Hey Church!
Welcome back to the weekend newsletter! Can you believe it’s already Friday? It’s time to start preparing our hearts and minds to gather for worship on Sunday once again.
BIBLICAL THEOLOGY OF WORSHIP: WEEK THREE
This week I want to look at the Torah and make note of just a few of the lessons these first five books of the Bible teach us about worship, giving minimal background as needed.
GENESIS: Worship is a way of being, now requiring a mediator.
In the Garden of Eden, humanity had unmediated access to the holy presence of God. He walked with them in the garden, spoke with them, and gave them important roles to play in sustaining and expanding His creative order. Worship was a way of being, and it was perfect. God was glorified in Adam and Eve’s work-as-worship and, in turn, they reflected the beauty and holiness of their Creator.
The fall broke all of that. Their work would become a labor of sweat and blood, their fruitfulness would be wrought with pain, their descendants would be continually hostile toward one another and, not unlike an earthly divorce, from that point on the Bride could only commune with her Bridegroom by faith in a heavenly-court-provided Mediator.
Immediately following the expulsion from Eden, the Bible tells us that Cain and Abel built an altar and brought offerings to God. God accepted Abel’s offering because it was offered by faith but rejected Cain’s because it was not. As Genesis says of Abraham, Abel’s faith, too, was credited to him as righteousness, and thus his offering of worship was pleasing to the Lord.
One lesson we can learn from Genesis, then, is that our worship is rooted in faith in the Mediator God has provided.
EXODUS: Both the object and means of our worship are provided by God alone.
God’s people were enslaved in Egypt for more than 400 years. God heard their cries for help and raised up a new mediator, Moses. Just before the exodus, the people were passed over if their doorposts and lintels were covered in the blood of a spotless lamb. In this clear prefiguring of Christ, we can see that Israel’s worship was a matter of obedience and also of God’s provision–of a Lamb who would take away the people’s sin. Moses commanded Pharaoh to release them for the express purpose of persisting in their worship of Yahweh.
The book of Exodus also contains the first song ever recorded in Scripture. The Song of Moses was a song of praise that the people sang after they crossed the Red Sea on dry ground. There is so much more to be said about this event–the echoes of creation, the future deliverance Jesus has promised to us, and all the symbols of water, spirit, and light. But, for now, I’ll only make one more note on Exodus, as we find another important lesson for worship in the Ten Commandments.
The First Commandment, “Have no other gods before me” and Second, “Do not make for yourselves any carved images” (i.e. idols). Have you ever looked at those two commands and wondered, “What’s the difference?” Would having another god before the true God be a form of idolatry and vice versa?
Historically, there have been two camps of interpretation here. The first is to list the Commandments in the way that you and I would most likely recognize, i.e. 1 – No other gods, 2 – No idols. The second is to say there is no difference at all between One and Two, so they should be counted together as one, which is precisely what many in the Roman Catholic and Lutheran traditions have done. They took Commands 1 and 2 together to read something like, “You shall have no other gods before me and not fashion for yourselves idols.” And then, in order to keep the number at the unanimously-accepted ten, they split the 10th Commandment (do not covet) into two.
We hold to the first interpretation–that the First and Second Commandments give two similar but distinctly different instructions. This is important to understand with regard to worship because while the First Commandment orders the object of our worship, the Second orders the means of our worship. In Reformed circles, this Second Commandment forms the basis for what is known as the Regulative Principle of Worship–that God, not man, gets to decide how He ought to be worshiped.
LEVITICUS
Exodus gave us God’s moral law in the 10 Commandments. Leviticus reveals His ceremonial law, which are guidelines for Priestly duties that would allow God’s presence to continue to dwell with His people.
One thing we can glean from this (difficult) book is that the Law is onerous. The writer of Hebrews will later explain that God could never be pleased by the blood of goats, and Paul even said that the Law was given to condemn, not to save. That’s because not one of us could keep God’s Law perfectly. We were doomed from the beginning! It is meant to teach us that 1) God is holy and 2) we are not. Furthermore, it teaches us to look with hope for the promised One who would keep the Law perfectly and set all the broken things right.
The central chapter of Leviticus is chapter 16, in which God instructs the High Priest to observe an annual Day of Atonement. It is here that we see Jesus most vividly. In short, all of the sacrificial ordinances, responsibilities of the Priest, and even the furnishings of the Tabernacle were all just types and shadows of what Jesus would fulfill in His earthly ministry (Heb. 10:1-10).
NUMBERS: 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, learning to trust and obey what God has provided.
One example of when “unauthorized” worship of Yahweh resulted in being struck down by God is in Numbers 3:4. Nadab and Abihu were sons of Aaron and priests who served in the Tabernacle. All that Scripture tells us about the tragic event surrounding their death is that they “offered unauthorized fire before the LORD.” Still, what the description lacks in details, it tells us all that we need to know about rightly-ordered worship: it was not an idol they were worshiping but Yahweh by inappropriate means. The means matter!
DEUTERONOMY: Deuteros (Second) + Nomos (Law) = the second giving of the Law.
Moses prepares a new generation to enter into the Promised Land by reminding them of God’s commands and the sins of their parents so that they might walk in the way of the Lord and enter into the land and keep it. And he does it in the form of a song. Why? “Because it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their offspring” for generations. This is a great example of God’s design for music, and why it is important to be discerning in what music we choose to hear. There are countless cases of elderly people who suffer from dementia and cannot remember their spouse’s name and yet are somehow (miraculously) able to sing every word to Amazing Grace. Here’s a beautiful example:
The Torah is chock full of wisdom of both the explicit and implicit kind, and both examples of what to do and what not to do. These stories, in a similar way as does music, make their way to a deeper part of our soul’s memory and are meant to be meditated upon day and night. In so doing, we begin to develop spiritual senses–eyes that see, ears that hear, and mouths that speak. Unlike those who worship idols of their own making; those who worship things of their own invention are destined to become like them (Ps. 115:4-8). But we who worship the One, living, and true God, will shine brighter and brighter, like the light of dawn that increases until the fullness of day (Prov. 4:18).
Your brother,
Ryan