Bryce Crawford

Aaron, they go up to Aaron.

They say, up, make us gods who shall go before us.

As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we don't know what has become of him.

So Aaron said to them, take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.

So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron, and he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf.

And they said, these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt.

When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it, and then Aaron continues talking.

We need to pause right here.

So the Israelites got impatient.

Moses said he was going to go up there to communicate with God.

That's what his role was to do, to communicate to God and then deliver the messages to the people.

Well, he was delayed, according to the Israelites, so they get impatient.

When they got impatient, they decided to take all of their gold jewelry, give it to Aaron, and Aaron built them a golden calf to worship.

A small detail that we need to recognize is where this gold jewelry came from.

When they were leaving Egypt, when Moses was leading the Israelites out, God allowed the Israelites essentially to loot the land and take gold with them as they left.

This gold was a gift from God.

And in chapter 32, we watch the Israelites take a gift that God graciously gave them, turn it into an idol, and then they say, this golden image that we just built right here, this is the thing that led us out of Egypt.

Not Moses, not Yahweh, this thing right here.

In today's society especially, we do similar things that Israel did.

One of the main purposes of looking at how stupid the Israelites were in the Old Testament was for us as believers to go, yeah, I'm never going to do that.