‘When the people saw that Moses delayed in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, “Come, make gods for us who will go before us because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt — we don’t know what has happened to him!” (CSB – Read the chapter)

We recently purchased a new (to us) vehicle. It was an owner-to-owner purchase. As a result, I got to go make a pilgrimage to the state licensing bureau. It’s basically the DMV, but privatized…sort of. Actually, I got to go there three times. In two days. It was awesome. Actually, the people who helped us were all delightful. But it did mean standing in line. A lot. With one person helping customers while the other three employees seemed to be standing around doing nothing. That was fun. We hate to wait. We especially hate to wait when we want something. Waiting leads to impatience, which regularly leads to bad decisions. If we were watching a TV series about our journey through Exodus, the next part we are starting today would be introduced with something like, “Meanwhile, back at the base of the mountain…” We’ve been on the mountain with Moses for several weeks now. Back down at the base of the mountain, though, the people were waiting with growing impatience for him to return. And they were about to make a really bad decision. Let’s talk about it.

When Moses went up on the mountain, he walked into the darkness of the cloud with Joshua in tow, and the people lost sight of him. The first few days were likely quiet as the people waited anxiously for him to reemerge from the cloud with a word from the Lord that would set them on the next part of their journey.y But then a few days became several days. Then it was a week. Then two weeks. Then a month. And the people were getting restless. They were getting anxious. They were getting impatient. They were tired of sitting around at the base of the mountain twiddling their thumbs while Moses was up there with the Lord doing who knows what. The fun and excitement of the new covenant was gone.

Boredom can lead to great invention. A bunch of bored kids at a YMCA training school in Springfield, MA one winter day resulted in the P.E. instructor, James Naismith, coming up with something to entertain his students. Now we have basketball. Boredom, however, can also lead to trouble. When our boredom is the result of waiting for something in particular, that boredom can lead us to begin looking for ways to speed the process along a bit. When Abraham and Sarah got tired of waiting on God to fulfill His promise to give them a child, they tried to speed things along by setting him up with one of their servants so that he could have a child with her that they could calls “theirs.”

In Israel’s case here at the base of the mountain, they knew that whoever this God was who had led them out of Egypt was going to take them to some far off “Promised Land.” This God had called Moses up on the mountain to give him some instructions about this new covenant they had all agreed to, but after more than a month, it was clear they had either forgotten about the people waiting anxiously for them at the base of the mountain, or else Moses had done something to make the God angry such that they were now down here waiting for no one. Or who knows, maybe there wasn’t ever really a God who did all this stuff. Maybe it was just Moses. Either way, he was AWOL, and it was time to get moving.

I love the way this part of the story was written. Honestly, this is the funniest part of the story. It’s one of the funniest stories in the whole of the Scriptures. Just look again at the wording here. When the people go complain to Aaron about Moses’ taking too long, they say “…because this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt – we don’t know what has happened to him!”

This whole conversation was happening with Moses’ brother Aaron, but they identify Moses as “this Moses” like Aaron wouldn’t know who he was. They go on to identify him to Aaron, Moses’ brother, as “the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt.” Yes, thank you for that. I had forgotten who my brother was and what he had done. I had forgotten that I had been there with him from the moment he returned to Egypt. I had forgotten that I did all the speaking to Pharaoh when Moses received the messages from the Lord. It’s a good thing you reminded me of all of these things that I could not forget even if I wanted to.

As for their request, it’s about as bad as it could have possibly been. “Come, make gods for us.” Really? Do you remember that big covenant ceremony you had just a few weeks ago when you signed on to being in a relationship with God? Did you forget that literally the first command He gave you as a part of this covenant relationship was to not have any other gods than Him? It’s been a month. Sure, it’s been a boring month waiting for Moses to come back, give us the instructions God has for us, and get on to the next part of our journey, but you people were in Egypt for 400 years. What’s a few weeks after all of that?

The pace at which the people turned their back on the covenant they had just made with the Lord is simply breathtaking. It’s like telling your kids not to do something only to have them turn around and do it as soon as you leave the room. How could the people be this foolish, this impatient? Because that’s how we always are. We don’t like to wait. And when we have to wait, we find ways to shorten our waiting. Sometimes those aren’t so bad. Sometimes shortcuts really do help us get to the next place faster. Other times, though, as Samwise Gamgee once observed, “Shortcuts make for long delays.”

There’s a gravel road around the corner from my house that connects over to the main road through town. The turn for that road is much closer than either other turn you could take to get to the same place. But because it’s gravel, and because the speed limit on the road is just 20 MPH, it actually takes longer to get to the main road when you take that “shortcut.” Also, I have twice driven it and wound up with nails in my tires. That took a whole lot longer than going the long way around.

There are times on our journey through life when the only way to get where we are going is the long way. Maybe it’s a skill we’re trying to learn or a habit we’re trying to develop. It could be a character trait we want to be more a part of our personality than it is right now. For most people, there’s no shortcut to learning all the various things we have to learn to get through school to graduation. It takes time. The time isn’t always fun, but it is part of the journey. It’s a cliche to say that the journey matters more than the destination (it’s also almost always not true), but the journey often really does matter. The journey may not matter more, but it is part of the destination. If we try to skip straight to the end without the journey, we may not arrive in the right place after all.

Israel tried to skip straight to the next part of their journey by cutting short this period of waiting. They wound up costing themselves a lot of time and grief and pain. Our efforts to shorten our own journeys may likely wind up doing the same thing in our own lives. When God has taken you on a journey, don’t look for ways to shorten the process. Trust Him to get you where you need to be, when you need to be there. To borrow another line from The Lord of the Rings, He will neither be early nor late. He’ll arrive precisely when He means to arrive.

When I was in college, some friends of mine invited me to a concert at their school. The artist was a guy named Allen Levi. He was a singer-songwriter, but more importantly, he was a storytelling extraordinaire. One of the songs he sang that night that was most memorable to me was all about learning to take life slowly. It’s called Sunday Driver, and it captures this idea of learning to wait patiently when life is going slower than we’d like it to go pretty well. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.