Devotional 106: The Light of Nature: Worship According to God's Will Alone

The Confession Read

The light of nature showeth that there is a God, who hath lordship and sovereignty over all, is good, and doth good unto all, and is therefore to be feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, and served, with all the heart, and with all the soul, and with all the might. But the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, and so limited by his own revealed will, that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 1

Introduction

There is a moment in every mountaineer's ascent when the summit comes into view and the heart leaps, not because the climb is nearly done, for the peak still towers above and the path between is uncharted, but because the goal has declared itself to the senses. You see it, therefore you know it is real. Yet between that sight and the summit stands a wilderness of false ridges, crumbling rock, and deceptive snowfields that beckon the climber toward a pleasant-looking route and then give way beneath his weight. The summit is visible to the eye, but the way to it is not. A thousand paths present themselves; only one leads to the top without fatal consequences. And the climber who trusts his own instincts, who reasons that any upward path must eventually arrive, has forgotten that the mountain does not negotiate. We have now arrived, after twenty chapters of doctrine concerning God himself, his decrees, his works, his law, and the liberty of his people, at the practical summit toward which all that doctrine has been driving. The Confession turns, in Chapter 21, to the worship of God. Section 1 stands as the great hinge upon which every subsequent section of this chapter turns, and it makes two claims so foundational that to mistake either is to build a house of worship upon sand. The first claim is that the light of nature (creation, conscience, the created order) shows that God exists and that he is owed worship. The second claim is that the light of nature does not, and cannot, show how that worship is to be rendered in a way acceptable to him. The what of worship is written in the stars and sewn into the conscience. The how of worship must come from the mouth of God himself, and from no other source. This is the regulative principle of worship, a term the Divines do not use but a doctrine they embed into the granite of Section 1, and it marks the boundary between Reformed worship and every other kind. Rome worships according to her own traditions, adding festivals, images, and ceremonies the Scriptures never commanded. Broad evangelicalism worships according to what is culturally convenient, what stirs the emotions, what the market will bear. Enthusiasm worships according to inward impulses it mistakes for the Spirit's leading. And fallen man, left to his own devices, worships according to the imagination of his own heart, carving a god in his own image and calling the echo of his own desires by the name of deity. Against every one of these the Divines plant their standard: the acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself, limited by his own revealed will, and not to be supplemented by any human invention, satanic suggestion, or visible representation. The Maker of the mountain reserves the right to mark the path, and every climber who veers from it, however sincere or skillful, does so at the peril of his soul.

Scripture Foundation

The first claim of Section 1, that the light of nature demonstrates God's existence and his claim upon the worship of his creatures, is not an innovation of natural theology but an exposition of the apostle Paul. Standing in the heart of pagan Athens, surrounded by altars to unknown gods and temples to deities of stone and silver, Paul did not open his discourse by appealing to the Hebrew Scriptures, which his audience had never read. He opened by appealing to the light of nature: "God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands; neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things." Acts 17:24-25 The logic is relentless and it tracks the Confession's own reasoning point for point. God is Creator, therefore he is Lord. God is Lord, therefore he is owed worship. God is self-sufficient, therefore he cannot be worshiped as though he needed anything from his creatures. The Athenians had enough light from nature to know that God existed, they had built an altar to the unknown God precisely because their natural knowledge told them that the pantheon was incomplete, but they did not have enough light to know how to worship him acceptably. Paul's sermon at the Areopagus is the biblical enactment of Section 1's doctrine in miniature: natural knowledge sufficient to condemn, revelation necessary to save. The more famous Pauline passage, and the one that has shaped two millennia of reflection on natural theology, is the opening argument of Romans. Paul writes that "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse." Romans 1:20 The Greek word Paul chooses for "Godhead" is theiotēs, a term that denotes not the fullness of the divine essence (for which Paul reserves the word theotēs in Colossians 2:9) but the divine attributes as they are displayed in creation, the qualities that belong properly to God and that the created order reflects. The creation, Paul argues, is not merely evidence for God's existence, the kind of evidence a philosopher might weigh and accept or reject. It is a manifestation, a display so clear and so universal that all humanity, in every culture and every century, is left anapologētos: without a legal defense, without a word to say in mitigation. This is not a modest claim about the probability of design. It is an apostolic declaration that the visible world is a theater of divine glory, and that every human being who has ever opened his eyes has seen enough to know that there is a God who made him, owns him, and will judge him. But Paul presses further, and his next move is the move the Confession makes as it transitions from the first sentence of Section 1 to the second. Natural knowledge of God does not lead naturally to true worship of God. It leads, in fallen humanity, to its opposite: "When they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, and changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things." Romans 1:21-23 The movement is from knowledge to suppression, from the light of nature to the darkness of idolatry, and the pivot is precisely at the point of worship. Natural man knows God but refuses to glorify him as God. Natural man perceives the Creator's power but exchanges his glory for images. The light of nature is real light, but fallen man uses it not to find the path but to build his own altar along whatever route seems pleasant to him. The Confession's prohibition against worshiping God "under any visible representation" echoes Paul's diagnosis with confessional precision. The image is not innocent. It is the expression of a heart that has exchanged the glory of God for a substitute, and the substitute, however beautiful, however artistically rendered, however sincerely intended, leads the worshiper away from the true God rather than toward him. The second claim of Section 1, the claim that acceptable worship is limited by God's own revealed will, has its own apostolic foundation and its own Greek vocabulary. Paul, writing to the Colossians against a syncretistic spirituality that combined Jewish ceremonialism with pagan asceticism, warns against "voluntary humility and worshipping of angels" and then delivers the phrase that has become the theological shorthand for invented worship: "Which things have indeed a shew of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body; not in any honour to the satisfying of the flesh." Colossians 2:23 The term translated "will worship" is ethelothrēskeia, a compound of thelō (I will, I wish, I desire) and thrēskeia (religious worship, ceremonial observance). It is worship that originates in the human will rather than in the divine command. It is religion a man devises for himself, however sincere, rigorous, or costly. And Paul's verdict on it is devastating: it has a show of wisdom, an appearance of piety, but it is of no value against the indulgence of the flesh. The worship that God has not commanded cannot sanctify. It can only inflate the pride of the worshiper while leaving his sin untouched. The Confession's echo of Paul is precise and deliberate. Worship according to "the imaginations and devices of men" is ethelothrēskeia, and those who practice it have received already their reward, the approval of their own conscience and the admiration of their fellow worshipers, and will receive nothing more. The Old Testament foundations for this doctrine are more terrifyingly concrete. Nadab and Abihu, consecrated priests who had seen the glory of the Lord on Mount Sinai, took their censers and offered "strange fire before the LORD, which he commanded them not. And there went out fire from the LORD, and devoured them." Leviticus 10:1-2 The Hebrew 'esh zarah (strange fire, foreign fire) marks worship that originates outside the boundaries God established. They worshiped the true God. They worshiped him sincerely. And they died for it, because sincerity does not sanctify disobedience. Aaron's silence before the corpses of his sons is the only appropriate response to a holiness that kills. The same principle runs through the entire Mosaic legislation on worship. "What thing soever I command you, observe to do it: thou shalt not add thereto, nor diminish from it." Deuteronomy 12:32 The command is both positive and negative. Israel was to do everything God commanded, not most of it, not the parts they found congenial, and they were to add nothing and remove nothing. The golden calf at Sinai was not an attempt to worship a false god. Aaron proclaimed a feast to Yahweh when the calf was set up. But he had added a visible representation to the worship of the invisible God, and the result was judgment and near destruction. The calves that Jeroboam set up at Bethel and Dan were not pagan deities imported from Phoenicia. They were representations of Yahweh, placed at convenient sites to keep the northern tribes from returning to Jerusalem. But Jeroboam had added to the commanded worship of God, and the phrase "the sin of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin" echoes through Kings like a funeral bell. Additions to the worship God has instituted are not enhancements. They are corruptions, and they corrupt the worship and the worshiper alike. The Lord Jesus himself reaffirmed the principle in his dispute with the Pharisees. "This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me. But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men." Matthew 15:8-9 The word translated "vain" is matēn, empty, fruitless, for nothing. The worship that God has not commanded is not merely suboptimal, not merely second-rate. It is vain. It achieves nothing before the throne of heaven. It is the ecclesiastical equivalent of a check written on an account with no funds, impressive in appearance but worthless when presented for payment. And the reason it is vain is that it replaces the doctrines of God, what God has actually said concerning how he would be approached, with the commandments of men. The worship God accepts is worship that comes to him along the path he has marked. Every other path, however crowded or ancient, however adorned with the piety of centuries, leads not to the throne of grace but to the judgment seat.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines carried the accumulated wisdom of a century and a quarter of Reformation conflict over worship. The question of how God is to be worshiped was not secondary to justification and predestination. It was one of the two great issues of the Reformation, authority in worship alongside authority in salvation, and the failure to resolve it, they had learned, would corrupt everything else. The medieval church's ceremonialism, its multiplying of festivals, its veneration of images and relics, its prayers to saints: every one of these had been justified by appeal to tradition rather than Scripture. The Reformers answered with a single principle: Scripture alone determines acceptable worship, and whatever lacks Scriptural warrant is forbidden. The Divines embodied this principle in the precise language of Section 1. The opening sentence does the positive work: the light of nature shows that God exists and must be worshiped. But the light of nature stops exactly there. It does not specify an object: we worship "the true God," not a generic deity. It does not specify a manner: we are not free to devise ceremonies and forms. The content of worship must come from outside us, from the God who is worshiped. And the Divines are equally precise about what may not determine worship: not the imaginations of men, those inward religious impulses that feel spiritual and are often nothing more than baptized self-expression; not the suggestions of Satan, for the enemy who tempted Christ knows corrupted worship is as effective as open rebellion; not any visible representation, for the God who is Spirit cannot be represented by matter without being diminished; not any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture, a comprehensive clause that sweeps into condemnation every addition, subtraction, and innovation the mind of man has devised. This is the regulative principle in its confessional form: what Scripture commands in worship is required; what Scripture does not command is forbidden. The Divines sharpened it against the errors they faced. Rome argued whatever Scripture did not forbid was permitted, the normative principle. The Lutheran churches retained whatever was not explicitly contradicted by Scripture: images, vestments, the liturgical calendar. The Anglican settlement under Archbishop Laud reintroduced ceremonies the earlier Reformers had purged: altars railed in, bowing at the name of Jesus. The radical sects claimed the Spirit authorized worship without Scriptural warrant. Against every one of these, the Divines answered: God alone determines how he is to be worshiped, and he has done so in Scripture. The biblical warrant is not a single proof-text but a pattern running through the whole canon. Every time God institutes worship, he specifies the elements, officers, place, time, and manner. When he commands the tabernacle, the instructions are exhaustive: "According to all that I shew thee, after the pattern of the tabernacle, and the pattern of all the instruments thereof, even so shall ye make it." Exodus 25:9 Moses was shown a heavenly archetype and commanded to reproduce it in every particular. The same pattern governs the temple: David received the plans "by the Spirit." The same pattern governs New Testament worship: Christ instituted the sacraments with specific elements and words; the apostles regulated the churches by commands and prohibitions. The God who is jealous for his glory does not invite his creatures to design his worship. He commands it. "Under any visible representation" aimed at the images and crucifixes that filled English churches under Laud. The second commandment, which the medieval church had relegated to a subset of the first, the Reformed tradition restored to its proper place, insisting the prohibition was against images of the true God as well as false ones. The infinite God cannot be represented by finite matter without lying about him. Every image of God is false, because it omits what cannot be depicted (his infinity, eternity, simplicity) and suggests what is not true. "The suggestions of Satan" aimed at enthusiasts who claimed the Spirit authorized worship beyond the written Word. The Divines answered that the Spirit who inspired the Scriptures does not contradict them, and every suggestion leading worship away from the prescribed pattern bears the mark not of the Comforter but of the deceiver.

Theological Depth

Calvin's treatment of worship forms the deep background against which the Confession's language must be read. In the opening chapters of the Institutes, Calvin develops the sensus divinitatis, the sense of deity planted in every human heart. Every man knows that God exists. This knowledge is innate, not the product of philosophy or culture. The idolater is not an atheist; he is a man who knows God but refuses to honor him as God, constructing a substitute his own hands can manage. The light of nature is real, and it leaves every man without excuse, but it is insufficient: it shows that God is but not who God is; that he must be approached but not how. The Confession's two-part structure, natural knowledge first, revealed worship second, reflects Calvin's conviction that the knowledge of God the Creator must be supplemented by the knowledge of God the Redeemer. On the regulative principle, Calvin was uncompromising. The second commandment was no footnote but a distinct prohibition striking at the heart of human religion. Men want visible gods because they want manageable gods; the image brings the deity within reach. God may not be represented, because God is Spirit, and every visible representation necessarily misrepresents him. The Reformed churches stripped their worship of images not from cultural philistinism (Calvin loved the arts) but because the second commandment meant what it said. Francis Turretin distinguished what the light of nature can achieve from what it cannot: it can show that God exists, is one, powerful, wise, good, and to be worshiped. It cannot show God as Redeemer: the Trinity, incarnation, atonement. And it cannot determine the mode of worship acceptable to God. The heathen universally acknowledge worship's duty and universally err in its exercise: multiplying deities, crafting images, inventing rites, imagining the deity is pleased with whatever their piety has devised. Wrong worship provokes wrath, and the Confession's distinction between the what and how of worship has its deepest root in Turretin's delineation of natural knowledge's boundaries. William Ames, whose Medulla Theologiae shaped Reformed orthodoxy across the Atlantic, distinguished between the actus eliciti (inward acts directly directed toward God, such as faith, hope, love, fear, trust) and the actus imperati (outward acts commanded by religion, such as hearing the Word, sacraments, singing psalms). The light of nature teaches the inward acts; every man knows he ought to love, fear, and trust the God who made him. But the outward forms must be prescribed by revelation. The Confession's list (feared, loved, praised, called upon, trusted in, served) is Ames's list, and the transition from sentence one to sentence two is the transition from actus eliciti to actus imperati, from what the heart owes to what only the Word can regulate. A. A. Hodge observed that the section establishes a principle cutting three ways: against Rome, which added to worship; against rationalism, which subtracted; against enthusiasm, which claimed to replace the commanded with inward impulses. The regulative principle, he argued, is not a restraint on liberty but its foundation. The believer who knows his worship is prescribed can worship with confidence. The path is narrow but clear, and the clarity is the kindness of God. Thomas Boston adds a dimension the systematicians sometimes miss. Worship was instituted in Eden before the fall. Adam was a worshiper in innocence; the tree of life was a sacrament in the garden. Worship is not a post-lapsarian remedy but the original vocation for which man was made. And if worship belongs to man's original righteousness, its forms cannot be human invention: unfallen Adam received his worship from the mouth of God. The creature does not determine the terms of communion with the Creator. The Creator determines them, and the creature's dignity lies in receiving them with the glad obedience of a son.

Puritan Application

First, be astonished and warned that you know what acceptable worship requires. There are more than seven billion souls on this planet, and the overwhelming majority of them, if they worship at all, worship according to the imaginations and devices of men. They bow before images. They invoke saints. They invent rituals. They trust their sincerity. They measure their worship by the intensity of their feelings and call the emotional heat by the name of the Holy Ghost. And they do this not because they are wicked (though they are, as we all are by nature) but because they are following the light of nature to its natural, fallen conclusion. The light of nature shows that God must be worshiped, but fallen nature, left to itself, always worships wrongly. If you sit under the preaching of the Word, if you gather with the saints on the Lord's Day, if you sing the psalms and hear the Scriptures read and receive the sacraments as Christ instituted them, you are the recipient of a mercy so vast that you have never measured it. God has not left you to devise your own worship. He has told you what pleases him, and in telling you, he has saved you from the vanity of ethelothrēskeia, the fruitless labor of will-worship that can never reach the throne of grace. This knowledge is not your achievement. It is a gift, purchased by the blood of Christ, and the proper response to it is not pride that you are right and others wrong but gratitude that God has spoken, and fear lest you, like Israel of old, grow weary of the prescribed worship and begin to long for the golden calves of the nations. Second, hold fast to the regulative principle as a jealous guardian of your liberty, not as a burden on your joy. The temptation to add to the worship God has prescribed is as old as the garden and as persistent as the flesh. A new song that stirs the emotions. A dramatic element that makes the service more engaging. A visual aid that helps the congregation concentrate. An innovation borrowed from a growing church down the road. Each addition seems small, reasonable, even edifying. And each addition, once admitted, becomes a precedent for the next, and the next, until the worship that God prescribed has been buried under the accumulated traditions of men. The history of the church is a graveyard of well-intentioned innovations that began as helps to worship and ended as substitutes for it. The regulative principle is not a narrow-minded obsession with precision for its own sake. It is the fence at the edge of the cliff, and those who remove it in the name of freedom are not liberating the worshipers but exposing them to a fall. When you are tempted to think that the worship God prescribed is too plain, too simple, too restrained, remember that the God who prescribed it is the God who spoke the galaxies into existence, and that his simplicity is wiser than the most elaborate human invention. The worship of heaven, as the apostle John describes it, is not a multimedia production. It is the ceaseless cry of the living creatures before the throne: "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty." Simplicity at the throne of infinite glory is not poverty. It is reverence. Third, examine your heart for the invisible idols that the second commandment forbids: the images you have formed of God in your mind. We are not likely to set up a golden calf in our living rooms. The visible representations the Confession condemns are, for most of us, not a live temptation. But the mental images we construct, the God we imagine rather than the God revealed, are idols of a subtler kind. A God who is all love but never wrath. A God who understands our weaknesses and would never judge them. A God who accepts us as we are and makes no demands. A God who is a cosmic therapist, a benevolent grandfather, a life coach with supernatural powers. Every one of these is an image, a visible representation of the invisible God constructed not in stone or wood but in the imagination, and every one of them is a lie. The God of the Bible is the God who drowned the world, who rained fire on Sodom, who commanded the slaughter of the Canaanites, who struck Uzzah dead for touching the ark, who consigned his own Son to the cross. The God of the Bible is love, but he is not only love, and his love is holy love, love that burns as it blesses, love that kills to make alive. The mental idol of an all-affirming, never-judging deity is as much a violation of the second commandment as the golden calf, and it is more dangerous because it is invisible to every eye but God's. Search your heart tonight and ask whether the God you worship is the God of Scripture or a god of your own imagining, and if the latter, repent, for you have broken the commandment and worshiped a creature rather than the Creator. Fourth, let the fixed forms of God-instituted worship school your heart in the fear of the Lord, especially when your feelings lag behind your obedience. The worship that God prescribed involves reading, preaching, praying, singing, and the sacraments. It does not depend on the worshiper's emotional state. It does not require a certain temperature of devotion to be valid. This is a mercy, because the heart is a weathervane and feelings are a mist. The believer who depends on emotional intensity for acceptable worship will find himself, in dry seasons, either abandoning worship altogether or manufacturing feelings through techniques that the Scriptures never prescribe. But the believer who understands that God has instituted specific acts of worship, and that these acts are acceptable not because of the fervor with which they are performed but because of the God who commanded them, can worship in the valley as well as on the mountaintop. The Word is still true when you feel nothing. The sacraments are still means of grace when your heart is cold. The psalms are still the songs of Zion when your voice is flat. The prescribed worship of God is a rock beneath the shifting sands of emotion, and the believer who builds his practice upon it will find that his feelings, in time, follow his obedience, not the other way around. Do not wait to feel like worshiping before you worship. Worship because God has commanded it, and trust that the God who commanded the worship will bless the means he has appointed, in his own time, to warm the heart that comes to him in obedience. Fifth, learn the art of holy jealousy for the purity of God's worship in your own congregation, but learn it as a peacemaker, not a polemicist. The regulative principle, rightly understood, is a principle of liberty. Wrongly understood, it becomes an engine of division. The congregation that fractures over the precise metrical translation of the psalms, over the use of instruments, over the frequency of the Lord's Supper, over the posture of prayer, has not understood that the unity of the body is itself a part of the worship that God prescribes. There are matters of principle (the elements of worship that Scripture clearly commands) and there are matters of prudence (the circumstances of worship: the time, the place, the order of service, the particular translations and tunes employed). The Confession itself acknowledges that "there are some circumstances concerning the worship of God, and government of the church, common to human actions and societies, which are to be ordered by the light of nature, and Christian prudence." The believer who cannot distinguish between a matter of principle and a matter of prudence, who treats every preference as a point of conscience and every disagreement as a cause for separation, has made an idol of his own scrupulosity. Love the purity of worship earnestly. Contend for the elements Christ has commanded. But where Christian prudence governs, let love govern, and remember that the Lord's Table is a table of communion, not a table of perfect uniformity. The saints in glory will not be divided by the controversies that divide us here, and it would be a tragedy to arrive at the heavenly worship and discover that you spent your earthly years refusing to worship with those whom Christ had welcomed.

Prayer

Almighty and most glorious God, who dwellest in light unapproachable and whom no eye hath seen or can see, we bow before Thee with the reverence of creatures who know that Thou art, and with the trembling of sinners who know that we are not worthy to approach Thee. We thank Thee that Thou hast not left us to the darkness of our own imaginations, to grope after Thee as blind men in a room without windows. Thou hast spoken. Thou hast told us who Thou art, what Thou requirest, and how Thou wouldst be worshiped. We confess that even this mercy we have abused, for we have often come before Thee with hearts distracted, with minds wandering, with lips praising while affections strayed. We have brought the body to the assembly and left the soul in the marketplace. We have added our own devices to Thy worship, trusting in the sincerity of our intentions rather than the clarity of Thy commands. Forgive us, O Lord, for every act of will-worship, for every image of Thee that we have formed in our minds, for every innovation we have preferred to the simplicity of Thy Word. Teach us to worship Thee as Thou hast commanded, in spirit and in truth, without the props and crutches that unbelief requires. Give us hearts that fear Thy name with the fear of sons who know their Father's love and their Father's holiness. Give us lips that praise Thee with the praises Thou hast inspired, the psalms and hymns and spiritual songs that are the language of Zion. Give us hands that receive the sacraments as pledges of Thy grace, not as empty forms but as seals of the covenant sealed in the blood of Thy Son. And give us, we beseech Thee, a holy contentment with the worship Thou hast ordained, that we may never look with envy upon the golden calves of the world, the entertainment dressed as devotion, the sincerity that supplants obedience, the beauty that replaces truth. We ask this not because we are worthy to ask, but because Thy Son, our great High Priest, has entered the heavenly sanctuary with his own blood and has opened for us a new and living way. Through him we come, in him we pray, and for his sake alone we ask that our worship, imperfect as it is, may be accepted before the throne of the Majesty on high, there to be purified by the fire of Thy grace until the day when we shall see Thee face to face, and shall worship without sin, without distraction, without end. Through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. Amen.