Goodness is the solution to everything. If everyone would just "be good" the world would be a better place. In fact, this has become the gospel of our age--be kinder, behave better, try harder.
We assume goodness is just a matter of telling people WHAT to do. "Here is God's law. Here are the Ten Commandments. Here is a Bible. Here is what my church teaches. Obey." We assume goodness is only a matter of pragmatics, "here let me show you HOW to do it. Take these steps, follow this formula, master this technique, buy this book and DVD."
All of this sounds nice, except it doesn't work. We have more ways of telling people WHAT to do than ever before, and yet the days are growing evil. We have more knowledge and expertise than at any point in history. You open your newspaper, you log into the Internet, and you're inundated with How-To advice touching upon every malady known to human race.
But that's the problem. We aren't good. Despite how we think of ourselves, Jesus taught, "there is no one good except God alone." Becoming good involves far more than preaching WHAT or HOW. The starting point for God? He always shows us WHO he is before he asks anything in return.
Before God ever gave the Ten Commandments, he appeared to Moses in a burning bush, showing his holiness to Moses. When Moses was angry about the wickedness of God's people, God took him to a mountain where he "caused his goodness to pass before Moses." In the Ten Commandments themselves, before God asks Israel to do anything, he invites them to first remember WHO He is... "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery... therefore... you shall have no other gods before me."
If we don't get our worship right, we'll never get goodness right. You see goodness isn't a cold dead list of dos and don'ts. Goodness isn't practical advice either. Goodness is the very essence of who God is. God is good. God is love. God is life. The more we have of God, the more we take on his goodness and grace.
The New Testament of goodness is that God give us his Holy Spirit, that we might partake of his Divine Nature. Only God can "make us good." And he does it as we abide in him through his Holy Spirit (show Gal. 5:25). Goodness is natural outflow of being in a relationship with God.
This morning I want to turn our attention to the second commandment, which is about the nature of worship itself. How should we worship? Exodus 20:1-6, God says to his people, "2 "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. 3 "You shall have no other gods before me.
4 "You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments."
God is Spirit, Don't Substitute!
What does it look like to worship God? First, we need to remember that God is Spirit. And for this reason there is always a temptation to substitute our worship with things that are physical, material, tangible, fleshly, worldly.
It wasn't until I started preaching that I began to realized the extent to which people affix their worship to physical objects. In a church, potentially everything physical becomes sacred. In the sanctuary was a communion table, an oak pulpit that felt like standing behind a massive fortress. There was the American flag, the Christian flag. There was an enormous King James Bible, probably hundreds of years old, opened up to Psalm 23. There was a cross, wooden pews, an organ, a piano.
Over the pulpit however, was a lighted hologram Jesus picture. During worship people would stare at this picture. You know that moment when people aren't making direct eye contact with you... I wondered if they were staring at my hairline or something. They were looking at that picture! I didn't realize how attached people were to that picture until one Sunday the light burned out. Suddenly, Jesus was no longer glowing yellow, and people panicked! Four different times during the service a different person came unto the stage to try to fix the picture. I wondered how it could have become such a focal point! They also had a lighted picture of the Lord's Supper.
I see this commandment as a reminder that our attachment is not to physical, worldly, or even fleshly things... but it's to God Himself, a God who is Spirit. When Jesus met the Samaritan woman, she questioned him about whether it was proper to worship in Jerusalem, or on Mt. Gerazim. Even a building, a place of worship, can become a focal point. Jesus comment to her was, "... the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshippers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship him in spirit and in truth."
Nothing physical can contain God, he is Spirit, he is infinite, he is invisible. Nothing physical can capture the essence, or convey the full reality, the truth of who God is. The only proper image to focus on during worship is Jesus himself... he is the image of the invisible God. He is exact representation of God.
By the way, modern worshippers can be just as attached to the physical as anyone. We have our guitars and drums, our vocalists and instrumentalists. We have state of the art lighting, smoke machines, environmental projection, color-filled staging, and we're all about that bass. Is it possible for us to simply be with God in worship? Do we need all these sacred things to supplement our worship? Is Spirit of the Living God, pointing to Jesus within us, enough?
God is Jealous, Don't Depersonalize.
What does it look like to worship God? Well first, He is Spirit, and we ought be careful we not attach to physical things, which can become God substitutes. But here we see another danger. We can so easily forget how intensely personal God intends our relationship with Him to be. In Exodus 20:4, God tells us, "I the Lord Your God, am a jealous God. . ."
To our modern ear, this word Jealous has negative connotations. Maybe the image of some psychopath comes to mind, or a movie like Fatal Attraction. The language of jealously however, is covenantal language. It's the kind of language used of marriage, where a husband and wife covenant together, until death do us part. Jealousy is the emotion husband or wife feels when their covenant is betrayed. Here God is seeking the very best for his Son Israel.... Here Christ is seeking the very best for his Bride the Church... yet we have this wayward heart. We don't realize that the commandments flow out of a deeply personal relationship with a Father.
You know when I was younger, I did all sorts of things for money. I had a paper route, I bailed hay, and de-tasled corn. But I also collected aluminum cans, thousands. Friends, I was a garbage picking, dumbster diving, shameless recycler. People would look at me in disgust at community events as I rummaged through trash cans. Each month my dad would drive me to the recycling center, and I'd get cash. One day I cashed in a half-dozen bags of cans... but a man who was there, with half as many bags as me, got twice as much for his bags! My dad had this look of disgust on his face, and later explained how the man had loaded up his cans with weights to cheat the system.
Well wouldn't you know, we boys used aluminum cans for many purposes. Once, in total innocence, with God as my witness, in total innocence, I used an aluminum can for holding steel ballbearings my dad had brought home from work, for us to use with our slingshots down by the creek. Never in a MILLION years would I have filled a can with steel bearings to cheat the scales, but one day my dad found that can in our garage. He assumed the worse, and came flying into our bedroom to confront us. He was so angry, I knew any explanation wouldn't be trusted. But you know one of the worse feelings I ever had as a child was my dad thinking I was a criminal. I knew I wasn't, I had a clear conscience, but seeing and feeling his disgust crushed my soul.
You know, when we do good, we ought to think what the face of God looks like. When we sin, we ought to consider the pain, maybe the disgust, the agony that sweeps across the Father's face. Part of worship is realizing the impact we have on God. If we commit spiritual adultery, we arouse his jealousy. In the New Testament Paul prays that we would learn to the please the Father in every way, discerning his will. Maybe we don't like the thought of God being jealous because we're terrified to think he takes us so seriously. Well guess what... God takes us serious. He is affected by us.
God is Life, Don't Trivialize
If we're uncomfortable with the language of God's jealousy being aroused, we're probably infinitely more uncomfortable with the language of punishment and blessing. God speaks of, "punishing the children for the sin of the parents 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."
If we believe that God IS Life... not just that God possesses life... but that God IS life itself, how might that affect how we understand these verses. Really, we are presented with a rather sober choice in life. One choice is that we can turn to God, who is LIFE, and be blessed for a thousand generations. But the other choice is we can turn away from God, toward sin and death, and feel God's wrath for 3 or 4 generations. Now notice the time disparity here... blessed for thousands of years, or under wrath a few generations?
When we turn to the New Testament, to Romans 1, we gain a little bit of insight about this second command. Notice how people turn away from the spiritual to the physical... and instead of knowing God personally, they dismiss God. And notice how when we turn away from God, things begin to spiral toward death. And when you consider this death spiral, think of the generational ramifications or Romans 1:18-32.
When it comes to worship, a lot of people think there is nothing at stake.... Not for them, not for their kids, and generations following.... Not for their soul. But worship matters for everything. The Bible says God does not delight in the death of the wicked. It says he rejoices whenever one sinner repents. Worship is about embracing God for eternal life... worship is about establishing generations of blessing in our family line. Think about that the next time you want to blow off worship. You might think it's a loving thing for your family to blow off God, but from God's perspective, it's the very worse thing you can do to your family.
We substitute...
We depersonalize...
We trivialize...