A Brief Excursus On The Connectedness of Worship To The Nature of God---by Kemper Crabb

In a recent conversation I was having with a songwriter friend of mine, he mentioned with sorrow and exasperation that a song he had written for a worship project had been partially changed at the behest of the project's producer because the producer felt that the lyrics at one point of the song misrepresented God, and would be offensive to the project's potential buyers. I was not surprised to learn that the offending lyric made reference to the fact that God will act in Judgment on behalf of His People.

The producer felt that it was in bad taste for Christians to make reference to, and especially to rejoice over, that fact in their worship, and he said as much to my friend. When my friend mildly (and correctly) pointed out that Judgment on sin is integrally tied up with the Holy Nature of God, the producer responded that he felt it would be offensive to the buyers of the recording, and needed to be changed anyway, since it might negatively affect sales and radio-play of the project. The song was summarily edited.

Although I'd like to think that the producer in question was wrong about the sales impact (and I do think a case for that could be made), it is undoubtedly true that he was responding to a widely perceived preference in the Evangelical Church's worship practices to deliberately exclude anything about God that is deemed unpleasant or distressing. (For the record, the reason I was not surprised at my friend's story is that, as a writer of worship songs myself, I have frequently been bedeviled [literally] by objections to the "unpleasant" Scriptural contents of some of my songs.)

How has this attitude arisen in the bosom of the Evangelicals, the supposed theological bastion of such doctrines as the Fall of Man, the existence of Hell, the Final Judgment, and the necessity of Christ's Blood-Atonement for sin on the Cross? After all, we Evan-gelicals are the heirs to a Church that has from earliest times sang the Psalter (all of it), hymns that laud God for both His Justice and His Mercy, and the chanting and singing of virtually all of the words of Scripture at one point or other in our two-millennia-long history as the Church. This was true up to relatively recent times. So what happened? How have we as a people come to the point where we restrict the range of characteristics we are willing to praise God for, when He plainly is so much more broadly and fully revealed to us in Scripture? Well, in seven words, bad theology and a failure of nerve are to blame.

As to theology, we have ceased to believe that all of Scripture applies to us in some fashion (the Older Testament, it is held, is for the Jews; only the New Testament is for us. This is taught despite the fact that, when Paul declares that all Scripture is inspired and useful for training a man in all godliness in II Timothy 3:16-18, he was referring primarily to the Old Testament, since much of the New Testament had yet to be written). As a result, like the ancient heretics who viewed the God of the Old Testament as different from the Christ of the New, we seek to drive a wedge between the unity of the Attributes and Character of the Triune God. (a very odd belief, since God is shown as loving in the Old Testament and New, and as a Judge in both Testaments as well, as Ps. 107; 103; 2 Thess. 1:6-10; and Rev. 15-16 demonstrate).

The result of this is that we only want to think of God as Loving and Merciful and Peaceful (which He is, of course), but don't want to think of the supposedly "negative" Aspects of God: His Justice, Holiness, and Wrath. This attitude results in our progressive failure of nerve. There is no question that it is uncomfortable to think of those Aspects of God's Character. We prefer a nicer, safer, tamer, more predictable God. You know, a God Who won't hold us accountable when we sin or interfere with our life-styles: a kinder, gentler God whom we can control. The problem is that such a view is myopic; we only look at part of God, Who, like Aslan in the Narnia series, is neither tame nor safe. God is not safe, but He is good.

"O.K.", you say, "I see your point. But what does it matter if we only praise God in worship for part of Who He is. We're still worshipping Him." Are we? If the God we worship looks only somewhat like the Lord revealed in Scripture, eventually our view of Him will conform itself to that partial view. Leaving aside the fact that Scripture commands us to worship God in all His Attributes, as He truly is, there is a concomitant practical truth related to all this: we become like what we worship. It is inevitable that we will conform to the image of whatever we worship.

If we worship a God Who is unconcerned with accountability for sin, or justice, or holiness, then why should we be concerned with such things? If God is not concerned with particular attitudes toward sex or violence, then why should we be? (When was the last time you heard a sermon on, or, much less, sang the words of, or a song about, the Song of Solomon or Jesus' Command in Luke 22:35-38 to His Disciples to sell their cloaks and buy a sword? Yet the divorce rate among Evangelicals continues to climb and confusion about the role of violence and our response to it plagues us as a Church and a Society. Do you think there is a connection between the Church's silence on these things and Her silence on them in worship?).

If we, for reasons of commerce or comfort (or whatever false god) refuse to worship God as He has revealed Himself in all of His Complexity (and as He wishes to be worshipped), we will find that, after we bend our knees and heads in worship, that, as we look again after we raise our heads, the god we are worshipping has morphed strangely, and looks increasingly less like the God of the Bible, and more and more like Mammon or Moloch. And if we chance to turn and look into a mirror, we should not be surprised to see the image of those gods looking back at us from our own eyes.

What is to be done? We must recognize and worship in our words, lives, and music, the God of the Bible in His Fully-Orbed Character and range of Attributes: His Justice as well as His Mercy, His Holiness as well as His Compassion, His Righteous Wrath as well as His Love. We must worship Him, in our sermons, words, and songs as He has been revealed to us in His Word, regardless of the cost in commerce, comfort, or public perception. It is time for Judgment to begin in the House of God.