Dead End Worship

”Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the instruction of our God, you people of Gomorrah! “What are all your sacrifices to Me? ” asks the Lord. “I have had enough of burnt offerings and rams and the fat of well-fed cattle; I have no desire for the blood of bulls, lambs, or male goats. When you come to appear before Me, who requires this from you — this trampling of My courts? Stop bringing useless offerings. Your incense is detestable to Me. New Moons and Sabbaths, and the calling of solemn assemblies — I cannot stand iniquity with a festival. I hate your New Moons and prescribed festivals. They have become a burden to Me; I am tired of putting up with them. When you lift up your hands in prayer, I will refuse to look at you; even if you offer countless prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are covered with blood. “Wash yourselves. Cleanse yourselves. Remove your evil deeds from My sight. Stop doing evil. Learn to do what is good. Seek justice. Correct the oppressor. Defend the rights of the fatherless. Plead the widow’s cause. “Come, let us discuss this,” says the Lord. “Though your sins are like scarlet, they will be as white as snow; though they are as red as crimson, they will be like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you will eat the good things of the land. But if you refuse and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword.” For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.“ (Isaiah 1:10-20 HCSB)

My wife and I love to take road trips. In fact, in the coming days we are planning on taking a drive west on old Route 66 – the Mother Road. No real plans other than to go westward, stop when we see something interesting, eat when we get hungry and find a place to spend the night when grow tired. After a few days of going west, we are going to turn around and head back home the same way. Now, you might think that sounds a bit like a dead end trip. We aren’t heading towards a destination, so you might assume we have no goal. Our goal is found in the journey, not the destination. We might make it all the way to Santa Monica, or we might just turn around at any spot along the way. We’re just planning on enjoying ourselves as we seek out interesting places to visit, eat and sleep.

Sometimes, we get caught up in the idea that worship of God and following Jesus are all about a destination – Heaven. We’re focused on a future promise while ignoring the circumstances and scenery of life as we follow Him. Just keep in step. Follow the right path (religious rites or rituals), speak/read the right words (Bible version – KJV only), have the right beliefs (orthodoxy – right religious group) and do it all religiously. Surely God loves a 40 year, 50 year or higher perfect attendance pin, right? Check all the boxes and God smiles upon us, blesses us and loves us. Right?

Last week, we looked at verses 1-9 and heard how God’s heart is broken over His people. They know what’s right but they refuse to desire it, seek it and pursue it. God contrasted their actions with that of unintelligent animals who at least recognize their own master and knows who feeds and cares for them. We ended last week with the condemnation that God’s people were like Sodom and like Gomorrah.

I think it’s possible that when Isaiah delivered his initial message in verses 1-9, the people reacted and were shocked. “What? How can you say we are like Sodom and Gomorrah? Look at our worship. Look at our sacrifices. Look at our Temple and all of the things we do to please God!” Perhaps after thinking about it, Isaiah decides that they aren’t LIKE Sodom and Gomorrah, they ARE Sodom and Gomorrah. Or maybe this is the prompting from God’s Holy Spirit, “My people aren’t like Sodom and Gomorrah Isaiah, they ARE Sodom and Gomorrah!”

Hear the word of the LORD, Isaiah says. And God responds to the people, “What are all your sacrifices to Me?” This is why I implied above that perhaps the people responded to Isaiah’s initial message in verses 1-9 with skepticism and doubt. “Why would God be upset with us? Look at our worship rituals. Look at the number and quality of the sacrifices. We’re doing EVERYTHING God has asked us to do. We’re orthodox in our beliefs, worship and practice. Nothing wrong here, Isaiah. You’ve got it all wrong, Isaiah. We aren’t the problem, God is!”

Ah, there it is. We’re not wrong, God is!

Notice in verse 12 that God tells the people, “When you come to appear before Me, who requires this from you – this trampling of My courts?” They hadn’t come before Him to worship, they had come before Him reluctantly, begrudgingly, out of expectation and religious fulfillment. They hadn’t come seeking God, His mercy, cleansing, and forgiveness. They weren’t worshiping in God’s presence, they were trampling His house, His courts of worship. Think on this, for a moment:

Worship is vain, unacceptable, empty and pointless without repentance. God calls for us to know Him, to love Him and to worship Him in a way that is consistent with who He is and who we are. We trample His courts when we worship without contrite acknowledgment of either, an awareness of His holiness and of our sinfulness. When we go through the motions of worship devoid of the contrition that our sin demands and deserves then our worship is empty, ritualistic and meaningless. Today, we tend to sing and speak of God’s love in our worship while avoiding the reality of God’s judgement upon our sin. We want a divine pep talk not a call to humble prayer, contrition and repentance.

Empty vain worship is all about us and our needs or desires and not about God. God hasn’t called upon us to only sing of His love, though we should rejoice in His faithful love. God hasn’t called us to only seek and pray for His blessings, though we desperately need them. God hasn’t called us to come fulfill an obligation by stepping through a ritualistic process. But He has called us to seek Him, to know Him and to fall before Him in humble repentance as we seek His mercy, forgiveness and His salvation – for He is the God of Salvation.

If you go back into Exodus and Leviticus you will discover that the sacrifices are not prescribed as a means of worship. They are prescribed as a means of restoration to worship when the people sin and fall short of what God demands. That’s why their sacrifices are vain, empty and useless here. However, God doesn’t just reject their sacrifices. He also rejects their celebrations and their solemn assemblies. He says, “I cannot stand iniquity with a festival (verse 13).” They are celebrating God’s blessing and provision even as they stand in sinful, defiant rebellion before Him.

Finally, God addresses their prayers to Him in a similar fashion. When they lift their hands in prayer God says He will refuse to even look at them. When they offer countless, repetitive, ongoing prayers He will not listen. Why? Because their hands are covered with blood. This is indicative of their sin. They stand before God in worship, praise and prayer even as their hands drip with the blood of those who suffer under their abject and willful disobedience to God.

That’s a sobering thought. If it isn’t to you, you haven’t spent enough time thinking about it. Go back and read that paragraph, again. And again, if necessary. How can we expect God’s blessings on our lives when we stand before Him, our hands dripping with the blood of those who have suffered under our disobedience. You may say, but I’ve never knowingly or intentionally harmed anyone. I’m not guilty of breaking the sixth commandment, “Do not murder.”

Yet, Jesus helps us understand that God’s intent with the prohibition on murder extends much, much farther than just the overt act of murder (see Matt. 5:21-30). As a part of that same passage, He also helps us understand that this principle applies to all of God’s commandments and expectations for His people. God doesn’t just desire their overt acts of worship, as He shows Isaiah in our focal passage this week, but He really expects and demands that their worship be a reflection of their hearts in right relation to Him.

As these hypocritical worshipers stand before Him, their hands dripping with the blood of those who have suffered under their disobedience, God calls upon them to wash themselves and to remove their evil deeds from His sight and we finally reach the heart of God’s judgment against His people – unrepentant evil. Evil? Yes, evil. That’s not my word choice, that’s His. We tend to use that word for the most heinous acts and the worst people. Pure evil. We reserve it for the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge, Jeffrey Dahmer, John Wayne Gacy and others like them. They’re evil, surely we’re not. But God calls unrepentant sin and false, hypocritical worship what it is, evil.

Worship often becomes a false front to disguise our resistance towards true repentance and honesty before God. But God calls these unrepentant worshipers evil. Just what have they done or not done that is so heinous as to be labeled evil? He tells them, “Learn to do what is good. Seek justice. Correct the oppressor. Defend the rights of the fatherless. Plead the widow’s cause.” Pay close attention to what He just said. It was less about what they HAD done and more about what they failed to do. Those standing before God with their hands dripping with the blood of their victims were not guilty of outright murder, but they were guilty of ignorance, negligence, laziness and busyness.

We tend to downplay our culpability in situations like this, don’t we? We cop out of the situation by declaring, “Well, I didn’t know.” But God calls for His people to learn to do good and to seek out justice for others. We don’t see our actions or lack of action as evil, but God does. Baptists are known to speak out on the sanctity of life and the evilness of abortion, but to speak out or be active on a single instance of evil is not sufficient for God’s people. This isn’t someone else’s problem, it’s ours. But to begin, we must see it for what it is… unrepentant sin.

In essence, God is telling His people that it isn’t sufficient to stand in the halls of our churches (or their temple) and condemn the evil that is ravaging our world and then to sing a song, recite a prayer, hear a sermon and go home to lunch (or offer a sacrifice), as if everything will be fine. He says that when we do so, we aren’t just like Sodom and Gomorrah, we ARE Sodom and we ARE Gomorrah. Now some will latch onto this and may try to say that I’m pushing for a social gospel but I’m telling you that God calls us to take the Gospel into our society and throughout our culture. He calls for us to win an audience for the Good News of Jesus salvation by loving people the way Jesus loves them, in a practical way. Giving them food when they are hungry, a drink when they are thirsty, friendship in their loneliness and compassionate care when they are hurting. A social gospel? No! But a gospel that impacts and transforms society with the truth, love, mercy and the compassion of God.

To make His point, God calls for them to come sit with Him and to reason these things out or discuss them with Him. Our response to sin will be entirely dependent upon our view of it. God wants to reason with them about their sin. He wants them to consider its impact and its consequences. Sin is unreasonable, it enslaves us, it destroys us, it never gives as much as it takes. Sin just makes no sense but we seldom see it that way. In a way, it is a bit like an adrenaline high as it beckons us to come back for more and more and lures us further and further into dangerous territory. Eventually, sin takes everything from us.

But repentance is what God seeks in us, even though it doesn’t come easily or without pain. Repentance is the result of holy introspection or Godly self-awareness. I’m NOT talking about looking inside yourself to find the strength to do better or “the god in each of us.” That’s just heresy and false hope. No, I’m talking about looking inside at who you really are, seeing that real person whom God sees. The one who fails to seek justice for others, who corrects the oppressor, who speaks up for the fatherless and defends the widow.

It is the natural result of seeing God and ourselves as we truly are. It is only after we recognize that we really deserve God’s judgment that we seek His mercy and salvation. The entire book of Isaiah is framed by the idea of our rebellion against God (see 1:2, 66:24). All that keeps us from renewal and relationship with God is our own unrepentant stubbornness towards our sin and all that keeps us from total destruction by God is His love for us and mercy towards us. God is gracious towards us, but He is not to be trifled with.

Grace is always hard for unrepentant rebels to understand; their view of themselves is too high and their view of God is too low. They see things backwards. But God gives us mercy when we deserve condemnation. God lavishes grace upon us and calls us His children when we deserve nothing more than to be His servants. God calls us into relationship when all we really want are His gifts and blessings. We’re so shortsighted, aren’t we?

In conclusion, Isaiah wants us to recognize just how deeply our lives are impacted and stained by our own sin. Though it is as deep as wool dyed red, we can be made as white as the new snow. If… if we are willing and obedient then we will eat the good the things of the land. What happens if we refuse and rebel? Well, we will be devoured by the sword. Then Isaiah puts the final emphasis on these verses: “For the mouth of the LORD has spoken!” Later in this same book:

”…so My word that comes from My mouth will not return to Me empty, but it will accomplish what I please and will prosper in what I send it to do.” (Isaiah 55:11 HCSB)

How can we be cleansed? How can we be restored? How can our worship be acceptable before God? Not by anything we do, but by being willing and obedient. A willingness to acknowledge and repent of our sin. To see and abhor this evil tendency within us. To recognize that we cannot fix ourselves no matter how many self help seminars we attend or positive thinking outcomes we seek. We must be willing to see ourselves as sinners and our God as the source of our salvation – the LORD who saves.

There’s no easy way to say this. Until we see our sin as evil, we will never reject it. We will never abhor it. We will never humble ourselves and seek cleansing. As long as that happens we will continue to blame the condition of our world on others and never on ourselves. Until that happens we will continue to offer up hypocritical, vain and empty worship and be offended when God calls us Sodom and Gomorrah. But when we do… oh, His mercy will flow. His cleansing will come, our worship will become holy and we will be restored because our LORD is salvation!