The Christian singer Sara Groves has a song on one of her recent albums, Conversations, called “Painting Pictures of Egypt.” The lyrics go like this,

I don’t want to leave here
I don’t want to stay
It feels like pinching to me
Either way
And the places I long for the most
Are the places where I’ve been
They are calling out to me
Like a long lost friend

It’s not about losing faith
It’s not about trust
It’s all about comfortable
When you move so much
And the place I was wasn’t perfect
But I had found a way to live
And it wasn’t milk or honey
But then neither is this

I’ve been painting pictures of Egypt
Leaving out what it lacks
And so the future feels so hard
And I want to go back
But the places they used to fit me
Cannot hold the things I’ve learned
Those roads were closed off to me
While my back was turned

The past is so tangible
I know it by heart
Familiar things are never easy to discard
I was dying for some freedom
But now I hesitate to go

I am caught between the Promise
And the things I know

If it comes too quick
I may not appreciate it
Is that the reason behind all this time and sand?
And if it comes too quick
I may not recognize it
Is that the reason behind all this time and sand?

Prayer - Lord God, you who delivered us up out of Egypt, you who freed us from our bondage in Jesus Christ, your presence is sometimes so difficult to see. Your ways are not our ways. Your time table is not ours. Sometimes you seem so slow in keeping your promise. Yet, you are everywhere around us. Your presence has not left us. Lord, we believe, but help our unbelief. Do not grow weary of our faithlessness but out of the bounty of your mercy be faithful to your promise until all us are home. Amen.

The worst part about being delivered is that sometimes you feel no better off than you were in your bondage. As Sara Grove sings, “And the place I was wasn’t perfect, but I had found a way to live, and it wasn’t milk or honey, but then neither is this.” It had been three long, hard months since the Exodus. God had continued to lead the people south into the Sinai desert where food and water are scarce, while reasons to be afraid were plentiful. To make matters worse, Moses had been away from the people upon Mt. Sinai for forty days, which is a biblical number for “a long time.” He had been their trusted leader, he was the one who pled their case before God, he was the one through whom God spoke. Every time something went wrong, it was to him they turned, and to him they complained. Moses was their mediator between God and themselves. But now their mediator and leader had been away for over a month, doing God knows what. No word from Moses. And that meant there had been no word from God. God seemed as absent as Moses – so here they are, out in the desert, having followed Moses and this God, and now both have turned up missing.

Put yourself in their sandals. Feeling abandoned out there in the hot, barren desert for so long, without any word from God, without any certainty that He remembers that you are there. And besides, it was time to get to the Promised Land. What was the purpose of wandering around hungry, parched and uncomfortable in the desert sand? It is enough to make you do something desperate.

Like the Hebrews, you may have been chasing a dream for a long time, longer than even a few months. It may be a relationship, or a child, or your health. It may be a move that you want to make, a job you want to take, an house you want to buy, or a marriage you would like to enjoy. Perhaps it is a dream for the kingdom of God or for our church. It’s such a good dream. You’re sure it came from God. But lately God has shown up missing, and He seems to be taking His sweet time while you wander around in the desert somewhere between slavery and promise.

Where is God? Why did He lead you down this road to abandon you in the middle of it? When you start feeling that God has forgotten about you, it will soon be tempting to look for something a little more tangible and immediate in a deity. “When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered around Aaron and said to him, ‘Come, make gods for us who shall go before us; as for this Moses, we do not know what has become of him.” (Exodus 32:1). In other words, what they were really saying was, “Aaron do something to take away the fear. Make another god for us that is more manageable, that is more respectful of our time, that we can understand, and that we can grasp when we really need him.”

Notice that the people did not intend to become idolaters. No one stood up and said, “Ok, we knew it. There is no god. We’re on our own out here. What’s the plan?” No, when they grew anxious, they got real religious. That is how it always happens. When people get discouraged and grow impatient with the true God, they always search for other gods that can meet the need. G.K. Chesterton claimed that when people stop worshiping the God of heaven and earth, they don’t worship nothing. Rather, they worship everything. “Maybe what I need is a new job, or a new house, or a new move, or a new relationship, or a new body.” Whatever it is that you are counting on to get you out of the desert and into your dreams quickly is an idol. It might even be a God that you think you can manage. Maybe even your expectation that you should be somewhere besides in the wilderness with God can be an idol.

The Hebrew choice of a golden calf seems strange to us, but that is only because we are not ancient Semitic people. For them it was a common idol of strength. Lots of people in their day worshiped the young bull. It was familiar and predictable, and so concretely present. It was a god they could shape with their own hands, just like our idols of success, wealth and power. And, best of all, a golden calf doesn’t make any demands on you. It doesn’t have ten commandments that you’re expected to obey. It doesn’t expect you to believe in it when it fails to do what you want. It doesn’t even demand exclusive loyalty. It’s ok with the calf. The calf doesn’t care how many other gods that you try. The calf is so agreeable. After all, what good is a God who doesn’t appear when you want Him?

The Lord God, the Lord Jehovah, is completely unmanageable and very demanding. He will not be shaped by human hands, and He will not come every time you beckon, or at least on your schedule. He even seems to go away for a while sometimes. But it is not because He ever really leaves you. He sometimes comes up “missing” because He is making room for you to have faith. If God was on a leash, you would not need faith. Faith is what binds you to the God you cannot control. And faith doesn’t come when God acts quickly to your every demand. Faith develops on the slow road with God.

A real leader of God’s people helps people find faith amidst their fears. But Aaron failed miserably at this test of leadership. Trying to calm down the people, he reduced his leadership to merely servicing complaint, giving them what they wanted. He told them to give him the gold earrings of their wives, daughters, and sons (Even the sons had earrings then … not just today huh?). He melted down the gold and shaped it into a calf. When the people saw the idol, they danced around it and proclaimed, “This is the god that will deliver us.” But not Aaron.

Aaron built an altar before the calf and said, “Tomorrow will be a festival to the Lord.” The word for Lord here is the Hebrew name for God, Yahweh. So Aaron doesn’t think he has given the people an idol. He thinks he has given them a symbol that will help them worship the true God. He wants to walk by faith in this God but have an idol on the side to make Him feel better. It is what people throughout time have always done when they felt God wasn’t working fast enough for them. It is what Adam and Eve did when they thought God had disappeared. They took matters into their own hands and took a bite of the fruit. It is what Peter did when he stood on the Mountain of Transfiguration with Jesus, and instead of waiting and listening, he offered to build some tents for them. It is what you and I do when we grow weary of the absence or slowness of God. We decide to take matters into our own hands. When we do this, we end up with unhealthy relationships, compromised values or unrealistic expectations that no one or anything can meet. But we try. We are not really turning our back on God. We just want something to keep us company while He is away.

The calf became a symbol for the mediation that the people had come to expect from Moses. Now that he was gone for so long, they decided to create an idol that would mediate for them. Not all symbols are idols. But there certainly is a fine line. You have lots of symbols of God’s blessing in your life, such as a home, cherished relationships, a job, or income. Symbols become an idol on the day that you think you can’t live without them. Symbols are easily relinquished because they only symbolize what is truly valued, whereas idols are the things to which we cling because we believe they will provide for us a better life than what we would have without them. The blessings of God were not meant to be your saviors. They won’t get you through the desert. They simply remind you of God’s presence until you come to know that only God, and not his blessings, can get you to the Promised Land.

Up on Mt. Sinai, the Lord said to Moses, “Go down at once! Your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have acted perversely . . . they have cast for themselves an image of a calf and I have worshiped it and sacrificed to it . . . Now let me alone so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.” Moses responds in anger in what may be his finest hour as a leader, “O Lord, why does your wrath burn against your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand?” (Exodus 32:7-11). How ironic. Down in the valley people are dancing in front of a golden calf; and up on the mountain, Moses and God are fighting it out over to whom these people belong. “They are yours.” “No, they are yours.”

Notice that Moses takes responsibility for the people (unlike Aaron), and he doesn’t excuse their behavior. He doesn’t say, “Sure, they are idolaters but remember that they are good people.” There really haven’t been that many good things. Instead, Moses reminds God of his own goodness, not that of the people. He tells God that it is His nature to be faithful to His people. Moses says, “God, you are the one who started this trip by taking the people out of Egypt. Now it’s going to have to be you who complete this journey. It’s the credibility of your own promises and faithfulness that is on the line.” That is a great gutsy prayer prayed by a person and leader who is convinced that the faithfulness and mercy of God will always triumph over the darkest sin, especially the sin crafted in the darkness of feeling alone and without God. It is the faith of one who can say, “What can separate us from the love of Christ? . . . I am convinced that nothing in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8:39)

This text tells us that God was so moved by Moses’ prayer on Mt. Sinai that he “changed his mind” about the disaster he planned to bring on the people. God changed His mind? What is that about? I thought God had already made the movie and we’re just acting out the script? Can God change His mind? Well, yes. But it is important to read this text in context. In this text it means that God can be moved by your prayers to be true to Himself. This God is always apt to change his mind when you are reminding Him of his tendency to be faithful even when you are not.

It is amazing isn’t it, that after so much bad fruit, golden calves, and so many broken promises, and being up to our ears in idolatries, that we still can count on the faithfulness of God? That is our experience in Jesus Christ, where for a time the people said “No” but God’s “Yes” counted for more. Our only hope for getting out of the desert is with this God who has led us out of Egypt, and not with the idols we make in our haste. Sometimes we are called to walk slowly, to listen and just wait. The French scientist and philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said it this way,

Above all, trust in the slow work of God,
We are, quite naturally,
Impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.

Do you feel like God is not working fast enough in your life? Are you about ready to reach out for some compromise or some idol to get you by until God shows up again? Trust in the slow work of God. The point is not never was to race through the desert to the promised place. On the slow walk we learn that God is present even when it seems that He is not. Just at the moments when you think His answer is “No,” when you are feeling all abandoned and alone, when you feel that there is no way this God could ever love you in the midst of your idolatries, then out of the darkness comes another voice of Jesus Christ that whispers, “Yes”, and you trash the idols, pick up your tents, and start walking again.

That is the reason behind all this time and sand.

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