Sermon: You Cannot Serve Both God and Mummy: Pharaoh Hunger and the Draw of a Golden-Calf Spirituality (Exodus 32:1-35) -- By: Russell D. Moore

Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 12:3 (Fall 2008)
Article: Sermon: You Cannot Serve Both God and Mummy: Pharaoh Hunger and the Draw of a Golden-Calf Spirituality (Exodus 32:1-35)
Author: Russell D. Moore


Sermon: You Cannot Serve Both God and Mummy: Pharaoh Hunger and the Draw of a Golden-Calf Spirituality (Exodus 32:1-35)1

Russell D. Moore*

*Russell D. Moore is Senior Vice President for Academic Administration and Dean of the School of Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he also serves as Associate Professor of Christian Theology and Ethics. He also serves as a preaching pastor at Highview Baptist Church in Louisville, where he ministers weekly. Dr. Moore is the Executive Director of the Carl F. H. Henry Institute for Evangelical Engagement and a Senior Editor of Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. He is the author of The Kingdom of Christ: The New Evangelical Perspective (Crossway, 2004).

Their little eyes widened as they pressed their faces to the glass. The room was dark, except for a single light shining on the shriveled corpse in front of them. There the thing was, mouth open, eyes still and dead. Their voices quivered as they asked two questions. The first, “Dad, what is it?” I replied, “She’s a mummy.” The second, “Dad can we go now?”

We walked out the doors of the room—the museum here on the campus of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. It was late on a Friday night, after a new student orientation event and I was walking back to my office with my two six year-old sons. Benjamin asked a third set of questions, with his voice cracking: “Dad, why do you have a mummy at your work? Aren’t you scared to be here?”

I reassured them that, of course, I wasn’t scared. Mummies aren’t real—at least, not real in the way we’re accustomed to seeing them in the black-and-white horror films. Mummies are dead. They can’t hurt anyone. Despite the fact that these boys kept looking over their shoulders, I told them, “One can’t be chased by a mummy.”

But is that entirely true?

The text in front of us is a very familiar passage to those of us who’ve followed Christ for any length of time. The people of Israel are dancing around a golden calf. We instinctively know this is wrong. We know this is idolatry. We know it kindles the anger of Israel’s God. What we miss is that this is no one-time incident. Instead, the entire Bible points back to this incident—repeatedly—as a paradigm of rebellion.

This act of worshipping a cow is exactly what the Apostle Paul tells us is true of all people in all places everywhere—a pattern of turning away from the Creator and toward the creature, even to the image of a beast (Rom 1:18-25).

The horror of this account is even worse tha...

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