The Work of Our Hands

Following the ceremony confirming Israel’s covenant with YHWH, Exodus 24:18 states, “Moses entered the cloud as he went on up the mountain. And he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights.”

Forty days and forty nights. That was apparently too long for Israel.

If Exodus 19 is God’s proposal and chapter 24, the wedding ceremony, then what happens in Exodus 32 is the equivalent of Israel cheating on their honeymoon.

The chapter begins, “When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us god(s) who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

The chapter goes on to recount how Israel, too impatient to wait for the God they’d just wed, made for themselves a calf of gold to bow down before.

The story of the golden calf is likely the most well-known story of idolatry in all of Scripture. But I wonder if it is also a story that we have long misunderstood and, in so doing, let ourselves off the hook from the deeper lesson it contains. I mean, I personally have never been tempted to hold a festival worshiping a statue that I fashioned out of gold. It’s absurd. How could Israel have done such a thing, especially when YWHW had just proven Himself powerful in their salvation from Egypt, caring in His constant provision in the desert, and faithful in inviting them into a covenant relationship with Himself. How could they turn from YHWH and worship anything or anyone else?

A golden calf? Really?

Maybe it isn’t as absurd as it seems. In the Ancient Near East, an image of a calf was not always viewed as a deity itself but as a vehicle for a deity. Archeologists have unearthed figurines and statuettes in which one god or another is literally riding on the back of a calf. In other words, in the religious imagination of the Ancient Near Eastern people, idols of calves functioned to bring whatever god from wherever he resided into the immediate presence of a people desiring to worship him. Be it Baal or YHWH, why worship blindly by faith when a calf can bring your god into sight?

Could that have been the idolatry of Exodus 32? Not that Israel chose to worship a god other than YHWH, but that they chose to worship YHWH in a way other than He had sanctioned? Verse 5 says that Aaron “built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” In bowing down and making sacrifices to the golden calf, was Israel knowingly worshiping another god? Maybe not. Maybe the issue is that they were attempting to worship YHWH–a God who called them to be holy and set apart in their worship–by mirroring the practices of the cultures surrounding them?

Listen, I’m not trying to let Israel off the hook. I’m trying to put us up there too.

Because if this is the idolatry of Exodus 32–not that Israel worshiped a false god but worshiped the true God falsely–then we must face our own susceptibility to do the exact same thing, just not in the same way. We too have our own tried-and-true vehicles for making God feel present. They may not be golden or in the shape of livestock but we have our idols. Anyone who has ever planned a worship service knows that we have certain things within our power that we can rely on to provide a quicker and easier route than asking people to worship patiently and by faith, things that make God feel close, things that transform a God who is Spirit into a thing to be seen or felt or heard (i.e. “this song + this arrangement + this level of excellence + dramatic lighting that waxes and wanes with the well-rehearsed dynamics of the band”). We too have vehicles that we attempt to place God upon week-in and week-out. And I am not saying that they are innately idolatrous; they aren’t. But I am saying they can become idolatrous when they replace a true encounter. I’m saying we may have more in common with Israel in Exodus 32 than we realize.

I wrote this song with all of these ideas bouncing around in my head. I wrote it empathizing with Israel in their idolatry.

The chorus is intended to be a fun sing-a-long tune; something you could imagine a bunch of people singing together after a long day’s work. Israel had relied on their hands each day in Egypt, making brick after brick in an attempt to remain in Pharaoh’s good graces. They had relied on their hands wielding swords in the battle against the Amalekites. Their hands had come through time and again for them. So, why not now? Certainly, they could put their hands to good use and fashion a means of worshiping God at their will and in their way. No need to wait. They can worship by the work of their own hands.

They were wrong, of course. They just didn’t know it yet. But as the song ends, God enters in singing the refrain of “Ever Your God” (the last song from Exodus: Act 1), but the key has changed from major to minor and the words now express anger and heartache. Read Exodus 32:7-35; it is clear that God does not take matters of idolatry lightly–theirs or ours.

Credits

Words & Music: Bill Wolf
School Instruments: Cole Creasy, Jamey Gorman, Phillip Joubert, Haley Mailhot, Chloe McCarthy, Makayla Millington, Keaton Stone, Drew Walburg, Adam Whipple