Gift of Gold
A Reflection
What Images Reveal
To be human is to be driven by image.
In the late 1800s, thousands of Americans were captivated by one such image: gold. The promise of glittering riches in the California landscape sent families packing wagons westward in pursuit of luck and luxury. Gold fever wasn’t just an economic movement—it was a full-blown cultural imagination with many imagining a cheat code to an easier life. But behind the sparkle lay devastation. The land was scarred, Indigenous and Mexican communities were displaced, and Chinese immigrants were forced into brutal labor. All because a nation fell in love with an image—one that reflected not beauty, but greed.
Images tell us what a culture values. Gold has always carried the image of wealth and worth—shiny, untouchable, rare. But Scripture shows us that even the most sacred images can become dangerous when they try to replace God. In the book of Exodus, when God frees the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, he tells them to collect gold from their masters as a symbol of prosperity in the midst of their freedom. By Exodus 31:1-4, God anoints Bezalel as the first person “filled with the Spirit of God”—a master craftsman charged to design furnishings of gold for the Tabernacle, a traveling sanctuary where God would meet with his people.
But the wilderness has a way of revealing what we truly worship.
The Golden God?
In the long silence of Moses’s mountain meeting with God, the Israelites grew impatient with the Tabernacle plan discussed in 31:1-4, and by 32:1-4 they begged Aaron to make them “a god/gods”.
In their waiting, they craved something visible—something familiar. Egypt had taught them that gods needed to be seen, carved, and carried. Egyptian monuments polluted the skyline. Now, they were being stretched to have faith in an invisible God. So they melted down their blessings and built an image they could manage.
Let’s pause on that for a second. Gold itself is mysterious. Many scientists theorize that heavy metals like gold formed when two neutron stars collided deep in space. This collision flung debris (including these heavy metals in many different directions and embedded them deep in the earth. Gold is literally not of this world.
The Israelites didn’t know that, of course—but they knew it shimmered. They knew it held power. So, they shaped heaven’s metal into something earthly—a golden calf—to represent the divine. In Exodus 32:5, Aaron spiritualizes the Golden Calf, declaring that it is dedicated to the Lord. Archeologists have a hard time deciding whether this calf followed the tradition of giving ancient gods animal sidekicks or representing the god themselves. Either way, they wanted an image they could touch, predict, and control.
The True Image
Colossians 1:15 says,
“The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.”
God didn’t need a golden calf. He already had a plan to send a true image—Jesus. The One who would leave heaven’s glory to dwell among us, to “tabernacle” with humanity. Jesus is the radiance, the perfection, the living gold of God—pure, untarnished, and eternal. Where the Israelites built an idol to fill their insecurity, Jesus became the image that would finally reveal the invisible.
The silence and uncertainty of life still test us the same way. When God feels distant, we reach for substitutes—our careers, our politics, our relationships, our platforms. We may not cast molten idols, but we forge our own golden calves in subtler ways. When your image depends on temporary things, they stop being reflections of God and become replacements for Him.
The truth is, any image we construct apart from Christ is just a glittering knockoff—bright enough to catch our eye, hollow enough to leave us empty. Maybe the question isn’t if we worship an image, but which one.
Take with You
When the Magi offered gold to Baby Jesus, they likely had no idea how poetic that gift really was. They didn’t grasp how far that gold had traveled across galaxies—or how far Jesus had traveled from heaven—to meet in that single moment.
For the Magi, gold was simply the proper gift for royalty. When the Magi’s journey began, their first stop was the palace of King Herod. From the outside, it seemed obvious! Herod the king was surrounded by splendor. But he was more like fool’s gold: bright on the surface, hollow underneath.
True gold, the rare kind, is never sitting out in plain sight. You have to dig for it, strain for it, work your way through dirt and uncertainty to uncover it. That is what made their discovery so shocking: the real King wasn’t wrapped in luxury at all. He was tucked away in a simple Bethlehem home, surrounded not by nobility but by villagers and starlight. God hid the priceless in the ordinary.
Excavate your everyday. Where is Christ shimmering quietly around you? How is Jesus waiting to be discovered—not in palaces, but in the places you overlook?
Colossians 1. (n.d.). In Holy Bible: New International Version.
Exodus 31-32. (n.d.). In Holy Bible: New International Version.
“ America the Story of Us: Gold Rush | History.” YouTube, History Channel, 20 May 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDkqvqqjMAA.
Klara Moskowitz. “ SPACE LAB: Where Did All the Gold in the Universe Come From?” YouTube, Scientific American, 5 Jan. 2023, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hSQsHIYEQf4. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.
