In his book The Christian Mind, Henry Blamires writes that it is a perversion of the Christian faith to treat God as a means to an end. We worship God simply because He is God, not because we want God to do something for us.[i] Everything in our culture predisposes us to reject the idea that we worship God simply because he is God, but to miss this is to miss the essence of Christianity. Isaiah caught a glimpse of God as He really is, and He responded with authentic and spontaneous worship: In the year of King Uzziah’s death, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, lofty and exalted, with the train of His robe filling the temple. Seraphim stood above Him, each having six wings; with two he covered his face, and with two he covered his feet, and with two he flew. And one called out to another and said, “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts, the whole earth is full of His glory.” And the foundations of the thresholds trembled at the voice of him who called out, while the temple was filling with smoke. Then I said, “Woe is me, for I am ruined! Because I am a man of unclean lips, And I live among a people of unclean lips; For my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts.” Then one of the seraphim flew to me, with a burning coal in his hand which he had taken from the altar with tongs. And he touched my mouth with it and said, “Behold, this has touched your lips; and your iniquity is taken away, and your sin is forgiven.” Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?” Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”[ii] Isaiah did not stop to ask himself whether worshipping God would help him in his quest for self-actualization. He was not interested in using God as a stepping-stone toward achieving his own goals. He worshipped God simply because He is God. Our utilitarian society has no patience for this sort of thinking and lacks the frame of reference needed to be able to understand it. We have no need for God unless he meets our needs and satisfies our desires. If He does not, why bother worshipping Him? So goes the logic of a society that has lost its soul, and if we’re not careful, sometimes we who are seeking to be authentic Christians can fall into this same kind of thinking. When we allow what seems culturally plausible to dictate our view of God, the result is something other than the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We’ve settled for a god of our own making. If we’ve come to know the true and living God, then we worship Him because He is worthy of our worship, not because He makes us feel good about ourselves (a good game of tennis can do that) or because He makes us moral (there are plenty of compassionate atheists and selfish religious folks out there) or because we want a more well-ordered society (theocracies don’t work). Once we’ve caught a glimpse of the real God and we’ve seen His beauty and His majesty we realize that we have only two options: We can fall to our knees in worship or we can turn away and run in the opposite direction as far and as quickly as we possibly can. If we choose any other option, then we’ve not encountered the real God in a real way. Any understanding of God that yields a passive response, as though God were like a flavor of ice cream, a mere personal preference, is a contemporary revisionism that has nothing to do with the Christian faith that was handed down by Jesus and the apostles, and it has nothing to do with the God who is really there. A. W. Tozer warned the Church about this a generation ago[iii]. I am merely echoing the sentiment of Tozer and calling a new generation to heed his words, which are more needful now than when Tozer first wrote them. This certainly does not mean that we no longer see God as good and loving and compassionate. God is indeed a compassionate God who meets us at our point of need. We could cite numerous biblical accounts that demonstrate the fact that God delights in meeting the needs of His children because of His great love for us. Though our gratefulness for God’s goodness toward us may be a motivating factor in our response to God, in the final analysis this is not why we worship Him. There is a deeper and more enduring motivation. For example, the prophet Habakkuk declared: Though the fig tree should not blossom, And there be no fruit on the vines, Though the yield of the olive should fail, And the fields produce no food, Though the flock should be cut off from the fold, And there be no cattle in the stalls, Yet I will exult in the LORD, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation.[iv] Job went even further by proclaiming: Though He slay me, I will hope in Him.[v] I’d like to suggest that if we’re serious about following Jesus, then at some point we’ll need to wrestle with this issue. If we’re willing to allow God to do some meddling in our lives, God will set us on a trajectory that will get us to the point where we’ll worship God simply because He is God. Once we begin to feel the weight of worshipping the God who is really there, the One who created the greatest galaxies and the smallest microbes, the One to whom we owe our very existence, and the One who is worthy of our worship regardless of whether or not He meets our felt needs, this will deepen our loyalty to Him and will temper our words about Him. It will give us something worth saying about Him. ________________ [i] Blamires, Harry. (1978). The Christian Mind. Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Publications (see chapter 3, “It’s Conception of Truth” on pages 106-131). [ii] Isaiah 6:1-8 [iii] Tozer, A.W. (1982). The Pursuit of God. Camp Hill, PA: Christian Publications (see chapter 1, Following Hard after God” on pages 11-20). Also, Tozer, A.W. (1961). The Knowledge of the Holy. San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, Publishers (see chapter 1, “”Why We Must Think Rightly about God” on pages 1-5). [iv] Habakkuk 3:17-18 [v] Job 13:15 Scripture quotations taken from the NASB.
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