SRY: Image (Golden Calf)

Sermon

A few weeks back we were in the book of Exodus, and we were talking about Moses. And Exodus, is more or less broken into 2 halves, chapters 1-18 are about the Israelites escaping slavery and exiting Egypt, which is how the book gets its name. And the second half is them at Mt. Sinai, making a covenant with God, this is the part where they get the 10 Commandments, and all the other rules. We’re going to spend most of our focus on Exodus 32.

But before we get into this story lets really quickly recap the first half of the book. (I need 8 volunteers)

(Miriam, Jochebed, Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses)

Exodus starts and all of the descendants of Joseph and his brothers have been living in Egypt for 400 years, they’ve become a large nation, but the Pharaoh doesn’t like that and so he makes them his slaves, and decides that in order to do population control for the Hebrews, he’s going to kill all of the baby boys. And during this time there’s a lady named Jochebed and she has a son named Moses, and she tries to save him by putting him in a basket in the nile river, and his sister Miriam watches as the basket floats along, until one of Pharaoh’s daughters finds the basket, and decides she wants to keep the baby. And so Miriam comes and offers to get her mother to nurse the baby, and then when he’s a little older he’s sent to live in Pharaoh’s daughter’s household.

(Moses, Egyptian, Israelite)

And Moses grows up, we’re not entirely sure how old he was, but some people think that he was about 40, and one day he sees an Egyptian beating an Israelite man, and so he kills the Egyptian and then flees for his life and goes into the wilderness of Midian, and goes and stays there likely another 40 years.

(Bush, Moses)

And so believe it or not, Moses is likely 80 when he meets God in the burning bush, and God and Moses have this conversation, and thats where we were a couple weeks ago and God says those 5 words. “I see you, I hear you, I know you, I’m coming, to rescue you.” And God sends Moses back to Egypt, but Moses resists, and Moses and God go back and forth. And according to the summary given by a puppet named Sunday School Lady (if you don’t catch that reference, thats ok, go watch What’s in the Bible With Buck Denver) this is how their conversation went: Moses says I can’t go, and God says you can, and Moses says I can’t, and God says you can, and Moses says will you come with me, and God says of course I will.

(Aaron, Moses, Pharaoh)

And God sends Moses back to Egypt. And he and his brother Aaron confront Pharaoh, and they say to let the people go otherwise God’s going to bring consequences in the form of plagues, and Pharaoh doesn’t listen and so there are 9 plagues, and then one final plague where the angel of death came struck down every firstborn in the land of Egypt, but the angel passed over the Israelites because they had the blood of a spotless lamb on their doorposts and so God passed them over, and finally Pharaoh says they can go, and so Moses leads all the Israelites out into the wilderness, until they get to the Red Sea.

(Moses with staff)

But then Pharaoh changes his mind and they’re caught between the Egyptian army and the sea, and so Moses calls on God to part the waters, and the Israelites walk across on dry ground. But once they’re across, God closes the waters on the Egyptians and Pharaoh and his army die. And so then God leads the people of Israel into the wilderness, and there he continues to provide for them. He gives them bread from heaven called Manna, which is funny because Manna in Hebrew means “what is it?” so they don’t really know what it is, but God’s providing for them.

(Summary break: Pharaoh, Pharaoh)

And God guides the Israelites to Mt.Sinai and there Moses goes up the mountain and talks with God, and God invites Israel into a covenant with himself.

And the premise of the covenant is this: if Israel will follow God and be in a close personal, intimate, covenant relationship with Him. Then He will be their God and He will protect them and provide for them, and help them to prosper. But if they don’t follow Him and keep their side of the covenant then He will remove His providence and protection from them. And so God proceeds to layout the terms of the covenant, both what is asked of them, and what He will do for them.

A covenant is like a really important promise. We don’t really use covenants as often as people used to use them. But we do use the word covenant regularly today, in one context, that context is in weddings. You may have heard people refer during a wedding to the ‘covenant of marriage’ and that makes sense, because when you get married, you make one of the most important promises of your life.

And so I think in some ways the best thing we can picture to really get a sense of what’s occurring over the course of the chapters in Exodus that are about the covenant is to picture a marriage ceremony.

In a way we could picutre it almost as if Moses is the officient at a wedding between Israel and God, and God has just finished writing out His vows on the marriage certificate and then as He’s doing that something awful happens.

Get _____ to read.

Exodus 32:1–6 ESV

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” So Aaron said to them, “Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

Growing up I don’t think I really understood what was going on in this story, and I think that a lot of people miss what’s happening here, the people aren’t making idols to replace God, they think what they’re doing is literally making God themselves, they’re creating a physical form for Him, and saying that this calf is God.

Cass and I got married last summer, and I want to get Cass and Dad to come up to the stage for a second so you can see how devestating to God, this story would be.

It would be like when Cass and I got married if while Cass was writing out the last part of the marriage certificate, if suddenly I just took out building materials (now I don’t have the ability to melt down gold on stage, so I just have playdough right now), But if I took out building materials and said this is my wife, this is the person I have dated the past several years, I will be married to her, and then it’s literally just a statue of a baby cow.

Now take that idea and amplify it by like 100 because we’re talking about something even bigger than marriage, we’re talking about the creator of the universe. And so this act is a slap in the face to God, because His chosen people who He has just decided to be in a covenant with, they’ve rejected the real Him even as He’s signing the covenant, and they decide that it would be easier to just have a fake version of Him, one that they can make in whatever way they like.

The real sin with the golden calf isn’t idolatry; that they replaced God with something else. It’s that they made a fake image of God, called it the real one, and tried to manipulate Him how they liked.

They say that the golden calf is “the Lord” and the words used here are the same Hebrew words that God used when He told Moses at the burning bush: “I AM WHO I AM”. The Hebrew word is YHWH, and it’s important to note that, because they are using God’s name and saying this fake version they created was Him. It’s the same idea as if I were to say that the golden calf was Cass, except even more extreme because God is their creator, not their creation.

Now, that said we need to keep in mind the culture they were in. In our culture it makes zero sense to make an image and call it God, but they grew up in Egypt. Egypt had hundreds of gods, and they honoured their gods by making idols. And so this didn’t seem as crazy to them, but the reason that it’s sin is because it missed the mark of seeing God rightly.

Sin literally means to miss the mark, there’s a verse in Judges that talks about a group of archers, and it says that when they shoot they didn’t miss. And the word here for miss is the same Hebrew word for sin.

The sin in our passage is that they missed the mark of rightly understanding God, the Israelites allowed the culture around them to influence the way they understood, portrayed and worshipped the image of God.

And here’s where we bring it back around to idea of Image, because that’s the series that we’re in.

We need to know God as He is not as we want Him to be, or as culture tells us He is. That was the problem Israel had with the golden calf, they were trying to make God into the image that they and the culture around them wanted, when scripture tells us that from the beginning we’ve been made in His Image, the way He wants.

Last week we talked about how image is the way someone is presented, humanity’s first identity was to be the image of God. Sometimes you’ll hear people call it imago dei, it refers to the verse in Genesis 1, that says: “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”

Humans were made to represent God to the world, in some really distinct ways, God made us in his image and it shows in the the ability of humans to think, rationally, morally, and relationally. People have the ability to think and create, and understand what is right and just, and to be in close relationships with people, and we were made as spiritual beings as well, with the ability to relate to God on that level.

But just like we talked about last week since Adam and Eve, humanity’s sin has distorted how we present ourselves, and how we present God. Sin messed up the way that we think about the order of things, the way we think about ourselves and the way we think about God.

All too often we try to make God into our own image too, sometimes without realizing it. Just like the Israelites with the golden calf, just like Adam and Eve in the garden.

I want to read a section from a book that I’ve found helpful on this topic, it’s called God Has a Name and it’s by a pastor named John Mark Comer. He says:

“Here’s the problem: we usually end up with a God that looks an awful lot like us. As the saying goes: God created man in His own image, and man, being a gentleman, returned the favor. There is a human bent in all of us to make God in our own image… Here’s how you know if you’ve created God in your own image: he agrees with you on everything. He hates all the people you hate. He voted for the person you voted for. If you’re a republican, so is He. If you’re a Democrat, He is too. If you’re passionate about ___, then God is passionate about __. And above all, He’s tame. You never get mad at Him or blown away by Him or scared of Him. Because He’s controllable. And of course, He’s a figment of your imagination… Maybe the truth is that we want a God who is controllable because we want to be God. We want to be the authority on who God is or isn’t and what’s right or wrong, but we want the mask of religion or spirituality to cover up the I-want-to-be-God reality. The most ancient, primal temptation, going all the way back to Adam and Eve in the Garden, is to decide for ourselves what God is like, and whether we should live into His vision of human flourishing or come up with our ow. All so “we will be like God, knowing good and evil”. This is why theology [studying and understanding God as He really is] is so incredibly important.” End quote.

I find this quote very gripping, John Mark Comer really hits the nail on the head. We far too often don’t look at God for who He is, we look at what we want Him to be, and I think that a lot of the times when we look at God for who He really is, and what the bible really says about Him. We’re going to be left a little bit confused, and a little bit uncomfortable, but that’s ok, because God is a very real, relational, and personal God, one that desires for us not just to know about Him but to truly know Him.

If I didn’t know Cass I could tell you about her, I could say that she was a 5’6” white female, with blonde hair, and brown eyes. That she was 22, or that she grew up in Sackville. But I couldn’t tell you what her character was like, what I know about her because she’s my wife and my best friend. I could try to make assumptions but more than likely I would get it wrong some of the time.

The same is true about God, based off of our culture or our traditions or going to church we could all say a little bit about God, or about what we think we know about Him.

But God desires to be known deeply and intimately by us, and we also should desire to know His character, deeply and intimately, and that’s why God has revealed to us His perfect image, Jesus.

That through following Jesus we can start to learn deeply and intimately who God truly is, not who He want Him to be. And as we follow Jesus, as we allow Him to take away our sin, and all of the ways that it affects us, we begin to put things back in the right order, we start to see and know and represent God and His image properly, and we start to understand our own image, we understand our identity in Him, that we too are His image, not a perfect one, but the more we follow Jesus, the more we chase after God and seek to know Him and understand Him, the more that distorted image, that black paint on the mirror, starts to come off, and the more we better understand and properly present both God’s image and our own.