Sunday, November 8
There’s something in us – something, no doubt, that was originally woven in us by God but, as with everything else, became warped by sin – that longs to worship. Obviously, in the beginning we were to worship the only One worthy of worship, our Lord and Creator. But since the Fall, all this has changed, even greatly.
But, yes, we all worship something, someone, whatever. This helps explain why all through human history, and even today, humans practice worship. In ancient Egypt, some people worshiped the pharaoh; at other times, in other lands, people worshiped statues of fish, multiheaded gods, and other supposed deities. Some people worshiped the sun, the moon, the stars.
Today, most people are too sophisticated to bow down before a statue of a frog (but, apparently, not a statue of Mary), yet this hardly means that humans, even secular humans, don’t worship something: money, power, sex, themselves, rock stars, actors, politicians. Whatever we love the most, whatever we focus most of our attention on, whatever we live for, that is what we worship. And, warned secular author David Foster Wallace, if you worship the wrong thing, it “will eat you alive.”
What does the story in Daniel 3 teach us about the importance of true worship?
The three Jewish boys obviously took the second commandment (Exodus 20:4-6) as seriously as God had meant it to be taken. After all, it’s part of the Ten Commandments, right up there with prohibitions on murder and robbery and so forth. Worship, proper worship, is so important that, in fact, it becomes central to the issues in the last days, before the second coming of Christ. Thus, Christian education needs to include the whole question of worship: what is it, how do we do it, why is it important, and whom do we worship?
Read Revelation 14:6-12. What do these texts teach us about how central the question of worship will be in the final crisis before Christ returns?
