The End of Deviant Worship
By Pastor Matt Black
12
August 2007
Lord's Day Evening
Isaiah 17:1-14
Introduction: Open your Bibles to the book of Isaiah 17. The title of tonight’s message is “The End of Deviant Worship”.
Last week we talked about how when God says we need to worship Him a certain way, we had better do it. We must be very precise in how we come to God. This really goes along well with our message this morning. We need to walk worthy or feel the weight of our calling. We are not called to a man-centered worship.
When you come to church, it is not so that you can feel good. There is one primary reason you come to church. Let me use the acronym J-O-Y to explain this. You’ve heard that JOY stands for Jesus, Others, and You last. Why do we come to church?
Tonight we are going to go back to Israel tonight and ask ourselves a few questions as to why we do the things the way we do them. The Bible is our guidebook. We ought to operate this church according to the Bible. We need to approach God in a certain way and realize that one day all creation will either worship Him properly or be disposed of in hell.
With that said, tonight we are going to ask ourselves three questions:
I. WHAT IS WORSHIP?
Alright, well essentially tonight’s message is all about the fact that we cannot add or take away from the way God has commanded us to worship Him.
Let’s ask ourselves first—what is worship? Well it is giving God the honor due to His name. You see that in the book of Revelation. We talked about this week before last:
Revelation 5:13, “And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever.”
When we come together, we are coming together not to joke and have fun, but to enter into the presence of an awesome almighty God that has paid the ultimate price for us to sit at His table. We are there for God. We have God focused worship. We have God-focused singing. We have God focused preaching. It’s not about tickling our ears or being entertained or feeling good. Truly it matters what you are giving to God. Are you partaking in it?
A. WORSHIP IN ISRAEL
Having said all that, let’s get into God’s ancient people. These are people that looked forward to Christ. They had a national identity—they were a nation. But there were believers among them.
B. In fact, OT SAINTS COULD IN A SENSE BE CALLED CHRISTIANS. How is that? Well, the New Testament tells us some of the inner workings of their heart.
By the way, one of the rules of Biblical interpretation is that the Bible interprets the Bible. Along that line, we must always remember an extremely important principle:
v The New Testament always interprets the Old Testament first.
How do we know that? Because we have the very words of Jesus and the Apostles giving us the meaning of some pretty obscure Scripture passages.
v That is not to say that we never look to the Old Testament to interpret the New. But priority wise, we first look to the New and then the Old.
When we let the New interpret the Old Testament, we find that the Old Testament believers did indeed look forward to Christ and were in a sense Christians. They looked forward to Christ.
1. Abraham looked forward to Christ. Abraham, the Scripture says trusted in the Gospel, just like we trust in the Gospel. Galatians 3:8, “And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the heathen through faith, preached before the gospel unto Abraham, saying, In thee shall all nations be blessed.”
2. The Prophets looked forward to Christ. We read in 1 Peter 1:10-13, speaking of the salvation of our souls Peter says, “Of which salvation the prophets have enquired and searched diligently, who prophesied of the grace that should come unto you: 11 Searching what, or what manner of time the Spirit of Christ which was in them did signify, when it testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ, and the glory that should follow.”
C. An important connection.
I want to make that connection, because the church is the fulfillment of all the promises given to Israel. That is what we learned in Ephesians 3. We also see it in Galatians 2 and in Romans 11. Jews and Gentiles share the promises for Israel in the church. Christ said he had not come to destroy the law and the prophets but to fulfill them. All the old covenant promises pertained to Christ, how He would come into this world, redeem a people for Himself, and finally, at the end of the age, He would come again and bring a consummation of all things.
So everything we read about in Isaiah 17—all the principles we learn about God there are for us. We are united with the entire spiritual remnant of the Old Testament. There are wheat and tares in both Israel and the church. But in heaven, as we will learn in Ephesians in weeks to come, there is only ONE BODY of elect and redeemed people. There are not OT saints and NT saints in heaven. We are all bought by the blood of the Crucified One.
II. What was so deviant about ancient Israel’s worship?
Let’s look at worship in Israel during the time of Isaiah 17 (somewhere just before 722BC).
Let’s go back in time to the time just before the Assyrian captivity of Israel.
Times are bad. In Isaiah 17, we have Ahaz king of Judah involved in an unholy religious and political alliance with Syria whose capital city is Damascus—he was worshipping the gods of the nations, Molech and Asherah. Ahaz, King of Judah has intermarried with the heathen culture. Remember King Ahaz of Judah was so evil, that he was the first king in all of Judah’s history to actually sacrifice a human being in fire--HIS OWN SON! Of course Pekah was just as bad. Remember northern Israel N-O good kings. You can remember that by the first two letters of the word NOrthern. Sothern Israel had SOME good kings. The first two letters help us with that. SOuthern S-O, SOme good kings.
Now in Ahaz’s eyes, he had not completely forsaken the LORD. He was not primarily breaking the first commandment (Thou shalt have not other gods before me). The first commandment is against polytheism—all the false gods of the heathen are not to be worshipped, for they are simply devils or simple vanity.
The second commandment (“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images”) is not against polytheism-“other gods”, but against syncretism—“graven images”—or changing and adding and mixing in other gods with the one true and living God.
A. Ahaz’s Motivation. It wasn’t that Ahaz was forsaking God all together—he was in his mind simply heightening and helping the worship of the Lord. We are going to see that our churches are making this same error today. We don’t need to assist the Holy Spirit of God in converting sinner’s hearts. The Word of God is sufficient. We need the simple preaching of the Word. We are going to look into these things tonight.
B. Isaiah’s Message of Isaiah 17. This sermon of Isaiah 17 that Isaiah is preaching is a warning Ahaz's Judah and their unholy alliance with Assyria. Likewise it is a warning to Ahaz’s counterpart in the northern tribes of Israel named Pekah who made an alliance with Syria. Both Israel and Judah were in an unholy alliance with unholy nations. Political prostitution is no different than what was happening in the families of Israel and Judah.
Spiritual adultery was going on in the homes. People professing to be believers were marrying unbelievers. Pluralism and syncretism was taking place because the way they used to worship God was inconvenient and boring. So what did that do? They tried to improve upon the worship of God.
C. The Manifestation of Deviant worship.HOW DID ISRAEL AND JUDAH TRY TO IMPROVE UPON the worship of God?
Turn over to Jeremiah 10. We find out that God’s ancient people were fascinated with the way of the heathen. But Jeremiah 10:2-4 says, “Thus saith the LORD, Learn not the way of the heathen, and be not dismayed at the signs of heaven; for the heathen are dismayed at them. 3 For the customs of the people are vain: for one cutteth a tree out of the forest, the work of the hands of the workman, with the axe. 4 They deck it with silver and with gold; they fasten it with nails and with hammers, that it move not.”
1. What is Asherah? Asherah in the Bible is the fertility goddess worshipped by the Zidonians (the ancient Phonecians), and later the Assyrians called her Ishtar. Jeremiah when referring to this false goddess in Jeremiah 44:17, not to “burn incense to the Queen of Heaven.” The Egyptians called her Isis. The Babylonians called her Ishtar. In fact they celebrated her especially in the beginning of the Spring, the time of Easter, or Ishtar! The Ephesians called her Diana.
2. Violation of God’s Law.
a. First Commandment Violation: Worship only God. Deuteronomy 6:4-6 clearly forbids violation of the first commandment. It says, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD: 5 And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.”
You would think that Israel could avoid this clear idolatry. It was obviously a breaking of the first commandment right? The greatest problem in Israel was not the outright breaking of the first commandment. Most of the time Israel would simply syncretize another god together with the true and Living God, Yaweh. Israel’s practice was not polytheism, but syncretism.
Those are big words. Polytheism is the belief in many gods. That is what is forbidden in the first commandment. Israel was to be radically monotheistic.
b. Second Commandment: We are forbidden from worshipping God in the wrong way!
But it is syncretism that is forbidden in the second commandment. We cannot take the Lord and mix His worship with idols. We are not to worship the right God in the wrong way. Benjamin Keach’s catechism question 57 asks, “What is forbidden in the second commandment?” And the answer is “A. The second commandment forbids the worshipping of God by images, or any other way not appointed in His Word.”
Worshiping the right God the wrong way is to contaminate pure worship with pagan methods. That is syncretism. Put God and idols in sync together and call it the worship of the true and Living God. That’s syncretism. It is worshipping God through pagan and worldly means. It is deviant worship.
Specifically, syncretism consists of…
1. inventing your own new methods of worshiping God, and
2. of course, eliminating His prescribed methods which no longer work.
We don’t have time to look into the life of Jeroboam I, King of Israel. We discussed his life two weeks ago. He changed the worship from Jerusalem to Dan and Bethel with golden calves and made priests of the basest of the people.
Ahaz did the same thing. He prescribed new methods and eliminated old ones.
Now let’s get to the root causes of these people’s syncretism. Why did they do it? Why did they forsake the ways of the Lord and invent new ways to worship Him?
1. Because God’s ways were obviously not working in this new culture. Pragmatism replaces purity. They sincerely wanted to help the Almighty affect other nations by being relevant.
2. It is the inability for Christians in our day to grasp this point that makes all of the Old Testament idolatry seem so hopelessly outdated to us.
We just don’t get that the problem in Israel’s worship was syncretism. The Word of God was not enough for Israel. They needed a little more of the world.
I want us to begin to understand the importance of this message and what it means to us. This whole text of Isaiah 17 is about the Asherah.
So in Israel’s case, the idols existed because God needed our help. They were not there primarily to be worshipped in place of or even beside of Him. So the thinking is something like this: since His face could not be seen, and since we all know that we can all learn better through visuals, we just should give them a few object lessons for their instruction.
The whole syncretistic worship of God is idolatry!! The thinking goes like this:
Since God’s ways are so intolerably slow and developing, we need to push them forward faster. Since God’s ways are not easily seen with the human eye, we need to show people that He can still be trusted in tangible ways. In essence the message is God needs our help to accomplish His purposes. This is what lies at the heart of Israel’s corruption.
Specifically, since God is described as a Father figure—the Israelites thought perhaps a little goddess worship will help the people relate to Him on a more balanced scale.
Now let us apply these ideas to our own contemporary situation. Effects of cultural goddess worship are infiltrating our country and our churches. I don’t know of very many people talking about it, but it’s true. This goddess worship is finding expression in our culture and in our churches through the environmental, feminist, and sodomite agendas of our day. Be sure, brethren, goddess worship is alive and thriving in contemporary American culture.
At the heart of goddess worship are two elements:
1. earth worship is one
2. and unrestrained physical pleasure and power is the other
Beware of trying to worship God in any other way than is prescribed by the Bible. I’ve said it before—if it is new, it’s probably not true. Nothing wrong with new songs, but the truth ought to be the same, and the tune ought to be a holy unworldly and other worldly tune.
Application: Don’t give in to the feminization of the church. We’ve got female pastors, and soft cushy, sensual music in our churches. Ladies ought to cover themselves and be modest and shamefaced. Sensuality is idolatry. Intimacy is reserved for the relationship of a husband and wife. Ladies listen to 1 Timothy 2:9 In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array;
The church is not a place for entertainment but for worship! We are to “lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty.” The church needs to forsake the flashiness of this world and worship Christ in plainness and obedience and not use worldly methods but depend on the old fashioned power of the Holy Spirit.
III. Having said all of that, let me say in closing there will be an end to all this Deviant worship.
And here we come right to our text. So let’s read through Isaiah 17:1-14 tonight.
A. An end to deviant worship in Ancient Israel.
1. Damascus is a ruinous heap! The city that Israel trusted in will be destroyed. We see God’s judgment immediately in verse 1. Of course this is speaking of the Assyrian captivity which took place in waves, but most devastatingly in 722BC. Here we go—the end of deviant worship—verse 1, “The burden of Damascus. Behold, Damascus is taken away from being a city, and it shall be a ruinous heap.”
2. Cities trodden down and left for wild animals. Look at verse 2, “The cities of Aroer are forsaken: they shall be for flocks, which shall lie down, and none shall make them afraid.
3. God withdraws his help from northern Israel. Verse 3, “The fortress also shall cease from Ephraim, and the kingdom from Damascus, and the remnant of Syria: they shall be as the glory of the children of Israel, saith the LORD of hosts.”
Think of how God delivered the ancient people from Egypt. Think later about Joshua’s conquests and the help that God gave Gideon. What about the prowess of David and Solomon? All of that is gone for Israel.
And as far as Syria is concerned, God is the one who raises up kings and kingdoms. Listen to the words of Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 4:17, “….That the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men.”
The point is we must do things God’s way or all is gone. We can build this church on empty promises and prop up spiritually dead people for the judgment day, or we can get them ready for it!!
4. The robust kingdom of I srael (“Jacob’s glory”) will be wasted. Verse 4, “And in that day it shall come to pass, that the glory of Jacob shall be made thin, and the fatness of his flesh shall wax lean. 5 And it shall be as when the harvestman gathereth the corn, and reapeth the ears with his arm; and it shall be as he that gathereth ears in the valley of Rephaim.” All of this takes place at the Assyrian captivity in 722 BC.
God takes down Israel easily.
Skip down to verse 9 and see the devastation: “In that day shall his strong cities be as a forsaken bough, and an uppermost branch, which they left because of the children of Israel: and there shall be desolation. 10 Because thou hast forgotten the God of thy salvation, and hast not been mindful of the rock of thy strength, therefore shalt thou plant pleasant plants, and shalt set it with strange slips: 11 In the day shalt thou make thy plant to grow, and in the morning shalt thou make thy seed to flourish: but the harvest shall be a heap in the day of grief and of desperate sorrow.”
B. Of course God preserves a remnant always! (Verses 6-8). So here we have God through judgment bringing revival. And that is what I pray for concerning our country.
Let’s read verse 6, “Yet gleaning grapes shall be left in it, as the shaking of an olive tree, two or three berries in the top of the uppermost bough, four or five in the outmost fruitful branches thereof, saith the LORD God of Israel. 7 At that day shall a man look to his Maker, and his eyes shall have respect to the Holy One of Israel. 8 And he shall not look to the altars, the work of his hands, neither shall respect that which his fingers have made, either the groves, or the images.
C. Ultimately all deviant worship will one day end.
We see this in verses 12-14, “Woe to the multitude of many people, which make a noise like the noise of the seas; and to the rushing of nations, that make a rushing like the rushing of mighty waters! 13 The nations shall rush like the rushing of many waters: but God shall rebuke them, and they shall flee far off, and shall be chased as the chaff of the mountains before the wind, and like a rolling thing before the whirlwind. 14 And behold at eveningtide trouble; and before the morning he is not. This is the portion of them that spoil us, and the lot of them that rob us.”
Look at Isaiah 24. Chapter 13 through 23 are sermons and messages against the nations, but in Isaiah 24, we have the summary of it all, “Behold, the LORD maketh the earth empty, and maketh it waste, and turneth it upside down, and scattereth abroad the inhabitants thereof. 2 And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the servant, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the taker of usury, so with the giver of usury to him. 3 The land shall be utterly emptied, and utterly spoiled: for the LORD hath spoken this word. 4 The earth mourneth and fadeth away, the world languisheth and fadeth away, the haughty people of the earth do languish. 5 The earth also is defiled under the inhabitants thereof; because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, broken the everlasting covenant.”
We are all transgressors of the Adamic covenant. Do you remember what that was? It was renewed in a sense a Sinai. It is the law. Basically it is “obey God”. God says to Adam in the Garden—obey me—do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Adam transgressed the covenant of obedience. And do you know what the penalty of breaking that covenant was? DEATH. What did God say to Adam and Eve in Genesis 2:17? “But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.”
But the everlasting covenant is found in Genesis 3:15, “And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.”
The bruising of the heel is the Cross!
The Seed of the woman is the Saviour!
The crushing of the head is the Cross that crushes Satan, sin, and death. Death and hell and the prince of the power of the air would be defeated by the seed of the woman.
Hebrews 13:20-21 name the blood of the everlasting covenant, “Now the God of peace, that brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, that great shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, 21 Make you perfect in every good work to do his will, working in you that which is wellpleasing in his sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.”
Back in Hebrews 10:29 we read about the one who does despite to the covenant. The previous verse said under Moses if people broke the Old Covenant they died under two or three witnesses, but let’s read Hebrews 10:29. Let’s read, “Of how much sorer punishment, suppose ye, shall he be thought worthy, who hath trodden under foot the Son of God, and hath counted the blood of the covenant, wherewith he was sanctified, an unholy thing, and hath done despite unto the Spirit of grace?”
Conclusion: There’s coming a day when Christ will put all enemies under His feet!
When will all this occur? When will the end come? We cannot know, but 1 Corinthians 15 tells us that the world ends and the eternal kingdom on the new heaven and earth begins at the coming of Christ. Look at I Corinthians 15:20-25 “But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept. 21 For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead. 22 For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive. 23 But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; [IMMEDIATELY] afterward they that are Christ’s at his coming. 24 Then cometh the end, when he shall have delivered up the kingdom to God, even the Father; when he shall have put down all rule and all authority and power. 25 For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
So at the coming of Christ, the Son of God delivers the Kingdom—the elect of all ages—to His Father, and all power and authority and rule is done! There will be no more rebellion or deviant worship. “For he must reign, till he hath put all enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
You see Paul tells us in Acts 17:31, “Because he hath appointed a day, in the which he will judge the world in righteousness by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof he hath given assurance unto all men, in that he hath raised him from the dead.”
There’s coming a day when God that even Enoch of old prophesied about! It is the second coming of Christ.
Jude 1:14-15, “And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints, 15 To execute judgment upon all, and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed, and of all their hard speeches which ungodly sinners have spoken against him.”
Christ will come says 2 Thessalonians 1:8, “In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ:”
Of course this was prophesied about in the OT—look at Psalm 21:9, “Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of thine anger: the LORD shall swallow them up in his wrath, and the fire shall devour them.”
On that Day when Christ comes with His saints and angels, he will turn to the goats and speak to them as it says in Matthew 25:41, “Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:”
Matthew 25:46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.
On that last day, all enemies will either have been united to Him through salvation, or they will go straight to hell in the Lake of Fire! Then death shall be no more. You will all live forever somewhere. Either worshipping God the way He commands, or in the Lake of Fire. This is the end of deviant worship!
Closing Hymn: 289 Hallelujah, What a Saviour (Verse 5)