“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.”

(Exodus 32:1)

Moses was gone a long time. High up on the mountain, out of sight, alone above the clouds, he had disappeared from view. In the plain below the people waited and waited. The weeks passed and they began to wonder if Moses was ever coming back. Their plan was interrupted. Their line of march to the Promised Land had been halted. Their forward progress was at a standstill. The dreary, unoccupied hours moved slowly past. The people grew restive, impatient. “Where is this Moses?” they began to ask one another. “What has become of him?”

Finally to Aaron, Moses brother and next in command, they said: “Up, make us gods to go before us and let’s get on with our journey.” So Aaron, acquiescing to their impatience took the earrings and trinkets of the people and made for them a golden calf, after the image of the fertility gods of the Egyptians, Assyrians, and pagan Canaanite tribes. Then the foolish rebels fell down and worshipped their gilded idol.

But just as the people were debauching themselves in an orgy of licentious revel about the golden calf, down came Moses from Sinai, the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments in his hands, and fire in his eyes. In despair and indignation the great champion of moral righteousness hurled down the tablets of the law smashing them into thousands of pieces, just as Israel had already, in spirit and in deed, broken the law which was the basis of her covenant relationship with God.

Now this is a quaint, old story, you will say, about a primitive people out of a far off antiquity, but why do you waste our time this Sunday morning with it? What earthly meaning can it have for us in this advanced and enlightened day? Oh, but here is a story timely and urgent for us, placarding the perpetual perils of human impatience with God and His ways with man.

Our life, like Israel’s, is not an uninterrupted course, a steady forward march from victory to victory. We have our long unexpected waits, the trying delays for our plans and purposes: the illness when return to health comes so slow; the lingering sorrow when the promised comfort does not come; the stretched out months of family trouble, misunderstanding and broken relationships which do not improve, the darkness of perplexity and uncertainty into which the prayed for divine guidance does not shine, the wished-for opportunity, the one good break in business we’ve hopefully expected which never arrives. Yes, we too know the forty days and forty nights of soul travail that drag slowly past and our patience is worn thin.

God knows patience comes hard. There are thousands of things to try our patience, but Israel’s experience teaches us that impatience is a dangerous disposition in which we dare not indulge. See Israel’s tragic fate. Patience comes hard, but we must struggle and pray and ask God for patience, for many are the spiritual perils which lurk in impatience’s dark shadows.

Impatience is a danger signal — which warns us to beware of what is taking place at a deeper level in our souls. Impatience is a symptom of critical spiritual illness. First of all, impatience reveals that we are forgetting our primary and continuing duty of thanksgiving to God for all His mercies to us. Had Israel remembered all she owed to this Moses and His God, the Lord Jehovah, would it not have cooled her hot impatience? Who had championed the hopeless cause of a captive people in Egyptian slavery? Who had shaken the very foundations of worldly power in the mighty Egyptian empire and miraculously lead a cowed, defenseless multitude through the parted waters of the Red Sea to safety? Who had supplied meat and bread and drink in the barren desert to that horde of helpless displaced persons?

If only Israel had remembered to be grateful to God for all His past mercies and for the leader He had raised up in her hour of desperate need, would not that remembrance have stilled her soul in patience? Of yes, impatience is the brutish disposition, the muttering of the ungrateful heart that remembers not the hand that has fed it and heart that has cherished it.

By the same token, patience is the virtue of the saints, the characteristic mark of the Christian martyrs, who remained steadfast, true, persevering under all adversities. St. Paul, in the midst of one of his many disappointing and heartbreaking adventures, wrote to some friends: “God has rescued me from so terrible a death; He rescues me still, and I rely upon Him for the hope that He will continue to rescue me.” No difficulty that ever arose, no disappointment that ever befell him, no delay that turned the garden of his life into a desert wilderness, could obscure from Paul’s mind the vivid memory of all his wonderworking God had done for him. He looked back across his life and at every turn he could see God stretching out His helping hand to him — now to open up a way of escape, now to ward off the lethal blow, now to comfort him in loneliness and loss, now to raise him up from a feverish bed. The remembrance of all God’s mercies of the past, His amazing grace that had been sufficient for Paul in every emergency kept him patient, steadfast, and calm when others were losing their patience. Paul could see

 — behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow

Keeping watch above his own.

Impatience is a perilous, spiritual state for it reveals an unremembering, ungrateful heart. Who of us is there, in the most desperate of straits, that cannot remember in past mercies of our God? It is His wisdom that hath created us, His love that hath redeemed us, His patience that has borne with us, His providence that now sustains us.

Then too, impatience is an alarming disposition in which the disciplined Christian dare not indulge for it is essentially a momentary repudiation of faith.  If He has forsaken us — we will forsake Him. When the guiding hand of God was for a season obscured from Israel’s vision and His way hidden, Israel’s impatience manifested itself in rebellion. “Up,” they said to Aaron, “make us other gods who will go before us.” Contrast these restless, impatient Israelites on the plains about Mt. Sinai who cannot wait out their 40 days delay but impatiently renounce their leader and their God with the Prophet Habakkuk, who in the midst of a desperate time, saw a cruel pagan power destroying God’s righteous people. Habakkuk couldn’t understand what God was doing. Was he not Lord of the Universe? Why did not the eternal judge bring judgment in the midst of time? Why was justice and mercy and salvation delayed? Habakkuk could not help asking the question which rose in his hard pressed soul, but Habakkuk would not give himself up to hot impatience. When the answer did not come immediately and the judgment from God was delayed, and times were out of joint, Habakkuk said: “I will get me up on my watchtower and I will wait to see what the Lord hath to say to me … the just shall live by His faith.” “I cannot understand what is happening,” says Habakkuk, “but I will not renounce my faith. I will hold on for the answer will surely come, and the deliverance will arrive.”

Impatience is a dangerous state of mind for it is essentially a momentary repudiation of the faith.

And finally, impatience is a perilous state for the soul of man for it always issues ultimately in idolatry. This is the startling, tragic lesson from Israel’s impatience at Sinai. Not only is impatience a sure sign of forgotten gratitude and wavering faith, but of impending idolatry.

Impatient over Moses delay, the people demand of Aaron: “Make us gods who will go before us.” So the earrings of the people were gathered and golden calf was fashioned and the people fell down and worshipped it. Whenever man in his impatience turns from the true God, who invariably refuses to fit into man’s little plans and his erratic time schedule, man invariably becomes an idolater. He must have a deity to worship. The only God he can make is one in his own image or in the image of his pagan neighbor’s gods. He raises to the place of veneration and worship and supreme value his own ideas and purposes.

And always there are false priests like Aaron and false prophets like Amaziah who will cater to a people’s impatience and help them to construct out of their material values an idol to worship and, out of their own perverted minds and corrupt practices, devise a new gospel for them to believe, a new code of morals and ethics for them to practice when they repudiate the everlasting moral law of God.

Hitler grew impatient with the church over its old fashioned ideas of human dignity, even for Jews, and its preoccupation with peace, justice, and mercy. And Hitler readily found priests to serve at his altar of expedience and prophets to proclaim his new gospel of a super race and of blood and hate. Impatience is a mood we dare not indulge for it ultimately issues in idolatry.

The very essence of our holy religion is the opposite of impatience — it is the demand for man to submit himself to God. Submit to God’s moral law revealed in the Ten Commandments. Submit to God’s timetable, revealed only a step at a time, for in this life we must walk not by sight, but by faith. Submit to God’s redeeming and forgiving love. Just accept it, surrender to it, that’s all we can do.

1. S. Lewis, in discussing the manner of his conversion to Christianity after long years of rebellious flight from God, says that the: “Amiable agnostics will talk cheerfully about ‘man’s search for God’, but to me, as I was then, they might as well have talked about the mouse’s search for the cat … You must picture me, night after night, alone in that room in Magdalen, feeling whenever my mind lifted, even for a second, from my work, that steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I had so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I feared greatly had at last come upon me. In the Trinity term of 1929, I gave in and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed; perhaps that night the most reluctant and dejected convert in all England.”

This was Francis Thompson’s experience, you will remember, for how movingly he wrote of it in The Hound of Heaven.

I fled him, down the nights and down the days;

I fled from Him down the arches of the years;

I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways

Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears

I hid from Him and under running laughter.

Up visited hopes I sped;

And shot, precipitated

Adown titanic glooms of chasmed fears,

From those strong feet that followed, followed after.

But with unhurrying chase

And unperturbed pace,

Deliberate speed, majestic instancy

They beat — and a voice beat

More instant than the feet —

‘All things betray thee, who betrayest me.’

“The one principle of hell,” said George MacDonald, “is ‘I am my own.’” So, there is no place, either in heaven above or in the life of Christian faith on the earth beneath, for self-assertion, for willful human pushiness, for the impatience of man which forgets his debt of gratitude to a merciful providence, or renounces his faith in an all wise and loving divine plan, and plunges into degenerate idolatry.

Therefore, in our patience let us possess our souls.