Sermon – A Golden Opportunity
Philippians 4:1-9; Exodus 32:1-14
Farmville Presbyterian Church
October 15, 2023
-Idols and their grip on us
When do you most realize that you are alive? That may sound like a strange question or maybe a silly one. Of course, you realize that you are alive, but if you are anything like I am, you actually don’t think about the fact that you are alive all the time. We just are alive until we aren’t, but there are times and situations that push us to notice especially that we are in the middle of life as living people. Birthday parties are one great example as they are directly about being alive, but those times are also when we are probably around people that we care about who also care about us. Spending time with special people is a good way to awaken those feelings of life.
For me, I also feel alive when I am genuinely struggling with Scripture. It might be when I am in the middle of engaging conversation about Scripture or when my own study of God’s Word is challenged and I have to wrestle like Jacob through the night. I have a great fondness for the Bible, but I do not like all passages equally. It would not surprise me if you were the same. We have favorite passages for a reason. Also, all passages are not equally accessible or understandable or relatable. There are even passages that are hard to like or enjoy, passages that trouble our souls, but because they are part of the big story, I feel compelled to include them in the struggle for greater understanding. Struggling with something important to me makes me feel alive. Today’s passage from Exodus is a struggle; it is not an easy one to read.
Last week, we saw how Moses received the Law from God with the gist of it being the 10 Commandments on those tablets. Moses was up on the mountain with God for 40 days receiving the instructions, and it was full of fury and commotion up there. If anyone down below even touched the mountain, they would die. This is terrifying. After weeks with no word, the people did not know what to do any longer. I understand that. They wondered if maybe Moses was dead up there because God’s glory was too much. He was not eating up there all that time, too, so maybe he starved to death. After a while, they did not know what to do, and no one down there was offering good, faithful ideas. Aaron seems to be second in command but really fails here. What they did not know was that Moses and God were going through important things. A lot of the time was spent discussing the tabernacle, the holy place for God’s worship that they could carefully take around with them. As you might guess, this ends up being the precursor for the Temple and our churches today. At the very same time that Moses and God are discussing the importance of God’s worship, the people are at the bottom of the mountain calling for new gods, different gods. And Aaron obliges them. Moses’ own brother helps them to create an idol to worship.
That is the context for the discussion in Exodus 32 today, but it is even worse. Moses goes on to destroy in frustration the actual tablets on which the law is written, he turns the golden calf into ash and makes everyone drink it, and he calls for help from his own tribe of Levi, and they kill about 3000 Israelites that day. No, this is not an easy, pleasing, or comforting passage. The lives of God’s people were lost. God’s holiness was flagrantly challenged, and Moses wants to both save and destroy the people.
Did you think the Bible was easy? No, but it is worth the struggle.
The struggle today is with idols. It is phenomenally impressive that Moses successfully talks God down from his righteous anger. If anyone should be angry, it is God, and an angry God is and angry God. Jonathon Edwards, the famous 18th century preacher and leader of the colonial religious movement wrote a sermon that I was required to read in high school English class – Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Maybe you find it helpful or comforting to think of God dangling us over the fires of damnation, but Moses was right there facing off with this God and talking God back from the edge of destruction. Somehow Moses got the fire turned down. But then Moses becomes enraged himself when he sees with his own eyes what his people have done.
This one idol and the crazed worship of the people in all kinds of pagan excess pushed God and Moses to their limits. God was going to eliminate the same people that God just went through all of that time and trouble to save. This is the same people that God had been grooming from the very beginning, from Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, and Jacob and his large family. They have already been through so much for so long, centuries and generations of life and experience, and now the thought is to throw it all away. Idols are a problem.
Even the writer does not know what to do with this story. Aaron seems to have a plan to create the golden calf, but then it seems to just pop out. It is one statue, but it is referred to in the plural. The description of its creation is ridiculous, and it is supposed to show the folly of chasing idols.
With God, it is always a matter of the heart. This is what Philippians tells us. There is so much in that passage that points to the greatest of the commands in the law – Love the Lord your God with your heart, mind, soul, and strength. You hear the passion in Paul’s writing.
Idols are not really about things. They are about what calls our hearts, about what rules our hearts, about what we love the most. It is possible for people to be idols, ideas to be idols, things to be idols, even a way of life. Anything that we care for more than God is an idol. Anyone we care for more than God is an idol. We can even be an idol unto ourselves.
In no way, shape, or notion am I trying to say you cannot love your family or yourself or your country or your security, but you cannot love any of it MORE than God. The great and almighty creator of all is more important than it all.
This failure to love God first gets us into all kinds of horrible situations. Do you think anyone unleashing death and destruction against their neighbor loves God first? Can anyone love God first who steals babies as leverage or who keeps an entire population in oppression for political control. There is so much our there in the world today that screams idol. Of course, that is not just out there. It is very close to home, as well. Most painfully, it is close to home. American culture has a long love affair with idols. This culture has also shaped us just like that golden calf was shaped. Thankfully, our Moses has stepped in to avert God’s righteous anger. It was never God’s intent to obliterate us, but for all that God has done for us, we can imagine how hard it is to be rejected.
So the heart of God came for us, to show us how our hearts were supposed to work, how we were created to work. We can be truly thankful to have the heart of Jesus working in us, but our own hearts have a lot of room to roam. We become distracted very easily, and we become very settled and accustomed to our idols. Our golden calves are the biggest problem of the people of God today. There are so many things we want to love in addition to God that we get them switched out too often and too quickly. If it is time to remember we are alive and who it is that makes us alive, bring it back to home, friends, to the Spirit of God who is our love, our hope, and our salvation. To God be the glory. Amen.