3 "You shall have no other gods before me.
4 "You shall not make for yourself an idol in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God Exodus20:3-4
There is only one logical response when we clearly see how great God is: worship.
The problem is that we are often blind and insensitive to God's awesome and majestic holiness. We are blinded and dulled by our own brokenness and distracted and misled by the temptations and desires that clamour for our attention. Worst of all, we are so busy trying to be our own gods that we lose sight of the One True God.
In the midst of this God calls us, no, more than that, He commands us to worship Him.
Does that sound narcissistic? Does it seem that God's ego might be excessive? Not at all. The commands are based on truth.
God is so big, so awesome, so incredible, so amazing, so perfect in love, so glorious in power, so majestic in grace and so holy in righteousness that we were to see it all clearly (and our brains didn't explode at all the information) we would know that not to worship would be a tragic denial of the truth that is right in front of our noses.
To use a simple analogy: it's like a child who says he doesn't like ice-cream! We would probably conclude that the child has never tasted real ice-cream. It is almost a universal law that children love ice-cream. It would almost seem criminal for a child _not_ to like it!
It would be a denial of the patently obvious if we refused to love and worship the one, true and living God.
But there's more: Worship is a built-in desire for us as humans. We want to offer our devotion, love and loyalty (that's what worship is) to something and when we offer it to anything but the one true God, it will destroy us.
So God commands us worship Him:
- because it makes sense
- because it reminds us not to point our built-in need to worship in the wrong direction.
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
