When the people became aware of Moses' delay in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said to him, "Come, make us a god who will be our leader; as for the man Moses who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him." Aaron replied, "Have your wives and sons and daughters take off the golden earrings they are wearing, and bring them to me." So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron, who accepted their offering, and fashioning this gold with a graving tool, made a molten calf. Then they cried out, "This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt." ( Exodus 32:1-4)

So begins the story of the golden calf—Israel’s “sacred cow”—as recorded in the Book of Exodus. Many a person hears this story and laughs at it, or at the foolish Israelites who would abandon God so easily. Others take more heed of the literally dozens and more homilies for the Sunday Masses about not making idols for ourselves, not worshiping the things of this world, and of being faithful only to God. While these are good lessons to draw from this passage, there is another and often-overlooked lesson which can be drawn.

The Israelites were not really abandoning God and replacing Him with their new idol. Consider the last line once again: "This is your God, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt." The Israelites knew that the God Who had brought them from Egypt was YAHWEH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and of Moses. Their sin here is not necessarily that they were setting up a new God to worship—at least not in the explicit sense. Recall that “No one has ever seen God” ( John 1:18), and that when God appeared to Moses, “Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:6). No one amongst the Israelites had seen God, only some of His manifestations (e.g. in the cloud which followed them to the Red Sea).

They knew nothing about God save what He revealed to them. He had no temple or shrine as yet, and they had no images of Him. In creating the calf, they were attempting to localize God, and to force Him into their own conception. The first of these two sins—the localization of God—was a sin not so much because they desired a space within which to worship God, but because they desired to create a physical object to worship as God. Now, God is said to be present in the tabernacle, and it is a fine thing to build a temple to Him (later, Churches and wayward shrines), but this was something else entirely. The Israelites wanted God to exist in the calf, and only in this calf. Prayer, worship, sacrifice—all of these things would now be tied into the presence of that calf. God is no longer transcendent, but local only, and would become as such just another local deity: the God of Israel, but not necessarily of the world.

The second, and graver, part of their sin was that the Israelites wished to determine God’s attributes for themselves, rather than relying on what God had revealed to them through Moses. Other Gods were represented in carvings and sculptures, and those carvings and sculptures were meant to portray them “as they really are,” or to reveal something about the deity in question. No less is this true with the Israelites’ new god, for it is difficult to separate the image from the thing which the image represents. A golden calf meant the worship of wealth, or of the gods of agriculture (e.g. Baal). A God Who can be captured in a single image no longer transcends*. The Israelite’ golden calf was to become their god to the exclusion of the real God.

There is a lesson in that passage for us, too. It is most plain in the various ideologies, some atheistic, others at least marginally theistic: the Transcendent, Trinitarian God is made to fit an image which is not true of Him. He is reduced into a classless being (Marx), or a tyrannical overlord (Nietzsche), or into mankind’s suffering (Bonhoeffer’s secular followers). Such people worship an ideal before God, and subvert God, and subordinate Him to their own ideals. When God does not match their conception of the ideal, it is God who is cast aside; their conception is never reconsidered.

But we don’t stop there. We don’t merely turn outward to define God to our tastes for society, or utopia. That is bad enough, but some sink further still. Tired of turning outward to find their idol, they turn inward. Culture of narcissism that we have, for many people the ideal is not to be found anywhere but the self. Thus is God feminized by the feminists, and masculinized by the chauvinists. The radical feminists cannot fathom God as having any attributes which are masculine—and few which are truly feminine, either—thus must they refer to God as “She is who is.” They scrupulously avoid the generic personal pronouns (“He,” “His,” and “Him”), and the more radical ones use only the feminine pronouns (“she” and “her”). No longer is the God of revelation worshiped, but instead the idol of self is God. No longer is He “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” but instead “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier” or “Mother, Daughter, Sister-Guide.” Even the normally neutral Holy-Spirit is sometimes changed into another neural name (at best), or into an explicitly female one (at worst).

The chauvinists aren’t much better, for they replace God's masculinitiy with "maleness." To be fair, Christ was a male, but the Trinity is a spiritual God; spirits can be masculine, but not male, for the concepts "male" and "female" require bodies. Such chauvinists insist that God is male, and that thus females are not made in His image and likeness, or are so to a lesser extent than are males. They do not affirm the equality of men and women; Ms Mary Daly was right about the small group of men who are chauvinists, because for them God really is male, because male is God.

Other examples abound. Those who rule or govern nations want God the King, and the gay lobby wants God the Queen, with the disciples to be something more than Jesus’ friends and the rainbow to be something more than God’s covenant with man. The poor want God to allow them into His kingdom while mercilessly baring the rich; the rich rightly argue that they too may have seats in the kingdom, while forgetting that they have to be good stewards of what they have first.

We may laugh at the golden calf, but we do so at our own peril. We may not be building any physical golden calves for ourselves, but the practice of replacing God with an idol is still quite alive and well.

*Lest those who read this think that I am promoting a type of iconoclasm, I am not. Our icons and sculpture represent God, but no single of them does so completely. Nor do we associate one particular icon with God to the complete exclusion of all others—though there are indeed some icons which ought to be excluded.