We love our golden calves.  As soon as Moses leaves his people for some alone time with God, the people turn away to other gods.  Yahweh, who freed them from generations of slavery, who performed miracle after miracle in their sight, who passed over their houses yet struck dead the firstborn of their enemies, who guided them with a pillar of fire and cloud, who parted the Red Sea, was forgotten after a month.  And Moses, who had led these people to plunder one of the greatest empires of the world is abandoned along with the God he served.  In Moses’ place, they placed Aaron, the spokesman.  In Yahweh’s place, they formed yet another golden calf.  Made of the gold they had plundered from Egypt, this idol was now declared to be the god who led them to freedom.

We love our golden calves.  When we begin to doubt God, to forget the miracles He has performed, to close our eyes to the leaders He has placed before us, we quickly turn to other sources of comfort and authority.  Maybe our golden calves take the form of political parties, or world governments, or philosophical systems, or wealth and power.  Whatever idol we turn to when we turn away from God, we can be sure they didn’t just pop out of the fire fully formed.  We have taken time to form these gods ourselves.

We love our golden calves.  But God doesn’t.  God declares to Moses His intention to wipe the people away and begin again with Moses (remember Noah?) as the father of the Jews.  But with Moses standing for his people, God relents and simply refuses to go with them.  “I’ll go ahead and prepare the way but I won’t travel with you or I might just wipe you out anyway,” God declares.

If we want God walking with us, if we want to be spared His wrath or at least His absence, we need to follow Him and only Him.  Follow another idol and you might just find yourself alone.  God will never leave us nor forsake us, but He will allow us to walk away from Him.  That’s called free will.  Use it wisely.

It’s always fascinating to find Jesus and the gospel stories in the Old Testament.  Today, we get a huge reference to Him as we learn about the dedication of the temple.

Throughout His ministry, Jesus was always comparing Himself to the temple.  For the Jews, the Temple was where God dwelt.  Sure, He was omnipresent, but the place where they could go and be in His presence, in fact were commanded to annually, was at the Temple.  Here was the Ark of the Covenant, and on it the Bema Seat, the place where God lived.

Jesus replaced the Temple for us as the place where God dwelt.  And as we see again and again, the closer you got to Jesus, the wider the welcome.  This was the exact opposite of the Old Testament laws, where the closer you got to the Ark the fewer people were allowed, and was a large part of what kept giving the religious leaders of the day fits.  And even back here in Exodus, we find this reality that Jesus replaced the temple.  In the listing of things used to dedicate the temple, did you see three old familiar friends?  The temple items were all cast in gold (30:3), the formula for the fragrance from the Altar of Incense was almost half frankincense (30:34), and the anointing oil for the priests was mostly myrrh (30:23).  These formulas were to be “holy” which means used only for this single purpose.  Anyone who made this particular recipe for either was to be killed!

When the Magi from the East came to Jesus, it is not coincidence that these are the exact items they presented to the baby.  They were, in effect if unknowingly, dedicating a new Temple, a new dwelling place for Yahweh, and a new means of relationship between us and our God.