We are going to be today in Exodus chapter 32 As we have been traveling through the book of Exodus and seeing what the Lord has for us there, a book of law that points us so beautifully to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We've come today to the passage about the golden calf. I've been telling you about this passage the whole way through. Telling you all these things that God has done and warning you, but they're about to worship the golden calf. They're about to worship the golden calf. And we've come to it today. So let's read that together from Exodus 32, verses 1-6. When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, Up, make 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. So Aaron said to them, Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me, so all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord. And they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. and the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play." We have just read the most famous case of idolatry in the Bible. Even as all of the nations around Israel were worshipers of idols, it seems without exception that every God who did not worship the true and living God were worshipers of idols. The most famous case of idolatry that there ever has been was when Israel itself, the people who should have known better, turn and form for themselves this golden calf and say, this represents the God or gods who brought us out of Egypt. We are going to bow down and worship this God right now. We need to, as we start to think about this, we need to dissect the idea of idolatry. Before we get into the six verses that we just read, I just want to give you a little bit of of hopefully some understanding that will help us think through what is idolatry and the different categories and why are there two different commandments, the first and second commandment, that both have to do in some ways with idolatry. Because this is an issue that I think is much talked about within evangelical Christianity in general. You hear all kinds of talk about idolatry, but people mean lots and lots of different things by it. One person may say, well, I'm struggling with idolatry. And what they mean is, I really, really like the guitar that I just bought. I think I might like it too much. And then the person next to them says, you're struggling with idolatry. And they think that this person has put a statue of Mary on their lawn and might be bowing down and praying to Mary through the statue or something like that. So there's all kinds of different categories of it. So I want us to think about two different categories in two different ways. One is first commandment idolatry, and the other is second commandment idolatry. And the two different ways that we need to think about those are in terms of what is going on in our hearts, because Jesus made it very clear in the Sermon on the Mount that the Ten Commandments are not just about external actions, but they can be broken and are broken first in the heart before they ever play out in action. So we need to know about how that happens in our hearts, and also how it happens externally in observable words and actions, observable fruits. So we need to know about first and second commandment idolatry, and we need to know about it in our hearts and in actions as well. First commandment idolatry, the first commandment says in Exodus 20, verse 3, you shall have no other gods before me. Now that's a pretty simple commandment. And what it means is not to have any other gods. And before me doesn't mean in rank, it means anywhere that God can see, which is everywhere. Not in front of God's face anywhere. It just simply means, I am to be your one and only God, says the Lord, our God. Now, that could be speaking of literal gods, of another religion, somebody like Allah. It could be gods that are literal gods that you've never thought of as gods, like luck, meaning whatever god you think is inside that mirror that you just broke, that is going to come and get you, even if you've never thought of it in those terms before, that's what that is when you're talking about good luck. It's superstitious other gods or even formal systems of other religions and other gods, or it could be something that takes over your heart's desires to an inordinate degree to a degree that's out of order we call these inordinate desires i think within evangelical popular christianity most of the time when we when we throw out the term idolatry that's what most people mean they're talking about uh... desires in their hearts that have gotten out of order where there is a desire for something fame power It could really be anything, where you desire it too much. And that truly is, from the heart, a breaking of the first commandment, to have something else that you prop up as a God in your heart alongside the living and true God. We can have this kind of thing going on in our inward desires, this first commandment idolatry of having other gods in the hidden desires of our hearts, like being in love with money. As Jesus says, you can't love both God and money. We can also have this happening on the outside, where somebody is bowing down and worshipping Allah. By the way, the Muslim religion is very big about having no visible representations of their God. and yet they are idolaters because they are worshiping the wrong god altogether and they are in that first commandment idolatry of the wrong god or it could even be things that work outward uh... not having to do with formal systems of other gods but but with those desires of our hearts i remember i remember one time it just stuck in my head so much there was a one of these comedy TV shows where they've got a comedian and a band, and the comedian said to the band leader, you know, are you glad? Do you love living in New York now, now that you're leading this band on this TV show? And he said, I love money. That's the way he put it. It's just this outward thing, like I'm just going to worship money, I'm going to order my life around it. So there can be in first commandment idolatry, which is having something else other than God as a God, We can have that in our hearts and we can have that in our actions. But there's also second commandment idolatry. And that's the primary thing that we're looking at today that Israel engages in. Second commandment idolatry. Second commandment idolatry is from the second commandment. You shall make no graven image. You shall not bow down to them. I'm going to read it. I thought I had it in my notes. I'm going to flip to it. So the second commandment says, You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments." What this commandment is, the second commandment, is not just about having some other god. And that is one way that the Bible itself even uses the word idolatry. Covetousness, which is idolatry. To have some other God in your heart. But there's also this idolatry of worshiping the true God in the wrong way. In a way that God has not ordained, picked out. Especially by images. Alright? God has especially said, I do not want you to worship Me through visible things. I do not want you to worship Me also in ways that I have not told you to worship Me. It's worshiping the true God in a false way, especially by images. That can happen on the inside and it can happen on the outside. It can happen on the inside as we long to image God as what He is not. Or maybe even just a restless dissatisfaction with worshiping God in the way that God has given us in the Bible to worship Him. and just thinking, I just really, really want to come up with something new. I really, really want to have something I can see. I want to be innovative. God is creative. I want to be creative in my worship. That is a longing in the heart for idolatry. And then it can come in on our outward works also. One of those ways is worshiping God through images. This is one of the primary just horrific things that happens week in and week out, day in and day out in the Roman Catholic Church. There are many, many, many reasons why Roman Catholicism is not the gospel, is not the saving gospel. But one of the things and one of the ways that that plays out and that you see that is bowing down to worship God through something that is visible. That is explicitly commanded not to be done in the second commandment. And it's not just there. It's also when you hang a picture that you say is Jesus on your wall, and you use it as an aid in prayer. That is an outward breaking of the second commandment. We're not to worship through what is visible. We worship an invisible God. Or it can be in our inner hearts just longing, I've got to get something. I can't just worship something that I don't see. Well, you know what we do is we walk by faith and not by sight. We have a God that we hear through His Word, but don't see with our eyes. And He has told us that the Gospel, the Word of the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation. Not something that we can see or take hold of. It's here. Jesus has said, blessed are they who have not seen and yet believe. Right? So, we have it in desire, we have it in action, and that's what we see right here. In this passage, we see the desire for idolatry, and then we see the outward action of idolatry. We've got traits of idolatrous desire that work out into traits of idolatrous worship. This is exactly what it says in James 1.15. Desire, this is how we are tempted. We want to blame it on other things. When we sin, we love to blame it on somebody else. James 1.15 says, here's how it happens. You start with sinful desire in your heart, then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it has fully grown brings forth death. So that's what we're going to look at today. These are the terms where we'll describe what we just saw there in that passage in Exodus, that they first have the desire and then they have the action of the outward worship. So let's first look at three traits of idolatrous desire. All three of these are found in verse 1 of Exodus chapter 32. The first trait of idolatrous desire within the heart is a dissatisfaction with walking by faith and not by sight. A dissatisfaction with walking by faith and not by sight. Look at that verse, Exodus 32. Verse 1, when the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain. Now what are we talking about? Moses has gone up onto the mountain by himself to receive the civil and ceremonial laws of God because after God had given his moral law, the Ten Commandments, allowed to all the people The people said, we are going to die if we keep on hearing the voice of God. Moses, please go there by yourself, and then come back and report to us. Well, Moses did that. He went up on Mount Sinai by himself, and he was receiving laws from God to bring back to the people. But as they are there at the bottom of the mountain, they say, he's been gone too long. Moses was up there for 40 days. And that must have felt like a really, really long time. When is this guy going to come back? And as they're there, they want something that they can see. They want a God that they can see. They want to worship, but they want to worship what they can see. It says, when he delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said, Up, make us gods who shall go before us, This man Moses, who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. They were dissatisfied with a God that they could receive His word and hear from Him, and had even heard His literal speaking voice, because they could not see Him. So they said to Aaron, Moses' brother, who was going to become the high priest, not sure if he knew that at this point, but he would become that, they said, make us something we can look at and worship. Here's what it says in 2 Corinthians 5, verses 6 and 7. We know that while we are at home in the body, we are away from the Lord. For we walk by faith and not by sight. Like I said, Jesus said, blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. It even says, Jesus said, an evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign. It's a spiritual adultery. that begins in the heart of saying, I want something to see. I am dissatisfied with this faraway God that I can't interact with here in person. I want something I can latch on to. That is a trait of that spiritual adultery, that desire for idolatry. The second trait we see here is a dissatisfaction with godly leaders. A trait of an idolatrous heart is a dissatisfaction with godly leaders. Obviously they are dissatisfied with Moses here. In fact, Moses is doing exactly what God had told him to do, and he's doing exactly what the people had told him to do. Go up there, go to God. I guess the people hadn't said, go up there and we're willing to wait for this many days, and if not, then we're going to give up on you. They hadn't exactly said that, and they didn't expect that he would be away that long. But God and Moses are up there face to face, in a sense. We'll see later Moses' desire to see God and how that plays out. But he's doing exactly what God wants him to do and the people are completely dissatisfied and they say, we gotta get rid of Moses. We need somebody new. Aaron, we're gonna recruit you. You know what this reminds me of a little bit? It reminds me of when Jonathan Edwards was fired. Some of you are big fans of Jonathan Edwards, and if you're not, then I think you ought to be. Jonathan Edwards was a pastor in Northampton, Massachusetts back in the mid-1700s. Many people would ascribe his preaching to be kind of the center point, the starting point of what was called the Great Awakening of the 18th century in America. as as is he he started preaching in his church just that the pure gospel and preaching in power and god sent the holy spirit and there was a massive movement of the gospel within his church and and then it he he began to preach elsewhere and there was this massive movement of the gospel of the holy spirit and and edwards had become i mean probably to this date still the greatest theologian in the united states of america and well-known, far and wide, well-respected, well-written, well-read, and yet his church fired him. His church fired him. Now why did they fire him? Well, it was over a dispute having to do with the Lord's Supper. Edwards had come to the conviction that the Lord's Supper should only be for believers and their children. Now, we would say it should be only for believers. This was one of the reasons why Edwards got fired, is he had a congregational voting style of church government without requiring that members be believers in Christ. He combined that together with infant baptism and the bringing in of unbelievers so that he had a church with this mixture of believers and unbelievers, but that's very similar to what Moses had, isn't it? That's Old Covenant kind of people of God, a mixture of believers and unbelievers. And just like they wanted to get rid of Moses here, well, they tossed Jonathan Edwards to the side back in the 1700s as well. They tossed Moses aside. They would toss others aside as they went. Prophet after prophet, they would toss aside. And here's what Stephen says in Acts 7 right before he gets tossed aside and stoned. He says, This Moses is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our fathers. He received living oracles to give to us. Our fathers refused to obey him, but thrust him aside, and in their hearts they returned to Egypt. saying to Aaron, make for us gods who will go before us. As for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. And they made a calf in those days and offered a sacrifice to the idol and were rejoicing in the works of their hands." You see, Stephen is bringing this up and saying this is the same pattern that led to the rejection of the Christ Himself. by His own people. This is not a new thing. It is not unexpected when you read through the Old Testament to think that this people that God had picked out as His people would reject Him when He came to them in person, in the person of Jesus Christ. Because they rejected Moses right here, and they would reject Him again and again. They would stage rebellion after rebellion. And it continues to be the case that idolatrous, wandering, adulterous hearts reject godly leaders. But it's not very much important how you feel about human leaders as it is how you feel about Christ. Let me get this point across. I'm not telling you this because I don't want to get fired. I'd prefer not to get fired, okay? I'm telling you this because I don't want you to walk away from Christ. Moses was a type of Christ. Moses was not Christ. But what was happening here with this rejection of Moses, it was just a type of rejecting Christ. If you say, I love Jesus, And then time after time when someone comes to you opening up the scriptures and saying, have you seen what this says? Do you see how this applies to you? Time after time when that happens, you say, no, thank you. Give me a positive message. I fear that your heart may be running after something other than Christ. So this is something to be very careful with. It's a pattern that you saw here that played out in the rejection of Jesus Himself. And we need to be careful to say, we want leaders who will open up to us the Word of God, who will follow after God, and we want not to toss them under the bus when they're following after God. There's a dissatisfaction with godly leaders and a third trait that you see here in this one verse of hearts longing after idolatry is itching ears that seek false teachers to scratch them. They wanted to toss out the guy who was following God. They wanted to bring in somebody that they could recruit to do things the way that they said. You see the way that they seduced Aaron into this? They came to Aaron and they said, Aaron, make us gods who will go before us. We do not know what has become of Moses. They're saying, Aaron, we know that you were on Moses' side, but he's long gone and you're here. Won't you do this the way that we want? And Aaron gets sucked into it. We don't know where Aaron's heart was before this. We know that his heart was not in the right place, or he would have told them, absolutely not. Did you not just hear the booming voice of God say, you shall make no graven images? Did you not just cower in fear that that God might destroy you if you kept hearing His voice? And now you want me to make you a golden cap? His heart had to have turned the wrong way to do this. But we also know in the weakness of our flesh how that could happen. We know the pull of it. We know the appeal. Well, there's a crowd of people who are saying that they're going to love me if I'll just do what they want. Well, what can it hurt? I'll just say this is a representation of the very God. We won't really be worshipping a different God. We'll be worshipping the true God, but we'll just be doing it in the way that the people like. We'll be doing it in a way that they can see. That's what we want. Those itching ears, those itching ears, they wanted false teaching to scratch them, and unfortunately Aaron was willing to give that. Here's what it says in 2 Timothy 4, verses 3 and 4. The time is coming, now this is not a new thing obviously, but the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions. You see how that's happening right here? Accumulating for themselves, seeking out. I've got itching ears, I've got passions, here's what I want in my worship. I'll find somebody who'll do that for me. Oh, that is a dangerous, dangerous path of the heart. You know, worship is not to, it's not about me, it's not about you. It's about God and He's already said how He wants to be worshipped. It's in His Word. And when we think to ourselves, I want to find somebody who will do it the way I want. Oh, be on guard. Be on guard. That is a deadly path. Right? Itching ears. Itching ears. Now, one of the things that this points us to here is that we need a better high priest than Aaron. I keep saying this over and over. Aaron may or may not have known that he was going to be a priest of God and the high priest. Moses was up there getting instructions for how Aaron was going to be dressed as the high priest, what he was going to do in his service as the high priest, and Aaron is down there at the foot of the mountain making a golden calf. That's not a very good high priest, is it? We need a better one. We need Jesus. Now Aaron would go, and it seems that he was brought to repentance for this. It seems that he made sacrifices for his sins in truth after this. But we need a priest who is not going to have to make sacrifices for his own sins. We need a priest who is not going to be tempted to run after idols. We need Jesus. Jesus is the only priest that we need. Because every other priest is a sinner who has to make sacrifice for his own sins. We need Jesus. And also, just watch after that tendency of your heart. We see it all around us. We see outside false teachers that we have to guard our hearts against. You know, they're all over TV. Joel Osteen is the most famous one of them all. Probably also the most positive and the most smiling. And he has a gospel that I call a positive thinking gospel. A gospel of positivity. Just cut out the negative, just think positively. And God, who is the positive God, will give you what is positive. That's just not the gospel. That's not the joy of Christ. The joy of Christ is, this world is messed up and my sin is horrible, but Jesus died. And Jesus' death is sufficient to pay for my sin. And Jesus rose from the dead, and I have an eternal hope in heaven, beyond this messed up world, so that I can say joyful in the middle of it, without cutting out the people that God has put into my life, even if I feel like they're negative. Something like that. We have joy in Christ. I just want to say that. That's a false gospel, that gospel of positive thinking. And it'll always be around. Before Joel Osteen, it was in Robert Shuler. Before Robert Shuler, it was in Norman Vincent Peale. Before him, I don't know where it was, but it had to have been around. It'll always be around. And then there's false teachers you see on TBN. I saw a headline this week on the internet. It said, TBN to drop Kenneth Copeland. And I said, praise God, maybe TBN is going to turn to the true gospel. And then I read the article and they said, oh, well, you know, he, Kenneth Copeland was appealing to an older crowd. And so they're replacing him with Steven Furtick. Oh, guys, guys, if you're not sure which TV preachers are okay, and which are not, just assume that they're all not. Okay? It's not like being on TV makes you a false preacher, but those guys who love money, TV's a great way to get it. You know? So be on guard against those things, but don't just be on guard against false teachers who will come from the outside. Be on guard against false teachers who will come from the inside, too. Be on guard about what might creep into our own hearts at First Baptist Church of Matawan, a church that's unlikely to ever have a show on TBN, unlikely to ever be famous in any way. But here's what Paul said to the elders of the church at Ephesus. He said, from among your own selves will arise men speaking twisted things. You see that here with Aaron, right? Aaron, a servant of the Lord. He was there with Moses, walking into the presence of Pharaoh, and with his staff going down on the ground, and his staff budding. You would think that Aaron wouldn't turn, but from his own heart these things came out. And Paul warns the Ephesian elders. He says, you know what? You're a solid church, founded by an apostle. pastored by Timothy, and yet from among your own selves can rise up those speaking twisted things. Guys, be on guard. If I start turning from preaching the Bible to scratching itching ears, please, for your own sake and for mine, fire me. There's instructions in your Constitution and bylaws of how to do that, and we hand that out to every new member. You've all got it right there. Please use those instructions if I start scratching itching ears instead of preaching the Gospel and the Word of God. When we bring on additional elders in the future, We want godly, qualified men who will teach the truth. But we also have to remember that it's possible even for those godly, qualified men to turn and to start scratching itching ears instead. Be on guard. Be on guard, guys. Now, we've seen those three traits of idolatrous desire. Let's look now at the rest of the passage at four traits of idolatrous worship. Four traits of idolatrous worship. Look in verses two and three and we'll see that one of those traits is sincere, sacrificial devotion to what is false. Sincere, sacrificial devotion to what is false. Here's what it says in Exodus 32. So Aaron said to them, take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives and your sons and your daughters and bring them to me. He's saying, I need hundreds of thousands of gold earrings if we're going to make this work. There are some who kind of want to use this as an excuse for Aaron. Maybe he was actually trying here to stop it. Maybe he thought that they wouldn't really give their gold. in order to do this, but it wasn't the case. They were willing. So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron. You hear that? They were committed to this idolatrous worship. They backed it up with their belongings. Probably their most expensive prized items, the golden rings that they had in their ears. He said, you know what? We want this so bad. We want this kind of worship so bad, we're going to give up what is precious to us. They're sincere about it. They're sacrificial about it. And yet, they are doing what is false. You see what happens here, too. They take these rings, they take them off, and they receive the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool. and made a golden calf. Probably very well crafted, probably very impressive. It probably would have been the kind of thing that when they saw it, they said, this is amazing. And this represents the majesty of the God or gods who brought us out of Egypt. And now we have what we want. And now we feel that we can really worship from the heart. They were sincere. They were sacrificial. But what they were doing was false. This is a trait of idolatrous worship. Guys, sincere faith does not save if it is misplaced. There was, right before the Democratic National Convention, they call it an interfaith service. They called it something like Believers for Biden, something like that. Here's the problem with interfaith services. There's only one in the Bible And it is the showdown between Elijah and the priests of Baal. That's the only interfaith service. If you don't know how that interfaith service goes, then you need to get out the book of Kings and read about that and see that God is not telling us to have some sort of a thing where we get together and we say all our differences don't matter, we are all people of faith. Guys, faith matters because of the object of faith. If you have absolutely Sacrificial, devoted, sincere faith in Allah, you are doomed because Allah does not save. If you have absolutely sincere, sacrificial, devoted faith in Buddha, you are headed for an eternity of eternal destruction if you don't repent and turn to Christ alone for your salvation. If you have absolutely sincere, devoted faith that you say is in God, and yet the way it plays out is in bowing down in front of a statue, like they have at the front of the Catholic Church, or bowing down in worship of a cracker and some juice, like they have in the Catholic places of perpetual adoration all over New Jersey, Guys, your faith is in the wrong place. You need to turn to Jesus who is in heaven, who died for our sins, who finished the payment on the cross, who rose from the dead, who is seated at the right hand of the Father, and who right now you can't see, but blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe. You need sincere faith in the right object, not in what is false. Is your faith in Christ? or is your faith in what you can see, or in some other God, you need to receive and rest upon Jesus alone for your salvation. Another trait of idolatrous worship is visual ways to worship the invisible God. This idolatry here in verse 4 is posing as though it were the real God. They said, these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Now it's a little ambiguous there. Is the crowd who's shouting this? Are they saying, this is God? You've got to remember, when it says, these are your gods, the name God in Hebrew is actually plural. So it's just, it's ambiguous the way that they word this here. Are they talking about the actual God who brought them out of Egypt? Are they talking about some other gods? Are they recognizing the right God or not? And I think that's on purpose. Because when you start to worship God through what you can see, it becomes really ambiguous whether you're worshiping God at all. And that's what's happening here. They thought that they were worshiping that true God. Aaron would even declare, as we worship in front of this God, let's have a feast to Yahweh. He names him specifically, the Lord. Let's have a feast to the Lord. And yet, what they're doing is they are not ultimately worshipping the right God, because as they say they're worshipping the right God, they're worshipping Him through a statue, a dead thing. Now, let me get this straight for you. Nobody there, and nobody in the ancient world, and nobody now, thinks that actual, physical, inanimate object is my God. Nobody thinks that. Among the pagans? Nowhere. They all say, we are worshiping a God through this thing. Or that God is here in this thing. As we have made this beautiful thing, that God has come to live there, and we're going to worship through it. That's what idolatry is. Sometimes you think to yourself, well, you know, I can't believe that they thought a piece of wood was their God. Well, if you asked them, they would have said, no, the wood's not our God. The God's in it. Or we're worshiping the God through it. That's what they were claiming to do with God himself. I say all that just to say, you know what, today, it is still possible to say, I am worshiping the true and living God. and yet be worshiping something false because we've invented our own way to worship that is not from God and is not for God. Here's what John Calvin said, he said, idolatry, and he's talking about that forming of images to worship God, idolatry has its origin in the idea which men have that God is not present with them unless his presence is carnally exhibited. exhibited in some way that you can look at and see and touch and feel. In consequence of this, blind passions, men have almost always, in all generations since the world began, set up signs on which they imagined that God was visibly depicted to their eyes. Guys, we can't see God, but we can hear Him, and that is good. We don't need to say, oh, this old worship through the word is not good enough for me. I want visual worship. Flee from that. Flee from that. Worship the true God in the true way. Another trait of idolatrous worship is new ways to worship the eternal God. Look at verse 5 there in chapter 32. It says, When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord. You know what? I mean, at this point, why not, right? You've already got a golden calf, why not just make up a bunch of stuff to go with it? Moses was up on the mountain receiving instructions for exactly how God wanted to be worshipped, and Aaron was down there saying, let's make something up. Let's make up something so that we can have a great time worshipping just the way that we feel like it. That's a trait of idolatrous worship. Innovation and creativity are amazing and good in most realms of life. And yet, when it comes to worship, God has blocked that off. In the way that we form our churches and do our worship, God has said, you need no innovation here. Don't bring innovation here. Don't bring your creativity into what worship will be. I've told you how I want it. This is what I want. He is an eternal God. He is an invisible God. And He said how He wants to be worshipped. Now we've got to distinguish there because obviously some of the things that we're doing in our worship service right now are not things that you would have seen in 1850 when this church was founded. I've got a camera right in front of me. There's a live stream going out to the world. What we call these is circumstances of worship. or forms of worship. What we're saying we don't want to innovate about is the elements of worship. What God has said is worship itself. There are going to be circumstances around that that change. Is the wine that we use fermented, or is the wine that we use going to be non-alcoholic now that there's technology to do that? Those are things that have to do with the form and the circumstance. And yet God has said, here's what you were to do, drink of the fruit of the vine. And that's just one example. But guys, what they're doing here is they're just inventing. Whole cloth. Let's make a festival. They're saying, we will have elements of worship that we thought of that we will like. And that is a mark of idolatry. The fourth and final mark of idolatrous worship is flesh-satisfying worship that feeds flesh-satisfying living. Look at verse 6, and they rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. Now, a burnt offering is an offering where you would put the animal on the altar and it is completely burned up. And it is a sign of a need for forgiveness of sins. It's a sign of seeking to propitiate, turn away the wrath of the God that sacrifice is being made to. That's what a burnt offering is. A peace offering is where part of it is burned up, and part of it is held back for the people to eat. And so the sign of a peace offering is to say, we are now at peace with this God, and we're going to sit down and we're going to have a meal with this God. as a statement, a sign of being at peace. Now, burnt offerings and peace offerings were part of the real worship of God, but what they were doing was making up their own festival, doing it in front of a statue, doing it however they feel like it, and they're doing it in a way that was according to the desires of their flesh, doing it in a way that feeds their flesh, and here's how you see that. The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play. When they sat down to eat and drink, that probably has to do with the meal of the peace offering, but it's also not presented very flatteringly here. This may have been somewhat of a drunken feast that they're participating in here. And then it says that they rose up to play. And that word play, well, what exactly does it mean? Well, it's not too different from the way that you would hear somebody in their 20s use the word party. Whatever kind of stuff they wanted to get into, we're going to celebrate, we're going to play, we're going to get into it tonight. And so you had this system of worship that fed their flesh, bleeding right into a system of life, of just indulging in the flesh. Here's what it says in 1 Corinthians 10, 6-8, these things took place as examples for us that we might not desire evil as they did. Do not be idolaters as some of them were. As it is written, the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play. And we must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did. And 23,000 fell on a single day. And he's speaking of two different events there and putting together the numbers of people who were killed out of both of those events. But he's saying, look, here's what they were doing in their idolatry, in their flesh-satisfying worship, is they were just seeking a way to feed their flesh. This is something, as you look in the New Testament, at 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus, Jude, these books, 2 Peter, that talk about false teachers. It comes up over and over and over that false teaching is the kind of teaching that appeals to the flesh. False worship, going away from the true God and the true Gospel. It just seems to always be tied with, and now you can do whatever you feel like with your body. They just go with the desires of your flesh. They're beautiful. They're good. And yet, you know what that is? That's just a mark of flesh-satisfying, idolatrous systems, idolatrous worship. So, with all of this, what do we do with this? I want to remind you of the context of what's going on here, where the people are. They're at the base of Mount Sinai. the base of the mountain where they had heard God speak the Ten Commandments. Not only had they heard God speak the Ten Commandments, including the one about graven images, they had explicitly agreed to obey the Ten Commandments. And they had had a God-prescribed feast as a mark of entering into covenant with this God, And they had made sacrifices, and they had committed themselves, we will be God's people, we will obey. And yet here they are, something like 39 days later, with a golden calf, and invented worship, and sitting down to eat and drink, and rising up to play, and in the middle of idolatry. How could that be? This is something that has puzzled generation after generation of people who look at this. How could it be that these people, at the very place where they received the Ten Commandments, at the very place where they committed to obey the Ten Commandments, is all of a sudden just so blatantly casting off every bit of restraint of God's law, and so blatantly in sin against this God? Well, here's the thing. I got this from Matthew Henry. This is not new. This is a beautiful picture of the failure of the law and our need for the Gospel. What you have in the Ten Commandments is you have ten rules that are good from God, that summarize every bit of God's moral guidance for every human being. But you know what? No matter how much you hear God's rules, and no matter how good those rules are, God's rules will never save you, and they will never sanctify you. Okay? God's laws that came to Israel were good, but the way that they played out for Israel was that Israel immediately fell into condemnation for breaking that law. That's what we're going to see next week is the conversation between God and Moses, with God saying, let me go ahead and completely destroy this people for this golden calf thing. We'll get into that next week, alright? But, guys, the reason the law failed for them is because of their sinful flesh. There's nothing wrong with the law. There's something wrong with us. It's that we're sinners. When the law comes to us, whether you're talking about one of the Ten Commandments explicitly, or whether you're just talking about some great piece of advice for life that your friend told you that you think, oh yeah, I'm going to do that. Guys, our flesh is weak. The law can't save you and the law cannot sanctify you. Here's what Psalm 106 says, just wondering about this. They made a calf in Horeb. meaning right there at Mount Sinai, and worshiped a metal image. They exchanged the glory of God for the image of an ox that eats the grass. They forgot God, their Savior, who had done great things in Egypt and the wondrous works in the land of Ham and the awesome deeds by the Red Sea. They forgot about it. Guys, law without gospel, it leads to idolatry, it leads to revelry, it leads to the indulgence of the flesh, it leads to lawlessness. Guys, if you are trying to make it on the basis of good rules and good advice that you will follow, that's what you will fall into. That's what Paul is talking about in Galatians 5 when he says, these are the works of the flesh. He's talking to people who think that they will do good works by the flesh, but he says you're going to fall into all those sins. What do we need instead? We need the fruit of the Spirit. It comes by the work of the Spirit that's received by the hearing and believing of the gospel. Guys, the law can't save you, the law can't clean you up, but the gospel will save you. To hear about the person of Jesus Christ who gave His life for lawless people like you and me, and who paid it all in full and rose from the dead and saves us completely by grace and not by works. Here's what it says about the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 1.5, Our gospel came to you not only in word, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction. You know what kind of men we proved to be among you for your sake, and you turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God. Did you hear that? When the Israelites received the Law, they turned to idols from God. When the pagan Thessalonians received the Gospel, they turned from idols to God. Guys, if we're going to turn to God, if we're going to walk after God, if we're going to get our lives cleaned up, if we're going to be forgiven, if we're going to have eternal life, you don't just need good laws and good rules and good advice. You need the gospel. You need good news. You need grace from God or you're not going to make it. Have you ever heard a rule or a piece of advice and thought, okay, I've got this. I'll never forget this. I'm going to live like this now. And how long did that last? Maybe some of you are way stronger in your flesh than I am, but I know that those things don't tend to last for me very well. Except by the power of the Holy Spirit. But just in our flesh, you say, well, there's a rule, it's going to make it. But guys, the law is not going to save us. Gospel saves us. We need more than good instructions. We need good news. You need Jesus. You need to turn away from idols and worship the living God through His Son, Jesus Christ. Let me pray for us. God, we thank you that you are the great, immortal, invisible God, eternal, the God who is only wise. Father, I pray that... Lord, I pray that you would keep us from idols as believers. God, I pray that where the longings of our flesh want something that we can see and take hold of rather than worshiping you as you've told us, I pray that you'd forgive us and grant us joy in worshiping you as you've told us. I pray that where you would... Lord, where we long with itching ears to accumulate teachers who will scratch those itches, I pray that you'd forgive us. And God, by the power of the Spirit, working through your Word, give us joy in the truth that's in the Bible, instead of those things. God, I pray that where there are any who are here, whether it's maybe our own kids, maybe those who just have come out of curiosity, whatever else it is, who are committed to worship, not through the truth, but through idols. I pray that you'd save them. God, I pray that you would grant people to trust in Christ alone, have forgiveness, to have cleansing and eternal life. And it's in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.