SermonStudio

Our "take-it-or-leave-it" attitude concerning God is evidence that we do not always fully appreciate who he is.

You may have watched Marlin Perkins of TV's "Wild Kingdom." This wonderful animal lover and trainer has been trying to get people on a first-name basis with animals for most of his seventy-seven years. His wife, Carol, gave this account: "When Marlin and I were dating, I wanted him so badly that I never let him know how little I knew about animals. Soon after our marriage we went to the Belgian Congo, and after weeks and weeks of traipsing around, and trying hard not to complain, I came in one evening absolutely exhausted. I told Marlin I didn't want to eat, all I wanted was to go to bed. So I undressed, crawled into bed, and reached for my pillow, and out from underneath it crawled a huge lizard that ran up my chest and down my arm. It was the last straw. I started to scream and realized I couldn't stop screaming. I was hysterical, tired of being brave, and terrified. When Marlin heard my screams he came running and, after he saw that I wasn't hurt, he put his arms around me and said, "Honey, just think of how lucky you were to see him up close!"

The Hebrews are being made ready to see God "up close." It's scary, but it is a magnificent opportunity. In fact, in this text, God is getting ready to enter into a Covenant relationship with his people. It is a very high and solemn event. What happened at Sinai was, in the language of the scholars, a "theophany" - an appearance, a visible manifestation of God's presence.

God reveals himself to Moses face to face. It is not, of course, the actual face that is seen, for God is a Spirit. It is rather the Presence of the Glory, not the Person, that is seen.

This visual manifestation of God came in a thick cloud, with lightning and smoke on Mt. Sinai. Besides what the eye could see, there were also those elements the ear could hear: the sound of a trumpet, thunder, and the voice of God himself. This is a vivid, colorful, descriptive account of God's appearance, involving all the senses. The culmination of this appearance of God was the giving of the Ten Commandments. What is particularly worthy of our consideration here is how much importance God places on the meeting of God and the human in worship.

Preparation is Needed for Worship

Before the people of Israel can be fully prepared for this awesome occasion of worship, it is necessary they begin three days before the actual event to get ready. (That's a far cry from our thirty-five-minute-dash out of bed, into the shower, hurried dress in whatever clothes are handiest, drive madly to the church, grab a bulletin from an usher, scoot into the last pew, and breathe a sigh of relief that you've made it one more Sunday morning.)

For these Jews, three days of ceremonial purification are required, including the washing of their garments and sexual abstinence - indicating, certainly, one must always come into the Presence clean. (No wonder we have the Confession of Sins and Absolution early in the worship service.) The sexual abstinence was not because such relationships were evil, but to symbolize that in the light of what was involved, their thoughts should be turned to the highest and holiest of all relationships.

When we understand the nature of the God we worship, then this seemingly unnecessary excess of preparation will seem more logical. We tend to forget that God is holy, and we are unholy. God is sinless and we are sinful. God is pure and we are impure. God is from above, we are from beneath. Therefore, when we presume to nonchalantly approach him without any consciousness of our lack of goodness, of how much distance separates us, then we have handled far too casually the privilege that is ours in being allowed to come to him at all. We have not understood the marvelous condescension of God that he would deign to communicate with us under any circumstances.

The media - newspapers, books, magazines, TV - has made sin so common that we forget it offends a holy God. Sexual promiscuity, adultery, lust, greed, violence, cheating, lying, gluttony - we are so familiar with it we are no longer shocked by it. In fact, we seem to make an effort to replace those words that imply moral absolutes, or the existence of sin, with neutral, non-judgmental substitutes. We use soft terms. We don't refer to fornication anymore, we call it premarital sex. No one commits adultery these days, they have extramarital sex. Dirty movies are for mature audiences, not dirty-minded ones. We reduce every sin from a felony to a misdemeanor. So, we give almost automatic acceptance to everyone we meet. "If you say I'm okay, then I'll say you're okay." "After all, to be human is to be good." That may be fine on a horizontal, human to human level, but it is not quite so simple when we consider the vertical dimension, the God to human. Then it won't stand up in God's high court! The Psalmist asked, "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Who shall stand in his holy place?" His answer to his own question indicated his awareness that some kind of scrubbing up had to occur; "He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully." (Psalm 24:3, 4)

When I was a child, our mother had a wonderful way of making us know God was holy, and Sunday School and worship were of vital importance. Almost all of Saturday evening was given over to getting ready for church. We didn't have a bath tub or running water in our house, so mother would bring a large, round, galvanized wash tub (she would use that same tub on Monday to do the weekly family laundry) into the kitchen. Then she would put a boiler of water on the stove to heat, and each of us children would take our weekly, Saturday night bath, wash our hair, and the girls would stand patiently while mother rolled our hair on rags so we'd have curls on Sunday. It was also the time to polish and shine our shoes, and go through each item of clothing we intended to wear the next day to see that it was clean, ironed, and ready to go. We'd lay our underthings on a chair by the bed, hang our clean clothes on a hanger over the door, and we were still not ready. Next we sat down with a Bible and Sunday school lesson and studied so we'd be prepared for the services. Several years of that kind of preparation, week in and week out, and you get the message very clearly that God and his house are of supreme importance, and you get ready for meeting him there!

God Demands Full Attention at Worship

After the three days' purification, the Jews were then told to approach the mountain where God would make himself visible. But even then, with all the proper preparation done, they still must keep in mind it is a holy and majestic God with whom they were dealing. You don't trifle with him! The worship of God is not just another human gathering, no matter how pleasing or entertaining it may be. We must experience a sense of the Transcendent. When we genuinely worship him, when we are lost in wonder, adoration, and awe, then a bit of heaven comes to our earth.

This is a laid-back, casual, nonchalant, take it easy, generation. We've lost respect for a lot of things. We don't esteem the clergy as once we did. Once the minister was, in our view, a real man/woman of God. A prominent layman, in speaking of the late Dr. Ernest Fremont Tittle, once said, "I disagree with him on many things and that makes me very uncomfortable, for it leaves me with the impression that I am really disagreeing with God." Not too many people carry that kind of respect for the ordained minister. Maybe part of it is the fault of the clergy, but for whatever reason, folks are pretty casual about us. Or consider the elderly; who venerates the aged any longer? Who bothers to stand when an older person enters the room? We are even overly familiar with the boss, the professor, our parents, calling them by their first names. It does not indicate a high regard, does it?

Bishop Eugene Maxwell Frank was my first bishop when I was ordained an elder in the United Methodist Church in the Missouri East Conference. He became not only a greatly admired bishop to me, but also a dear and treasured friend. I can call his lovely wife, Wilma, but as much as they mean to me as beloved friends, the office Bishop Frank holds, means I simply cannot bring myself to call him Gene. Such familiarity seems like a brash impropriety.

Our speech about God, too, betrays our flippancy. Jesus is a Buddy. God is the Man upstairs, and we even call the great, omnipotent Creator and Lord of the universe, Mother nature.

Among the Hebrews, the name of God is the same as the nature of God. The name and the person are one. Since God is so holy, they did not dare to even mention his name. So careful were they, lest someone should blaspheme God or show disrespect for his name, they omitted the vowels and wrote only the consonants, spelling it YHWH. No one to this day knows what the vowels are; some say it is Yahweh, others have translated it Jehovah. Since the Hebrews could not pronounce the name of God, they substituted Adonai, which is translated Lord. We assuredly need a substitute in our day to make the name holy among us again. How tragic it is that we use the name of God so loosely; we blaspheme it, we use it to express strong feelings, we say it to indicate anger, or just as a thoughtless filler in our casual conversation. A United Methodist minister in Alabama, for whom we conducted a series of special services, told us of serving Holy Communion in his church one Sunday morning. Along with all the other people who quietly took their places at the chancel rail, there was an eighty-two-year-old man. He reached for a wafer and dropped it, and had to get another. Then, taking the cup from the pastor, he dropped it also, spilling the wine. In exasperation and frustration, his automatic response at that altar, receiving the body and the blood of our Lord, was to whisper, "God damn!" Our Lord deserves better.

As the Jews come to the holy mount to meet God they are enjoined not to come too close. A boundary was marked around the mountain. Beyond that separating line they must not go. They were commanded not to go up to the mountain or even get near it. If anyone set a foot on it, he was to be put to death, either stoned or shot with arrows.

Does that mean God doesn't want us to worship him? No! Does that mean God is discouraging the people from drawing near? Of course not! Does that mean God is angry, and he wants to frighten the people until they forsake worship altogether? Never! What it does mean is God is holy, and we are not to take for granted the high and wondrous privilege of speaking with him, worshiping him, and having him come into a relationship with us.

Ananias and Sapphira took too casually their dealing with God. They lied about the money they were giving in their worship, and the Holy Spirit struck them dead.

When David was bringing the ark of God from Baalejudah to Jerusalem, (2 Samuel 6:1-15) it was placed on a cart, and when the ark began to slip on the cart, Uzzah put out his hand to steady it and was struck dead. It seems, on the surface, a very unfair thing for God to do. But, remember, the ark symbolized the very actual presence of God. It was always to be carried on the shoulders of the priests (not hauled by oxen on a cart), it was never to be touched by any save those appointed to its care (and Uzzah was not one of them). So, when a mere man, for whatever reason, is audacious enough to presume to touch the Divine Presence, God had no recourse but to vent his terrible displeasure.

In our time, it is very popular for our religion to have a lot of chumminess in it. To be sure, God allows us access into his Presence, but it is never to be regarded lightly nor taken for granted.

As a child, if I ran down the aisle of the church, chewed gum during worship, climbed on the altar or chancel rail, when I got home I was severely punished. My mother would say, "That's God's house and I expect you to treat it like it is!"

Our lackadaisical indifference to church gives us away. We glance about to see what others are doing during the prayer, we pay little attention to the reading of the Word of God, we ignore the message of the hymns we sing, we let our thoughts wander during the preaching of the sermon. We let familiarity breed contempt for the holy.

C. S. Lewis said, "A good way to worship is to be unaware of time, light, and those about us, but center our attention solely upon God."

Ideal Worship is the Blending of Transcendence and Immanence

Ideally, we experience both the Transcendence and Immanence in worship. He is the God we hold in awe, the God high and lifted up, the all-knowing, all-powerful, all-present, Totally Other. On the other hand, however, he is the God at hand, the God near us, closer than hands and feet and breathing.

When Jesus came, he, by his death on the cross, gave us glorious liberty to enter into the Holy of Holies. We are brought near to God by the blood of the slain Son of God. He brings the whole God-people relationship into proper perspective.

Now our way to God is not via a God that is too holy to approach, nor yet a God too chummy to breed contemptuous familiarity. Rather, the way to God is held in marvelous balance. We come to a God who is, at the same time, both above us and with us, a God Transcendent and Immanent. He is big enough to help us and near enough to want to.

Jesus combined this understanding so beautifully when he taught us to pray, "Our Father (the God near) who art in heaven (the God far above us in sinlessness and power), holy be your name."

Make no mistake about it, the Transcendent God is not an angry God; neither is he a master we somehow have to convince that we need to approach him. Rather, he desires with all of his great heart of love and mercy to make it possible for us to see him and enjoy his Presence. Dr. Menninger tells the story about President Thomas Jefferson and a group of companions who were traveling horseback, cross-country, and were obliged to ford a stream which had been swollen by spring rains. A wayfarer waited at the edge of the same stream, watching as several men of the president's party crossed over. Then the stranger hailed President Jefferson and asked him to take him across the river on the back of his horse. The President willingly did so, and carried him safely to the other side, putting him down on the bank of the stream. One of the men of the party came to the stranger and asked, "Tell me, why did you select the President over all of us to ask this favor for yourself?" The man answered, "I didn't know he was the President. All I know is that some faces say 'No' and some faces say 'Yes,' and his was a 'Yes' face." That's what we learn from Jesus; God's face is ever turned to us in beseeching love, offering his help by the Divine "Yes."

Results of Proper Worship

The result of the appearance of God on the mountain was a union between the human and the Divine - a God-people covenant. What a glorious privilege is ours in worship. The human is now linked with the God above and beyond us. May God give each of us, each time we worship, a revealing theophany of himself. We must not let anything keep us from seeing him!

There was once a father and his little girl who were going to be a part of a once-in-a-lifetime event; the coronation of the Queen of England. They got up very early to get a good place in line among the thousands who crowded the roadway. As they waited for the queen to come, the little child spotted a man selling lollipops. She wanted one, and begged and coaxed her father until, finally, they stepped out of line to buy her one. While they were gone, the queen passed by. Because of a lollipop they missed what they had come for. Our worship must not fail because we have neglected to prepare, or because we are indifferent, or because we fail to give reverent
attention, or because we are willing to settle for lollipops! When God meets with his people, we have been honored with the Presence of the High and Holy One who inhabits eternity. Can you imagine? He is willing to come among insignificant and transient earthlings like you and me. The sinless God accomodates himself to the likes of us so we might, one day, by his grace, be like him! WOW!