Idols: Memory
Do Not Conflate God With What He’s Not
Exodus 32:1-14
Rev. Tim Callow
Preached Sun. Oct. 11th, 2026
You would think the Israelites would have a strong faith because they had been eyewitnesses to the astonishing power of God. They watched as the Nile turned to blood. They saw how Egypt was covered in deep blackness when the sun continued to shine in their own lands. They saw the boils, the gnats, the flies, the hail. When they faithfully covered their doorposts in the blood of the lamb they saw the spirit of God pass over them. They saw the Lord before them as a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. They saw the Red Sea turned to dry land and the chariots of pharaoh consumed by the waters. They were fed by the manna of God and drank water that gushed out in the desert. How, then, do they now turn to this idol of their own making? How do they end up worshiping a golden calf?
The Old Testament is full of prophets asking the same question regarding their own time. Why has Israel turned away from the living God? Why do the people make statues of silver, gold, and wood and act as if they are gods? Do they not know what God has done? Do they not realize their lives are in his hand? Have they forgotten his covenant?
But the Israelite predilection for idolatry goes back to this moment in the wilderness. Moses goes up the mountain to be with the true and living God. God is teaching Moses the Law so he might hand it down to the people. But Moses stays on the mountain a bit too long and the people start to grumble. Always a bad sign. And they are blunt with Aaron, Moses’ brother and priest of God. They tell him, "Come, make gods for us, who shall 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.” They’re like children who lack object permanence. Moses is gone, they do not know what has become of him. But please, give us gods that we might worship.
So Aaron instructs them to take the gold they had plundered from the Egyptians and to give it to him. He takes the gold and molds it into a calf. He presents the calf to Israel and proclaims, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” And he announces a festival to the Lord.
The next day they revel before the calf. It is a loud and ridiculous sight. The sound of revelry reaches up the mountain and the Lord tells Moses to go down because he is about to wipe Israel off the face of the earth. But Moses, as the mediator between the Lord and his people, calms the Lord down and begs for mercy before he goes down to confront Aaron.
This is a very strange story. But to me the strangest detail is what Aaron says as he reveals the golden calf. "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” He does not say “here are your new gods!” Or “Here is a god in addition to the god who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” Instead he announces that this idol, this statue, is the god who brought them up out of the land of Egypt. From Aaron’s perspective, and the perspective of the people, they are not putting a statue up in the place of God. But they are creating an image for god. A means by which they might worship god. He is now with them not in the cloud and fire. But as this statue made with hands.
Today the danger of idolatry is not that we might make a literal golden calf. We no longer believe that the images we create might be filled with the numinous presence of the god we worship. In this respect the temptation to idolatry is a matter for a bygone age. But in essence an idol is that which we worship in the place of God. Whatever we put in the center of our lives, that determines our lives, that drives our lives, that which we are willing to live and die for. And while the Israelites weren’t tempted to replace God. They were tempted to conflate God with something he is not. That is, this statue made of gold. And we too face temptations to conflate God with what God is not. And by conflating God we worship an idol in his name.
This is a continual temptation for all the people of God. The Spanish conquistadors conflated the cause of the gospel with the imperial expansion of Spain. In Nazi Germany many renowned pastors and scholars conflated Jesus with antisemitism, and the cause of the gospel with the cause of the nazi party. In either case it was no cynical manipulation of the faith, but a deeply held conflation of God with their own beliefs. Even so to this day people will conflate the salvation God offers with a prosperity gospel of health and wealth. Or conflate the teachings of scripture with racism. There are some people who cannot be challenged by the words of Jesus because they think Jesus agrees with everything they already believe. We will never get beyond idolatry until Jesus returns to set things right.
Recognizing when we conflate God with an idol requires discernment. We need two things in order to discern rightly whether something is of God or if something is an idol. The first is memory of God. Memory of what God has revealed of himself, what he has shown himself to be. The Israelites face a difficulty with memory. When Moses goes to be with God up the mountain, they say they do not know where he went. When Aaron produces the golden calf they are happy to imagine that statue delivered them from Egypt. Even though they should know better. Even though they saw the mighty works of God. Even though they followed him through the desert as a pillar of fire.
This is why we need to remain in the scripture. That we can recognize when something that is not of God is being conflated with God. This is also why we pay special attention to Jesus, the incarnation of God by which his character is shown to us. The scriptures, and especially the gospels, give us solid ground by which to critique idols of our age. I recall a pastor who was preaching on Revelation. And he talked about how Jesus comes back as a tattoo’d warrior with a sword coming out of his mouth to wreck vengeance on the world. And he made the comment, “I cannot worship a messiah I could beat up.” What an odd thing to say about a crucified messiah. But he worshiped certain visions of masculinity, strength, and virility. He had to see Jesus as an MMA fighter because he conflated such virtues with God. But it took him down a wrong path. The cross, as it happens, is a spiritual machete that can slice and dice most idols we concoct.
But secondly we must remain in prayer. We do not only read the Bible to hear about what happened way back when. But we have a relationship with God today. He hears us. He speaks to us. And his Spirit is within us. Through prayer we grow closer to him and he softens our hearts. Just like you can pick out someone you love whether their glasses are on or off, whether their hair is down or not, whatever get up they have on, so too the disciple in prayer gets a spiritual sense of when they are close to God and when they are being led astray. What smacks of their savior and what seems like an impostor.
It can be a painful process to distinguish what has been conflated. To see what is of God and what is of our own making. We naturally want to believe that what we deeply hold and who God is are one and the same. But life is found in the true gospel. We should be humbly vigilant and allow the Bible to remain ever strange to us, ever critiquing us, that we may humbly critique the idols of the world.