exodus 32, think of what God has done for the Israelites: protected them from 10 devastating plagues, delivered them from several centuries of slavery at the hands of the world’s superpower, supernaturally conveys them through the Red Sea, and provides manna and water in the wilderness. Moreover, he graciously declares, “I will take you to be my people and I will be your God. (Ex. 6:7)” God had shown himself to be a faithful covenant keeper, with more promises yet to unfold. Almost no sooner than affirming their fidelity to God’s commands – “All the words that the Lord has spoken we will do. (Ex 19:7; 24:3)” – we find them, “turned aside quickly out of the way I commanded them. They have made themselves a golden calf and have worshipped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ (32:8)” What caused their turning?
In short, spiritual adultery. Sigmund Freud proposed humans to be psycho-sexual beings, and therefore saw sexuality as the root behind all behavioural fruit. However, the bible presents us as psycho-spiritual beings (psycho coming from the Greek word for soul), souls made in God’s image to worship him. Yesterday, I said idolatry is a sin of the heart. Truthfully, all sin is a form of idolatry. All sin is fundamentally a worship disorder. Whatever the sin, we are looking for love, fulfillment, satisfaction, approval, identity etc – in all the wrong places. Cornelius Plantinga writes, “If we try to fill our hearts with anything besides the God of the universe, we find that we are overfed but undernourished.”[1]
Something to Understand
It is easy for us to scratch our heads and wonder what the Israelites were thinking. After all they had seen, all they were given, and all they were promised, why was such a pathetic substitute suitable for worship and sacrifice? The truth is, at the root, our sin is no different; our sin represents the longing for substitute gods, modern ‘golden calves’ in the place of the one true God.
[1] Plantinga, Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be, (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1996), p122