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Joe Heschmeyer examines the true biblical meaning of “worship,” how it relates to the second commandment, and what Evangelical Protestantism is missing.
Transcription:
Speaker 1:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. Now I know a lot of Protestants are disturbed. The Catholics not only have religious statues, but even kneel in front of them. And if you’re used to reading the 10 Commandments in English, chances are this looks like pretty blatant idolatry. I understand why people say things like this,
CLIP:
All forms of idolatry and bowing down to the work of our own hands are grievous sins against God. Roman Catholics have made a mockery of the second commandment. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them.
Speaker 1:
So today I want to explore how this is both on the one hand, a pretty bad misreading of the 10 Commandments. It doesn’t say what it sounds like it says in English, and two, that this objection actually reveals something about worship that is true in something that is actually missing from a lot of evangelical worship services. So let’s start with the biblical text itself. In Exodus 20, we’re told not to make what is an English described as a graven image, and then we’re told not to bow down to them. So let’s start with this. What is this term graven image? Does the Bible forbid images? Well, the Hebrew word here is peal, and if you ask people what it means, you’re going to get a bunch of different possible definitions. Number one, it means image that all imagery is forbidden. Number two, that it actually means engraved image.
So if you have a picture of the saints, maybe that’s okay but not a statue. Number three is that it prohibits the religious images. So Geneva, Switzerland can have a wall of reformers where they have giant statues of Protestant reformers like John Calvin, but if those were in churches, then they would be a problem. Or number four, that it means idle. Now the reason we know, so taking at the outset, maybe the word means any of those four things we know, it doesn’t mean the first three of them from the biblical context because just a few chapters later in Exodus 25, God instructs the Israelites to create the arc of the covenant and then above it to put two gold cherubim and they’re made out of gold and they are literally engraved and people are bowing down in worship before the ark in front of these angels.
So unless God is contradicting himself, he is clearly not forbidding images, engraved images or religious images. As such, he is prohibiting idols. Now, it’s true, an idol might be engraved just like an idol might be woven or human from a tree or any number of other. It doesn’t have to even be engraved. The issue here is not representational art. The issue here is idolatry pail only and always means idol in this context. That’s what the Bible is warning against. It is not warning against religious art like we see at the Ark of the Covenant or inside the temple or a number of other places. That’s just not what the 10 Commandments are actually prohibiting. But second, what about the kneeling aspect? Because I get it. If you listen to that first clip, he says, what’s prohibited is idolatry and kneeling down before images, but that’s not actually true.
What it says is you shall not bow down to them or serve them well, what is the them? The them are the pasts, the idols. And so yes, by all means, Catholics and Protestants agree. You should not make idols. You should not worship idols. You should not bow down to idols. But then the broader question is bowing down before anyone or anything other than God automatically and inherently worship because certainly it can be no one’s denying that bowing down before someone or something other than God might be worship. If you’re bowing down before king nebuchadnezzar’s statue, that looks like worship in the context of the story in Daniel. But there are other times and places where maybe not. So let’s start with this. In Exodus 1227, the people bow their heads in worship. And as James Dunn points out in one of his books, this is actually an expression that this physical expression, prostration kneeling obedience more broadly, this can be an act of worship or it can be an act of respect.
And you have to look at context because for instance, Jacob prorate himself before his brother Esau. He’s not treating Esau as an idol. He’s honoring him by prospering himself before him. Likewise, Joseph’s brothers not knowing it’s Joseph do it before his brother because he’s governor of Egypt. Numerous people do this to King David. And this is by the way, not something the Bible is condemning. It is depicting this act of homage or reverence that exists in the culture in one Chronicles 29 verse 20, the whole eia, the whole assembly worships if you’re going to translate it that way, the Lord and the king. Now that would be idolatry if you understood that to being literally divine honor is being given to the king.
OB is made, done, says before, angelic being and above all, ob is made before God. The point here is that this Greek word and the Hebrew word that it’s translating into both the Hebrew and the Greek word mean to fall down, to do homage, to do obedience. And so depending on context, that might be divine worship or it might not be. So for instance, when the magi come and they’re bringing gifts and it says they fall down and worship the child Jesus, they might literally be worshiping. They might just be honoring him as the king. It’s not entirely clear from context which one it is, and people can debate it in either direction. Now, I want to be clear as well, this isn’t just a cultural thing where oh, maybe shouldn’t have been doing that. Jesus speaks of this in a positive way in the Book of Revelation to the church in Philadelphia, not the Eagles Philadelphia, the other Philadelphia, he says that he’ll make those of the synagogue of Satan, the false worshipers come before them.
He says, I will make them come and bow down. And the word there again is that New Testament word that is our standard New Testament word for worship. I’ll make them come and bow down before your feet. That’s what says in Revelation three verse nine. That is if you want one verse to debunk the whole idea that bowing down or kneeling before a statue is inherently idolatry or bowing down or kneeling before somebody is inherently worshiping them. Revelation three, nine is your go-to because Jesus does not use it that way. And he’s using the exact same word, Daniel block, who we’re going to hear from quite a bit talks about how both the Hebrew word and the Greek word that are kind of your standard words for worship. There are other words, but these are the two biggies. They literally referred to a subject prostrated before superior.
So on the one hand, yes, these are very common words to mean worship. On the other hand, they also have the expression of long live the king. And so when you have this language, it is language being applied to God, but it is royal language. We’re treating God as king of kings and Lord of lords, but just as king of kings and Lord of Lords King and Lord refer to God there. King and Lord are also these titles of earthly authority. And so saying he’s Lord, maybe a declaration of divine honor or maybe a declaration of earthly authority, likewise be in prostrate, bowing down, et cetera, may be an expression of recognizing one’s superiors or it may be an expression of adoration, worship, et cetera. It depends on the context. And so the Bowers lexicon, which is kind of the biggie in terms of Greek English lexicons, explains that ProScan, this Greek word I keep referring to is used to designate the custom of prostrating oneself before persons and kissing their feet or the hem of their garment or the ground, et cetera.
So it’s that notion of we are now worthy. That could be worship or it could be just a recognition of one’s unworthiness to be in the presence of another. It can be an honorific, in other words. Now, what does this get right about worship though it gets right that kneeling matters, prostration matters. Think about it. The people making this objection, oh, you Catholics, you kneel before this statute, therefore you must be worshiping intuit that there are postures of adoration, postures of worship. And what makes this wild is many of the same people who make that objection when they get together on Sunday to worship together. Don’t bend the knee before the Father don’t bow down before God at now, Daniel Block who I told you we’d get back to, we’re going to get back to him here. He gives a great talk to a largely assumed Baptist because he’s at a Baptist seminary audience talking about how this is something that he had to discover, that he doesn’t say it this way, but that a lot of modern Protestant worship just doesn’t look or feel or sound like biblical worship at all
CLIP:
Through an exhaustive study of expressions associated with worship in the Bible, I’ve concluded that worship is far bigger than praise. Worship is far bigger than the English word worship and certainly far bigger than music to be sure. A recovery of biblical worship must begin with definitions. But both the Greek and Hebrew words usually translated this way have a much more specific meaning than our English word, both awa and pro bear, the specific sense of physical prostration before a superior. We’ll have more to say about this in a moment, but worship is more than genuflection. It also involves other physical gestures. It involves a disposition, it involves cultic service and it involves life itself.
Speaker 1:
So think about what block just said that biblical worship involves things like genuflection, prostration, kneeling and sacrifice, cultic service that looks in sounds like the Catholic mass, like Catholic adoration, like Catholic worship more broadly. What it doesn’t look and sound like is a lot of the modern popular evangelical and non-denominational Protestant ideas of worship and block basically acknowledges this. He says it’s a real problem that modern Protestants or modern evangelicals don’t really seem to want to bow down and worship God when they come together.
CLIP:
When’s the last time we did this? We used to, when I was growing up, when my mother taught us to pray, we would kneel Wednesday prayer meeting, we always knelt, but no, we don’t have to anymore. We’ve arrived. God is lucky to have us. There’s no sense of reverence and awe, submission and homage.
Speaker 1:
Now, I don’t want to paint too broadly here because there’s plenty of variations in Protestant approaches to worship, but there is undeniably a strand that block is describing where people sing about how they’re here to worship and here to bow down, but then they don’t bow down in worship. In his book block actually explored some of the reasons why Protestants can be reticent to actually bow down in worship before God, and he points to a couple of passages. For instance, in John four, Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman about how true worship will be in spirit and truth. And there is sometimes this gnostic misreading that this means disembodied. Now, if you’ve ever read Romans 12, you know that for St. Paul, spiritual worship is bodily worship, but there can creep in this idea that what Jesus really means is we don’t use our bodies in worship anymore.
That’s like a Jewish thing. That’s an Old Testament thing. Block responds to that by saying that fundamentally gets wrong. The relationship of what he calls the First Testament, the Old Testament and the New Testament, Jesus does not announce the end of gen flex in the beginning of inner spiritual worship in this passage. And to point this out, he points out that there’s literally eight times between John four, verse 21 and 24 in Jesus’s response to Samaritan woman where he uses the Greek word psca variations of the word clearly. Then Jesus is not announcing that pros is no longer needed, that you don’t need to prostrate, you don’t need to bow down and worship before God as block says Jesus’. Point was not that inner submission has replaced external gestures or that individualistic devotion has replaced corporate expressions of worship. That’s just not a good reading of the passage at all.
But then he gets to what I think is even more at the heart. He says, many evangelical churches resist physical prostration as an expression of homage and submission before God. This resistance represents both an unfortunate overreaction to what he calls Roman Catholic abuses and the arrogance of our culture. We don’t want to bend the knee to anyone. And so he concludes. Although UF flex before superior is universally recognized as a legitimate expression of respect, Western culture impatient with expressions of deference has discarded these millennia old symbolic gestures catch that bit because this is exactly where the problem is. If you’re a Western Christian, you probably have been brought up in a culture, certainly if you grew up here, you did. That is really uncomfortable with the idea of prostrating oneself before a superior, an earthly superior, not because of a tremendous love of God, and this is reserved to God alone, but because of Western style individualism.
And so these expressions that were perfectly at home in the biblical times in the biblical cultures feel very foreign and uncomfortable to us, not because we are holier, but because we’re more selfish, arrogant, and individualistic. And so we don’t want to acknowledge anyone in the way that Jacob acknowledges Esau. We don’t want to acknowledge anyone in the way that Ruben acknowledges Joseph, right? That’s just something that makes us uncomfortable. That’s the real issue here, not anything the 10 Commandments says. So final thoughts here on the inner and outer postures of worship. One of the objections I’ve heard that I find very strange is I’ve had multiple Protestants say, yeah, but how can I tell if my Catholic neighbor is worshiping that statue or not? It looks like idolatry to me. And the response is, biblically is mad, looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart.
We are not called to be able to judge our neighbor by his external posture of worship. So I want to reiterate, I think the external postures of worship matter. The Bible thinks the external postures of worship matter, but God alone knows the heart. The place we don’t want to end up is the Pharisee in Luke 18 where he imagines he’s praying, but he’s really praying to himself about how he’s better than his neighbor because his neighbor is a tax collector, an extortion or that sort of thing. You don’t want to sit there and worship and be like, I’m better than my neighbor who has a different physical posture than I do. And that applies to both Catholics and Protestants. Protestants, stop judging. Rashly your Catholic neighbor as an idolater because he flecks before a statue or kneels or whatever. That physical posture doesn’t give you the right to try to judge his heart.
You can’t do that. On the other hand, Catholic, don’t judge your Protestant neighbor. Just because he doesn’t bow the knee before God doesn’t mean he doesn’t worship God. It does mean that there is a biblical way of worshiping that he’s refusing to do or failing to do. So we can’t take that next step and say, that’s a moral failing. Maybe he doesn’t know. And so I just close with that. Don’t judge your neighbor for that. But do know that as Christians, we are called as St. Paul says, I bow my knee before the Father in Ephesians three and in Philippians two, at the name of Jesus. Every knee should bow. And so if you are a Christian, you should reclaim this Christian posture of submission and respect for our superiors. This means both the saints, but even more so to God if you’re not bowing before God, if you’re not prostrate before God, let’s work on that first. And then you have the cultural framework to make sense of why it’s okay and not idolatry to bend the knee and bow before a saint. For Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.