HOTL: SB #04 - Willy-Nilly Worship

New Living Translation Chapter 32

When the people saw how long it was taking Moses to come back down the mountain, they gathered around Aaron. “Come on,” they said, “make us some gods who can lead us. We don’t know what happened to this fellow Moses, who brought us here from the land of Egypt.”

2 So Aaron said, “Take the gold rings from the ears of your wives and sons and daughters, and bring them to me.”

3 All the people took the gold rings from their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 Then Aaron took the gold, melted it down, and molded it into the shape of a calf. When the people saw it, they exclaimed, “O Israel, these are the gods who brought you out of the land of Egypt!”

5 Aaron saw how excited the people were, so he built an altar in front of the calf. Then he announced, “Tomorrow will be a festival to the LORD!”

6 The people got up early the next morning to sacrifice burnt offerings and peace offerings. After this, they celebrated with feasting and drinking, and they indulged in pagan revelry.

Hanging on to Love

We are on a journey in these coming weeks and months where we want to learn deeply what it means to love God and love our neighbor...

We are taking seriously the words of Jesus where he taught the two greatest commands is to love God with all of our heart, soul and mind and to love our neighbor as yourself.

Jesus said all that is revealed in the Law and the Prophets hang on to these two commandments…in other words central to God’s will is that we Love God and love others...

Today we want to take a “step back” and see how loving and worshipping God really matters...

Willy Nilly Worship

We just read a story where worship of God goes wrong.

God’s people fall into worship of golden calf. The people demanded from Aaron to make gods that could lead them…with the absence of Moses they felt their ability to access God was cut off.

So they ended up worshipping God with a molten image. They felt they could worship God through this way. Even though they had received the 10 Commandments back in Exodus 20 telling them not to worship God in this manner - through graven images - 2nd command was - “You shall not make for yourself an image...”

According to John Durham - The calf represented Yahweh on their terms. Yahweh had made clear repeatedly that he would be received and worshiped only on his terms.

Today I think when we talk about loving God we need to ask ourselves are we loving God by worshipping the one true God or have we created not a molten image but mental image that we are now bowing down to...

In other words have we fallen into willy nilly worship of God because we want to worship God on our on terms.

Worshipping God: My Way

The challenge and danger we all face is worshipping God the way we want to…as we like to worship...

Like the old singer Frank Sinatra - Often when we worship God - we are singing - I did it my way...I did it my way...

Theologian JI Packer asks this question - How often do we hear this sort of thing: “I like to think of God as the great Architect (or Mathematician or Artist).” “I don’t think of God as a Judge; I like to think of him simply as a Father.” We know from experience how often remarks of this kind serve as the prelude to a denial of something that the Bible tells us about God.

(Packer, J. I.. Knowing God (p. 52). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition. )

In other words we may all have our own speculations about who God is but those speculations lead us not closer but further away from Him - as the Bible says - “the world through its wisdom did not know him...” The New International Version. (2011). (1 Co 1:21). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

We are created to worship

This story in Exodus reminds us is that we are created to worship…we will worship God, our own understanding of the divine or something else...

When we worship we are expressing a love for Something or someone - our hearts are bent that way - our hearts can become an idol factory when we fall from loving God...

A the old Bob Dylan song goes - you got to serve somebody.

For most of us:

we need to believe in something -

we want to have something that gives us a reason to believe, have hope and keep going...

We are quick to abandon (v.1)

But this story reminds we have this tendency to panic when our experience of worshipping God doesn’t fall in line with our expectations.

In this story - Moses had been absent - People had the need for knowing God’s presence - so they needed to come up with another wqay to connect with God.

We build ‘gods’ with what we have and who we are (vv. 2-6)

Here we see they take what they have - golden earrings and a golden calf is shaped...

This golden calf imitated images of idols they saw from the surrounding pagan cultures.

Often when people try to imagine God - they end up simply using something from creation.

When Aaron made the calf - It was likely meant as a visible symbol of Jehovah, the mighty God who had brought Israel out of Egypt. No doubt the image was thought to honor God, a symbol of his great strength.

But such a symbol in fact insults God for how does this image of God display his moral character, his righteousness, goodness and patience .

This image hid God’s glory - and gave false ideas about God.

Aaron, by making an image of God in the form of a bull-calf, led the Israelites to think of him as a Being who could be worshiped acceptably by frenzied debauchery. Hence the “festival to the LORD” which Aaron organized (Ex 32: 5) became a shameful orgy.

[cf. Packer, J. I.. Knowing God (p. 51). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.]

In Isaiah 40: 18, after vividly declaring God’s immeasurable greatness, the Scripture asks us: “To whom, then, will you compare God? What image will you compare him to?”

We must be careful that in our desire to encounter God we do not reduced God down to our imagination...

God is not a smorgasbord of religious ideas we draw from our various cultures...

God the Creator is transcendent, mysterious and inscrutable...

New Living Translation Chapter 55

My thoughts are nothing like your thoughts,” says the LORD.

“And my ways are far beyond anything you could imagine.

9 For just as the heavens are higher than the earth,

so my ways are higher than your ways

and my thoughts higher than your thoughts

Romans 11:33–34 NLT

Oh, how great are God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways! For who can know the Lord’s thoughts? Who knows enough to give him advice?

Loving God is letting God decide how we worship Him.

We cannot know him unless he speaks and tells us about himself.

But God has spoken - He has spoken to and through his prophets and apostles, and he has spoken to us in the words, deeds and life of his own Son - Jesus.

Holy Scripture is the window that let’s us grasp the truth and glory of who God is - who loves us and knows us.

How does want us to worship HIm - we worship in Spirit and Truth, we worship with gratitiude and awe, we worship with humility and dependence on God - we coe before God with songs of praise, prayers of petition and confession...

We worship mindful that God’s Word is given to us…so that we may transformed by Christ the living Word.

We must learn to wait

In this story of Exodus we see people turned to willy nilly worship when they sensed God’s absence. They had to wait.

In our journey of faith -there are times that we get anxious wanting God to show up in a big way…in those moments we are most prone to wandering away from God…worship is simply at times waiting on the Lord - to guide, to renew, to keep trusting despite the circumstances surrounding us.

We must accept that the God of the Bible has spoken in his Son.

So when we worship God we worship the one true God as He has revealed himself.

In the Exodus story was God’s revealtion was from MT Sinai…but now our revelation is in Christ

The Christian message is simply this - God has revealed himself to the world not only in the ordered loveliness of the created universe but supremely in Jesus Christ and in the full biblical witness to Christ…his incarnation, atonement and resurrection - the manger, the cross, the empty tomb.

Do I look habitually to the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ as showing me the final truth about the nature and the grace of God?

Packer, J. I.. Knowing God (p. 55). InterVarsity Press. Kindle Edition.

“Now this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (Jn 17: 3).