I often feel the need to translate “religious” terms back into terms people can wrap their head around. Language can hide as much as it reveals, so we must constantly audit its meaning.
Religious blinders
It is forever the case that once a term becomes “religious” people stop using their brains and simply fall back to mere association when discussing it. This means that religion is almost always false, empty, vain, and performative, because people are unable to penetrate the verbiage of religion to find out what it’s really trying to convey. There is a truth in there, we just need to find it.
The believer says: “I’m supposed to worship. What is worship, though? Oh, that person over there is worshiping! How are they doing it? I see, they bow their head, fold their hands, close their eyes, say a prayer, stay quiet…”
Let me walk you through the concept of worship using principles and logic instead of association. As deception increases in this world and false religion will multiply, this might become a useful tool to keep in mind.
Is worship spiritual?
Despite popular assumption, “worship” is not inherently spiritual. You can worship many things without consciously trying to invoke a spiritual process. You probably have worshiped many things accidentally. And likewise, worshiping God is not a mystical process that is triggered by performing only specific rituals. In fact, rituals often become a hollow performance that destroys true worship.
(John 4:23) But a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such as these to worship Him.
There is a reason why God hates empty, performative worship, which is what Israel was doing for many generations. They lost the meaning of worship, and turned it into an exercise instead of a living reality.
I’m here to help you avoid that trap. The Father wants you to worship Him in spirit and truth, not in outward actions or rehearsed behaviors.
Kissing the ground
The Greek can help us slightly here, so let’s look at the Greek term used in the New Testament and then deduce the real underlying principle that is even more powerful.
proskuneó
definition: to do reverence to
(link to Strong’s Concordance page)
4352 proskynéō (from 4314 /prós, "towards" and kyneo, "to kiss") – properly, to kiss the ground when prostrating before a superior; to worship, ready "to fall down/prostrate oneself to adore on one's knees" (DNTT); to "do obeisance" (BAGD).
["The basic meaning of 4352 (proskynéō), in the opinion of most scholars, is to kiss. . . . On Egyptian reliefs worshipers are represented with outstretched hand throwing a kiss to (pros-) the deity" (DNTT, 2, 875,876).
4352 (proskyneō) has been (metaphorically) described as "the kissing-ground" between believers (the Bride) and Christ (the heavenly Bridegroom). While this is true, 4352 (proskynéō) suggests the willingness to make all necessary physical gestures of obeisance.]
Here we have an illustration bound up in a word that derives from kissing. The image of a person kissing the ground as an act of reverence is striking to our imaginations, because there is no such thing in our modern world. To kiss the very ground a person is standing on is an act of humility, obedience, and “lowering” of one’s self in order to show the relative superiority of the one being worshiped. Today, the principles of equality, rights, and empowerment of the individual make this kind of worship seem cruel and ego-driven. Who would even want that kind of pathetic, glorifying honor? It smacks of insecurity. Although certainly, for most of human history, there were many figures (or classes) who demanded this kind of reverence from their inferiors, and this is what kept society orderly.
Now notice that there is nothing religious about this act in the definition. People “worshiped” others all the time (and in reality, still do). In medieval centuries, many figures were called “Your Worship” as an honor, but this was not a religious title. People would bow, kneel, and show reverence for social superiors without being considered an idolator or having more than one god.
Inflation
Although the image of bending down and kissing the ground is powerful and useful when considering how to develop our relationship with God, it is also tied up in an ancient system that we’re unfamiliar with, so it doesn’t click. We don’t know how to act in front of royalty as peasants, or what it means to have a “lord” that “lords over” us. When we call God “Lord” we have no choice but to invoke it as a religious term, because we can’t apply a term that comes naturally to us.
I have noticed from reading the Bible that there is a principle of “weight” that God seems to care about. This is not a physical weight, but a mental or emotional capacity within the human heart. It is especially contrasted against “light things” or that which is “vain” and “puffed up.” Light things are meaningless, trivial, temporary, or detached from reality.
(Colossians 2:18) Let no one disqualify you, insisting on asceticism and worship of angels, going on in detail about visions, puffed up without reason by his sensuous mind,
(Isaiah 49:6) he says: “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to bring back the preserved of Israel; I will make you as a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.”
(2 Kings 3:18) And this is but a light thing in the sight of the LORD: he will deliver the Moabites also into your hand.
(Ezekiel 8:17) Then he said to me, “Have you seen this, O son of man? Is it too light a thing for the house of Judah to commit the abominations that they commit here, that they should fill the land with violence and provoke me still further to anger? Behold, they put the branch to their nose.
This is why the Israelites were instructed to eat unleavened bread, and why leaven is considered evil: because it caused bread to rise up and be puffy, which makes it look more impressive than it really is. It is a symbol of the human heart when it becomes arrogant, or inflated. God wants people to have no arrogance at all, and to be strictly realistic about how they are not worthy of honor and praise. We are supposed to hate things that are puffed up and inflated to seem bigger or better than they really are. We are not supposed to be impressed by showmanship, rhetoric, spectacle, or all the other ways that man creates the illusion of grandeur.
Worship is the feeling of giving weightiness to something.
Lighthearted vs. Worship
Why do people fall on their faces when they meet angels or God? Because the sense of gravity or weight overwhelms them. Gravity and seriousness are synonymous when speaking of the human heart.
Is is possible to be lighthearted and worship at the same time? I believe not.
Is it possible to joke about—or treat lightly—something that you worship? No.
We ought never to joke about God or treat His instructions lightly, as if they come and go and have no real bearing on reality. We ought never to jest about godly things, or be carefree in the face of mockery about them. It is very easy to get lured into a lighthearted attitude about religion, or to go along with the mockers and blasphemers, if you haven’t felt the weight of the Holy Spirit on your soul.
If we were truly in the power of the Holy Spirit, we would feel the intensity and seriousness of God’s reality. We would have no sense of humor about it. We would silence the fools and warn the mockers.
The logical conclusion
Let’s see where this logic leads us.
I contend that God watches us to see what we treat lightly or heavily, and that this has nothing to do with “religion” at all.
If we take something very seriously, so that we prioritize or care about it a great deal, we are giving it “weight” and in danger of “worshiping” it in a non-spiritual way. You do not need to invoke a spiritual concept to worship something, you just need to treat it with enough gravity to conform to its logic.
Now think about it: is God pleased if we “worship” Him lightly in a spiritual sense, giving Him great titles, honors, celebrations, rituals, etc. in our behaviors, but meanwhile take everything else in the world more seriously than Him?
Would God rather have no celebrations, rituals, temples, sacrifices, etc. but have a people whose hearts are “anchored” by Him, so that nothing else is taken more seriously? If we worship God in spirit and truth, we should be held down and nearly crushed by our awareness of Him, to the point where nothing else can budge us, or seems to have any importance at all in comparison to Him. By this we are stabilized, grounded, and lowered down to the point where we, like those who encounter the divine in the scriptures, fall on our faces and kiss the ground. In other words, worship is not the performative act of obedience, or even the conscious acknowledgment of their superiority to you, but the inward gravity we feel towards the object that causes us to (emotionally/spiritually) collapse and be struck by awe and have no lightness in our soul about it.
Nothing can budge us in this situation, or prioritize itself above it. All of it is “a light thing” by comparison. Death, life, suffering, prison, demons, wars — what are they compared to God? Nothing at all. There is only one we should “worship” and it is the Father, and by extension His image, representation, and Word, Jesus Christ.
(Matthew 11:28) Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Jesus takes away the “heaviness” of this life, because he replaces it with the Father, who we cannot know without him. And once we have the Father as the ultimate “heaviness” in our life, everything else is vanity by comparison.
This world is a joke. God is what we should take serious.
Great article. Very well put. However, I take exception to just one thing.
I think the Bible is very funny in some places. I think God has a very good sense of humor. And I think he wants us to have a good sense of humor too. Sure, there is a time to laugh, as well as a time to refrain from laughing. But God is pretty funny. Peter acts the fool in the Gospels and makes me laugh at times. Some of the prophets in the Old Testament ended up in some pretty funny predicaments. The Greek Philosopher's reaction to Paul in Athens makes me laugh.
So, I get what you are saying, but maybe you went a little too far.
In 605 BC the apostate synagogue and nation of Israel were taken away into captivity by Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar. Babylon’s captive Jewish synagogue assembled for the dedication of the glorious golden image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. In weighty heart felt reverence they stood before it with idolizing admiration. Then the herald loudly proclaimed, “Nations and peoples of every language, this is what you are commanded to do: As soon as you hear the sound of the horn, flute, zither, lyre, harp, pipe playing Babylon’s anthem, you shall bow down and worship the sacred image that King Nebuchadnezzar has set up. Whoever refuses to worship, bowing their heart’s allegiance to the King’s golden image, will immediately be thrown into a blazing furnace.” Therefore, as soon as they heard the patriotic music of Babylon’s national anthem, all the nations and peoples of every language bowed down in allegiance and ecumenically worshiped the nation’s sacred image that King Nebuchadnezzar had set up. Daniel 3:1-30
Three righteous Jews were set over the secular affairs of the province of Babylon—Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego. They paid no attention to the King’s commandment. They could not idolatrously serve the will of Babylon’s god by bowing/pledging their heart’s democratic allegiance in idolatrous worship to its beloved sacred image (i.e. Uncle Sam’s sacred Masonic image—Old Glory) . Faithfully taking up their martyr’s cross they were cast into Babylon’s fiery furnace where they worshipped and communed with the Creator of the Universe.