Last time we discussed the relative levity with which we often approach the throne of God. We talked about our natural (old man/flesh) desires to do things that are easy, and come without much effort. We found that we cannot approach “as we are” and live. We need to be re-created in the image of Christ, and be given new clothes in order to stand before a thrice holy God (Zech 3). We talked mostly about why it is important to take seriously our call to worship, and to come ready to be stretched and taken out of our comfort zone. In this essay, I want to throw out some suggestions as to how to worship seriously, with reverence and awe, fear and trembling, and at the very core, real, meaty joy. Worship is at the heart joyful. But not a modern sense of joy, that is synonymous with a happy-clappy idiocy that doesn’t understand the world we live in. I’m talking about real joy, the joy that we defend in the midst of harsh persecution, and the joy we see in all sufferings and trials, the joy that produces steadfastness, and hope. This type of joy is not sentimental, it is not unrealistic, and it is certainly not frivolous. Like glory, it has weight. It is heavy and substantial. It is life altering.
A joyous worship, a joyous sacrifice of praise, sees all things as a gift from the hand of a loving God. Every minute of every day we are receiving from the hand of God. Our response in every such moment, needs to be gratitude. Even more so, gratitude must define our weekly ascension to the courts of heaven, where God meets with us. He visits us in a different way than through the course of the other six days. At the beginning of the week, He comes with a purpose to renew His covenant with us, to remind us that He is our God, and we are His people. He comes to enact on us, to change us. He does this (as pictured in the Old Testament sacrificial system) in three parts. He breaks us down, cutting us, and opening our hearts bare to Him. He then builds us back together, restructuring our hearts, and soothing our wounds with His Word. Finally He feeds us, nourishing our souls, fitting us for ministry, and equipping us for war; war with the flesh, war with the world. Our response at each point is one of gratitude. This is our hope and joy, that God Himself does this to us. We are not strong enough to bare our sin to a Holy God in our own strength. We have not the ability to turn our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh. And we dare not come before the Bridegroom, ready for the wedding feast, in clothes of our own making. But here is the very essence of life, confessing our sin before the Father, being sanctified by the Word, and nourished, sacramentally by Holy Spirit. The gospel is this: the Father, Son, and Spirit give this to us as gift. How can we not but give thanks?
To reiterate thoughts from last time, giving thanks must mean obedience. How can disobedience imply gratitude? We must approach the throne of God obediently. This means doing worship His way. What is His way, you ask? The first 39 books of the Bible go into great detail as to the nature of God, what He likes, what He doesn’t like, how He is to be approached, and how He is not to be approached. And if we really believe that God is the same, yesterday, today and tomorrow, we cannot dismiss the Old Testament as simply good, fun reading in between serious devotions in the New Testament. We take the whole Word of God as just that, the Whole Word. Modern Christians are often ashamed of the Old Testament because of all the violence toward minorities, strange temple behavior, and weird names from thousands of years ago. Just give me Jesus, they say. News flash folks: Jesus was Jesus even back then, in the “irrelevant” pages of Scripture. All this is to say that we find much instruction as to how God wants to be worshipped, how He desires to be approached, in the Old Testament.
With that in mind, let’s look at Leviticus. Leviticus was written, as the title implies, as a rule book for the Levites, the nation’s priesthood. Peter says, under the inspiration of the Spirit, that we, as Christians, are a royal priesthood. So it becomes more apparent that Leviticus was written for us, Christ’s priests. Leviticus 9:1-4, 22-24 reads:
On the eighth day Moses called Aaron and his sons and the elders of Israel, and he said to Aaron, “Take for yourself a bull calf for a sin offering and a ram for a burnt offering, both without blemish, and offer them before the Lord. And say to the people of Israel, ‘Take a male goat for a sin offering, and a calf and a lamb, both a year old without blemish, for a burnt offering, and an ox and a ram for peace offerings, to sacrifice before the Lord, and a grain offering mixed with oil, for today the Lord will appear to you.’” ... Then Aaron lifted up his hands toward the people and blessed them, and he came down from offering the sin offering and the burnt offering and the peace offerings. And Moses and Aaron went into the tent of meeting, and when they came out they blessed the people, and the glory of the Lord appeared to all the people. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed the burnt offering and the pieces of fat on the altar, and when all the people saw it, they shouted and fell on their faces.
The order of worship we see in both texts (the middle portion is a description of Aaron actually doing it) is the same: Sin offering, Burnt offering, Peace offering. The sin offering was an act of confession, and absolution. The priest took hold of the animal, symbolizing a transfer of guilt and the atonement it would make, and killed it, symbolizing the death of sin. The animal would then be burned and the smoke would ascend to God, who would receive it as sufficient atonement for the worshipper’s sin, and therefore enact forgiveness. “And the priest shall make atonement for him for the sin which he has committed, and he shall be forgiven” (Lev 4:35). The sin offering could be and was then eaten, symbolizing an absolution, the worshipper once again being accepted before the eyes of God (Lev 6:24-26). This posture of eating is a posture of gratitude. We receive food (forgiveness), and therefore eat (give thanks). Ungrateful eating is presumptuous and turns the best of foods into ash inside our mouths.
The burnt offering is a mistranslation. The meaning of the Hebrew word, translated as burnt, is really ascension. This is an ascension offering. Burnt is redundant, as most offerings are burnt. What makes this offering different from the others is that the whole animal is burnt, and offered in smoke to the Lord. This symbolizes, especially in coming after the sin offering, the worshipper offering all of himself to the Lord’s service. We recognize that we are not our own, but belong to God, wholly. Therefore we offer ourselves entirely on the altar of living sacrifices, cut up by His Word, transformed by the fire of the Spirit from one state of glory to the next (flesh and blood to smoke), and enabled to ascend as a pleasing aroma, sacrifices of a broken spirit.
The peace offering was an offering of thanksgiving (or for a vow/freewill offering which is another form of gratitude; Lev 7:11-18). Like the Sin offering, it was to be eaten. The worshipper would bring loaves of unleavened bread with the animal that was to be sacrificed. Only in the peace offering was bread and blood combined. Bread was eaten and blood was poured out, together as one offering and as one act of thanksgiving. In this act of peace, God invites the worshipper to dine with Him. God nourishes His people and communes with them. The worshipper eats with God. This is different from the sin offering in that the sin offering is a succession. Man offers sacrifice, God eats, is pleased, forgives, and then the worshipper receives and eats. Here with the peace offering, man eats bread as God eats the sacrifice. They dine at a common table.
God throughout Scripture reveals Himself as Trinity, and does so clearly here. The sin offering is performed for and by the Father. We make atonement with the Father, and He then grants us forgiveness, and restores us to life. The ascension offering symbolizes the work of the Son. In Christ we are dressed and made acceptable to approach the throne as a pleasing aroma. Through the Living Word, we are cut up and transformed from one level of Glory to the next. In the peace offering the Spirit draws us to God, allowing us to dine at His table, filling the very distance that separate creature from Creator. Obviously this is not to say that all three persons are not at work in all three aspects, but God reveals Himself to us in these ways, pedagogically, teaching us who He is.
It is interesting, and very cautionary, that the story of Nadab and Abihu comes directly after the portions of Leviticus 9 quoted above. The moral? God tells Aaron through Moses, exactly how He wants to be worshipped. Aaron obeys, and they beheld the glory of the Lord accepting their offerings in the fire. Immediately after this, it is recorded that Nadab and Abihu offered strange (unauthorized) fire on the altar, with the intention of worshipping the Lord, it must be remembered. Their intentions didn’t hold much meaning in the final judgment. They then beheld the glory of the Lord consume them, bringing judgment on them for their disobedience. You would think that with examples like this we would learn to not be so flippant with how we approach the throne.
How does this all give us practical tools with which to define and design our worship services? The first thing to do is actually read the texts. Study them, imbibe them, and learn to speak Scripturally about all of Scripture. Then we pull out principles. Obviously, Hebrews says we are no longer to offer actual animal sacrifices anymore. But it is equally clear that we are still a sacrificial people, offering sacrifices of praise, and are ourselves living sacrifices. So how do we define sacrifice? How does God define sacrifice? This is why we go to Leviticus. I am indebted to people like James B Jordan, and Peter Leithart for their work in this area. They have dug and we students have been able to enjoy the fruit of their labor. The principles that we have talked about above, with regard to each sacrifice, fall out into five points that help us when it comes to our own modern day service. First, we are Called. God calls us to enter into His presence. He calls us to come before Him with thanksgiving and praise. He calls us to Himself. We cannot come of our own accord. Second, we enter a season of Confession. This correlates with the sin offering. We come before a holy God, and the first thing we do is remove our shoes. God is Holy, and we are not. We come acknowledging this, and asking for forgiveness. In response to repentance, God grants forgiveness, and we receive absolution. Next we are Consecrated. This correlates with the ascension offering. We are made holy and fit for the service of God. We receive His Word, both read and preached. The Word refashions us, restores us, and renews us, equipping us for service in the Kingdom. Following the tearing down, and the building up, we enter into Communion. This correlates with the peace offering. Here we dine at the table of the Lord, and receive nourishment and strength. We feed on Christ, and through the Spirit, dine with the Father. After being equipped and nourished, we are Commisioned to enter the world, fulfilling our calling to “Go and make disciples of all the nations.”
Here we have an outline from Scripture, from God’s own handbook on worship, no less, outlining a progression. We are called, we confess, we are consecrated, we commune, and we are commissioned. This is high drama, full of rising action, climax, and resolution. It is a progression from unsettled fear and trembling, to rest. We come as sinners, we leave as saints. It sounds trite, but that is what is happening. We come in need of cleansing, and leave refreshed and renewed. This is not to say that we are not still sinners when we leave. Or even to say that we are not perfectly accepted in Christ before we come. We are. But God is into picturing reality in actions. The worshipper was alive before he presented his animal sacrifice, a picture of God’s grace. And he certainly didn’t leave the sacrifice free from sin. Same with today. These dramatic pictures are here to involve us in the truth of what God is doing. He wants us not only to know it with specific head knowledge, but to smell it, to see it, to act it, to hear it, and to taste it. On Sunday mornings, God is drawing us into His presence and renewing before our very eyes the covenant He made thousands of years ago, that He will be our God, and we will be His people. That covenant has gone unbroken since Abraham. In Christ, we are the seed of Abraham, and that covenant is a covenant we cannot break. Abraham had no part in it. He was as asleep as Adam when Eve was taken out of his side. God brings this to us each week, to remind us, to cause us to partake in it, to find joy in it. But not only does He do this to remind us. This is His chosen means of grace. This is how He wants to do it. It’s not our deal to play around with. We don’t have the freedom to move it to Saturdays, so we can Sundays off. Nor is it ours to skip if we feel going to the beach is more important. This is our life. This is where God meets with us. He could have chosen any number of ways to commune with His people. But He didn’t. He gave us this. This is His day, given for our good. It would behoove us to pay attention.
