Salad Bar Faith
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Opening:
Does anyone here like a good salad bar? Okay, good, I’m not the only weirdo. Well, what makes a good salad bar? I’m glad you asked. A good salad needs
A variety of lettuce types
Lots of different vegetables
Different cheeses
Eggs
Dried cranberries
Sunflower seeds
A variety of dressings
If I get a salad, I want to make it the way I like it. I don’t want to order it off the menu, I want to take ingredients from different salads and make my own creation. In fact, there was one time someone watched me make a salad and then told me, “Wow, you really know how to turn something healthy to unhealthy.” To which I simply respond with, “Thank you!” I bring up a salad bar because, sadly, that is how our society today approaches faith. We like to see God as a salad bar where we choose the ingredients we like and leave the ones we don’t.
Today, I want to speak on the subject of Salad Bar Faith. Salad Bar Faith is having the freedom to pick and choose what we like. See, with Salad Bar Faith if we don’t like something about God, we just simply reshape Him into a form we do like. This is something that is very common in our society today, however, the tendency to re-imagine God in a form we prefer is not a new problem. It didn’t originate with us. In fact, it was so common that the 2nd Commandment of “God’s Top 10” was explicitly about this, and incidentally this was the 1st commandment Israel broke after receiving the commandments.
Text:
The 2nd commandment reads like this:
4 “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.
5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me,
The key word here is ‘image.’ This is a command to not add a shape in our minds to God that He has not given to Himself.
People sometimes read this commandment and assume it is just a restatement of the 1st commandment:
3 “You shall have no other gods before me.
And there is some overlap, but there is also a shade of difference.
The 1st commandment focuses on worshipping the wrong gods. The 2nd commandment is about worshipping the right God in the wrong way.
We violate the 2nd commandment when we add something to God that goes beyond, or contrary to, what God tells us about Himself in His word.
We also might be tempted to read this today and think, “Well, I don’t own any graven images. I don’t have any gold statues I bow down to, so I’m clear on this one.” But we break this command whenever we assign to God a form or an attribute He did not give to Himself.
We break this commandment whenever we define God as we want Him to be rather than as He is.
And I would suggest to you that there is probably no command we more consistently and routinely break than this one. It comes out like, “The way I see God is...” or “I don’t think God would really have a problem with...” or “I prefer to think of God as…” Who cares how we prefer to see God?!
When we allow our preferences or feelings determine how we see God we dishonor Him.
A good depiction of how ridiculous that is can be found in a scene from the movie Talladega Nights, where Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly go on a rampage about how they like to see Jesus. (Quote what they say)
If someone spoke like that in real life, we would say they are ridiculous. Yet, if we’re honest, most if not all of us are guilty, at some point or another, of seeing God through our preferences. And the truth is, it doesn’t matter how we like to see God, God is who He is. When God appeared to Moses and Moses asked Him His name, God didn’t say, “Moses, I am whoever you need me to be.” He said, “I am who I am.”
Notice, in this commandment, that God equates re-shaping God into a new image with hating Him. Because when we do that we are saying, “God, I don’t like the real You, I need You to be this for me to love You.”
Imagine if your spouse or significant other found out that you routinely told your friends, “I like to see my spouse as… (and fill in a description that isn’t them)...
It’s an insult to God when we have to reshape Him into something else in order to love or desire Him.
And here’s a little litmus test to help you determine whether or not you are doing this.
How often does God contradict you, confuse you, or make you mad?
If that’s not happening, chances are you’re not really letting God be God, you’re only re-imagining Him as you would want Him to be.
Any time we are in a relationship with a real person, they are going to confuse us, contradict us and make us mad. It’s why marriage, especially the first couple of years, can be very hard.
See, when we start to date a person, psychologists tell us, we get to know a part of them—and we like that part, and then we fill in all the gaps of what we don’t know about them with what we want them to be. This all gets shattered, of course, in the 1st 6 months of marriage, because the real person is usually not like our imagination. That’s why I’ve heard it said that love is a dream and marriage is the alarm clock. Real people in real relationships do things that surprise and contradict us. How much more so with God?
God’s ways are not our ways, so sometimes He won’t make sense to us, He will contradict us, and He will make us mad.
The Bible is a book that offends. It offends every culture and every generation, just in different ways. It’s an equal opportunity offender—and that’s what you’d expect if the Bible really is the Word of God and we are a fallen people.
To really know God, we have to be willing for God to say some things to us that we don’t want to hear. Because, only then can we hear from Him the things we desperately do want to hear.
This was the 1st commandment the children of Israel broke. Let me walk you through that story, because it gives us insight into where the temptation to distort God comes from and the spiritual damage that it causes.
Exodus 32:1–24
1 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
List what God did for the Israelites from Egypt until Exodus 32
This all happened in the month leading up to Exodus 32, BUT NOW they think God has abandoned them because He doesn’t send Moses back exactly when they expected.
2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.”
3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron.
4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.”
Important: It’s not like they had “switched teams” altogether. They are still trying to “worship the Lord.” In fact, the bull was something God had told them to sacrifice in worship to Him.
To ancient peoples, the bull represented strength, and that’s what the Israelites most wanted right then, so they are attempting to reshape God into a form that guaranteed to them that sense of power and protection they craved. So, they elevated one attribute of God above all the others.
So, vs. 5, Aaron makes the calf and declares “a festival to the Lord”
6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.
And these just so happen to be the very things God had told them to use in worship of Him! So, again, this is not brand-new religion, but the worship of God in a new-and-improved way.
The word “revelry” here in Hebrew has sexual connotations. After this new and improved worship approach, they all got hammered and then got jiggy with it, which is not how God prefers His worship services to end. Any time one of our worship services ends with a bunch of us with our clothes off, things have not gone according to plan!
So, God tells Moses in vs. 7, you better get down there. The people have corrupted themselves.
19 When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain.
20 And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.
Then, Moses says, “Aaron, what have you done?”
22 “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil.
23 They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’
This is classic passive-aggressiveness. He is very subtly trying to blame Moses! “You were gone a long time, Moses!” And then, as if his defense couldn’t possibly get any dumber, he says,
24 So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
Seriously?! Is Aaron in middle school? “Yeah, we just threw it in the fire, and whoa, what do you know?! A golden calf! It must have been God! You see my situation here, Moses? You were gone, and apparently God provided, so we had to worship it.”
Body:
I’ve heard some pretty dumb excuses before – remember when Winona Ryder got caught shoplifting and she claimed she had to try it to prepare for an upcoming role in a movie? Or the Canadian woman who got pulled over for drunk driving and the officer pointed out she was so drunk she was seeing double, and she claimed it was okay because she had been driving with one eye shut to overcome that? But this one by Aaron, is among the worst of excuses. Anyways, all this reveals their Salad Bar Faith.
2 Questions to Ask to See if We Have Salad Bar Faith:
1. Does fear direct my faith? (Exodus 32:1)
*Israel created this image because the promises of an invisible God were not enough for them, not when there were real enemies around and real needs to be met.
They felt like they needed something more than God’s promises to protect them.
Fear leads us to do dumb things.
Think about it. How many dumb choices have you made in your life because you gave into the pressure of fear?
I know I have:
When I bought my first house.
When I bought a bad Jeep.
When I thought I couldn’t afford to give.
Moses isn’t back yet! What do we do?! Let’s create a God!
If we aren’t truly connecting with God on a regular basis, eventually fear will direct our faith.
Salad bar faith always grows out of distrust—where we feel like we absolutely need something beyond God and His promises, so we reconstruct God in a way that guarantees that He’ll give us those very things.
2. Does compromise direct my faith? (Exodus 32:2-6)
In the 1st commandment, to have no other gods before God, we identify something we need more than God, but rather than reject God altogether, in breaking the 2nd commandment, we just reshape God into a form where He guarantees that He will give us that thing in the way that we want it.
For example:
Prosperity Gospel
Conservative, Cultural Christianity.
Family Stability
Liberalism
Divorce
Love is Love
#SpeakYourTruth
God is truth. And sometimes, truth is hard to handle. But truth is always right.
The tragedy with these cthought is that when God doesn’t do one of these things, we complain that God isn’t keeping up His end of the bargain and even suppose that maybe He doesn’t exist!
The irony of that, is we lost faith in a god that never existed in the 1st place, because he was just a projection of our fears, desires and compromises!
Or we lose confidence in God because we evaluate His love according to our made-up terms rather than receiving the love given to us on His terms.
Just because God doesn’t do things the way we think He should doesn’t mean His love and control is not at work in our life.
Closing:
St. Augustine said you can identify your wrong views of God by simply tracing worry, stress, and dissatisfaction in your life back to their source. These things are like smoke from a fire.
So, here is my challenge for you this week. Do just that, find the places of stress, anxiety, bitterness, or unrest in your life, the places where you are most tempted to sin and trace them back to their source and I guarantee you they’ll come from a graven image of God.
Are you worried? Embrace His sovereignty.
Do you feel insecure? Embrace the promises of Christ. He says He has chosen you and promised to make you sufficient for whatever task He assigns you.
Do you find yourself being judgmental a lot? Embrace what the cross teaches you about how sinful you were when God saved you.
Are you not naturally generous? Think about the generosity God poured out for you when He saved you.
Are you materialistic? Think about how richer a treasure we possess in Him and how little life’s treasures matter in light of that.
8 Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them.
tells us that we become like what we worship.
If we worship money, we become materialistic and anxious all the time about your savings.
If we worship family, we become co-dependent and obsessive about our children and we annoy the heck out of them.
If we worship romance, then we are always desperate for attention, or depressed that we’re not in a good relationship, or dissatisfied with our marriage.
How can we experience deep change in our heart when God is simply the product of our heart?
If we only allow God to tell us what we want to hear, He will never be able to tell us the things we truly need to hear.
We want to hear acceptance from and have fellowship with the infinitely large God. That was what you were created for! But that God will not just be a reflection of our desires, who wants what we want and is not that much smarter than us. A God of that size, wisdom, purity and love will often contradict us, confuse us, make us mad, and routinely blow our mind.
So, that’s your choice: A god small enough to be understood or a God big enough to be worshipped!
Are you in a posture of humble surrender toward Him—believing what He says even about the hard things, the difficult things, the things you find disagreeable and offensive—or are you supposing that you can come up with an image of Him that is better than the real thing?
So, what do you choose? A fake god that never confuses and contradicts us, but who ultimately cannot deliver us in the day of trouble—OR THE REAL GOD who is beyond our understanding and control, sometimes confuses and contradicts us, but has the power to save and sustain us.
Prayer
Alter Call
Salvation Opportunity