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The Hewn Stones of Contemporary Worship

Posted by on January 27, 2013 in General

If you make an altar of stone for Me, you shall not build it of cut stones, for if you wield your tool on it, you will profane it. – Exodus 20:25

This and other verses in this chapter have to do with the public worship of God. They concern the regulations or rules for public worship. The altar was not to be made of cut, or hewn stones. Time, expense and effort was not to be applied by dressing up the altar. The stones were to be simple, plain, unpolished, not carved into elaborate figures or made to look attractive in any way. Later, God would forbid the stones to even be painted.

You see, idolaters of the day did all of these things to their altars. They made their public worship attractive to others.

Yet God forbids it of His people, then and now. To make our public worship of God attractive to others, like the unsaved world, distracts from God being the focus of our worship and leads us down the path of idolatry which the wicked were and are guilty of.

When local churches adopt “contemporary” worship services, with their bands and flashing lights and music that attracts the world into the sanctuary – sometimes in the name of establishing a platform to reach others – then the public worship of God has been defiled; the world coming in sets aside the purpose of the church to train and equip the saints to carry out the great commission; true fellowship is tainted and the cut stones of worldly idolatry are laid for all to see.

It’s difficult to be a witness to the world when the world has been invited in by the church with contemporary efforts to pollute and profane the worship of the One they claim to love and obey.