Praising God in Zion

Announcer: The people of God had completed their worship. They were leaving Jerusalem and on their way home, but thoughts and memories of the beauty of that moment remained in their hearts as they went on their journey. Already, they were thinking of their return to the Holy City.
Announcer: Welcome to The Bible Study Hour, a radio and Internet broadcast with Dr. James Boice, preparing you to think and act biblically.
Announcer: Temple worship was a beautiful and sacred privilege in the lives of the Israelites. But why is it that so little of that kind of passionate praise is seen in us today? Why is it that so many Christians are committed to pleasing self, rather than honoring God?
Announcer: Join Dr. Boice as he studies Psalm 134, and the sad state of worship in the modern church.
Dr. James Boice: I suppose it would be very unusual for anyone to be part of a Christian congregation for very long, without becoming acquainted with the first question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism and its answer.
Dr. James Boice: That's probably the most recited question and answer of any catechism in the Christian church. You know how the question goes. It asks, "What is the chief end of man?"
Dr. James Boice: And then the answer is this, "Man's chief end is to glorify God and to enjoy Him forever." It tells us that the chief end of man is to worship God. But do we? That's the question we really want to ask today. Do we even really know what it means to worship God, let alone really do it?
Dr. James Boice: John Stott is the Rector Emeritus of All Souls Church, Langham Place in London, and he wrote some years ago, "Christians believe that true worship is the highest and noblest activity of which man by the grace of God is capable."
Dr. James Boice: That's true, but Stott's statement also highlights what is also probably the greatest problem, namely that very little true worship actually happens among God's people at least in our day. Millions of believers, in my judgment, have forgotten what it really means to worship God.
Dr. James Boice: Now, that's an introduction to Psalm 134, the last of the Psalms of Ascent, because it is about worship. It's also the highest point in these Psalms of Ascent.
Dr. James Boice: Now I want to begin by asking this question, "Who are the servants who minister by night in God's temple?" And the answer is, the priests of the Levites, not the people in general.
Dr. James Boice: Now at first glance, that seems strange, because you would expect the people themselves to be talking about worshipping God. But it's not strange when we reflect on the position that this Psalm occupies in the collection.
Dr. James Boice: You have to understand that the people who have made their way up to Jerusalem for worship at one of these three annual feasts have now completed their pilgrimage and they're returning home. They're leaving the temple and the worship and all of these splendid things that they enjoyed when they were there in Jerusalem. They won't be able to worship God in His temple again until their next journey.
Dr. James Boice: But you see, as they leave the city, they're encouraged to know that the priests will be there. They're staying behind as it were, to represent them at the temple, and that the priests will be worshipping God there continually.
Dr. James Boice: There's a lot in the Old Testament about the duty of these Levites. In First Chronicles chapter 9 and chapter 23 and chapter 25, there are important descriptions of the Levites' task. And it's also referred to in the book of Deuteronomy in chapter 10. They were in charge of the temple worship, and it's explicitly said in one of these texts that they were to do it day and night.
Dr. James Boice: In other words, the worship of God was to be continuous. Now that's the way it is. So it has been, and so it will be. God always has His people who are worshipping Him. There have been sad periods in the church when there have been very few worshippers.
Dr. James Boice: And there are very sad times like our own where the people of God hardly know what it is to worship. Nevertheless, God has His worshippers and they are continually worshipping Him. Charles Haddon Spurgeon wrote, "When night settles down on a church, the Lord has His watchers and holy ones still guarding His truth, and these must not be discouraged, but must bless the Lord even when the darkest hours draw on."
Dr. James Boice: We remember, for example, that it's when they were in a dungeon, having been beaten by many stripes in chains, that Paul and Silas sang praises to God at night. And it's while they were singing praises to God in the hours of the night that the foundations of the prison were shaken and the doors flew open.
Dr. James Boice: It was also true during the dark ages, as we call them, when the monks in their cloisters, the various hours of canonical worship, 'round the clock, praised God in the cloister. And it's the same in our own time. God has His people who are worshipping Him even now. Are you one?
Dr. James Boice: Now, I need to say that although God does have those who know Him and know how to worship Him and do worship Him, ours is nevertheless an age when that is very scarce. Why is it that so little of the worship that characterized the people of God in past ages is seen among us? Well, I think there are several reasons.
Dr. James Boice: First of all, ours is a trivial age, and the church has been deeply affected by this pervasive triviality. Ours is not a great age for thinking. Our age has no heroes. Our age trivializes everything and it is also a technological age, and the ultimate objective of our popular technology is entertainment.
Dr. James Boice: If you watch television much, you're aware of how things have trivialized, how in the advertisements, for example, the greatest products of Western art, either visual art or musical art, have been trivialized in order to sell things. You would think that you get people to buy more cars if somehow you have Mozart playing in the background. Or if toothpaste is being sold against the backdrop of some great painting in a museum. And sometimes it's even stranger than that, and it carries over even into religious things.
Dr. James Boice: Ours is also, secondly, a self-absorbed, man-centered age, and the church has become sadly, even treasonously, self-centered. Worship means being concerned with God and the attributes of God. It's knowing, acknowledging and praising God for being who He is and accomplishing what He has accomplished. But you can't do that if all you are doing in church is thinking about yourself.
Dr. James Boice: We've seen something like a Copernican revolution in the evangelical church's understanding of worship in our lifetime. In the past, true worship may not have taken place all the time or even very often, but at least people knew what it was.
Dr. James Boice: Sometimes it was crowded out by the church's program. That's what A.W. Tozer wrote about years ago in that little book, *The Pursuit of God*. Here's what he saw. He was writing in 1948, 50 years ago.
Dr. James Boice: "Thanks to our splendid Bible societies and to other effective agencies for the dissemination of the word, there are today many millions of people who hold right opinions, probably more than ever before in the history of the church. Yet I wonder if there was ever a time when true spiritual worship was at a lower ebb.
Dr. James Boice: To great sections of the church, the art of worship has been lost entirely, and in its place has come that strange and foreign thing called the program. This word has been borrowed from the stage and applied with sad wisdom to the type of public service which now passes for worship among us."
Dr. James Boice: "And yet as I say, in Tozer's day, they at least understood what worship is, and today we've lost even that in large segments of the church." R. Kent Hughes is the senior minister of the College Church in Wheaton. And I think he was exactly right when he wrote this: "The unspoken but increasingly common assumption of today's Christendom is that worship is primarily for us, to meet our needs."
Dr. James Boice: Such worship services are entertainment focused, and the worshippers are uncommitted spectators who are silently grading the performance. From this perspective, preaching becomes a homiletics of consensus, preaching to felt needs, man's conscious agenda instead of God's.
Dr. James Boice: Such preaching is always topical, never textual. Biblical information is minimized and the sermons are short and full of stories, anything and everything that is suspected of making the marginal attender uncomfortable is removed from the service. Taken to the nth degree, this philosophy instills a tragic self-centeredness, that is, everything is judged by how it affects man. This terribly corrupts one's theology.
Dr. James Boice: Well, that's right, but it terribly corrupts our worship too, because we cannot focus on God and His attributes, praising Him for them, if all we are really doing is thinking about ourselves.
Dr. James Boice: Now thirdly, our age is oblivious of God, and the church is barely better, to judge from its so-called worship services. The tragedy here, you see, is not that Christians, at least in evangelical churches, deny essential biblical doctrines. They don't do that. They're not heretics. They believe them in some way, but the problem is that it doesn't seem to make any real difference in their lives.
Dr. James Boice: This is the burden of that very disturbing book that I referred to many times before by David Wells, entitled, *No Place for Truth* or *Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology*. His point is that American Evangelicalism is either dead or dying as a religious force. He's not suggesting that it's dying as a sociological presence. It isn't, there are lots of churches, many people in them, large budgets.
Dr. James Boice: But he is suggesting that it's dying as a religious force, and the reason for that is that evangelicals have forgotten their theology. They're no longer characterized by truth as they were at one time in the past. They are simply drifting along with the surrounding culture and are mostly indistinguishable from it, which of course is exactly what George Gallup has been telling us for years in the Gallup polls when they deal with matters of religion.
Dr. James Boice: The symptoms are all there, but the decline is apparent. What's the cause? Well, the answer is the inconsequentiality of truth in our lives or as Wells expresses it, the weightlessness of God in our experience. We don't reject God, it's just that He doesn't matter very much. We live as if He were non-existent.
Dr. James Boice: And what that must mean in the final analysis is that we really don't know God at all. And if we don't know God, how can we possibly begin to worship Him?
Dr. James Boice: Now we want to talk about a solution. How can we find a solution to this deplorable lack of worship in the church today, especially in the evangelical church? We can approach it in various ways. I've already suggested one. If one of the problems is that we don't know God, that's the point at which we have to begin. We have to come to know God. And the only way we can come to know God is on the basis of the biblical revelation. God has made Himself known in Scripture. If you want to know God, you have to study the Bible.
Dr. James Boice: And so the obvious place to start would be to shut off the television, and begin to read the Bible and to study books about the Bible, in order that you might know something that is not trivial, but something that is weighty and makes a difference for eternity in your lives forever.
Dr. James Boice: But now, having said that, I don't think that that's what comes to us from the Psalm. It's true enough. And we've studied it extensively when we were studying Psalm 119. That's all about the need to study the Bible. If you don't know the Bible, you don't know God. If you don't know God, you're not worshipping God. If you're not worshipping God, you're not fulfilling the chief end for which you were made.
Dr. James Boice: But that's not what Psalm 144 is saying. What comes to us from this Psalm is the responsibility of the appointed ministers of God to worship God themselves, and by doing so, to show God's people how to worship Him and to lead them in worship.
Dr. James Boice: You see, there's no mistaking the fact that congregations learn from their minister's examples and they will either worship well or fail to worship based on the pattern they see. How will people ever come to learn to praise God if all they discover in church is a minister who is striving hard to be a stand-up comic, and keep people entertained with funny stories, whose chief goal in the service is to make people go away feeling good?
Dr. James Boice: Well, what must ministers do? The reference to the Levites in this Psalm points us in the right direction and it's a sort of thing that we're going to explore as we go on with the other Psalms. First of all, ministers must lead in prayer.
Dr. James Boice: Now that comes directly from the Psalm, because that's what the words, "Lift up your hands in the sanctuary" in verse 2 mean. That was a characteristic posture for prayer in the ancient world and it's proved by First Timothy 2:8, where Paul is writing to Timothy. He says, "I want men everywhere to lift up holy hands in prayer." It's a meaningful gesture because it does by gestures what ought actually to be happening in the mind and heart, namely that we are directing our thoughts and our minds up to God, seeking whatever blessings and gifts may come from Him.
Dr. James Boice: Now I attend scores of evangelical services across the country and even around the world in the course of a normal year, and one thing I have noticed is the striking absence of prayer. It used to be that there were pastoral prayers, significant prayers in the middle of the service when ministers actually led the people in contemplating the attributes of God, seeking His blessing, confessing sin, thanking Him for salvation, and then laying requests before Him. But I find all of that disappearing in the churches today.
Dr. James Boice: I find that there really are only two times in the service where there is any prayer, and that is hardly significant. One is at the beginning. I don't know why we begin that way, and I have noticed even that is disappearing. Because quite often, you have the entertainer, he sort of has the role of Ed McMahon on The Tonight Show, walking out to warm up the audience, and you don't even have much prayer. But sometimes you have prayer there, and then there's always prayer when the offering is taken. And I do understand that.
Dr. James Boice: Because it requires the supernatural power of God to get these stingy people to give their money to support the work of the church. But whatever happened to the pastoral prayers? Pastoral prayers are gone. There's no adoration of God, no confession of sin, no thanks to God for what He has already abundantly given.
Dr. James Boice: And if we need to make a supplication in the service, if Mrs. Jones is having an operation, and we need to pray for her, there's no place really to pray for her except tacking it on to the offering prayer, which I've seen done many, many times.
Dr. James Boice: Many things rightly go on in church, but what's happening if we are not praying? We're not worshipping God, certainly. We are actually focusing on ourselves and on our needs exclusively. Good ministers must lead the way in prayer, and thus teach the people how to direct their deepest thoughts to the Almighty.
Dr. James Boice: Now secondly, ministers must read and teach the Bible. That's not said explicitly in Psalm 134, but the reference to the Levites provides it, because it was well understood that this was the Levites' chief task. They were to study the Bible and then they were to teach it to the people. We have a great example of that in Nehemiah.
Dr. James Boice: After reassembling the fallen walls of Jerusalem, Nehemiah brought Ezra, who was a priest and a scribe, that is a Levite, to the large open square before the Watergate to read from the Book of the Law from daybreak until noon in the hearing of all the people. That is about six hours.
Dr. James Boice: And what we're told in the eighth chapter of Nehemiah is that all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law. The people lifted their hands in prayer, saying, "Amen, Amen," and they bowed with their faces to the ground, after which we're told, "The Levites instructed the people in the law while the people were standing there."
Dr. James Boice: Then the text says, "They read from the Book of the Law, making it clear and giving the meaning, so that the people could understand what was being said." That's a wonderful picture of the duties of ministers to read the law, to make it clear, and to give the meaning.
Dr. James Boice: But today, what's happening today in the evangelical church is very little Bible exposition, even very little Bible reading. Instead, sermons focus on what feels good to the people. If there is any Scripture reading at all, it tends to be just one or two short verses before the sermon and it's often only a pretext for the sermon.
Dr. James Boice: What's happening in services where neither prayers nor serious Bible exposition occur? We used to say that in prayer we speak to God, and through the Bible God speaks to us. But what's going on if we are not speaking to God and God is not having the opportunity to speak to us because we neglect the Bible? Whatever is happening, it's not worship.
Dr. James Boice: Today, ministers need to recover the priority of the apostles. You recall in the sixth chapter of Acts, when they were confronted by all the difficulties that were emerging in a growing congregation, administrative matters and so on, how they responded. They said, "It would not be right for us to neglect the ministry of the word in order to wait on tables. Therefore, choose seven men among you who are known to be full of the Spirit and of wisdom. We'll turn this responsibility over to them, and we will give ourselves to prayer and the ministry of the word."
Dr. James Boice: It would be probably the single greatest factor in the revival of the evangelical church in our day if ministers were just determined to emulate the apostles at that point.
Dr. James Boice: Now number three, ministers must oversee the music. What about the music? Today, in many churches, this is turned over to a minister of music who often has no biblical or theological training, and who chooses the service music for its emotional impact on the people rather than for its value as an element of the genuine worship of God.
Dr. James Boice: Now the function of the Levites should help us here, because one of the responsibilities that was assigned to the Levites was the direction and even the performance of the music. This was a task that had been given to them by David. It's described in First Chronicles 25. They were to direct the music, employing such instruments as cymbals, lyres, and harps. And there were a lot of Levites doing that. There were 288, to be exact, in the time of David.
Dr. James Boice: What kind of music did they have? We don't know. We don't know anything about the music itself, but we know something about the content. What was the content of the hymns that they were singing? We know it very well because we have it. It's what we've been studying. It's the Psalms. What wonderful content. What edifying compositions.
Dr. James Boice: Now, today's ministers probably can't perform the music. At least I can't perform the music. But they do have some responsibility for what actually goes on musically in the churches. Instead of what is biblically corrupt, they need to see that what is sung is biblically correct and serves the proper function of directing the thoughts, the minds, and the emotions of the people to God.
Dr. James Boice: And then finally, ministers must reverence God. They must make clear in every aspect of their lives and speech that they hold God in solemn regard and are never flippant where spiritual matters are concerned. The Levites modeled this for us in the way they served and guarded God's house. They prepared the flour and wine, the oil, the incense and spices for the temple services, and they oversaw the purification of these items, First Chronicles 23, 28 and 29.
Dr. James Boice: We need to recapture something of their reverence for God and His holiness in our day. Most ministers act and encourage the people to act as if God were their buddy, the kind of buddy down the street that you'd like to invite in with you to watch the Super Bowl and drink beer and eat peanuts and have a good time.
Dr. James Boice: Well, I know Jesus associated with the common people. I wouldn't suggest for a moment that He'd refuse to watch the Super Bowl, though He would probably refuse to watch it on Sunday. But you see, when people came face to face with Jesus in His day, the normal reaction was not to say, "Oh, what a good guy He is!" But rather to say, as Peter did, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." You see and You are the Holy One of God. That needs to be recaptured by the people of God and by the ministers of God.
Dr. James Boice: Now what will happen if we do take God seriously and worship Him reverently as He needs to be worshipped? Well, the answer is here in the Psalm, it's where it ends. The first two verses talk about the duty of the ministers. The last verse has a great promise. "May the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth, bless you from Zion."
Dr. James Boice: That's not a blessing that's just tacked on, as it were, like a little doxology thrown in at the end of the service. It's intimately connected with what has gone before, which is very evident in the Hebrew, though not so much in the English, because the same word that is translated "praise" in verses 1 and 2, is the word that is translated "bless" in verse 3.
Dr. James Boice: So the idea is clear. It's this, if we will praise God or bless God as we should, then God will bless us. In other words, it's a matter of priorities. If you get priorities ordered right in your life, and priorities for creatures made in the image of God concern the worship of God, then the blessing which comes from God will follow. It's what Jesus said. He said, "Seek the Lord and His glory first of all, and then all these other things will be added to you."
Dr. James Boice: The only truly ultimate goal of any Christian is to bless God and be blessed by Him. In other words, as I said at the beginning, to glorify God. That's half of it, and to enjoy Him forever. That's the other half. So let's do it. Praise God from whom all blessings flow. And the people respond to that by saying, "Amen."
Dr. James Boice: Our Father, we thank You that we've had a chance to study something about worship through this Psalm, and we would ask You to bless it to us, not only as a result of our study in this hour, but also as we go on from this point to study what it really is to worship You in the remainder of the Psalter. And grant that we might grow. We don't want to come merely to go through religious motions, but we want to grow as Your people in the knowledge and the love of Jesus Christ our Savior. We pray in His name. Amen.
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