Ch 31 In Dabney’s Systematic Theology
You become what you worship and you worship what you have become.
1.) All of is explanation of why it is of first importance to think well upon and about God. Nobody worships a God that they have not already understood to one degree or another. Doxology presupposes theology. Worship presupposes epistemology. If that isn’t true worshipers are left worshiping an “unknown god” which is still a god known enough to know that while unknown, he must be worshiped.
Do you want to be excellent parents to your children? Then make sure they think long, hard, and well about the God of the Bible. Make sure they learn not only who God is but also see that they learn what the concrete implications are to knowing God. If you want to measure your children’s behavior (or your own) then every time you see misbehavior, ask yourself, “what is it that my child is wrongly thinking and believing about God that is driving that behavior.” After all,
“As a man thinketh in his heart so he is.”
Proverbs 23:7
2.) Worship takes the knowledge of God and hones it to a razor-sharp reality. When we worship, we are grinding even deeper into our character and personality what it is we believe about the God we serve.
“Those who make them (idols) become like them, and so do all who trust in them.” Psalm 115:8
This means that if you show me the person, I will tell you about their God.
3.) This idea then flips into cultural considerations. If it is the case that showing me the person allows me insights into the God, they worship then it is also the case that showing me any given culture or subculture allows me insights into the God that culture is reflecting. Culture is, after all, only theology externalized as poured over particular people groups.
4.) Note Dabney’s statement, “blemishes are always reproduced in the votaries.” If any individual, family, church, or culture thinks wrongly about God that blemished thinking will out. Again, this is why we must spend our whole lives checking and re-checking how it is we think about God and what we think about God.
5.) All of this reinforces the idea that theology remains the Queen of the Sciences. What we believe and then worship gets into every other thing we do. What we believe and then worship gets into everything we say, our mannerisms, our priorities, and our relationships. Indeed our whole lives are nothing but lived out theology.
6.) Nobody gets a pass here. Even the Atheist who claims there is no God is animated by what he thinks about the god he denies exists.
7.) When one has a particular culture or people group who become divided amongst themselves on the character and nature of God (as the Wests currently is) the results are explosive. No people can exist as a people without a harmony of conviction on the nature and character of God. Now, those kinds of culture may not articulate their disagreements in quite that way but the fact is that their ownership of different cosmologies as driven by their differences in theology proper accounts for the divisiveness that exists in the culture. Such differences account for what we today call “culture wars.” Where there is no harmony of thought regarding theology there one can eventually expect blood in the streets because two or more gods can never co-exist in the same family, church, or culture.
8.) Of course, if one will not worship and serve the God of the Bible the only other option left is the worship of the creature and that in turn means either anarchy as each man does what is right in his own eyes or it means the tyrannical State, Church, or family as some covenantal hierarchy will seek to take the place as God walking on the earth. If man will not have God, then man will have man as God and man will get man as God, good and hard.
9.) This quote then emphasizes that we worship well. We should think long and hard about what our worship is communicating. Is our worship reflecting the character of the Triune Holy God?
Allow me to suggest that most of the modern Worship in the contemporary West is absolute trash. The sense of majesty is completely gone. The idea that we are meeting with the thrice Holy God has disappeared. The Gospel absolution in the liturgy (if it even exists in a worship service) is not thirsted for any longer because men no longer are convinced how benevolent and gracious God is in taking us for Himself as redeemed sinners in Jesus Christ as wooed by the Holy Spirit.
Our worship today in Protestant churches (exceptions notwithstanding) is just as bad as what Dabney was complaining about in the churches of Rome during His time. (Rome continues to suck as to this issue.)
