I was asked last night if I could teach the lesson in my Primary class. I haven't had much time to prepare the lesson, but thankfully, the lesson mostly prepares itself, since the subject is the Ten Commandments. I'll remind the kids what the Ten Commandments are, what they mean, and how we can keep them. What I need to figure out is how much I want to say about what else was happening while Moses was receiving the Ten Commandments. Mainly, how much do I want to say about the Israelites making the Golden Calf?
I certainly need to at least mention that they did it, but I'm not sure if I can explain why they did it. I don't really understand idol worship, and I especially don't understand why Aaron, Moses' brother and spokesperson in Egypt who was the one who actually made the golden calf, went along with it. If you ask me, I think he should have known better and should have taught his people better. Then again, he was raised among the Egyptians, and the Egyptians worshiped idols. Maybe idol worship was ingrained in their culture. Besides, maybe they hadn't received the Ten Commandments yet and didn't know yet that idol worship was a sin.
The lesson manual uses the golden calf as an opportunity to explain the first and second of the ten commandments, and maybe I should, too, but I don't want to spend too much time going into to much detail about a situation that I don't really understand. I'd rather focus on the Ten Commandments, how they relate to the two great commandments, and what all these commandments mean for us, because I think that learning about what the commandments are and hat they mean for us now is far more important than learning about how a group of Israelites broke one or two of the commandments thousands of years ago. It's not really relevant anymore. Maybe we can learn from their example, but other than that, I don't see much point to even mentioning it at all.
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