Let God Be God

July 9

“Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron, and said to him, ‘Come, make us gods that shall go before us; for as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’

“And Aaron said to them, ‘Break off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me.’

“So all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them to Aaron. And he received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and made a molded calf.

“Then they said, ‘This is your god, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt!’

“So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, ‘Tomorrow is a feast to the LORD.’

“Then they rose early on the next day, offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings; and the people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.

“And the LORD said to Moses, ‘Go, get down!; for your people whom you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made themselves a molded calf, and worshiped it and sacrificed to it, and said to one another that it is their god that brought them out of the land of Egypt,’” Exodus 32:1-8.

How many of us have lost patience with God? One truth that we have extreme difficulty appropriating is the reality that He does not operate on our timetable. We, for example, recognize a problem, and make it a matter of prayer. And when we do, in our mind, it’s as though He hadn’t observed it before we brought it to His attention.

When He doesn’t act immediately upon bringing a remedy to the matter, we behave as though the whole of creation will whirl out of orbit. Rather than seek the Lord in the matter of how we can best interject ourselves into His prescription for solving the difficulty we’ve observed, we presume that it can’t be solved if He does not fix it in our way and in our time.

Like the Israelites of old, we often react in that faithless manner after seeing a great move of God’s Holy Spirit or after praying through to a great miracle. With our focus now on the mighty thing He has done, we can’t fathom more great things in response to our next prayer.

The Hebrew children had spent 400 years in bondage in Egypt. They had been miraculously freed when Pharaoh capitulated to the pressure of the plagues that God had put upon him; God’s people even escaped the hot pursuit of Pharaoh and his army when the arrogant Egyptian leader had repented of setting his slave laborers free.

The Hebrews did not only escape the power of Egypt but they escaped miraculously when the Lord parted the Red Sea to allow them to flee on dry land while their pursuers were swallowed into the depths of the sea. But now, with the relatively small inconvenience of having Moses delay his return from his meeting with God on the mountaintop, they became impatient to the point of capitulating to sin!

Not only did the people demand a brazen idol be constructed to be their ‘god that delivered them out of Egypt,’ but Aaron, Moses brother who had been by Moses’ side throughout the ordeal with Pharaoh, acquiesced to their demands! Can we see ourselves here?

We come from a spiritual victory. We have seen the hand of the Lord move in response to our prayers and we know that we know that we know He has bridged the gulf between the natural and the supernatural in our behalf. We are on a spiritual high that is equivalent to that of the people of Israel. We expect something dramatic in response to our every prayer and when normalcy is our portion we become disgruntled. Perhaps we even lapse into sin.

The lesson we must take from the experience of our Hebrew brothers is that God’s schedule is not necessarily our own. He does not move on our timetable but on His. Our trust must be in His will, not in our perception of what His will must be.

The bottom line of the matter is that we must focus on the Lord and His plan for us. As the great Pentecostal preacher of the Nineteenth Century, Smith Wigglesworth, said regarding his position in prayer, “I must have no mind in the matter.”

Like this great man of God, we must take our supplications to the Throne of Mercy and Grace and leave them there. We, too, must let God be God.