One of the strangest incidents recounted in the Bible, at least to my modern ears, is when Aaron, brother of Moses, made for the stubborn Israelites a new god to worship—after God had freed the Israelites from Egypt.
Even if you are still an atheist and don’t believe any of this, stay with me here, because this is going to turn out to have a very modern sequel you are going to want to know about.
Here is the gist of the story, from Exodus. If you already know it, you can skip to the bottom.
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!”
Next day, they offered a service to the new god, worshiping it with burnt offerings, singing, and dancing—presumably barefoot. Bad dancing is always barefoot. Did you ever notice? Fred Astaire always wore shoes.
At any rate, the Israelites fresh paganism angered God, and he sent Moses back to the tribes to castigate them for their apostasy. Then this happened (with my emphasis):
So it was, as soon as [Moses] came near the camp, that he saw the calf and the dancing. So Moses’ anger became hot, and he cast the tablets [the Ten Commandments] out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. Then he took the calf which they had made, burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder; and he scattered it on the water and made the children of Israel drink it. And Moses said to Aaron, “What did this people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them?”
So Aaron said, “Do not let the anger of my lord become hot. You know the people, that they are set on evil. For they said to me, ‘’Make us gods that shall go before us; as for this Moses, the man who brought us out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him.’ And I said to them, ‘Whoever has any gold, let them break it off.’ So they gave it to me, and I cast it into the fire, and this calf came out.”
Now when Moses saw that the people were unrestrained…then Moses stood in the entrance of the camp, and said, “Whoever is on the Lord’s side—come to me!” And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together to him. And he said to them, “Thus says the Lord God of Israel: ‘Let every man put his sword on his side, and go in and out from entrance to entrance throughout the camp, and let every man kill his brother, every man his companion, and every man his neighbor.’”
So the sons of Levi did according to the word of Moses. And about three thousand men of the people fell that day.
Nasty business, wouldn’t you say?
Aaron only half apologizes; his words are like a modern news headline. He blames the fire for the creation of the god, in the same way journalists blame the SUV for mowing down civilians.
And what’s with Moses making the Golden Calf worshipers drink the ashes of the destroyed god? Christians eat the living God, but here are pagans forced to consume the fallen remains of a false god. Sarcastic mockery?
You see what happened. The punishment was swift, harsh, bloody and just. If you do not think it just, then you have not understood the premises of the story. The key one being God, in all his might, is real.
So much for history. A huge whopping problem we moderns have is that we believe history only happened in history. History for us, we say, has ended. We no longer make the mistakes our ancients ancestors make. We don’t have history, we have iPhones!
We certainly would not, like the crazed Israelites, wake up one fine morning and decide to make for ourselves a new god to worship. What superstition! We have electric cars!
England’s National Maritime Museum recently “unveiled a statue of a ‘god-like protector of all migrants’”. Here it is:
As befits a modern god of color, it is angry. It is without sex—a “genderless being born of the sea”. It has bad hair. And, most befitting of all, it was made by someone named Eve Shepherd. Well, you can’t get more Biblical than that.
According to another story, “The genderless creature [was] created in consultation with the transgender children’s charity Mermaids UK states it is ‘neither male nor female, neither human nor fish'”. Forget transgender. We’re doing transspecies.
The new god will sit next to a bust of Admiral Horatio Nelson, who gladly would have protected England from its current invasion of “migrants”. The museum boasts
The exhibition is part of the museum’s strategy to offer more diverse historical perspectives. The migrant goddess statue engages in a pre-recorded dialogue, downplaying Nelson’s military accolades in favor of recognizing the protection and support given to migrants. This reinterpretation of history gives a voice to the often-overlooked heroes of the sea.
The god speaks.
You can, I hope, see the parallels. Our Lord tarries, we have grown bored, and have created for ourselves a new god, in the same way they did way back in history. It has taken on the characteristics most desired.
One wonders what our punishment will be. Historical, maybe.
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Touché Mr Briggs
The modern world appeared rather quickly out of a small place just as the Israelites appeared rather quickly in a very small place.
One aspect of the modern world existed for centuries but the second essential ingredient only happened by happenstance and rather quickly. The first was Christianity but the second necessity was individual freedom that emerged from religious wars in England.
Now the world wants a new god and both Christianity and freedom are being abandoned by the chosen people of the modern world, experts. What could go wrong? These experts have no clue what brought them here. But they know better.
“The key one being God, in all his might, is real.” Just sayin… the evidence that God is real, from the passage provided, is that one man, Moses, heard God speak and that man demanded that people break one of the 10 commandments that were about to be given. God is angry (so is Moses). God told Moses to ask all the Israelites who was on God’s side… apparently the tribe of Levi spoke up… so armed with the men of the tribe of Levi, Moses says that God told him to command these men to kill their brothers (weren’t they in the tribe of Levi also?… that was the definition of tribe, wasn’t it?) and kill their companions and neighbors. At any rate they murdered 3000 fellow Israelites… I’m sure the Philistines were watching in glee. Presumably that was all the men who were not of the tribe of Levi… since only the men of Levi responded to the call…. the others were still gagging on the gold-water. So I know the right answer is that this happened because the Israelites disobeyed God and disobedience always demands blood in both old and new testaments… but put yourself in the shoes of the women and children who were just widowed and orphaned… what you just saw was one man who says he heard God tell him to gather up a posse and kill your husbands…. that’s hardly a proof that God is real, at least to a rational person… taking their position for a moment… wouldn’t a real God who loves you have spoken to you directly and disciplined you by telling you what you did wrong and give you the opportunity to change your behavior? My guess is that their take away was that Moses is using fear to retain power… in the minds of those left alive, I don’t think that God was a factor… Moses was the crazed man pulling the strings… and why did Aaron get to live? Odd justice. That said, the British transvestite immigrant statue is hideous. They should have taken a cue from the statue of liberty.
What Punishment Will We Get For This?
Wrong question Briggs should be:
What Punishment Will They Get For This?
What will they get?
Punishment.
Boatloads of punishment, caravans of punishment, punishment by land, sea, and air.
JWM
In the story in Exodus, the Levites got to be the hand of God’s vengeance. Hopefully we’ll get to be his hand again against our errant countrymen soon.
The Jews continually revert to Moloch, god of infant sacrifice. Why do you think they push so hard for abortion?
Mr. Briggs,
It sure is a beautiful statue. I bet it is as powerful as Ms. Karma.
Ah, now people shall be punished because “they” create a statue that is not up to your taste for whatever reasons. (Your ability to find something to distress yourself is amazing.) Or perhaps, you are praying to your God to punish them? I don’t know if your God would like such a prayer though. Anyhow, if He (gotta be a straight white male, right? ) is angry at you, No worries, Mr. Briggs, just go to the mass, follow a cantor’s lead, and keep singing along…
“Jesus lamb of god, You take away, the sins of the world; Have mercy on us.”
Just repent and you shall be saved. (Love your all-loving and forgiving God for this!) Karma is not so forgiving though. She (undoubtedly, a feminist) shall punish and let you (and only you) know. (And you know already whether you she has punished you. The daily distress! )
Eve, named after the first human sinner in my Bible. I would think that’s like naming your kid Satan.
I read and study the Bible dispensationally. This tells me that from Heaven, Jesus introduced a new program to Paul, that deals with people (Acts 9). This Dispensation of Grace offers salvation to any individual that will believe in Jesus. The Lord will not punish nations for sin, just people after they die.
One day Jesus will take the saved, Body of Christ, to Heaven. Then those left in the world will suffer tribulation until Jesus comes back to earth.
So have hope! Your soul depends on your decision to believe in Jesus and has nothing to do with what’s going on in the world.
“So much for history.”
You misspelled “mythology”.
@JH,
I suppose some things never change, do they? “Why doth the heathen rage and the people meditate vain things?”
Case in point.
The statue is definitely of a woman. No idea why Aaron appears to not have been punished, unless the second description is the true one. No idea as to why Moses made them drink. Moses definitely did hear God as did Aaron.
How ever God is handling and is going to handle the mess mankind has made and is making, we are to be in Jesus and He in us, no matter what. Our God, is the Triune God, of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
God bless, C-Marie
The moral of the story is obvious. Most people are useless eaters who succumb to their animal urges and you should only build your polity with quality people of faith.
The gist of this post is a bit above my pay grade, I’ll leave that discussion to more studied minds. But I found one aspect intriguing.
My starting points: “The new god will sit next to a bust of Admiral Horatio Nelson” and “The migrant goddess statue engages in a pre-recorded dialogue, downplaying Nelson’s military accolades in favor of recognizing the protection and support given to migrants.”
What immediately caught my attention was what was missing – no statement about removing the bust of Admiral Horatio Nelson. In the US, his bust would have been melted down to create the new god statue to appease the DIE gods of wokeminster or some such. My take on this (which I’m unable to verify as the “museum boasts” link yields a “bad gateway” error, and the museum’s website itself is way too tedious for my limited attention span) is that the the two statues, the woke god and the admiral, will have dueling pre-recorded dialogue messages. I like that concept.
Imagine if in the US some woke group wants to tear down a statue, and instead of appeasing them, they are given the option of creating a pre-recorded dialogue. Then visitors could hear different sides of the story and make up their own minds.
One can see the obvious challenges, such as who decides who gets to create the dialogues. Since Wikipedia has never figured this out, as evidenced by entries on even mildly controversial topics invariably being highly biased, it’s probably unworkable for statues as well. But I like the concept in principle.
Actually, no Ken, you are factually wrong. If you ever plan on reading the whole book of Exodus, you’ll learn very early on that EVERY Hebrew heard God speak multiple times, so it was not “only Moses”, and they were so afraid of God’s voice they requested that only Moses should act as an intermediary between them and God. Also they all personally witnessed the crazy miracles, pillars of fire, parting of the Red Sea, and other cool and scary stuff that would impress anyone that God really was talking to someone and leading them.
Also the Hebrews were well aware of the fact that God didn’t like paganism, which is why the Egyptians got their asses kicked and every plague was a demonstration of power over the gods of Egypt. Not to mention that the land they were going to take from the Canaanites were the sort that loved post-birth aborting their children and offering them as burnt offerings to this fella named Baal Peor in exchange for blessings of wealth. A god who happened to be represented as a bull… are you getting the picture now?
Still far more reliable than modern Expertise, fak-chacking, and THE SCIENCE ™.
Better track record of prophecy too!
If I know Briggs, and we are very internet-close, he is laughing as hard as Elijah was watching you and your fellow cultists slitting your wrists and cutting your arms and your dicks and your breasts begging for proof of climate change to fall from the heavens and cover your offerings.
He does like those prayers! Especially when sung as in the Psalms by the best choirs Western Civilization could offer!
Are you coming out as jealous, JH? A trait well associated with faggotry? And you don’t have to be un-straight to be a fag!
Actually, it’s called the Sacrament of Confession. Homos are welcome to convert and confess too, and sin no more.
And sin no more! Don’t forget! Or you’ll find out that God is not ackshully “all-loving”, He only loves what is good, and hates what is evil, because He, straight-loving and historically white-blessing, is all-just! You know? JUSTICE! That word your activist friends love using a lot, but don’t ackshully understand?
So Ms. Karma is a typical woman then…
Thankfully the real God, being logical, uses male pronouns, just so we don’t mistake Him for a hersteric!
Didn’t I say, when we made our predictions ~2 weeks ago, that we’ll see the return of paganism in Europe? Well, I’m still waiting for the murmurings to happen about the sacrifices, but I’m feeling rather elated. AND some economists are predicting a huge rise in inflation during Summer! Now if only I can get around to ordering Uncertainty…
You can have some amusing fun thinking up a name for the god/dess.
Sh/He/It of the sea.
JWM
You wrote: “One wonders what our punishment will be. Historical, maybe.” Just open your eyes and look around, thou shalt see.