A Feast to the LORD,
Around a Calf

Verse 5 of this passage records one of the strangest announcements in the book of Exodus. Aaron built an altar in front of the calf and proclaimed, "Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD." The altar was real and the proclamation rightly used God's own covenant name. The next morning the people brought burnt offerings and peace offerings, which were the same kinds of offerings God Himself had previously prescribed.

Although almost every element of that gathering was correct, there was one element that was wrong: the object. The worship, destined for God alone, was aimed at a calf. What makes this scene so unsettling is that nothing here looks like the pagan idolatry we usually imagine, such as the people bowing to a foreign god under a foreign name. Rather, they were using the right forms, the right offerings, and even the right name for God, but they were aiming all of it at the wrong thing. Now notice how God describes the result when He speaks to Moses in verse 7. He does not say the people have switched religions or allegiance; He says they have corrupted themselves. Corruption here simply means that truth and falsehood have been mixed together almost imperceptibly.

Verse 6 then shows us what the people spent all their energy on. The people sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry. The center of the gathering was their own enjoyment, and God's name was attached to all of it. In Scripture a calf is an animal for celebration, the one a host kills when he wants to throw a feast, so the idol they chose tells us what they were really worshiping. They were worshiping themselves, that is, worshiping their thirst for entertainment and enjoyment.

But we should be careful before judging them because we fall into the same patterns. It is entirely possible for us to sing all the right songs and pray with all the right words while the actual center of the gathering is how the music makes us feel or how well the hour entertains us. Mixture is hard to detect precisely because everything looks correct and sounds correct. The honest test is not an audit of other churches; it is a question we each ask about our own heart: who is this feast actually for?

The most hopeful detail comes two chapters later. When God renews the covenant after this disaster, He does not abolish feasting and enjoyment; He commands it, three times a year, but this time with Himself as the host (Exodus 34:23). The desire to celebrate was never the problem, since God Himself built it into His people. The problem was the object at the center of the table, and God's answer to a corrupted feast was to invite His people to a better one with Himself.

Today's question is one of attendance: when I sing or pray this week, who is the feast really for?