Intro
One time and only one time can I remember my parents washing
my mouth out with soap. (Yes, I was a goody-two-shoes, without a doubt. I used
to cry when they even threatened to spank me!)
On this fateful day, I happened to say a word, in their
presence, which I probably learned on the bus but didn’t yet know was not the
kind of word that should be repeated. So as a reminder not to say that word
EVER AGAIN, they washed my mouth out with soap.
(For the record, washing my mouth out with soap was a very effective punishment--I don’t think I’ve ever said that word again. Maybe if you ask me nicely after church, I’ll tell you what the word was--but I’m NOT going to say it in the pulpit for fear that one of YOU will want to wash my mouth out again!)
At any rate, in our Scripture reading today, we find the
inspiration for every parent’s favorite punishment when unsavory language comes
out of a child’s mouth--washing it out with soap. Well, it’s not exactly the
same thing, but it’s awfully close, which you’ll see in a second.
We’re going to look at the incident of the Golden Calf. While
Moses is up on Mt Sinai, hanging out with God and receiving the 10 Commandments,
his co-leader and brother Aaron is left alone trying to manage those pesky Israelites.
Moses is gone so long, the people begin to feel abandoned by him … AND by God.
So in their minds, they do the next logical thing--they ask Aaron to build them
a god to worship since the one they WERE worshiping seems to have disappeared.
And Aaron gives in to peer pressure, commanding them to
throw all their jewelry into a pot; and out of that pot comes a shiny, golden
calf--their new god. So pleased are the Israelites with their new creation,
they decide to throw a festival--with dancing and celebrating and worshiping
this new god they made with their own two hands.
As you can imagine, Moses has a little meltdown when he
comes down from the mountain. I’ll be reading from page 65 of “The Story” which
is Ex 32 starting at verse 15 in your Bibles:
SCRIPTURE “The Story”
p 65 Ex 32:15-20
15 Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two
tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on
both sides, front and back. 16 The tablets were the work of God; the
writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.
17 When Joshua heard the noise of the people
shouting, he said to Moses, “There is the sound of war in the camp.”
18 Moses replied: “It is not the sound of victory, it
is not the sound of defeat; it is the sound of singing that I hear.”
19 When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and
the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands,
breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. 20 And he
took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground
it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink
it.
Poor overworked and underpaid Moses has a little meltdown
here. But you can’t really blame him, can you? I mean, put yourself in his
shoes--he has just spent 40 days and 40 nights in the very presence of God
receiving the 10 Commandments and learning about how to teach them to the
Israelites. It was literally a mountaintop experience for him, a huge high that
must have had him glowing and grinning from ear to ear.
His disappointment is understandable then, when he hears the
carousing of calf worship coming from the bottom of the mountain. Then his
disappointment boils over into absolute rage and burning anger.
After throwing down and breaking the 10 Commandments which
God had written himself on the stone tablets, Moses devises a new punishment
for these unfaithful Israelites.
Listen to what he comes up with again: “And he took the calf
the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder,
scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.”
It’s like Moses is washing their mouths out with soap; he’s trying
to come up with a punishment that will be so memorable that they will never do or
say these wrong things again (like me and that word I’ve never said again!).
It’s pretty clear from this golden calf story that God (and
Moses) mean business about this whole “DON’T make an idol and worship it” thing.
But in case that’s not enough of a reminder, just think about how God starts
off the 10 Commandments in Exodus chapter 20 or p 61 in “The Story:”
“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 “You shall have no other gods before me. 4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God…”
You shall have no other gods before me, God says.
Nothing and no one should be more important to you than Me,
God says.
Not a golden calf … not money, not power, not having a good
reputation, not being the best Christian in the church, not being the best at
your job, not having the biggest house in your neighborhood or the newest phone
in your pocket or the fanciest car in your driveway--not even a god of your own
making.
Me, God says.
I am the only God you will worship … “for I, the Lord your
God, am a jealous God …”
Take all that in for a minute. It sure sounds kinda … selfish,
doesn’t it? It sounds--God sounds--demanding and possessive and jealous and all
those things we know we’re not supposed to be all and those characteristics we
try to stay away from in other people.
We like--we prefer!--to think of God as gentle and loving
and kind and merciful and forgiving.
But jealous?
I’m not so sure about that.
Here’s the thing: we think of the word jealous as a negative
word, characterized by wanting or demanding something or someone that belongs to someone
else. It even sounds a little bit like coveting, which one of those other
commandments tells us not to do.
So, if being jealous really IS a bad thing, then why does
God choose to use that word to describe himself?
That’s the question that plagued me this week. We talked
about it at Bible Study on Wednesday but didn’t really come up with any good
answers. And it aggravated me more as the week went by, so I brushed off some
of my rather rusty Hebrew skills and did a little research about this word “jealous.”
The Hebrew word we translate as jealous is pronounced “kan-naw.”
It is used just 6 times in the Old Testament. And it turns out that the only
way it is ever translated is “jealous.” And each and every time it is used, it’s
talking about God.[1]
For the Lord our God is a jealous God, who demands our ultimate allegiance; our primary devotion; our singular focus and worship. Our God is a jealous God who will not tolerate idols of any shape or size, golden or silver. And when someone or some thing happens to take over the #1 priority in our lives, we shouldn’t really be surprised by the punishment that follows--that God would somehow wash our mouths out with soap.
And that is His right to be worshiped in this way, for He is
the Creator; we are the creation.
He is potter, we are the clay.
He has
every right to demand and command these things from us because we are his
people--we have been bought with a price by the blood he shed through Jesus
Christ on the cross.
We belong to Him; He doesn’t belong to us.
Conclusion
There is no other person or thing in this world to whom you
owe this kind of loyalty. Don’t let anyone demand that of you.
And there is no other person or thing in this world who is
WORTH this kind of devotion. Don’t let yourself fall into this kind of idol
worship.
For the Lord our God is a jealous God--He is our Creator and
our Sustainer; the Alpha and the Omega; the beginning and the end.
He knitted us together in our mother’s wombs; He has counted
the number of hairs on our heads and the number of days in our lives; and He
has written our names in the book of life.
The Lord our God is a jealous God … and He loves us so
deeply that He wants and EXPECTS that kind of love in return--love that is
devoted and loyal and committed to Him above all else.
In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment