Devotional 107: The Elements of Worship: Prayer, Reading, Preaching, Singing

The Confession Read

Religious worship is to be given to God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost; and to him alone; not to angels, saints, or any other creature: and, since the fall, not without a Mediator; nor in the mediation of any other but of Christ alone.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 21, Section 2

Introduction

Under the wide Babylonian sky, a golden image sixty cubits high caught the desert sun and commanded the worship of every nation, kindred, and tongue. The penalty for refusal was known: the furnace heated seven times beyond its custom. And three men remained standing. Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego did not debate whether the music was beautiful or the image accomplished. They refused because the object of worship was wrong, and the object of worship determines everything. Worship belongs to God alone; to give it to any other is treason against the Creator. The Westminster Divines, having established in Section 1 that the acceptable way of worship is instituted by God himself, now turn to the two questions every worshiper must answer: to whom am I coming, and through whom may I draw near? The first answer sweeps away an entire universe of human religious invention. Religious worship is to be given to God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, and to him alone. Not to angels, however glorious. Not to saints, however holy. Not to any other creature, however exalted. The second question concerns access, and it answers with equal precision: since the fall, worship requires a Mediator, and that Mediator is Christ alone. No saint, no angel, no system of merits can bridge the chasm sin has opened between the creature and his Maker. There is one Mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, and every soul that attempts to come by any other road will find, at the end of all its striving, that the road leads nowhere.

Scripture Foundation

The Bible's teaching on the exclusive object of worship has no sharper statement than the words of our Lord himself during his temptation in the wilderness. Satan had offered him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory in exchange for a single act of homage, and Christ's reply was not a negotiation but a citation: "Get thee hence, Satan: for it is written, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve." Matthew 4:10 The words are drawn from Deuteronomy, and the Greek vocabulary is instructive. The verb proskuneō, to worship, carries the sense of prostration, of falling down before a superior in acknowledgment of absolute dependence. The verb latreuō, to serve, is the language of religious service, of the cultic acts by which a people honors its deity. And the little word monō, "only," is the razor's edge upon which every false religion in history has cut itself. Not primarily. God. Not preeminently. God. Not first among many. God. Only. The exclusive claim of the living God upon the worship of his creatures is not a negotiable preference that accommodates itself to the pluralism of the nations. It is the foundation of the first commandment and the heartbeat of every act of worship that has ever ascended from earth to the throne of heaven. When the Son of God, facing the ruler of this world, defined the boundaries of acceptable worship, he drew a circle around one name and one name only, and everything outside that circle he consigned to the realm of the tempter. The apostle John learned this truth from an angel in the apocalyptic vision, and he learned it twice, the repetition underlining the difficulty of the lesson even for the beloved disciple. Overwhelmed by the glory of what he had seen, John fell at the angel's feet to worship. The angel's response was immediate and sharp: "See thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God." Revelation 19:10 A chapter later, John does it again, and the rebuke is identical: "Worship God." Revelation 22:9 Twice the apostle who had leaned upon Christ's breast at the Last Supper fell to worship a creature. And twice the creature refused. The angel did not say, "Worship God primarily, and angels secondarily." He said, "Worship God." If an angel, fresh from the presence of God, refuses worship, what possible justification can there be for offering it to any other creature: a departed saint, a consecrated image, a human authority that claims to stand in the place of God? The second great assertion of Section 2, that since the fall no worship is acceptable except through a Mediator and that this Mediator is Christ alone, has its apostolic anchor in Paul's first letter to Timothy. "For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; who gave himself a ransom for all." 1 Timothy 2:5-6 Paul's logic carries the weight of an axiom. Just as there is only one God, the foundational confession of Israel, the Shema, so there is only one mediator. The word mesitēs describes an arbitrator who stands between two parties to reconcile them, and Paul insists there is precisely one such figure in the economy of salvation. The Son of God took flesh precisely to occupy this office, and the ransom he paid was his own life. To suggest other mediators, whether a sympathetic saint, an angelic intercessor, or a human priest, is to suggest that the one Mediator is insufficient, and that suggestion assaults the sufficiency of Christ's work and the wisdom of the Father who appointed him. The epistle to the Hebrews sharpens this teaching with a contrast between old and new. Jesus is "the mediator of a better covenant, which was established upon better promises." Hebrews 8:6 The Levitical priests were many and their sacrifices repeated; Christ's priesthood is singular, his sacrifice once for all. "And for this cause he is the mediator of the new testament, that by means of death, for the redemption of the transgressions that were under the first testament, they which are called might receive the promise of eternal inheritance." Hebrews 9:15 Christ's mediation is grounded in his death, in the blood of the covenant that cleanses the conscience from dead works. No other mediator has died for sins, risen from the dead, or ascended to the right hand of the Majesty on high. To propose any other mediator is to propose a bridge that does not reach the far shore. The Lord Jesus himself stated the principle with inescapable clarity on the night of his betrayal. "I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." John 14:6 The language is exclusive not because Jesus is narrow-minded but because he is the only one who has come from the Father and returned to him. He is the way, not a way, not one valid path among many, not the best way for people of a particular culture or era, but the way. The definite article stands as a sentinel at the gate, barring every alternative and directing every pilgrim to the one path that leads to life. "Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved." Acts 4:12 The apostle Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, declared this truth to the very council that had condemned his Lord to death. There is no other name. Not Mary, not Peter himself, not any of the apostles living or departed, not the company of martyrs whose blood was the seed of the church. One name, one Mediator, one way to the Father, and every approach that circumvents or supplements that name is an approach to a throne that has become, for the one who comes wrongly, not a throne of grace but a throne of judgment.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines wrote Section 2 with the Church of Rome squarely in view, and their language has the precision of men who knew exactly what they were rejecting and why. The Council of Trent, barely a century before the Assembly convened, had anathematized the Protestant doctrine of exclusive mediation and reaffirmed the invocation of the saints, the honoring of relics, and the veneration of images. Rome did not deny that Christ was the supreme Mediator. The question was whether he was the sole Mediator, or whether the merits and prayers of the saints could supplement what Christ had done and what the believer's own deficiencies required. The Divines answered with one word, "alone," placed at the end of the first sentence and repeated in the second, and that word has been the dividing line between Reformed worship and Roman worship from the sixteenth century to the present day. The specification "to God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost" was not a mere formality. It was a Trinitarian confession embedded in a section about worship, and its placement is theological rather than decorative. The Divines understood that the worship of the one true God is necessarily Trinitarian worship, that the God who is worshiped is the God who has revealed himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and that worship offered to an undifferentiated monad, a generic deity stripped of his triune character, is worship offered to a god who does not exist. The Father is worshiped as the fountain of deity, the Son as the eternal Word who became flesh, and the Spirit as the Lord and giver of life who proceeds from the Father and the Son, and the worship that ascends to the throne is the worship of the one God in three Persons, distinct but not divided, united but not confused. The Arians and Socinians of the seventeenth century, who denied the full deity of the Son and the Spirit, were worshiping a different God, and the Divines' Trinitarian formula drew the boundary with apostolic clarity. The prohibition against worshiping angels addressed a specific error that had grown up in the medieval church and that Paul himself had warned against in his letter to the Colossians. "Let no man beguile you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels." Colossians 2:18 The worship of angels presented itself as a deeper humility: one was not worthy to approach God directly, so one approached through the angelic hierarchy, ascending through the celestial ranks until one's petitions reached the throne. The Reformers recognized this as a counterfeit humility that actually insulted the God who had invited his children to come boldly to the throne of grace. The angelic prohibition was not theoretical. Popular piety in the late medieval period was saturated with devotion to particular angels, from Michael the warrior and Gabriel the messenger to Raphael the healer, and prayers were composed and offered to them as intercessors and protectors. The Divines swept the whole apparatus away with the same stroke that removed the saints: worship is to be given to God alone, and the angels themselves would be the first to refuse any worship offered to them. The prohibition against the worship of saints struck at the practice most deeply woven into medieval Catholic life. Patron saints for every trade, illness, journey, and danger; prayers addressed to the Virgin Mary as mediatrix and queen of heaven; pilgrimages to shrines where relics of the holy dead were believed to channel divine power. The theological justification distinguished between latria, the worship due to God alone, and dulia, the veneration due to saints, with hyperdulia reserved for the Virgin. The Reformers and the Divines after them judged this to be a word game. Ordinary worshippers did not distinguish between latria and dulia in practice; they knelt, prayed, and entrusted their souls to saints and angels with the same posture and confidence they offered to God. And even if the distinction could be maintained in the theologian's study, the practice was without biblical warrant. The Scriptures record no instance of a believer praying to a departed saint, no command to invoke the dead, no promise that the dead can hear the petitions of the living. The silence of Scripture is, in the logic of the regulative principle, a prohibition, and the Divines treated it as such. The companion claim of Section 2, that since the fall worship requires a Mediator and that Christ alone occupies this office, addressed the same Roman errors from the direction of soteriology rather than liturgy. Rome acknowledged Christ as Mediator but multiplied subordinate mediators: the Virgin Mary as co-mediatrix, the saints whose superabundant merits could be applied to the faithful through indulgences, the priest who re-presented the sacrifice of Christ on the altar. The Reformers answered that the mediatorial office of Christ is not a genus of which there can be many species but a singular office occupied by a singular Person whose work is complete, sufficient, and unrepeatable. The priest at the altar does not offer Christ again; Christ offered himself once for all and sat down at the right hand of God, his work finished, his sacrifice accepted, his intercession perpetual and effective without any human supplementation. The invocation of saints as mediators implies that Christ's intercession is inadequate, that he needs assistants, that his sympathy as our great High Priest requires augmentation by the sympathy of fellow sinners who have been glorified. The Divines answered that the sympathy of Christ is infinite, that he was tempted in all points like as we are, yet without sin, and that his intercession is the intercession of the Son in whom the Father is well pleased. To ask a saint to add his voice to Christ's is to suggest that the Father might not hear the Son, and that suggestion borders on blasphemy. The phrase "since the fall" is a small hinge upon which a great door of theology swings. In the state of innocence, Adam enjoyed direct communion with God. He walked with the Lord in the garden in the cool of the day. He needed no mediator because he had no sin to separate him from the divine presence. But the fall changed everything, not merely the moral condition of man but the terms of his access to God. The flaming sword that barred the way to the tree of life was the visible sign of a rupture that only a Mediator could heal. Every approach to God since Eden, if it is to be acceptable, must come through the one whom God has appointed to stand between the offended Majesty and the offending creature. The Divines' "since the fall" is not a chronological note but a theological assertion about the necessity of mediation, and it sets the terms for everything that follows in this section and in the whole structure of Reformed worship.

Theological Depth

John Owen, whose treatise on communion with the Triune God remains one of the most sustained meditations on the worship of the undivided Trinity in the English language, insisted that distinct communion with each Person of the Godhead is essential to Christian worship. The Father is worshiped as the fountain and origin of all grace, the one who loved the world and gave his Son. The Son is worshiped as the purchaser and procurer of grace, the Mediator who bought our peace with his own blood. The Spirit is worshiped as the applier and effecter of grace, the Comforter who takes the things of Christ and shows them to the believing soul. Worship that is not Trinitarian is not Christian worship, because the God who saved us is the Triune God, and the soul that has tasted the distinct love of the Father in election, the Son in redemption, and the Spirit in regeneration cannot be content with a vague theism that dissolves the three Persons into an undifferentiated divine essence. Owen's Trinitarian piety is the theological substructure beneath the Confession's apparently simple phrase, "God, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost." The names are listed in their biblical order not for convenience but because the order corresponds to the economy of salvation, and the worship that honors each Person distinctly is the worship of saints who know whom they have believed. B. B. Warfield devoted his most penetrating essays to the deity of Christ because he understood that the exclusive worship of Christ was the necessary corollary of Christ's full divinity. If Christ is a creature, worship offered to him is idolatry. If Christ is God the Son, consubstantial with the Father, then worship must be offered to him, and the refusal to worship Christ is the refusal to worship God. The Jehovah's Witness who knocks at the door with an Arian Christology has not merely a defective view of Christ's person; he has a defective object of worship, because the Christ he honors is not the Christ of Scripture. Warfield traced the New Testament's attribution of divine honors to Jesus: proskunēsis, prayers addressed to him, divine names, the judgment of the world committed to him, and demonstrated that the early church worshiped Jesus as God from the beginning, not as a later development of Hellenized theology but as the immediate response of disciples who had seen the risen Lord. Robert Shaw structured his treatment of Section 2 around three denials and three affirmations. The affirmations are that religious worship is due to God alone, that it is due to each Person of the Godhead, and that it requires the mediation of Christ. The denials are that worship may be given to angels, that it may be given to saints, and that any mediation other than Christ's is lawful. Shaw noted that the Confession does not deny that the saints in heaven pray (they do, and their prayers are part of the fellowship of the church triumphant), but it denies that the saints on earth may invoke them, because the living have no warrant from Scripture for such invocation and no ground for confidence that the departed can hear them. The invocation of saints is not an exercise of faith but of presumption, and presumption, however pious, is not worship. It is will-worship dressed in the garments of devotion, and the God who has revealed the way of access to himself is not honored when his creatures invent their own. Stephen Charnock, treating the divine jealousy in his Discourses upon the Existence and Attributes of God, pressed home the exclusive claim God makes upon the worship of his creatures. "I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another, neither my praise to graven images." Isaiah 42:8 Charnock observed that God's jealousy is not the petty insecurity of a finite being who fears rivals. It is the righteous claim of the infinite Creator upon the total devotion of the creatures he has made for himself, and the giving of worship to any other is not merely a mistake but an injury, a wound dealt to the divine honor, a theft of what belongs properly and exclusively to God. When a man bows before an image, he transfers to a block of wood the devotion that the living God purchased with the blood of his Son. When a congregation invokes the saints, it channels toward the creature the petitions that should ascend directly to the throne of grace through the one Mediator. And when a religious system multiplies mediators and intercessors, it obscures the freeness of the gospel invitation and erects a labyrinth of human invention between the sinner and the Savior who said, "Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Charnock's treatment of divine jealousy provides the theological grammar for understanding why the exclusivity of Section 2 is not narrow-mindedness but faithfulness, not bigotry but the jealous guardianship of the glory of God. John Flavel, the Puritan pastor of Dartmouth whose pages carry the brine of the Devon coast and the blood of the covenant, made Christ's mediatorial office the center of his devotional theology in The Fountain of Life. Flavel traced the offices of Christ, Prophet, Priest, and King, and demonstrated that each is an aspect of his singular mediation. As Prophet, Christ reveals the Father to those who could never have known him otherwise. As Priest, Christ offers himself as the sacrifice that satisfies divine justice and ever lives to intercede for his people. As King, Christ rules his church, subdues his enemies, and leads his people into the presence of God. No other figure in the economy of redemption combines these offices. Moses was a prophet but not a priest. Aaron was a priest but not a king. David was a king but his prophecies pointed away from himself to a greater Son. Only Christ is Prophet, Priest, and King in one Person, and his threefold office establishes him as the sole and all-sufficient Mediator. Flavel's devotional application of this doctrine is characteristically warm: the believer who knows Christ as Mediator knows that he has a friend in the court of heaven, an Advocate with the Father who has never lost a case, a High Priest who is touched with the feeling of his infirmities and who intercedes with the authority of the Son and the sympathy of one who has worn our flesh and borne our griefs. To add any other mediator to this is to insult the sufficiency of the one we have.

Puritan Application

First, search your heart honestly for any dependence upon creature-mediators, and if you find any, repent with the urgency of a man who has discovered a crack in the foundation of his house. The Roman Catholic who prays to Mary does so openly; the error is visible. But the evangelical sin of mediation-by-installment is subtler and no less deadly. Do you ever pray as though Christ's intercession were for major matters but your own earnestness must carry the smaller ones? Do you trust a particular minister or author to mediate your access to God, depending on their voice rather than the Shepherd's? Do you approach worship as though the music must first stir your affections before you can draw near, making the band your mediator and the emotional atmosphere your sacrament? Every one of these dishonors the Christ whose blood has opened a new and living way through the veil of his flesh. You do not need the worship band to get you into the presence of God. You do not need a particularly gifted preacher to make the Scriptures alive. You have Christ, and having him, you have everything. The access you have through him is direct, personal, and complete. Do not exchange the reality for a shadow. And if you have been doing so (and who among us has not, in seasons of dullness, looked to the creature for what only the Creator can supply?), confess it as the idolatry it is, and return to the simplicity of coming to God through Christ alone. Second, let the exclusivity of the object of worship anchor your soul in an age of religious pluralism, for the pressure to broaden the circle of acceptable worship will increase, not diminish, as the Lord's return draws near. The culture in which you live celebrates religious diversity as a moral good, and the celebration carries an implicit rebuke to anyone who claims that his God is the only God and his Mediator the only way. The neighbor who accepts your faith as valid for you will recoil when you suggest it is valid for him as well, and that his rejection of it places him under the wrath of God. The temptation is to soften the edges, to speak of Christ as the way for Christians while acknowledging that other traditions have their own valid paths. But Section 2 will not allow it, and the Scriptures upon which Section 2 is built will not allow it. There is one God. There is one Mediator. There is one name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. The truth that feels like narrowness to the world is in fact the breadth of divine mercy, because the one Mediator is sufficient for all who come to God through him, from every nation and tribe and tongue, and the exclusivity of the claim is matched by the universality of the invitation. Hold fast to this truth when it costs you, because the alternative is to be ashamed of the gospel, and the Son of Man will be ashamed, at his coming, of everyone who was ashamed of him and his words in this adulterous and sinful generation. Third, cultivate the habit of distinct communion with each Person of the Godhead in your private worship, so that the Trinitarian structure of the Confession's language becomes the shape of your own devotional life. The Father chose you before the foundation of the world; thank him. The Son redeemed you with his precious blood; adore him. The Spirit called you out of darkness into marvelous light; depend upon him daily. Too much evangelical piety is functionally Unitarian, addressing all prayer to "God" or "Lord" without ever distinguishing the Persons, as though the Triune name were a theological formula to be recited in creeds rather than the living reality into which every believer has been baptized. Owen's counsel remains as urgent now as when he wrote it: the believer who has tasted that the Lord is gracious should seek communion with the Father in love, with the Son in grace, and with the Spirit in comfort, and the neglect of any Person in worship is a loss to the soul that cannot be measured. When you pray, pray to the Father, through the Son, by the Spirit. When you give thanks, thank the Father for his electing love, the Son for his redeeming blood, the Spirit for his sanctifying presence. When you confess sin, confess that you have sinned against the Father who made you, the Son who died for you, and the Spirit who dwells in you, for sin is always against the Triune God, and the worship that restores the soul must be Trinitarian worship. Fourth, rejoice in the freeness of access that Christ's sole mediation provides, and never allow the memory of your sins or the accusations of the devil to persuade you that you need another mediator, a better record, or a stronger claim than the righteousness of Christ imputed to you. The great pastoral danger on this side of the Reformation is not that we will explicitly invoke saints but that we will functionally rely on our own merits, mistaking our sanctification for our justification and measuring our access to God by the state of our feelings rather than the finished work of our Mediator. When you have sinned grievously, and the accuser whispers that such a sinner as you cannot approach such a God as this, your answer is not to deny the sin. The sin is real, and worse than you know. Your answer is to point to the Mediator: "If any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the propitiation for our sins." 1 John 2:1-2 The advocate does not argue your innocence. He argues his own satisfaction, his own blood, his own righteousness, and the Father who appointed him as Mediator is the same Father who receives his intercession with infinite pleasure. Your access to God does not rise and fall with your devotional performance. It rests on the unchanging priesthood of Christ, and because his priesthood is eternal, your access is secure. When you pray feebly, Christ intercedes perfectly. When you wander, Christ remains faithful. When you are silent, Christ speaks on your behalf. This is the comfort of a sole Mediator, and the believer who grasps it has grasped the heart of the gospel. Fifth, extend this Trinitarian and Christ-centered worship into the corporate gathering of the saints, and take care that the worship of your congregation reflects the priorities of Section 2 rather than the preferences of the religious marketplace. The church that wishes to be relevant to its culture will face constant pressure to address its worship to a generic deity acceptable to seekers, to soften the distinctively Christian claim that God is Triune and that access comes through Christ alone, and to replace the prescribed elements of worship with forms that, however engaging, the Scriptures never commanded. The regulative principle established in Section 1 and the exclusive object and mediation established in Section 2 are not two different doctrines but two aspects of a single biblical vision of worship, and the church that compromises on either has compromised on both. Pray for your elders and pastors, that they would have the courage to lead worship that is unmistakably Christian: Trinitarian in shape, Christ-centered in content, Spirit-dependent in power, and unashamed of the exclusivity that is not a mark of pride but of fidelity to the God who said, "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." The worship that pleases God is the worship that honors the Son and depends upon the Spirit, and the congregation that orders its life around these priorities will find that God is present in the midst of her, not because she has manufactured an atmosphere of devotion through technique, but because she has built her worship upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief cornerstone.

Prayer

O Triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we bow before Thee with the reverence of creatures who know that Thou alone art God and there is none beside Thee. Thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, and to Thee alone belong the worship, the honor, and the praise of every creature Thou hast made. We thank Thee, O Father, that Thou hast revealed Thyself in Thy Son, the brightness of Thy glory and the express image of Thy person, and that through him we who were far off have been brought near by the blood of the covenant. We thank Thee, O Lord Jesus Christ, that Thou didst not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but didst empty Thyself, taking the form of a servant, and didst become obedient unto death, even the death of the cross, that Thou mightest be the one Mediator between God and men. And we thank Thee, O blessed Spirit, that Thou hast taken the things of Christ and shown them to our souls, that Thou hast opened our blind eyes and unstopped our deaf ears, that Thou dwellest within us as the seal and earnest of our inheritance until the day of redemption. Forgive us, we pray Thee, for every straying of our hearts toward creature-worship, for every moment in which we have looked to angels or saints or men or institutions or our own righteousness to do for us what Christ alone can do. We confess that we have often insulted the sufficiency of our Mediator by supplementing his work with our own, by trusting our prayers rather than his intercession, by measuring our access to Thee by our feelings rather than his finished sacrifice. Purge from our worship every trace of idolatry, every reliance upon the arm of flesh, every impulse to find a shorter road to Thy presence than the road that passes through the cross. Teach us to come boldly to the throne of grace, not because we are bold in ourselves but because the blood of Jesus speaks a better word than the blood of Abel, and the Advocate we have with Thee is thy beloved Son in whom Thou art well pleased. Grant us, O Lord, the courage to worship Thee alone in a world that multiplies gods and mediators, and the charity to speak the truth of Thy exclusivity with the tears of those who know that apart from this truth the nations perish. Give us hearts that love the lost without loving their idolatries, and tongues that confess the name of Jesus without embarrassment or apology, and lives that adorn the gospel of the one Mediator with the beauty of holiness. And when at last we see Thee face to face, when faith gives way to sight and the Mediator delivers the kingdom to the Father, then shall our worship be perfected and our joy made full, and we shall fall before the throne with the living creatures and the elders and the numberless multitude, crying, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing." Through Jesus Christ our Lord, the one Mediator between God and men, who with the Father and the Holy Spirit liveth and reigneth, one God, world without end. Amen.