Aaron and the Golden Calf

We used this story to illustrate the truth that God is Spirit—not a golden idol.

We first introduced Moses, and said that at the time of our story, he had climbed Mount Sinai to meet with God.  Our Moses made climbing motions all the way to a chair and that sat down for the time being.  So he has been gone a while now, and the people are starting to get nervous.  They remembered how God had led them around with a pillar of cloud by day (everyone follows a leader holding up a pillar of cloud) and a pillar of fire by night (another round of the room, following the pillar of fire).  But now, no cloud, no fire, and no Moses!  But Moses’ brother is here, let’s ask him what to do.

Ah yes—before the story began, we passed out “jewelry”—necklaces, bracelets and rings—made of shiny gold twisty-ties.  So now Aaron collects everyone’s jewelry in a bag.  Then he gets out a stool, puts some “firewood” on it, and orange scraps for fire, and finally a large pot.  He dumps the jewelry into the pot and stirs it for a while.  Then he reaches into the pot, behind the piece of aluminum foil that is lining part of the pot, and pulls out a shiny gold cow.  He announces that this hereby represents the god who brought them out of Egypt.  He sticks it on the wall, then goes and gets a bottle of wine and pretends to share it with everyone.  Then Moses shows up, clutching a styrofoam tablet bearing the ten commandments.  He is furious, and tries very hard to break the tablet over someone’s head but the tablet is too strong.  He is, however, able to take the cow off the wall and rip that to pieces!  He demands that everyone apologize to God for representing Him as a cow, so everyone pulls their ears and says sorry.  End of story.

Aaron had gone around collecting people’s gold jewelry, so our game was going around collecting gold things that had been hidden (not too carefully) in the side bedrooms: lemons!

Then for the craft, we talked about how, in the real Bible story (as opposed to the tweaked-for-the-skit story), Moses had ground up the golden calf, sprinkled it over water, and made the people drink it.  First we ground up some not-gold things: everyone got plastic cups full of sugar cubes and a little bottle to smash them up with.  We needed a full cup of sugar, so there was lots of pounding.  I was afraid the kids might get bored with this but everyone stayed on task and asked for more cubes when theirs got ground down—cool!  Finally we turned our attention to the gold things.  Well over a year, someone had given me a gift of an electric juicer.  Well, here at home, if I need to squeeze one or two lemons, I am certainly not going to drag out an electric juicer!  So I’d never used it.  But for having kids help squeeze a dozen lemons, it was wonderful!  Everyone enjoyed this too.  Then we mixed the lemon juice & the sugar with water & enjoyed our lemonade!  Very popular craft!