10: The Golden Calf

[00:00] Stephanie: Season 2, episode 10. We are continuing our Lessons from the Wilderness series with a look at the golden calf incident.

Hello, Father.

[00:09] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:10] Stephanie: Yes, happy topic.

[00:12] Marcus: Happy topic. The golden calf.

[00:14] Stephanie: I hope everyone had a lovely, happy Easter. I have an icebreaker for us today that, you know, I’m not going to try to connect it. Would you rather do a crossword puzzle or a jigsaw puzzle?

[00:31] Marcus: I would rather do a crossword puzzle. Now I do like them, unless I’m doing them with people, then jigsaw puzzle I would do with other people.

[00:41] Stephanie: But when you do crosswords, you still tend to be like, hey…

[00:46] Marcus: I honestly, I’ve done a lot of both.

[00:50] Stephanie: Not necessarily like, hey, do you know this? Although sometimes you’re asking that if you’re doing crossword, it’s usually like, “I know this. Do you know this?” Not in a bad way. You’re a verbal processor and like collaboration and stuff.

Anyway, I would go, jigsaw puzzle. Crossword puzzles, I like the idea of them, but I haven’t practiced them enough, so I don’t have that skill set. You’re really good. You’re really good at, you know, you could probably win jeopardy.

[01:17] Marcus: I know, Brenda’s always like, “When are you going to go on tv and make us some money?”

[01:26] Stephanie: Yes, crossword puzzles, all that kind of stuff. That’s definitely a you thing. I like it.

Well, all right. That’s no segue, just golden calf. I had segues in mind, and I’ve lost them. And they were tenuous at best. Last episode we talked about the tabernacle and God wanting an intimate in-our-midst relationship with us. And this episode, we’re going to talk about the troubling event of the golden calf. So would you like to set us up?

[02:03] Marcus: Yes. Keeping it in the exodus marital context of God saves the bride, marries the bride. From that perspective, she cheated on him on their honeymoon, so it’s like this was not a great start to the relationship. Now what happened was that Moses went up on the mountain and was gone for 40 days, but they weren’t told how long this was going to take. And so all they know is they can see fire. They can see clouds. This is a God.

From what they know of gods, they can be very fickle. For all they know, this God killed Moses. They don’t know what’s going on, and they feel abandoned, and they feel like sheep without a shepherd. So they turn to Moses’ brother, who’s been his spokesperson throughout, and say, “You do something about this. You take charge. Make us a God to worship!” Which I know makes no sense to us, but made sense in the ancient neareastern context of, “This is how all the other nations do it. Let’s just be like all of the other nations.”

And you get this really interesting thing, because Aaron doesn’t make for them Baal. He doesn’t say, “Okay, let’s start worshiping Atenra. Let’s start worshipping one of the gods of Egypt.” This is not a foreign or a pagan God he’s introducing. He says to them, “These are your Elohim. These are your gods who brought you up out of Egypt,” which is fascinating in and of itself.

And then he says that the ceremony, or the party, that they’re throwing the next day will be to Yahweh. So the golden calf is meant to be a continuation of the worship of Yahweh, but it is a direct violation of words that came from his own mouth that they all knew, which is, don’t use images in your worship of me. I have no idea how they justified this. I mean, I have no idea what they were thinking.

There’s a lot of different theories about it, because you have to dive into stuff that is outside of the text to try to figure out what their motivation was and what they were thinking. But they clearly were going back to the way the Egyptians worshipped and said, “Let’s just worship this God in a more tangible way.” My personal thought is that they were probably afraid that they needed to worship this God so he didn’t kill them the way he killed Moses. But there was more to it going on there. And all we know is, this was bad at a very deep level of bad.

[04:57] Stephanie: We will get to happier things toward the end of it, but it was so bad that God said, “You know, I should just start over.”

[05:07] Marcus: I should just start over. Yeah. There are some words here in Hebrew that are actual echoes of the flood story. And that is, in the flood story we read that God regretted that he had ever made humans. And we get that exact same word for regret. He regretted, but it’s in a slightly different context, but it reminds us, there’s something going on here where God was on the verge of just saying, “I am wiping these people out, and I am starting over.”

At first, there’s a lot of Hollywood thoughts on this that says God is like this child having a temper tantrum. This is why we don’t like the God of the Old Testament. He’s fickle.  For no good reason he’ll just start blowing people up and wiping them out. And I’m like, not really what’s going on here. In fact, you could make the argument that it might have been a better plan.

In other words, if you look at what happens after, they not only have done the golden calf, but then they lead in a revolt against Moses and his leadership, in which the ground opens up and swallows people alive into Sheol. They commit sin with the Baal of Peor, and snakes invade the camp, and they all end up having to die over a 38 year period anyway. In some ways, God was just going to speed up the timetable and say, “Instead of taking 38 years to do this, I’m just going to do it now. We’ll start over. We’ll get this process going.”

He would not have been unjust to do that, is what I’m saying. There would have actually been some wisdom and some righteousness in that it wasn’t God having a temper tantrum and overreacting. So we also have to remember that God is God, and he does have the right to do these things. He is ultimately the judge. So that’s one element of it.

Now, the flip side of that coin is, this is also reminiscent of God and Abraham and Sodom and Gomorrah, where there’s an interesting thing in the oldest texts of the Sodom and Gomorrah story. And I say oldest texts because the Masoretic text that most of us are familiar with doesn’t have this, but a note on the side says, “The original text should say that God waited for Abraham, and God told him, ‘I’m about to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah.’ And then he waited.”

What’s he waiting for? Well, what happens next is, Abraham’s like, “Wait a second, you’re going to kill everybody? What if there’re 50 righteous people?” And we get this interesting dialogue where he is interceding and asking, “Will not the judge of all of the earth be just? Isn’t that kind of the idea of being judge, that you’re just?” And by the time he’s done petitioning, Abraham realizes, “Actually, this is right. This is just. There probably aren’t ten righteous people in this whole city.”

In the same way, we have something going on here. When God says that, it’s almost like he’s now waiting. It’s an invitation. And Moses is like, “But God…” And what I find interesting is he doesn’t say, “But God, these people don’t deserve that.” That’s not his argument. His argument is, “But God. Think about your reputation. Other people are going to misinterpret what’s going on here. And they’re going to say you didn’t have the power to actually deliver and so you had to wipe them out. Or they’re going to say that you break your promises and you promised them one thing and you didn’t fulfill.”

And so Moses is like, “Think about your reputation.” He’s not like, “Oh, they’re not that bad, God.” Which I think is important because part of intercession is a form of confession. It’s like, “It really is this big of a mess. It really is this big of a problem. I don’t deserve it. They don’t deserve it. But God, for the sake of your glory, for the sake of your name, show compassion.” And that’s what God actually does.

[09:23] Stephanie: And how he reveals himself to be is compassion and forgiveness. And when people are seeking forgiveness, and we’ve talked before about that also being a gift, but when people seek forgiveness, then he’s going to step in.

[09:41] Marcus: Yeah. And what’s interesting here is that Moses is interceding for the people before they ask him to.

[09:49] Stephanie: But he is the spokesperson for them, in terms of permission and authority, he is the one holding that on behalf of everybody as well.

[10:01] Marcus: Yes, it is kind of interesting because the golden calf thing starts with Aaron saying, “Take off your gold and give it to me, and I’ll do what you want.” Well, when this incident is over, and they go back to building the tabernacle, what’s the first thing? God says make a free will offering of your gold. It’s kind of interesting that there’s this parallel, but now they’re bringing gold in for the righteous purpose of building what it is that God actually wants built.

Sometimes there’s a sense that we jump ahead of God and we run ahead of him. And in running ahead of him, we end up building something that is a counterfeit of what he actually wanted to create. That’s why he’s like, “Stay in step with me. Don’t run ahead. Be patient, even when you don’t understand what’s going on.” Because at some level, the Israelites didn’t understand what was going on, and they were trying to take control of this. And that’s essentially what we’re doing when we run ahead of God. We’re trying to take control of situations we don’t understand.

[11:00] Stephanie: And I see throughout this, and when we get into Leviticus, God is not only addressing, “Don’t be like the pagans, don’t be pagan,” but he is also saying, “Don’t be syncretistic. Be wholly devoted to me and my way. And let me direct you. I know what is best for you, and my heart is for you, and I have good plans for you, and don’t run ahead of me. I know what will happen if you run ahead of me, and you won’t like it, and we won’t like it. And I know what will happen if you follow in step with me, and you will like it, and I will like it.”

[11:36] Marcus: I think it’s true, too, that you bring up a good word, syncretism, and that is commandment number one is don’t have other gods. That would be, don’t worship Asherah, don’t worship Baal, don’t worship Marduk. Commandment number two is don’t use images in worshipping me. That would be syncretism. And the number one battle that the Israelites faced was, first and foremost syncretism.

What syncretism is, is the unnatural blending of worldviews and the unnatural blending of religious ideas. It’s massive in our world today, where people take something Christian and something Buddhist and put it together, or they take something Christian and something secular and they put it together. They take something Christian, something pagan, and they bring it together. That is syncretism, whenever you bring things together that don’t belong together. And commandment number two was meant to put a stop to syncretistic practices.

If you want to get a deep dive into this, you go to the Book of Judges. And what it says in Judges is that “In those days, Israel had no king. Everyone did what was right in their own eyes.” And what was missing was, because there was no king, there was no one enforcing the Torah and making sure that Torah stayed at the center of society. As a result, there was all this syncretism, and I don’t have time right now to unpack that, but it’s story after story after story in there of how they’re doing things in the name of Yahweh that Yahweh does not want them doing.

And this is a classic example that, with the golden calf, they’re doing something in the name of Yahweh that Yahweh has actually forbidden. And how often has that happened in the history of Christianity, where people, in the name of Jesus, have gone and done something that is absolutely contrary to the nature of Jesus? And that is, a nice word for what would be syncretism.

[13:29] Stephanie: Yes. So God invites intercession. And then he does forgive. Now, forgiveness is not without consequences. So why don’t we take a practical look at forgiveness? What is forgiveness and what is it not?

[13:45] Marcus: First of all, if you’re a parent, which, for those who are parents in the audience, everybody knows you can forgive your children for doing something wrong and still give them consequences. Because consequences aren’t just punishments, they’re training and they’re teaching. It’s a discipline for the future so the things don’t repeat. Forgiveness has to do with relationship. We’re going to stay in relationship, but there will be consequences here. And so God kept the relationship with this group of people, but he punished and he disciplined and he said, “This is not going to stand, though, there will be consequences.”

And you get this interesting time here where Moses intercedes and he says, “These people have committed a grave sin. They have made a God of gold for themselves. If only you would forgive their sin.” And then he says, “If you won’t forgive their sin, put the blame on me and wipe me out of the book of life. Erase me from the book you’ve written,” which I don’t think means send me to hell for all of eternity. What he’s talking about here, the book of life means, kill me. It’s like, take me out of picture.

[14:59] Stephanie: Let me take the punishment.

[15:00] Marcus: Let me take the punishment. And God’s like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” You know, he doesn’t come right out and say, “You’ve got your own sin, Moses.” He doesn’t go there, but he easily could. He’s like, “Look, whoever has sinned, I will erase from my book.” He said, “Now you go ahead and lead these people to the land.” So his forgiveness is demonstrated in that he doesn’t wipe them all out and he says, “I still want you to take them to the promised land. Let’s still go with the plan, but there are going to be consequences.” And he says, “On the day I settle accounts, I will hold them accountable for their sin.”

And so I think that that’s a difference. And a lot of us know this. We’ve been forgiven for our sins, but there’s still consequences. We’re still living with the pain of the ramifications of the things that we’ve done wrong, but we’re forgiven.

[15:53] Stephanie: And consequences aren’t always even punishment. There are natural consequences. If you do this thing, I forgive you, but you still lost that thing because you destroyed it.

[16:05] Marcus: Well, there are a couple other things that are kind of key to this whole story, and one of them is the idea of, “My presence won’t go with you. I’m going to send an angel.” Which is like, what? And Moses is like, “No, it needs to be your presence. If it’s not your presence, don’t send us from here.” And it’s this idea that God says, “I am such a holy God, and this is such a stiff-necked people.”

And the word stiff-necked shows up a few times in this story. The stiff-neckness is, they don’t trust me. They’re going to do things their own way, and they’re just going to keep bringing judgment on themselves. And if I go with them, I’m going to have to give them consequences so I’ll just send my angel to kind of put a little buffer there for their own sake.

And Moses, like, “No, no, no. It’s got to be your presence.” Which is, again, bringing us back to the idea of intimacy and that the problem with the golden calf was it was a direct contradiction of everything the tabernacle was supposed to be about, everything that the covenant was supposed to be about, everything that the freedom from slavery was supposed to be about.

All of this was done not just to set the people free and give them a comfortable life in the promised land. It was to mold them into God’s people. And their stiff- neckness was basically, “Yeah, we don’t really care about being God’s people. We just want life to be the way we want life to be.”

[17:40] Stephanie: And doing what he wants for us. Great.

[17:42] Marcus: Yes. And there’s a lot of folks like that, especially in a survivor mindset and a victim mentality, where it’s, “I will do whatever it takes to survive. I will do whatever it takes to keep this going. And if that means making God happy. I’ll try to make God happy, but if I, to survive, I ignore God, I’m fine with that, too.” And we see that a lot with people who have been through trauma, that there is this survival mentality that develops, that almost uses God. And God will put up with some of it because he knows that’s where they’re starting.

But in the end, he wants a relationship. He wants his presence to be with us and that’s part of what this is all about. It’s a restoration of God’s presence. So the golden calf story ends on a happy note. Restoration of covenant. The stone tablets are broken, but now new stone tablets are given. Moses was angry with the people, but now he’s going to shepherd the people.

God was like, “I’m going to destroy them. No, I’m going to get him to the land.” He said, “I was going to just send my angel, but no, I’m going to send my angel ahead of you. I’m actually going to send my angel into the land ahead of you. And there’s going to be a spiritual war taking place there.” And so you see within the text and the story, a complete restoration that God walks them through that is now saying, “Okay, let’s go ahead, and it’s time to complete the project.”

So they go back, and they do build the tabernacle, and God’s presence does inhabit the tabernacle. And his purposes stand because he’s a God of compassion. And Moses was faithful to intercede.

[19:31] Stephanie: Mm hmm. Very good.

Well, I’m going to take a moment to remind everyone it is April now. We are in the month of our online conference, our name-your-own-price, The Body, The Brain, and Breakthrough, with Dr. Jim Wilder, Dr. Todd Hall, and Dr. Marcus Warner. It’s going to be a good time. We hope to see you there. Maybe you even want to put together a church watch party or something. Contact Deeper Walk and let us know how we can help with that.

[20:11] Marcus: We’re going from the Bible to the brain to the body. That’s kind of because they’re all important things to understand.

[20:18] Stephanie: Yep, it’s good. All right, any final thoughts for this episode?

[20:25] Marcus: It’s a big topic, the golden calf. I find it interesting that later in the Books of Kings that the golden calf becomes the institutionalized religion of the northern kingdom. This idea that these golden calves are the gods who saved you from Egypt is this idea of a syncretistic Christianity, a syncretistic faith, that is such a key danger for us today.

There’s a core lesson for the church in the golden calf. It is that there is always a temptation to create a Christianity that is acceptable to culture instead of embracing a Christianity that is exactly what God has asked for it to be. And so we need to always be on our guard of what are we changing about Christianity just to make life easier versus what are we doing regarding Christianity because that’s actually what God has asked us to do.

And so it is a key warning. Again, this syncretistic idea of adopting just enough Christianity to feel like you’re okay with God and just enough of the world to feel like you’re not going to get in trouble with the world. It’s a big issue and it’s a big problem that a lot of us face. We have to be careful not to create our own version of golden calf Christianity through cultural syncretism. All right, that was dark, but there we are.

[21:55] Stephanie: Good word. Thank you.

Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to, like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend. And hey, do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer.

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