“Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself. Now therefore, if you will indeed obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all peoples, for all the earth is mine; and you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Exodus 19.3-6

The way to participate in God’s covenant is through obedience.

For the people of Israel, this applied to the ceremonial laws as much as to the civil laws and the Ten Commandments. If the people wanted to enter into the pleasure of God as His “treasured possession” they would need to make sure they were focused on obeying Him at all times.

Thus, as we have seen, they were not to introduce into the worship of God anything imported from the surrounding pagan cultures. Nor were they to innovate with respect to any of the forms or elements of worship God had approved, as the sons of Aaron tried to do. The worship Israel brought to the Lord was to be like the Tabernacle they constructed for Him: strictly according to the pattern of divine revelation.

Obedient worship begins in the heart. We must make sure that we are motivated in our worship by gratitude for what God has done in redeeming us from our own captivity in Egypt. From gratitude worship proceeds in the heart to desire for God: it should be the great longing of our hearts to realize His intention of making us His treasured possession. It behooves us, thus, to prepare well for worship, by allowing the Spirit of God to search our hearts and set them into a right frame with respect to the purposes of worship.

Then, our hearts filled with gratitude to God and love for Him, we come as priests to the Lord in worship, set aside according to His anointing and precepts to worship Him obediently, using only the forms and elements He has revealed and will accept. Thus our worship will be holy to the Lord, and we will be His holy people, when we come to Him, obedient from the heart, to please and honor Him in a celebration of covenant renewal.

For a fuller study of the pattern of worship revealed in Scripture, order the book, The Highest Thing, by T. M. Moore, from our online store. These studies and brief essays will help you to see how the pattern of sound worship, which began in the Law of God, comes to complete expression in the rest of Scripture. Subscribe to Crosfigell, the devotional newsletter of The Fellowship of Ailbe.