Keep sharing good news without ads.
Umbrella Needed: Worship in Eden
If you look at the inside of your prayer bulletin on the very bottom, it tells you the source for our study for the next several weeks, skipping next week, next Tuesday night. Next Tuesday night we'll have our praise service, so it won't be a Wednesday night service.
But looking at this book entitled, When God Draws Near, using that kind of as a basis for our study, and the author of the book begins the whole book, first chapter, this way. He says, a young boy sat next to his mother in a Sunday morning church service.
He was restless and bored stiff. His mom had insisted that he leave his Nintendo at home, lest he be distracted or worse yet, irritate the people sitting behind him. Suddenly the boy's wandering eyes spotted a bronze plaque on the sidewall of the church that showed letters, stars, and the outline of a flag.
What's that? He asked his mother, and she whispered in reply, oh, those are the names of people from our church who died in the service. There was a long pause as the boy was obviously upset with that answer.
Panicking, he nudged his mother again, mom, mom, did they die in the first or the second service? Yeah, I don't think the unique to the last generation. In fact, I'm sure it isn't because after all, Isaac Watts, the hymn writer, wrote some of those great hymns of the faith.
What motivated him and prompted him to write those hymns was his father responding to Watts. When Isaac was a young man, a teenager, as I recall, he lamented the dull services and particularly the singing, because he was in a church that only sang the Psalms and sang them without any instrumental accompaniment.
And he found that to be extremely boring. And so his dad said, well, if you think you can write something better, then you write something better. And he said, okay, I'll see what I can do. And Isaac Watts came up with a bunch of hymns.
So it's not unique that the notion of boredom, though it wouldn't have been titled that, expressed that way, it's not unique to the last couple of generations. But what is unique is the way churches have responded to that notion of boredom.
Historically, at least in the church, the church has said, this is worship. And I wouldn't say it was a top-down thing, but the church has said, this is worship. You come to church and this is worship.
And you accept it. And this is the way it is. But more recently, there's been efforts to deal with the boredom. So Paul Engle writes this, he says, perhaps more changes have been made in the structure, style, and format of worship services in the past 20 years than in the past 200 years combined.
And all in an effort to accommodate a culture of bored churchgoers or prospects who don't want prospects to come to church and be bored. So Joel Osteen's wife, you all know Joel Osteen, right? She expressed this philosophy of sort of a man-centered worship in this way.
She said this publicly. I mean, it was broadcast on the air. She said, quote, when you come to church, when you worship him, you're not doing it for God, really. You're doing it for yourself. Really? Okay.
So that kind of thinking and the notion that worship shouldn't be boring, but tailored to our particular excitement level is why we need to study the subject that we're going to study for the next several weeks.
And it's really a fascinating study. Paul Engle takes the concept of worship and how worship was conducted on seven different mountains, seven different summits in the scriptures. And the first of those mountains is in Eden.
But let's ask the question first, why even bother with this subject? Why be concerned about the subject of worship? Well, for one thing, John chapter 4, verse 23, the Lord Jesus said that God is spirit and those who worship him must worship him in spirit and truth.
The father seeks such to worship him. So the father seeks our worship and he seeks that we worship him in spirit and truth. So we have been summoned. We've been summoned to worship. A second reason to be concerned about the whole subject of worship is the experience of corporate worship shapes and reflects our view of God.
So the person who thinks, I can worship God wherever I want to worship God, whenever I want to worship him. I don't need the church. I don't need corporate worship. We'll have a very limited understanding of what God is like and what God likes.
God calls his church, he calls his people to gather together and to worship him. And in that corporate setting, we experience some things about God that we cannot experience out on our own, out in the woods somewhere or whatever.
Now, worship can take place and it does take place. You're out on a hike by yourself in the woods. But that's not the same thing as what happens when you gather together with God's people and you worship him as he prescribes.
Again, Paul Engel writes this, he says, it's the setting, that corporate worship service, it's the setting in which our appetite for God and our understanding of his acts and attributes are stimulated and stretched and that in a unique way.
And then a third reason to bother with the subject is that Sunday worship is the best way to prepare us for what will engage us for eternity. So for all eternity, you know, you're not going to be off on your own cloud strumming a a harp somewhere apart from all the other believers.
No, the people of God will be in corporate worship of our God and that'll take place for all eternity. William Nichols wrote this, he says, worship is the supreme and only, now get this, think about it, worship is the is the supreme and only indispensable activity of the Christian church.
There are all kinds of activities that are legitimate that the Christian church is engaged in and they are important and they need to be engaged in. But worship is the supreme and only indispensable activity of the church.
Why? Because it alone will endure into heaven when all the other activities of the church will have passed away. You know, there won't be any more Sunday school classes, there won't be any more, you know, children, there won't be any more nursery, there won't be any more this or any more that, but worship will go on forever.
So the theme that we want to look at that explains worship, what we want to understand that explains worship, is the theme of the presence of God, that is, God's plan to dwell with us. God's plan to dwell with us.
I think on the back of your handout, yes, on the back of your handout, there's this nice graphic imagery that shows shows that theme as an umbrella theme that covers all of scripture from Genesis to Revelation.
The presence of God or God's plan to dwell with us. That is a thread that runs throughout the entire Bible. God dwelling with his people. You know, think about it. We're going to look at what happened in the Garden of Eden tonight, but look beyond that, and you see God meeting with and dwelling with his people in every stage of revelation, biblical revelation.
What was the whole concept of the tabernacle? What was the purpose of the tabernacle? What was the message of the cloud in the tabernacle, and then in the temple, and so forth? And even the name Jesus when he came into the world.
We'll talk about that in just a minute. So again, Engel, using the theme of his book, the idea of his book, he says, like mountain peaks rising above the mist, the stories from Genesis to Revelation provide us with elevated views of the divine presence.
So the starting point of this umbrella theme of God's plan to dwell with us is the book of Genesis. So let's go there. Genesis chapter 3, and we'll focus our some attention there as we look at this tonight.
Genesis chapter 3, and think about worship before the fall. What was it like before the fall? All right, well, notice in the first place that man was created uniquely equipped for worship. Only human beings have the, have been created in the image of God and have the capacity to know him, to respond to him, and worship him.
So some of you have, have pets in your home. You have an animal, a dog, or cat, or something like that. And some of you have, you know, animals out on your farm and so forth. God created those creatures.
He created all the animals, but none of them, you know, we have a dog in our house. That crazy dog, he can't pay any attention. He doesn't know who God is. He couldn't care less. And, you know, we could, we can play some Christian music, and it can thrill our hearts, but the dog is like, you know, he's indifferent to it all.
He doesn't respond to that in the least bit. He has no, he has no worship of God. I do remember a preacher one time talking about, about a hog that will at least lift its snout in the air and snort before it rummages through the, through the ground looking for its grubs, its snort of thanks.
Of course, that's not really what he's doing, but he was using that as to illustrate how ungrateful we can be. But, but man is uniquely created. He's uniquely equipped for worship. And so, again, Engel, he says, just as plants in the garden needed sunlight in order to flourish, and listen to this statement because it's very important in understanding a root problem of human beings, unconverted people.
Just as plants in the garden needed sunlight in order to flourish, so humans would not flourish without spending time in the light of God's presence. So the key to human flourishing is not education, it's not comfortable surroundings, it's not having all the different amenities of life.
The key to human flourishing is spending time in the light of God's presence. It's worshiping God. So before the fall, man was uniquely created and equipped for worship. The garden where man was placed was an elevated setting for worship.
I had never thought about this before. I'd never caught this detail before, until I read this chapter, that Eden had to have been on an elevated, uh, an elevated plane, a higher plane. And how do we know that?
Because in chapter 2, verse 10, it says, now a river went out of Eden to water the garden. From there it parted and became four riverheads. Well, you know, water needs to flow. If it's going to flow, it's going to flow downward.
So there's this river that came from Eden and it flowed in a downward direction and then split into four other rivers. So there was some degree of elevation related to Eden. But another indication of that is in Ezekiel 28, um, Ezekiel 28, it's the, um, the passage about, uh, Tyre, the king of Tyre being, um, equated with Lucifer, right?
And he says, um, he says of him in verse 13, you were in Eden, the garden of God. And then in verse 14, he says, you were on the holy mountain of God. There's a parallelism there as to where this king of Tyre was, or literally the, the, the cherub or figuratively, I guess we could say, uh, the cherub who is Lucifer on the, in the, in the garden of God, garden of Eden and the holy mount of God.
So the garden was an elevated setting for worship. Thirdly, regarding this worship before the fall in the garden, we can say this regarding the manner of that worship. It was unique. It was unique, unique to, in, in terms of anything we've experienced or can experience.
Worship in the garden was both natural and immediate. It was natural and immediate. It was the, it was the breath of life for Adam and Eve in the garden. Um, it, it was as natural to them as, um, as breathing is.
It was natural and immediate. Secondly, we can say that communion with God, that worship with God, of God, was pure and it was open. There was, there was no, uh, there was no distortion to the, to their worship.
There was no mixed motivation in their worship. There was no, um, there was no underlying, well, think, think about, think about your own experience at coming to church on Sunday morning to worship God, right?
How many times have you come to church and you're frazzled, your mind is elsewhere, you're distracted, and, you know, it may take, it may take, uh, into the third hymn before you're fine, finally oriented in, in the right direction.
Now, is that because you don't want to be there? You don't want to worship? No, it doesn't have anything to do with it. It just has to do with the way life is and in a fallen world and the complications of such life.
Adam and Eve had none of that. Their communication with God was pure and it was, it was just open, just open conversation. And then the third thing we can say about it is that it was unhindered by the barrier and effects of sin.
The natural man cannot rightly worship God and will not rightly worship God. The unconverted person can't. And even, even those of us who know Christ as our savior, how many times does sin serve as a barrier to our worship and hinder us in our worship?
Wasn't the case before the fall. So in that regard, it was unique. And then next, what did God, what did God's plan for worship involve in the garden before the fall? The first thing we can say about it is God intended for, planned for the multiplication of worshipers.
How do we know that? Because of the, the mission that God gave to Adam and Eve. Chapter one, verse 28, God said to them, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth. Well, you know, think about this. If, if there was no fall, if there had not been the fall and Adam and Eve fulfilled that mandate of being fruitful and multiplying and filling the earth, then there would have been a multiplication of worshipers with each succeeding generation that came after them.
And then God also in this plan for worship involved, it involved an expansion of the arena for worship. As, as the descendants of Adam and Eve multiplied, again, no fall, no sin in, entered into the world, no curse.
The descendants of Adam and Eve multiplied, worshipers multiplied, and they filled the earth. Then that means the worship center, if you will, the, the place of worship, the arena of worship would expand as the generations expanded and multiplied.
And then that leads thirdly to this idea of the globalization of worship, the globalization of worship. Meaning that within the sense that all of the descendants of Adam and Eve would worship as they did.
It would be a global reality, a global experience. Now I'm not, by saying God's plan for worship, I'm not suggesting in that statement that God's plan was frustrated by the fall. Because I don't believe that's the case.
I know, I know as well as you do that when God created Adam and Eve, he knew exactly what was going to happen. He had, he had a bigger plan than just that worship would occur as it did pre, pre-fall.
So we understand that. But we're looking at, you know, what would, what would worship be like if there had been no curse before the curse, before the fall? It would have expanded. It would have, it would have encompassed the earth.
The worshipers would have been multiplied. There wouldn't have just been two. All right. Well, the fall did come as you well know. And so what were then the effects of the fall and particularly what effect did the fall have on worship?
So let's look at this passage in Genesis 3 and, and notice several different effects or impacts of, of the fall. There is, first of all, in verse 7, internal disruption, internal disruption. Okay. So the, the, the sin itself occurs in verse 6.
The woman saw that the tree was good for food. It was pleasant to the eyes, a tree desirable to make one wise. She took of its fruit and ate. She also gave to her husband with her and he ate. So in Adam's eating of that fruit, the, the, the, the fall is finalized.
I mean, there's all kinds of speculation. You know, what, what would have happened if Adam didn't eat the fruit and just Eve did? Because I mean, after all, God gave the command to Adam not to eat the fruit, you know?
So Adam was the one responsible. So what if he didn't eat that fruit? Well, we don't have answers to those speculative questions and it's not really profitable to go too far down that road. The bottom line is he did.
He did eat that fruit. The fall occurred. And the first impact of the fall on worship was internal disruption, internal disruption. You see that in verse 7 because it says, then the eyes of both of them were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings.
There was something that happened inside of them. And the way I would describe it is a loss of peace and harmony within the individual. Prior to the eating of that fruit, Adam and Eve were in a state of innocence.
They were in a complete state of harmony or peace. The old testament, the Jewish term is shalom. Everything was in harmony. Internally, externally, everything. They were at harmony with themselves. They were at harmony with each other.
They were at harmony with creation. They were at harmony with God. And the fall messed all of that up and it started inside. And by the way, I've mentioned this before. Those of you that have literary interests, you know, in the writing of a story, you've got to have a plot.
And every plot has conflict. Every good plot has conflict. And that conflict will either be, it will be in one of four categories, one or more of four categories. Man against God, man against nature, man against man, or man against himself.
And you look at any good story and you're going to see in the plot of that story, conflict in one or more of those areas. And the first place you see conflict after the fall is with himself, man against himself.
The harmony within has been disrupted. Now what that does, when the harmony within is disrupted, it mars the desire and the impetus for worship. You know, worship most purely engaged in will come from within, will come from the heart that wants to worship our God.
And when that internal, when I am in internal disharmony and out of sorts internally, that desire and impetus for worship is marred. Second area of disruption in verses eight through 10 is communion disruption, communion disruption.
That is a loss of peace and harmony with God. So in verses eight to 10, Adam and Eve hear the sound of God, the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, Adam and his wife hid themselves.
Never happened before, never happened before. When, when the sound of God rustling the leaves in the garden occurred, they, they gravitated toward the sound, but now they go away from the sound. They seek to hide themselves from the sound.
So they lost peace and harmony with God. And, and that, that disruption of communion with God mars the perception of the object of worship. What, how do they perceive God now after the fall? And you get a hint of the distrust in the fact that Eve ate the fruit and Adam did too.
Because, because what, you know, Satan used the, the little, the tactic of did God really say this? You're not going to die. God's tricking you. God's deceiving you. And they have lost that, they've lost that pure, accurate view of God.
A third area of disruption is relational disruption. All right. Remember the, the, the different areas of plot, right? Man against himself, man against God, and now man against man. In this case, man against woman, but relational disruption.
In verse 12, the man said, the woman whom you gave to me to be with me, she gave me the fruit. So, so Adam is blame shifting his sin, blaming Eve for that. The harmony between man and woman, the harmony between each other here has been disrupted.
And what that does is it mars the corporate unity and joy in worship. And how many times have you seen that happen? Maybe you've been blessed and never seen that happen, but how many times have you seen that happen in the context of corporate worship, even in the 21st century among God's people, gathering together to worship on Sunday morning?
I wanted the red carpet. I wanted the blue carpet. You know, I'm being facetious there, but there have been churches that where people have had that kind of dissension. How in the world can you have unified, joyful, meaningful worship when, when there's that kind of dissension and that kind of relational conflict and disharmony?
You can't. Well, it all started here in the garden, relational disruption. And then a fourth area of disruption is global disruption, global disruption in verses 14 through 19, a loss of peace and harmony in and with the world, man against nature, man against nature.
And it comes out with the expressions, the different expressions of the curse. So there's a curse on the ground in verses 17 to 18. So man is going to have to fight with the ground in order to have a harvest.
There's a curse on procreation in verse 16, when the Lord said to the woman, I will multiply, I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception in pain. You shall bring forth children. The, the clear implication there, isn't it?
Is that when God told Adam and Eve in Genesis 128, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, that, that, that, that would have occurred painlessly. We, we can't, we can't imagine that. How in the world could that possibly be?
I have no clue. I have no clue, but what is, what is clear is that one of the results of the fall is that in procreation, in childbirth, there's now going to be pain. There's now going to be a difficulty and every succeeding image bearer that comes into this world would come into this world causing pain and sorrow.
So there's a loss of peace and harmony in procreation. And then there's the curse of separation in verses 23 and 24, where God expels Adam and Eve from the garden, from the place of worship. They're not allowed in there anymore.
So they're expelled from the garden. You might think of that as the divinely created worship center, and they can't go in there. They're barred from it. So what happens in this global disruption is that the reflection of God's glory, which is the earth, right?
God created the earth and, and all that is in it, and all of that creation is to speak of. It's to bring glory to God. It's to glorify God. It's, it's to magnify Him. And we know that from Psalm 19, the heavens declare the glory of God.
The firmament shows his handiwork. But that's now marred. It's been, it's been distorted. So that, so this global disruption mars the reflection of God's glory, and it therefore mars the stimulation for worship, the stimulation for worship.
Think about this. Imagine, those of you who might have a garden, a flower garden, or a vegetable garden, or whatever. Imagine if you could go out in the spring, and you could plant your seeds, and you put them in a garden, and you don't have to do anything.
Not a thing. You don't have to weed. You don't have to water. You don't have to worry about bugs eating your garden stuff. Nothing. And, and you just watch. You go out there every few days, and you see this stuff popping up, and you, you say, oh boy, that's, that's wonderful.
It's, look how great that is. And, and you watch it grow, and then, and then it produces abundantly. And all of that, again, think of it pre-fall. All of that compels you to turn to the Creator, God, who has provided all of this in such wonderful bounty, and with such relative ease, that you just, you just want to worship Him, and praise Him.
Instead, what's it like working in your garden? Oh, there's crazy weeds, you know, you know, so forth. It mars the reflection of the Creator's glory, and the stimulation for worship. There's another area of disruption, and that is eternal disruption.
Eternal disruption. The last part of verse 19, in the middle of the verse and on, the Lord says, you will, you will work by the sweat of your brow, and eat your bread, until you return to the ground. You die, for out of it you were taken, for dust you are, to dust you shall return.
This is a loss of peace and harmony in time, quote-unquote, because prior to the fall, there was no death. Prior to the fall, Adam and Eve would not cease to exist. They would not be returning to the ground, and so their relationship with time is now closed.
The rising of the sun, and setting of the sun, day after day after day, is working against you, because every day you're getting closer, and closer to the reality of worship. There will come a day, as the psalmist says, you know, nobody can pray in the grave, when your body's lowered in the grave, in the, in the tomb.
Your body isn't doing any worshiping. You say, well, but to be absent from the body, lips are quiet. There's no more worship with God's people. So there's eternal disruption. All right, so let's, in the few minutes left, let's talk about God's ultimate plan to restore the Temple of Eden, to restore the Temple of Eden.
The plan is hinted at in Genesis 3 .15. That's called the Proto-Evangelium, the plan to his plan to send Christ, here in Genesis 3 .15, who would break down the barriers that hindered sinful humans from entering the presence of a worship.
This promised future Redeemer would be called, what? His name shall be called, he shall be called Emmanuel, which is, as for the Temple of Eden, is to send, and that plan is defined in this way. It is to restore the unmediated presence, the unmediated presence of God.
So think of it this way. After the fall, and then you see it most clearly pronounced in, in the ceremonial law, in the Mosaic law, God's people could not go into the Holy of Holies. There had to be a mediator to the throne of God without a mediator, without the mediated, the mediatorial work of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Christ is our mediator by whom we can now enter God's presence, but in the ultimate plan that God has to dwell with his people, it is to have an unmediated presence of God. You see this plan clarified as you see the unmediated dwelling presence of God bookended in the Bible.
So in Genesis 3, you can go down, go down, look at, look at the, the parallel between the garden pre-fall and Revelation 21, the heavenly Jerusalem, the new earth. You had the creation of the sun and moon, in the Revelation, you have the removal of the unnecessary sun and moon.
You had creation of day and night. You have the end of nighttime. In Genesis 2, you have the river flow, watering the garden. In Revelation, you have the river of life flowing from the throne. You have the tree of life in Genesis 2, as well as in Revelation 22.
You have pressure in 21. You have cherubim in Genesis 3, guarding the entrance to the garden so that they could, so we couldn't go back in. But in, in Revelation at the heavenly Jerusalem, the cherubim are surrounding the throne and worshiping God.
And then in the garden, there is the experience of God's immediate presence for Adam and Eve. There was no mediator. And in Revelation 21, there is an enhanced experience of God's eternal presence for all the redeemed sons of Adam and the daughters of Eve.
There, there will be no mediated, uh, uh, communion with God in, uh, how does that plan apply to us presently? And it gives us a couple of questions to think about for ourselves. One of them is, how can I be more aware of God's presence in our worship services?
How can I be more aware of God's presence in our worship services? And the other question is, how can we avoid distractions in our worship to help maintain a God-centered focus? That's a question that I often ask myself.
And just, just as a, just as a little practical, um, insight to, as an answer to that question, you remember how, um, it used to be the tradition in the Baptist church that you would have, um, you just have an opening hymn, a prayer, and then, then something else, and something else.
And then right, right in the middle of the service, there were the announcements. Okay, take out your bulletin, and you're looking, here's what's coming Alexander Graham Bell said this. He says, we are all too much inclined to walk through life with our eyes shut.
There are things all around us and right at our very feet that we have never seen because we have never really looked. And Engle commenting on that, he said,.
