What If You Could Choose Your Own God?

What if You Could Choose Your Own God?

Exodus 32:1-8 Romans 1:21-25

Theme: This sermon deals with how would you go about creating your own God if you didn’t want the one found in the Scriptures.

How many of you have ever created something from scratch? It could have been a cake, a drawing, a building, a table, an outfit, a boat or a host of other things. But when you finished, whether you realized it or not, you had created something unique.

There was not another one on the planet that was exactly like yours, even if you followed a plan or a design. God created us to be creators, because we are made in the image of God. God is best known for what God has created.

We are in our series, “What If”, in which we allow our minds to run wild with all kinds of possibilities. We have been in a sort of Twilight Zone with our what ifs. First it was “What If-Jesus had not come”.

Then it was “What If The Bible was a Lie”, and next Sunday it will be “What If You Didn’t Get Saved”, but today we are going to consider, “What if You Could Choose Your Own God.” We are going to build God with our own rules.

Today it’s popular to run into people who will say they are a very deep spiritual person, but they have nothing to do with the church or any organized religion. They just kind of know God for themselves. The idea of being spiritual but removed from the God of the Scriptures has been around for 1,000’s of years.

There were a group of people in the early part of the Bible who had been slaves for over 400 years in Egypt in Africa. They were cruelly beaten and oppressed. They were ordered to kill their male babies as soon as they were born. They prayed that God would deliver them because without God they had no hope.

God heard their prayer and sent two men, Moses and Aaron, to lead them out of Egypt and to destroy the Egyptian nation that oppressed them. God did a host of miracles to make this happen. God even miraculously provided food and water for the people in the desert as they traveled toward a land that was rich with trees, fruits, pastures, and grasslands.

God even spoke to these people out of smoking blazing mountain causing the mountain to quake. The people were terrified when they heard the voice of God for themselves.

They were at a distance from the mountain, but they saw lightning and heard the thunder. There was smoke rising from the mountain and the sound of a trumpet. They told Moses, “you go up on the mountain to talk to God for us. But do not have God speak to us or we will die.”

So Moses goes up on the mountain to talk with God and leaves Aaron in charge of the people. Everything is okay for a while, but then the hours turn into a day, and the day into days. Somebody said, “Moses never should went up that mountain, I had a bad feeling about that from the start.” Somebody else said, “I bet you anything he is somewhere lost on that mountain.”

Somebody else said, “You saw all that lightning and the mountain shaking with all that smoke. I bet you he got hit by lightning or got burned up by whatever was causing that smoke. I’m telling you right now, he’s probably up there dead.”

Somebody else said, “well whether he is dead or not, if he was planning on coming back, he should have been back by now.” The gossip got to flying around. People started getting scared. They wanted some protection.

Some of the people decided something had happened to Moses, so they needed a new god. Obviously the God that called Moses up the mountain he couldn’t save Moses, so they certainly were not going to put their trust in Him.

They told Aaron, “Come out here and make us Gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.” Unfortunately Aaron was quick to start to create a new god with the people’s help.

The people are now right where we are today in our series, “What If you could choose your own God.” Today like the people with Aaron, you can start from scratch on a new god. I think the best thing we should do as we choose to create a new is to ask ourselves some questions. That way we will know what ingredients we need to arrive at the kind of God that we want.