THE WORSHIP OF THE GOLDEN CALF.
It is not in the past in the peninsula of Arabia; it is a present worship. That worship (see Exodus 32 and our Sunday-school lesson in this issue) was simply substituting something else for the worship of God and calling it God. It was not any conception of God as a person by a devout and faithful follower, but it was the worship of the carnality of the human heart, deifying that lust or carnality, substituting that false god for Jehovah, and calling its worship the worship of the true God. At Sinai the carnality of Israel longed for the old nature worship of the Egyptian Sun-god Apis. They loved the sensuousness, the licentiousness of it. The golden calf was the apotheosis of low, lustful nature worship. And so the people sat down to eat and drink in gluttony and rose up to wanton, naked, lewd orgies. And yet this sun-god feast was called “a feast to Jehovah.” It was an awful backsliding, and the words were an awful blasphemy. There is another striking lesson. In less than six weeks previous to this the people had three times, amid the most solemn and awful grandeur, overshadowed by the radiant glory of the Eternal God, declared, “All that Jehovah hath spoken will we do.” Yet notwithstanding this they had yielded to utter apostasy, set up a false god, a rival of Jehovah, had used, of course, the sun’s day as a day of special worship, and had declared it to be “a feast to Jehovah.” A parallel to this backsliding was witnessed in the Galatian church. That church came from the heathen. They were once largely the worshipers of the things “which by nature are no gods.” Gal. 4:8. When they turned from the Gospel of Christ, salvation only in Him, they turned back again to the “weak and beggarly elements, whereunto” they desired “to be in bondage over again.” And turning back to their false gods, they immediately began to observe the days and times of the heathen, of which the apostle was afraid. Gal. 4:9, 10; Lev. 19:26. Chief among these days was “the wild solar holiday” of all pagan times, the Sunday. Both of these comparatively sudden apostasies go back to the old heathen sun-worship. These are written for us upon whom the ends of the ages are come. 1 Cor. 10:11. We need the lessons. The golden calf is worshiped as truly to-day as then. The apotheosis of wealth and science and pleasure and fame is substituted for the worship of the great Jehovah. How many bow at the shrine of mammon! How many devotees of pleasure are dying of sensuousness and sensuality! How many substitutes for the true has the professed church received from the ancient apostasy? What authority is there for the first-day sabbath in the place of God’s holy day? Who declared that sprinkling should take the place of immersion? Where is the authority for the substitution of ornate and elaborate formalism for the simple, spiritual worship of God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ? Surely “an enemy hath done this.” Well indeed would it be for God’s people to-day to heed the lesson from the apostasy of the past, and turn to the Lord with all the heart.