Monday 21 December 2009

When the cat’s away…

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. – Exodus 32v6

…the mice will play. We use that idiom all the time to talk about how people act when an authority figure or one who holds power is not present.

Look how powerful the flesh is. Moses was gone, and with him any kind of reminder about who God is. So what did they do? Did they remain faithful to God and trust Him? Did they rest in Him and carry on in their faith?

No – they offered to their false god, sat down to eat and drink, and then they rose up to play. What was going on? How could they do this, with a man like Aaron supposedly still God’s man for the job?

It really is pretty simple. These were flesh focused people. When God was out of their lives their first thought was to gratify their flesh.

Sadly, we can do the same type of thing even when we KNOW God is here. If we are not careful our flesh can be so powerful and we can be so weak that instead of following Him we too ‘rise up and play.’ We somehow think that we can actually hide from Him!

The problem is that God saw their actions. Even a bigger problem for us is that God sees our actions too. We cannot hide our ‘playing’ from Him.

May we choose in those time to follow the spirit and not ‘rise up and play’ ignoring the One who died for us.

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