Whatever Happened To God?
by James M. Boice
In
any discussion of reformation in doctrine one must come to the
realization that the real problem of our time is that there is hardly any
doctrine at all to reform. So when we talk about reformation we must focus
on a recovery of theology, period. Certainly in the liberal churches there
is a lack of exposition of Scripture and sound doctrine, and unfortunately,
this is rapidly becoming the case in evangelical circles as well.
Now you might ask which doctrines are missing? I argue that primarily
what we need is a recovery of the doctrine of God. You have to have some
kind of starting point and that's the point where I think we should begin.
People have lost any real sense of the fact that when we come to church we
come to worship and learn about God. Years ago I spoke at a conference and
my topic was on a number of the attributes of God. Later I got some
feedback from a gentleman who was listening to my presentation. He had
been in the church for thirty years, and in fact was now an elder, and
that was the first time that he ever heard a series of messages on the
attributes of God. And after hearing this his friend asked him, "Well,
whom did you think you were worshiping all that time?" But he hadn't
really thought about those things and I'm convinced that we have
literally thousands of people in our churches today who really seldom,
if ever, think about who it is they are worshiping, if they think about
God at all.
Now, I think there are some reasons for this. One reason is the terrible
impact of television on our culture which has produced a virtually
mindless age. Television is not a medium which shares information well,
it is primarily an entertainment medium. It puts pictures on the screen
onto which people project their own aspirations and desires, and because
it works so powerfully and is so pervasive it has the tendency to
transform anything it touches into entertainment, and it does it very
quickly. One of the most significant books I've read in the last few
years in terms of what is actually happening to the mind is Neil
Postman's, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of
Show-Business. It's not that entertainment itself is bad. But television
is most damaging when it tries to be serious. So when you put news on TV,
you get brief little soundbites encased in slick images, and this is not
really information, it is entertainment.
This happens to politics, it happens to education, and according to
Postman, it happens to religion. Postman even raises the question of what
one loses when one puts religion on television. It is obvious what there
is to gain: a mass audience, money. But what do you lose? He argues you
lose everything that is important: tradition, creeds, theology, etc. And
he says above all, you lose a sense of the transcendent. And what he
means is that you lose a sense of the presence of God. When Christians
meet together to worship God, whether it is in a cathedral or a simple
chapel, typically there will be prayers and open Bibles for the study of
God's Word. There is a sense that God is present in these activities. And
you lose that when religion is put on TV. All you have on television is
the picture of the star of the show who is the "entertainer." Postman
says God necessarily, in that kind of medium, comes out second banana.
And when the preacher becomes the star of the show he begins to think
and act as if he is a Hollywood star then you have the kind of tragedies
that we've seen in the industry. Postman has a very serious comment at
this point. He says, "Now, I'm not a theologian and maybe I don't have
the right word for it, but I think the word for it is 'blasphemy.'"
All of this would be irrelevant if it were not for the fact that all
this has a significant impact on our churches. So just as God is absent
from televised religion, there is tremendous pressure to push him out of
our church services in favor of a more upbeat entertainment-oriented
Sunday morning visit. We do all kinds of things to fill in that vacuum,
but as Augustine said, we are made for God and our hearts are restless
until they rest in him. In my judgment, we have a hollow core at the
heart of evangelicalism, and that is the cause of all the restlessness.
The Sovereignty of God
If we want to recover the doctrine of God we have to recover the
attributes of God, and one attribute that is sorely missing in our time
is the attribute of God's sovereignty. What happens in the Christian world
if you don't give attention to the sovereign God? Human sovereignty comes
in to take the true God's place. Idols always replace the true if the
true is not kept there. So you have human beings becoming sovereign in
their own estimation in a variety of ways. Theologically: we are the ones
who elect God rather than God electing us. Programmatically: we are the
ones who determine what should be done in our worship rather than following
the statements of Scripture. In this sort of business God gets relegated
to the sidelines, we really don't need him. But really, when you think
about it, this is secularism.
I think the best illustration of this in the Bible is the story of
Nebuchadnezzar when he stood on the roof of his palace in Babylon and he
looked over that magnificent city with its famous hanging gardens and he
said, "Is not this the great Babylon I have built as the royal residence,
by my mighty power and for the glory of my majesty?" That is probably the
best statement in all of literature of what we call secular humanism,
because he is claiming that the world he observed was of him, by him
and for his own glory. But the sad thing is that it is not just secular
humanism, but is becoming "evangelical" humanism as well. If we're the
ones who conceive of what should be done and we're the ones who accomplish
it by our skills, whatever they may be, often without prayer (because we
are not a prayerful people), then I guess the glory should go to ourselves.
So we find ourselves right back where Nebuchadnezzar was, right around the
time God judged him with insanity. And as I look at the evangelical world
I'd say a lot of it is insane. In addition, Nebuchadnezzar was driven out
to live with the animals to behave in a bestial way. And when I read the
polls that tell me that evangelicals behave virtually no different than
their secular counter-parts, and I recognize the bestial manner that the
world around us is behaving, I think that maybe the judgment of
Nebuchadnezzar has come home to us as well.
Fortunately, Nebuchadnezzar got the message. For his final testimony
reads:
At the end of that time, I, Nebuchadnezzar, raised my eyes toward heaven,
and my sanity was restored. Then I praised the Most High; I honored and
glorified him who lives forever. His dominion is an eternal dominion; his
kingdom endures from generation to generation. All the peoples of the
earth are regarded as nothing. He does as he pleases with the powers of
heaven and the peoples of the earth. No one can hold back his hand or say
to him: "What have you done?" ...Now I, Nebuchadnezzar, praise and exalt
and glorify the King of heaven, because everything he does is right and
all his ways are just. And those who walk in pride he is able to humble.
(Dan 4:34-35, 37)
God is not only able to humble them. He does humble them, and perhaps
that ought to be a good starting point for renewal in our churches. We
evangelicals need it especially.
The Holiness of God
If there is any doctrine that rivals God's sovereignty in importance it is
the holiness of God. But do we have any sense or appreciation of the
holiness of God in our churches today? David Wells writes that God's
holiness weighs "lightly upon us." Why? Holiness involves God's
transcendence. It involves majesty, the authority of sovereign power,
stateliness or grandeur. It embraces the idea of God's sovereign majestic
will, a will that is set upon proclaiming himself to be who he truly is:
God alone, who will not allow his glory to be diminished by another. Yet
we live in an age when everything is exposed, where there are no mysteries
and no surprises, where even the most intimate personal secrets of our
lives are blurted out over television to entertain the masses. We are
contributing to this frivolity when we treat God as our celestial buddy
who indulges us in the banalities of our day-to-day lives.
Perhaps the greatest problem of all in regard to our neglect of God's
holiness is that holiness is a standard against which human sin is exposed,
which is why in Scripture exposure to God always produces feelings of shame,
guilt, embarrassment and terror in the worshiper. These are all painful
emotions, and we are doing everything possible in our culture to avoid
them. One evidence of this is the way we have eliminated sin as a serious
category for describing human actions. Karl Menninger asked the question
years ago with his classic book, Whatever Became of Sin? He answered his
own question by arguing that when we banished God from our cultural
landscape we changed sin into crime (because it is now no longer an
offense against God but rather an offense against the state) and then
we changed crimes into symptoms. Sin is now something that is someone
else's fault. It is caused by my environment, my parents or my genes.
But once again, this is not simply a problem outside the church. We too
have bought into today's therapeutic approach so that we no longer call
our many and manifold transgressions sin or confront sin directly, calling
for repentance before God. Instead we send our people to counselors to
work through why they are acting in an "unhealthy" manner, to find
"healing."
David Wells claims that "holiness fundamentally defines the character of
God." But "robbed of such a God, worship loses its awe, the truth of his
Word loses its ability to compel, obedience loses its virtue, and the
church loses its moral authority." It is time for the evangelical churches
to recover the Bible's insistence that God is holy above all things and
explore what that must mean for our individual and corporate lives. To
begin with we need to preach from those great passages of the Bible in
which people were exposed to God's awe-inspiring majesty and holiness.
If nothing else, we need to preach the Law without which preaching the
Gospel loses its power and eventually even its meaning.
Reformation in Worship
John R. W. Stott has written a book on some essentials of evangelical
religion in which he affirms "that true worship is the highest and
noblest activity of which man, by the grace of God, is capable." But that
highlights our weakness, namely, that for large segments of the
evangelical church, perhaps the majority, true worship is almost
non-existent.
A. W. Tozer, a wise pastor and perceptive Bible student, saw the problem
nearly fifty years ago. He wrote in 1948,
Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for
the dissemination of the Word, there are today many millions of people who
hold 'right opinions,' probably more than ever before in the history of
the church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual
worship was at a lower ebb. To great sections of the church the art of
worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange
and foreign thing called the 'program.' This word has been borrowed from
the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which
now passes for worship among us.
It is not unusual to read in books dealing with worship that worship is
hard to define, but I do not find that actually to be the case. I think
it is very easy to define. The problems-and there are many of them-are
in different areas.
To worship God is to ascribe to him supreme worth, for he alone is
supremely worthy. Therefore, the first thing to be said about worship
is that it is to honor God. Worship also has bearing on the worshiper.
It changes him or her, which is the second important thing to be said
about it. William Temple defined worship very well: "To worship is to
quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with
the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to
open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose
of God." In defining worship, William Temple also gives us a good
description of the true godliness throughout the Christian life.
John H. Armstrong is editor of a journal called Reformation and Revival,
and he devoted the 1993 winter issue to worship. In the introduction
Armstrong calls what passes for the worship of God today "Mc-Worship,"
meaning that worship has been made common, cheap or trivial. What is the
problem? Why is so little of that strong worship that characterized past
ages seen among us? There are several reasons.
First, ours is a trivial age, and the church has been deeply affected by
this pervasive triviality. Ours is not an age for great thoughts or even
great actions. Our age has no heroes. It is a technological age, and the
ultimate objective of our popular technological culture is entertainment.
I argue that the chief cause of today's mindlessness is television, as I
discussed earlier. Because it is so pervasive-the average American
household has the television on more than seven hours a day-it is
programming us to think that the chief end of man is to be entertained.
How can people whose minds are filled with the brainless babble of the
evening sitcoms have anything but trivial thoughts when they come to
God's house on Sundays morning if, in fact, they have thoughts of God
at all? How can they appreciate his holiness if their heads are full
of the moral muck of the afternoon talk shows? All they can look for
in church, if they look for anything, is something to make them feel
good for a short while before they go back to the television culture.
Second, ours is a self-absorbed, man-centered age, and the church has
become sadly, even treasonously, self-centered. We have seen something
like a Copernican revolution. In the past true worship may not have taken
place all the time or even often. It may have been crowded out by the
"program," as Tozer maintained it was in his day. But worship was at
least understood to be the praise of God and to be something worth
aiming at. Today we do not even aim at it, at least not much or in
many places.
Pastor R. Kent Hughes, Senior Pastor of the College Church in Wheaton, is
on target when he says,
The unspoken but increasingly common assumption of today's Christendom is
that worship is primarily for us-to meet our needs. Such worship services
are entertainment focused, and the worshipers are uncommitted spectators
who are silently grading the performance. From this perspective preaching
becomes a homiletics of consensus-preaching to felt needs-man's conscious
agenda instead of God's. Such preaching is always topical and never
textual. Biblical information is minimized, and the sermons are short
and full of stories. Anything and everything that is suspected of making
the marginal attender uncomfortable is removed from the service, whether
it be a registration card or a 'mere' creed. Taken to the nth degree,
this philosophy instills a tragic self-centeredness. That is, everything
is judged by how it affects man. This terribly corrupts one's theology.
As I have been arguing all along, we are oblivious to God. In recent years,
as I have traveled around the country speaking in various churches, I have
noticed the decreasing presence and in some cases the total absence of
service elements that have always been associated with the worship of
God. These desperately need to be recovered.
Whatever Happened to Prayer?
It is almost inconceivable to me that something that is called a worship
service can be held without any significant prayer, but that is precisely
what is happening. I mean really, what do you go to a church service for
if it is not to pray? And yet, you can go to evangelical services filled
with thousands of people and hear virtually no prayers at all. There is
usually a very short prayer at the beginning of the service and another
prayer at the time the offering is received. But longer prayers-pastoral
prayers-have all but vanished. Whatever happened to the ACTS acrostic in
which "A" stands for adoration, "C" for confession of sin, "T" for
thanksgiving, and "S" for supplication? Now and then a few supplications
are tacked onto the offering prayer, but most all other prayers have been
thrown out. How can we say we are worshipping when we do not even pray?
The Reading of the Word
The reading of any substantial portion of the Bible is also vanishing. In
the Puritan age ministers regularly read one long chapter of the Old
Testament and one chapter of the New Testament in every service. In some
services I've attended there are no Scripture readings at all, other times
it is a reading of only one or two verses. Sometimes it just precedes the
sermon and very often it is only a pretext because the sermon has nothing
whatsoever to do with the passage. I'm not talking about liberal churches,
mind you. I'm talking about the lack of Scripture readings in our
evangelical churches. We must again recover the apostle's command to
"devote [ourselves] to the public reading of Scripture" (1Tim. 4:13).
The Exposition of the Word
In this television age of ours, preachers are expected to be charming and
entertaining. And so your sermons have to be shortened because people have
short attention spans, they are funny if they can be, and you have to
eliminate any theological material that would cause people to think, and
you most certainly do not bring up negative theological material like sin
because that makes people feel uncomfortable. Preachers want to be liked,
and in order to be liked today you have to be entertaining. I am reminded
of Jesus' harsh words to the Pharisees about wanting to be popular, seeing
the smiles from the folks in the market place. As our Lord said, "They
have their reward." But for pastors who are looking for more than smiles,
and parishioners who are looking for more than to have their ears tickled,
our Lord gave a very simple explanation of what the exposition of the Word
is really all about. "You search the Scriptures thinking that in them you
have eternal life: yet these are they which testify of me" (John 5:39).
The preaching of God's Word is about Christ, and him crucified. This
central message is food for our souls. But we are settling for junk
food.
Confession of Sin
Who confesses sin today-anywhere, not to mention in church as God's humble,
repentant people? It is not happening, because there is so little awareness
of both God and sin. Instead of coming to church to admit our
transgressions and seek forgiveness, we come to church to be told that
we are really all right, we want to be affirmed.
Hymns
One of the saddest features of contemporary worship is that the great
hymns of the church are on the way out. They are not gone entirely, but
they are going. And in their place have come trite jingles that have more
in common with contemporary advertising ditties than the psalms. Now, not
all of them are bad and I would even argue that there is a place for some
of them, like when you're having a fun night with the Jr. High. But what
place do they have in serious worship? The problem here is not so much
the style of the music, though trite words fit best with trite tunes and
harmonies. Rather it is with the content of the songs. The old hymns
expressed the theology of the church in profound and perceptive ways
and with winsome memorable language. Today's songs reflect only our
shallow or non-existent theology and do almost nothing to elevate one's
thoughts about God.
Worst of all are songs that merely repeat a trite idea, word or phrase
over and over again. Songs like this are not worship, though they may
give the churchgoer a religious feeling. They are mantras, which belong
more in a gathering of New Agers than among the worshipping people of the
triune God.
Reformation in The Church
The disaster that has overtaken the church in our day in regard to worship
is not going to be cured overnight. But we ought to make a beginning, and
one way to begin is to study what Jesus said about worship. He had been
traveling with his disciples and had stopped at the well of Sychar while
the disciples went into the city to buy food. A woman came to draw water
and Jesus got into a discussion with her. As the discussion progressed he
touched on her loose moral life, revealing his insight into her way of
living, and she tried to change the topic by asking him a religious
question. "Sir," she said, "I can see that you are a prophet. Our
fathers worshipped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place
where we must worship is in Jerusalem" (John 4:20).
Jesus' answer is the classic biblical statement of what worship is all
about: "Believe me, woman, a time is coming when you will worship the
Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship
what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from
the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers
will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of
worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must
worship in spirit and in truth" (vv. 21-24). There are several important
things about this.
First, there is but one true God, and true worship must be of this true
God and none other. This is the point of Jesus saying that the Samaritans
did not know whom they were worshipping but that the Jews did, that
"salvation is from the Jews." He meant that the true God is the God who
had revealed himself to Israel at Mount Sinai and who established the
only acceptable way of worshipping him, which is what much of the Old
Testament is about. Other worship is invalid, because it is worship of
an imaginary god.
We need to think about this carefully because we live in an age in which
everyone's opinion about anything, especially his or her opinion about God,
is thought to be as valid as any other. That is patently impossible. If
there is a God, which is basic to any discussion about worship, then God
is what he is. That is, he is one thing and not another. So the question
is not whether any or all opinions are valid but rather what this one
true existing God is like. Who is he? What is his name? What kind of a
God is he? Christianity teaches that this one true God has made himself
known through creation, at Mount Sinai, through the subsequent history
of the Jewish people, and in the incarnation, life, death and resurrection
of his Son Jesus Christ. In addition, he has given us a definitive
revelation of what he is like and what he requires of us in the Bible.
So that is the point at which we start. There is one God, and he has
revealed himself to us. That is why there can be no true worship of God
without a faithful teaching of the Bible.
Second, the only way this one true God can be truly worshipped is "in
spirit and in truth." Jesus was indicating a change in worship when he
said this. Before this time worship was centered in the temple at
Jerusalem. Every Jew had to make his way there three times annually for
the festivals. What took place in the local synagogues was more like a
Bible school class than a worship service. But this has been changed.
Jesus has come. He has fulfilled all that the temple worship symbolized.
Therefore, until the end of the age worship is not to be by location,
either in Jerusalem or Samaria, but in spirit and according to the truth
of God.
Worship should not be confused with feelings. It is true that the worship
of God will affect us, and one thing it will frequently affect is our
emotions. At times tears will fill our eyes as we become aware of God's
great love and grace toward us. Yet it is possible for our eyes to fill
with tears and for there still to be no real worship simply because we
have not come to a genuine awareness of God and a fuller praise of God's
nature and ways.
True worship occurs only when we actually meet with God and find ourselves
praising him for his love, wisdom, beauty, truth, holiness, compassion,
mercy, grace, power, and all his other attributes.
Reformation in Life
Surveys of contemporary Christian conduct tell us that most Christians do
not act significantly different from non-Christian people. This is not
surprising since little contemporary preaching teaches anything that
might actually make a difference. But we obviously should be different,
at least if we take the Bible seriously. Christians are to be the new
humanity, a community of those who "love...God, even to the contempt of
self" as opposed to those who "love...self, even to the contempt of God"
(Augustine).
Where should we start? The scope of this subject is analogous to that of
the reformation of the church in doctrine with which this article began.
I asked what doctrines needed to be recovered, and I answered "all the
major doctrines of all the creeds." Here I ask, what areas of Christian
life and conduct need to be recovered, and the answer is: all areas of
life both for ourselves as individuals and the church. We need the Ten
Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount and the ethical teaching of the
epistles. It is all needed. In short, we need to recover what it means
to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul
and with all your mind" and to "love your neighbor as yourself" since
"all the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments" (Matt.
22:37-40). We need to live out our faith, not to obtain grace, but
because we have obtained God's grace in Christ.
To God Alone Be Glory
This article began with God, and it is appropriate that it end with God,
too, for a recovery of the sense of the reality, presence, will and glory
of God is what it is about. It is significant that Paul's conclusion to
the great doctrinal section of the book of Romans ends with a doxology.
The last words are: "For from him and through him and to him are all
things. To him be the glory forever! Amen" (Rom. 11:36).
Moreover, after the closing application section of the letter, the entire
epistle ends similarly: "To the only wise God be glory forever through
Jesus Christ! Amen" (Rom. 16:27). I would argue that the reason the
evangelical church is so weak today and why we do not experience renewal,
though we talk about our need for it, is that the glory of God has been
largely forgotten by the church. We are not likely to see revival again
until the truths that exalt and glorify God in salvation are recovered.
How can we expect God to move among us until we can again truthfully say,
"To God alone be the glory"?
The world cannot say this. It is concerned for its own glory instead. Like
Nebuchadnezzar, it says, "Look at this great Babylon I have built by my
power and for my glory." Arminians cannot say it. They can say, "to God
be glory," but they cannot say, "to God alone be glory," since Arminian
theology takes some of the glory of God in salvation and gives it to man.
Even those in the Reformed camp cannot say it if what they are chiefly
trying to do in their ministries is build their own kingdoms and become
important people on the religious scene. We will never experience renewal
in doctrine, worship and life until we are honestly able to say, "to God
alone be glory" in all that we do.
To those who do not know God that is perhaps the most foolish of all
statements. But to those who do know God, to those who are being saved,
it is not only a right statement, it is a happy, true, inescapable,
necessary and highly desirable confession.
Author
The late Dr. James Montgomery Boice was the president of the Alliance
of Confessing Evangelicals, and senior minister at Tenth Presbyterian
Church in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He is the author of over 50 books.