I Made God into a "Golden Calf"

Tonight, when my family did our nightly "devotions", my dad read this story out of my little brother's storybook Bible:

Exodus 32:1-4

When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

After hearing it, I thought, "How offensive! Reducing God to a calf?!" Aaron basically said, "This lifeless statue is what brought you out of Egypt," or, "The God who rescued you is this statue of a cow." But then I realized I do the same thing all the time. I've never actually compared God to a calf, but I've reduced Him in my mind to things that do not come close to representing His infinite greatness. I have also given my affections to things that are much less worthy of them than He is. This thought brought me back to something I read in C.S. Lewis's book, The Screwtape Letters. In this book, a demon named Screwtape gives advice to his nephew, who is also a demon, about how to keep a man, referred to as "the patient", from giving his life to Jesus. The book is fictional and may or may not be comparable to the actual motives or actions of demons, but gives a lot of insight into the things Christians struggle with, which are probably enjoyed by and maybe spurred on by the devil. Don't be confused; in this book, because it is a demon writing, God is referred to as "Enemy".

"The humans do not start from that direct perception of Him which we, unhappily, cannot avoid. They have never known that ghastly luminosity, that stabbing and searing glare which makes the background of permanent pain to our lives. If you look into your patient's mind when he is praying, you will not find that. If you examine the object to which he is attending, you will find that it is a composite object containing many quite ridiculous ingredients. There will be images derived from pictures of the Enemy as He appeared during the discreditable episode known as the Incarnation: there will be vaguer-perhaps quite savage and puerile-images associated with the other two Persons. There will even be some of his own reverence (and of bodily sensations accompanying it) objectified and attributed to the object revered. I have known cases where what the patient called his "God" was actually located-up and to the left at the corner of the bedroom ceiling, or inside his own head, or in a crucifix on the wall. But whatever the nature of the composite object, you must keep him praying to it-to the thing that he has made, not to the Person who has made him. You may even encourage him to attach great importance to the correction and improvement of his composite object, and to keeping it steadily before his imagination during the whole prayer. For if he ever comes to make the distinction, if ever he consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situation is, for the moment, desperate. Once all his thoughts and images have been flung aside or, if retained, retained with a full recognition of their merely subjective nature, and the man trusts himself to the completely real, external, invisible Presence, there with him in the room and never knowable by him as he is known by it-why, then it is that the incalculable may occur..."

What Screwtape is trying to express to his nephew is that humans often try to reduce God to something tangible. In addition to this, most of the time we'd rather give our time to things we can see and feel.

We will never fully comprehend or grasp God's greatness! He isn't a song, or the feeling we get during worship or at church. He isn't the pictures people paint, or the tattoos people get. He isn't a specific place, or time of day. He isn't a video of smiling people jumping up and down to a Jesus song. He is in all of these things, but He is so much more! Isn't it great news?! We will never get bored of Him, because He continuously reveals to us new aspects of Himself. And yet, in His greatness, He still desires to love us and spend time with us. Let's give Him the honor He deserves by taking our limits off Him and acknowledging that He is infinitely more than we could ever know or imagine.