Golden Calves.

Last night I read through a lot of my old blog posts.

Wow.
Do any of you journal? Looking through old journals is like taking a walk through the recesses of your mind. I don’t think I realized how much of my life I have chronicled on this thing and until last night I didn’t realize how much of it I had forgotten. Or pushed aside. Or crowded out. Or what has simply faded.
Therefore, I am quite pleased that I have done this. It’s good to be reminded.

God is faithful; don’t ever forget it.

I have got to tell you, though, a slight panic came over me as I was reading through these things. Half of the time I was like, “Wow, I can’t believe I wrote this. I don’t recall a single thing.” Or I would see a title listed and go, “What in the world is that one?” Reading through a lot of them was literally like reading them for the first time. It had all faded that much.

And the panic comes in when I remember where I was with the Lord in those times. And I see where I am now, and not that where I am now is bad at all, but it’s just different.

He is different to me now because I need him to be different to me now. I am no longer in those situations and therefore I require different grace to get me through these weeks as opposed to the grace I needed 10 months ago.

Sometimes, however, the memory of our relationship is what I prefer to the current reality. Maybe the memory was more warm and fuzzy or maybe more powerful or maybe brand new.

I think about the Israelites when they were walking through the wilderness for 40 years. And I see their story and I want to scream at them and yell at them, “You built a golden calf?!?! What were you thinking?!” and I walk away from that passage all in a huff calling them all kinds of mean names.

But then I have to stop myself. Because I am no different. What they did there is what I am tempted to do now.

I heard a pastor talk about the golden calf once in a way that has stuck with me through the years. He says that they weren’t necessarily trying to invent a new God, they had just forgotten what he looked like. So they took what they knew to be the strongest thing in their existence: cattle. The ones who pull stuff or work in fields or fight matadors or whatever baby calves grew up to do in that time period. They were making a representation of that which is the strongest thing they could relate to.  

It’s not as if they were worshipping a calf, they were trying to remember. They remembered that God was strong. That’s how they wanted to picture him (because we all are tempted to put God in a box and make him into an image we can control). Picture him how they remembered him.

But sometimes in my wanderings through life, just like the Israelites in the desert, the vision of God and of what our relationship looked like at one time begins to fade. And then if I ever realize it has faded I start into a panic and I want to give myself a tangible way to remember the way God has been faithful.

Which is the panic I felt last night after reading my old journal entries here.

Which is the panic I felt that made me think I needed to make some kind of golden calf; something to remind me of who He was to me at that point. Because that is the relationship I was tempted to try to live with him in now.

I don’t know, I am probably totally wrong about this, but maybe golden calves are our poor attempts to live in a memory, rather than a truth.

Think about it. The Israelites had seen that God was faithful and they had seen that he was powerful. He turned Egypt into a madhouse for them and he parted crazy waters for them, they knew that. But somewhere along the way the lines began to blur. They lost vision of him and so they tried to make a picture of how they remembered him.

Strong. Powerful.

I can’t want to worship how I remember him, I have to worship him for how he relates to me now. I can’t forget that God took those people through that desert. He wanted them there. God wants us to be present in our relationship with him, not living vicariously through a memory of the way we once were.

Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever, I however am not. Which is how it should be. And he should look different to me now than he did 10 months ago, because we aren’t still in Egypt. He has been faithful and brought me further. He has changed me again. We’re in totally new kinds of territory now.

Worship Jesus for who he is, not for how you remember him. Lines of memories get blurred; we can’t live today in our past relationship with the Lord. Doing that is us worshipping golden calves, it’s worshipping his attributes, not him.

God is not dead as if we need to remember him, in that sense. God is alive as if we need to know him, and know him for his faithfulness NOW, not just for his past faithfulness.

I don’t want an image of him, I want the real deal.