Make us gods

Moses has been up the mountain too long. Days pass, and then more days, and the disoriented people at the foot of Sinai cannot bear the waiting any further. As for this Moses, they say, we do not know what has become of him. So they go to Aaron with a demand that is really a confession of how unbearable the silence has grown: make us gods to go before us, now. And out of the gold in their ears comes a calf, cast and shaped, something they can see and touch and carry, a god small enough to manage. These, they cry, are your gods, Israel. Disorientation breeds idolatry. This is its mechanism laid bare. When the true God seems delayed or hidden up some mountain, the uncertainty becomes intolerable, and the intolerable uncertainty pushes the heart to manufacture a substitute, anything visible to fill the silence and go before us now. The calf is never really about preferring metal to God. It is about the agony of the wait. It is what a people builds when the One they are waiting for is, as far as they can tell, taking far too long.

In the disorienting wait you will be tempted to build a calf, and you should know the shape the temptation takes. It will not announce itself as idolatry. It will arrive as relief: some visible, controllable certainty grabbed quickly to quiet the unbearable silence, something that goes before you now so you no longer have to stand in the dark not knowing. Watch for it, because the idol is always whatever you reach for precisely because God seems to be taking too long. It might be a certainty too rigid to be true, a leader asked to be more than a leader, a system that promises to end the not-knowing. The mark of the calf is that it ends the wait on your terms. And here is the hard discipline of the wilderness: it asks you to wait for the real God rather than fashion a manageable fake. The One you are waiting for is not lost up the mountain. He is not late. He is coming down with something better than anything you could cast from your own gold.