Tehillah Generation Chapel
Daily Manna | Saturday, May 12, 2018 | Topic: Conscience 17
Scripture: My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge; because you have rejected knowledge, I reject you from being a priest to me. And since you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children. Hosea 4:6
Note: The first mention of a golden calf in the history of Israel as a nation was in the wilderness under the leadership of Moses. Their leader, Moses, had gone to the top of Mount Sinai to obtain the tablets containing the 10 Commandments. Under the temporary leadership of Aaron when Moses delayed in coming, Aaron had been subjected to extreme pressure by the people to make them a god just as they saw in Egypt. Unwilling but afraid for his life, Aaron had succumbed to the pressure from the people, and much against his wish knowing that what he was doing was wrong, Aaron used the gold jewellery that the people brought from Egypt to make a golden calf for them to worship.
The return of Moses from the Mount saw him flaring into anger at what he saw at first sight. Losing his cool in the process and breaking the two tablets containing the 10 Commandments written with the finger of God, the result of that revelling and debauchery, reminiscent of the wrong practices that they had assimilated in Egypt, was to cost Israel thousands of human lives when the wrath of God fell upon the perpetrators who engineered the golden calf idolatry idea.
Jeroboam I, king of Israel, had resurrected golden calves worship about 150 years earlier. His was a regime that opened the floodgates to every evil expression of Canaanite idolatry, associated with the usual revellings of drunkenness, religious prostitution and human sacrifice. Jeroboam I had been a twin creation crafted from the folly of both king Solomon and his successor, king Rehoboam. This led to the division of united Israel into two kingdoms; the northern kingdom comprising of all the other tribes except Judah, and the southern kingdom which became Judah.
The raising of golden calves against the direction of Yahweh, as a political ploy to jettison the idea of the people travelling to the temple in Jerusalem for their religious feasts, became a trap that led the people into idolatry, a decision that was to cost him his rule. Yahweh had chosen Israel to be His wife, so any rival worship of other gods is deemed spiritual adultery. Unfortunately, Jeroboam II wasn’t doing anything different to alter the spiritual climate of a nation that had fallen into moral and spiritual declension. The continual flirtations with other gods brought a stark reminder of the violation of the 1st command in the 10 Commandments, “You shall have no other gods before Me.”
Food for thought: The golden calf mentality has kept reinventing itself in the lives of people and nations for generations till date.
Declaration: You shall have no other gods before Me. Exodus 20:3
©Author: Rev Fred Aboe
