Redefining God

Today’s reading: Exodus 32

Our scripture today opens with Moses on the mountaintop receiving the Law from God.  He’d been gone from the Israelite camp for 40 days and nights, and his people were wondering where he was.  In his absence, they grew impatient (or perhaps just manipulative) and convinced Aaron the high priest to build them a god they could see and touch, much like the gods of their Canaanite contemporaries.  Aaron obliged and built them a golden calf to which they bowed and worshipped.  God’s anger burned against his people.     

Honestly, I don’t think about idols very much.  Even though we, in 21st century America, don’t routinely build and bow down to idols made of precious metals, there is no doubt we struggle with idolatry.   I contend that anything we are we elevating to be more important than God is definitely an idol.  Anything, other than the Kingdom of God, in which we are investing our time and money has the potential to be an idol also.  Would you consider your job, house, higher education, relationships, vacations, cars, etc, to be idols?  As I contemplated each of these examples, I quickly realized they all lead to the exact same place.  They are all about glorifying me.  My struggle with idolatry is quite simply my tendency to make me and my selfish desires a higher priority than God.

In his book Radical: Taking Back Your Faith from the American Dream (2010), David Platt challenges his readers to consider how they have manipulated the gospel to fit their cultural preferences.  Do you think molding God to fit our cultural or personal expectations / desires / circumstances, rather than what the Bible tells us about who he is, is idolatry?   Platt contends that this behavior leads us to worship ourselves rather than the God who created us.  He wrote,

“We have this dangerous tendency today to create God, redefine God, to be who we want Him to be. And really we create a god who looks a lot like … us. He’s a nice, middle-class, American God. He looks like us, and he thinks like us, and he’s quite comfortable with our lifestyles. We think He’s comfortable with our self-saturated lukewarm faith. He’s comfortable with our apathy. He’s comfortable with half-hearted devotion to him. He’s comfortable with materialistic indulgences. We think He’s comfortable with all those things, because we are. We fashion a god who looks … a lot like us.”

If we are re-defining God to be who we want him to be, are we any different than the Israelites who re-defined God to look like a golden calf?