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G. K. Chesterton once argued that when things go wrong, we need “unpractical men” who will analyze the problem before rushing in with solutions.
Worshipers gather to perform actions. The biblical language of worship has people doing things before God (“offering” [Ps. 4:5]; “prostrating” [Is. 49:7]; “confessing”|Ps. 32:5]; “kneeling”[Ps. 95:6]; “singing”[Ps. 95:1]; bringing “gifts” in their hands [Exod. 34:20]). In addition to this, worship is evaluated not according to the affect it might have on worshipers, but whether it is “acceptable” to God or not (Gen. 4:3-7; Exod. 32; Is. 1; Rom. 12:1-2; 14:17-18; Heb. 12:28-29; 13:16).
For us, as creatures of God, there can be no such thing as “disinterested praise. We simply cannot love or praise God for who He is apart from what He has given us or what we continue to receive from Him.
Simply stated, the purpose of the Sunday service is covenant renewal. During corporate “worship” the Lord renews His covenant with His people when He gathers them together and serves them.
Here at the outset I should emphasize that the end or goal of God’s covenant is always a feast. God invites us to a meal. We come to church on Sunday to eat with Jesus and one another, to feast in His presence.
God has not given us a simple sentence definition of a covenant; rather, He has told the story of how He has entered into covenant with man so that we can appreciate the richness of His covenantal relations with us.
Without a simple definition we are driven to contemplate the multi-dimensional form or structure of His covenantal initiatives, acts, and speech as revealed in the Bible. These concrete, historical events and literary documents therefore become the paradigms (or models) of what the covenant is and ought to be.
Great strides have been made in our understanding of the covenant with the introduction of the discipline of “biblical theology” in the twentieth century.
1) God takes hold, 2) God separates and makes something new, 3) God speaks, 4) God grants ritual signs and seals, and 5) God arranges for the future.
Two trees are singled out from the rest to serve as “sacramental” signs and seals of the covenant. This should not surprise us since food and meals function this way in virtually every covenant in the Bible. But the important point here is that essential to every biblical covenant are these public, very physical memorials of the covenant. There is a sign of the covenant, something physical and tangible to remind God and Adam of the covenant: the two trees in the Garden.
God inaugurates and maintains this new covenant with Adam by speaking to him, and Adam is encouraged to find blessing and life in obedience to his gracious covenant Lord by thankfully eating from the Tree of Life, confessing his dependence on God’s grace, but dutifully avoiding the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil for a time.3 Finally, God graciously provides for the succession of the covenant by making a wife for Adam. God and Adam are in covenant with one another. We call this “the creation covenant” or “the covenant of life. “4
Our outline of the form of God ‘s covenant includes five dimensions: 1. As covenant Lord, Yahweh takes hold of His creation in order to do something new with it. 2. The Lord effects a separation. What God grasps is then transformed from one state to another, from the old to the new! a new creation. This new union (dirt and life-giving breath of Yahweh) receives from God a corresponding new name, which implies a new hierarchical relationship. There is a covenant head (Yahweh) and there are those who are dependant on that covenant head (human creatures). 3. A new verbal communication of
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If the corporate worship of the Christian Church is such a covenant renewal event, then we should expect it to have a similar shape. This is precisely what we find in traditional Christian liturgies.
Traditional liturgies have not typically been labeled “covenant renewal services” largely because the covenant has not been adequately appreciated or understood until recently.
Whether the word “covenant” is used or understood, these covenantal patterns have profoundly influenced the historic liturgies of the Church.
The way of sacrifice has not been abrogated; animal sacrifices have.
The fact that the covenant renewal meal is an integral part of weekly Christian worship was a dramatic experience for the first-century Jews.
This mode of “sacrificial living” coram deo ought to characterize our daily lives, to be sure, but on the Lord’s Day there is a special sense in which we are gathered together by God as the body of Christ in order to be drawn into God’s holy presence as “living sacrifices.”
I believe that explaining the biblical order or sequence of man’s approach to God in the service may be the key to resurrecting a hearty Bible-based liturgy in our churches.
I believe that the traditional Christian liturgical order arose in the early Church from a gut-level familiarity with the biblical way of approaching God, even if Church theologians have not always explicitly identified the biblical source of their intuitions.
The three operations or steps can be conveniently identified as Cleansing, Consecration, and Communion.
As it ascends into the Lord’s presence each sacrificial animal is always : 1. slaughtered and its blood splashed on the altar (cleansing and forgiveness) , then 2. skinned, cut up, washed, and arranged in proper order on the altar grill (consecration), and finally 3. transformed into smoke and incorporated into God s presence as food (communion).
Interestingly enough, in addition to the three “steps” taken by (or “operations” performed on) each sacrificial animal, there were also three main types of sacrifices that were part of the normal taber-nacle/temple liturgy of Old Testament worship: a Purification Offering, an Ascension Offering (sometimes mistakenly called a “whole burnt offering”), and a Fellowship (or Peace) Offering.8 Each specific type of sacrifice highlights one of the three major operations:
1. The Purification Offering highlights and expands on the cleansing or purification dimension of sacrificial offerings. That is why it is called a purification offering. The offering accents the animal s slaughter and the display of the blood on the altar. For example, Leviticus 17 (the day of atonement) is an elaborate Purification Offering where the act of confession and forgiveness is highlighted. The other two aspects are present, but downplayed. 2. The Ascension Offering expands on the element of consecration and the ascension of the animal/worshiper into God s presence. That’s why it is
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these three types of sacrifices are always offered in the same order: Purification Offering (cleansing), Ascension Offering (consecration), and Peace Offering (communion meal).
Another biblical way to think about these three steps in the service is to consider them as God’s three ways of serving us or God’s three gifts given to us on the Lord’s Day.
Gordan Wenham maintains, “The pattern of OT sacrifices may thus provide a pattern of truly Christian worship. Worship should begin with confession of sins, a claiming of Christ s forgiveness, and a total rededication to God s service, before going on to praise and petition. “18
W. Robertson Nicholl concurs: The significance of this order will readily appear if we consider the distinctive meaning of each of these offerings. The sin offering had for its central thought, expiation of sin by the shedding of blood; the burnt offering, the full surrender of the person symbolized by the victim to God; the meal offering, in like manner, the consecration of the fruit of his labors; the peace offering, sustenance and life from God’s table and fellowship in peace and joy with God and with one another.23
Peter Lange comes to the same conclusion: In the order of the offerings of Aaron both for himself and the people is clearly expressed the order of the steps of approach to God; first, the forgiveness of sin, then the consecration completely to God, and after this communion with Him, and blessing from Him.24
Finally, even the NIV Study Bible gets this just right: When more than one kind of offering was presented (as in Num. 6:16-17), the procedure was usually as follows: (1) sin offering or guilt offering, (2) burnt offering, (3) fellowship offering and grain offering (along with a drink offering). This sequence furnishes part of the spiritual significance of the sacrificial system. First, sin had to be dealt with (sin of-fering or guilt offering). Second, the worshiper committed himself completely to God (burnt offering and grain offering). Third, fellowship or communion between the Lord, the
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Whatever we “do” in worship must always be a faithful response to God’s gifts of forgiveness, life, knowledge, and glory—gifts we receive in the service. Without this perspective, the purpose of the Lord’s Day assembly degenerates into an opportunity for Christian people to gather together and offer human devotion to God.
While Reformed seminarians are busying their brains with Hodge and Berkhof, are the seeds of the destruction of our distinctive doctrinal commitments being sown in our churches every Sunday as our people are blown to and fro by every wind of liturgical fad? What they do in church every Sunday may actually undermine what they confess in their confessional standards and learn in the classroom.
Precomposed prayers are biblical. This practice is not merely some leftover from Roman Catholicism. Our use of set prayers is very self-conscious. The historical Church got the idea from the Bible, particularly the Psalms and the book of Revelation, but not exclusively so. The Old Testament is filled with examples of how the saints used set forms of prayer to confess and praise God (Deut. 26; Ezra 3:10; Neh. 12:24;Ps. 136). David appointed Levites to compose prayers and songs to be used in the corporate worship of Israel (I Chr. 6:31-48; 15:16-24; 16:4-6; 25:1-5). These prayers and songs were
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Does anyone in the Bible stroll into God’s presence singing, “I’ve got joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart”?They may eventually express their joy, but their first response is always confession of sin.
You don’t come to church because you are guiltless. Rather, you come to church guilty because you need forgiveness. You come to the service to hear Jesus Christ say to you, ‘Your sins are forgiven!’ So does everyone else.”
The covenant renewal service is for the people of God, not unbelievers. If unbelievers arc present, let them observe humble Christians confessing their faults and receiving forgiveness from God their Father. How much more “evangelistic” can you get?
This, then, is the first major moment in the movement of the ritual of the Lord s Supper: the Spirit-filled church memorializes Jesus to the Father.15
One of the most harmful notions ever foisted upon Reformed Christianity is this idea that God ordinarily communicates His presence immediately to the soul of man, by-passing all outward, physical means.
The regulative principle is not well formulated when we say that only that which is commanded ought to be allowed in worship. Whatever is not commanded therefore is forbidden. Why should we need only explicit “commands”? This is completely unworkable, and in practice has never been followed.
“Nothing should be introduced or performed in the churches of Christ for which no probable reason can be given from the Word of God.
the Church must have biblical warrantfor the way she worships God; such warrant can be derived from biblical commands, principles, or examples.
More often than not, popular Protestant imagination inadvertently links Roman Catholic worship with Old Testament worship, as if Catholicism is somehow a throwback to Old Testament worship.
In the Bible the adjective “spiritual means “of the Holy Spirit” not something non-material or inward or mental as opposed to the material, physical, and outward.
In fact, a recent fad is to stress that all of life is “worship.” In some sense this is true, but only in a very loose sense. When used in this sense “woship denotes a mental disposition. But this is not the sense in which this word proskuneo or “bowing down” is ordinarily used in the Scriptures. If you want to say that all of life is “bowing down, “ that is fine; but this can only be so in a very abstract or metaphorical way.
All special, corporate worship in the Bible is external and bodily and involves the biblical ritual (among others) of kneeling or bowing down.
As a pastor I have called on scores of visitors like this. I have never yet talked to people with “intelligibility” problems who were new Christians or unchurched people. They know that they don’t know much about Christian worship. They are often willing to learn. But I have almost always had problems with evangelical Christians who come to our service with all kinds of preconceived notions about their own preferences for worship.
