Pastor Stephen preached Exodus 32:1-8. He taught us to see that we were made to worship God and become like him. Lector: Erin Warmbier
Pastor Stephen preached Exodus 32:1-8. He taught us to see that we were made to worship God and become like him.
Lector: Erin Warmbier
Have you ever accidentally become something that you didn’t mean to become? Jeff Foxworthy tells the story that he became the thermostat control for his house without meaning to. One night he was lying in bed, reading a book, and his wife says, “I’m hot.” So Jeff gets out of bed, walks around his side of the bed and is near the light switch to turn the fan on when he goes, “Woah! I wasn’t hot. She was hot. What am I doing?” He had been trained without his knowledge to become the thermostat control.
Now for us, we say, well thank goodness no one has conditioned me. “Ding!” Everybody now looks down at their phone. So that’s a joke, but here’s the thing. We do live in a world where we are constantly being conditioned to become something. But that brings up the question, well, what are we supposed to be and what are the things that are conditioning us?
Well if you’ve been with us the past few months you will know that we’ve been talking about who we are supposed to be and become. We did a whole series called “Sacred” where we talked about how God beautifully and wonderfully made humans in his image to be his ambassadors on this earth to take dominion and steward this earth on God’s behalf. So we are meant to be image bearers of God almighty, stewarding the this wonderful creation towards enjoying and glorifying God. Well that’s not happening so what went wrong?
Well we then started a series called “Desecrated” where we’ve talked about the nature of the universe and what is wrong with the sacred creation that God has made. We talked about how at the fall, the sin of humans entered the world and broke relationship with God. When then looked at genesis 6 and saw how spiritual beings in rebellion against God attack invite and encourage humans to join in their spiritual rebellion. And then last week we looked at how the world was broken at Babylon in a way that broke relationships between people. So the three main groups of things that are conditioning us away from God are sin, Satan, and the world.
We’ve been conditioned by these three things since birth to redefine good as evil and evil as good. Unless I’m mistaken, no one in here intentionally went through a training where they said, You know, I’ve been designed by God almighty, maker of heavens and earth, the Lord of heavens army and I bear his image but today I’m going live against his design and sow disorder in the world.” No we’ve been conditioned by our own sin, satan and the world to become something warped and twisted. So what are we really supposed to be like and how do we get back to that? How do we undo the conditioning? By going to the word.
So here’s what I want us to do. I want us to see ourselves in the passage this morning and I want us to see how our disordered desires lead to wrong worship. But here’s the hope we find. If we can restore our worship to the rightful place, we will become like what we are are supposed to be.
So the main idea you were made to worship God and become like him. How does that work? Well we see it in this passage.
Let’s look at the passage this morning.
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.” Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. 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.” When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the LORD.” 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.
Think about this. God is giving Moses the 10 commandments at the top of the mountain. Commandment 1 is there is only one God and commandment 2 is don’t make idols. Moses isn’t even down yet and they’ve broken the top two.
Notice how sly Aaron is here. He me makes a calf, not a bull. A bull was an Egyptian God called Apis. A calf is just a small God. And notice that he calls a festival for the Lord. He doesn’t call a festival for the calf. When you mix two religions trying to get the best of both worlds that’s called syncretism.
And we make the mistake here of saying, “First off, I would never worship some dumb man mad thing, and second I would never mix my faith with something else.”
But we do this all the time. We all make idols and worship them. Humans were designed to worship and we worship all the time.
However, we all live lives of worship. Even atheists. Worship is devoting yourself to something. Worship is saying I will celebrate this thing because it is the purpose of my life. What you put at the center of your life, what you live your life for, the reason you get out of bed, is what you worship.
David Foster Wallace was an author who was not a Christian and did not believe in God but here’s what he said about humans.
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out…”
We all worship something. And if you are honest with yourself, the thing that you worship most often is likely not God. But we don’t see it because it is so subtle. The Israelites had spent 430 years in slavery around the Egyptians watching and participating with them as they worshiped idols. They had been freed but they reverted back to their conditioned state as slaves because it felt safe.
We do the same thing. God has freed us, but in our weakness, we revert back to our worship of idols because our person sin has conditioned us, the world has conditioned us, and the evil powers against God have conditioned us. It is subtle.
We usually don’t become idolators overnight because usually good Christian folk say, just like Aaron, “This idolatry is for the Lord.” You read all those books trying to figure out how to raise your kids right but you’re worshiping at the alter of well adjusted kids. You care about your health because your body is the temple of the Lord but you’re worshipping your own fleeting life which is falling through your hands. You come to church because you shouldn’t give up the gathering of the saints, but you’re only here to make connections.
All of those things are good things. Kids. Health. Church. Gifts from God. But when they become your master, your idol, you worship the gift rather than the giver.
We all worship something. And we usually worship with our time, money, and energy. You want a concrete way to find what you're worshipping? For your time, check your browser history. For your money, check your bank account. For your energy, think about the thing that gets you the angriest on the inside. Child rearing? Politics? How your spouse organizes the Tupperware drawer? Follow your time, money and energy and you’ll find what and how you worship.
So, we all worship. So what? We become what we worship.
Read with me.
Then the LORD said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’ “I have seen these people,” the LORD said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”
So first notice that the people become like what they worship. They worship a Golden Calf and God says they are a stiff necked or stubborn people. It’s an animal term meant to say they will not obey. Cool right? But so what?
We really have to dig into this idea that we inhabit not only a physical world but also a spiritual world to make any sense of this.
Our souls become molded to the thing we worship. If all we are is physical beings, then when you give something your all, you are simply putting a lot of mental and physical energy into something. But if we really are spiritual beings, and we really are made in the image of of God, then what’s happening here humans are melding their souls with the thing they are worshiping. The Israelites are becoming one with the spirit of these rebellious satanic beings because, like their grandparents Adam and Eve, they believed a lie.
When we worship something that is not God, we desecrate ourselves and the image we were made with. God is right to be furious seeing his beautiful creation use the abilities he gave them to willingly turn themselves into horrific, demonic, nightmarish creatures.
The Israelites, worshipping a stone statue of a calf, meld their souls with it. They become like the statue. Stubborn. Unwilling and unable to follow. Willingly turning their hearts into stone.
Psalm 135 says it like this, “The idols of the nations are silver and gold, made by human hands. They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but cannot see. They have ears, but cannot hear, nor is there breath in their mouths. Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.”
We do the same thing. And like I said before, we become these nightmarish creatures led away from God so subtly. We worship our entertainment and we, like our phones, become objects to be used, turned on in the morning, and charged at night. We worship our politics, and we, like our political scripts, become dogmatic words, unable to change or think beyond what’s on the page. We worship our health and we, like our heart monitors, beep along, not trying to live, but only trying not to die.
These are the things we are conditioned to worship like the Israelites had been conditioned to worship statues. How do we break free?
We all worship. We all become what we worship. If all that existed in the cosmos were physical objects, we would rightly feel despair. But we live in a spiritual and physical universe where the creator God, the maker of heavens and earth, the Lord of Heavens armies invites us to worship him in order to free ourselves from our conditioning to slavery to sin, satan and the world and to become like God himself.
We were made to worship God and become like him.
So if what I am saying holds true, and we become what we worship, then worshipping physical things is a terrifying prospect. But if we become like the thing we worship then worshiping the God of the universe who is filled with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness gentleness and self control.
Now we’ve said it before and I’ll say it again right now. Adam and Eve did not sin by wanting to be like God. The people at the tower did not sin by wanting to be like God. The sinned because they tried to take God’s power on their terms.
God wants us to be like him. He made us in his image. 1 John 3:2 says, “Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.”
I think we get confused here because when I start talking about becoming like God people think in very narrow and frankly unimaginative categories much like Adam and Eve and much like the people at the tower of Babel. We think that being like God means we’ll have power and knowledge. But that is a very simplistic and reductionistic view of God. And second, those aren’t even God’s best traits!
You could be an all knowing, all powerful, omnipresent being, but if you were that being devoid of love and joy and relationships, you’d want to not exist. God in his mercy does not offer us the chance to become all powerful, but he offers us the chance to be creatures filled with love and joy and peace. He offers us the chance to rule the cosmos as his stewards in right relationship with himself and each other as we kindly and graciously make the universe more good, true, and beautiful.
And this invitation to worship God, to become like God, only exists because of what Jesus did. The evil spiritual powers, satan himself, tempted Jesus to worship him. Jesus knew that the world would one day be his but Satan offered him a short cut. Satan offered Jesus the chance not to go to the cross. Not to endure suffering. Not to endure death. He offered him the world. But he offered it to him at the price of worship, for Jesus to meld himself into one with the power of darkness. And Jesus, unlike our ancestors Adam and Even and unlike the Israelites, saw through the lie. Jesus was the new and better Adam. Jesus was the true Israel. He fully and only worshiped God because he was God. And so he resisted the temptations of the devil. He conquered death. He has life that can never die. And he offers you that life today. He offers you the chance to become like God, to be filled with love, and joy and peace, to have right relationship with yourself and others, to have right relationship with him, by coming home to Eden and worshipping God.
Jesus is inviting you today to step out of the conditioning that has shaped you. So let’s not mindlessly walk through our lives, waking up one day finding ourselves conditioned slaves. Free yourself by bowing your knee and worshiping the one true God.
What might that look like? Maybe that means you call a friend instead of turning on the TV. Maybe that means you go out and garden and watch for God’s provision. Maybe it means you quit trying to go it alone and call a counselor. Maybe it means not looking at your phone while you’re with people or in a worship service.
These tiny acts of worship, living life the way God has called you to, are transformative. Not immediately. Maybe not even in a way you can tell. But that’s the thing about conditioning. It’s slow. It’s subtly. It takes time. But it is transformative.
We all worship. We become what we worship. You were made to worship God and become like him.
We remind ourselves every week of the freedom that Jesus has brought us to worship God by taking communion.
On the night he was betrayed, took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.” For whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.