Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him, "Come, make us gods that shall go before us; for 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." – Exodus 32v1
‘Walk by sight, not by faith.’ That seems to be the theme of Israel as they wandered in the desert. Here we have yet another example. Moses went up to the mountain to meet with God. The people had seen God manifest His power. They had once again affirmed their decision to follow and obey God.
But a problem arose. Moses was gone longer than they thought he should be gone. So they went to Aaron, someone who should have known better. ‘Where is Moses? He led us out of Egypt, but we don’t know where he is. Lets go make some gods of our own.’
Of course Aaron sorted them out. Not at all! He told them to bring their gold and he made a golden calf – ‘Okay, here is the god that brought you out of Egypt!’ Then he went on to build an altar.
How could this happen? How could they reject the God they had just seen manifest His power? The key is at the start of the verse – ‘When they saw that Moses delayed.’ There are two problems there. The based their faith on what they saw and they based their faith on their timetable.
The problem is that we are afflicted with the same two problems. We see things that trouble us or God doesn’t work in our time frame so we start to doubt Him. Our desires and our timetables become our gods instead of the true God.
When will we ever realise that what we see and how long we have to wait are not what really counts. Walk by faith. Wait on God and His perfect timing. Doing anything else is a sure recipe for disaster.
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