IS IT WORSHIP OR MEMOREX
1 Kings 12:29 -30 (Jeroboam, King of Israel made two golden calves to worship) One he set up in Bethel, and the other in Dan. And this thing became a sin. The people even went as far as Dan to worship the one there.
1 John 2:3-4a We know that we have known Him if we keep strict His commands. The one saying, “I know Him” and doesn’t keep strict His commands is a liar.
1 John 2:22 Who is the liar except the one who declines, that Jesus is not the Christ.
John never did mess around. For him, there was not much gray area, only dark or light; there is only truth or a lie. No believer in their right mind would ever say that Jesus is not the Christ, but according to John, one can only claim to know Jesus by keeping strict His commands. This is the where the rubber of faith meets the road of belief. Are the Twenty Commands in Matthew and Luke the commands that John refers to? Of course they are, what else would they be? The Sermon on the Mount documented by Matthew is Jesus’ first sermon. Wouldn’t He come out of the gate with a full double barrel? But breaking these commands does not come with a jail sentence, so it’s easy to ignore them.
Straying from the commands is like straying from the temple and refusing its holiness, like the Israelites did in the Old Testament time of the early kings. They decided they could define worship anyway they wanted to. They set up shop in Bethel in the south and in Dan to the far north and began a huge snowball headed for hell. Talk about impertinence!
Can anybody just write up some blueprints for a new construction site anywhere and call it a temple? Can you just walk off the street, go in and sing some songs, cross yourself, get a pep talk, sacrifice a bull or a few bucks or whatever else might be done in the name of religion?
Nearly a thousand years later, Jesus was still straightening out the worship conundrum. Where do we find Him? In Samaria of all places with the woman at the well, the region of Bethel, where one of those evil golden calves used to be kept for worship. John 4:20 (the woman said to Jesus) “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and you people say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Jesus answered her with this paraphrase, “Dear lady, a time is coming when there will be no temple worship in Jerusalem and no golden-calf worship in Bethel.
What He meant was, John 4:24 “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” Jesus would seal that deal when he was crucified on the cross, sacrificing Himself for the spiritual ecclesia. He tore the curtain of religion, and with the introduction of the Holy Spirit to individual lives, He created a new Holy of Holies, a new temple where the Holy Quartet would dwell together; God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, and me.
Jesus cut a new path with the Twenty Commands as the firm foundation to walk the Jesus-Walk on. The Holy Spirit powers the temple of each believer, and the word of God is the Truth the fuels the engine of the Jesus-Walk. Truth used for anything else would be like setting up a golden calf in Bethel, becoming a sin.
John reminds us with the seriousness of snake venom that we can only know Him if we keep strict His commands. John wasn’t preaching anything he wasn’t doing himself. Fourth century historian, Eusebius, writes of John the senior citizen who ran after a young man he had brought to the Lord and into the church at Ephesus. With a change of mind and heart, the youngster abandoned his faith a rejoined his rabble-rousing friends. John’s strict use of commands and Jesus-Walk are evident in this story. With his Jesus-Walk of Justice, he did not judge the young man for his actions, and he kept shining his light. With his Jesus-Walk of Compassion, he went the extra mile, running with only spirit-power, forgetting he was an old man. With his Jesus-Walk of Mercy, he turned the other cheek and overlooked any possible personal attacks only to see the boy’s salvation was at stake.
While we’re on the subject of rabble-rousers, Paul wrote to a brood in Corinth, a city known for fornicating scoundrels, a dreadfully sinful community to live in. Paul writes about the holiness of the temple that each believer is, contrasting the temple prostitution shrines that are perched high about the city as if beckoning to the people down below to come up and ‘worship’ the gods. Ha. We know what that temple worship looked like. Paul was pealing those believers out of a cultural cesspool with a shoe horn: 1 Corinthians 3:16 “Do you not know that you are a temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?”
Ove the course of thousands of years, people have twisted and contorted worship to suit the occasion, suit personal agendas, suit personal tastes. But if John is the expert, and I believe that his gospel and his epistle proves it, worship calls for spirit and truth, and a lack of commitment to the Commands a liar makes.
