“If God has made us in his image, we have returned him the favor,” according to Voltaire. That is a waggish way of observing that the making of idols is not limited to fashioning a golden calf. God told Moses that the people “have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them, making for themselves a molten calf.” The human tendency is to determine what we want to do and they justify it by picking and choosing those parts of the Bible that we like and ignoring the parts we don’t like. That is idolatry — creating a god of our preferences. Jesus warned the people that they needed to sit under the word of Moses which speaks of God’s grace and mercy.
