The Gods We Choose

This sermon was preached for Capital Pres Fairfax on March 23, 2025  as a part of our sermon series “Exodus: Journey to Freedom.” Where do we turn to when we need direction, rescue, or peace? The Book of Exodus is an account of God graciously leading his people from slavery to freedom, teaching us about God’s passion to make his glory known and his commitment to be present with his people. Exodus helps us learn what it looks like to live in hostile environments and walk through wilderness seasons while relying on God’s grace to lead us to freedom. This week we focused on Exodus 32:1-14. A recording of this sermon will be available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. 

Exodus 32:1 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.

7 And the LORD said to Moses, “Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. 8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, ‘These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!’ ” 9 And the LORD said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people. 10 Now therefore let me alone, that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them, in order that I may make a great nation of you.”

11 But Moses implored the LORD his God and said, “O LORD, why does your wrath burn hot against your people, whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them out, to kill them in the mountains and to consume them from the face of the earth’? Turn from your burning anger and relent from this disaster against your people. 13 Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self, and said to them, ‘I will multiply your offspring as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have promised I will give to your offspring, and they shall inherit it forever.’ ” 14 And the LORD relented from the disaster that he had spoken of bringing on his people.

So what do you think of our passage this morning? A golden calf and a God of wrath, that’s what we’re working with, huh? 

Can we just take a second to be honest with each other? You don’t need to raise your hand or anything, but just ask yourself this question. Who here is sitting and thinking to themselves “You know what, this is kind of why I prefer the New Testament”? Because all this talk about idolatry and this picture of God burning with anger, it just feels so foreign! 

If that’s how you’re feeling right now, you’re not alone, but stick with us for the next half an hour and you’ll see how this passage is a lot less foreign than you think. Why? Because we are the same kind of people as Israel in this story. The famous church reformer John Calvin once wrote that the human heart is “a perpetual forge of idols.” They might look different than Israel’s golden calf, but the idols you and I make today represent the exact same gods Israel chose back then. The good news is, the real God is the exact same now as he was then—and that is good news. We’re going to see why as we explore two points this morning: the gods we choose, and the God who chooses us. 

The Gods We Choose

If you’ve got a Bible on you, go ahead and open it back up to our passage, we’re going be looking at some details in the text. If you were here last week, you might notice we’ve skipped ahead quite a bit from chapter 24 to 32. Last we heard, God and the people of Israel had bound themselves to a covenant with each other. And remember, a covenant is a committed relationship, it’s a blood bond between God and his people built upon God’s loving rescue of Israel from slavery. As with any committed relationship, it comes with some boundaries. In this case, it’s the Ten Commandments and the laws that accompany them. So covenant: founded on their rescue, upheld by the law, and ultimately for the purpose of God dwelling with his people—sharing his fellowship and his glory with them. 

Chapter 24 ends with Moses climbing the mountain to meet with God, and we’re told “Moses was on the mountain 40 days and 40 nights.” Take a second to flip through Exodus 25-31 to see what’s going on during those forty days. God takes Moses on a tour of heaven and tells him to write down directions on how to make a copy of what he sees; that’s what the tabernacle is. So God is literally guiding Moses in how to make heaven on earth. God’s presence with his people in a beautiful sanctuary. 

Friends, you need to know this morning that that’s God’s vision for his people: dwelling with you in beauty and perfect security. But our passage today shows us how Israel abandons this whole vision. Let’s come back down off the mountain and join Israel in the camp. It’s been about six weeks since Moses left. They can see the pillar of fire that led them out of Egypt up on top of the mountain, and they saw Moses go up into it. But the days pass. Still no Moses. And they start to get antsy. 

So here’s a question for you: what do you do when you start to get antsy with God? Here’s what Israel does (and what we do, too): they make an idol. Here’s three observations from our passage on the gods we choose. 

First, why we choose them. And we see it right there in verse 1, just two simple words: “Moses delayed.” The people aren’t focused on the pillar of fire on top of the mountain, or the manna they’re eating every day. They’re focused on the barren desert, and on the Amalekites who are prowling around looking to attack them again. 

Are these legitimate threats to the people of Israel here? Yes. The desert is hostile and the enemies are real. We shouldn’t dismiss the danger they face. But every step of the way, God has proven the he will protect his people. That’s the key point here. No matter where you are in life, you will never not have threats on your radar. That’s just the world we live in. You can always find something to worry about, but you can always trust God with whatever you face. 

Israel is still learning this lesson, and if we’re honest with ourselves, we are too. We choose our own gods when we’re threatened and we feel like God has left us alone. In chatting with our pastor Rob about this passage, he recalled a quote from French philosopher Blaise Pascal “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” So think for yourself. What are the threats on your radar? What do you feel God has left you alone with? It could be something personal, like the threat of job loss, or stress in your relationship (or singleness). Maybe it’s global, relating to politics or the economy or the environment. 

There’s a big difference between knowing we can trust God and actually trusting him. And the tell tale sign that we aren’t trusting God is when we start crafting idols. 

Second observation about the gods we choose: how we make them. It might be helpful to first define our terms “idol” and “god.” You might be thinking, “Patrick, you’ve used that word a lot, I don’t know what an idol is. I know what American Idol is. I’ve watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Will that help?” Well, maybe! 

Here’s two definitions for you. A god (little “g”) is anything we worship as a source of power, security, wealth, life—it’s the thing we look to as an answer to the threats we face. An idol is a concrete representation of a god. These two things are related, but distinct. Think about the relationship between the American flag and our country. There’s a reason we care about the treatment of the flag, we don’t let it touch the ground, we don’t misuse it, because of what the flag represents. That’s like how an idol works with the god it represents. You treat the idol the way you want to treat your god. But the added element with idolatry is that the way you treat the idol directly relates to how the god treats you. There’s a clear cause-and-effect relationship between idols and their gods. 

All this might still be foreign, but let’s look at our text again and see how close to home this hits. Look with me at verses 2-4. How does Israel make the god they chose? Aaron takes their gold, throws it into the fire, and fashions a bull out of it. Remember where this gold came from. God promised his people that when they left Egypt, they would take Egypt’s wealth with them. Each and every earring and bracelet is a gift from God, it’s his blessing and provision for them. And what do they do with God’s gift? They destroy it. They melt it down for the idol. 

Friends, there is a strong warning in these verses, because you and I do the exact same thing. So often we take the blessings the Lord has given us and we twist them into an idol, hoping we can control the god it represents. When we lose a job, we turn our qualifications into a god. We think “I need to rely on my college degrees and my connections and my years working in the field, these things will get me a new job.” And then we find ourselves turning our resumes into an idol. We obsess over our LinkedIn profile and the exact wording of our cover letter. A threat could be the fear of death and the degradation of your body. A false god could be fitness, a strict diet, or modern medicine. An idol of that god could be a fitness app you obsessively check, a diet you meticulously track, or medical trends you read and follow religiously. 

And it’s worth saying, DC friends, that idolatry and politics went hand in hand all through the Old Testament. When the world gets crazy, it’s all too easy to turn your country into a god and its leader into an idol—and this isn’t exclusive to any one country or political party. Scripture is clear that God is sovereign over kings and rulers, and that a good leader is a blessing from the Lord. But when we begin to bank all our hopes and dreams on a political candidate or a country’s policies, when we invest all of our time and effort into defending our views at the expense of our relationships, that’s a sign we’ve stepped into idolatry. 

We need to be extra careful to ask ourselves, “Am I taking this good thing the Lord has blessed me with and banking all my peace and security on it? Am I obsessing over it and it’s not healthy?” So that’s how we make the gods we choose. We find something that promises fulfillment, and we use the Lord’s blessings to serve that false god. 

Here’s our last observation on the gods we choose: where they lead us. Let’s come back to our passage. In verse 6 it says the people “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.” It feels good to have a god you can control, to have an idol you can see and touch and manipulate. But if we keep reading, we see where these gods really lead us: destruction. 

Here’s a question you might be wondering: Why a bull? Here it says “calf” but what you should think of is a full-grown bull. In the Ancient Near East, the bull was a common symbol for strength and fertility—and these are the two things Israel is most concerned about (remember, they’re in a desert surrounded by enemies). Lots of neighboring people had gods associated with bulls. That includes Egypt. Hapi and Osiris and even Pharaoh were associated with bulls. Now, here in this passage, Israel is still identifying this golden calf as Yahweh. But in effect, they’re turning the Lord into the exact same kind of god Pharaoh was. 

That’s the grave sin behind idolatry. It completely misrepresents God, so much so that an idol becomes a different God entirely. Idolatry reduces God to something we can see and touch, something we can understand, something we can manipulate and control. The Living God is transcendent. He cannot be controlled. He is beyond us. That’s what makes it hard to trust him—but that’s also what makes him alone trustworthy. If we control the gods we choose, how can we expect them to control the things we can’t? The Lord cannot be controlled because he controls everything. 

One Old Testament scholar puts it this way, “The gods are nothing in terms of the divine reality that is claimed for them. There is only one rightful occupant of the category of deity, and that is the Lord God of the biblical revelation, Creator and Ruler of the universe…We are the makers of our own gods—which, of course, is part of the absurdity of worshiping them.”¹ 

So by forging the golden calf, Israel has in fact abandoned the God who loved them and brought them out of slavery. And friends, you need to know that for yourself, too. When we turn to our idols, we are turning our backs on God. We are saying to the Lord “I trust in my resume, or this political candidate, or whatever other idol, more than I trust in you. I don’t know what you’re doing, I can’t control you, so I can’t rely on you.” 

Those are the gods we choose. Why do we choose them? We’re facing a threat and we don’t trust the Lord. How do we make them? We take the Lord’s blessings and twist them into idols. Where do they lead us? Into a false sense of security, and ultimately away from the God who saved us. Remember where we started this morning: With God and Moses in heaven, as he prepares to dwell with his people in the tabernacle. Seven chapters of that beautiful vision, and all of that is undone in just six verses. In verse 7, we come back to God and Moses on top of the mountain. And that brings us to our second point: in verses 7-14 we see the God who chooses us. 

The God Who Chooses Us

We’ve got two more observations from the rest of our verses. First, we see from our passage that the God who chooses us is the God who cares. Starting with verses 7-10, we see that God is furious. Hopefully now you can see why. Idolatry is no small matter. But the context makes this even worse. Through the whole book of Exodus, God has done nothing but prove his love and faithfulness to Israel, and Israel has consistently responded with suspicion, slander, and accusations. Here’s a few examples. 

“Is it because there are no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us in bringing us out of Egypt? Is not this what we said to you in Egypt: ‘Leave us alone that we may serve the Egyptians’? For it would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.” (14:11-12)

“Would that we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” (16:3)

“Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” (17:3)

Remember, Israel and God had just entered into a covenant with each other. And as a part of that committed relationship, God explicitly commanded against idolatry twice (Ex 20:23 “You shall not…make for yourselves gods of gold.”). One commentator described this passage as “infidelity on the wedding night right after they had taken their vows.”² If you were in a committed relationship and your partner cheated on you, and you didn’t get upset, something is seriously wrong. So it’s actually a good thing God is burning with wrath, he genuinely cares about his people’s unfaithfulness. 

But perhaps the biggest reason of all for God’s anger: Israel’s turn to idolatry doesn’t just lead them to destruction, it damns the whole world. God called Israel out of Egypt to be a “nation of priests” (Ex 19:6). Just as God had led Israel out of spiritual slavery, God’s plan was for Israel to lead the nations out of idolatry and back to the one true God. By building the golden calf, they become no different than the other nations and abandon their witness. 

Friends, the same thing applies to us today; we can’t afford to ignore God’s wrath when it comes to idolatry. God deeply loves you, he knows that idolatry will never satisfy you and will only lead you away from himself. And God has called you to share the good news of the freedom you have found in Christ with the rest of the world. If your neighbors or your children see you just as enslaved to the idols of our culture as everyone else, they will have no hope of salvation. The God who chooses us is a God who cares too much to leave us in idolatry. 

Now looking at our text, you might be thinking “Hey, it sure looks like God intends on leaving Israel.” In verse 10, it seems like God is about to pull a Noah 2.0 in destroying Israel and restarting with Moses. But it’s important for us to ask this question: Why do you think God is telling Moses any of this in the first place? He’s God, after all. He’s not just a verbal processor, he’s not looking for a sounding board or someone to give him advice. Why not just go and execute judgment? 

God makes it a practice of voicing his judgment to a human who can then serve as an intercessor. It’s a pattern that plays out all through the Old Testament. Abraham, Moses, the judges, David in the psalms, the prophets—All these intercessors do exactly what Moses does here. Look at verses 11-13. Moses pleads God’s own words back to God. He pleads God’s story. He reminds God, “these are your people, remember the salvation you’ve won for them!” He pleads God’s glory—his name to the nations, his victory over the idols of Egypt. And he pleads God’s promise, pointing to his covenant faithfulness to Abraham and his descendants, and asking God to be who he is. 

The New Testament shows us that all this is modeling what God will ultimately have with Christ. Jesus is the true and greater Moses. In Jesus, God himself came to deliver his people from the slavery of sin and the bondage of death. He did this by taking sin upon his own shoulders and dying in our place, then raising from the dead in victory. But that’s not all. Jesus isn’t just our Savior. He’s our intercessor. 

Think about it like this. It can be really easy for us to feel like Israel waiting on Moses to come back down the mountain. 40 days? How about 2000 years? What do you think Jesus is doing in heaven right now? Nothing? Just sitting around, dragging his feet to come back? No! Jesus is standing before God in heaven right now hard at work interceding on your behalf. 

That’s our second observation about the God who chooses us: this is the God who forgives. This passage makes it very hard for us to underestimate God’s mercy. Here’s what I mean. I know for many of us in here, we’ve been a Christian for a while. When we slip into idolatry, it’s not because we don’t know what we’re doing. I’ve got two degrees dedicated to knowing our faith, and yet I still sin! When I come to my senses, it is so easy for me to think “That’s it, I’ve ruined it now. Surely God is done with me. Could he possibly forgive me?”

Friends, you cannot outrun God’s mercy. This passage shows us that even when we run away and choose false gods, our God still chooses us. Jesus right now is interceding on your behalf, he’s telling our Heavenly Father “Remember, this one is yours. This is your person. You saved him; you rescued her from her sin. My blood covers this one. You’ve made this person a witness to the whole world of your salvation. Remember your promises to deliver your people.” That’s what Jesus said he’d do in his high priestly prayer (Jn 17:15,26). That’s what Hebrews tells us Jesus is doing before God in heaven (Heb 7:25). The God who chooses us cares when we sin and he still forgives. 

Conclusion

Here’s a few summary thoughts for you to take home. Idolatry is an attractive alternative, but it leads to destruction. Run from it at all costs. Think about it like this: let’s identify threat-god-idol. Identify your own threats. What are the things in your life that threaten your peace, security, comfort, etc? Then identify the gods you choose over the Lord. What are you turning to as answers to the threats you face? Finally, identify the idols you make for those gods. What concrete objects or pictures are you fixating on or

obsessing over in service to the false god is represents?

Take some time to journal about that this week, maybe discuss with your family or your Community Group. But right now, let’s close our worship simply sitting in the glorious mercy of our God. 

  * * * 

¹ Christopher J. H. Wright. ’Here Are Your Gods’: Faithful Discipleship in Idolatrous Times (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2020), 30. 

² Christopher J. H. Wright. Exodus (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Academic, 2021), 550n6.