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When fear and uncertainty close in, we don’t just want comfort—we want control, something solid we can hold onto. In Exodus 32, Israel melts down the very gold God gave them in Egypt to cast a god they can see, and the impulse driving that golden calf is closer to our own hearts than we’d like to admit.
The following study questions are AI generated and may contain errors.
The preacher describes idols as “security blankets” we create when facing fear and uncertainty. What are some modern “security idols” (beyond the obvious material ones) that Christians might unconsciously rely on instead of trusting God—such as reputation, relationships, career success, or even religious institutions?
In what ways might we, like Aaron, prioritize the approval or demands of people around us over obedience to God, and how can we recognize when that shift is happening in our own lives?
Moses responded to crisis by appealing to God’s character and promises rather than seeking personal security. How does his choice to prioritize who God is over what would benefit himself challenge the way we typically make decisions when facing uncertainty?
The sermon warns that “the ends never justify the means” when discussing how people hide sin to “protect” churches or institutions. The sermon also notes that idolatry has generational consequences, as seen with Jeroboam. How might our own compromises—however well-intentioned—shape the faith of those who come after us, and what would it look like to break that pattern?
How does the law function as a “guardian” leading us to Christ, and what changes in our relationship with God’s commands when we understand them as invitations to relationship rather than rules meant to condemn?
This transcript has been automatically generated and may contain errors.
The last few weeks as we’ve begun this series, it sort of felt like that opening was almost out of sync with it. If you think about what we’ve been talking about, because we’ve been talking about how faithful God is, and how he delivered the people from Egypt. And it’s sort of, well, why is it so dramatic? Why is it fading and looking like winter’s coming upon them? Doesn’t feel very much like the wilderness throughout in the physical wilderness, but it doesn’t really feel that much like the wilderness at that point. But God’s preparing them for the wilderness to come. Not necessarily going to respond very well to that preparation. It’s going to come down to a matter of fear and uncertainty. And we’re not going to look at every instance where they run into fear and uncertainty in their wilderness years. Because if we did, we’d be doing this series all year. The Israelites have a very hard time in the wilderness, and they have a very hard time trusting God in the wilderness.
But when we think about that, I could erase Israelite and simply say, we as humanity have a hard time trusting God in the wilderness. When we face fear, when we face uncertainty, we have a hard time. We think about that tonight. That’s a heavy topic, fear and uncertainty. That’s what we’re going to be talking about tonight. And as we do, let’s come before our God because we need him to face it. Let’s pray.
Father, thank you for your goodness and your love. Thank you for being with us, not just the times of plenty, but also the times in which it feels like it’s not just a lack of plenty. It’s a complete famine. It’s everything going wrong. Everything feeling like it’s crumbling around us. Everything feeling uncertain and unstable. Lord, you were with us in those times too, and we pray that you would be with us as we face those times, that we might be strengthened and encouraged to cling all the more to you in them. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
We act out of fear and uncertainty, and maybe I should just start with, I act out of fear and uncertainty because I’m someone. I think I sometimes convince people I can be pretty calm and easy going, but I’m not. I spend a lot of time in my head worrying. I’m very, very good. This is something I can tell you, and this is completely truthful. This is not bragging. I mean, I’m going to tell you how good I am at something, but it’s just absolute truth. I am very good at worrying. I am a master worrier. And so I can say, certainly I act out of fear and uncertainty oftentimes.
However, I think when it really comes down to it, most of us are pretty good at that. Maybe not in the same areas, but there’s things that keep us up at night. There’s things that cause us to want to run away. There are things that cause us to just struggle even to think during the day because they overwhelm us, those sorts of things. They come and they come again. What do we do in those times? Well, Jim kind of, I mean, he had us confess one of those things. This wasn’t supposed to be confessing sin at this point. This was just supposed to be a good thing, which is comfort food. And yet here he has us confessing about eating food as a source of security in the confession.
So he’s trying to convict me as I’m preparing to share this message and bringing the conviction home. Because sometimes it is, right? OK, I know I will feel better if I just eat something particular. And for me, I have to say oftentimes, and if you know me, you know what I’m going to say is my comfort food. It is the potato, the potato. The potato is the perfect food, a baked potato, French fries, hash browns, fried potatoes, mashed potatoes, new potatoes. I feel like I’m twice. Oh, yeah, twice baked potatoes. Potatoes are, I’m convinced, the perfect food because you can provide them. You can do a loaded baked potato, regular baked potato, broccoli, cheese baked potato, barbecue baked potato. Potatoes are great. Potatoes make life good. Or we did have before the service someone may have smuggled in some chicken McNuggets.
And I think I’ve shared this story several years ago on steadfast. But I remember one time, I think it was for a family funeral that my mom and I found ourselves coming back from Indiana in the middle of March. About this time, maybe next like a week from now would be the anniversary that I don’t remember what year it was. But here’s what I do remember. And our weather this week has been reminding us of this, that we can get snow still. And we got snow still. We hit Effingham coming back. And it wasn’t just a snow. It was like blizzard. You’re out in the middle of Illinois. And I remember we pulled into the driveway at the end of the trip and you couldn’t see the front of the cart, which is caked in snow. I want to eat some comfort food after that. And just getting back was so comforting.
Anyway, though, on that trip, that’s what makes me think of chicken McNuggets. We had gotten lost and we were trying to beat the storm and we stopped. And we got McDonald’s because, of course, you can count on McDonald’s at any exit. It’s going to be the same wherever you go. And so chicken McNuggets, wow, is that comforting. You know, when you’re really hungry and you don’t know where you’re going, just finding something familiar is comforting. So there’s lots of comfort foods. And so we turned to something like that. We turned out a lot of things. So that, yeah, OK, Jim had us confessing that and that’s true. Sometimes we overeat for comfort, right? We or we think I’m going to eat these chicken McNuggets or this potato and everything is going to be all right. Well, no, it’s going to be the same. I just not hungry anymore. Maybe it just was sort of soothing.
But we do other bigger things, too, when we’re trying to seek comfort. We eat that comfort food and we realize it’s still bad. And so what do we do? Well, we could eat more chicken McNuggets, eat another baked potato. Maybe we have some chocolate chip cookies. You know, we have the complete comfort meal, right? And it’s still bad. So we’re trying to take control. We think I need to make sure that I’m going to be OK. I need to make sure that the situation is going to be OK.
And that’s when we move into very deep, deep waters that are problematic. That’s what the Israelites do in the next verses we’re going to look at, because here’s what they do. They say things are bad. They’ve eaten their potatoes. They’ve eaten their chicken McNuggets. They’ve had their chocolate chip cookies. They are still stressed out because Moses has been on the mountain getting the law from God. He’s been up there for a really long time. They’re convinced something’s happened to him. And they’re out here. They can’t go back to Egypt. They go back to Egypt, boys are going to be bad. They don’t have any place to go. Their leader is gone. Now what?
That’s where we pick up Exodus, chapter 32, if you want to turn there in your Bible or look out on the screen. It says 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.” 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.” So all the people took off the rings of gold that were there in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 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.”
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.” 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.
So what’s going on here? A number of things and none of them good. And the starting point is that they’re looking up at this mountain and Moses has gone up on the mountain. The cloud is to send down the mountain. They can see God still at work, but they start to think maybe that wasn’t really God. Or maybe it was a God that wasn’t really a nice God. After all, the ancient world, there were many people and Israelites are going to struggle with this for some time. Still, many people believe there were a bunch of different gods and some of them were better than other gods.
If you watch the Marvel series a few years ago or you’ve seen the different Avengers movies and so on, you know Loki. Loki is an example in Norse mythology of a not good God, right? Because he’s always trying to cause trouble and so on. He doesn’t care about anyone that tries to serve him. In the ancient world, people believe there were gods like that. And maybe part of what creeps in Israelites’ minds would be something like this: Well, you know, Moses came and said this God that was going to leave us, lead us out of Egypt was the God of our forefathers and was going to be faithful. But maybe he’s really a trickster God and he just thought it’d be really funny to watch us all die in the desert. Maybe Moses was just crazy and he wasn’t leading us nowhere, you know, that that party in the sea, I don’t know about that. And anyway, we’re out here. We’re all going to die. Moses is gone. We’re never going to see him again. Maybe it was all big sham. And Moses took off on the other side of the mountain is halfway to China by now. Maybe that’s the sorts of things that they’re thinking.
It’s the sort of thing that we think when we find ourselves trapped in a place, here we are in it, but things aren’t moving along. We’re waiting and we’re waiting. Those doubts start to creep into our mind. Or we get someplace and it seems to be going well. And then things start to break down and we think, well, if God were with me in this, it would all be going smoothly, but it’s not going smoothly. And something like that, I think, is going through the minds of our friends, the Israelites. And they’re thinking, where is Moses? He’s gone and we need to do something.
And so what do they do? Well, there aren’t any McDonald’s yet, so they can’t go. They don’t. They’re not driving down the highway on their journey through the wilderness. And they see the sign up next exit food at exit and they say, oh, there’s the Golden Arches. We can order our McNuggets and maybe some milkshakes, some fries. Oh, McDonald’s fries. Speaking of comfort food. Wow. So you get those fries. You can’t do that. They can’t do that. So what are they going to do? I forgot tater tots earlier. Maybe they get some tater tots. Can’t do that either. They haven’t been invented yet.
So what are they going to do? Well, something that would bring them comfort. If you think that one God isn’t serving you well, you go and worship a different God. Because if you believe there are a bunch of different gods and the God that you’ve been serving isn’t coming through, it’s sort of like if you’re at a company and you realize the company isn’t paying you your paycheck anymore, what do you do? You go and you try to find a different job. You have friends and they don’t ever seem to be there for you, then maybe you seek out some different friends.
At best in the ancient world, oftentimes the way that people looked at gods is sort of like a marriage. So, OK, they had pledged their loyalty to this God. But if he disappears and abandons them, maybe they need to go and pledge their loyalty to a different God. They need an annulment from this God who’s left them out in the wilderness. And so all these things are running through their head.
Yes, God has demonstrated so much faithfulness to them, they shouldn’t be thinking that. God has demonstrated so much faithfulness to us, we shouldn’t be thinking those sorts of things either. And yet we do. We let those doubts creep in. We start to wonder, is God going to be faithful in this instance? Is God going to be with me right now? For them, they decide, no, we don’t think he is and we need something else. We need something we can see. We don’t want just a God that’s up in a cloud. We want God like all the gods that we worship back in Egypt, where we can go and we can see that God.
And so what do they do? They trade the God who’s taking them out of the land of Egypt, opened up the waters and let them walk through it. They take that God and they say, how about we kind of pretend we’re still being faithful to him, but we’re going to make a God that we can see. We’re going to see someone in front of us craft a God that we can worship. And so that’s what they ask for. They say, Aaron, OK, you’re a priest, you don’t know all that priestly stuff. How about making us a real God, one that we can see with our own eyes?
And so what does Aaron do? Well, Aaron, who’s been right with his brother and seeing God working even more closely than the other people says, oh, OK, well, if that’s what you’d like, sure, why not? Why does Aaron go there? We’re not really sure. We’re not told exactly what causes Aaron to go that way. We’re just told that he does it.
But again, we could maybe think here, maybe Aaron’s thinking that Moses isn’t coming back. The other thing and very early translations of this text add a little something to verse five that commentators think might actually provide an insight into Aaron. And that’s it just says here in our Bibles says, “When Aaron saw this.” But some of those very, very early translations of the text say Aaron was afraid when he saw this.
And I’m not so sure that Aaron’s real problem, he’s not necessarily afraid that Moses isn’t coming back. He’s not afraid that God is some evil God. What Aaron is afraid of is he’s looking at all these people out here getting anxious. And he’s thinking, I know what happens to leaders who are around people that get too anxious. Leaders of people that get too anxious end up being deceased leaders of people. And so he looks on the one hand, he can look up the mountain and he sees this cloud descended upon the mountain, and the sign of the Almighty God of the universe.
And on the other side, he looks at the people who are saying, “Aaron make us gods.” We’re not happy with this situation. And he decides the one that’s more fearsome is the group of people. And we may want to beat up on Aaron on that, but we often look at the people around us and they’re starting to get anxious. They’re starting to get upset. And we look at what God has called us to do and what God has said is faithful. And we say, well, I want to be faithful to God. But what’s really going to affect me in this moment is that my friends are going to think I’m crazy or my boss is going to fire me or my community isn’t going to accept me. And that determines more about what we’re going to do than the fact that we know that the God of the universe has said to do otherwise.
And I think that really is what’s going on in Aaron’s head here. There’s a cloud, but there’s people here with weapons. And when he looks at the two of those, he decides, I want to deal with my fear. I don’t want to assume that God is going to rescue me. I’m going to rescue myself. And so what can I do? I know how to make something. And so I’m going to make something. And so he makes the golden calf. And we know that Aaron knows this is wrong because what happens later on when Moses comes down the mountain, Aaron lies about it. He says, oh, I threw the gold in the fire and out came a calf. Wow. What do you know?
Aaron knows that the Lord is faithful. Aaron knows that the Lord has said not to do this. And yet he does. So we see the people are motivated by fear. Aaron is motivated by fear. And so they look for security and they find their security in idols. They find their security in something that they can have control of. And I think we see the weakness begin at the very beginning of this when it says that when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron.
So they come up, “Up, make us gods who shall go before us for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt. Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt,” not Moses, the prophet who was guided by the Lord who took us out of Egypt. Moses, the man took us out of Egypt. And so they’ve taken their eyes, brought them downward onto Earth and said this leader that we’ve had, he’s the one that rescued us. He’s the one that we can count on. And he’s gone. Do we ever do that all the time? Do that all the time as human beings?
We even when we see God working, we look at who it is that God is working through. And we put our confidence in that person. If that person fails, we either make excuses because that person can’t possibly be wrong. That’s the person who’s my ticket to everything being OK. Or on the other hand, we abandon all hope because that person has failed. And so therefore, everything good that was happening is going to fail as well.
Do we understand when God’s working through people that it is God who is working? God’s the one doing it, not Moses, not the people around us today. Yes, God uses people, but our trust should not be in those people, but in God. I’m not saying don’t trust people. I’m not saying we should live our lives as cynics that constantly assume everyone’s going to fail us all the time. But when we actually start to say, wow, God is working, then we need to go a step further and say, therefore, this person that God is working through. If this person someday acts like a person and actually does something wrong, actually fails me in some way, actually does something sinful, it doesn’t in any way negate the fact that God is working. Can we do that?
Israelites couldn’t. They said Moses is gone. And so we need something we can trust. And that gold calf is something we can trust. And it only gets worse because what do they do to make that golden calf? They take the gold that they’re wearing.
Now, remember, these are slaves. They’ve left the land of Egypt. They were enslaved. The Egyptians weren’t handing them over gold all the time as they made bricks there. Have some gold jewelry. We’re so thankful that you’re our slaves. That’s not how it works. Why did they have the gold? They had the gold because God brought plagues and the Egyptians said, clearly, your God is a powerful God and we don’t want him too angry. He asked, here, take some of our treasures, please just go so we don’t all die here, have treasures. That’s what they did. And so as the people take this gold off of themselves to make an idol, they’re taking off gold that only is in their possession because God had acted mightily for them.
Taking what God has provided them. Now, of course, we can go a step further and say, well, of course, anything we have God provided has been provided to us. And how often, ironically, do we take the very things that God has given us. The very things that at one point we’re in here praising God that he’s given us his blessing, we take those and we do those. We use those things, whether it’s money or the home that we live in or the cars we drive or the clothes we wear and we put our trust in those things rather than God.
I have clothes that people are going to think look successful. I’m going to go get this job now because people are going to respect me. I have clothes that are cool. I’m going to go to school. And people are going to think I am someone that they should hang around because I have the right clothes on. Who provides it? People forget that Aaron forgets that Aaron is saying, give me all this stuff. Aaron knows where that stuff came from, too, and he’s taking it. And what is he doing with it? He’s going to form a golden calf with it. And then Aaron even has the audacity to then use language that refers to the Lord in presenting the golden calf.
As they prepare to worship this golden calf idol, what does Aaron say in verse five? When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron said, he made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” Now, before in that first statement, these are your gods of Israel. It’s echoing the language that’s declaring that God is with them. But we could say, well, you know, they’re just kind of echoing it, but they’re saying God’s. But here he actually refers to the Lord by name. He’s transferring God’s name and he’s applying what he’s solely been being trained by the Lord is here’s how you lead the people of God in worshiping. He’s transferring that over to this new security idol that he has.
We have the golden calf and we’re going to have a feast of the Lord. So he’s taking the worship of the Lord and bending it to what’s going to make him feel secure, what’s going to make the people feel secure. Our search for security is so often the source of our sin. Because we want something that we can hang on to, something that we can touch and hold and know will hold us. And as we look for that, we take the blessings God’s given us, we take the faithfulness God has shown us, and even the worship that God has given us. And we use it to provide our own security in a way that’s actually blaspheming him. And that’s exactly what they do.
There’s no repentance there. It’s not that, well, we have a golden calf, but we didn’t realize that was wrong. And now we’re going to worship the Lord properly. No, what do we see here? It says, and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. And if you really get into that language, what’s it saying? They have a drunken, just absolutely disgraceful gathering.
It’s like some really just utterly horrible cultural festival. I can think of one. I don’t want to mention it because I’m not trying to speak to anything and I certainly haven’t been there, but some of these festivals you hear, there’s a couple of them that take place out west in the United States every year. And you hear about some of the just the horrible stuff that people do at these festivals. And why do they go and gather there? Because it’s going to somehow give them a sense of success. It’s going to give them a sense of being in the know of what’s going on. And oftentimes even giant well-known artists and movie producers and so on show up there because they want people to say, oh, we have the trendy stuff that’s shown in these places.
And yet what’s going on there? It’s people finding excuse to do all kinds of drunken sin. And that’s exactly what happens here. They worship this idol and they don’t just worship it in some very staid reverent fashion where you can try to somehow squint and say, well, maybe they just didn’t get that command about the idols yet. No, they’ve completely let go of anything about what God actually said about worship. It just keeps devolving. And that’s exactly what happens with idols because we may start and think, well, I’m still really trusting in the Lord, but I’m also trusting in my job. I really trust in the Lord, but I’m also trusting in my own ingenuity. I really trust in the Lord, but I’m also trusting in my street smarts. I really trust in the Lord, but I’m also trusting in this network of friends I have that can get me out of anything.
And we think for a while we’re still kind of we’re kind of playing it both ways. But what happens when we start to move our trust? Once we move our trust, Satan comes right in and uses that to draw us into more and more sin. That’s exactly what happens here. And that’s generational consequences, too.
We have Aaron making a golden calf here, but this isn’t the only time we see a calf idol with the people of God. First Kings 12:28, after the northern kingdom and southern kingdom split, Jeroboam says, “So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold. He said to the people, ‘You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.’” Boy, that sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Jeroboam, just to refresh, you do have this split. Rehoboam’s Solomon’s son is a bad king. He doesn’t understand how to treat the people. The people say, “Enough of that,” and this is a punishment that God has put on the land. They’re going to split. God allows Jeroboam to become king of the northern kingdom. But Jeroboam doesn’t want to trust in the God who’s made him king. He says, “You know, if people still go down and worship in Jerusalem, which is the only place that God is authorized for worship, if people go down there, they might say, ‘You know what’s better down here? People are nicer down here. The economy is doing better down here.’” That temple, wow, look at that beautiful temple that is under the control of Judah.
And Jeroboam says, “If they do that, I’m never going to have full control of the people. And so what I’m going to do, yeah, God made me king, but I need more control than God making me king. I’m going to ensure I stay king by creating idols and telling the people to worship those idols rather than going down to the temple.”
And so what does he do? He goes right back to that sin that Aaron had done so many years before. And I think that’s something that we often don’t think about. We think about our own sin, and maybe we’re convicted of it, but do we think about how we’re influencing those who come after us, that people are watching what we do, whether it’s one’s own children or just the people around us? And so, for example, Jeroboam isn’t, it’s not about family tree per se other than in a broader sense as the people of Israel, but certainly here, Jeroboam looks back to what his predecessors did and says, “I’m going to try this again because it works so well the first time.” It doesn’t work any better, ultimately, for Jeroboam’s line, but he thinks it will.
So we need to recognize what we’re doing when we start to trust in these security idols. It often has long-term ramifications, and we don’t even realize we’re doing it because we don’t call them idols today. We don’t melt gold, but the shift of trust away from the Lord is just as strong when we trust in the job or money or power or anything else as it is when we trust in a golden calf.
Jeroboam won political security, and so it wasn’t enough that God had given him political security. He needed more. We want security in our own lives, and so it’s not enough that God has provided us with where we are. We want more, and so we seek, “How can I add that into my life?” It’s a weak spot for us. We want that security. It feels so nice when everything is secure that we’re willing to trade the only one who can make us secure.
I think sometimes we justify it by saying, especially when we’re at a slightly larger level than just our own individual selves, but we should start there because that’s both where we can influence the most because we can actually wrestle with our own sin, and often we can’t cure societal ill, but here is something that really is disturbing, I think, when we think about how the people of God are acting, and we do this over and over again. We look and we say, “Sure, this politician, sure, this church leader is doing wrong things, isn’t acting in a godly fashion, but we’re going to say that this is our source of security, and we’re going to chase after this person because, yeah, it’s wrong, but it’s protecting God’s people.”
I’m not so sure that Jeroboam would have said the same thing, “Yeah, it’s wrong to make this idol, but I have God’s people to look after here, and if I don’t make sure that it’s secure and it’s politically stable, there aren’t going to be a people of God.” We do this today over and over again. How often do you hear about some scandal break out in a church, and it turns out that many of the leaders knew about it for years, but they were afraid if they let it out, if they actually admitted there was wrong, that the church might collapse, that the organization might fail, and so they hide it. Maybe they even persecute the people who’ve been hurt even more because what if they speak, and so they layer sin on top of sin. We layer sin on top of sin because we think, “Yeah, it’s wrong, but I have to protect God’s people. I have to protect God’s church. I have to protect my country. I have to protect my world, and so I’m going to overlook sin as long as it’s for the right goal.” The ends justify the means. The ends never justify the means, ever.
But it sure feels good because security blanket that we can wrap ourselves around when we feel like we’re doing something, and someone was going to protect us. Some strong leader is going to protect us. Some security of an organization is going to protect us. Our own cunning is going to protect us. There’s Linus van Pelt. I’m sorry, I just switched to the European pronunciation. Linus van Pelt. Good old Linus. What is Linus famous for that you can see in that picture there? His blanket, right? Linus has his blanket all the time with him, and here’s the thing that always amazes me. I love Charlie Brown Christmas. I could watch it multiple times every year. It’s just such a beautiful story. If you haven’t ever, has anyone not watched Charlie Brown Christmas? If you—okay, you guys need to watch Charlie Brown Christmas next Christmas. I’m telling you. It will. It’s beautiful. It’s wonderful.
In any case, here’s something that’s amazing. Linus, wherever he happens to be, and it’s really apparent when you’re actually watching animation rather than the cartoon, the printed cartoons, but in any case, wherever he might be, his security blanket is not only with him, but he can always accomplish whatever is needed. If he needs a slingshot, he can take that security blanket and suddenly a slingshot. If he needs a tree skirt for the Christmas tree that’s falling apart, that’s going to make it all okay because I have a tree skirt now, he has the tree skirt with that blanket. If he needs to have a shepherd’s hat, he can wrap it around. He has a shepherd’s hat, and it just happens instantaneously.
You give me a blanket, and I can’t do any of that very quickly. I certainly wouldn’t—a slingshot, I just slingshot it myself, but Linus, whatever he needs that blanket to do, it does. So it’s a genuine—it’s good that he treats it as a security blanket. The problem is our security blankets don’t work as well as Linus’s. They feel comforting, but we think, ah, if something comes and attacks, I can turn it into a slingshot, and the only thing it’s doing is clunking us on our own heads. We think it will make the twigs of my plan suddenly turn into a beautiful Christmas tree, and we wrap the blanket around, and what happens—we still have twigs that have no needles on them.
What are my idols? What are my security idols? I think that’s the question we need to ask ourselves, because here’s the thing that I am confident in. As long as we are fallen human beings, until the day that we are in Jesus’s presence, all of us are going to have security idols, something that either we’re actively giving into at this moment, because we wanted to give security to us, or something that we feel the pull. And Satan loves to bring those things up. Satan loves to say, “If you just give into this, you’ll feel so much safer, so much better, or you’ll, you know, it’ll help you in your promotion, your job, and so things will be okay, or it’ll take away this challenge.”
And that’s exactly what the Israelites did here. That’s what every human being is tempted to do, and every human being, I really can say with confidence, all of us are going to fall to it. At some point in our lives, we either have or will, we have and we will again. That’s why we need to be thinking about this, and it’s really easy to look at the Israelites and say, “How can you be so stupid as to build this golden calf idol, and yet, how can we be so stupid to trust in the things that we do?” We do. What are my security idols? What are the things that make me feel safe?
We answer Jesus, we’re answering correctly, but let’s make sure even when we say Jesus, we really mean Jesus, we don’t mean Jesus as I’ve pictured him. Jesus as in when I walk into a particular church building, as long as that church building stands, I’m okay, but if that church building ever closes, I’m not okay. If that pastor ever is gone, I’m not okay. If that denomination ever falls, I’m not okay. If that Bible teacher that publishes the books I love to read ever dies, I’m in trouble. Or if it turns out he plagiarized, oh boy. Let’s make sure that it’s actually in Jesus.
God offers security in himself when we want to find security in the things of this world. And we see that as Moses is confronted with this problem, God says, “Okay, we need to stop this discourse that I’ve been giving on the law because those people down there, they’re a stiff-necked people, they just love to rebel. And guess what, Moses? Well, you’ve been up here listening and learning so you can go teach them. They’re down there making an idol and worshiping it rather than me. Okay, Moses, go down there and deal with it.”
What does Moses do? Because God says, “How about this Moses?” I really believe this is a test of Moses’ character. God says to Moses, “You know, Moses, why don’t I just wipe out all those people because they’re evil, they’ve done evil now, and I’ll let you be the people of God, you and your descendants.” How about that instead? Sounds like a pretty good deal. Moses hasn’t had an easy time with these people either. What does Moses do?
That’s an insecure situation. Moses looks not to himself or his own wants or what would provide his own security, he looks to God.
Excuse me, Exodus 32 verse 11, “But Moses implored the Lord as God and said, ‘O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians say, with evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains, to continue to consume them from the face of the earth. Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. 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 I have promised I will give to your offspring and they shall inherit it forever.’ And the Lord relented from disaster that he had spoken of bringing to his people.”
So God makes an offer that Moses surely shouldn’t refuse, right? God will give him all the security. Why don’t you just take this, Moses? And Moses says, “No, I want what I know about you, God. I know you are a faithful God. I know you are the God that brought these people out of Egypt. I didn’t. You’re the one that did it. And you’re the one that’s preserved every generation going back to Abraham. You have called these people. Why would you destroy them?” Moses passes a test here very well because what does he do?
He doesn’t look at what’s going to be good for him. He doesn’t look at what would be sort of a promotion for him, that everyone in the land that’s the people of God will be his descendants. What does he say? “I know who you are, Lord, and that’s all I want.” I’m not trying to make Moses perfect, and we know later on Moses makes his own mistakes, but in this moment what Moses is doing is exactly what we should do, which is when we face a situation, what do we do? We turn back to God into his promises.
Moses says, “I know who you are,” and so this situation doesn’t make any sense, but I still know who you are, Lord.
What does God do? He gives them back his word. He’s already instructed them in the law. Now he instructs them again in the law. Exodus 34:1, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘Cut for yourself two tablets of stone like the first, and I will write on the tablets the words that were on the first tablet which you broke.’” Moses breaks the Ten Commandments as he goes down the mountain and sees what’s happening. God says, “I’m going to provide it again.”
Later in that chapter, “The Lord passed before him and proclaimed, ‘The Lord, the Lord of God, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers, on the children and the children’s children to the third and fourth generation.’”
What does God do? He reiterates everything he’d already told them. You can find this back in Exodus 20. It’s something that’s really struck me on our Tuesday night Bible study. We’re going very carefully through this section of Scripture right now, and it’s so striking when you’re going through it in one batch over the course of a few months. You think, “I’ve heard this before.” And it’s so striking. God is going to repeat most of what he said before they worship the golden calf. He’s going to say it again. Why? Because he’s going to restore them, and he’s going to restore them by giving them his word again.
It’s not just a law. It’s inviting them back into relationship with him. And sometimes we think of the law as condemning. It says that God’s going to judge them, right? God is going to bring iniquity on those who aren’t faithful to him, and yet the law isn’t about God’s judgment. It’s about God’s love.
Galatians 3:24, “So then the law was our guardian until Christ came in order that we might be justified by faith.”
What does that mean? Well, we don’t… maybe if you’re really high society today, this might be true, but it was more common in the past. You’d have a servant or in the ancient world a slave who would watch over the children. Someone trusted in the household, and he’d make sure that they would get to school and back. Later on, maybe say in England, you’d have an older woman that would watch over the children, and she’d make sure they’d get to school and back, and everything was going okay, that they were protected. Then at some point they get old enough they don’t need that anymore.
And Paul says that’s what the law is. God gives his law not to punish. That person who watched over the kids wasn’t there to punish, that person was to make sure those kids didn’t die and learn what they needed to learn so they could live in the world. And likewise, the law, what’s it there for? It’s there so that the people know how to relate to God and understand that God is with them. So what does God do? He restores them, he gives his law back to them. He says, here it is, here is how you relate to me, I am still with you.
It’s a guardian. And later on as Paul develops that in Galatians, he says, and now we have Jesus, so where is the law developing us to? The law is developing us so we know that God has a relationship with us, that he’s with us, so we understand when we encounter Jesus that this is who he is, and this is what he’s rescued us from, and now we have him and his grace and he’s with us.
We put our security in the wrong things. I was reading about the great Antwerp diamond heist. Has anyone heard of that? I love reading about good heist, and this one was pretty ingenious. This is in 2003, so high-tech security systems. They had laser beams that were—this isn’t just a movie—they actually had laser beams going across the vaults to make sure they could detect if someone walked in. They had heat sensors that could sense body heat as it went into the vaults.
And so this group of thieves wanted to go and steal billions of dollars of actual diamonds. Now how do you do this? It sounds like straight out of a movie, what did they do? Well, the leader of this group of thieves, a man by the name of Leonardo, he went and pretended to be a diamond trader, and he rented an office in this diamond exchange building, and he was there for 18 months, and he’d go in and out like he was trading like everybody else in the building, so that the security guards would learn that he was a normal face in the building. They wouldn’t think of anything with him. And so the people storing their diamonds, they think that it’s all secure. They have all these guards, they have all these high tech security systems, giant vaults, all this stuff just like in the movies.
And he starts to defeat it simply by becoming familiar to them, and they think well he’s another person we can trust. So they had this secure thing they could trust to an extent, but they start to shift their trust. And how does he defeat all these systems? Like how do you defeat a heat sensor that senses if a body’s heat is apparent someplace it’s not supposed to be? Well, he discovered that you can spray hairspray on it.
And so what did he do? He perfected motion away. They built a model of this vault where he could spray hairspray over where he knew the sensors would be, so that he could go in one day as the diamond trader just going in doing his normal thing in the vault and go and none of the security guards are even paying attention because he’s supposed to be there. They did that, they then learned the pattern of the vault so that they didn’t have to trust in light, they could walk in the dark and get through the vault.
So they did all these things so they could get away with this, and in fact the diamonds have for the most part never been found. They actually did get away with it.
Leonardo, the head of it though, did not get away with it because while he thought he was so genius and he’d come up with all this stuff to protect himself, he forgot one thing. One day as they were preparing for this he went and got a sandwich. He had his comfort food and he didn’t finish the sandwich, I don’t know why, but he left the half-eaten sandwich there.
And when they were trying to find the thieves, that half-eaten sandwich was discovered. This must have been right before the heist. They found his DNA on it and they found them and they arrested him.
So we see different ways that we can trust in ourselves in the wrong way. The diamond traders were trusting in their security system and it failed them. Leonardo was trusting in his ingenuity and he wouldn’t have even been caught. Here’s the kicker on this. They caught him when he went back to burn the plant so no one would see how he did it.
And they caught him. He trusted himself one too many times. We trust ourselves and we think we’re getting away with it. We trust ourselves one too many times and God calls us to turn away from the things that we trust in ourselves, turn away in the organizations and institutions and leaders and anything else that we place our trust in instead of God, trusting Him and Him alone. And then what we find is that when we are in the places of insecurity in our lives, when we’re looking to Him instead of all these other things we can do, like Moses, and say, “I know who you are, God, and you are with me. I know who you are. I know what you’ve said and therefore I know what you will do.” And friends, that’s what we can know today as well.
Would you pray with me, please.
Lord, would you help us? We are people who too often shift our attention away from you and towards the things of the world thinking somehow we can trust in them, but we leave those half-eaten sandwiches behind. We are not able to provide our own security. May we not trust in the idols that we make, whatever they might be in our own lives, but would you reveal those security idols to us that we might run from them and run to the cross and trust in the only one who is truly trustworthy. We pray in his precious name, the name of Jesus. Amen.
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