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.
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Having corrupted natures we can’t reform ourselves. We can’t even choose Christ as our Savior unless the Father makes “us alive together with Christ” (Ephesians 2:5). By God’s grace sinfulness can be pardoned and weakened but not destroyed in this life. Even born-again people sin because they are still sinners till the day they are fully redeemed in glory.

One of the first questions friends ask parents of newborns is, “Does she look like mom or dad?” Often it’s hard to say; kids inherit traits from both their parents.
Children share more than their parents’ looks. They also acquire their nature. “When Adam had lived 130 years, he fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image, and named him Seth” (Gen. 5:3). That sentence is both happy and sad. Seth was a gift from God, a new start. But Seth was born to sinners; the likeness he now shared with his father and mother was marred. And so the human story has continued.
To know ourselves we need to understand what happened to our first parents when they tried to make their own way in the world contrary to God’s truth.
The First Sin (6.1–3)
The event of the first sin is narrated in Genesis three. Satan, taking the form of a serpent, seduced and deceived Eve (1 Tim. 2:14). Eve disobeyed God and ate fruit from a forbidden tree, as did Adam, following his wife.
The Bible doesn’t explain how it was possible for Adam and Eve to sin. But we know they had a truly free will; they were not forced into disobedience. The serpent was “more crafty than any other beast of the field” (Gen. 3:1). But the father of lies (John 8:44) still has creaturely limitations. Today too if we resist Satan he will flee from us (James 4:7; Matt. 4:11). Even fallen humans can rule over sin (Gen. 4:7). Moreover Adam and Eve had one rule to respect. They clearly understood God’s word and could have lived by it (Matt. 4:4). Finally, Eve had a partner. She should have asked Adam, the master of the garden, to help her withstand the devil. She didn’t have to stand alone (see Eccl. 4:12). Despite every advantage to obey God and retain their innocence, our first parents disobeyed.
Even this catastrophic first sin, “God was pleased, according to his wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to his own glory.” Just how sin is part of God’s plan doesn’t have to make sense to us.
Our first parent’s sin had immediate tragic consequences. From a plain read of Scripture clearly something happened to the relationship between God and his first people after their sin. Hiding from God was something entirely new and totally unexplainable apart from disobedience. God had warned that death would come to earth if they ever transgressed; and it had. Humans had become “dead in sin.” Evil now defined them (see Gen. 6:5). So it was no longer natural for man to commune with God. As further evidence of their fallenness their eyes were truly opened (Gen. 3:7); they now knew shame, fear, and conflict.
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Christian, you are a runner in a race. The race you are running is the most important race you will ever run. You have everything to lose if you quit, but everything and more if you finish. Therefore, run to win. Run together to the end. Keep your eyes on the prize and run with confidence. Run without any burdens and discard entanglements. Finally, look to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of your faith.

One of the many lessons I learned from my cross-country ski coach was to keep my head up and look ahead when skiing, particularly when skiing up a steep hill. Going up a sharp incline is hard work, and it is natural to look down when you are tired. The problem, however, is that looking down leads you to focus on the pain and impedes your forward movement. By looking up and ahead, you are in a better mental and physical position to drive yourself forward up the hill.
In a similar fashion, when we run the Christian race, we need to look up and ahead to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith (Heb. 12:2). By encouraging us to look to Jesus, the author of Hebrews is not saying that we should merely think of Jesus, but that we ought to grasp the practical significance of who Jesus is and what he has done.
Specifically, what should we think about when we think about Jesus? When we look to Jesus, what should we see?
Our Trailblazer
First, we should see our trailblazer. The author of Hebrews says that Jesus is the founder of our faith. The word “founder,” which is also used in Hebrews 2:10, may be translated as “pioneer.” The context in Hebrews strongly suggests the idea of a pioneer, who lays down a path for others to follow. In some of the cross-country ski races I attended, the racetrack had not been set by the morning of the race. This might have happened because of a lack of equipment or because of a heavy snowfall the night before. In such situations, it would be a serious handicap to race at the front because you would have to blaze the trail yourself, which would require a lot more effort. To make the race fair, two or three non-racing skiers would ski the course early in the morning to lay the track for everyone else to follow. They would be the trail blazers.
Similarly, Jesus is our trail blazer who has paved the way to God for us.
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