Our Golden Calf

Recently I preached on the infamous scene in Exodus 32 where Aaron casts a golden calf for the people of Israel to worship. It’s a pretty shocking moment, really. The people haven’t even finished finalizing their covenant with the Lord, and they’re camped at the foot of a mountain blazing with God’s glory (24:17). Yet, they seem to think it’s a very sensible thing to exchange “the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats grass” (Ps 106:20), to trade the God of the plagues and the Passover, the God who stomped through the Red Sea like a kid in a puddle, for an inanimate object they just made out of old earrings. (32:2-4)

After everything that’s already unfolded in Exodus, this scene exposes the sad truth about idolatry. No matter how brightly that gold glistens, it pales in comparison to the Great I Am.

In that sermon I said that modern idolatry is more subtle than the Old Testament variety. Offering sacrifices to a golden statue should set off any modern believer’s alarm bells. The idols that seduce us today don’t demand literal worship—they simply ask for more and more of our time, money, energy, and devotion.

This point really came home to me a few days after I preached the sermon, when I was at a Bible study on Ephesians, and we read Ephesians 5:5: “For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person—such a person is an idolater—has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God.”

I typically think of greed as an issue of stewarding your resources well. Are you using what God’s given you to satisfy your desires, or to pursue God’s? Are you heaping up non-essentials, while some Lazarus lies at your gate, going daily without life’s most basic essentials? (See Luke 16:19-21.)

But Ephesians isn’t concerned with our priorities, our contentment, or even the needs of our struggling neighbors.

Ephesians is concerned about idols, and it calls greed idolatry. This is the subtle kind: you don’t bow down to anything, but you set your heart on material things that make life more pleasant. If I devote my life to working for money to spend on more possessions, I’ve devoted my life to more possessions. And if that’s what I’ve set my heart on or devoted my life to, how can they belong to Jesus?

I’ve often heard Christians lament our culture’s gradual acceptance of certain practices—unrestrained sexuality, widespread profanity, Wednesday and Sunday sports for kids, pervasive cohabitation, the list goes on. I rarely hear anyone worrying over our deep-seated consumerism. Yet, it seems to me, that our commercials, store displays, online ads, and shopping apps are training all of us, every day, in greed. They’re teaching us what to desire—the next car, the new tool, the latest device, the handiest appliance, the trendiest look.

Meanwhile, scripture and the Church try to point our desires in a different direction: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.” (Ps 42:1-2)

Are you paying attention to which desires preoccupy your mind?

Have you ever stopped to evaluate your contentment and your desire for more?

What can you do today to guard Jesus’s place at the center of your life from any would-be challengers?

You can listen to today's devotional below!