John H. Paterson
THE idea of worshipping God is one of the most familiar of human themes. It is common to those who worship tree-spirits and those who crowd into great cathedrals. A part of every religion which acknowledges a god is that he should be worshipped. Christians are bidden to worship, and gladly do so. Yet if we stop to ask, "What does worship consist of? What are we actually doing when we worship?" we may find this universal reaction to the godhead difficult to define.
The problem is compounded by the embarrassing richness of the English language in alternative words like "praise", "adore" and "give thanks". Are they different from "worship" and, if so, in what way? Is a "worship service", which you will sometimes see announced, anything more than a meeting of Christians at which they carefully avoid asking God for things they need? Can we give the idea of worship any content?
This word, "content", is, I think, the key. Those of us who, from age or taste, find much modern worship devoid of content can easily point out that to sing choruses which simply repeat the name of Jesus -- or, even worse, "I'm so happy" -- over and over again has very little to do with worship. Only when we come to consider content can we begin to distinguish between the tree-spirit worshipper (who may well feel happy in doing whatever he does!) and the worshipping Christian believer.
Perhaps I can introduce this search for content in worship by making two very simple points about it to begin with. The first is the suggestion that the focus of worship is what God is rather than what He does . I think that there is a simple, practical distinction between thanking God for His mercies and worshipping Him as their author -- as the One who thought of such things for us in the first place.
The second point then follows: that since the theme of worship is God's attributes and character, the quality of that worship depends on just how much of them we know. The worship of a believer who knows little of God and His ways will grow richer if, with time and experience, he comes to realise more of what God is like: in other words, our capacity for worship should increase as we come to know Him better. Let us trust that all of us may, in this way, grow in grace and knowledge.
If these points are accepted, I want to choose three aspects of worship for our present purpose and look at them in turn. For ease of reference they can be listed in this way:
Worship as Acceptance or Submission
Worship as Appreciation
If we are to worship in spirit and in truth, then we must begin by recognising that God is utterly different from us His creatures: He is the Wholly Other. So long as we think of God as being separated from ourselves only by virtue of being wiser, or stronger, or more far-sighted than we are, we have no subject-matter for worship. Worship stems, on the contrary, precisely from the recognition that, no matter how good we are, or however hard we try, He is simply outside our class, and far off the top of our human scale.
Let me take a simple illustration. A young man or woman who is interested in, say, football or tennis watches their favourite player and thinks, "If I train hard, and watch my diet, one day I may be as good as he or she is." Between their own ability and that of their hero there is no discontinuity; the greater ability and the lesser are linked by a chain of evident circumstances -- practice, speed, muscle power. [101/102]
But between God and His worshippers there is, if I may put it this way, a total discontinuity! God is not just a very special version of ourselves: He is utterly different. He is in a class altogether by Himself. And that, as I see it, is one of the main Bible grounds for worship, a worship that grows as our understanding increases of just how deep and wide is the gap between God and ourselves.
The problem is to get some idea of scale of the greatness of God. The psalmist chose the only possible scale when he wrote:
"When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; what is man ...?" (Psalm 8:3-4)
If you are like me, you generally read that familiar passage as a measure of the scale of man; it is the word "man" which we emphasise as we read it. But the psalm is addressed "O Lord, our Lord"; what the psalmist had in mind was to focus equally on how great God is, judged by the scale of His infinite universe.
Nor is the unbounded superiority of God in His creation recognised by man alone. In the Book of the Revelation, there is much worshipping of God, and that by beings far ahead of us men and women in their own wisdom and power, yet who realize that for them, too, there is this great gap between God and themselves. The perceptive beings who surround His throne know (Revelation 5:1-5) that "there is no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth" who is worthy to open the book -- no one except the Lamb and, recognising this, they worship.
Worship grows out of being repeatedly out-classed by God -- in wisdom, skill, perception and power! This is, of course, very obvious when you think about it, yet I feel that it also has practical importance. At least, one of the things guaranteed to stifle worship in our hearts is a feeling that God is in some way just one of us: that we could do better for ourselves than He has done, or that He has not willed for us the best will possible (and you may recognise that as the very thing of which Satan successfully convinced Eve in the Garden of Eden). He then becomes no more than a trade union official who has failed to negotiate for his workers as good a contract as they were hoping to get. No worship there!
The reality is, of course, that not merely could we not have done what God in Christ has done, but we could not have thought of it in the first place! What He has wrought is, in the most literal sense, amazing grace -- amazing because it would never have occurred to us at all. On our own, we should never have got further than John in Revelation, who "wept much" because the opening of the book seemed utterly impossible.
The assurances which we offer one another that God is near us, and interested in us, that He loves us and indwells us by the Spirit are all true. They are all things for which we should be thanking Him every day. But worship comes from putting this in its context -- that the One who does all this, and gives all this, outclasses us completely; He is immeasurable by our standards, and what a good thing that He is!
Now that leads straight into my second suggestion about the content of worship: that worship means submission to, or acceptance of, God's way of doing things. This may seem at first sight a little surprising; yet I find that all my own favourite Bible references to worship fall under this heading.
Worship consists, then, of recognising the "otherness" of God, and that means that His ways are not our ways and that His thoughts are higher than ours (Isaiah 55:8-9). We show that we have indeed recognised this by accepting His way, even when it seems contrary to all that our wisdom might suggest. [102/103]
But what, you may ask, has that got to do with worship? Consider, if you will, this list of men of God in the Scriptures whose worship lay precisely in their submission to God's sometimes strange way in their lives. There was:
1. Abraham He was told by God to kill and sacrifice his son Isaac, the son of the promise, and he set out to obey God, saying to his servants (Genesis 22:5), "I and the lad will go yonder; and we will worship ."
2. David While his child by Bathsheba lay dying, he fasted and prayed that it might live. He was then told that, after all, it had died (2 Samuel 12:15-20), at which he stopped praying and, to the astonishment of his household, "came into the house of the Lord, and worshipped ".
3. Job His family was struck by the most bizarre combination of tragedies that ever a man knew; yet he never uttered a word against God (Job 1:20-22), but rather "fell down upon the ground, and worshipped ".
4. Jacob He had an encounter with God which left him lame and powerless. Years later (Hebrews 11:21), recognising the hand of God in his life, he " worshipped, leaning upon the top of his staff."
What is common to all these cases, as you will see, is an attitude: that this is not the way I should have chosen; indeed, it makes no sense to me but, because it is God with whom I am dealing, I accept and submit to His way. For the corollary of God's greatness is that He is always right! And acceptance of that fact is worship. Paul expressed the same thing in his own way, when writing about certain people who thought their way right:
"For we are the (true) circumcision, who worship God in the spirit, and rejoice in Christ Jesus, and have no confidence in the flesh " (Philippians 3:3).
Now if you have followed my argument so far, you will notice at this point a rather curious thing: that up to now there has been nothing in what I have suggested which is exclusively Christian. Spirit-worshipping pagans stand in awe of their gods because they acknowledge the gap that divides God and man, and in most eastern religions submission to the will of God is taken for granted, even though, in that case, submission may carry overtones of resignation and fatalism which, as Christians, we reject. It is when we come to my third heading, worship as appreciation, that we find the distinctively Christian note struck.
Anybody can recognise the awesome gap between God and man: as a matter of fact, the devils also believe and tremble. But appreciation is something quite different. My dictionary defines the word as "to be fully sensible of all the good qualities in ...". Appreciation implies a knowledge or character rather than action; it implies in this case that we may come to know why God is doing things, rather than simply what He is doing.
Our tree-worshipper -- or, for that matter, a sophisticated Greek whom Paul might have met in Athens -- is in the position of trying to argue from what he sees of the actions of his god -- storm, sickness, crop failure -- back to the character of the god who would do such things, and that is bound to be, at best, a hit-and-miss process of deduction. What we have in the good news of Jesus Christ is just the reverse of that: the revelation in human life of the character of a God who must otherwise have remained unknown.
How could we ever be "fully sensible of all the good qualities" in the character of our God if the Word had not become flesh and dwelt among us ... full of grace and truth (John 1:14)? Without that all-important revelation of God in Christ, we should be like the woman of Samaria to whom the Lord said, "Ye worship ye know not what" (John 4:22).
So the idea of worship as appreciation focuses our attention on the Lord Jesus. It is because He embodied the character of God that we can give content to our worship. We have only to notice, [103/104] in order to see this, the contrast between Old Testament worship and New: how much more variegated -- how much more appreciative, to use our word again -- that reaction had become for those who had seen and known Jesus!
Through the Son, then, we know what the Father is like. We may worship Him for His own special qualities -- that is, we can give content to our worship -- because we see them displayed in the Son. We do not have to guess at the character of God; we look at the Lord Jesus. And if, in our worship, we tell God what we appreciate about His Son, that is the same as telling Him that we have come to understand something of Himself.
We are not, of course, telling Him anything He does not already know! No one appreciates the Lord Jesus like His Father: as the hymn-writer puts it,
The Son can comprehend.
But to see the Lord Jesus appreciated, even if only in a very small way, by His human creatures must surely be a source of the deepest joy to the Father, who will say to us, in effect, "I am so glad that you are beginning to appreciate Him, too, and have you noticed this also, and this ...?"
Is His delight for ever more ...
This, I suggest, is what a "worship service" should be -- a time when we share with one another what the old divines used to call "the excellencies of Christ". The outcome of doing so will surely be the drawing together of the Father and His creatures in a common appreciation of His Son. What better definition of worship is there?
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