Word of Salvation – Vol. 35 No. 25 – July 1990

 

Worship As God Prescribes

 

Sermon by Rev. M.P. Geluk on Lord’s Day 35

Reading: Exodus 20:4-7; Jeremiah 10:1-16; Romans 1:18-25

 

Do not make a likeness of God other than Christ.  The best way to distinguish the second commandment from the first is to say that the first commandment is about whom we must worship and the second about how we must worship.

The first commandment says: do not serve any other gods, for there is only one true God.  Serve Him only.  All others are false.

The second commandment says: worship this one true God only in the manner that He prescribes.  There is nothing in the whole creation, whether you look for it in the sky, or on the earth, or in the waters of the sea, rivers or lakes that can come anywhere near to the true nature of God.  For although God is the Creator of all things, He is also a Being who is completely separate and distinct from all that he has made.  He is quite unique within or by Himself.  To point to something in creation and say: God is like that – will always do Him injustice.

The one exception is Jesus Christ.  He is the only one who has the perfect image and likeness of God in His Own Person.  When you find out about Christ from the Scriptures then you can say: now I know what God is like.  Christ is very unique.  He came into this creation when He was born of Mary, but that’s only true of His human nature.  Christ is not а created being for He has always been.  Like God, He is from everlasting to everlasting.  In fact, he is God.

And now in a positive sense, the second commandment says that we should look to Christ in order to truly know who God is and what He is like.  When we thus get to know Christ, then we can know also how to worship God.  Christ enables us to serve, praise, honour and obey God, in а manner that pleases God.  And that’s what worship is all about.

The second commandment, then, instructs us how to worship the one true God.  It says: Do not make a likeness of God other than Christ.  And in the first place let us see why we need this commandment.

1.

We all know that God is spirit, and you cannot have а physical representation of something that does not consist of matter.  That does not make the spiritual less real.  There are lots of things that you cannot see but which are nonetheless very real.  There are signals or waves transmitted from the radio and television towers all around us.  You cannot see them or touch them but they are present, as a switched on radio or television set would soon prove.

God is real even though we cannot bring Him into our midst in a physical and visible form.  And now we are to worship this invisible spiritual God and He says that we must be careful that we only do that as He has commanded in His Word.

But isn’t such kind of worship difficult and complex?  How does one worship God whom we cannot see, taste, touch or smell?  That is, how can we experience Him, sense Him, be aware of Him, all of which we need to do if are to worship Him?

Some time ago I saw an advertisement in a religious magazine that showed Anthony Gruerio’s portrait of Jesus.  You could buy prints of this portrait and to persuade you to do this, the advertisement said: “Feel the warmth and compassion, from what many say, are the most penetrating eyes ever captured on canvas.”  Above the picture in the advertisement were the words: “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Now suppose you bought such a print and hung it up in your lounge.  You then invite your unbelieving friend to whom you have often witnessed about Christ and said to him: “John, I would like you to take a good look at this picture of Jesus.  You know how I have often tried to persuade you to believe and trust in God.  Well, this picture of Jesus will help you to turn to God even more than the Word of God can.  Can you see the warmth and compassion in those eyes?  It’s only a picture, of course, but it does give you a real idea Christ, yes, of what God is like..

But do you think that your unbelieving friend would now be able to really know Christ and worship Him?  Of course not!  The way Christ looked in the body whilst He was on earth does not do anything for us in our worship of Him.  At the most you could say that the print conveys the impression of the artist of how he imagined Jesus to look as a man.  But in no way can the print be used as а means to worship Christ.  How can any artist succeed capturing Christ, who is God, on canvas?  Or any film or play, for that matter.

Some years ago there was an uproar amongst evangelical Christians about a film concerning Christ.  In this film Jesus is presented,   apparently, as а man full of doubts and misgivings about his mission, and whilst hanging on the cross has lustful thoughts for Mary Magdalene.  Of course, the picture should have been banned for it is an affront to the Christian community.  But Anthony Gruerio’s portrait of a Jesus with the nice eyes and this film’s impression of а Jesus with sinful imaginations are really no different.  Yes, the one is seen to have good taste and the other extremely bad taste.  But both pictures of Jesus are just impressions from people, who like others before them, cannot in any way succeed in making а true image of Christ, the Son of God.

Christians may rightly feel insulted about this latest film of Christ which seems to be the most offensive to date.  But God must also feel insulted when а supposedly good film about Jesus is seen by Christians as a means to get to know Christ better.  Human reproductions of Jesus are always terribly inferior to the real Jesus who is God.  And an inferior Jesus cannot glorify God, not even a little bit.  Moreover, God can never be satisfied with people whose worship of Him is based, not on the living preaching of His Word, as it should be, but on distorted visible representations of Him in some portrait, play, or film.

But how then can God be worshipped if no sinful person on earth can visibly represent Him any shape or form?

Well, we must listen to the Lord Jesus Himself, who said: “…true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks; God is spirit and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth.” (John 4:23, 24).  Worship, says Jesus, must be in spirit and in truth.

In the past the church has often made a complete mess of this kind of worship.  In trying to worship Jesus, believers of the past got hold of all kinds of visible things in order to remember Him by.

Just like you might have a show box somewhere, crammed full of treasures that you wanted to keep and with them remember the past.  Things like old certificates, cards, old toys, children’s books, jewellery, driftwood, yes, you name it.

In the same way people tried to worship Jesus by means of things they could remember Him by.  God’s Word and the sacraments were not sufficient.  And so they collected so-called holy relics, which consisted of bits of wood, supposedly of the cross, and nails and parts of the crown of thorns, and soon they began believing these were the originals used on Jesus.  In due course of time there were, of course, hundreds of these bits and pieces.  John Calvin once scoffed: “If all the pieces of the cross which could be found were collected into a heap, they would add up to a good shipload.

It was sad but you could say that churches became shoe boxes, crammed with sacred junk, saved by well-meaning people who wanted to worship their Lord.

Now we could smile about these mistakes from the past but are we any different today?  There are people today, as there were in the past, who worship God as though He were nothing more than a stern policeman and who love nothing more than pulling you up when you break the rules.

People who imagine God to be the grand, old man, who is kind and sympathetic but hardly someone who is able to cope with today’s diseases like AIDS and space technology.

Or a God who is meek and mild; and Christ as the soft, sticky-sweet, sentimental Jesus.

Or a god who is seen as being no more than an extension of one’s own church, denomination, or race.  Thus you end up with a god who is always on the side of the Reformed, Presbyterians, Baptists or Catholics; or always approving what the English do, or the Dutch, or the Afrikaners, or the blacks, or the whites.

With these modern-day examples there are no relics that you can touch or see, but there are the mental images of what God is supposed to be like.  And they are not based on the Word of God only but also on man’s own imagination.

In the past people bowed before saints and icons and were instructed in the faith by pictures of Jesus, Mary, and the Stations of the Cross.  The authors of the Catechism were familiar with such things and they judged them to be contrary to the second commandment.  In the Protestant churches of today we may not have those visible things around anymore as aids in worship but someone rewrote Answer-96 to fit today’s main deviation.  “Q.  What is God’s will for us in the second commandment?  A.  That we do not worship him in ways intended to satisfy our Own needs or fulfil our Own selves, but only as he has commanded in his Word.

The worship of God then must be then must be in accordance with His Word.  We have seen already that we must see God as Christ represented Him.  And Christ said our worship is to be in spirit and in truth.  Let us then in the second place learn from Christ as to how that kind of worship is given.

2.

When we look to Christ then we soon discover from the gospels that His whole life was a worship of God.  For Christ’s worship did not really consist of going to the temple and doing various things there.  No, His whole life was a response to God.  Christ was not some recluse.  Just the opposite.  He interacted with people, went from village to village, knew what went on in society and politics and was fully ware of the thinking and leadership of the religious leaders of His time on earth.

Now God’s Word says we are to have the same mind as Christ, having the same love, and be one with Him in spirit and purpose (Phil.2:2).  It is to do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility we are to count others better than ourselves, not only looking to our own interests but also to the interests of others (vs.3,4).

Elsewhere in Scripture this same attitude as that of Christ is described as the fruit of the spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self- control.  Christ possessed all these virtues and it characterised the way He served and glorified God.  That was his worship of God.  It wasn’t just the praying He did to the Father in the quiet hours in some secluded spot.  His worship involved all of life.

Now let’s look at the way we worship.  Frequently our minds are not on Christ but on someone else.  Not on the attitude of Christ and the fruit of the spirit but on the current attitudes of our times.

And so it can happen that our minds are influenced and even controlled by the people we admire.  We are attracted to someone’s charisma and wouldn’t mind to be a bit like them.  So we start copying them, even taking over their way of thinking and life-style.

If such people we look up to, and in varying degrees adopt their views and behaviour patterns, are non-Christian, then we will no longer feel at home in a church where Christ is in the centre.  We will feel strangely out of place.

These are churches which are not Christ-centred because they will get the local football hero, or the so-called Christian basketball team, to take part in the worship service, with the aim of course to keep, or win people to church whose lives are pro-sport.  And that’s а lot of people.  The sport-people are asked to take а prominent part in the worship service – not because they are Christ-minded in the first place, but because they are sport-minded first and Christians second.  If Christ was uppermost in the minds of everyone, then then sport would not even be mentioned, no matter how enjoyable it may be to many.  But if Christ is not the main attraction in the church, then such a church will have members whose lives and minds are not wholly given to Christ.  Thus you have the makings of false worship.

So what do we hope to see in our worship services?  That will depend on the things that influence and control our everyday lives.  But if it is Christ and His attitude, and that’s what God wants in this second commandment, then our worship services will also be Christ- centred.  Our aim and purpose will be to please God, as it was with Christ.  We will do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, for Christ was not like that.

Now the second commandment speaks of God’s jealousy and we touched on that in connection with the first commandment.  God is the Husband and the church His bride.  God is righteously jealous when His people put Him aside and go after other gods.  But the second commandment also speaks of fathers and children.

When God’s jealously is aroused then He will punish the children for the sins of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Him.

Third and fourth generation children punished by God, not because their forefathers were sinful and they innocent, but because successive generations tend to copy the sins of their fathers.

When a father today sins by not worshipping God in that Christ-centred way, then such a father will present to his children a false worship.  The children will follow in their father’s footsteps.  The picture they have of God, and the style of worship they will prefer, will most likely be the one their father presented to them.  Thus the generations that came from that father whose worship of God was false, will be as guilty as the father was if they followed him in his false worship.

You have many sad examples of this in the Old Testament.  King Jeroboam was such a father who introduced false worship when he brought in his golden calves (1Kings 12).  Hundreds of years after the Israelites were still being reprimanded by God for following the sins of Jeroboam.

Yet, the second commandment also speaks of God showing love to thousands of those who love Him and keep His commandments.  So if anyone broke with the false worship of the father and returned to God and put away idols, then God’s love would return.  Yes, even if they repented and turned to God in their thousands, then God would love all.

The way out of a tradition of false worship is therefore to repent and be converted.  One must be born again by the Spirit of the living God and turn away from useless idols.

The way we see God will also be the way we will worship Him and the way we will teach our children.  If I see God as one who says – don’t worry, you’re in the covenant and you have been baptised, therefore things are okay between you and me, even if your worship of me is a bit irregular at times and Christ could be a bit more in the centre of your life, and your obedience could be a bit better.  If I see God like that, then my worship of Him will have an easy-going attitude about it.  The worship services I would then prefer are the ones where things are fairly casual.  And my image of God is something along the lines of a fatherly figure, who is not overstrict.  He is serious of course but not overly serious.  That I have a sound doctrine is important, but that I have a sharp mouth sometimes, an unkind or selfish, or stingy, or unfaithful, or unforgiving, or crude attitude, well, admittedly they are not right but then none of us are perfect.  Right?

But with that attitude I have no fear of God.  And with a distorted picture of God in my mind, I will worship Him falsely and lead myself and the church astray.

Yes, how do we see God?  We must get rid of all our self-made images of God and come to the one, only true image – Jesus Christ.  If we are not united with Christ, if we have not been born again into His likeness, if we are not of the same mind as He, if we do not have the same attitude as He, then we are not of God and we do not know how to truly praise Him, serve Him, obey him and worship Him.

And I know of no other solution to this terrible situation other than what God offers in His Word.  And that is to humble ourselves before God and repent before Jesus Christ the Saviour, and ask Him to forgive us and make us His true disciples.  Yes, to change us into His likeness, which is the likeness of God.

AMEN