Worship and Perfect Happiness
How happy are the angels? Perfectly happy! They behold the glory of the Lord.
How happy are those who have gone before us into heaven? Perfectly happy! They too behold the face of God in Jesus Christ. They’re rejoicing - no tears, totally healed, and have found their heart’s true home.
The created order - angels, people, stars & planets, oceans, mountains, and trees - was fashioned for communion with God, to behold and reflect his bounty and beauty. What does sin do? It undoes this perfect communion and happiness. What does redemption do? It restores it. The Gospel received results in communion restored.
That starts with redeemed people and this is why we who are redeemed are called ‘Priests’, people who draw near to God, see his glory, and declare his praises.
To be worshippers is our destiny because it was for communion with the eternal that we were formed in the first place. God does not need worship. He doesn’t even seek it. God seeks worshippers! Why? Because as our Creator he knows we can never experience perfect happiness and ultimate joy apart from beholding his face revealed in Jesus Christ. God knows that broken people need the worship of God to be made whole.
Inescapably Worshipful
The truth is that we humans are inescapably worshipful creatures. Often our worship is misdirected and idolatrous, but it doesn’t change the fact that we were made to adore another.
David Foster Wallace wrote: In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship — be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles — is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough… Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you.
If you worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on...Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation."
But we do make idols and we do worship them. We take good things and make them ultimate things and this deceives and destroys our souls. Like DFW says, these things kill us when they become gods from whom we seek life.
Those Who Trust Idols Will Become Like Them
The Psalmist knew this. In Psalm 115, he wrote of idols that, “those who make them will be like them, as do all who trust in them…”
The idols had eyes, but couldn’t see. They had feet but couldn’t walk. They had ears but couldn’t hear. They had hands but couldn’t work. They had tongues but they couldn’t speak. And those who made and served these idols became just like them.
This is why Jesus bursts on the scene with the kinds of healing miracles we see - he is healing the human race of its self-imposed ruin created through idolatry. We became those with eyes that can’t see, mouths that can’t speak, ears that can’t hear, hands and feet that won’t move - and He is healing us! That means we become true worshippers of the true and living God.
As “Priestly People” our goal is to liberate all people and all things to worship God and bask in his beauty.
This is the language and meaning of Exodus: “Let my people go so that they may come and worship me…” We are saved by grace to be a priestly, worshipping people. We are liberated from the slavery of sin and death to be brought into the liberty of God’s glorious presence, here and forever.
By his incarnation, death, and resurrection, Jesus has created a greater Exodus, delivering us from an even more powerful tyranny, forming us to be a priestly people. Priests were sprinkled with water, oil, and blood in their consecration and that is what happens to us in our baptisms. Baptism as the mark of our consecration into the priesthood. This is not about personal devotion or family worship, but the communal-congregational worship of God’s covenant people gathered around his throne. There we join the holy angels and all the saints to cry out, ‘Holy!’, our worship being mediated and made acceptable in heaven through Jesus Christ our Great High Priest.
Here are a few things God’s priestly people must remember.
First, gathered worship is an action we perform and only then an experience we receive. Eugene Peterson wrote, “Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.” A little boy described his first ride in an elevator this way: “I got in this room and the upstairs came down.” God calls us to himself, takes us up in his arms as we draw near, and then we find ourselves experiencing the upstairs reality we long to see.
Second, gathered worship is first the sacrifice God makes that sanctifies the offerings we then present to him. Worship offered by sinful people has to be mediated to be acceptable in heaven. Our purest worship here is still polluted by our fallenness and imperfections. This is why the Scriptures exhort us, “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, the fruit of our lips that give thanks to his Name” (Heb 13:15).
John Chrysostom preached that our worship is like a bouquet of wildflowers gathered by a child for his mother. Before they are presented, the father gently removes the thorns and briars so what arrives before the mother is a perfect arrangement.
Third, gathered worship is first the song God sings over as and only then the song we sing back to Him. Gathered worship is God’s grace in action. It is a response to his initiative, his mercy to us that elicits from us the voice of praise and thanks. We love him because he first loved us. You see, one doesn’t become a Priest voluntarily. If we are Priests of God, then it can only be that God has called us and consecrated us to this Priesthood and we must steward that calling faithfully and in the fear of the Lord. We respond to his call; we are not volunteers but draftees!
Lastly, we need to recall that gathered worship proclaims the mystery of God’s Gospel. In worship God Calls, Cleanses, Communes with, and Commissions us. It is a weekly forth-telling of his divine providence that leads to our Election, Justification, Sanctification, and Glorification. Glorious gathered worship is God calling us and in doing so repeating over and again the wonder that he has saved us and destined us for a mission here and ultimate restoration with him in the splendor of his everlasting light.
The result? Perfect happiness and contentment. We are his, now and forever. We hear his song sung over us and our souls sing back the antiphonal response, ‘Worthy!’