Everywhere you looked, people were shedding their jewellery. Heads were intentionally tilted as people carefully picked off their chunky golden earrings. Perhaps many of them had only had the precious gold dangling from their ears since they borrowed the stuff from the Egyptians the night they left Egypt. The women and men, the girls and the boys, had to peel off their precious jewellery. It seems everyone participated in the massive jewellery meltdown. The fire was blazing as gold chunks sizzled to liquid in the flames.
“Mommy, I like my earrings. Why do I have to burn them?”
“Dear, Mommy likes hers too, but we want to make our own god. We must do our part and sacrifice something to make our golden god gleam brightly in the bright sun. You will be excited when you see it. Rumour has it, dear that our god will have four legs, hooves, a tail and two pronounced ears – very much like a cow calf. The technicians are working on it now. We will be able to see this god and take it with us wherever we go, so we won’t be alone. If we feel like dancing around it, falling on our knees before it, decorating it, or even hiding it – we will be able to. Our god will be completely portable, adaptable, susceptible to our preferences and amenable to variations in our worship practises – not to mention visible and tangible as well.”
“Now when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people assembled about Aaron and said to him, “Come, make us a god who will go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us up from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.” Exodus 32:1
“Shocking,” you say. “How could they even think about doing such a thing, let alone do it, after God displayed His power as He brought them out of Egyptian slavery? Unimaginable!” you exclaim.
The same human hearts and minds that envisioned a god with four calf legs back then are capable of worshipping a small, adaptable, invisible god very far away or a visible creature-god or a me-god today. Who is your God today, and how big is He? Or, what is your god today, and how big is it?
Four-legged gods may not be in your life, but a four-wheeled one might be. Golden cows may not be your thing, but a gold-in-cash cow may be. Bright, shining goals before us may cause us to sacrifice our time, our spiritual responsibilities, and even our family at the altar of secularism or materialism.
Oh, yes! Christians can have other idol gods. Note the spelling of ‘idol’ – not ‘idle’ gods. Such gods in our lives are anything but idle. They captivate our thinking, sap our energies and demand more and more.
We can also have a distorted understanding of the only True and Living God. Our small minds so often fall into the sinful trap of scaling God down to the puny limits of our own thinking. Instead of a God who created us in His own image, we create a God in our mind after our own image and understanding.
Let’s immerse our hearts and minds in the Word of God and gain a deeper appreciation of the one and only True God. Job must have dropped his jaw in wonder as the Lord started speaking to him out of the whirlwind in Job 38. With a barrage of over 70 questions – God makes his greatness obvious to Job. The bigger God became in Job’s understanding of Deity, the smaller he felt in the shadow of Omnipotence.
Does the only living and true God have the proper place in your life today, or are you crowding Him out with your own little monstrous idols, your own caricatures or your small or wrong imaginations of God?
John closed his first epistle with these words:
“And we know that the Son of God has come, and has given us understanding so that we may know Him who is true; and we are in Him who is true, in His Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God and eternal life. Little children, guard yourselves from idols.” 1 John 5:20-21
Don’t hesitate to share a thought from your personal experience or a verse that has been a blessing to you – in the comment section below. Or, if you would like to reach out privately, click below.
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