“Aaron replied to them, ‘Take off the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters and bring them to me.’ So all the people took off the gold rings that were on their ears and brought them to Aaon. He took the gold from them, fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made it into an image of a calf. Then they said, ‘Israel, these are your gods, who brought you up from the land of Egypt!’ When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of it and made an announcement: ‘There will be a festival to the Lord tomorrow.’ Early the next morning they arose, offered burnt offerings, and presented fellowship offerings. The people sat down to eat and drink, and got up to party.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Have you ever been given a set of instructions you didn’t properly understand? The result is often that you do the wrong thing without realizing it. Maybe you do something that falls more in line with a previous understanding than the one you didn’t quite get this time. Either at, your doing the wrong thing is the result. While Moses was up on the mountain, after the people had agreed to play by God’s rules, the first thing they did was the wrong thing. Worse yet, they were led into it. Let’s talk about what’s going on here, and making sure we understand God properly.

With the possible exception of when the people refused to enter the Promised Land when they first arrived at the border, this is probably the most tragic episode in the entire Exodus journey. As we talked about yesterday, after waiting for Moses for far longer than they expected or wanted, the people began to get restless. Then they got impatient. Then they started down the path of hurrying God along. That’s where things ran off the rails. They asked Aaron to make them gods who could take them the rest of the way to Egypt.

There are a few things wrong with this. Okay, there are actually a ton of things wrong with this, but a few stand out as particularly significant. For starters, they had just agreed to not have any other gods before God. And what are they doing now? Making gods other than God to lead them. But maybe they were thinking they were making representations of that God. But the next command was explicitly to prohibit the making of images of their God. So, either way, they were in the wrong from the start here.

But the people were only part of the problem here. Sure, the whole thing was their idea, but groups like this don’t accomplish anything without leadership. And they had leadership. Aaron led them forward into this mess. He could have heard this request and blown them up for their unfaithfulness and their pathetic inability to wait on the Lord until He sent Moses back down the mountain to them. Instead, he was right there with them in their fit of impatience. They asked for him to make them new gods to lead them, and the person who was soon going to be ordained to lead them in the worship of the God who actually led them out of Egypt almost immediately said, “Sure, let’s do that.”

He’s the one who told them to give their gold earrings. He’s the one who fashioned that golden into the calf idol. He’s the one who built the altar. He’s the one who proclaimed a festival and led them in worshiping the idol he had made. If there is a real villain in this story, there’s a good case to be made that it’s Aaron.

The silliest thing of all in this episode, though, was neither of these two things. It was the fact that they made up a new religion basically on the spot and threw themselves completely into it. The people asked Aaron to make them gods. So, Aaron made them gods. I suspect archaeologists and anthropologists have traced out where this calf god might have come from, but ultimately, they made it for this purpose. They were wearing these gold earrings as decorations, then they melted them into a calf idol, and bowed down to worship it. They put themselves squarely in the crosshairs of Isaiah’s mocking of idol worshipers in Isaiah 44.

So then, what do we do with all of this? Did Israel just not understand the command God gave and they agreed to? Perhaps. It may be better to say they understood it through the lens of what they knew and understood about God and gods and the world and worship that had been shaped over the previous 400 years’ worth of time living in the pagan environment of Egypt. And it is this idea that directs our attention to a connection point for us here.

We are products of our culture. We can’t escape that reality. It is the water, and we are the fish. We don’t know that we’re wet. Well, the message of the Gospel is not merely that we are wet, but that we are swimming in the wrong ocean to begin with. That’s hard to break from. It’s easy to take the Gospel, sink it in the ocean we are already swimming in, and process it only in those terms. The Gospel is good all by itself. Anywhere it gets unleashed, it is going to accomplish good things. That’s simply in its nature. But when we merely incorporate the Gospel into what we are already doing rather than letting it totally transform our lives, making us entirely new creations, we not only limit that full impact of that good, but we ultimately corrupt it so that it isn’t nearly as good anymore.

If we are going to follow Jesus, we’ve got to do it His way. If we try to follow Him, but in our own way, we won’t really be following Him at all. We’ll be following something else while trying to mimic His walk. We won’t ever sustain that for very long. We’ve got to make sure we not only hear what God has to say, but that we understand it. This means taking the time to study the Scriptures carefully. It means being intentional about prayerfully reflecting on them. It means reading them in community so that our understanding can be checked against the understanding of the people around us. It means committing ourselves to actually doing what they say rather than always what we want.

Draping a garment of Christianity over what amounts to a kind of cultural paganism never accomplishes anything good. In fact, it tends to do harm. A lot of harm. It convinces people that Christianity isn’t something they want to have anything to do with. I don’t blame them. I wouldn’t want anything to do with that version of Christianity either. Christian paganism will be just as corrupt and corrupting as real paganism. Let’s commit ourselves to getting it right. The stakes are simply too high to do otherwise.