Title: Reformation Issues - Worship No Idols

Date: October 26, 2005

Scripture: 1 John 5:21; Exodus 20:1-7

AI TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to Bible Insights with Wayne Conrad. God's Word is a lamp to our feet and a light on our path.

Today, in our particular congregation, we celebrated the Reformation. By Reformation, I mean the Protestant Reformation of the 16th century. In the 1500s, when God began to restore the light, the glorious light of the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to various people on the continent of Europe, beginning with Martin Luther.

But even before him, 100 years before, there was John Hus, who had been put to death. And then there's William Tyndale in England. There is Zwingli in Switzerland. And there would be later, about 10 years behind Luther, would come Calvin in France.

There were a number of reformers, all of whom God dealt with in their lives to bring them to the knowledge of Christ and the rediscovery of the power of the word of God, revealing the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ for dead sinners.

Now these Reformers all had a desire to restore the church that they saw was in ruins and had been greatly weakened by the influence of false teachings and false religious practices, including idolatry, the denial of the Cup of the Lord's Supper to the laity, the separation of the sacred from the secular Christian life or religious life being totally separate from ordinary life. A lot of things that were different from what you read in the New Testament.

And as they became more and more familiar with the contents of God's revelation in the New Testament, they set out in the teaching and preaching of the Word of God to bring reform to the churches under their influence.

So, there are a number of areas in which Reformation touches. We have been focusing many times on the particular doctrine of salvation and how this was restored in what we call the five solas. But the five solas have to do really with this doctrine of salvation. How does a sinful person come to a state of reconciliation with a holy God? How does one experience the forgiveness of sin and a restored relationship to God that is permanent, one of acceptance and adoption and full forgiveness?

That's what the doctrines of grace deal with and the doctrines of sola, that is, that we are saved by faith alone in and by the grace or through the grace of God alone in the Lord Jesus Christ alone to the glory of God alone and all of this teaching is based upon the word of God alone.

Those are the psalms and they're very important. And we should emphasize them both in our celebration, especially in our teaching and preaching of the word of God week by week as they appear in the text of scripture.

But there are other issues that the Reformation addresses, which are just as earth shattering in some respects, may even be more earth shattering. Those are the issues of the restoration of the power and authority of the word of God in the life of the church, and the accessibility of the people of God to the word of God in their own language, a very important truth that was rediscovered then.

The issue of who rules the church. What is the proper government of the church? Now, the reformers had different answers to that, but all of them were agreed that it was definitely not the Bishop of Rome. It was definitely not a Pope who was here as a vicar of Christ, who was here as the representative of Christ above all other bishops. That is totally rejected by all reformers and by all Protestants.

The Pope, if he's a true believer at all, is simply another bishop, another priest or minister in the church.

But the issue of worship is probably one of the most crucial issues that the Reformation addressed. The worship of God should be based directly on the revelation of God, centered on the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, as revealed and set forth in the writings of the New Testament and the Old Testament, the 66 books of the canon. This is the word of God. It must be restored to the people of God so that they can read it in their own language. And so that it will be the basis of all teaching and preaching in the church.

And so it was the movement of the word of God back into the life of the church that leads to the whole reformation of the worship. Now what does scripture have to say about the worship of God? I want to point you to first an Old Testament passage because you see God revealed himself in what we call the Old Testament to the history of the Hebrew people, the people we now call Jews, God spoke to them from out Sinai, the Ten Commandments, and he gave to Moses on the holy mountain detailed instructions concerning his worship under the old covenant.

Now all of those detailed instructions having to do with priesthood, and vestments, and offerings, and days, and weeks, dress, and food, and all of the multitude of laws concerning the worship of God and life in the community of God constitute the law of the old covenant given by God on Mount Sinai to Moses and Moses gave them to the people. But the heart of all of that law is the summary of the law that God himself spoke from the holy mountain. The first section of that law deals with the worship of God. Let me read. I'm reading from Exodus chapter 20, verses one through seven.

God spoke all these words saying, I'm Yahweh, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that 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, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain, for Yahweh will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain.

Now these three commandments, as far as the Protestant understanding of how you number them, are for, if you happen to be counting as a Jew, concern God and the worship of God. Notice that The God who commands is the God who is redeemed. He has redeemed a people, the covenant people, the offspring of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to whom he had entered into covenant in Abraham. He redeemed them from the house of slavery. He did so for his own namesake to bring them back to the land that he had promised to give to Abraham. I'm Yahweh, your God. I'm the God who's redeemed you out of the house of slavery. So the first commandment is that you shall have God, Yahweh, as your God. This is reflected in the Shema. Here, O Israel, Yahweh, your God, is one. And then the commandment that flows out of that is you shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all of your soul, with all of your strength. And when Jesus interprets that commandment in the New Testament, he adds, and with all of your mind. That is with the whole person. We are to love Yahweh our God. our God, and he is to be our exclusive God. There is to be no other God and no other objects of worship. So you shall have no other gods beside me. I'm the only God that you shall have. This does not deny that people may have other gods that they serve, but they're not true gods, they're false gods. But we have only the true God, and He should be our only God.

Even in the New Testament, the Apostle John writes to Christians at the end of his epistle, little children, keep yourselves from idols. Idols of the mind, idols of the heart. But the next commandment you see beginning in verse four of Exodus 20, deals with the idols of the hand. the making of carved images of the likeness of creatures. They're in different spheres of life, in the air, on the earth, under the earth, in the seas, making images of them and then bowing down to them and then serving them. This was at the heart of the idolatry that we found talked about in the Old Testament scriptures. It's at the heart of the idolatry you found in the world even today. in Hinduism, in Buddhism, in all different types of animistic faith, you have idols. And sad to say, you also find them even in those that claim to be churches. That is, that the Roman Catholic Church, and there are all different forms of Catholicism, tolerate, not only tolerate, but endorse the use of idols in the worship of God. Though they do not make an idol of God himself, they make idols of various biblical people. are other people in history, especially of the Virgin Mary, of other saints, or even angelic beings, and they bow down to them, they have offerings to them, and they say prayers to them. These are acts of worship. Now you can say, well, that's minor worship, but God has the high worship. That's simply splitting hairs. It is idolatry. You shall not worship God by the use of idols, period.

What about icons or just flat images? Well, they're definitely not carved images, so in that respect, they are better. But if you do the same thing before them as you do from an idol, then they too become an object of idolatry. Remember, even in the Old Testament, the people of God had this tendency to take things that God used in the fulfillment of his will. Think about the bronze servant that Moses set up in the wilderness where the people were bitten by the snakes. And God told him to make a bronze image of the snake, just like the snake that was biting the people with poisons, and it was killing them. And the people were to look at that snake. And when they did so, God would cause the poison not to affect their bodies. He would, in other words, heal them and deliver them from the effects of it so that they lived and did not die. You did not look, then you died. So, the commandment was to look and live. But later, after all of this incident is passed, the people maintain that bronze servant, first of all, as a memorial of God's act of mercy and grace, that's good. But ultimately in time, that idol became an object of the worship of the people. And at some point, God had to deal with it and have it destroyed by one of the reformers, one of the prophets in Israel.

My point in bringing these commandments before us is that they are so important and they deal with proper worship. The next commandment is you not take the name of Yahweh your God in vain. That is an emptiness. You shall not use God's name without meaning. And I'm afraid even sincere Christians sometimes do this. We just routinely just say the name of God or Jesus without filling it with its content, without proper reverence and due honor. We need to be careful in handling the name of God.

You should never swear. You should never use God's name to damn another person because you're assuming to yourself a prerogative that belongs only to God or you're asking God to damn someone else. That's not your or my responsibility. We must not take God's name in vain, in emptiness or in any other way that's a violation of his holiness and reverence.

Now many would throw in the next commandment, the commandment of the Sabbath, as dealing with worship. And it may, at least indirectly, but primarily that commandment is about the rest that God's people need. And that rest is to be a complete rest on the seventh day of the week. We'll not deal with that one because it's not a direct commandment concerning the worship of God, though the worship of God becomes associated with it, especially in the arrival of the synagogue.

Primarily, the worship of God in the Old Covenant occurred in the homes and at the feast days at the temple, first at the tabernacle and labor at the temple in Jerusalem. Well, this is God's commandment concerning worship. in the old covenant.

Now, when we come to the new covenant, then Jesus fulfills so much of the law, the law concerning worship and sacrifices and priesthood, by taking up into his own self the fulfillment of them. He becomes the sacrifice, and he becomes the great high priest, and we are his worshipers.

Well, the issue of worship in the New Testament is going to take a decisive turn. The truth of the matter is that the medieval worship and the Catholic and Orthodox worship in various parts of the world, but especially the Catholic worship in various parts of the world, still retain the look, the feel, the actions and attitude of the worship that Luther and Calvin and others said these are contrary to the fulfillment of the New Testament. These are contrary to the Word of God.

Though if you look at the Catholic worship, let's say in the West, especially maybe in the United States, Catholic worship is and has been influenced directly by the Protestant Reformation, so that many things that the Protestants contended for, you now find also in Catholic churches, such as the reading of the Bible in the language of the people.

Well, I think for today's podcast, maybe I've covered enough territory, and maybe we can continue this with the next podcast, looking at the New Testament and the issue of worship as it's brought to the fore in the Protestant Reformation, and how we must maintain the purity of the worship of God in our day, because we have the tendency in Protestant churches today of reverting from the principles recovered at the Protestant Reformation in our worship.

And that worship has become no longer centered necessarily on the word of God but has been centered on other things rather than God's word. God's word must be central in the worship of God. It's reading, it's preaching, its teaching, it's practice. Nothing must usurp the place of the word of God, for it is God speaking to his people.

This has been Wayne Conrad with Bible Insights.