A Bitter Drink

A Bitter Drink

Women And The Gold Calf

Read: Exodus 32:1-20

Nicole touched a drop of the prescription medicine to her tongue and immediately gagged. How on earth would she get this bitter-tasting stuff down? She always had trouble swallowing medicine, but she needed something to ease her symptoms. Then Nicole remembered a song from the movie Mary Poppins about a spoonful of sugar helping medicine go down. Nicole slept better that night after learning the trick of chasing medicine with a spoonful of honey.

The women in today’s Bible passage had to swallow a bitter drink with nothing to help it go down. After Aaron crafted the gold calf, he announced that the next day would be a “festival to the LORD.” Perhaps the Israelites thought that they were worshiping God as they sacrificed offerings, but their festival soon dissolved into blatant immorality.

When God sent Moses back to deal with the situation, Moses angrily smashed the stone tablets on which God had written his commandments. He then burned the calf, ground it into fine powder, put it in water, and forced the people to drink it. As the women choked down the liquid, were they flooded with regret at this reminder that they had to bear the consequences of their sin?

Just as the natural world operates according to laws such as gravity, there are spiritual laws that also carry consequences when they are broken. Partying our way through life without giving a thought to God will result in an eternity of regret and separation from him. Mixing our faith with worship of other things is also dangerous. When we choose to do things our own way rather than God’s way, sooner or later we will bear the consequences of our foolishness. No matter how enjoyable sin appears at first, it eventually turns into a bitter drink that doesn’t go down easily.

They must eat the bitter fruit of living their own way, choking on their own schemes.

Proverbs 1:31