AMERICAN IDOLS: THE ATTRACTION OF GOLDEN CALVES

AMERICAN IDOLS: THE ATTRACTION OF GOLDEN CALVES July 9, 2006 Given by: Pastor Rich Bersett [Index of Past Messages] Introduction It started quietly enough in the summer of 2002. Three self-appointed talent scouts started traveling the country in search of talented vocalists. Unlike the old Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour or, more recently, Star Search, their program kept the cameras rolling even when the “not-so-talented” tried out. Who can forget the musical travesty of William Hung’s solo. But, one recording contract, several commercials and TV appearances and a movie role later, William is laughing all the way to the bank. So are Simon Cowell and his production team who have spun th process of whittling a hundred thousand “idol wannabes” in seven cities down to a few stars who become instant entertainment icons. The television show rocketed to the top with over 30 million viewers. Of course this show had to be. America has long been rife with idols of all kinds. This broader category of idols in America include little gods that far outweigh Clay Aiken, Fatasia Barrino or Taylor Hicks. These American idols are real and they are dangerous. Chances are they are affecting your life—and that of your family and friends, maybe even damaging your spiritual life. For the next few weeks, we are going to study some American idols, in a mid-summer series. My purpose is to examine patterns in our way of life that may not be as spiritually healthy as we think. Maybe you protest that we’re not idolaters. The worship of idols belongs to different cultures and other ages—not ours. Maybe we don’t keep golden statues in our gardens or chant prayers to carved ../images, but the Bible will not let us off so easy. Maybe our idols are more subtle. It may be that we have “refined idolatry to make it a part of everyday life” (Marshall Allen, “American Idols IV: Ditching the Idols”, May, 2004). In very real ways our twenty first century America may be full of idols, camouflaged as normal behaviors and popular philosophy, quietly drawing our attention from Yahweh, our Creator and Redeemer and slowly eating away the spiritual core of our souls. In this first message I’d like us to consider the quintessential example of flagrant idolatry in the Bible and draw some foundational inferences for our next few messages and for our next few years of life. The Alchemy of Idolatry Exodus 32:1-6 – When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. What stuns us in this text is the remarkable suddenness of it all, and how quickly the people turn from following Moses and the God who delivered them from Egyptian bondage not long before. It was a surprising faithlessness demonstrated by the people of God! Yet the history of Israel in the desert illustrates the fickle spirit within the people of God, swearing allegiance to the Lord, sprinkled by the blood of the covenant, only to cast off restraint at the first sign of challenge or temptation to worship other gods. But we can’t thoughtlessly accuse them without recalling the grace of God in our own lives and how quickly and repeatedly we ignored or forgot it in order to go our own sinful way. The turning to idolatry was so unanimous If we read verse one too quickly it may hide the gravity of this event – The people gathered themselves together In a very short period of time a trickle of fear that Moses may be gone for good became a rushing torrent of insecurity among the people, and in mere days it became a flood of rebellion against God and a love affair with a statue made of their own jewelry! And it seems no one protested! No one stood up and said, Wait a minute—can’t you see the fire burning on the mountain? Don’t you recall the deliverance at the Red Sea? Are you insane? The first thing He told us was “NO OTHER GODS!” Listen, whole cultures turn on a dime when faith and commitment to God are weak. Had someone told your parents the day you were born that their child would see the day when activist homosexuals would dance naked and perform lewd acts on the streets in public with police protection on a Saturday, then on Monday they would stand in the halls of courts and congress making tyrannical demands and reshaping our entire systems of economics, employment and education with the impudent assertion that a 7% minority could do it. And they are—because faith is dying in America and only a few will dare to stand against the torrent of evil. Lovers of God must set themselves against the rush of popular drift and understand that there are times when silence is as corrosive as compliance. Not only did the people of God rush unanimously into idolatry, but they convinced their spiritual leaders to go along! Hundreds of tribal family leaders fell victim to mob action in the frenzied idolatry. Impatient for their strong leader, Moses, to come back from the mountain meeting with Jehovah, spiritual leaders were talked into national idolatry. So today religious leaders in large segments of the liberal church have left their biblical moorings to drift away with their parishioners of popular opinion into such political correctness that they are barely recognizable as Christians, let alone ministers of the gospel. It’s what the people want, and we are their servants! Real Christian leadership combats the tide of godlessness; it doesn’t concur with it! Even Aaron—even Aaron was hectored into not only conforming to idolatry, but conducting it! He takes the lead in fashioning the golden calf, He encourages the pagan festival, though giving it a veneer of Israelite worship, and he even builds an altar before the idol and thinks it prudent to receive offerings in its name. He had everything but fireworks! How far the people fell! Israel contradicted their covenant commitment as they turned from God to idolatrous worship of the image. It had been only six weeks since Moses had rehearsed the covenant of the Lord with the people and they had said, everything the Lord has said we will do. (Exodus 24:3, 7) The very first commandments was You shall have no other gods before me (Exodus 20:3)! What did the golden calf have to offer them? Some false security? A fleeting sense of doing something spiritual? An excuse for a little carnal fun in the name of religion? Idols lure us toward powerful illusions, misplaced hopes, unfounded hubris and seductive promises. We can idolize almost anything—career, race, gender, sex, wealth, getting high, getting strong, getting more. Some of our gods are so petty and pathetic they would be laughable if they weren’t so sad. We are as gullible as Aaron if we think that the right zip code confers status, that wearing the right clothes with the right logos validates our identity, that wealth bestows security, that the cost of what we drive or live in signals our worth. Our gods are as powerful as a golden calf to suck us in. Ask the enormously wealthy advertising industry how alluring our American gods are. Who among us should not confess that pleasure has been our god? And should we not admit that it has left us unsatisfied? What about money and possessions? Are we really any happier when we have amassed riches? We will admit to feeling temporarily more secure—but that only testifies against us that we have trusted the golden calf more than the God who gives it. There was a man who worked all his life and saved as much as he could. He loved money more than anything. Just before he died, he said to his wife, "When I die, I want you to take all my money and put it in the casket with me. I want to take my money to the afterlife with me." His wife promised she would. At his funeral, just before the undertakers closed the casket, his wife put a box in the casket. The undertakers shut the casket and rolled it away. The wife's friend said, " I know you weren't foolish enough to put all that money in there with that man." She said, "I can't lie. I promised him I would put that money in the casket with him." "You mean to tell me you put that money in the casket with him?" her friend asked. "I sure did," said the wife. "I wrote him a check for the entire amount." There is something else to notice in verse 6 – they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. The word “revelry” there (translated as “play” in other versions) is a decidedly sexual term that refers to orgies and adulterous partnering. It would be safe to assume that what they drank wasn’t orange juice, and what they “played” wasn’t volleyball. When caught up in idolatry, the result is always spiritual confusion. What insolence! It seems weird to us to connect sexual immorality with worship, but in the surrounding cultures of Canaan and Egypt it was not unusual. The lesson for us is that idolatry leads inevitably to irresponsible actions and such irresponsibility leads to license and gross immorality. Once we marry ourselves to other gods we get hooked and our thinking gets messed up. In an experiment on the Izu islands of Japan, endangered albatross were encouraged to breed. They used decoys to attract the birds. For more than two years a 5 year old albatross named Deko tried to woo and mate with a wooden decoy by building facy nests and fighting off rival suitors. He spent his days standing faithfully by her side. Japanese researcher Fumio Sato, talking about the bird’s infatuation with the decoy, said, “He seems to have no desire to date real birds.” So it is with people who put their affections on the gods of this world—they lose interest in true worship and commitment to God. The Subtle Slide into Idolatry The slide into idolatry is not only attractive, it is so subtle. Hey, everyone around me has a lot of stuff—why shouldn’t I have some? Everybody else is having fun, why can’t I? It’s not like I won’t still be a Christian, is it? I deserve a little action, too! It’s so easy to compromise and smelt our riches into trusted idols. Please remember that these are God’s people, these Israelites. We think of idolatry as the sin of those pagan people who carve ../images of wood or stone and bow down to them. But this passage teaches us exactly what the rest of scripture testifies to: that the idolater is not the one who has never known God, but the one who, having known God, refuses to glorify Him (10), or devises some substitute in life to which he gives the praise and glory that belong to God alone. Romans 1:21 – For, although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. There is no question that idolatry is rampant among the pagans, but it reaches its ugly apex among those who should know better because they have experienced the grace of God in their lives, yet still turn to other gods. Let’s jump ahead and look at Exodus 32:15-24 and study what happens in the next step of idolatry’s slide, namely, denial. – Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the Testimony in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, “there is the sound of was in the camp.” Moses replied: “It is not the sound of victory, it is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear." When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. And he took the calf they had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it. He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?” “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!” What we see in Aaron’s explanation is a combination of denial, deceit and projection of blame. He denied much of the responsibility; he lied about his deliberate efforts to form a calf; and he shifted the responsibility onto the people instead of himself, trying fruitlessly to avoid at least some of the guilt. Is it just me, or does Aaron sound like a child trying to get out of the punishment he deserves by fabricating an elaborate explanation? And through it all he made no sense at all! This is another result of idolatry--spiritual issues get “fuzzy”. I have witnessed many dozens of believers who have gotten caught up in idolatrous pursuits of everything from illegal drugs to illicit lovers, financial prosperity to false prophecies. And every time I’ve noticed that their minds and reasoning processes have been detrimentally affected. While they were walking in faith they were sharp, clear thinking and bent on truth. Gradually, sometimes drastically, they lost their coherence. The lesser gods they had begun to worship robbed them of their soundness of mind. It is almost as pitiable as their renunciation of faith. And the more idolatrous a person becomes, the farther into the mess he slides, often trading off one false god for another. Robbie Williams, a British pop singer, spoke on BBC Radio in July 2001 about his previous addictions: I haven't had a drink or done drugs for seven months, and I'm feeling good. I'm enjoying it. It's quite hardcore to get up in front of 60,000 people knowing that when you come off stage you're not going to get drunk. [Instead of drinking I] pray. Not for long. I ask Elvis to look after me. I've got the tattoo on my arm: "Elvis grant me serenity." Before the gig we all get in a huddle and pray to Elvis to look after us while we're onstage. How does such lunacy begin—what are the warning signs? I’ll leave a fuller explanation to others wiser than I, but I do know one thing: the beginning of the slide into idolatry is always accompanied by moral compromise in little things. We’re not trampled by the elephant of full-blown idolatry until we are first cornered by the little foxes. Jesus said that we cannot serve two masters because we can only truly love and serve one. An African proverb puts the same truth this way: “The man who tries to walk two roads will split his pants.” One never makes the radical jump from living the life of faith to moral perversion and radical idolatry all at once. First, he tests the waters. Just a little dabbling in gambling or pornography or flirtation or drugs. Guess what? It feels good, and he discovers God didn’t kill him for it. In fact, he has adjusted quickly and discovered that he can make himself still feel comfortable among fellow Christians despite his chicanery. Just takes a little deception in the form of not opening up too much to others—a pattern too easily accommodated in the church. Pretty soon, he’s thinking, Hey, what do you know? I can live a double life. Satan throws in an extra pinch of enjoyment in the diversions, fattens the kitty a little, and soon the hook is set and the disciple turns more and more to idolatry. The pattern continues and it becomes clearer to those around him that he has changed, he’s different, less committed, his religion is perfunctory, his attendance is irregular, his attention isn’t on the Lord and his program of sanctification any longer. For Aaron and the Israelites it seemed to happen overnight. For others it may take weeks, months, even years. But the end result is the same. Like those mentioned in 1 Timothy 1:19, they reject faith and good conscience and shipwreck their faith. But it always starts small, with the small, seemingly insignificant compromises—giving in to gossip, a white lie, one draw of marijuana, a couple Sundays away from the body of Christ, a slightly padded expense account, one flirtatious glance, withholding some of the offering you committed to God, stealing something very small from your workplace… These are almost insignificant, but if you’re saying to yourself, those little thing don’t mean anything, then you already have one toe in the water. Mercy Triumphs Over Judgment Let’s look quickly at those verses we skipped over. While the idolatrous shenanigans are going on in the camp at the foot of the mountain, here is what’s happening on the top of the mountain. Exodus 32:7-14 – Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.” “I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.” But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “O Lord,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’” Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened. I want you to notice in this passage the intercession of Moses. It was a gutsy thing Moses did to speak with God like that. What power there is in intercession! We witness here the thought processes of the immortal, omniscient, wise God reasoning through whether to judge Israel or withhold it. This is awesome, even though we are unable to fully explain what we find here. Let this be a lesson to take from Exodus 32. We have a wonderful privilege in interceding for others with the living God. Apply this idea to the wandering brother if you will. Your privilege when you see a brother drifting toward sin and idolatry is first to pray for him. Ask God to stay judgment and draw his child into repentance. 1 John 5:16 – If anyone sees his brother commit a sin that does not lead to death, he should pray and God will give him life. Notice also the message about the mercy of forgiveness. The point is that God was willing to provide forgiveness, apparently on the basis of Moses’ intercession. Ultimately of course it is because of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross that sins could be forgiven. You know, it doesn’t matter where you are on the continuum of sin or idolatry—sinning in little ways or deeply committed to a false god—if you recognize the mercy of God and you want it, you can have it. But you cannot have it on your terms—it must be on God’s terms. And His terms are clear: repent (turn fully away from the other gods in your life and fully commit to the true God, even though you are uncertain you can do it, because He will give you what you need to be faithful). Accept Jesus Christ’s sacrifice by faith. Acknowledge Him and receive His grace into your life. I know that you sharp students of the Word and theology are wondering, If the Lord forgave the people, why did they have to drink the contaminated water and why God authorize Moses and the Levites to slaughter many of the people for their sin? And why, later in the chapter, does God promise to blot the names of the sinners out of his book and to punish them for their sins? In other words, why are there residual effects of sin? We don’t have a clear answer in the text, but there is an important biblical principle that applies here. The reason is that many did not repent and only some did. God, who knows the hearts of men, arranged for the guilty to be punished and the repentant to receive pardon. Is that fair? After all, they all sinned! Yes—more than fair. God forgives sinners through the death of His Son. Those who receive it are saved and those who reject it are not. John 3:18. Revelation 20:15   [Back to Top]