I recently had the opportunity to share a message in my local church, and I want to share that with you here in a short series of blog posts.
Hands up if you know that some people in Old Testament times worshiped idols?
Hands up if you know that even the people of Israel, God’s own people, also worshiped idols at various times in the Old Testament?
Hands up if you know that in the New Testament, idol worship still continued in the nations the disciples travelled through?
Hands up if you know that there might be an idol worshiper reading this message today?
Does that shock you? Aren’t idol worshippers half-naked heathens in the Amazon jungle, or robe wearing priests in some Asian country?
Isn’t everyone sitting here today a good Christian, who would never bow down to a fat statue or pray to a jackal-headed totem pole?
To answer your questions, let me tell you a story ...
The Lord said to Moses, “Come up to me on the mountain. Stay there, and I will give you the stone tablets with the teachings and the commandments I have written for the people’s instruction.”
13 Moses set out with his assistant Joshua, and Moses went up on the mountain of God. 14 He said to the leaders, “Wait here for us until we come back to you. Aaron and Hur are here with you. Take all your disagreements to them.”
15 So Moses went up on the mountain, and the cloud covered it. 16 The glory of the Lord settled on Mount Sinai. For six days the cloud covered it, and on the seventh day the Lord called to Moses from inside the cloud. 17 To the Israelites, the glory of the Lord looked like a raging fire on top of the mountain. 18 Moses entered the cloud as he went up the mountain. He stayed on the mountain 40 days and 40 nights.
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When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods 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.”
2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” 6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. (Exodus 24: 12 - 18 and Exodus 32: 1 - 6)
Suffering reveals a lot about a person.
It’s one thing to sing about how good God is, to say “Amen” when the preacher shares some punchy biblical truth, to underline beautiful promises in our Bibles, and to pray confident, hope-filled prayers when the sun is shining, the rainbows are sparkling, and life is good.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with rejoicing in God’s blessing, and we should seek out His truths in Scripture. But the true test of our faith happens when great dark thunderclouds of hardship roll in, big fat hailstones smash into our picnic, and the rolling fields of strawberries we were living in are plundered by hordes of locusts.
That’s when our theology, our faith, and our perseverance matter.
And that’s when what we really believe in can make itself visible.
In the passage I read from Exodus, Moses was gone for forty days (Exodus 24: 18). This probably seemed like a long time to the people, but a probably felt like a short time to Moses. And it was certainly a short time in the full outworking of God’s plan for Israel.
But as we see with the Israelites, how we handle God’s ordained delays is a good measure of our spiritual maturity. It took a little over a month for them to lose all hope in the God who had led them out of slavery in Egypt, and all trust in the man who had fearlessly led them through the Red Sea. Needing something, anything, to hold on to and call out to, they gave up their pretty jewellery to create a “god” they could see and touch.
What about us, in our lives today?
What do we do when the dark clouds linger, the disease isn’t cured, the job doesn’t materialise, the stock market slides and the government doesn’t change?
What do we run to, when instead of getting better, the trial and the testing even intensify?
A little further in the Exodus passage I read from earlier, Moses comes down from the mountain, and furiously asks Aaron for an explanation of what he sees. And Aaron, feebly, says, “... they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
What just “comes out” to save us, or what things do we run to for help when our backs are to the wall, and God takes “too long” to come through for us? That thing, folks, is an idol.
Tony Evans defines idolatry like this:
“We may not have wooden idols in our culture today, or statues to bow down to. But we do have other gods whom far too many of us serve on a regular basis. People have chosen race over God, culture over God, class over God, gender over God, possessions and entertainment over God, and so much more. We keep making all these choices and wonder why things are so chaotic, not only in the world but also in the Church. It’s because we keep choosing idols over God’s revealed rule.
How do you know when you’ve chosen an idol? An idol is any unauthorized person, place, thing or thought which you look to in order to determine your decisions; any person, place, thing, or thought that we look to as our source. It is anything in God’s kingdom that competes with God Himself. If it is not the true, living God and His Word, it’s an idol.”
From this definition, it’s clear to see that idol worship is definitely not just an Old Testament thing, or something that non-Believers do.
Please join me on Saturday for the next part of this series, when we explore how idol worship affects our lives in the 21st century ...