Exodus 32:15-24

¹⁵ Moses then turned and went down from the mountain and the two tablets of the testimony were in his hand, tablets that were written on both sides; on the front and on the back they were written. ¹⁶ The tablets fashioned by God, and the writing was the writing of God, he had engraved the tablets. ¹⁷ When Joshua had heard the noise of the people as they were shouting, he said to Moses, “There is a noise of war in the camp.” ¹⁸ But he said, “It is not the sound of shouting for victory, or the sound of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.” ¹⁹ And as soon as he came near the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, Moses’ anger burned hot, and he threw the tablets from his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. ²⁰ He took the calf that they had made and had it burned with fire and ground it to powder and scattered on the water and made the people of Israel drink it. ²¹ And Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you that you have brought such a great sin upon them?” ²² And Aaron said, “Let not the anger of my lord burn hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil. ²³ For they said to me, ‘Make us gods who should go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ ²⁴ So I said to them, ‘Let any who have gold take it off.’ So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire, and this calf came out.”

passionately wrong

The golden calf incident was one of many examples in the wilderness narrative where the people rose up to revolt against Moses, and their betrayal was later seen as an apostasy against the LORD. It was not like the people just woke up one day and said that they wanted to be idolaters like the Egyptians. No, the root of their sin was their resentment against the man that God had chosen to lead them. They resented his long delays as he stood upon the mountain, waiting on God. They refused to trust that God was working through him. They wanted a god they could manage – a god they could manipulate to their own liking.

They also had their own ideas about worship, and were passionate about those ideas as well. Joshua heard the sounds the people made as they reveled over their newly acquired god. He mistook the noise for the sounds of war. The LORD had already told Moses of the people’s apostasy, so he knew that the sounds were not war sounds. The people had been so caught up in getting what they wanted that their worship had become about that. Their focus was no longer on their deliverance, or the LORD who had delivered them. They were passionate, but their passion was wrong.

LORD, restore right worship to us. Forgive us for making it into a self-centered frenzy. Turn our hearts back to you, and to an expression of your worth.