Worship

The first of our Bible readings this morning comes to us from the book of Exodus, and I'll be reading from the New King James Version beginning at the first verse. Now when the people saw that Moses delayed coming down from the mountain, the people gathered together to Aaron and said to him, come, make us gods that shall go before us. For as for this Moses, the man who brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we do not know what has become of him. And Aaron said to them, break off the golden earrings which are in the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters, and bring them to me. So all the people broke off the golden earrings which were in their ears and brought them to Aaron.

And he received the gold from their hand, and he fashioned it with an engraving tool, and he made a molded calf. Then they said, this is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt. So when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it. And Aaron made a proclamation and said, tomorrow is a feast to the Lord. Then they rose early on the next day, offered burnt offerings, and brought peace offerings, and all the people sat down to eat and drink and rose up to play.

And the Lord said to Moses, go. Get down for your people who you brought out of the land of Egypt have corrupted themselves. They have turned aside quickly out of the way which I commanded them. They have made themselves a molded calf and worshipped and sacrificed to it and said, this is your God, O Israel, that brought you out of the land of Egypt.

And the Lord said to Moses, I have seen this people, and indeed, it is a stiff-necked people. Now, therefore, let me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them, and I may consume them, and I will make of you a great nation. Then Moses pleaded with the Lord his God and said, Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? Why should the Egyptians speak and say, he brought them out to harm them, to kill them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth. Turn from your fierce wrath and relent from this harm to your people.

Remember Abraham, Isaac, and Israel, your servants, to whom you swore by your own self and said to them, I will multiply your descendants as the stars of heaven, and all this land that I have spoken of, I give to your descendants, and they shall inherit it for ever. So the Lord relented from the harm which he had said he would do to his people. And Moses turned and went down from the mountain, and the two tablets of the testimony were in his hand. The tablets were written on both sides, on the one side and on the other, they were written. Now the tablets were the work of God, and the writing was the writing of God engraved on the tablets.

And when Joshua heard the noise of the people as they shouted, he said to Moses, there is a noise of war in the camp. But he said, it is not the noise of the shout of victory nor the noise of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing I hear. So it was as soon as he came near the camp that he saw the calf and the dancing. So Moses' anger became hot, and he cast the tablets out of his hands and broke them at the foot of the mountain. Then he took the calf which they had made, burned it in the fire, and ground it to powder.

And he scattered it on the water and made the children of Israel drink it. And Moses said to Aaron, what did this people do to you that you have brought so great a sin upon them? And the second reading is from the New Testament, from the Gospel of John chapter four, beginning at the nineteenth verse. The woman said to him, sir, I perceive that you are a prophet. Our fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.

Jesus said to her, woman, believe me. The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. You worship what you do not know. We worship what we know for salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming and is now here when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth.

For the Father is seeking such people to worship Him. God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth. This is the word of the Lord. Thank you. And our text comes to us from the Ten Commandments we read earlier, and we will look at the second commandment where it says, you shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth.

You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. Dear friends, it is my privilege to be able to lead you for a number of Sundays on a kind of once-a-month basis. And I think I am down for five and hope to cover five distinctives that we as reformed churches and reformed Christians hold to. Now I want to make it right clear from the start that we are not claiming that we are better Christians than people of other denominations, people who go by different names, nor do I want to say that we cannot learn from them, but I do think God has given us some strength, some of which we share with other Christians, but some of which perhaps are more uniquely ours. And I think it will help us to know what these are and to thank God for them and to share them with other Christians we know.

And I want to ask you to begin with, why do you think we are called reformed? You think it has to do with the doctrine of election, predestination perhaps? Does it refer to our emphasis on divine sovereignty? No. We are called reformed because when reformed churches were first founded, they reformed the worship of the church.

So it is worship, our way of worship, that earned us that name reformed. And how did that come about? Well, it came about because reformed pastors rediscovered the second commandment. Hey, wait a moment.

How do you lose a commandment? Well, what had happened, and you are probably aware of that, in the early Christian church they began to put up images of saints and the Virgin Mary as aids to worship. And, of course, that does not fit in very well with the second commandment as we have it. But the way to get around that was to join the second commandment to the first commandment so that the whole of the first and second commandment, now one commandment, was talking about serving other gods rather than how you serve our God. Now does that mean they only had nine commandments?

No. They got around that one too. What they did is they split the last commandment so that coveting your neighbour's property was different from coveting your neighbour's wife. So in that way they still had ten commandments. Now that, of course, left no commandments about how we should worship God.

And when humans decide how they should worship God, all kind of problems can come in, and we see that in the early church with the worship of saints, the worship of the Virgin Mary. And in many ways, as these saints and Mary replaced some of the gods and goddesses they used to worship. You can see that clearly in South America. I do not know if you have ever seen any of those processions where they walk with the saints seated on a throne, and the whole population walks behind them singing and clapping a festival and so on. Well, these are no different from the way they used to worship before the coming of Christianity, except the names of the idols have changed.

They are now the Virgin Mary and saints. Now Luther, of course, as a reformer, recognised that the Roman church of his day had gone off the track, but he never did recover the second commandment. And so Lutherans followed the same division that you find in the Roman church where the first two commandments are combined and the last one is split. And it is the reformers in Southern Germany and Switzerland who went further on this point. Though Luther corrected some of the wrongdoings, Luther's approach was we continue with the worship we have unless there is something that contradicts something we have in scripture.

So we do away with the worship of idols and so on, but you will see that in some ways, Lutherans still have an altar in the church and so on because there is no specific commandment saying you cannot have an altar in New Testament church, I guess. But a reformer said, now we have to go further. It is not a matter of taking away what the Bible forbids. Rather, it is a matter of worshipping God in the way He commands. In other words, if it does not talk about altars in church, then you do not put an altar in the church.

We have got to let God decide how He should be worshipped. In other words, what we are talking about is the kind of situation we read about in Exodus where the Israelites, and they got Aaron to go along with them and said, yeah, we want to worship Jehovah God, but we want to have something we can look at. So let us make this calf. And then Moses said, this is the god who led you out of Egypt.

And I used the New King James Version because, unfortunately, other versions say these are the gods. Now the word for god is always plural in Hebrew, so you can translate it either way. But we know it should be god and not gods because in the very next verse, Aaron identifies him as Jehovah God, Yahweh God. So clearly, this is he is not changing gods. He is only changing the way of worship.

And it was the reformers who recognised that this is what was also happening in the church of their days, that people were now worshipping God through a golden calf, so to say, through these images which God had not commanded. And so you will find it in all the reformed confessions, the Belgic, the Heidelberg, and the Westminster, this idea that we must worship God the way He says He wants to be worshipped. You want a name for that, we call it the regulative principle of worship. And so worshipping God as He commanded is important because if we do not do so, we end up with a distorted picture of who God is and who Christ is. So I want us to look this morning at three questions.

Firstly, how should we think of God? Secondly, how must we worship Him? And lastly, what are the consequences? Now when people make idols, it is very clear that these idols symbolise the way that people think of these gods or goddesses. Perhaps, I think you have all seen a picture of the Hindu goddess Kali.

And the thing about Kali is that she has six arms, and each one holds a different weapon. And so she is obviously somebody who is equipped for warfare. In the old time, they had gods like Phenaes, a goddess, and Baal, who were fertility goddesses and gods, and with emphasis of sexuality and sexual practice and so on, and which led to all kind of hanky-pankies you can imagine. The sun was worshipped because the sun was a symbol of fruitfulness. And, of course, in Egypt, they not only worshipped the sun, but they had all these gods with heads of animals.

And these animals, of course, then revealed something about the nature of that god. So the eagle-headed god was like eagle eyes who can see everything in that kind of way. And, of course, then we see that in Israel, they put this golden bull calf up at Mount Sinai because they thought of God as strong. And, yeah, admittedly, God is strong, but He is so much more than that, and we would not want to limit God to that. It is interesting that later, when Israel split off from Judah, they again put up these golden bull calves at Sinai and at Dan.

Now the thing is these gods and goddesses then symbolise the way that people think of God. And I think today we are really becoming aware of how strong symbolism is. Advertising companies spent literally millions of dollars finding out what is the best symbol to promote a product. And, well, this is not always accurate. Take for example, and I mentioned an old example, all the people would remember it, but young people when people like me were young, we saw advertisements on television for cigarettes.

And guess who were promoting the cigarettes? Men dressed in long white lab coats. Doctors, medical people saying, these are good. And sportsmen, famous sportsmen, these are good. Now all of that is total nonsense.

You see, the symbolism is saying, you want to smoke because you will be a sportsman, you will be healthy, but, obviously, it was false. And I am afraid that we have that kind of thing coming into church when we use images. If you go to the Roman church, the images of Jesus come in two kinds. It will either be baby Jesus or it will be Jesus on the cross, the crucifix. What about Jesus as the ruler of heaven and earth?

I do not know any such symbol in the Roman church, but you will find symbol of Mary, the queen of heaven, as if she were the ruler of things. And that affects the way people think of God. Now I want to point out that it is not just these people we talked about who can make these mistakes. You and I can make them by having the wrong image of our God in our mind. And I am afraid there are a lot of Christians who think of God as a kind of doting grandfather, and I am learning to what that means because I am becoming one.

And, you know, you are much more tolerant about what your grandchildren do than what your own children did. Do not know what it is, but hopefully, I am still helping to lead them. But, yeah, there has been a change that took place, and people like to think of God in that kind of way. Oh, it is wrong what you did, but it does not matter, Johnny. Just, you know, I love you.

And I am afraid that is the kind of god that you will find preached in liberal churches. God is love. So if you do find you are straying here or straying there, oh, it does not really matter. God loves you anyway. It is so important that we let a whole Bible inform us about what God is like and not some kind of mental picture or, yeah, something that leads us astray.

And the Bible makes it clear. Yes, God is gracious, but He is also a jealous God. God is merciful, but He is also just. God is loving, but He is also stern.

And the second commandment then is about recognising God as He reveals Himself, not as we picture Him. We know, of course, that man himself was created as an image of God. And if sin had not come into the world, all I would have to do is look at you guys and say, oh, I know what God is like. Unfortunately, like me, you have all been affected by sin, and we can no longer give that perfect picture. Although, hopefully, in a Christian community, collectively, we can give to the world some kind of idea of what God is like through our loving actions and also through our reprimanding of what is sinful.

But, of course, we do have a perfect image of God who came down to earth, and that was Jesus Christ. And so we should model ourselves on Christ who shows us the true nature of God. Now notice that the second commandment is not a commandment against images as such. I remember coming into our church way many years ago in Bachlam speech, and I discovered all the Sunday school pictures had been turned upside, well, back to front, so you only saw the back of them and not the picture itself because these were pictures of Christ with little children. And the new worship leader for that broke the second commandment.

I think the second commandment is against using pictures in a way of worship, but we do find that there were, in the temple, many images of nature, for example, and we can have such images. But when it comes to worship, it is only the water of baptism and the bread and the wine of the Lord's Supper that we have been given as kind of signs pointing to Christ and to forgiveness. And there is a danger if we start to include other symbolism. And I have heard of people doing baptism by first putting dirt on the baby's head and putting a sprig of green with it. I do not know what it is supposed to symbolise, but I think we have to be careful that we do not fall into that.

When it comes to worship, we should worship the way that scripture commands us we should worship. So that then raises the question, how do we worship Him? And here, I think Calvin can help us because Calvin pointed out that the commandments come to us in a particular way, and the word that describes that is the word synecdoche, and I would like you all to say it after me. Synecdoche. Synecdoche.

What is a synecdoche? Well, a synecdoche is when you take one thing to represent a whole group. For example, when we first came to New Zealand, we were invited to this special church too, and it said, ladies bring a plate. Gentlemen, wear a tie. And my mum said, one plate, both of six of her five of us had better take five plates long.

And my dad, oh, by the way, she did not put anything on it. She did not realise that the plate was a synecdoche. It stood for the plate with something on it that you can share with other people. So here we came with five empty plates. I am glad my dad did not go all the way because he wore more than a necktie when he turned up.

He realised that it meant a proper dress, but that is what a synecdoche is like. And so the Heidelberg Catechism interprets the second commandment as follows, nor should we worship Him in any way other than he has commanded. That is what I call before the regulative principle. God tells us how we should worship, and this comes to us by examples, and the golden calf is a good example of how not to do it. There are other examples in the Bible.

There is, for example, the sons of Aaron who decided to use another incense to burn before God, and you remember how the fire smote them. You remember the sons of Eli who had their own way of worshipping God. But I am also thinking of Saul's sacrifice. Saul was not meant to sacrifice. He was king.

He was not a priest. They were not following God's commandments. Now in the New Testament, of course, we are also given direction on how we should worship God, and that comes in from Christ's discussion with the woman at the well. And she was a Samaritan, and she says, now who is right? We Samaritans who say we should worship God here on this Mount Gerizim or you Jews who say, no.

You should worship Him on Mount Zion. And Christ says, woman, the time is coming when those who worship God must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Now we know how seriously God took that commandment when we see Ananias and Sapphira conspiring to deceive the early church. They were not acting in truth. They were pretending to give a big gift when they were only giving a smaller gift.

And you will remember how God smote them for that sin. So this is a very serious business that we worship God in spirit and in truth. Now there are large parts of the New Testament that address the manner of worship. Paul has, for example, in one Corinthians nine and chapters twelve to fourteen, he says how we should do our Lord's Supper, how we should bring our gifts on the first day of the week, and so on. But I want you to notice these are not details, but they are general principles to do things decently and in order.

And I think that is important because what is decently and in order can vary from culture to culture and place to place as we discovered when we worshipped in Africa. That things could sometimes go very differently, but by their standards, they were doing things decently and in order. We also read about principle like male headship in worship, and these are not just things we can brush aside. They are general principles to guide us here. But notice that the regulative principle that I mentioned is not a kind of blueprint for Sunday worship.

And here, I can think of some reformed churches that have gone too far, think, oh, this has got to be done here and this and here and this here. Every Sunday, identical services the way they did it two hundred years ago. Now we do not have any such blueprint. Things change with time and as long as we are obedient to the principles given in scripture on how we should worship God. And so we see that the Bible itself allows for different methods.

But I want to point out that in Hebrews, we read that when it comes to worship, church worship is not like temple worship. Something has changed. Hebrews chapter nine points out that many of the things that Old Testament believers did were there to point forward to Christ, and these things have now been fulfilled, so there is no need for these anymore. We read there, since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near to God with sincerity of heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience, and having our bodies washed with pure water, let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful, and let us consider how we may spur one another up towards love and good deeds. Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another and all the more as we see the day approaching.

Now, friends, that is New Testament worship, and the New Testament gives us liberty on a lot of things here. Read Colossians two. It speaks about festivals. Some people keep one festival, others do not. Circumcision, fasting, none of these are enforced.

They are now a matter of Christian liberty. Now the second thing I want to point out is that when we are talking about worship, we are not talking about what is happening here now, and that is it. As though Sunday were the day of worship, and the rest of the week, we do what we like. On the contrary, all of our life must be a life of worship. In Romans twelve one, we read, therefore, I urge you, brother, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.

This is your spiritual act of worship. Alright. Our bodies should bring glory to God. James one twenty seven, religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this, to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. But notice this, of course, is not that different from the Old Testament.

For example, Micah six eight says, and what does the Lord require of you? Not offerings, but to act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. See, when we live for ourselves and leave that worship to God only for the Sunday, we are breaking the second commandment. Like the Jews who, yeah, gave all their required sacrifices, but Christ said, but you are overlooking the need of widows and orphans. So exactly what Micah speaks against.

Or the Pharisees. The Pharisees who could make a vow, oh, everything I have belongs to God, and they would then also carefully count out a tenth of everything, including their mint and their spices. They are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Oops. This one forgot.

What? And so on. But Jesus said, you do not look after your parents. What kind of life is this? That is not worshipping God.

And so we can get so centred on our Sunday worship that we forget that it is supposed to prepare us for the rest of the week so that our whole week may be a week of worship to God. I do not know if any of you have ever come across the book The Jungle. It is written by Upton Sinclair, beginning of last century, and it is about the meat factories in Chicago. There were two big competing meat factories, and the slogan of one is we process everything except for the grunt of the pig. We do not know what to do, but everything else we use.

And but these meat factories relied on migrants to do all the work. So they had representatives in New York where migrants would come in, and they would say, do you want a home and a job? Yeah. This is what we are looking for. Oh, come with us and work for us in Chicago in a meat factory.

You will have a job, and we will give you a house. You have to pay rent. But if you pay the rent for seven years, then the house will be yours. We will count it as if you paid it off, or maybe it was ten years. I forget.

Whatever it was, these migrants came, but they did not realise how demanding the task was because they had to pickle meat with dirt, mild, dangerous chemicals. They had to handle bent sauce and all kind of things. And it was so terrible that you could find things you should not find in sausages because they came of one of the workers or something. And but the idea was such that nobody lasted to ten years because their health went under. And so sorry.

You did not pay for ten years. Thank you for your rent, but you have got to move out of the house, make room for the next person. So all the promises were of nothing. Now the sad thing is that the owners of both meat factories were claiming to be Christians, and in fact, were very generous in giving to missions. But what kind of message do you give if that is how you live?

Is that worshipping God? I think when we worship God in that way, we are not worshipping God. We are worshipping idols of our own making. The purpose of the second commandment is to let God be God, and that means that He decides how He wants to be worshipped. Now lastly, I want to discuss what is at stake here.

And it is interesting that this commandment particularly involves the effect that our behaviour has on our children and grandchildren. It says there, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. Friends, how we worship God has great effect on our children. They will judge us by our love of God. How do you show your love of God?

By pleasing by doing what pleases you or by doing what pleases God? In human relationships, if you really love someone, a husband and a wife, you do not give your wife a fishing rod for her birthday because you want to go fish. You want to know what she wants to do. That is true love. And so how do we please God?

By doing what He wants us to do. That is how we show we love God. And in our behaviour, we model what we think of God by what we do, and our children watch this. And what kind of worship pattern do you show? Do you have Sunday worship, but then the rest of the week, you go into cutthroat competition, you watch movies you should not be watching, you use language you should not be using.

What kind of worship patterns do you model? Speeding to get to the church on time, driving past somebody stranded on the road. What kind of message do you leave for your children when you do that? The bottom line here is do you give an example of a godly life? Is your life a life of worship?

Now a common complaint that I hear from my old friends who have left the church is that for them, Sunday was the worst day of the week. How sad. For my family that I came from, my brothers and I, Sunday was the best day of the week. That is when dad was home and we went to church. We would go and do something together, go for a walk through the bush or something, play some games, and we always looked forward to Sunday.

How sad that some people said, no. That is not how it was for me. Sunday is supposed to be a feast, a celebration of what God has done for us. And so let us make it that for our family. Surely parents who leave children with that idea did not understand the true purpose of worship.

The way that we worship affects the next generations up to the third and fourth generation we read here and saddens us when we think how often we have been bad examples. I think the important thing is if you realise that you have set a bad example, make this known to your children. Sorry, kids. I did not really set a good example here. Do not do what I did.

That is not how God wants us to live. Rather than to bluff food, oh, I am allowed to do this, but you are not. That is not going to, yeah, generate the right type worship mood in children. And I, yeah. If we truly love our God, then this will show up despite our failings, and then we can claim God's promises.

With friends, I do want to point out that even some of God's saints had children that went astray. Think of Eli, the priest. I think of David, the king, Josiah, the king, and there are probably more people who were godly people but whose children went astray. I am glad to say that we often see God's love returned in the grandchildren where they returned to God. And so let us always make it a matter of our prayer that God will have mercy on those who have gone astray, that He will bring them back, that they will turn out to be the prodigal children whom God loves and will restore to Himself.

And let us pray that if our children are astray, that our grandchildren will return to God. So, friend, our closing question is, who do you worship? God as He revealed Himself or a god of your own making? The God who revealed Himself can be most clearly seen in Jesus Christ who said, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father. And it shows God's love for us, how He was prepared to take on human flesh, to die for us on the cross, but also how He rose victoriously to overcome what was sinful and to reign over us.

Do not find your idea of God in one of these images, in pictures, or just one of His attributes. No. Worship God as He reveals Himself in totality in His word, especially worship God as He reveals Himself in Jesus Christ. Amen. Let us pray.

Our Lord God and our Father, we thank you that you have called us to be a people who worship You. And, Father, we pray that we may do so with joy, that we may do so to your glory, that we may do so in a way that other people can see and emulate to follow our examples. We pray especially for our children, Lord. And, Lord, we are grieved by those who have departed from your ways. And it is our earnest prayer, Lord, that you would turn them and bring them back to yourself.

Forgive us, Lord, where maybe we have not set good examples. But, Lord, we pray that it is not in our hands, but in your hands. So we pray, Lord, that in these matters too, we may recognise you as the God of scripture who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ who came to die so that you may show your love to a thousand generations of those who love you and obey you. We pray it in His name. Amen.