Friday: Further Thought ~ Worshiping the Creator

Further Thought:

The worship of God is central in the Scriptures and has always been a bone of contention to humans and to God’s people. Throughout the Old Testament the prophets reprimanded the people of God for worshiping other gods or for worshiping the Lord using the worship practices of the pagan world.

Image © Stan Myers from GoodSalt.com

The conflict between worshiping God or worshiping other gods belongs to the very center of the cosmic conflict and came accompanied by disregard to the law of God.

“Worship addresses the most fundamental aspect of human existence in that it has to do with what humans as living creatures should do when confronted by the presence of the Creator. … Only those who are alive can worship the Lord; the dead cannot praise and worship Him. … The One who created us invites us to surrender our lives in the act of worship in order to receive them back from Him enriched, to be used for the benefit of others. Worship has to do with the very nature and purpose of our existence and with the need for having a center outside of ourselves that frees us from selfishness. Not to worship God is to lose our reason for existence; it is to exist in a state of disorientation and therefore to be dying, heading to total extinction because we are disconnected from the very source of life.” — Ángel Manuel Rodríguez, The Closing of the Cosmic Conflict: Role of the Three Angels’ Messages, unpublished manuscript, p. 42.

Discussion Questions:

Dwell more on this idea of why, in a fallen world, being created by God is not enough. Why do we need the promise of Redemption, as well?
Think about some experience in which you unmistakably saw the power of God work in your life; that is, in a way that showed you God’s love for you personally. And then dwell on the fact that this is God who created the entire cosmos! And this God loves you enough to care about your life. Why should this reality be not only comforting but humbling, as well?
If evolution were true, think about how we would be called to worship a Creator who used billions of years of death, violence, destruction, suffering, and mass extinction in order to create us, while at the same time giving us a completely different story in Genesis about how we were created. And yet, we are supposed to worship Him? Worship Him for what? For lying to us for thousands of years about how we got here to begin with?

<–Thursday

Amen!