Wrong Worship
When Aaron made the golden calf, he proclaimed a feast to Jehovah. In other words, the Israelites in their idolatry did not think of themselves as forsaking the true God for a pagan god. But they were worshiping him as if he were a pagan god. Their preconceived notions, picked up from the surrounding culture, created a blind spot that made God’s revelation at Sinai go right over their heads. As a result, their worship of Jehovah was corrupted by paganism, and they were too blind to see it. And as far as God was concerned, it counted as idolatry, just as if they had consciously been worshipping Baal or Moloch.
The Israelites’ experience raises a question for us: How far is our worship corrupted by neo-paganism, secularism, and/or postmodernism? Are we willing to pray seriously that God would show us the answer to that question?
Donald T. Williams is Professor Emeritus of Toccoa Falls College. He stays permanently camped out on the borders between serious scholarship and pastoral ministry, between theology and literature, and between Narnia and Middle-Earth. He is the author of fourteen books, including Answers from Aslan: The Enduring Apologetics of C. S. Lewis (DeWard, 2023). He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.
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