The story of Exodus is a popular one and not without good reason. There’s so much to look at and so much that God did. It’s also filled, however, with tragic human failing. Moses doubts God can use him. Pharaoh refuses to listen to God. The Israelites freak out so badly they claim they were better off in slavery. And then there’s Aaron and the business with the golden calf.
You know the story. The Israelites freak out about how long Moses has been gone and think he’s either left them or died. Unable to cope, they come to Aaron begging him to build them something to worship. He obliges by having them bring him their gold that he melts down and sculpts into a giant calf. Bing, bang, boom, and the Israelites are falling away from God to worship Aaron’s art project
But there’s something important to note in the timeline of all this. The whole calf building fiasco takes place while Moses is receiving all manner of instructions from God up on Mount Sinai. And part of those instructions concern setting up priests. For this vital and esteemed position he picks Aaron and outlines rules for him and his sons to be set apart with honor and purpose for this work.
Imagine that. In the very moment Aaron was giving in to hysteria and despair, God was outlining plans to honor and consecrate him and his entire family.
This could have been such a victorious, beautiful moment for Aaron and instead it was tarnished by his sin. It was like a parent bringing a treat home to reward their child for doing well home alone only to find that the child has broken every single rule they could think of while unsupervised. It’s a betrayal of trust, but also a destruction of celebration.
I wonder what Aaron thought in the aftermath. I wonder if he sat with the weight of that timing. What kind of regret hit him? Did the weight of his mistake hit him all at once? Did it build with time? Did it forever cloud for him his work as a priest?
At the end of the day, the unavoidable fact remains. At the moment of testing during the unknown, Aaron failed.
So what does this mean for us? The simple answer is “don’t be like Aaron here”, but really, it’s more than that. We’re going to find ourselves in situations like Aaron. Situations where God feels absent and everything is weighing down on us and something has to give. We’ll cry out praying for him to show up in some big, demonstrative way and it just won’t happen. We’ll have our equivalent of God and Moses up on the mountain and us being left in the valley below.
Life’s hard like that. We see so little of the entire picture when all we want is to see the entirety of what God is doing. Seeing God at work is only like seeing the tip of the iceberg. The plain and simple fact is that he will always be doing more work than just the work we’re seeing. Our job is not to know every little movement of God’s and have him answer to us. Our job is to bring him glory. And there are few greater ways to glorify than to love someone through trusting them completely.
We have a responsibility to stay faithful and true no matter how much of the work we are seeing.
And I know, that is far easier said than done. I don’t want to seem flippant about this. Trusting that God is still working even when you can’t see it might just be the hardest, most heartbreaking thing you do in this life. It might take everything you’ve got to do it. What’s more, you might not get the answers you seek this side of life. No part of this is easily done but it is desperately important.
Our faithfulnes to God despite our unknowns is an amazing way to bring God glory and to show him honor. How different would this story in Exodus read if Aaron had stayed faithful and had rallied the Israelites away from panic and into trust? How glorified would God have been by the actions of the nation he just saved? We have that same sort of choice before us. In our own lives, in our own ways, each of us are faced with Aaron’s choice. Will you give in to fear? Or will you hold fast and trust that God is working even when you can’t see it?
Because he is. He never stopped. God is at work in your life and in his love for you he will never stop working. That’s reason enough not to panic.
Let’s find some joy,
A
Avalon Robinson Author 