Lay down your sweet and weary head Night has fallen, you've come to journey's end From tent-toting patriarchs greeting promises from afar, to vagabonds and vagrants doomed to wander in a wasteland, God's people never saw final satisfaction in the journey. Traveling is tough going. We seek the promised land, the city with foundations, whose designer and builder is God, aiding you on towards the destination. Welcome to Journey's End. You've come to Journey's End. Jeroboam I was the first king of Israel. Now you might say, I thought Saul and David and Solomon came before. Well they did, but that was in a unified kingdom. When Solomon died, Israel was split in half, and the southern half was called Judah, and Jerusalem and the temple were in the southern kingdom. The northern kingdom was called Israel. It didn't have the temple, didn't have Jerusalem, and Jeroboam was its king. Jeroboam became the model of all the kings that would come after him in the north. But he was not a model to emulate. Ten times in the Book of Kings it is said that such and such a king did, quote, "...what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of Jeroboam, and in his sin which he made Israel to sin." Today on Journey's End, we are continuing our discussion of legalism and the law and we're going to look at one particular aspect of this that we get asked about regularly as Reformed pastors. It's the idea of corporate worship. How should we think about the corporate worship of God as it relates to both the law and to legalism? Good afternoon, I'm Doug Van Dorn. I'm the pastor of the Reformed Baptist Church of Northern Colorado. We are located in Boulder, Colorado, and with me is Tony Jackson. He's the pastor of Reformation Baptist Church down in Highlands Ranch. Tony, we've looked at parts of Romans 14 for the past two or three weeks. So I want to ask you as a way of segue between the shows so that people don't think that we're just kind of coming up with this out of our heads as a new topic. It's actually related to what we've been talking about. What is it about Romans 14 that makes us think about the idea of corporate worship that we're going to talk about today? Well, if you recall, one of the things we talked about is that there are many people who believe that keeping the law in the New Testament is legalism. In other words, if I say, we're still required to obey the Ten Commandments, some people might say, well, you're a legalist. And last week we talked about the Sabbath in particular. that some people would say if you teach that we're still obligated to obey the law and keep the Sabbath, keep the Sabbath day holy and rest on the seventh day and not do our work on the seventh day, that we're a legalist. And one of the passages that people point to In support of this idea is Romans 14, where Paul says in verse 5, And then some Christians would also point to Colossians 2, which we looked at last week, where Paul says you shouldn't let anyone be your judge in festivals and new moons and a Sabbath. And there people think that Paul is talking about the Sabbath, but actually in the context he is not. So people think that essentially when it comes to worship, when it comes to the first four commandments, it's up to me to be fully convinced in my own mind how I worship God. So whether I do that on Sunday or Tuesday or in church, Or at the coffee shop, meeting with another Christian. Or maybe even hiking up in the mountains, looking up at what God has made and saying, wow, isn't this wonderful what God has made. And so people have this idea that worship is something that is very personal. It's not something that's now commanded for Christians as to how we ought to worship God, but it's a personal choice. That's an interesting dichotomy, I would say, because we would say that it is intensely personal, wouldn't we? Yeah, we wouldn't deny that worshiping God is a personal thing, but we would simply argue that scripture shows us that it is personal, but it also is corporate, because the individual is not alone. The individual Christian is never alone. We're always a part of something bigger than us, and that is a community that God has established, and in the New Testament we certainly see the idea that Christ has purchased for himself a bride or a church, and the church is a corporate thing, it's not an individual thing. Now what we're going to talk about today, in some ways, is going to be very difficult for American people and American Christians because we're so used to our rugged individualism. I mean, this is what defines us, especially in the West. So when we start talking about corporate worship and that God might actually still care about how we do that, that strikes against almost everything that we stand for as a people. So with that kind of in the back of our minds, last week I remember hinting at that besides the Sabbath, the fourth commandment, there may very well be another one of the first four commandments that people don't really think applies that much today. And I think the problem is that a lot of people aren't really aware of this. So that they actually think that they're obeying the commandment, but they haven't really understood what the commandment really teaches. So the commandment is the second commandment. Why don't you read that for us? Okay, so in Exodus chapter 20, the first commandment is, I am the Lord your God, you shall have no other gods before me. So, no other gods is the first commandment. The second commandment is in verse 4. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the Lord your God am a jealous God. So, in summary, the second commandment is no images. We shouldn't make images of God or anything that God has made. Now this might seem like a dumb question but I think it's actually not so dumb. Is this really the second commandment? Well that's a good question because actually Roman Catholics include the second commandment with the first commandment and they say they're one in the same which is why Roman Catholics I think have trouble with this because they don't have any problem with making images. Orthodox and Protestants It's kind of interesting that Eastern Orthodox I'm talking about and Protestants actually have this as the second commandment, not as part of the first. And so the question is, who is right? And our answer is that from everything we know about the first century and Judaism, that Jesus himself would have divided the commandments up the way that we're talking about today. And so we're going to go with what we understand that Jesus would have done, and we're going to talk about the second commandment as teaching something different from the first commandment. It's the difference of the second commandment that really gets at the heart of, I think, why a lot of people think that they're obeying the second commandment, but in reality they haven't understood what it teaches. So you brought up a minute ago that the commandment strictly forbids making carved images. The question is what does that mean? And maybe the way you can help us answer that is by telling us the difference between the first and second commandment. Well the first commandment is no other gods. And the idea there is that there are other gods throughout scripture. We've talked about this before. The sons of God, for example. You could worship an angel as a god, because in a sense he is a god. He's not the god, but he is a god. He rules over a nation, for example. But God says you shall not worship any other god except me. I'm the only true God, and I'm the only one you should worship. And then the second commandment says you can't image God in a way that he hasn't imaged himself. I think where a lot of people have trouble with this is they read the second commandment and they think it only has to do with idols. And they would say to themselves, well, I don't have any idols in my house. I don't have any idols of God. I don't have a Buddha when I walk in my door. Maybe they feel uncomfortable when they go into a Chinese restaurant because there's a Buddha there with you know, ords is on its lap or whatever, and they think of that as a carved idol. And so they think of this commandment as only having to do with carved idols. What's wrong with that, Doug? Well, the problem is that since Buddha is not a god, it's not really the best example, but you can take an image of Zeus or something like that from older days when they actually thought that Zeus was a god. The problem is that that's already been forbidden in the first commandment. You're not supposed to worship false God. So the second commandment has to be telling us something different than the first commandment. The way that we talk about this is with our little children when we teach them the differences is that the first commandment tells us who we are to worship. The second commandment tells us how we are to worship the true God and how we're not to worship him. So, a good example of this would be Deuteronomy 12.30, where God says, That really, that commandment there is related or comes out of the second commandment. You're not supposed to worship God in a way that He hasn't told you to worship Him and you're not supposed to go worshiping Him the way that the nations worship their God. So the second commandment is about worshiping the true God the way that He has told us to. Now, what we want to do is we want to give some people some examples of how this has worked out in Old Testament history. Before you do that, Doug, let me just ask you a quick question. So, if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is that God actually tells us in His Word that there is a right way of worshipping Him and a wrong way of worshipping Him. Is that what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying, and it's not just because I think that there's continuity and that I actually read the whole Bible and believe that the whole Bible still speaks to this issue today. We could just talk about the New Testament. It says as much. Remember Jesus at the woman at the well. You pointed this verse out last week in how people bring up the word spirit there. We're to worship God in spirit. We're going to talk about this here in a minute when it comes to sincerity and worship. But Jesus adds another word there, doesn't he? Yeah, in truth. In truth. Truth implies that there's a right way to worship God and that there's a wrong way to worship him. One of the problems that we have is, I think, this came out in a Barna book 20 years ago marketing the church. Or he actually said that the people in the church are the audience. The audience of worship is the people sitting there. And so therefore the whole point is we need to cater to what they want in worship. The problem is that that's fundamentally backwards of what the Bible says. In the Bible it's not people that are the audience, it's God that's the audience. Worship is not for us, it's for Him. And so we could ask the question, don't we think that God should have the right to determine how He wants to be worshipped? Yes, God does have a right to say how He wants to be worshipped, because He's God. He's the one that is worthy of our worship. We've heard many people say, rightly, that we can think of worship as worth-ship. We worship God because of who He is, because He's worthy of being worshiped. And so the idea of worthy there is that He's worthy because of who He is, and who He is is communicated to us in the way that we worship God. So we're not free, as one of my professors used to say, to worship God out of the fertility of our imaginations. We can't just make up how we want to worship God. This was one of the biggest revelations to me when I studied this issue in seminary and I started to come to the understanding that, look, God does command how we worship Him and we can't worship Him any way we want. That was very difficult for me because as an American I wanted to break free from all the constraints of my past, from all the constraints of tradition, and worship God the way I wanted to worship Him. But when I began to seriously engage this question of does God command us how we ought to worship Him, and I had to come to the conclusion that Scripture is clear that He does, It was really a revolution in the way that I think about worship. And I think it's very difficult for us as Americans because we don't want the constraints of someone telling us what to do. And for some reason, this especially applies to worship. I think about the video that came out, this rap video, I don't know, three or four months ago on YouTube, and it went viral faster than anything I've ever seen. You know, 10 million hits in like a day. And the guy basically sings this whole song about how God wants you to be spiritual but not religious. And I think the attitude behind that is exactly what you're saying, that we don't want the constraints of somebody else telling us what to do with regard to how we worship God. Because we're a very spiritual people. We are very personal in our religion. And so this, we realize that this hits at the heart and makes it very, this is a difficult thing for people to listen to, but we hope that you'll bear with us and listen to a couple of the passages that we're going to read. I think where I would like to start is with the story of Jeroboam, since I brought him up at the beginning of the show, and then we can look at some other stories. We haven't looked at what it was that Jeroboam did that was wrong. God says that he brought Israel into the sin and they committed this great sin and all of these kings are held up to Jeroboam and they did the same thing. They didn't turn away from the sins of Jeroboam. What in the world are the sins of Jeroboam? Well, if we look at 1 Kings chapter 12, it says that if this people go up, because remember Jeroboam was in the north, and the two kingdoms were divided, and he recognized that the temple was in Jerusalem, and so he reasoned to himself, hey, if this people go up and offer sacrifices in the temple of the Lord of Jerusalem, then the heart of this people will turn again to their Lord, to Rehoboam, king of Judah, and they will kill me and return to Rehoboam, king of Judah. This is so important to start off saying that everything that we're going to talk about that Jeroboam did here is all because he was looking after number one, which was himself. So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold and he said to the people, you've gone up to Jerusalem long enough. Behold your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Whoa, wait a minute. your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Wasn't it Yahweh or Jehovah that brought up God's people out of the land of Egypt, Doug? Yeah, this is a great, great point to bring up here, Tony. What Jeroboam is doing here is he's mimicking Aaron and Moses, especially Aaron, not Moses, I guess. when he makes the golden calf and he says, behold your God that brings you up out of Egypt. The word God there, that's translated gods, I mean it's plural because he makes two of them, I understand that. But every Israelite knew that it was Yahweh that brought him up out of the land of Egypt. They knew it in the Exodus. They knew it in the days of Jeroboam. Jeroboam is not suggesting that here's two brand new gods that you've never heard of and now we're going to worship them. He's telling them that these images represent Yahweh and in order for you to have convenient worship, I'm just going to go ahead and make these two gods and then he does something next. He puts one at Bethel and one at Dan. The point being that he's establishing a new place of worship that hasn't been commanded And he told us why. It's because if the people go down to Jerusalem to worship the Lord, then his whole kingdom is going to be destroyed and they're going to kill him. So he's just making this convenient. It's very pragmatic worship that Jeroboam is engaged in here. And he's doing it under the auspices of, here's Yahweh, you guys. You can just come up to here to worship him now. And you can do it through this image, just like Aaron did. So would you call this the first drive-thru church, Doug? The first drive-thru church with drive-thru communion. Yeah, today what we see is, you know, there is a great shift of emphasis from traditional worship where we actually go to worship service and there are a lot of churches out there who say, look, you know, we know you're busy on Sunday so let's have church on Saturday night and then you won't have to bother with your Sundays of coming to church, of actually, you know, keeping the Sabbath holy But, you know, let's have this drive-thru church so you can just come through and get your communion and maybe hear a little message on the speaker and then you can go about your business. Isn't this exactly what Jeroboam was doing? I think that's a contemporary manifestation of it because it's creating a place of worship that God hasn't prescribed. Obviously, as we said even last week, the place of worship now has changed from the temple in Jerusalem but it's changed to a specific place which is where God's people are gathered together to worship Him. Jeroboam does a couple other things that we should at least just mention. He creates a new priesthood that God had not prescribed. It says that they were not the Levites. And it also says that he appointed a feast that God had not prescribed. And so what he's doing is he's worshiping Yahweh through an image. He's creating a new place of worship. He's creating his own priesthood. He's creating his own feasts. And verse 33, the very last verse of 1 Kings 12, tells us What the problem was, it says that he had devised from his own heart. This is the sin that the kings of Israel did not depart from and caused Israel to continue to commit and because of it eventually God drove them into captivity and exile. So talking about creating worship out of our own hearts, that's what Jeroboam was doing. The idea there is essentially creating worship that is convenient for us, or it appeals to us. It's what we want to do. It's a self-styled worship. It's a buffet, if you will. Look, I like this, I don't like that. I'll take a little bit of this, I won't take any of that. And that's the kind of worship that we see going on all around us today in so many churches. And the question that we need to engage and really think about is, does God prescribe how we ought to worship Him? Or another way we could ask that is, is there worship that God is pleased with and is there worship that God is not pleased with? That's a hard question for people to answer because none of us want to say, no, God's not pleased with my worship. But the fact of the matter is that scripture is very clear on this point. We can go all the way back to Genesis chapter 4. with Cain and Abel and just listen to these words and the Lord had regard for Abel and for his offering But for Cain, and for his offering, he had no regard. And so Cain did exactly what many of us would do. He became angry with God, and his countenance fell. So very clearly, right from the beginning, we can see that God has prescribed worship that he is happy with, and there is worship that he's not happy with. Why is that so hard for us to grasp in our generation? Yeah, it just makes people mad and it just breaks my heart as a pastor who cares very deeply about these things and we're trying to have a church that is trying to be faithful to the way that we think God would have us to worship Him. What we're finding is that it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to even want to sit in a worship service like we have because of the problems that we're talking about this morning. And when you end up reading what happened to Israel and how God was so concerned about this issue, it's a little bit frightening to me as a pastor to wonder what exactly it is that God thinks about what we're doing a lot of the time. So I think a lot of Christians today would say in listening to this conversation, well everything you've talked about is in the Old Testament, but what about the New Testament? You brought up John chapter 4 where Jesus said you've got to worship God in spirit and truth. So there is a truth, there's an objective truth to how we worship God. We can also look at Hebrews chapter 12. In Hebrews chapter 12 verses 18 and following he says you've not come to what may be touched a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. There he's talking about Moses and Mount Sinai. But then he goes on and he says, but you have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, to the heavenly Jerusalem, to innumerable angels in festal gathering, worship gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven. Later he goes on and he says, therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken and thus let us offer to God, listen Doug, this is a very important word here in verse 28, let us offer to God acceptable worship with reverence and awe for our God is a consuming fire. Does the New Testament teach that God is pleased with our worship when we worship according to that which is acceptable to Him? Without a doubt, Tony. And it's so important for people to hear this. This is not some kind of a cultural thing that we're talking about. This is a continuing thing that goes from the Garden of Eden to the end of time. Jesus told the Pharisees that you worship me and you teach people to worship me with the doctrines and commandments of men. That goes back to the legalism question where people add things to God's worship that he hasn't prescribed and it actually ends up binding them in ways that they don't understand. Colossians 2 brings this up. People are submitting to these regulations. He says, do not handle, do not taste, do not touch. referring to things that are all perish when they are used, according to human precepts and teachings. Then he adds, these have an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion. Or the King James says, will worship. Talk about that, but we don't have time. Aestheticism, severity of the body, but he says they're of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh. True worship is for God in ascribing worth to him, but true worship also helps us to stop indulging in the flesh. We could also look at positive things of what the early church was doing. Go to Acts chapter 2 and they were breaking bread, they were meeting together, they were praying, they were fellowshipping, they were preaching the Word of God. These are all the basic elements of worship that they were participating in. So it's not just don't do these things, but here's the things that you're supposed to do. And when we do those things, we know that God is pleased with our worship because these are the things that he's told us that he wants in his worship. These are the things he's told us that he likes when he's worshiped. And if we remember that worship is for God instead of ourselves, by putting him first, He will end up changing us and growing us in ways that we could never imagine when our focus was simply on ourselves when we go to worship God. Well, we've come to the end of another show and we want to thank you for sticking with us in this difficult topic and we hope that you'll listen to us again next week. Journey's End is a production of the Reformed Baptist Church of serving the Front Range. Our show is dedicated to helping Christians think deeply about their faith and helping them understand that the destination is the purpose of the journey. At www.ColoradoReformation.com you will find an increasing number of helpful tools. We have local churches in the southern and northern metro areas to assist you in understanding both the journey and the journey's end. Our worship services are Christ-centered and driven by the teachings of Scripture. This leads to our people seeking to emulate our Savior through kindness and humility. We are rooted in the historic creeds of Christianity and our traditions arose out of the Protestant Reformation. We invite you to head to our website www.coloradoreformation.com for more information. That's www.coloradoreformation.com. We look forward to being with you again next week. Thanks for listening. That was a great show! into the world.