15 February 2014 - repeat offender

15 February 2014 - repeat offender

What is it about golden calves?  Why can't we seem to get away from them?  We have all spent time in bondage to sin in the land of Egypt.  Is our memory of who delivered us really so bad?  The calf in Egypt may still call to mind unfettered license to sin.  It may call to mind the orgy suggested in the wording of the text of Exodus.  It certainly represents selfishness.  It represents making ourselves the ones who create and choose what we worship instead of submitting ourselves to God.

We need to instill in ourselves memory of our deliverance, individually and as a people.  We need to ponder God's mighty deeds in our hearts.  Because the world is not done throwing calves of gold at us yet.  It wants to twist our story to suggest that true freedom is found in this revelry and this license.  And the world will make this terribly convenient.

The king took counsel, made two calves of gold, and said to the people: “You have been going up to Jerusalem long enough. Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.”
They are placed at Bethel and Dan.  There are temples built in the high places.  We do not have to travel far for gratification of this sort.  And look, we even imagine that we have increased importance in this system.  We imagine wrongly that our dignity is greater when we choose stupid things simply because we are choosing.

He also built temples on the high places and made priests from among the common people who were not Levites.

This system is ready and willing to use us as cogs to enslave all who encounter it.  This role is the source of our imagined dignity.  But in the service of this system we become something less than fully human.

They made a calf in Horeb
and adored a molten image;
They exchanged their glory
for the image of a grass-eating bullock.

Let us remember the God who saves.  Let us never forget the mighty works he does for his people, the mighty works he does in each of our lives.

They forgot the God who had saved them,
who had done great deeds in Egypt,
Wondrous deeds in the land of Ham,
terrible things at the Red Sea.

Perhaps this morning we find ourselves hungry for renewed purpose.  Perhaps we long for deeper meaning.  We must stay near to Jesus.  His heart of moved with pity for us.  He will never send us to collapse on the way.

“My heart is moved with pity for the crowd,
because they have been with me now for three days
and have nothing to eat.
If I send them away hungry to their homes,
they will collapse on the way,
and some of them have come a great distance.”

Trusting in Jesus we won't succumb to the temptations of more immediate forms of fulfillment.  We won't leave early to find food on our own.  We won't think that we "have been going up to Jerusalem long enough."  We will trust him to give us our food in due season (cf. Psa. 145:15).  It is fear of this hunger which drives us to sin by insisting on more immediate forms of gratification.  The antidote to fear is faith.

When we put him first "the hearts of this people will return to their master".  God remembers us and favors us with such generous provisions that there will even be baskets left over.