B. The Means of Acceptable Worship: Revelation and Redemption 1. God has revealed Himself through His Word In the Old Testament, God at Mount Sinai set forth in great detail the pattern for acceptable worship. Israel was to abide by these regulations in order to worship God in an acceptable way. Any deviation was regarded as idolatry. Besides these ritual stipulations, the Ten Commandments governed Israel’s personal relationship with God. In Leviticus 10:1-3, God insists He be approached in accordance with His Word. Leviticus 10:1-3 1 Aaron’s sons Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them and added incense; and they offered unauthorized fire before the LORD, contrary to his command. 2 So fire came out from the presence of the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD. 3 Moses then said to Aaron, “This is what the LORD spoke of when he said: “‘Among those who approach me I will show myself holy; in the sight of all the people I will be honored.’” Aaron remained silent(my emphasis). Similarly in the New Testament, we encounter exhortations concerning how we ought to live and also stipulations for what believers should do when we gather for public worship. The New Testament also makes clear that the Bible is central to public worship. In 1 Timothy 4:13, Paul commands Timothy to devote himself to the, “public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.” Ligon Duncan writes that when we gather for corporate worship, we should read the Bible, hear the Bible, pray the Bible, sing the Bible and see the Bible (as it is displayed in baptism and the Lord’s Supper). Don Whitney writes, “Bible reading and preaching are central in public worship because they are the clearest, most direct, most extensive presentation of God in the meeting. God alone determines how He is to be worshiped. This is what is meant by the “regulative principle,” which refers to how Scripture must shape and regulate our corporate worship. The principle states that nothing must be required as essential to corporate worship except that which is commanded by the Word of God. 2 extremes can lead people away from New Testament worship: Experientialism and intellectualism. J. I. Packer in “A Quest for Godliness”, describes experientialism this way: “Their outlook is one of casual haphazardness and fretful impatience, of grasping after novelties, entertainments, and ‘highs’, and of valuing strong feelings above deep thoughts. They have little taste for solid study, humble self-examination, disciplined meditation, and unspectacular hard work in their callings and their prayers. They conceive the Christian life as one of exciting extraordinary experiences rather than of resolute rational righteousness. They dwell continually on the themes of joy, peace, happiness, satisfaction and rest of soul with no balancing reference to the divine discontent of Romans 7, the fight of faith of Psalm 73, or the ‘lows’ of Psalms 42, 88 and 102. Through their influence the spontaneous jollity of the simple extrovert comes to be equated with healthy Christian living, [and I might add worship] while the saints of less sanguine and more complex temperament get driven almost to distraction because they cannot bubble over in the prescribed manner. In their restlessness these exuberant ones become uncritically credulous, reasoning that the more odd and striking an experience the more divine, supernatural, and spiritual it must be, and they scarcely give the scriptural virtue of steadiness a thought.” Packer goes on further to describe the Intellectualist this way: “Constantly they present themselves as rigid, argumentative, critical Christians, champions of God’s truth for whom orthodoxy is all. Upholding and defending their own view of that truth, whether Calvinist or Arminian, dispensational or Pentecostal, national church reformist or Free Church separatist, or whatever it might be, is their leading interest, and they invest themselves unstintingly in this task. There is little warmth about them; relationally they are remote; experiences do not mean much to them; winning the battle for mental correctness is their own great purpose. They see, truly enough, that in our anti-rational, feeling-oriented, instant-gratification culture conceptual knowledge of divine things is undervalued, and they seek with passion to right the balance at this point. They understand the priority of the intellect well; the trouble is that intellectualism, expressing itself in endless campaigns for their own brand of right thinking, is almost if not quite all that they can offer, for it is almost if not quite all that they have. They too, so I urge, need exposure to the Puritan heritage for their maturing.” The Christian life of worship is not a quest for experience or intelligence, even though both are in part what it means to be human and more importantly spiritual, it is a quest for an intimate relationship with God in the person of Jesus Christ.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 03:25:34 +0000
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