Prior to journeying into the biblical teaching on worship, it may be helpful to establish some groundwork regarding the nature of humanity. Mankind is made for worship, and this is a truth which is established by Scripture and human experience. So innate is the desire for us to worship something that even the staunchest atheist has objects of adoration. The creation’s inherent longing for God leads us to “deify” the most common objects: money, home, sex, other people. Everyone has the tendency to make something ultimate in their lives (the thing that gives them a sense of meaning), and in doing so they elevate it to a place God has reserved for himself. This desire was keenly observed by the agnostic novelist, David Foster Wallace, who said in a speech delivered to the graduating class of Kenyon College,
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already—it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.
Wallace may not have been a devout Christian, but he recognized something about the world which God created. We are unconscious worshippers, and the danger in worshipping finite things is that they will always leave us disappointed.
The problem we face then is not that we don’t worship, but that our worship is misdirected. According to Paul, “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things.” (Rom. 1:21-23)
Throughout Scripture, this kind of worship is called idolatry. God prohibited this in the very first commandment (Ex. 20:3), calling his people to worship him as the highest and ultimate good. When we direct our adoration to the true God, revealed in Scripture, we experience his transforming grace. Contrarily, as Wallace noted, worshipping the wrong thing will eat you alive. The question each of us must ask is, “Is my worship idolatry, or is it the life-giving adoration described by Scripture? Is it transforming me for better, or for worse?”
