Tracking the Gold

So I'm reading through Exodus, been slowly moving through all summer long. Recently I've paused for a while and been really meditating on Exodus 32, the story of the Israelites making the Golden Calf.

If you're not familiar with the story, the quick gist is this: Moses leads the people out of Egypt, through the Red Sea, and to Mt. Horeb. There, he goes up the mountain to get the Ten Commandments from God and a bunch of other rules and regs for the newly established nation.

While he's up there, the people get impatient. He's gone a long time. So they demand that Aaron, Moses' sidekick and the guy who's supposed to be their priest, make them a 'god' that they might worship it. So Aaron commands the people to take off all their gold earrings. He melts the gold down and fashions a calf out of it.

If you track the gold in Exodus, you find that the first time gold is mentioned is when the people are still slaves in Egypt. God tells Moses that the Israelites will plunder the Egyptians--that their slave drivers will literally give them the clothes off their back and all their gold and silver as they leave. This is part of God's gift to them--part of him preparing them to leave with confidence in God in their hearts and materially for the trip ahead.

So what happens at the foot of the mountain is that the people take the good gift given to them by God and they create for themselves a new, no-god. They use what God has given to them and proclaim "here is the god that led us out of Egypt." God's gift is fashioned into an idol, and hence, a curse. This is precisely what I (and I think most of us) are tempted to do all the time.

We are tempted to take the gifts that God has given to us and imagine that these are our tickets to success, significance, worth, value, security--our hope, our future. We are tempted to lean into these gifts for our redemption, our salvation, in whatever way you might define those terms. We are tempted to leverage the things that God has given us (talents, resources, opportunities, relationships) and worship those things, use them to redeem ourselves rather than waiting on God to do the redeeming.

Most of us at our core are not satisfied with ourselves. We were made to be dis-contented creatures apart from God and genuine inter-dependent relationships. We want a new name. God has one for us. But we are sorely tempted to carve one out for ourselves using the raw materials he has blessed us with for the journey, rather than waiting on him for the real thing.