“Then Moses asked Aaron, ‘What did these people do to you that you have led them into such a grave sin?’ ‘Don’t be enraged, my Lord,’ Aaron replied. ‘You yourself knew that the people are intent on evil. They said to me, “Make God’s 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!” So I said to them, “Whoever has gold, take it off,” and they gave it to me. When I threw it into the fire, out came this calf!'” (CSB – Read the chapter)

I once got grounded from watching TV for a week. I was in grade school, and I don’t have any recollection of what I had done to be in trouble. On the Saturday morning of that week, though, I was up early and found myself alone in our den…where the TV was. Yes, I turned the TV on, and, yes, I got caught fairly quickly. When my dad asked why I had done that, I remember offering up a reverse psychology excuse that I knew I watched too much TV anyway, and that having the extended punishment duration I knew would be coming would probably be good for me. Much to his credit, I’m pretty sure my dad kept a straight face the whole time. As far as excuses for bad behavior go, that one was pretty terrible. But at least it wasn’t as bad as Aaron’s here was. Let’s talk today about what may be the funniest scene in the entirety of the Scriptures.

Let’s just remind ourselves of how this whole episode began. The people had gotten impatient with Moses’s extended absence. They had in fact gone to Aaron and said what he credited them with saying here. That much of Aaron’s dialogue here is consistent with what we know had happened to get the people in the position they were in here. But the rest of this? Hogwash.

When Moses got to the bottom of the mountain where he could see for himself what the people were doing, and after he had thrown a fit which included smashing the law tablets he had just made, he went straight to Aaron for an explanation. After all, when he headed up the mountain a few weeks earlier, he had left Aaron in charge. All of what the people were doing that had reached the point that God had told him about it up on the mountain, interrupting whatever else He might have planned to tell him, so that he could go back down the mountain and deal with it had unfolded on Aaron’s watch. The buck always stops with the leader and that was Aaron in Moses’s absence.

But surely Aaron wouldn’t have been the one to lead the people into worshiping an idol. At least that’s Moses’s generous assumption. Surely the people must have coerced him in some way to get him to allow them to do something like this. Well, Aaron definitely didn’t take any responsibility for his role in it. He threw the people under the bus. But his explanation for how they wound up with the golden calf is on the level of a student telling her teacher that her dog ate her homework.

Fun side note: When I was in high school, I wore a retainer. One day, after having misplaced it, I found it broken into a couple of pieces. When I showed my parents the broken retainer that they were now going to have to take me back to the orthodontist to replace, I told them that I thought our dog had done it. I was sure I hadn’t stepped on it or something like that. They rhetorically rolled their eyes at this suggestion and clearly thought that I simply wasn’t taking responsibility myself for the broken retainer. When we got to the orthodontist’s office he took one look at it and immediately declared, “Looks like the dog got ahold of that one.” I don’t remember if I restrained myself from saying, “I told you so,” out loud, but I was definitely thinking it.

Aaron’s excuse was not justified by the facts. After throwing the people under the bus as being “intent on evil,” he goes on to explain how the calf came into existence. He did tell the people to give him their gold jewelry, but that was the extent of his active involvement. He simply threw the gold into the fire and “out came this calf!” Yep, that’s right. Aaron’s excuse for how the calf got made – the calf Moses already told us Aaron carved and shaped himself – was that it just popped out all by itself. It was a miracle! Like I said: Hogwash. You can almost imagine Aaron cowering before Moses’s rage, stumbling over his words like I did with my dad that Saturday morning, as his brain raced around for something that he thought would keep him from having to face whatever punishment the rest of the people were going to experience. This whole scene makes me laugh every time I read it.

It also makes me cringe. It makes me cringe because I understand it far better than I wish I did. We all make excuses for our sin. All of us. Even if you don’t want to call it “sin,” you have still done things you know you shouldn’t have done. You have said things you know you shouldn’t have said. Sometimes those things were done or said intentionally, sometimes they happened without your giving them much in the way of forethought. But they happened. And you knew either immediately or else when someone alerted you to the fact that you shouldn’t have done it. And while perhaps you have taken ownership of your actions in some of these cases, I suspect that you have also given in to the temptation to make excuses for what you did as well. Even if you verbally took ownership to get the person holding your feet to the fire off your back, you might have still made excuses in your head to justify what you did to yourself.

The uncomfortable reality here, though, is that there aren’t any good excuses for sin. Ever. We never have to do what is unrighteous. Instead, there are only honest explanations and dishonest ones. The dishonest ones – like Aaron’s here – point the finger at someone else and refuse to take actual ownership of our actions. The honest ones nearly always ultimately acknowledge selfishness or pride as lying at the root of our actions. And they wind up making us look ridiculous.

If you are feeling tempted down some path of sin, one of the best ways to keep yourself from taking it is to be brutally honest with yourself about why you are considering it. What is it about doing whatever it is that you think is going to get you what you ultimately want? What good is it going to bring to the world? What benefit is it going to bring to your relationships? Is it going to make you more or less reflective of the character of Christ?

The trick here is that we can sell ourselves on what seem to us to be good, solid answers to these questions that make our actions totally reasonable and above board. We’re wrong, of course, which is why facing temptation on our own is never a good idea. It is wise to have an accountability partner of some sort to whom we can turn in moments of temptation and who has the permission to tell us that we’re being selfish, that our excuses are dumb, and that we need to go in another direction.

The truth about sin is that it is always irrational. The apostle Paul made that clear in his letter to the believers in ancient Rome. “For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse [in denying His existence and nature]. For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.”

If you are facing a moment of temptation, taking the time to be honest about the ultimate irrationality of what you are considering – especially with another person as a party to that conversation – is always a helpful idea to keep yourself on the right track. Don’t copy Aaron’s pattern here. Learn from it. Stop making excuses for your sin or otherwise trying to deny it, and get back on the path of righteousness. You and everyone else who will be negatively affected by your sin (because sin is never a solo-impact affair) will be glad that you did.