Exodus 32-34

What a great passage today! So many stories! Cool things! All in three little chapters! What to focus on?!?!

One of the most intriguing things and often most difficult things about Christianity is that we serve an unseen God. We have no idea of His form. Many have considered Him to be a glowing sphere of light, similar to the way His glory is depicted in the OT. God is spirit. So how can we worship that which is unseen? Even Christ in the NT is not physically described. We have done our best through time to turn Him into a wavy long-haired blue-eyed light-skinned westerner. I think for many of us if Jesus showed up today we would be blown away by our misguided thoughts. Yet we continue to see His face everywhere and have become so familiar with a certain type of description that we can see a person or picture and comment to its amazing likeness to Christ!?

How many of you have a best friend that you've never seen? How easy is it to have a relationship with someone you can not picture in your head, or point out in the crowd? A couple months back during youth group I had an object in my pocket which I began to describe to my students. I tried to explain it as best I could. Once my students got the general idea about the object, I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to them. I heard things like,"Ohhh, I understand!" or "I thought it was something like that!" to "I was way off!"

So often we associate knowledge with seeing. We want to be able to picture it. So it's hard when we come to Christianity and have nothing to go off but an empty cross and pictures of our man made Jesus (both of which are more than likely nowhere near accurate).

So can we really fault the Israelites for the golden calf? Well, yes.... but. Reading chapter 32 it was clear to me that the Israelites were not going after another god. Notice v.4 "'This is your god, O Israel, who brought you up from the land of Egypt.'"And v.5 "'Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD.'" They were not leaving YHWH for another god, they just wanted something they could understand, something they could see, something they could get their minds around. Moses had disappeared and they were seeking to move on, with the God of their deliverance.

Yes this was wrong, for God has never given us an image to worship, but remember that Moses wasn't satisfied either without the physical comprehension. He wanted it just as his people did. For only one chapter later after scolding Israel for making the image, he asks God to show him His glory(33:18). I.e. "God those people down there have it completely wrong, ... but show me what you look like so that I can know You." (v13) God's response? Neither will you see my face, Moses, but I will let you see my back(v.23)! He at least got this much!

We desire visible leaders and often trust is conveyed when we can see them working. So why doesn't God do that for us?

A couple thoughts. We would surely attempt to worship the image rather than the Person which it represents! Our focus goes so quickly from seeing something symbolically to attaching to it the actual significance. Hence baptism is symbolic of salvation, but many have come to believe it is through it that a person is saved. The Eastern Orthodox Church struggles with icons which they believed had power in themselves; supposed pieces of the alabaster jar of perfume, the shroud of Christ, the sandals Christ wore, even pieces of Christ's actual cross have popped up throughout the centuries... It was once commented that there were enough pieces of the real cross of Christ to crucify Him several times over!

Second, our God can't be confined or represented by an inanimate object! No rock, tree, or man made piece can ever capture who our God is. In fact God is so awesome, that the closest thing Christianity has to a God-idol stares us back in the face every morning when we look in the mirror! God's image is so profound that it is best explained through humanity, which was created in His very image. To think! There is no dragon statue, or molten calf, or pile of mud (see Kerry Spencer's blog of his adventures in African missions)... no "dumb" idol which can do Him justice. For a partial, yet flawed by sin, image we must look to the creation of man himself. But even this is merely an image and not the real thing. No evangelical would announce they are the embodiment of all that is God!

We have a God whose appearance may well be shrouded in mystery, too great for us to even behold, but at the same time... in His wisdom... this might be just what we need right now, though clearly not what we want. We need a God bigger than we can grasp, we need a God who can not be constrained or labeled, we need a God who we can never stop learning about.

Never think for a moment that just because we don't have an image that our God doesn't exist. He is very real. But our God is a God that demands our faith. Yet though we know not His figure, we surely know His heart and nature.

For He has revealed to us all we need, but has still left the mystery of His vastness for us to ever ponder! Praise God that we can ever search Him and never know Him all. There is surely a great measure of peace that comes from knowing our God is bigger and more powerful than we can imagine. It's easy to leave our worries before a God like that!