Doubts to Cows

You see, every sin you’ve ever committed in your life was, ultimately, a failure of faith. And it is really amazing to note just how quickly our faith can fail:

They arrived at the mountain with great anticipation. Moses had told them that something great was going to happen. They’d seen the power of God in Egypt. They’d seen locust turn the sky black and the fields brown. They’d seen the teeming Nile dying with the stench of blood. They’d walked by the stinking piles of dead frogs after that plague was over. More than anything, they’d heard the wails of mothers crying as they clutched the lifeless bodies of their first born sons. They had witnessed the awful power of God, and you would have thought that those images, those smells and those sounds so stamped their brains that they would never doubt Him.

But this was different. Now Moses, their great leader, had disappeared into the dark thundercloud at the top of the mountain. Surely no one could enter such a storm and live. Surely no one could behold God and survive. That had been the reason why, when they had heard the thundering voice of the Living God they had begged Moses to ask God not to speak to them anymore. They literally thought His voice might kill them. Maybe Moses was close enough to God that he could survive an audience with God, but maybe he wasn’t.

And as the days ticked by, the doubts picked up. Finally, their mustard seed faith evaporated and they told Aaron to make them a “more manageable” god. This invisible being with thunder for vocal cords and lightening for breath was too much of a risk. They couldn’t believe in that kind of a being. They needed something golden . . . like a calf.

And the Bible says that they fashioned that calf and turned their faith to an object of their own making, becoming idolaters. What was their problem? They did not believe. Every sin is a failure of faith.