Devotional Day 16

Scripture

Exodus 32:1-6

When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, “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 do not know what has become of him.” 2 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.” 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. 4 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!” 5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, “Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord.” 6 And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

Devotional

Idolatry can often be a sneaky and sinister thing. In Exodus 32, we read the people of God grew impatient waiting for Moses to come down from the mountain. In their impatience they demanded that Aaron make gods for them who would go before them into the promised land. Interestingly in order to worship this new idol Aaron told them to give him their gold jewelry. This gold jewellery had been given to them by God back in Exodus 12, when God caused the egyptians to be favorably disposed towards God’s people and gave them the jewelry.

So God’s people took what God had given them, I believe, to build the tabernacle that they might worship God, and used it to create a false god, an idol. This is exactly what idolatry does, it costs us what we should use to worship God and instead sacrifice it to the idol. This might be money - that instead of investing in the kingdom of God we sacrifice to the idol of self, it might be time - demanded by an idolatry of success, where we spend inordinate amounts of time working that we might have worldly success instead of sowing that time into building and cultivating an intimate relationship with God. Whatever the case, idolatry always comes at a tangible cost to our relationship with God, for it demands of us what is meant for God. For many of us it could also be our purity - pornography has demanded our purity to give us distraction from our pain, which is a high price to pay.

What has idolatry cost your relationship with God? And how could a journey of repentance see you giving back to God what you had previously been offering to an idol? If it’s purity, then, in your overcoming of pornography, give God back your purity and see him take that which has been broken and marred and restore it. No matter what has been lost, our God is a redeemer and he can wash, clean and purify that which has been broken and misused. He can redeem that which has been lost, burned up and defiled at the altar of an idol.

Prayer

Bring whatever comes to mind before the Lord in repentance today, and give it back to God and ask him to redeem it.