Jamin Bradley

It’s debated among Bible scholars what exactly was at the heart of Israel’s idolatrous sin when they made a golden calf to worship. The classic view most have heard in church holds that they decided to make a god and worship it instead of Yahweh. But I agree with the scholars who think the golden calf was made to represent Yahweh, and that’s why they said the calf had brought them out of Egypt and why they wanted to celebrate the calf with a feast to Yahweh.

In this particular case, the idolatry was not in finding a new god, but in trying to redesign Yahweh to look as we would have him. It was an attempt to take control of the powerful Creator God up on the mountain with Moses and subject him to the same kind of creature-statue box that all the other gods were subject to, for idols were thought to be spiritual spaces where divine beings could dwell—not solely an artistic expression.

Humans have been redesigning God ever since. When God showed up in human skin as Jesus, his actions messed with everyone. Everyone could get behind his great displays of miraculous power, but even the famous holy man John the Baptist had a hard time wrapping his mind around Jesus’s ministry techniques. He didn’t check or fit the boxes we had set for the Messiah. He hung out with the wrong people. He was too harsh toward the wrong people. He was too soft toward the wrong people.

The Way, the Truth, and the Life was too… wrong.

As has often been said, God made us in his image and we have returned the favor. Once Jesus was resurrected we started reimagining who he is and intentionally misremembering who he was. We don’t want someone else, but we do want something else. We want a Jesus that we shaped with our own hands, guided by our own spirit. We want Jesus to look like a violent, angry, prideful, power-hungry president who focuses his eyes on anything that glitters like gold.

We want a Jesus who had a divine mood swing once he got to Heaven. We don’t want the one who “was and is,” we just want the fictional reimaginings of the one who “is to come.” Since that has yet to happen, we feel we have more control to design the shape of what he might look like in that time.

Christians must want Jesus as he is, not as they want him to be. All other Jesuses are forms of idolatry. The Spirt of Jesus will teach us who he is as he grows us in intimacy with the Father who loves us deeply. Don’t settle for anything less than the real thing. He’s worth more than that, and so are you.