Everett Henes: The place of worship
If you were to come to my house, you would notice certain things right away. Displayed prominently in our front room is our wedding picture along with pictures of our children and their spouses. These are there because we value them highly. I don’t mean we value the pictures highly, but we value the people represented in the pictures. Those things that represent our greatest loves are often put on prominent display. Or take, for instance, someone who loves a particular sports team. You will often know from their talk, shirts, hats, stickers, and posters about it.
This is something about human nature: those things we value highly, we make a prominent part of our lives. This isn’t the result of some attempt to survive. It is the result of design. Augustine, that great early church theologian, discussed this as the idea of disordered love. We all love things in this life. We set our affections upon them, and they are prominent in our thoughts, in our words, and in our deeds.
Augustine's concept of disordered loves revolves around the idea that humans have an innate desire for happiness, which leads them to love various things. However, when these loves become disordered, meaning they are not properly aligned with the love of God, they can lead to sin and suffering. Augustine argues that the root of all sin is the misplacement of love, where humans prioritize finite and temporal things over the eternal and infinite love of God. He emphasizes the importance of aligning one's loves in the correct order, with love for God at the forefront, to achieve true happiness and fulfillment.
This checks out with what Jesus calls the first and greatest commandment: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Matthew 22:37) The love for God is to be central, prominent, in our lives. This is the basis for our worship of God. Worship is expressing love.
Worship is the praise, adoration, and reverence of God, both in public and in private. It is a celebration of the worthiness of God, the giving of honor to his name. To give honor to a name, in the Bible, is to give honor to the person. Jesus teaches, in the Lord’s Prayer, “Our Father … hallowed by your name.” To speak of God’s name as holy, or hallowed, is to honor God himself.
The centrality of worship is seen in the creation story itself. God made man to dwell in perfect communion with himself. This was the intention of God, before sin entered the world. God made man body and soul in true knowledge, righteousness, and holiness with dominion over the creatures. Man was to serve God by being faithful in the tasks given. This is one of those things that makes the fall so tragic. Man lost communion with God.
You might think that this meant man no longer worshiped at all. But man was created a worshiping being. It’s not that we stopped worshiping, but that we began to worship anything and everything that we could. This desire to have communion with one greater than ourselves led man into all manner of idolatry.
The sun and moon became objects of worship, along with the stars, the angels, and even other people. Ultimately, though, we began worshiping ourselves. The center of our lives often revolves around our own satisfaction, comfort, and joys. Our time and our talents are our own and we cultivate them so that we are happy. The problem, though, is that we are not happy. We are wanderers on the earth, seeking something or someone greater than ourselves. Someone greater than even all of creation. We long for something eternal. This is why we mourn death. Death is not part of life but is that final enemy who keeps us from eternity.
Man is made a worshiping being, which is why the first two commandments that God spoke to his people dealt with worship. The first commandment speaks to the exclusivity of worshiping God: “You shall have no other gods before me.” No other gods are to be worshiped, even secondarily. God alone is to be worshiped. Even further, he instructs on how he is to be worshipped. The second commandment teaches us that it is not to be through images or according to the imagination of man. As God made us to worship, so he also teaches us how we ought to worship.
— Pastor Everett Henes, the pastor of the Hillsdale Orthodox Presbyterian Church, can be reached at pastorhenes@gmail.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Everett Henes: The place of worship
