Glimpses of Glory: A 7-Day DevotionalExemplo

A God Made by Humans

As they passed through the waters of the Red Sea that God parted for them, do you think the Israelites knew that, in just a few months’ time, they would worship a golden calf?

Probably not. And yet they did exactly that.

Here stands the tragic reality of the human race: We are not as strong as we think we are. The Exodus story teaches us that God can show up in the most powerful way imaginable, yet His people will still stray. Even as Moses camped atop Sinai to receive the Law from God—the Law given to help Israel live according to the Creator’s image—his brother Aaron stood at the foot of the mountain hammering away at a god made in creation’s image: a god-like statue based on the cultures around them. A month and a half earlier, they saw God’s presence descend on Sinai with fire and smoke; now, they reduced that same God to a roughly hewn statue crafted from the jewelry they’d carried from Egypt. I’d bet that at least one sober-minded Israelite in the crowd thought to himself, "How did we get here?".

Sadly, the answer is simple. They wanted to get out of the wilderness, but God had other priorities. In fact, He seemed absent. They grew impatient waiting for Him (32:1), and in their restlessness took matters into their own hands. Because they’d lost sight of the God who had saved them (vv. 2–4), they created a false god like the nations, called it by His name (v. 5), and began to worship it as if it were Him (v. 6). They called it Yahweh and treated it like Yahweh, but it was an imposter. They continued their religious practice but lost sight of the true God.

We might smack our foreheads in disbelief as we hear that the Israelites did this, but how often do we do the same thing? Like Israel, we grow impatient waiting for God to fulfill His promises. Like Israel, we take matters into our own hands and try to speed up the process. Losing sight of Christ, we create false gods that look like the culture around us and devote our affections to things that look a lot more like our sinful selves than they do like Jesus. We might still go to church, read our Bibles, and say our prayers…but have we lost sight of the one true God?

God made us for something different. He created us to bear His image, not to make gods in our own. Over the next six days, we will track Moses’s response to the Golden Calf Debacle: within his response, we will see what it looks like to pursue God in the right way, for the right reasons, and chase after the right goal.