It Just Sorta, You Know, Happened
May 8, 2022
Preached by Benjamin Vrbicek
Scripture Reading
Exodus 32:1-6
1 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.” 2 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.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 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!” 5 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.” 6 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.
One quick announcement as we begin. It’s about children and student ministry for the summer. Many of you with children have already heard about this, but our hope is to have more children in the sanctuary over the summer, as we’re going to suspend the some of our Sunday school classes. We’ll still have programs for nursery through kindergarten, but above kindergarten, we’re inviting children to stay in church. It won’t start until Memorial Day, but I want to mention it now so you are not caught off guard.
There are probably ten things that went into this decision, but for the sake of time, I’ll just give you two of the main reasons. First, our children’s ministry volunteers need to rest. I was talking with one of our volunteer pastors, and he mentioned that there were three reasons he was able to stay a volunteer in youth ministry for a decade: June, July, and August. Every year, he said, he’d get to May and think that was the last year. But then every August, he’d be like, “No, I love this want and want to help again.” We went those who are serving our children to be serving for a long time. So rest is the first reason. The second reason is that we think it’s good for families to be together in the sanctuary. There are some children whose families only go to one service and those children might grow up in our church with their predominant experience of church being in classrooms. While there are benefits to Sunday school, we believe that when our young men and women leave home, we want them to have a frame of reference for what it means to participate in meaningful ways in a church that has biblical liturgy, biblical musical lyrics, and biblical preaching. So, for the summer, the other preaching pastors and I will our best to preach with the awareness of all the differing ages in here.
As we turn our attention to Word, let’s pray again. “Dear heavenly Father. . .”
Introduction: marriage problems on the honeymoon
The other day during premarital counseling my wife and I were telling a couple all the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things that happened on our honeymoon. I’ve brought this up before a few times during sermons, and y’all seem to get a kick out of our suffering—which I’m not sure what that says about you, but that’s beside the point. My wife was telling this couple about my failure to bring to Miami International Airport what we needed to travel out of the country. We mentioned the day and half in the middle of the honeymoon we both got super sick. We talked of the week of relentless rain during the rainy season in a rainforest. We mentioned that we ran out of cash and had to buy Oreos instead of full meals, the struggles with our rental car, the delayed and missed flights, and the fifty-six bug bites just on my wife’s right arm. And there were hundreds more than that because, apparently, the mosquito netting didn’t work so well. Finally, we told this soon-to-be-married couple how it all ended: my wife and I boarded the airplane by walking on the tarmac, climbing the little section of portable stairs, and she turned to look at me and said words I’ll never forget: “Take a good look around, because we’re never coming back.” So ended my first week of marriage.
For all that was miserable on our honeymoon, we didn’t experience the pain—the much greater pain—of adultery. That didn’t happen and hasn’t happened. Years ago I heard a pastor speak of adultery as the common cold of the church, by which he didn’t mean that the consequences were insignificant but that the problem seems to come in seasons. Our church is not immune. Of course violation of covenant vows is always painful and tragic. There would be, wouldn’t there, a special pain if a newly married bride met someone on her honeymoon, right? That would be a special kind of tragedy. Yet this is the very situation that many authors and pastors have used to describe the passage of Scripture we have before us. Only days before this, the Lord entered into a covenant relationship with his bride, his people Israel, and Israel entered into a covenant relationship with the Lord. And now something in the relationship has, or perhaps many things in the relationship have “quickly” gone wrong, to use the wording of v. 8.
Here’s the thing I want you to notice at the start that we’ll see throughout the passage: when we make God into our image, we ruin far more than we can imagine. Again, when we make God into our image, we ruin far more than we can imagine.
My outline only has two points this morning. First, we’ll talk about what happened in the story. And then we’ll talk about what it means for us.
1. What happened?
First let’s talk about what happened. To see that, the best way I know how is to walk through the narrative chunk by chunk. I’ll start by reading the first part of the passage, the part that was already read for us.
32 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.” 2 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.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 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!” 5 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.” 6 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.
Here we see that Moses appears to delay in coming back down the mountain. You might remember that he’s up there receiving instructions. Back in chapter 24 Moses told the people to people to wait for him (24:14). But they struggle to wait and ask Aaron, Moses’s brother and the second in command, to make them something more tangible to worship. Aaron does. He makes them a golden calf. Note what he says about it. Aaron doesn’t claim that this is a new god to worship but rather that this—the golden calf—is the God, or gods, who saved Israel out of Egypt.
Perhaps many of you can relate to the Israelites, though. Everything about Christianity is new to some of you. Many of our people here are not third- or fourth-generation Christians. Many of you are learning how to be Christian wives and Christian singles and Christian husbands and parents and employees and church members for the first time. It’s all new. What is familiar to you is what was familiar to them. They were familiar with the religion of their world, the religion of Egypt and the worship of, not one God but, gods. The Lord, YHWH, was now wonderful to them but also weird to them. The Lord was strange, other. We might use the word holy. He was different, and it was hard for them to see God’s ways as good for them. Again, perhaps some of you can relate.
But sympathies aside, what takes place at the foot of the mountain is as bad as adultery on a honeymoon. The text says they hold a “feast to the LORD” and get up to play, but they don’t play cornhole or Settlers of Catan. I want to be discreet in how I describe this, but the word “play” at the end of v. 6 has illicit connections (cf. Gen. 26:8). In other words, when they made for themselves an image of God in their likeness, which is the essence man-made religion—the making of god into our image—what follows is sexual immorality, sexual play (cf. 1 Cor. 10:7ff).
To feel the abruptness and irony of what took place, let me read words of the second commandments, which, by the way, God had just given them. In Exodus 20 we read,
You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Ex. 20:4–6)
It is possible to read the second commandment as just prohibiting you from making all art. But last week I preached about people who were specifically said to be gifted by God’s very Spirit to “devise artistic designs” (Ex. 31:4). In other words, God’s very Spirit helps people make beautiful art. So, the second commandment is not merely about art.
Here’s how Aaron and the people broke the second commandment and how people still break it today. Aaron was not trying to give the people other gods to worship as more important than the real God. Instead, while Moses was away and talking to what they imagined to be a distant God, Aaron tried to give the people an image of the real God, something tangible. But Aaron did so by changing the real God into one image for worship, the image of a golden calf.
It’s true that the calf may have communicated something of God’s strength. This is why in financial circles people can speak of a strong economony as a “bull market.” But the idol concealed far more than it revealed. Note what author Jen Wilkin has to say about this. She writes, “Think about the enormity of the lie the golden calf tells: It is small, but God is immense. It is inanimate, but God is Spirit. It is location-bound, but God is everywhere fully present. It is created, but God is uncreated. It is new, but God is eternal. It is [not powerful], but God is [all powerful]. It is destructible, but God is indestructible. It is of minor value, but God is of infinite value. It is blind and deaf and mute, but God sees, hears, and speaks” (Ten Words to Live By, 38). And the Lord is not happy to be changed; he’s not happy when we make him in our likeness. Look at the next section.
7 And the LORD said to Moses, “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. 8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’” 9 And the LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. 10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.”
11 But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’” 14 And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.
15 Then Moses turned and went down from the mountain with the two tablets of the testimony in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides; on the front and on the back they were written. 16 The tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets. 17 When Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, “There is a noise of war in the camp.” 18 But he said, “It is not the sound of shouting for victory, or the sound of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.”
This, for some of us, seems like a strange passage. In the passage the Lord seems ready to destroy the people. This was something of a test of Moses and whether he would identify with the people and lead them or whether he would use this chance to dump them. Yet Moses intercedes for them. Moses prays for them. And Moses bases his prayer to the Lord on the promises of the Lord. “You can’t destroy this people, Lord, because you’ve promised to make a great nation of Abraham’s children, and that’s us,” he says. I believe this is the kind of response God wanted from Moses.
The analogy is not perfect, but let’s say a husband and wife are talking about their child. The husband and wife are really struggling with the seven-year-old who’s into all kinds of trouble in Target—crazy Target disobedience. And the husband has had it with the kid, ready to lose it. The wife says, with a twinkle in her eye, “Well, we could just leave him in Target, and you and I could go adopt another kid.” Again, it’s not a perfect analogy. But in that analogy, the wife is inviting her husband to say, “Yeah, we can’t do that” (cf. Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24–30).
And God doesn’t do that, though he is angry—so is Moses. As Moses comes down and meets his assistant Joshua, they hear singing, not songs of war, but songs of play. After God saved them through the Red Sea, the people of Israel wrote and sang a song (Ex. 14, 15). The singing here in Exodus 32 is not that kind of singing, not those kinds of lyrics. This is the song of a drunken frat party (taken from DeYoung’s description in his sermons at University Reformed Church on this passage).
Moses responds in a way that mirrors the Lord’s jealous anger at their spiritual adultery.
19 And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. 20 He took the calf that they had made and burned it with fire and ground it to powder and scattered it on the water and made the people of Israel drink it.
Moses breaks the most valuable object in the world, the Word of God written by God himself, as a way to display that they had so despised the most valuable relationship in the world: a relationship with God. What shall we make of the grinding down of the idol and throwing the idol dust in their water source? Perhaps it was like taking a young teenager who wanted to smoke one cigarette, and Moses makes him smoke a pack. One pastor mentioned that it might have to do with showing the absolute impotence of the idol: nothing says defeat like being ground to powder (DeYoung). It’s hard to tell. But now we come to the passage that I drew my title from. Moses and Aaron talk.
21 And Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them?” 22 And Aaron said, “Let not the anger of my lord burn hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil. 23 For they said to me, ‘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.’ 24 So I said to them, ‘Let any who have gold take it off.’ So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf.”
Last spring I helped create the preaching schedule for the next year. And as I planned Exodus, just to be funny, I gave the sermons a whole bunch of goofy placeholder titles. And for a year the guys in the office laughed at them. We maybe only used one or two of them. For example, two weeks ago, as the passage delt with all the stuff for God’s special tent, the tabernacle, the title I made up was “Camping Is Intense.” We did not use that title and forty others. But I went ahead and kept this title, which is “It Just Sorta, You Know, Happened.” Moses comes down and asks his brother, “What did this people do to you that you [let them break loose]?” Moses assumes the people must have tortured Aaron or something, used enhanced interrogation techniques, perhaps waterboarded Aaron. Moses is thinking, surely, this didn’t just, you know, happen.
As you compare Aaron’s account here with the account at the start of the passage, they are very similar up until the last point. The people did this, and I did that, and then, well, it’s crazy, right, but this calf just sorta came out of the fire. Above, we read that Aaron took an engraving tool and fashioned the calf himself (see v. 4). Here, when confronted by Moses, Aaron leaves that part out, even as he blames the people. Several pastors have pointed out how Aaron makes himself into a minor character in the plot.
We’re getting long on time, so I’ll just summarize the rest of the passage, and then we’ll talk about what it means for us. After this, Moses calls all those who are on the Lord’s side to come to him, and they go through the camp and slaughter some of the people, presumably killing the ringleaders most responsible for the idolatry (vv. 25–29). Then Moses talks with the people and with the Lord about whether their sin can be atoned for (vv. 30–34). In the final verse of the passage, we read that a plague broke out upon the people, a very omoionus ending (v. 35). Plagues are only for Egyptians, right? (DeYoung, The Biggest Storybook Bible Story, 98). Now, Israel has become like Egyptians. Idolatry, as I said at the start, ruins more than we could imagine. Next week Pastor Ben will preach Part II of this story from chapters 33 and 34.
2. What does this mean for us?
So, what does this passage mean for us? I’d love to take an hour and give you ten things. We could talk about the importance of godly, spiritual leadership in restraining people. This passage teaches us that, when you’re thinking rightly, you want a leader who might be willing to restrain you from you. We could talk about that. The algorithms of social media and news media give you exactly what you want. And it’s dangerous.
We could also talk about the essence of pagan religion, that is, religion that seems to worship other gods but really is transactional. In paganism, the gods are not really worshiped, that is, worshiped in and of themselves. The gods are just there to give you want you want. And “worship” is really about the self. Notice the language God uses to describe their sin in v. 8. “They turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf.” They made it for themselves. If your god is merely a bigger version of you or merely a projection of everything culture believes, you don’t have the real God. We could talk about that more.
We could also talk about the way that Exodus 32 is replaying Genesis 3 over again. Just think about that one for a minute. In Genesis 1 and 2, God puts Adam and Eve in paradise, and then, so quickly in chapter 3, Adam and Eve doubt if God is really good for them. Did God really say? they wander. The parallels with Exodus 32 abound. Did God really say he’s near by? Did God really say, Don’t make an idol? We could put side by side the fall of Adam and Eve and the fall of the Israelites. In both, there is a doubt that God is good and God is present. We could talk about that.
And it would be important talk about this, too: You sometimes think that your main issue is to be saved from things outside of you, all the problems and enemies around you. Most of Exodus reads this way. So far in the book of Exodus, the great enemy of the people of God has been those outside of them, Pharaoh and the seductive powers of Egypt. But Exodus 32 makes a crucial point in the story. In Exodus 32 you see that not only must you be saved from external threats, but God must save you from yourself. That’s worth talking about.
So, how shall we end the sermon? I’m going to do the safest thing I know how to do with a passage this big. I’m going to end by reading from the apostle Paul’s reflection on Exodus 32. That feels the safest and best way to end. In 1 Corinthians 10, Paul has a long discussion of this passage, and I want to let Scripture be our guide for how we understand Scripture. Let me read it to you. The passage is on page 900 in the pew Bibles. Picking up in v. 6, we read Paul say of Exodus,
6 Now these things took place as examples for us, that we might not desire evil as they did. 7 Do not be idolaters as some of them were; as it is written, “The people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.” 8 We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did . . . .11 Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. 12 Therefore let anyone who thinks that he stands take heed lest he fall. [Note the admonition is to humility.] 13 No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. 14 Therefore, my beloved, flee from idolatry. (1 Cor. 10:6–8a, 11–14)
Paul says these things to a church, that is, people who he believes have been loved by Christ, people who have found forgiveness in the gospel, people who have found forgiveness in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. In chapter 6 of this same letter, after listing a host of terrible ways to be a sinner, sinners that would be excluded from the kingdom of God, Paul says, “And such were some of you.” Then he adds, “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).
In other words, you were Egyptians, but the love of God has changed you, and is changing you, and will change you. And those who have been loved by God, those who have been changed by God, this same God charges his people to flee idolatry. Whatever place in your heart you are saying, wouldn’t God be better if he was like this or like that, God is telling you that this way of thinking leads to death. But taking God at his Word, taking as he is, is not only the best way to take him, it’s the only way. Let’s pray . . .
Family Discussion Questions
The passage begins with the people looking for a solution to a problem, the problem they perceive of God’s distance from them. They think God is too far away, and maybe he has even stopped caring about them. When was a time when you felt like God was far away and he didn’t care?
Look again at Exodus 20. Can you re-say in your own words the first and second commandments? What is the difference between them?
The second commandment speaks of how God is “jealous.” What is he jealous for and why is this a good thing for us? How is the good news story of Jesus an outworking of God’s jealousy for a tender relationship with people?
What are some ways that God wants to help us stay away from making God in our own image? To say it another way, what are a few things that God has given us to keep us from committing idolatry?
