Dehumanized

I'm going to read Romans 1:18-25 again. We looked at it two weeks ago. I want you to listen to it again. Says this:

18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth.

Paul's saying that what is wrong with humanity is not primarily ignorance. It's a willful choice of suppression. The truth about God is plain. He continues:

19 For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. 20 For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. 21 For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Claiming to be wise, they became fools,

As I said two weeks ago, if I ever write a book about modern American culture, that's my title: "Claiming to be wise, they became fools".

23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.

Paul is laying out here his identification of humanity's problem. And he's describing a process, a process of corruption, a process of self-corruption. Right? The truth about God is plain. It's always been plain. It's written into the fabric of creation, visible in everything that has been made. But humanity takes that truth and rejects it, exchanges it, trades the glory of the immortal God for images, for lesser things, images of man, images of beasts. It's a deliberate descent, a chosen diminishment.

And the result, verse 24:

24 Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,

“God gave them up.” Oh, this is a phrase. God gave them up. He's going to say that three times in the following four verses. This is just the first. He gave them up. So, this is not God doing something to us. It's not punitive in that sense.

God saying if that's what you want to worship, have at it? If that's where you want to aim, go for it. If that's what you want to submit to, go ahead. And he's going to allow the consequences to unfold. He releases them to the logic of their own choices. He lets the exchange run its course.

What does that look like? The body begins to dishonor itself. Desires that were made for covenant faithfulness become disordered. The mind that was designed to know God loses the capacity to think straight about anything. God gives them up to the dishonor of their bodies among themselves:

25 because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen.

See, Paul's not just laying out a list of things to avoid, bad things that you shouldn't do. Paul is describing the disintegration of a human being—body, soul, and mind. Every dimension of the person bears the marks of what the soul worships. Every part of us is shaped and influenced by what we give our allegiance and attention and affection to.

That's the lens that I want us to have for this morning, really for every morning, because it's the lens that helps us understand ourselves and the story we find ourselves in. Paul doesn't invent this out of nowhere. He learns it from a story, a very old story. One can say the paradigmatic story of idolatry, one that we all know very well, one that we make movies about, one that's legendary. And it all begins with a man who's been gone for 40 days.

1 When the people saw that Moses delayed to come down from the mountain, the people gathered themselves together to Aaron and said to him, "Up, make us gods who shall go before us. 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."

Here's the great story. God's people have been enslaved in Egypt and God moves in mercy and goodness to rescue them. We're stepping into the middle of this incredible story. God has shown up through Moses and confronted not just Pharaoh but the gods of Egypt. God has demonstrated his supremacy and his superiority over everything through the ten plagues and the Exodus out of Egypt and the Red Sea and the destruction of Pharaoh and his army. God has liberated his people. He's brought them freedom.

Then he brings them to the mountain. At the mountain, they hear the voice of God. The elders and Moses go halfway up and share a meal with God. God makes a covenant with them. God covenants with them to be his people and that he will be their God. The covenant is ratified and sealed in blood. Then Moses goes up to the top of the mountain to meet with God, and he's up there for 40 days. That's a little too long for the people.

When the people saw that Moses delayed—this Hebrew word " בּוֹשׁ = bwš = boshesh " carries the sense of being stood up. Moses ghosted them. They're like, "Where'd he go? I don't know, he's up there. There's clouds, there's lightning. How long has it been? Forty days." So there's this sense of abandonment, of dissatisfaction and disappointment, this sense of anxiety. Moses has been delayed and that absence creates a demand within the people.

The anxiety of Moses's absence, of having to wait for 40 days with uncertainty in the unknown, makes them make this move that we're actually all very familiar with: Give me something I can control. Because what's happening this morning right now is a control freak is talking to a whole bunch of control freaks. That's the essence of sin—a desire to control that which we are not supposed to control.

"Up Aaron, make us some gods." Give us something that we can touch and see. Something that's not going to ghost us because we're going to make it and we'll be in control of it. Make us some אֱלֹהִים = ʾlhym = elohim. This is the great word that means spiritual being. It's a word that we use for God. It always shows up in the plural and the context determines whether they're talking about one or multiple. In this context, they're talking about one thing. Give us a god to worship.

"As for this Moses"—poor Moses. I bet there were so many days he wished he could go back to watching sheep. "As for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt." Do you see that switch there? Who brought them out of Egypt? Do you see how they've already been darkened in their minds, denying reality, shaping it into what they understand? It's leading to a hardness of their heart. Do you see how the process is unfolding? "This Moses who brought us, we don't know what's become of him."

They're depersonalizing Moses. They're reducing him to a function and at the same time they're crediting him with what God did so that they can feel better about what they're asking.

2 So Aaron said to them, "Take off the rings of gold that are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me." 3 So all the people took off the rings of gold that were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.

What is this gold? They're a bunch of slaves. They've been slaves for hundreds of years. But when God brought them out of Egypt, one of the most significant details in that Exodus story is that as they left, they left burdened with the wealth of their oppressors. It got so bad as God came upon the Egyptians that the Egyptians said, "We'll pay you to get out of here. Take my gold, take my silver, take my wealth. Just go. We don't want God's hand against us anymore." So when Israel left Egypt and came out to the wilderness and they're at the mountain...

They have the wealth of Egypt, the wealth of their oppressors, the gold that God gave them as a blessing. The instrument of their liberation becomes the very material of their bondage.

4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf.

When I preached through Exodus a few years ago, don't think cute little frolicking baby cow. This is a young bull. This is an image of a powerful, mighty, strong beast, a beast of burden, a beast to be feared, a beast to be used. This is not a cute pet. They fashion this image as a representation of the one who just defeated Egypt and who brought them out and who had led them in victory. They're like, "What's that deity going to look like? It's going to look like this thing of power and might. He's going to look like a mighty bull."

What the text says here is so important. It says that Aaron fashioned it. The verb here is “יָצַר = yṣr = yatsar.” It's the same verb that is used in Genesis 2 of God fashioning a body for Adam (Genesis 2:7). See, Aaron is performing a dark parody of creation, forming a creature and calling it divine. It's the imago dei inverted. Man was made to be formed by God and image him. Here, man forms a god and images himself.

Aaron's complicity here - he doesn't argue. He doesn't resist. He doesn't negotiate or intercede. He simply facilitates. Later on in the story, his excuse is, "I threw it into the fire and out came this calf."(Exodus 32:24) It's one of the great deflections in scripture. He retroactively gives the calf a divine origin story. Do you remember the craftsman I talked about last week who would lay his hands on the idol and say, "My hands didn't make this"? That's what Aaron does. "I didn't do it. I just got some gold. I threw it in the fire and boop." Yet right here we have this fashioned verb. And the inclusion of a graving tool. This is intentional work and sculpting and activity. He didn't just throw it in and out it popped. See, this is what we always do with our idols. We construct them and then we pretend that they appeared all on their own so that we don't have to be liable.

4 And he received the gold from their hand and fashioned it with a graving tool and made a golden calf. And they said, "These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!"

The theological hubris! The calf that they just made that didn't exist a day ago, let alone 40 days ago, let alone the months ago when God was delivering them out of Egypt. See, idolatry always rewrites the past to justify the present. Let's say that again because sometimes I say things that are much deeper than I have a right to say. Idolatry always rewrites the past in order to justify the present. Something we should watch for in our own lives.

5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, "Tomorrow shall be a feast to the Lord."

When we see the Lord in small caps like that in our Bibles, that means that this is the covenant name of God, the tetragrammaton, most commonly we think it's pronounced as Yahweh. So this is really interesting. He uses the covenant name of God. What Aaron and Israel are doing here is not saying we need a new God. What they're doing is attempting to worship God the Lord through the calf.

So it's not as simple as just apostasy. This is syncretism. The blending together of thoughts and religious ideas and practices. The bringing together things that shouldn't be brought together. There's a lot of things that should be brought together. Chocolate and peanut butter - made for each other, right? Ice cream and manure? Syncretism; it's far more insidious, it's far more dangerous because it's so much more subtle than just outright atheism or outright abandonment of God and apostasy to worship something else. Because syncretism feels like faithfulness. It feels like faithfulness.

This is the kind of idolatry that is alive and well in the church today. We don't abandon God outright. We simply change the terms of engagement. We still come to church. We still use the right language. We simply define God in our image rather than be defined by him. Aaron built an altar to Yahweh in front of a calf.

Let me ask you this question: What do our calves look like? What do our calves look like? How about a "love is love" banner spread at the front of a church? How about an American flag draping the cross? How about the abomination of the prosperity gospel? Dressing up greed in the name of God. We can make an idol out of anything. And the most dangerous idols are not the things that are blatantly evil. The most dangerous idols are the good gifts of God that we try to make ultimate rather than in their place.

This is the reality of idolatry in our day, in our time. It's not an outright rejection of God. It's not an outright rejection of Jesus. It's a diminishing of Jesus and a blurring and blending of Jesus with the cultural values and creeds of our day. Aaron didn't build a pagan altar. He built a Yahweh altar in front of a calf. That's the move we keep making.

6 And they rose early on the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. And the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

They rose up early the next day. It's a verse I just can't relate to. They were eager. Just say they woke up so excited. They rose up early the next day and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. They are zealous. They are devoted. This is not reluctant worship. They're enthusiastic. Idolatry rarely feels like rebellion from the inside. It usually feels like devotion.

They rose up early and offered burnt offerings and brought peace offerings. The end of this verse: "And the people sat down." So they buckled in for the long haul to eat and to drink and they rose up to play. You look at that and go, "Well, that sounds okay." Until you dig into what that word there means...

That we translate as "to play." This is a Hebrew word “צָחַק = ṣḥq = tsachaq” and it appears in Genesis 26:8 with unmistakable sexual connotation. You got to understand in the ancient near east worship involved feasting. Worship involved drinking and drunkenness and worship involved sexuality.

So what we have described here, the people have chosen to try to worship God through a golden calf. And the way that they choose to worship him is in a drunken orgy. I can promise you that's not going to happen at EMC on a Sunday morning. Let it sink in though because the point is not the act itself. Like I want it to scandalize you. That should make you go…icky. But it's not the act itself as much as what the act reveals.

Something happened to them. They've been in this process and something has already changed in them. I'll go back to my thesis statement. They have bowed to an animal and they immediately begin to act like one. Dehumanization is not something that's coming down the road for them. It's already begun. This is Paul's Romans 1 sequence playing out in real time. If you exchange the glory for the lesser glory of a created being, the body begins to dishonor itself.

Paul actually quotes this verse in 1 Corinthians 10:7 as a warning against idolatry. This is what happens. It's the process that we need to see. We become what we behold. We resemble what we revere. We're shaped by what we serve. They make a calf, a young bull. And then they begin to act like one.

And the Lord said to Moses—so remember Moses, he's still up at the mountain. Moses doesn't know what's going on, but God does. The Lord says to Moses:

7 Go down, for your people, whom you brought up out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves.

So now God is going to go on their terms. They've said Moses brought us out. That's what they've been accusing. Moses doesn't know they've been doing this, but God does. And so God's like, "Oh yeah, by the way, the people claim to be your people now because you brought them out and they've corrupted themselves."

“שָׁחַת = šḥt = shachat”, it's a verb that means to destroy, to ruin, to corrupt, to spoil beyond repair. You can't unspoil milk, right? You've all had that experience. You grab milk and you're super excited to have that bowl of cereal or to put it into your coffee and you're just expecting a nice little stream and you get chunks coming out. That's visceral. And you can't make that clump unclumpy. You can't do it. Spoiled beyond repair.

“They have corrupted themselves.” That's important. He doesn't say they have been corrupted. He doesn't say they have been led astray. The reflexive form that the Hebrew is in is unambiguous. They did this to themselves. The weight of this word though goes deeper than the grammar because this is the word that is used in Genesis 6 before the flood to describe the brokenness of humanity that required the flood. That's the word that God reaches for when he looks down at Israel at the base of Sinai.

Israel was supposed to be God's answer to Genesis 6. They were the covenant people, the nation through whom God was going to begin undoing what the fall had set in motion, the new humanity called out of Egypt to image God into the world. And within 40 days of the covenant being ratified in blood, they have become what they were called to reverse. Not stumbled into a minor infraction. They've recapitulated the fall. Sinai and the golden calf is Eden all over again. And they chose the same way Adam and Eve did. They have corrupted themselves.

8 They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They have made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and sacrificed to it and said, 'These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!'

“They have turned aside quickly.” That's an important little detail. I think they turned aside quickly. The speed is part of the indictment. 40 days. The covenant ratified in Exodus 24 is barely a month old. Idolatry doesn't require years of slow drift. It requires one moment of choosing convenience over covenant.

9 And the Lord said to Moses, “I have seen this people, and behold, it is a stiff-necked people.

“Stiff-necked people.” This is the first occurrence of this phrase in all of the scripture, but certainly not the last. God looks at Israel and this is what he sees, a stiff-necked people.

This is a word, a phrase that describes the base of the neck on a beast of burden where a yoke sits. A stiff-necked animal resists the yoke, refuses direction, will not be led. This is bovine language. God is describing Israel using the vocabulary of the animal they just worshiped, right? They bowed to a calf and God now looks at them and sees…a calf. We become what we behold. We resemble what we revere. We're shaped by what we serve. They didn't just worship a calf. They became one. And God names it. The diagnosis is complete. They bowed to a calf. God looks at them and sees a calf.

But here's what is remarkable. That moment doesn't stay buried in Exodus. It echoes and ripples forward through the story. For centuries, Israel's poets and prophets return to this scene like a wound that just won't close because they understand that what happened at Sinai is not just a story about their ancestors. It's the story of what Israel keeps doing, what humanity keeps doing.

This Exodus 32 story of idolatry serves in the scriptures as the paradigm of idolatry to show us what idolatry looks like, how it debases us, how it dehumanizes us. And that's the connection between Romans 1 and Exodus 32 is how this story serves as paradigm in Psalm 106. I want to connect the dots between Exodus 32 and Romans 1 in Paul's thinking. Paul doesn't just invent this, right? He's seeing how this plays out. Psalm 106:

19 They made a calf in Horeb and worshiped a metal image. 20 They exchanged the glory of their God for the image of an ox that eats grass.

See, there it is. That word exchanged. This is the same word in the Septuagint, the Greek version of the scriptures that Paul would have read. When Paul would have read, "exchange the glory of God for the image of an ox," that's the same word that he uses in Romans 1 over and over again for the exchange. When he writes that humanity has exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things, he's reading Exodus 32 through Psalm 106. He sees the pattern and now he extends it because what happens at Sinai with a calf, Paul says, is what happens to every human being who suppresses the truth about God. It's the pattern that's established and it's the pattern that is unavoidable.

So, I want to go back to Romans 1 now and pick up in verse 26, continue Paul's thought. It says this:

26 For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. For their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature; 27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error. 28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done. 29 They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, 30 slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them.

I want to say again, don't make the mistake of reading this as a list of sins. Paul is not cataloging sins for the purpose of condemnation. He's describing a condition. He's showing us what a human being looks like when the image of God has been systematically exchanged for something lesser. Every item in this passage—the disordered desires, the broken relationships, the darkened mind, the hardened conscience—these are not the disease. They're the symptoms. The root is always the same. Something has taken the place of God and the whole person is reorganizing itself around that thing. The body, the mind, the will, the desire, everything downstream of worship begins to malfunction when the worship itself is disordered. It's not moralism. It's anthropology. Paul's not telling you what bad people do as much as he's trying to show you what happens to human beings who wrongly worship.

And the capstone of this, verse 32: "Though they know God's righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them." The final stage of dehumanization is not the act, it's the applause. "Woe to those who call evil good and good evil" (Isaiah 5:20). This is what happens. Doesn't happen out of the blue. It doesn't even require the activity of the enemy, although that's certainly there and we're going to go there next week. All it requires is us giving our hearts to something lesser than that they were made for. And the process begins.

The final stage of dehumanization is not the act, it's the applause. When a person has traveled far enough down the road, they lose not only the capacity to resist the idol, but the capacity to recognize the damage it's doing. They begin to celebrate what is destroying them. They call it freedom. They call it identity. They call it love. And all the while, the image is bending further inward. This is what Israel did at the base of the mountain. They rose up early. They were zealous. They were devoted. Idolatry never announces itself as destruction. It always announces itself as the liberator. And that's what makes it so deadly.

Now the good news of the gospel—because we need some good news of the gospel right now—is that Paul, in diagnosing the problem, also points us to the solution. The exchange, the wrong beholding, the wrong worship, the wrong glory shapes us into disordered beings. But we, in Second Corinthians 3:

18 And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit.

The solution has the same shape as the disease. If we're destroyed by beholding the wrong thing, we are restored by beholding the right one. If we're dehumanized by beholding lesser things, we are rehumanized by beholding the one who is the true human. If the image bends toward whatever we worship, then the recovery of the image requires the replacement of a new object of worship. Not a program, not a ritual, not a resolution or religious performance—a new image, a new icon. That's Colossians 1:15:

15 He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. 16 For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. 17 And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together. 18 And he is the head of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, that in everything he might be preeminent. 19 For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, 20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.

Jesus is the answer. Jesus is what every idol promised and every idol fails. He is the image that the idols are always trying to counterfeit, and He is the only one that delivers. This is the story that we've been telling all morning. Humanity was made to image God, to reflect his character, to bear his likeness, to exercise his dominion into the world. But we exchange that glory for something smaller, something we could manage, something we could carry. Jesus offers us a different way.

Israel made a god in their image and then became it. They'd been liberated from Egypt, but Egypt had not been liberated from them. Paul tells us that the recovery of the image requires a new object of worship—the true icon, the true image, the one who is the image of the invisible God in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. That is the invitation of the gospel. That is what Jesus offers us today, here now, the chance to be rehumanized.

So the question we can't leave without asking is: what are we carrying out of Egypt? What do our calves look like? I mentioned a few before, but I want to drill in on one—the prosperity gospel—because I think it ties into Exodus 32 so clearly.

The golden calf was not random. Bulls and calves in the ancient near east were symbols of strength, fertility, and wealth. They just came out of Egypt. They worshiped the bull god Apis. Israel didn't invent a new idol. They brought Egypt's idol with them into the covenant. The pursuit of financial security, comfort, and accumulation hasn't gone anywhere, and it certainly hasn't diminished. If anything, it's grown. But today it just has a new altar. We call it the prosperity gospel. It's the golden calf with a cross on it.

It doesn't abandon Jesus. It worships Jesus through the calf. It takes the promises of God, the covenant language of blessing, the resurrection from the dead, and credits them to a financial principle. Give and you will receive. Sow and you will reap. Name it and claim it. Aaron would recognize the liturgy immediately. He used the covenant name, too. He built an altar to Yahweh in front of a bull.

Here's what I need you to see this morning, and I'm okay if you don't like me for saying it: prosperity gospel is not a fringe aberration confined to television preachers and stadium churches. It's the formal theological version of what most of us do informally. The quiet unexamined assumption that God and financial security are the same thing. The idea that we tell ourselves that faithfulness to God and comfort must go hand in hand. That the blessed life looks like the life we imagine for ourselves. That God's vision for our life is the American dream, whatever version of that we are telling ourselves.

You see the danger in this is that we don't abandon God. We simply decide what God owes us, shape him into that image, and worship him on those terms. We build our altar accordingly. But Jesus will not share the altar. This is why we've got to confront our idols.

Jesus was remarkably clear about this. In fact, more clear than most of us are comfortable with. He said this straight out in the Sermon on the Mount:

24 No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money.

He's saying you can't do syncretism. This is not how God's going to accept your worship. This is not how it works. And I love that he doesn't say it's difficult. He doesn't say you can pull it off with enough discipline and intentionality. He says it's impossible. No one can serve two masters.

See, the prosperity gospel or the version of it that we tell ourselves is the attempt to make both the same master, to convince ourselves that what God wants and what we want must be identical. That the pursuit of wealth and the pursuit of God run on the same highway. They don't. They never have. The man who said so was not some aesthetic philosopher with nothing to lose. He was the image of the invisible God in whom all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. If anyone knew what God wanted, it was Jesus. And Jesus said, "You can't serve both. You can't do it." And yet we constantly try.

So today, as we're walking through the 40 days of Lent together, I'm simply asking myself, and I'm simply wanting you to ask: what are you beholding? What story are you telling yourself? How are you defining God and yourself in that story? What has your heart? Because what has your heart has your life, and we become what we worship—slowly, invisibly, from the inside out. We are made into the image of what we worship.

The same law that describes our ruin describes our restoration. If we will behold the glory of the Lord, we will be transformed into that image from glory to glory. It's in the present tense. It's ongoing. It's continuous. Which tells me, and this is such good news, God's not done with you yet. He's not done with me yet. I'm not a finished product, and neither are you. The image is bent, but it's not broken.

And every time we turn our eyes to Jesus, whether it's in this room, whether it's in the word, in prayer, in the breaking of bread, something happens—something that becomes visible, something real, something God himself is doing. We become rehumanized slowly from one degree of glory to another. That is the gospel. That's what Easter is about. And that's the process we need to lay hold of.

God, show me what has my heart. Not so I can simply identify it. Not even so I can reject it or repent of it but show me God so that I can replace it with the perfect image of Jesus the King. Show me God how to behold Jesus that I may become like him by his grace for our good and for his glory. Amen.