There is an idea in circulation that has become increasingly
popular, and it is that God needs or is somehow validated by our attention, our acts of worship or our fawning, groveling subservience.
In this view, man speaks well of God or prostrates himself
before him because God has a well-developed taste for burnt offerings and
ritual; because he wants to rub in our faces how magnificent he is and how
horrible human beings are by comparison.
American physicist Steven Weinberg puts it this way:
“He’s a god ... obsessed [with] the degree to which people worship him and anxious to punish with the most awful torments those who don’t worship him in the right way … that is the traditional God and he’s a terrible character. I don’t like him.”
Perhaps the reason this “traditional God” makes such a
terrible character is because he is fictional. But the late Christopher
Hitchens felt much the same as Professor Weinberg. He asked:
“How much self-respect must be sacrificed in order that one may squirm continually in an awareness of one’s own sin?”
Agreed. If self-respect is the be-all and end-all, then
Ezekiel, for example, certainly failed to display any.
Ezekiel and
Self-Respect
Confronted with the appearance of the likeness of the glory
of the Lord, Ezekiel fell on his face. But Ezekiel’s prostration was a by-product of overwhelming awe, not some
contrived religious display designed to placate his deity.
This was not a mere gesture of respect. It was not something
he did ritualistically, as Muslims do; he did not ease himself down to his knees, then bend forward to touch his
forehead to the ground. If his experience was anything like that of John the apostle, all the strength went out of his muscles and he fell like a puppet
with its strings cut.
Notice that the Lord didn’t hurl Ezekiel to the ground; that’s
not the way he deals with his servants. But the overwhelming splendor of his
glory produced in Ezekiel a very natural (though rather drastic) physical response.
If we fail to do likewise when we worship, it is only because we have not seen
what Ezekiel saw. Sometimes, sadly, we fail to see anything at all. But if the
Lord were to suddenly appear in the middle of our workday, with or without
cherubim, I guarantee you there would be an epidemic of bruised foreheads —
or worse.
Who is this Character the Atheists Don’t Like?
Mr. Hitchens may have felt that the traditional weekly religious
rituals with which he was brought up are more than a little contrived and that
they rob the worshiper of self-respect. But when we read the accounts of men
who encountered the Living God — Ezekiel, John, Paul, Peter, Moses or
Abraham, among others — we find nothing contrived about their responses
and little or nothing imposed on them. Rather, confronted with the sudden
vision of Perfection, they respond spontaneously and appropriately.
And Professor Weinberg? Well, he paints the picture of a
fussy, anxious and obsessive God micromanaging the offerings of men. But this
is not the God we find in the Old Testament. The God who gave Israel the specifics
of how he was to be approached did not do it in a vacuum. For centuries he kept
his distance from humanity, leaving mankind minimally obligated to heaven and
intervening only when their actions became intolerably wicked: the Tower of
Babel, the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah. In the absence of God, man found less worthy things to
worship and it was in their acts of devotion to these figments that a peculiar and distinctive
evil evolved.
Worship and Sacrifice
Child sacrifice is not a human evil limited in time, place
or even scale. The Carthaginians did it. The Incas, Aztecs and pre-Islamic Arabs did it, as did Ugandans and South
Africans at various points in history. The Canaanites definitely did it. And of course child sacrifice is not limited to so-called primitive man: having
done away with the notion of God, our present social order tops them all by
sacrificing its children on the altar of self.
Weinberg’s and Hitchens’ pseudo-deities have emotional
problems or want to make a point at the expense of man’s ego. But the God of
Israel gave his Law (with all the details and specifics Professor Weinberg so
dislikes) to a people seemingly compelled by their own natures to engage in worship, and frequently disposed to do it in the vilest of
possible ways.
Let me say this again: God did not force a nation of amiable agnostics into the ritualized worship
of Jehovah. He gave curatives and directives to keep his people from
worshiping false gods. At its best, such worship is vain; at its worst, it was a recipe for a public horror show. This is a people who, by the way, chose of their own volition to make a covenant with God and to enter into a relationship with him. Every single “torment” that Israel endured was a product of their own repeated and deliberate choices, with every consequence of failure to live up to the covenant spelled out clearly up front.
Even with the Law that God had given, Israel drifted again and again into imitation of the practices of the nations they had displaced in Canaan.
Try to imagine how bad they would have been without it.
Ritual and
Relationship
Does God need our groveling devotion or the food provided by burnt offerings to feel good about
himself? “If I were hungry, I would not tell you,” the psalmist says, “for the
world and its fullness are mine”.
Do ritual and even repeated sacrifices on his behalf please
God in and of themselves? Not without the correct attitude of heart. Isaiah says:
“When you come to appear before me,
who has required of you this trampling of my courts?
Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and Sabbath and the calling of convocations —
I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly.”
Human beings have always worshiped. They have always
sacrificed. It is in our DNA, apparently: take away deity and we worship ourselves. In contrast, God needs no validation
from us, but is gracious in allowing us to have fellowship with him provided we
approach him on his terms and in accordance with his nature. If coming face to
face with the glory of God knocks us off our feet occasionally, that is the peculiar dynamic of a relationship between Creator and created. We are not equals and
never will be, no matter how highly man likes to think of himself.
And yet God still desires to fellowship with us. Mr.
Hitchens and Mr. Weinberg would not notice this or care, but when Ezekiel fell
on his face in the presence of God, the Spirit actually set him back on his feet. More than once. When John passed out, the Son of God gently laid a hand on him and said, “Fear not”. And then they had a conversation.
Keeling over in awe is not the worst place to start, but God is looking for worshipers who worship in spirit and in truth, not those merely engaged in obsequious,
fetishistic ritualism.
If the worship that atheists mock and deplore is encrusted with ritual, it is not God who first introduced ritual, nor is it he who perpetuates it.
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