
1.5 WORSHIPING THE ONE TRUE GOD
I. THOSE WHO BUILT THE TOWER OF BABEL WERE FILLED WITH
A. They Sought to Make a Name for Themselves
And they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth.” —Genesis 11:4, NKJV
A few phrases in this verse seem to stand out:
1. “Let us make a name for ourselves.” Were not the words
“let us” the very words God Himself used in creating man? It is as if the people at Babel were trying to remake man in their own image.
2. The phrase “lest we be scattered abroad” reveals the fearmongering that often forms the foundation of false religions. The necessary ingredients for a successful false religion are a threat and a proud and idolatrous promise to neutralize that threat.
B. They Ignored God and Chose Their Own Way
It is important to notice that this narrative follows the narratives of human failures and divine intervention. We might say that everything surrounding the building of Babel was an attempt to build a secular religion by replicating, on some level, faithful Noah’s religion. Unfortunately, these people only replicated Noah’s technology and did not bother with Noah’s humility—the true essence of Noah’s faith. In sum, the Tower of Babel was an early attempt at a secular religion, one that parrots true faith but substitutes the rule of God with the rule of man.
C. We Must Never Ignore God or His Word
The way of the people of Babel led to where humanity’s way always leads: confusion and division. The religion of Babel is still alive today. As a society we may well be, at this moment, in the middle of yet another Tower-of-Babel project.
II. PRIDE WILL
A RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD
A. Pride Goes before Destruction
Proverbs 16:18 warns us that pride is a prelude to destruction. This is true on the individual level, but it is also true on the societal level. Our culture is ignoring the warnings of the past and arrogantly building its own version of Babel. This tower, which is being built in an attempt to unify human beings, will ultimately lead to greater confusion.
B. God Resists the Proud
God actively works against the prideful. No doubt you have experienced opposition in your life. We all have experienced opposition in many forms, ranging from mild resistance (e.g., a car full of people disagreeing over where to go for dinner) to more powerful forms of resistance. You probably remember what it was like to have a parent resist what you were trying to do. When we were little, our parents were simply too strong and had too much control of circumstances for us to carry on for long without caving in. Take this to another level: Imagine being opposed by, say, an angel or a demon. No amount of work on our part alone could overcome such power. Yet the angel or demon too is merely a subordinate to an even greater power. What if God Himself opposed you? What hope could you possibly have? What power could you call upon to assist you against such a terror? And this is who the proud are up against. When pride enters the equation, failure and destruction are no longer a hypothetical outcome. They are a certainty.
C. We Must Fight against Pride
Before God becomes our opponent, we would do well to resist anything God resists. We are called to walk humbly before both God and man. The apostle Paul taught the Philippian congregation to esteem others as better than themselves. Is this the view you take of the average person in your sphere? Do you regard that person—any person—as better than yourself? The apostolic way is the way of humility. We are not even to seek equality for ourselves individually. Though we hope our government recognizes everyone as equals, our spiritual task is to submit ourselves to others. One way of ensuring we do not turn God into an enemy is to humble ourselves before everyone we encounter.
Human culture is bound in a seemingly endless cycle of trying to forge its own way forward. But God’s ways are above our ways. Let us take a look at our own times and consider how the practice of God’s Word has led the way forward.
Is our world adopting a holiness view of men and women? Lately, important publications have produced a steady stream of articles denouncing the sexual exploitation of women. A piece complained that the NFL profits from having cheerleaders dress provocatively; a piece accused Hollywood culture of depicting women as mere sexual objects, compelling women to dress (or, more precisely, undress) provocatively; another column criticized Victoria’s Secret for parading nearly naked women around, like animals in a zoo; and yet another article bemoaned the fact that our culture is so depraved that the magazines one sees in grocery store lines profit in direct proportion to the amount of skin the model reveals.
Additionally, you may notice how focused our cultural commentators are these days on proper male conduct. Off- color jokes are now off-limits. On campuses, Title IX offices are enforcing strict, no touching, no propositioning, no ogling, no flirting ordinances. Consensual relationships between a man in a position of authority and an employee or student are potentially fireable offenses. We could go on and on. Where are we? At the Plymouth Colony, circa 1640, under the watchful gaze of Governor William Bradford, Puritan Separatist? If we close our eyes real tight and use just a bit of imagination, these publications almost sound like the preachers of yesteryear.
But this is also confusing. Are these not the same publications that, even as recently as ten years ago, mocked prudish Christians for teaching modesty and sexual purity? Did they not call us “silly puritan fundamentalists” and “fanatical schoolmarms with a Bible in hand” for frowning upon cheerleading? Perhaps you well remember these same pundits saying that Christians who detested celebrities’ loose lifestyles were betraying a repressive, neurotic obsession with sex. Now that #MeToo has come, in tow with a few other cultural shifts, their tune has changed a bit.
Perhaps there is a pattern here. Could the world’s great discoveries simply be re-discoveries of what the biblically oriented church wrought a long time ago? The world’s idea of progress is merely to rehash what the church has taught from the beginning. When the church practices holiness, the world mocks it; but then like expert antiquers, years later the world goes through the old houses of belief, picks through our beauties, and brings them out to the marketplace, trying to pass them off as products of its own genius. Perhaps this might be an application of the Book of Psalms where it says the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. Maybe this has been the character of the relationship between the world and the church all along. It appears that worldly progressivism is always about fifty years behind the times.
The world’s treasures are only ever secondhand. And every day the world has to start over from scratch: its temporal, fragile work being blown over and destroyed by the merest breath of the Holy Ghost; its converts almost always refusing to be real disciples of the devil; its leaders rarely being anything more than lukewarm for the doctrines of the world, constantly being tempted to faith by the awesomeness of Creation and the goodness of God.
III. GOD RESPONDS TO SINCERE
A. Sincere Worship Is Birthed in Humility
Worship is essentially the overflow of the heart. The humble heart is full of grace, gratitude, and wisdom. Where there is humility, God’s work will soon be in evidence. Consider, for example, an account from our own Pentecostal history:
You will experience a bit of déjà vu if you reread an account of the Azusa Street Revival, particularly the way the columnists for major publications (i.e., the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle) understood the goings on in that old Azusa Street warehouse. By and large, they were condescending and disparaging, especially of the fact, it seems, that the Azusa Street congregation consisted of blacks, whites, and Hispanics. Mixed worship troubled the pundits. One hundred years later, columnists for the same exact publications cannot shout loud enough their support for the cause of minorities. But the virtue is merely secondhand virtue, an easy virtue to practice now that the church has shown the way. Where was the San Francisco Chronicle in 1905 when Pentecost was but a tender branch, a root out of dry ground? The truth is: they were standing where the world always stands on important issues—in the dead center of public opinion.
The Christian church has been endowed with a wisdom far beyond its years. We are a part of something greater than the sum of our members. There are countless examples of the church partaking in a wisdom its mortal components did not fully understand, even while we were preaching it. We follow (though imperfectly) the leading of the Holy Ghost wherever He goes and remind the world that every spirit must be tried. The church routinely practices principles the world will need a century (or more) to understand. And when the world finally does understand, it will invariably act like it invented those practices and treat its benefactor (the church) like the enemy of progress.
B. I Will Worship Only the One True God
The apostle Paul said this would be the way of things—the Church in front, piloting the way to a new creation, as the old creation groans, waiting for the sons of God (Romans 8:19). He said the examples of the Old Testament were written for the church, “upon whom the ends of the world are come” (I Corinthians 10:11). Notice he did not say the church had come to the ends of the world; rather, the ends had come to the church.
But what ends was Paul talking about? He was referring to the eschaton, or age in which the Holy Ghost rules—the age of peace; the age of innocence; an age which the prophets characterized as a time when the wolf would lay down with the lamb, the child would walk unharmed over the snake hole, the swords of war would be transformed into instruments of agriculture, and the reaper would have so much work to do that he would still be out in the fields gathering when it was time to sow again. In other words, in the eschaton, the enmity between races will end. Wars will cease. There will be a fullness of life and peace. The people would be skilled in the art of goodness and forget the art of war. This age, Paul insisted, is what has come to the church—the future. The church does not have to wait for the future; the future has already come to the church. The reason the church is always out ahead of the world is because the future—through the gifts of the Spirit—literally reaches back into the present and equips the church with power the world will only know in the age to come.
Knowing God has purposed for our end to be glorious, we will choose to live our lives in worship to the one true God.
INTERNALIZING THE MESSAGE
Suppose time travel were possible and a traveler carrying technology from the twenty-first century was to go back to the eleventh century and teach, say, the tiny kingdom of Armenia how to use and replicate this future technology. Before long, Armenia, no matter how small, would be leading the world. Just so, the Spirit has bestowed upon the church gifts that will only be fully available at the end of time. The gifts of the Spirit empower the church to live and be witness to that blessed future in the present.
Moreover, if we are given the tools of the future, we are also required to live the ethics of that end-of-time kingdom. This is why Paul became so rankled by church members going to a pagan judge to sue a brother. He heard about this kind of thing, and immediately his mind went to the future. He did not assert that going to the pagan court diminishes our witness (though there is truth there). He did complain that taking a lawsuit before a pagan judge was far beneath the present dignity of our future occupation. This is also why Paul was so adamant that the church be made up of one people under one covenant and Lord. Many of his contemporaries wanted one covenant under the Messiah for the Jews and another for the Gentiles, but Paul said no. In the age to come, the wolf lays down with the lamb, or, in the words of Ephesians 2:14–15, “[Christ] is our peace, who hath made both one, and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us; having abolished in his flesh the enmity … for to make in himself of twain one new man, so making peace.” Paul was always thinking about how the church is living the future, Spirit-ruled age in the present.
This is exactly why, when Azusa Street came, a characteristic of the age to come was present from the start. A strange, other-worldly peace between races had settled unbidden over our spiritual forefathers. Right in the middle of Jim Crow bigotry, God decided to put on a show—not a minute before, not a minute after. In the fullness of time, He stepped into an era steeped in old-fashioned worldliness, took a reality that will be the law of the land in the future, and bestowed it upon a small gathering of people He called His church.
My fellow Apostolic, do not trouble yourself that your church is so different from the world. In this present age, that’s the whole point. In time, future Babel will secretly admire your stand so much that it will try to build its own religion out of it.