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.
