By Wayne Stewart
Worship Arts Pastor at Christ Community Church, Ames, IA
Excerpted by permission from his book, “Bigger < Maybe Our Worship Is Just Too Small”
---
In Pre-Fall Genesis we don’t see what we would normally size up as worship. At least not in any forms that we commonly identify as worship. There’s no singing that we know of. No praying, at least in a structured devotional sense. No creeds. No liturgy.
Instead, God and Man seem to interact in a perfectly relational manner—that is, a perfect relationship. We don’t note any actions required or times to be observed for them to connect and engage. It’s unbounded. Free. It’s also the indicator and picture of what we might call the First Act of worship in the Bible: Perfectly Relational Response.
Worship has always been a relational and responsive reality in God’s universe. It just looked very different in the beginning. This truth indicates the enormous reality of what it is that we trade away when we live out a smaller worship. Like the storyline that this is, we will need to allow ourselves to sink into the depths of a great tragedy in order to appreciate its great rescue and restoration.
Act Two of worship in the Bible takes us there quickly. As the curtain rises, the sin of mankind enters God’s perfectly ordered universe.
Suddenly, everything changes, radically and horribly. In this corrupted next generation of worship some elements of the previously perfect relationship undergo significant change. Devotional elements, conspicuously absent before, now surface as core parts of the interaction. Notably, we see the additions of time, form, and ritual. In Act One these worship boundaries were nowhere to be found. Sadly, they now make their entrance from the wings to take their mark at center stage. This is a tainting, a marring of the grand design of God as a result of the treason of mankind. And it continues to devolve.
In Genesis 4, Cain and Abel bring an offering before God, one from the produce of his flocks, the other from the fruits of the soil. We don’t get the details or steps here, but clearly there has been a system of offering (worship) put into place since the banishment from Eden. That’s worth noting in and of itself. On the “outside” of God’s design, a system emerges in replacement of relationship. Worship, formerly perfectly relational in nature, now has details attached to it. And a deep sorrow as well.
Cain’s failed offering leads him to anger and murder. Condemned to another level outward from Eden, his banishment brings with it the sting of relational brokenness with God. Cain realizes what this really means. It’s another level out of distance, another step removed from that perfect relational connection to God that we all had in the beginning. Here is his cry of anguish:
“My punishment is more than I can bear. Today you are driving me from the land, and I will be hidden from your presence...” (Gen. 4:13-14a)
This loss of fellowship with God, even in its diluted, post-Eden form; that’s what Cain couldn’t bear. Act Two of worship in the Bible, Broken: Pre-Law, displays for us a tragically twisted scene where worship is transformed from pure relational response into ever deepening layers of form, time, and ritual. We have lost much. Too much to bear (see also Gen. 8:20; Job 1:4-5).
This is the sense of tragedy carried into the third act of worship in the Bible where the newly established people of God, Israel, are released from their captivity and led to a mountain in the wilderness. It’s here that we get a glimpse of the increased detail around how God’s people are to bring offerings and worship before Him. We might refer to Act Three as Broken: Law and Tabernacle/Temple.
It’s clearly a fallen and imperfect system (it has to be repeated), yet a gracious design of God’s to allow us to walk with Him anyway. It points to the severity of our disobedience by indicating that life needs to be taken, blood shed, in order to maintain a holy interaction with a perfect God. We brought death into this world by our sin. Therefore, death is now the currency by which we must engage in our relationship with God. Horribly, blood is the cleansing agent through which our stain of rebellion is tempered. Please hear this: God is not blood-thirsty. He is not a vulgar, ancient deity that relishes the sacrifice of life from His created ones. This is simply a just reflection of what we have done.
We invited the malevolent force of sin into God’s perfected creation. We did this. The outcome perfectly, yet gruesomely, matches the act. What we have done is no small thing. Yet as deep as we have sunk, we need to also note God’s faithful and loving hand at work in the midst of the carnage.
All is different, but not all is lost.
Difficult as it may be to see through the haze of Leviticus, the core issue and call is still to know and honor God. Although our approach to God is now regulated by form, time, and ritual, it’s not about those things alone. As far as God is concerned, it’s still all about relationship. Praise God, He is neither deaf nor indifferent to our plight.
To Dwell Among
Consider for a moment one of the most densely-packed portions of Scripture with regard to worship details. The eleven chapters between Exodus 25 and 35 are a long and intentional listing of all the aspects of the worship life of the newly formed nation of Israel with that infamous “Golden Calf Moment” sandwiched in-between. You want to know the dimensions of a table for the tabernacle? It’s there. The type of materials and design for lamp stands? Got it. How big, wide, and tall the movable curtains should be surrounding it? No problem. Every article of clothing and accessory required for the priestly service? Eleven. Chapters.
Okay, now look at the tail end of Chapter 29 and you’ll see something simply and utterly amazing:
“...There I will meet you and speak to you (Moses); there also I will meet with the Israelites...then I will dwell among (emphasis mine) the Israelites and be their God.” (Ex. 29:42b-45)
This promise of dwelling, declared here and re-stated throughout the Bible is glorious. It tells us that God’s intention is still nothing less than to have an actual relationship with His people. The point of chapter after chapter of details in the Law is not the structure or the form itself. It’s a means to an end, a facilitator of sorts to provide the way for the Holy God of all to walk among the unholy, established to create nearness when distance would otherwise be the default reality.
As we mentioned earlier, this system is not perfect. It is good but not perfected. It needs to be repeated—never completely satisfying the moral debt of humanity toward a Holy God. For that, there would need to be a completely and utterly perfect sacrifice. And it will have to be a human sacrifice; something God has never before ordered His people to do, yet absolutely necessary for complete cleansing and satisfying of the rightful wrath of God.
The problem is that no one is perfect.
No human qualifies, no matter how good. At this point we have no method to affect this situation in any way on our own. We have God’s original design for us to know Him perfectly. We have His gracious restatement of this desire—to dwell with us. Yet, we remain at a distance because of our sin-stain. Who will release us from this revolving door of sin, distance, and loss? Thank God, He has not walked away.
Which brings us to Act Four: Restored, Yet Not Fully. [continued here]
---
Wayne Stewart has been serving as Worship Arts Pastor at Christ Community Church in Ames, Iowa (ccames.org) since 2010. For more than two decades, his passion has centered on helping people grow into a bigger understanding and experience of worship—the privilege and power of knowing, meeting with and walking with God. You can catch a deeper sense of Wayne’s heart and teaching at worshipisnosmallmatter.com. His new book, “Bigger < Maybe Our Worship Is Just Too Small” offers both leaders and laypersons biblical scholarship and practical insight and is available in both paperback and Kindle format at Amazon.com. Additionally, the content is available online at Bigger Online.
