I don’t think Jim Gaffigan realizes how accurate his joke really is.
“But the people thirsted there for water, and the people grumbled against Moses and said, ‘Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill is and our children and our livestock with thirst,’” Exodus 17:3
One consistent theme throughout the Old Testament is the inconsistency of the faith of the Israelites. It predated even the Exodus. Abraham fathered a child through a woman who was not his wife rather than wait on God’s provision to fulfill his promise through a child born of Sarah. The entire book of Judges is a cycle of the Israelites pursuing idol worship followed by calamity followed by repentance. A people of faith losses their faith quite quickly, and quite regularly.
Jesus says that if we have the faith of only a mustard seed we could transplant mountains, but we seem to have misplaced those small seeds.
The strength of our faith is not dependent on us, but rather on what our faith is in. For example, let’s say that for some reason, I’m hiking along some scenic cliffs and want to take a great picture to post on instagram close to the edge. In my desire to post the perfect #nofilter image, I lose my balance and fall off the edge, but I spot a branch of a tree growing on the side of the cliff. It doesn’t matter how strongly or how desperate I feel that if I reach out and grab that branch it will support my weight. It’s all dependent on how strong the branch is and how far deep its roots penetrate the side of the terrain.
When God brought his people out of Egypt, it wasn’t because of their faith. He had made a promise to Abraham that he would make him into a great nation. A great nation does not spend its existence in slavery, but God heard the groaning of his people and remembered his covenant with their fathers.
God ordains Moses to lead his people out of Egypt. Go read about it in Exodus, or if you have some free time, go watch that Charlton Heston movie or Prince of Egypt.
Eventually the Israelites end up at Mount Sinai. They had seen God bring about disastrous plagues on Egypt, they walked through a parted sea, they ate mysterious bread that appeared every morning, they drank water from a rock and they defeated an army because Moses stood on top of a hill and raised his staff above his head.
At Sinai, God makes his arrival known very audibly and visually.
“On the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightings and a thick cloud on the mountain and a very loud trumpet blast, so that all the people in the camp trembled” Exodus 19:16
Moses goes up and receives some important laws. Something about ten commands and a bunch of other stuff, and a promise of inheriting a land currently occupied by some terrible people. Again go read about it. And after this, Moses comes down and reads the law to the people. They confirm the covenant, and Moses goes back up the mountain to get more instructions. And God was still very present in all of this.
“Now the appearance of the glory of the Lord was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain in the sight of the people of Israel. Moses entered the cloud and went up on the mountain. And Moses was on the mountain forty days and forty nights,” Exodus 24:15-18
Moses gets to listen and record instructions for the building the Tabernacle and some other rules about the Sabbath.
Meanwhile, the Israelites get restless. Their leader had been on the mountain for a really long time. And they weren’t sure if he was dead or alive. What follows is the story of the golden calf. They go to Aaron and ask him to make up new gods for them to follow. Aaron takes the gold from their jewelry and casts it into the image of a golden calf and declares that there will be a feast for the Lord the next day. They must have forgotten in those ten commands that they were to have no idols, no gods before God.
Moses goes down and sees this feast, this party they are having before this calf. He gets pretty angry and breaks the tablets that were inscribed by God, he crushes the calf to bits and puts it in the water and makes them drink it. And he instructs the Levites to run through the camp with blades strapped to their sides and run through the camp in a zig zag pattern killing the idol worshipers, 3000 in all. When are they going to make Prince of Egypt 2?
Why do the Israelites so quickly desert their God? The same God whose presence is a few meters above them, the one that did all those miraculous signs, the one that parted the red sea, did they really think he abandoned them?
In Exodus 32:1, they say to Aaron, “[M]ake us gods who shall go before us. As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.”
Did the Israelites attribute their victory to God or to Moses? Was their faith in the leader, or the authority to who their leader answered to? Had they forgotten the first statement in the beginning of the Ten Commandments, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,” (Exodus 20:2). Was the manna not enough for them? Where was their trust?
The Israelites knew they needed to worship something. But their faith was misplaced. They made offerings and had a feast before this image, but Aaron says the feast “shall be a feast to the LORD,” invoking the name of God and associating it to a created golden calf.
When Moses comes down from the mountain, Joshua tells him that there is noise of war in the camp, but he is mistaken. It is a party in celebration of a created work of gold. Did the Israelites forget that they were aliens in an unsafe land, where they would encounter enemies hostile to them, that danger was all around them?
Perhaps the most humorous part of this whole encounter is Aarons explanation of how the calf came into existence. “So I said to them, ‘Let any who have gold take it off.’ So they gave it to me, and I threw it into the fire and out came this calf,” (Ex, 32:24). Yeah Moses, I threw this jewelry in the fire and out came this idol, and we thought it would be a good idea to worship it and to attribute their escape from Egypt to.
The golden calf doesn’t just magically appear out of the fire. It is the culmination of a pattern of distrust and unfaithfulness to God. It is the logical conclusion, the end result, a tangible object of worship that arises out of misplaced faith. Where did their faith truly lie? Perhaps it was in Egypt, where at least they could work and live and be buried in proper graves. They thought it would be better to live in bondage when they had already experienced freedom.
And while we can look back at these people and their mistakes, we repeat them every day. We return to old sin habits because it is easier to give in to temptation than it is to live as God’s chosen people. It is easier to attribute our success in life to our own hard work, to the people in our lives, to our leaders, to our churches, to our ministries, and only give God an obligatory shout out at our awards acceptance speeches and postgame interviews. It is so easy to forget that we are in the midst of a cosmic war, but we party as if our dangers are far off and not in our midst.
When we realize that we’ve been worshiping something other than God we think to ourselves, how did we get here? How did I arrive at this place? How have I hit rock bottom once more? As CS Lewis writes in the Screwtape Letters, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” Nevertheless there are always signs. And a gentle slope is still a slope. It’s only when you have orientation that you realize the road you are taking, but how easy it is to forget.
Our faith is not dependent on us on our efforts, but on the efforts of Christ. He is faithful when we are faithless Paul writes. (1 Tim 2:13). God extends mercy and offers forgiveness. The Israelites will eventually reach the promised land despite their repeated violations of the covenant. But our faith must be placed in the right place. Not in signs, not in inspirational stories, but in truth. In Jesus.
In John 6, Jesus tells the massive crowds that are following him that he is the bread of life, that his blood has eternal life, that those who take part in him will never die. The crowds wanted to see him perform miracles, to feed them to their fill from a few loaves of bread and a some small fish. Many desert him. They simply stay for the show. But Peter, in one of his stronger moments, believes and speaks on behalf of the twelve disciples. “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life and we have believed and have come to know what you are the Holy One of God” (John 6:68)
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Peter’s faith is in the right place. It will not remain there. He will deny Christ in the face of a young girl. He will be humiliated, but his salvation is not dependent on himself. It never was.
The illustration I used earlier about falling off a cliff and grabbing hold of a branch is not entirely accurate. My safety is dependent on being able to hold onto the branch and pull myself to safety. God is not a safety branch. He is an arm reaching out to grab us and pull us to safety. We must only open our eyes and see that hand and reach out and grab it. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that I fell off a cliff when I want to take a picture from a dangerous view. My own actions led me to that dangerous place. But God is right there with me still in that moment. He always has been. But my eyes are often elsewhere.
Lord, help us keep our eyes fixed on you. You're eyes are never off of us.
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