When we read Exodus 32, it is incomprehensible to believe that the children of Israel, having just seen the most awesome display of God's power, could attribute that power to a statue that they had just finished making with their own hands, yet that is exactly what they did. Perhaps it is the speed and brazenness of the idolatry that shocks us, but we should not be so easily shocked. We do it all the time. We attribute our financial well-being to the economy or to our skill in the market, our happiness to our marriage and family, our health to our wise eating and exercise habits, our spirituality to a good church, and our safety to our security system and the safety features of our vehicles. As believers, however, we should question this apparent logic. We know that there are many people who are smarter investors than we are who have lost their shirts, especially in this economy. We know of many people who have taken care of their bodies, only to be stricken with some grave disease such as the various cancers or neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimers, Parkinsons and ALS. We know of a number of people who have made wiser choices regarding their personal security only to end up a freak accident or perhaps were in the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001 or even the father of one of Ashley's friends from Chiles/UNF who was killed in a motor vehicle accident on Orange Avenue on Saturday afternoon or perhaps the family of three who were crushed to death in their car 9 days ago at North Monroe and Tennessee Street; the examples are literally endless.
So what is really the problem here? Does the physical absence of God tempt us to give credit to tangible things for providing us what ultimately only the Lord can give? He is Lord over our finances, our health, our happiness, our safety and our spirituality. And yes, we are called to make good and/or wise choices, even as the Israelites were called to do certain things during their exodus from Egypt. But they could not, by doing all of those very things, actually deliver themselves. And this is true of us as well. God calls us to make responsible, godly choices, but unless God is bestowing His gracious favor and sovereign protection on us, we will not be okay.
This is especially germane for mid-life. Because mid-life tends to be a time for assessing our past, we tend to do a lot of giving credit and assigning blame. This is where we tend to get ourselves in trouble, because we tend to make assessments that take ourselves off the hook [blame] and forget God's constant care altogether [credit]. One of the most important things that we must do is to look for the hand of God in our lives! We need to make an accounting of His presence, protection, provision, wisdom, guidance and grace.
There is something terribly wrong when we can look at our lives and not see God's fingerprints all over it! There is something deeply idolatrous about crediting the creation with what only our loving, wise and sovereign Lord is able to do. Yes, we live in a fallen world. And yes, we've all had difficulties and disappointments along the way. And no, things haven't always turned out exactly as we had planned, but when we look back, we see God's hand again and again, and we should be thankful.
In Exodus 32, we also see that God's people grew tired of waiting on their ambassador, Moses, to return. In their minds, they felt he had been gone far too long so something untoward must have happened to him. Thus, if God is not on site, delivering what we want when we want it, our confidence in Him begins to flag and we are prone to give our hearts to something else. One of the hardest things for us to do as sinners is to wait. We have far too little tolerance for delayed gratification, so when we ask God for things, we handily include our schedule for delivery in our requests. Yet God has a completely different sense of timing than we do. Who could have imagined that there would be thousands of years between the Fall and the Cross? Who would have thought that world would have to wait so long for Abraham's promised seed? Who could have imagined that God would have allowed His chosen nation to be subjugated to slavery for 420 years? Who would have thought that these "last days" that Peter and Paul spoke of would still be continuing now 2,000 years later. Still God has a perfect sense of timing. His moment is always the right moment. He never gets "off-schedule" or gets things out of sequence. Yet the wait typically confuses us, because we reason that if the thing is a good thing, then a loving God would deliver it to us with haste.
So we, like the children of Israel at the foot of Mt. Sinai, begin to give ourselves to other things. So though it may not be as brazen as the overt idolatry at the base of the mountain while God, in His love, was dispensing His Law, but rather a subtle migration of affection. In ways that we likely don't even realize, we give up on God and give our hearts to things that we can see, hear, touch, taste, measure and quantify. These things tend to become our "Plan B" messiahs. We ask them to give us things that only God is able to give such as meaning and purpose, a sense of identity, hope and security, contentment and peace. We hope that houses, cars, careers, experiences and people will satisfy our hearts. We tend to look to those things to give us life or at least life to our lives. We grow tired of waiting on God, so we drive to the mall hoping that it will be able to deliver.
And the grief of mid-life is not simply that we collect things to regret, that we fear getting old, or that we mourn the demise of our dreams or worse yet the actualization of our dreams that failed to deliver what we thought they promised. Yes, ultimately, we mourn the fact that mid-life exposes our idols' fundamental inability to deliver. Think about it: The idol that Israel said would lead and guide them was made of metal and formed by human hands. It had no mind, emotion, power or life. It had no ability to do anything but divert the worship of those who made it. It was bound to disappoint. So it always is with created things. They can never fill the void in our hearts; only God can do that.
Lastly, we all tend to blame our idolatry on others. Look at the "logic" behind Israel's idolatry. The people would say, "Moses and God disappeared and we didn't know if they were coming back, so we made this calf to lead us and make us feel secure. If Moses had not been gone so long, none of this would have happened." Or consider what Aaron said about his complicity and even leadership in this horrendous event, "I gotta tell you Moses, these are pretty evil people, and it didn't take them long to turn their backs on you. I was a minority of one, so what was I supposed to do?" Aaron even tried to shift the blame from himself onto the fire saying essentially, "Moses, it was the strangest thing. I've never seen anything like it before. I put this gold into the fire, and not only did it melt, but WHAM-O, out came this perfectly formed calf. Now isn't that amazing?!?"
There is a great temptation in mid-life to blame the idols that God is exposing in our lives on the people and things around us as well. Those of us who've worked far too many hours in our lives [and I am certainly guilty of this] and whose careers tend to be our idols will justify all that time away from home by saying "no one understands the sacrifices required to pursue a career in medicine, its not like I created the system." Others who work long hours may say "outsiders just don't understand how much it costs to raise four children and support a wife in this economy. There never seemed to be enough money, so it took an ultimate commitment on my part to elevate my career so that I could make more. After all, God called me to be a good provider for my family, didn't He?" Or the wife, who was excessively controlled by the beauty of her home may say, "I know it seems like it took too much of my time and energy, and maybe I was a bit too attached to things, but I just wanted to create an environment that our kids would be proud to call home and that they would want to bring their friends to our house. That way I would always know where they were and who they were playing with." Or the dad who spent far too many of his parenting years angry because his heart was controlled by a drive for respect may say, "Yeah, I know that I may have been a bit too hard-nosed as a father, but kids need to learn to respect their elders. There is far too little of that going around these days. I didn't want my kids leaving home without learning to respect and live under authority."
What do these people all have in common? Yes, they are all making assessments of their lives and yes, they each are having to face deficiencies in the legacies they have left behind, but none of them has really admitted that their legacy is directly tied to the desires/idols that rules their hearts. In fact, each of them has shifted the blame for their idolatry on to something or someone else.
To be continued ...
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