One Way Is As Good As Another

It’s a modern-day adage that doesn’t seem to get many challenges, “It doesn’t matter how you worship as long as you worship God”. It is a way we can make all religions equal if not if doctrine or practice at least in result. Besides God doesn’t care how a person comes to him as long as he comes to him. Right?

Let consider a passage a command given by Moses to the Israelites:

"These are the statutes and the judgments which you shall carefully observe in the land which the LORD, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess as long as you live on the earth. "You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess serve their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. "You shall tear down their altars and smash their sacred pillars and burn their Asherim with fire, and you shall cut down the engraved images of their gods and obliterate their name from that place. "You shall not act like this toward the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 12:1-4

Here God tells his followers to do exactly what he has told them to do. Part of that was to wipe out the people and the practices that were taking place in the land he was about to give them. Tear down the idols, burn their places of worship, forget everything they did and how they did it. Sounds pretty harsh, doesn’t it? Then, they are told don’t act that way toward God. What does that mean?

When we look at the next verse we see the train of thought. “But you shall seek the LORD at the place which the LORD your God will choose from all your tribes, to establish His name there for His dwelling, and there you shall come.”(Deuteronomy 12:5). Those punished people had worship their God however they pleased. They made it up whatever they wanted. God didn’t like that. A made-up god can be worshiped in any made-up way, but the true God must be worship HIS way.

Failure to worship God by the way he tells us to worship him is an insult to the very nature of who God is. The ultimate creator and power in the universe deserves ultimate respect. Just doing whatever is worthy of him. You shouldn’t treat God that way.

So then, shouldn’t it be a part of the worship of Him to seek out the way He wants to be worshiped? God seeks to destroy false worship. That’s false worship made false by the object of worship or by the means of worship. We never want to be a people that think whatever is good enough for God.

He deserves so much more.

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