Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in a ring;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ’t is centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

There are a lot of interesting things going on in the story of the golden calf.

First, I find it interesting that only a few verses before God instructed Moses that Bezalel would be his craftsman. But, while Moses is on the mountain the people ask Aaron to craft an image of worship for them. The people asked the wrong person to be the craftsman for the community. When we don’t listen to God; we don’t select the right people.

Second, Moses asks God not to destroy the people, then, once Moses saw for himself what the people were doing; Aaron has to talk Moses out of destroying the people. Moses and God shared the same anger over what the people were doing.

Finally, and this is the one most people pick up on, Aaron says “I threw [the gold] into the fire, and out came this calf.” Whenever we do what we knew we were not supposed to do, we have a tendency to try to disassociate ourselves from our actions. The blame shifting is strikingly similar to Adam and Eve after they ate the front. I think the take away from this is that God already knows when we messed up; be a man (or woman) and admit it and ask for forgiveness.