What is it? How is it carried out? Why? When? Where? and for Who?
Alot of questions for such a simple word! But we will tackle such a conundrum in the next few blogs. Where should we start, why we should start at the beginning, I say!! LOL.
What is it? This could be the trickiest and the most broadest definition that we have given it by the christian community to date. Is this a good thing or a bad thing. We shall see in our studies. Let’s get going then.
We will start with the first verse in the bible that mentions the term ‘worship’, and go from there. Genesis 22.5 is the first mention of it, and it says ‘Then Abraham said to his young men, ” Stay here with the ass; I and the lad will go yonder and worship, and come again to you.” Now, this might seem a straight forward explanation of where it is, there is more to it than you think. First, and foremost when studying scripture we must always stay in ‘context’ with the scripture.
This is the first true example of God’s purpose for us to see in his simple but raw sorta way for us to see it. Abraham was God’s ‘chosen’ one to bring out the ‘chosen’ children of the miry clay of the futility that it was in. We might need to mention here that we could use just Abraham as the perfect example of the ‘worshiper’, we will touch on him even more later. But we will use him now to see what the ‘chosen’ and also the first worshiper was without realizing it.
God’s using Abraham as his instrument in bringing back his people to him, started with this incident with Abraham and his son,Isaac. It established the bond, or covenant that God still had with ‘his people’, he never forgot his side of the covenant’s responsibility. Jeremiah 7.23 and Ezekiel 36.28 both reiterate God’s covenant with his people. By using these verses as well as others we can see that first it is all about ‘who’ or what we will ‘worship’. The what(man making their own gods) and temples to put them in, was the issue; this was a result of mankind choosing not God but themselves as their god.
Let’s go back even further than this story and use the first mention of man by God and see what his intention for him to do or be. It is found in Genesis 1. 27) So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. 28) And God blessed them and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the earth. So Man was an image of God in God’s realm, World or Kingdom. Let this sink in for a minute with the last statement……… Let’s look at this in two ways, one is This is what God was intending what His creation be all about! His Creation being an example in the Whole Creation(Universe,stars,galaxies,animals,plants,insects,the whole earth). Man was to be the centerpiece of all of it! Secondly, the last statement should be a clue to the next storyline of the scriptures. The whole bible is filled with the picture of God’s people using this miniature example of the big picture of what God had previously designed for them. It is the temple model of God being in the center of his creation and mingling with His creation. The temple was the miniature example of this creation story that He had showed them in the beginning.
Worship or acknowledging who the ‘Creator’ of the universe is, and being a part of it is the essence of Worship. It is being what we were designed to be, the ‘image of God’.
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