Worship - The Pattern of Things in Heaven by Joseph Garlington

Author:Joseph Garlington [Garlington, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-06-22T16:58:49+00:00

Chapter 8

Worship: The Pattern of Things in Heaven

Can you imagine trying to explain to someone who had tasted strawberries, but had never seen or tasted a raspberry, what raspberries are like? "Well, raspberries taste something like strawberries, but then they don't." Sometimes, we enter into new and exciting levels of worship and are tempted to think we "have arrived." What we don't understand is that even though New Testament worship is more mature and closer to "the perfect pattern" than Old Testament worship, it's still not heavenly worship. God is taking us somewhere that we have never been before.

You may think that I'm a little strange, but I think that if God gave us heavenly worship right now, we would explode! Does that make sense to you? I believe we couldn't handle heavenly worship because we don't have heavenly bodies yet. The Bible says, "For our conversation is in heaven; from whence also we look for the Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ: who shall change our vile body, that it may be fashioned like unto His glorious body, according to the working whereby He is able even to subdue all things unto Himself (Phil. 3:20-21 KJV). Don't worry. This doesn't mean that we can't move higher in worship and praise right now! We have to because we have a world to win in battle through Christ.

We need to understand that we live and move in the midst of a dynamic tension between the seen and the unseen, the temporal and the eternal, the earthly and the heavenly. Throughout Scripture you will find comparisons and transitions. On the one hand, there is Moses' tabernacle of the wilderness era. Then, there is David's tabernacle, which made God's presence accessible to the common man for the first time in human history since before Adam's fall into sin. After David, things seemed to take a step backward toward the "boxing-in" of God and the separation of man from Jehovah. Yet, even David's tabernacle of intimate worship falls short of the true tabernacle, which God Himself pitched without the hands or plan of man.

Even under the New Covenant of the blood of Jesus Christ, we still come to worship laden with our human limitations and imperfections. It's true that we no longer face the problems common to the Old Covenant, when each worshiper had to bring a lamb, a goat, or a meal offering. We don't need to bring the blood of animals anymore. Instead, we bring the sacrifices of praise! The prophet Hosea (yes, an Old Testament prophet) says: "We offer Him the calves of our lips, the sacrifices of our lips."

Early in this book, I mentioned the revelation Jesus gave us at the well in Samaria when He told a fallen but spiritually hungry woman, "But an hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers shall worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers" (Jn. 4:23).

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