Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Getting worship right really matters. Of course I’m fully aware that plenty will agree with me but their vision of “right” will not cohere with mine. It’s a challenge we have to work through. But, even so, it does mean that if we want to reform our communities we start by reforming the worship of the church.
We see this in the way it’s structured; it’s built as a copy of the Garden of Eden: a mountaintop land with trees. The Temple is on the apex of a mountain, it’s full of trees (the lampstands and the decorations), and it’s decorated with fruit (all those pomegranates, notice the connection between the Song of Songs and the Temple).
It’s also a model of the world, with layers. We find the ‘sea’ on the outside (the large replacement for the tabernacle’s laver), then an outer court with the altar, then inside the temple, and then into the holiest place with the Ark.
The Temple moves from the chaos of the sea, to the courtyard where sacrifice is made representing the land, into the heavens and then the third heaven in the holiest place. It’s a microcosm of the whole world.
More than that, it’s a microcosm of the whole of reality as it’s supposed to be. It’s a copy of the new creation, or the old creation before it fell at least.
The Church works the same way, except it actually is the new creation (2 Corinthians 5). Not the New Heavens and the New Earth, not yet, but the in-breaking of the New into the Old because Christians are new creation and the Church is the new society. The local church is supposed to be a mirror of true reality, a blueprint for the Kingdom; she’s a microcosm, a miniature cosmos.
As an aside, if the church has deeply hurt you, this sounds like nonsense. Believe me, I understand. We aren’t good at being a mirror, but that means we’ve been terrible mirrors not that we don’t reflect the new creation. I think this concept intensifies how bad it is when churches get things terribly wrong.
This is why Paul is so concerned about ‘order’ in worship (1 Corinthians 12-14), he’s concerned that worship appropriately reflect the reality of the world. It’s as we encounter true reality in Christian worship each Sunday that we start to be reordered—or as I would say ‘restoried’—into people who live like the new creation and then restory/reorder their own worlds (households, initially) into the image of the kingdom.