The worship of our infinitely glorious God comes to life for us in the book of Revelation wherein we are given a portal into the spiritual world to see, through apocalyptic symbolism, that Heaven is a place of unending worship of God by both the Holy angels and most importantly by those men and women whom the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ has redeemed by His blood – His sacrificial death on the cross (Ephesians 1:7) (Revelation 5:8-14) (Revelation 7:9-17) (Revelation 15:1-4). These men and women, through their personal repentance and faith, (both gifts granted to them by God) had become true worshipers of the true God while on earth, and as they continue to do so throughout eternity will glorify God by their enjoyment of Him and all that will bring pleasure and delight in the new universe and new earth that Jesus will establish at His second coming (Ephesians 2:8-9) (Romans 2:4) (Revelation 21:1-4).
It is essential to our rightly and joyfully worshiping God that we understand that He does not call us to worship Him alone because he is some type of cosmic narcissist or tyrannical egomaniac. He is self-existent, self-sufficient and infinitely glorious, existing as three distinct divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, in an eternal love relationship of unimaginable pleasure, joy and delight, and thus need nothing from the creation (Psalm 16:11). He calls us to worship Him because He loves us and alone can satisfy the deepest needs and desires of our heart and fulfill the most noble longing of our soul in ways so wonderous, so glorious, it is beyond our imagination to conceive of while we are in our present sin corrupted condition (Jeremiah 31:3) (1 Corinthians 2:9) (Psalm 16:11). And the reason He alone can do so is because He is the one who created us to find the fulfillment of our deepest and truest needs, desires and longings in intimate relationship with Him (Psalm 42:1-2).
In my recent post regarding John 4:1-27, we have Jesus speaking with a Samaritan woman. The Samaritans did worship the God who revealed Himself to Moses as “I AM” or Yahweh in Exodus 3:13-14, but they did so along with other cultic versions of gods that had been imported into their culture during the Assyrian invasion 700 years earlier. In her interaction with Jesus, she reveals herself to be a worshiper of the creation rather than the Creator, looking for love in all the wrong places, pursuing her significance., security and ultimate happiness in the fallen creation (men) rather than in the infinitely glorious Creator, and this has brought her great loneliness and shame (John 4:16-18) (Romans 1:25).
In heartfelt compassion, Jesus speaks kindly to her, revealing that He is there because God is seeking those in whom he can restore a heart of true worship of the one true God, wherein He alone would be passionately pursued as the object of her deepest love and source of her greatest joy, as the one who truly cared for her soul, the one who alone could save her from the guilt, shame and condemnation of her sin, and the one who alone could, and would satisfy the deepest needs and desires of her heart (John 4:23) (Psalm 37:4).
Jesus graciously reveals Himself to her as the promised Messiah, the one who would reconcile and restore fallen men and women back to the glorious life and intimate relationship with God for which we were created, proving once and for all eternity that God was and is fully inclined, fully committed to and fully capable of making men and women who will believe on Him, exceedingly, abundantly and eternally happy in Him (John 4:25-26) (Luke 1:68-74) (Psalm 36:8).
In the midst of this interaction, Jesus presents to the woman, and to us, an imperative regarding our worship of God, namely, we must worship God in Spirit and in Truth (John 4:23-24).
To fully understand what Jesus is saying here in this imperative, we must begin by realizing that fallen, sin corrupted men and women have neither the desire nor ability to worship God in this way. That is because everyone born into this world is born spiritually stillborn, spiritually dead – cut off from the glorious life with God for which we were created, corrupted by sin at the core of our very being, our heart, and helpless in ourselves to do anything about it (Ephesians 2:1) (Romans 5:12) (Genesis 6:5). As such, we are willful suppressors of the truth of God’s glorious person and purpose in creating us, and thus blinded to the truth of the infinite perfections of God’s being that make Him worthy of our love, our trust, our obedience, our devotion – our worship (2 Corinthians 4:4). Thus, we live in this world as worshipers of gods of our own imagination or making and thus subject to God’s wrath and judgement (Romans 1:18-23).
And because we are spiritually dead and blind to the truth of God, we have no way in ourselves of escaping that judgement (2 Thessalonians 2:9-12). The Bible makes it clear that in our spiritual deadness we can do nothing that accords with spiritual life (1 Corinthians 2:14). We are told that as such, no one seeks after God (Romans 3:10-11), that God is not in our thoughts (Psalm 10:4) and that we find the gospel of grace, the good news of God seeking after us through the person and work of Jesus Christ to be foolishness, unworthy of our time and attention (Luke 19:10) (1 Corinthians 1:18).
Thus, the Bible makes it clear that it is only by a gracious, merciful, supernatural work of God in the life and heart of a spiritually dead man, woman or child that one can be restored to spiritual life, have our spiritual blindness lifted and behold, by faith, the truth of the glory of God revealed in the person and work of Jesus, such that knowing, loving and being loved by Him becomes the all consuming passion of our life, as we now, upon seeing His glory, come to embrace Him as the object of our deepest love and source of our greatest joy (2 Corinthians 4:6) (John 1:14) (Psalm 63:1-4).
The Bible speaks of this supernatural work as being born again, born from above or regeneration, and it is this supernatural, sovereign work of a holy and just God in the life of helpless, sinful men and women. It is only upon our being born again that that we can come to worship God His way, namely in Spirit and truth (1 Peter 1:3-5).
More on this in my next post
Grace and Peace ×