There are some things you probably shouldn’t buy via the internet. Like, say, fine art. Case in point: a while back, a man sued eBay after he bought a piece of paper with some crayon squiggles on it that was advertised as a sketch by Pablo Picasso. Turns out it was just an ugly picture. The buyer sued to get his $40,000 back. eBay’s lawyers fired back a two-part reply to the suit: First, the fine print declares that the auction site isn’t liable for fraud perpetrated by sellers. Second, they pointed out that the guy tried to buy a Picasso sight-unseen over the internet. If you’re going to shell out the kind of cash that it takes to buy a masterpiece, you might want to take reasonable precautions to make sure you’re getting the real thing. To do any less is, well, dumb.
Pretty much the same principle lies behind the hundreds of commandments and warnings that you find in the Bible against the sin of idolatry. From the Bible’s perspective, the problem with worshipping and serving something other than the true God – that’s what idolatry is – isn’t merely that it offends him, though you better believe that it does. Besides that, the Bible warns, idolatry is a fool’s bargain. The idolater gives the most valuable things he or she has – love, worship, obedience, even the soul itself – to something that in the end proves utterly worthless. It doesn’t matter what the idol is, whether we’re talking about full-on devotion to a false god, or something less dramatic like money, or sex, or a job, or an addiction, or whatever. It all boils down to the same thing: trading, as Paul said in Romans 1, the glory and truth of the immortal God for a lie. As for the cost – well, the cost is beyond measure.
And yet people do it. All the time. Christians. People who should know better. If you don’t believe me, look at this story from Exodus 32. Keep in mind: these people, the Israelites, had no excuse. They had seen the power of God up close. They had watched as the plagues. They had passed through the sea. They drank the water from the rock that was struck by Moses’ staff. They followed the pillar of cloud by day and fire by night. They stood in the presence of God on the flanks of Mt. Sinai.
But when Moses went up the mountain, and disappeared from their sight, they got panicky. Before you know it, they announce that they have no idea what happened to this Moses guy, and talk his older brother Aaron into building a gold-plated calf out of their discarded earrings. The fall from grace takes up a mere four verses, before Aaron is standing proudly over his handiwork and announcing, “these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!”
It was simple, blatant idolatry. How did it happen? How do people who have seen the glory of the living God wind up trading him in for an overpriced cow? I’d like to have a closer look at a few verses here and make a couple of suggestions, along with a few warnings for us, as 21st- century Christians. As we look at this, keep in mind that we’re talking about idolatry in the strictest, religious sense: worship of a false god. And we’re not talking about statues. We’re talking about the subtle, dangerous stuff.
So how did it happen? The first clue to the disaster with the golden calf comes in verse one, in the gripe that the people of Israel level against Aaron: “Up!” they said. “Make us gods” – or make us a god, the word in Hebrew isn’t clear – “who shall go before us.”
Deep down, people are innately religious. The need to worship is built in. Scientists who study the brain have suggested that we’re hard-wired to believe in God. Now, that shouldn’t surprise Bible-believing Christians. We know why: we’re made in the likeness and image of God. We were created for a relationship with him. Augustine, the great fourth-century theologian, said “our hearts are restless until they find rest in you, O God.” But there’s another side to the coin: We want to do our own thing. We want a god who isn’t scary, who won’t make outrageous demands of us, who’s cozy and comfortable – in other words, a god who will protect us from the bad stuff, but otherwise agrees with us and will let us do what we want.
The trouble is that the real thing never obliges. Yes, the Lord loves you, more than you can imagine. Yes, he has great designs for your life. But he also has this expectation that you’ll obey and serve him and him alone. Some people think this is unreasonable of him. So if God won’t agree with them, they do the next best thing: they make up a new god. One who doesn’t push too hard. One who stays reliably right there in front of them, ready to cater to their every whim.
That’s the explanation. Here’s the warning: When someone explains to you that God couldn’t possibly ask you do such and such a thing; or that God wouldn’t ever frown on such and such a sin, ask yourself: Is this just a little too convenient? The easy god may sound good, but he’s rarely the true God.
The second clue to this business of the golden calf comes in verse two. It’s the appeal to religious authority, in this case, to Moses’ brother and chief spokesman, Aaron.
Aaron’s role in this business is particularly pitiful. He’s a shill. The people instigating this little rebellion knew that it would never get anywhere without the right people behind it. So they leaned on Aaron, and Aaron collapsed like a house of cards. His involvement lent instant prestige to the whole enterprise. All of a sudden it was respectable. I mean, the chief priest of Israel would never be tangled up in an attempt to foist a false God on the people, would he? Well, would he?
The answer, of course, is yes, he would. This, incidentally, is the way that all the best forms of religious idolatry work. They attach themselves to someone with impeccable spiritual or ecclesiastical credentials. How can this man be wrong, when he preaches every Sunday to a church of 25,000? How can she be wrong when she has this great television ministry? How can he be wrong when he’s a respected pastor, who everyone agrees is a decent, spiritual man?
I’ll give you two examples. The first, and for lack of a better word, the conservative example, is Joel Osteen. He preaches to millions of people every week by television. His message, in short, is that God wants you to be happy. Which is true, insofar as it goes. But the problem is what’s missing: any notion of sin, or wrath, or atonement, or forgiveness. In other words, any real reason for the cross. Osteen’s services and his books are immensely popular. And, in my humble opinion, they’re desperately misleading. He preaches, as Reinhold Neibuhr once said, a god without wrath who saves men without sin by a cross without blood.
The second example cuts close to home: the leaders of the mainline protestant churches, including our own Presbyterian Church USA. Actually, I could come up with a few dozen examples, but one will suffice: over the last few years, the leaders of almost all of the mainline churches have declared repeatedly that Muslims and Christians worship the same God.
Now, they’re not alone. The President of the United States has said as much. Nor, I would add, are their motives wicked. But they are wrong. Christians have every reason to love and respect Muslims as men and women made in the image of God, loved by him, and for whom – at least potentially – Christ died. But that’s a far cry from saying that we worship the same God. The Quran says that Allah has no son, and that Jesus, the Son of Mary, while a prophet, was not the Son of God, and he did not die on the cross. The Bible speaks of a triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. It says very plainly that Jesus of Nazareth was God the Son in flesh, and that he died on the cross for the sins of the world, and rose again. The two claims are mutually exclusive. Allah of the Quran and the God of the Bible simply cannot be one and the same, no matter what the President of the United States or the General Assembly says.
That’s the explanation. Here’s the warning: When someone is speaking of God, pay no attention to his status. I don’t care if he’s the pastor of a 20,000 member church, or the President of the United States, or me. Ask yourself: does what I hear agree with what God says about himself in his Word? If not, ignore it. Even if, as it says in Galatians, it comes from an angel himself.
The third clue as to why the people of Israel might have fallen for this golden calf business comes in verse five: “Aaron made proclamation and said, ‘Tomorrow shall be a feast day to the Lord.’” The word used here is the divine name: YHWH. It’s the name by which the living God introduced himself to Moses in Exodus 3. Aaron was pointing to this gilded cow and claiming that it, in fact, was the Lord, the God of heaven and earth. It was a pitiful lie. But it played into what the people wanted to hear.
P.T. Barnum said that you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. If you go too far, if your claims are too outrageous, people smell a rat. Consequently, all of the best idolatry – that is, all of the most dangerous – depends on the lie that the thing being worshipped is, in fact, the genuine article.
Here’s the warning: When someone tells you that what he’s peddling is only the God of the Bible, you’d better be sure you know the Word well enough to call him on it. Just for the record, that includes me. Otherwise, you might be misled.
There’s only one God, the Holy Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And there’s only one savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God. Accept no substitutes. Know the Word. Keep your guard up. Don’t make the fool’s bargain. Eternity depends on it. Amen.
