Our worship is no longer the worship of one chosen ethnic race, but the worship of representatives of all nations, tribes, and tongues. But what remains constant is that worship is still a privilege given to us by God and that when it comes to the elements and even the style of our worship, we still cannot trust our own instincts. Instead, we must look to God’s instructions and then obey them.

You can’t read the first five books of the Old Testament and fail to conclude that God takes worship seriously. But then, you can’t observe the lay of the evangelical land today and fail to conclude that many churches do not take worship seriously. While granting there is a great and necessary difference between Old Testament worship and its New Testament counterpart, we should still wonder: How did we get from the tabernacle to the stormtrooper dance? How did we get from sober, serious worship to the lowest depths of megachurch tomfoolery? Why is it that so many churches seem locked in a race to the absolute bottom?

As I follow the five-day Bible reading plan, I’ve begun in Genesis, made my way through Exodus and Leviticus, and am now well into Numbers. These early books of the Bible have a lot to teach us about worship. The first and foremost lesson is that worshiping God is an immense privilege. Though we were created to worship God, we turned our backs on him and, in our willful disobedience, became worshipers of other things. Rather than having hearts fixed on God, we have allowed other things to gain undue prominence in our lives. So now, instead of pursuing the Creator, we pursue created things. We run around looking for satisfaction in sex and money and power, we bow down to idols of wood and stone or set our hearts on gods of green and gold.

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