2 And Aaron said unto them, Break off the golden earrings, which are in the ears of your wives, of your sons, and of your daughters, and bring them unto me.

3 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron.

4 And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt.

It does seem a strange thing that Aaron complied with the wishes of the Israelites and would fashion them a golden idol. Based on all the other accounts of him, it seems he was generally obedient to the Lord, so why would he consent to this? And why would the Lord trust him hereafter to serve as a priest after making this infraction?

Perhaps this was a point of failure for him, but one that didn’t destroy his soul. Perhaps he saw himself as a representative of the people, his duty being to execute their will whether for good or ill, regardless of his personal feelings. It does occur to me that Aaron might also have only complied with the people out of spite. Perhaps he saw the people’s insistence on damning themselves, and in his anger was happy to see them do it. Some of the later verses in this chapter might support this theory.

In any case, performing this idolatry was going to require the people to give up their most precious possessions. Their gold, their jewelry, and their heirlooms were all stripped from their families and given up to fashion the pagan idol.

Let us compare and contrast this to the first instruction God gave to Moses for the Israelites in building the tabernacle. Right at the start God told Moses that the Israelites would need to offer their riches if they were to build the holy place. But in those verses, God made it explicitly clear that this was to be a willful offering. They could choose to participate, or they could choose not to. No such freewill election is expressed here with the golden calf. Unlike God, the idol wouldn’t even exist without their gold, so if they insisted upon having it, sacrifice was mandatory.

Either path of worship, whether to the true God or to a false theology will require a cost of that which is most precious. The difference is that God only invites us to make that offering, whereas the false religion demands it of us! If we follow God, we will be taken only so far as we willingly submit to. If we follow evil, we will be taken for everything, whether we choose it or not.