Thursday, April 11, 2024

Old Liturgies not Sinful

When you say "worship", what do you mean by the word "worship"? That English word is very plastic, and means different things to different people, sometimes meaning different things between two uses of it within the same sentence.

I suspect you mean "liturgy", the actions performed, usually in a corporate gathering, to honor God.

If that's what you mean by "worship", and you believe that "old testament worship" is now sinful, I remind you that in the beginning of the book of Acts, the disciples were praising God in the Jewish temple on a daily basis, as Jews (they are stunned to discover, years later, that Gentiles can be Christians), right in the middle of the choirs and the instruments and the incense-burning and the animal sacrifices and all other of the "old testament" things of "worship". And the Apostles do not say a word against any of this, nor do they move their new congregation away from it.

I remind you also that nearer the end of the book of Acts, the Apostle-trained elders of the very first church of Christ speak approvingly of the tens of thousands of Jesus believers who remain zealous for the law of Moses and their Jewish customs, and they urge Paul to prove he is one of them by "worshiping" according to the "old testament", which he is glad to do, so that they can see that he is not teaching them to forsake the"old testament", but that he too "walks according to the law". He then proceeds to "worship" according to the "old testament", which included undergoing temple purification rituals and making animal sacrifices to end a voluntary "old testament" vow (which Paul had taken two chapters earlier).

In another place Paul writes that faith does not nullify law, but rather that he establishes law, which he says is holy and righteous and good.

It is absolutely correct to point out that the new covenant is better than the old, but that does not magically make the old covenant sinful, the way we have often been taught. The Jewish Christians continued to observe those "old testament" ways of "worship" after the coming of the new covenant, and they did so with God's approval. God never said that those "old covenant" ways of "worship" were now unclean; what God has cleansed, we should not call "unclean".

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