Left-Behinds, Exodus and Idols.

We are really good at taking matters into our own hands. While some of us will make a decision and live with whatever consequences come and others of us will calculate what we might do to incur the maximum benefit with the minimal effort, all of us have our ways of determining how we will respond when the going gets tough. It’s easy to overlook or ignore the fact that the times we take matters into our own hands tend to be the times in which we think that God is taking too long to show up. Fearing that God has left us to our own devices, we take matters into our own hands.

So, instead of waiting for God to show up, we create gods for ourselves. Even I want to protest: but I am trusting God! But I am doing the right thing! God just isn’t showing up! And we become more afraid of not having enough money, of not getting the job we want, of things not working out, and we cast gods in the shape of our anxiety, worry and doubt. We come to fear, love and trust things other than God, displacing our trust in God. If we are anxious about money, we obsess about it and it takes over our lives. If we worry about our job or getting a better job, we continually search the job listings. If we doubt that things will work out, we create plans that will ensure that they will work out and that, if we just do the right thing, everything will work to our advantage. And so we give power to these things that cause us the greatest anxiety, worry and doubt, which have the pesky habit of keeping us busy but not accomplishing much of anything. We create gods that are powerless, serving as a reflection of our own powerless feelings in situations in which we find it difficult to trust.

So, after Moses took too long on the mountain, the Israelites made a golden calf, and proclaimed that it was the one that had brought the Israelites up out of Egypt. How quickly they had forgotten that it was God! So, after interceding with God on behalf of the Hebrew people, Moses goes down the mountain. Hearing the celebration, he dashes the commandments at the foot of the mountain and destroys the calf. Moses trudges back up the mountain to talk with God, and we pick up today where God indicates that the Presence will no longer travel with the people.

Rather than saying, “Fine then, God! Fat lot of good having a God does us if you’re going to bring us out of slavery and then ditch us in this wilderness!” and going off to do it by himself, Moses says “If your presence will not go, do not carry us up from here.” If you’re not going, then neither are we.

But Moses, too, needs assurance. After the incident with the calf and God threatening to destroy the people, after God threatens to not go with the people as they travel throughout the wilderness, he asks “How will it be known that I have found favor with you if you leave us here?” And, of all the things he could request, Moses requested to see God’s glory. All he receives, however, is a glimpse of the divine backside.

How often, though, when we ask to see God, when we ask for a sign, when we ask for an assurance of God’s presence, is a glimpse of the divine backside, of a God that seems to be intent on leaving us behind, of a God who seems so absent in our sin and in our failure?

As we fear God has – or will – leave us behind, we forget that the divine hand is shielding and protecting us. The gods we have created out of our anxiety, fear, and doubt tell us that God has, can, and will leave us behind. These gods never tire of telling us that our sin is more real than God’s presence or mercy or grace. They never tire of reminding us of our continual failures. They never tire of reminding us that they are gods that we have created and that, having made them into gods, we are stuck with them. These gods that we have created start to define us more than the God who created us.

A glimpse of the divine backside seems hardly enough to dismantle the gods we create out of our anxiety, worry and doubt. The gods we have created in our image keep us at the center of the universe and presume that the God of the universe looks a lot like these gods: impotent, helpless and unresponsive as we ask for assurance. In our demands to see God in ways that conform to our expectations, whether evidenced by our financial well-being, getting a desired job or things working out in the ways we expect them to, we forget to look for God in the midst of our struggles, in the midst of our sin, in the midst of us demanding that God conform Godself to the shape of an idol.

But God says no. God refuses to confine Godself to the shape of the idols we create out of anxiety, fear, and doubt. God refuses to become an idol cast by pride or self-assurance. God remains entirely other, even as God shields us with the divine hand so that we might catch a glimpse – however vaguely, however foggily, however incomplete – of God’s presence among us. God promises to be present, but does not promise that the Presence will conform to our ideas of what God’s presence entails. Instead, God promises to be present in the Water and the Word, in the bread and the wine, in the community of saints that is gathered together by the Holy Spirit and sent into the world as a reminder that we bear the indelible mark of the Creator. Having been made in God’s image, we ought not be surprised that God refuses to conform to ours.

The idols we have created won’t come out of the wilderness with us. Refusing to be moved by our entreaties, refusing to respond to our cries, the idols are exposed for what they are: lifeless, impotent, and unresponsive. Instead, it is God who draws us out of the wilderness. Having freed us from the shackles of sin, anxiety, worry and doubt, God draws us through the wilderness, promising to be present as we journey, despite our stubbornness and propensity to create new gods as quickly as we destroyed the old. In our sin and doubt, God comes, sheltering us with God’s hand and – at the same time – revealing Godself to us. It is in this revelation of a God that is entirely other, we find instilled in us a hunger for relationship that refuses to be filled by the idols we cast in our own image. It is this God who beckons us to say, “If you’re not coming, then we aren’t going,” because it is this God who refuses to let us journey alone. It is this God who refuses to allow the idols that we created to define us rather than the God who created us. It is this God who refuses to allow the idols we create in our anxiety, sin, and doubt to tell the truth about who we are. Rather than being abandoned in your sin and your doubt (or perhaps because of it), as the ceaseless idols remind you, you are shielded by the divine hand, and beckoned by a glimpse of God’s glory. This God refuses to leave you behind because you are inscribed in God’s very being, even as God’s image is inscribed upon you.