You JUST Made That Cow: Exodus 32.4

You’re fresh out of Egypt; you saw all of the plagues, you heard the screams from miles away as Egyptian families saw their first-born males collapse into death; you look into your tent and see some of the gold you basically stole from your Egyptian neighbors and you recall how you crossed the Red sea, yet the Egyptian army was eaten by it. Moses who, by God’s direction, has led you to a wilderness and has been gone on the mountain quite awhile. There is a ton of lightening and commotion going on at the top of Sinai, but you reasonably figure it is a storm of sorts and Moses ain’t coming back.

Logically therefore, you get your neighbors and y’all all gather your gold together and make an image out of the gold. You make a super detailed cow out of old earrings , nose rings, bracelets, and headdresses. It looks awesome. Then Aaron declares this thing is not only a god but the very one which led Israel out of Egypt, that land of slavery.

. . . but you JUST made that cow, Aaron. How can you reason that it was the one who freed you? Maybe he had too much strong-drink or wine and got some lamp-shade-helmet idea and ran with it.

It is easy to look at Aaron and Israel as a bunch of fruit-loops at this point--it is not even chronologically possible guys!! But we are wrong to hammer them so. It is not as though he was making all this up as he went along; Aaron was simply giving God a face. He was not saying that this is some new god we invented, rather, LOOK, this thing, this god is now visible, tangible, it is like all the other gods the pagans worship.

Moses just had his socks blown off, literally having a mountain top experience, when he turns the corner to see God’s people groveling before some life-less shining peace of farm animal. It would not be unreasonable for Moses to have in mind some of the things God just told him . . . such as, ‘you shall not make any image of Me.’ So like any normal human being when he encounters foolishness he chunks these sacred stone-etched pieces of literature so that they are broken and new ones need to be made.

God, YHWH, Jehovah, the Almighty, Maker of heaven and Earth, etc. is not like other gods. He, therefore, does not want to be worshipped like other gods. He will not suffice to be downgraded, in a sense, as al the other gods who were made into images resembling fish, frogs, moons, half-fish half-man figurines, and other silly things. But it also awakens the understanding that God is both not confined to any location nor is He is to be shut away or left behind; the God of the Bible is not a figurine which can be totted around like a purse, rather He owns all creation—that’s you and I, my friend.

We can find sympathy for Aaron and Israel: they were just doing what the rest of the world was doing with gods. The problem is God is unequivocally unique and completely unlike any other being to ever exist.