Acts 7:35-42

³⁵Stephen kept on talking to them. He said, “You see, God’s people didn’t listen to Moses before. They said, ‘Nobody said you can be our boss or our judge.’ But later God sent Moses back to save them, and to be their boss. And God sent his angel messenger to help Moses, the same angel that made that little tree keep burning with fire.

³⁶So all our people followed Moses out of Egypt. He did powerful things in Egypt for them to see, and again when they came to the water called the Red Sea he did a powerful thing to let them cross it, and he did great things for them while they walked around in the desert for 40 years.

³⁷That same man, Moses, said to the people of Israel, ‘God will get one of your own people, and send him to tell you his message. He will be like me.’

³⁸All our grand-fathers followed Moses together through the desert. And God sent an angel messenger to Moses at the big hill called Sinai, to tell him the good message that has life, and then Moses told our grand-fathers that same message.

³⁹But our grand-fathers wouldn’t listen to Moses. They didn’t want him to be their leader. They just wanted to go back to Egypt.

⁴⁰So they told Aaron, ‘Make us statues of gods, and we will get them to lead us back to Egypt. We followed that Moses out from Egypt, but now he is not here. What happened to him? We don’t know.’

⁴¹So then they made a statue that looked like a baby cow. They brought money and things to it, and they had a big party to show respect to the thing they made.

⁴²So God turned away from our grand-fathers. He left them, and they showed respect to the sun and the moon and the stars. Some time later a man that told God’s messages wrote about it in God’s book. He wrote this, ‘You people of Israel, you were in the desert for 40 years, and at that time, did you bring animals to kill and give to me? No, they were not for me.