Exo. 32:4b – “…This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!”
On the surface this text quoted above might appear to be a celebration of God for what He had done for His people. However, even a brief survey of the context will reveal that nothing could be further from the truth. After Moses had gone up the mountain to receive the law from God, the people quickly engaged in catastrophic lines of inquiry that ended in outright idolatry. What appears to be praise to God turns out to be blasphemy! Blasphemy literally means to revile or speak evil against, and this can be done directly or indirectly. It can be observed that many heresies which have sprung up over the centuries had their beginning in some blasphemous thought or declaration. Puritan Obadiah Sedgwick once said there are three main ways that blasphemy breaks out:
1) When we affirm that of God which is unbecoming to Him, which is incompatible with His holy and divine nature – In other words, when we define God in a way that is not congruous with who He actually is
2) When we deny that to God, which indeed belongs to Him – It is called blasphemy in the King of Assyria, when he said, that the Lord was not able to deliver Jerusalem out of His hand (2Chron. 32:17)
3) When we give to anything else, what is proper only for God – This is what the Israelites were doing by bowing down and worshipping the golden calf and calling it by the name of God, and attributing to it the works that the true God had done
The book of Nehemiah says that by doing this, the Israelites “worked great provocations” (Neh. 9:18). In the original Hebrew that verse should be rendered: “they committed great blasphemies.” The Israelites were too impatient to wait for the Word of the Lord, and they couldn’t wait for their teacher to come down the mount and instruct them. So the Israelites mused amongst themselves, and pressed Aaron to make them a new god that suited their wicked desires, as the text goes on to say: “They rose early on the next day, offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings [before the golden calf]; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.” (Exo. 32:6)
Their idea of worship was to make token offerings and then go out and live according to their fancies. Compare that to the true Lord’s command to worship the Lord your God with all of your heart, soul, mind, and strength – what a huge difference! But still yet these Israelites wanted to pretend that they were still worshipping the one true God, and so they called their new permissive and liberal god by the name of the Lord, and even said that this inanimate, man-crafted, cow-shaped, hunk of metal had done the mighty miracles that the almighty Lord had done to make His name and power known. If that is not blasphemy, I don’t know what is!
It’s easy to look at these Israelites and condemn them while we in our day do the very same things. People are too impatient or lazy to study the Word themselves – to hear from God on its pages what He is like. People will not seek the instruction from sound teachers who can show them what God’s will is for their lives. Instead men prefer to muse amongst themselves, and find leaders that will acquiesce to lead them in the way they wish to go, to tell them what they want to hear, so they can pursue their own whims and carnal enjoyments. And all the while these people like to think that they are worshipping the one true God, because they call Him by the right name and attribute His works to their idol. It is blasphemy! Out of such soil can we expect anything but heresies to grow and flourish?
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