The Golden Calf

[Denise]

The Golden Calf

Peter and Paul Ministries

The whole world has bought the fundamentally pagan idea that each person makes up his own code of morality and then in the next world is judged upon how well he has observed his own code. For the world, it is as if Christ had never come at all. The revelation made by Christ, unknown even to the Jews before the time of Christ, that the Ten Commandments were not merely a Jewish moral code, but were already written on the hearts of every man on earth, has not just been spurned. It has been ignored!

The person who supports his family by selling pornography tells himself that he will be able to explain and defend his conduct before God. The man and woman living together without the benefit marriage tell themselves that fornication is not sinful. So, too, with those unrepentant in abortion, divorce and remarriage, contraception, sodomy, drug taking, theft, and perjury. Even the person who has built up within himself a total aversion to the Catholic faith and all hearing and reading of the Scriptures, tells himself that he, too, will be able to explain all this satisfactorily and be accepted into heaven.

What is all this? It is the idea that God is a bit of a dope, a bit of a sap, and in fact, very much a wimp. These people, whose name is Legion, are not just fallen Christians, Not just lost sheep at all. Rather, they are really atheists, unbelievers not just in the Church, but in the very notion itself of a meaningful God.

Such people will often snicker at the Biblical account of the worship of the golden calf(Exodus 32). How could the Israelites, they ask themselves, have run off into such idiocy? How could so many have done so? This was the whole people, not just a lunatic fringe. How could they all together have developed such a pathetic image of God and acted upon it?

The fact is that the gods that the modern world worships are not one whit less inane than was the golden calf. The people of Israel wanted desperately to have a god they could feel superior to. So, too, with the modern world which has sunk largely into paganism. The worship of Christ and obedience to His moral precepts has been cast aside. The world now slavishly venerates the unholy trinity of power, greed, and lust.

People must understand that the large number of Hebrews that worshiped the golden calf in Exodus did not make it right, and like wise the multitude today that profess belief in equally foolish and pathetic gods does not make it any more acceptable to God. The warning must be proclaimed from the housetops that those who follow false notions about God, worship the counterfeit gods of this world, ignore the truth of the Catholic faith, or disregard the self evident laws of holiness written upon their hearts will not like where they end up.