Don't Be a "Mad and Brutish Person"
The function of God's justice in corporate worship
To help prepare my heart for corporate worship this morning I spent time in God’s Word and with Stephen Charnock in his The Existence and Attributes of God. In his “Discourse 4: On Spiritual Worship,” Charnock gives various incentives for true worship. I found his discussion of the justice of God as a motive for worship particularly profound:
Sometimes his justice is proposed to us as a motive of worship: “Serve God with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:28–29), which includes his holiness, whereby he does hate sin, as well as his wrath, whereby he does punish it. Who but a mad and totally brutish person, or one who was resolved to make war against heaven, could behold the effects of God’s anger in the world, consider him in his justice as a “consuming fire,” despise him, and rather be drawn out by that consideration to blasphemy and despair than to seek all ways to appease him? Now though the infinite power of God, his unspeakable wisdom, his incomprehensible goodness, the holiness of his nature, the vigilance of his evidence, the bounty of his hand signify to man that he should love and honor him and are the motives of worship, yet the spirituality of his nature is the rule of worship and directs us to render our duty to him with all powers of our soul. As his goodness beams out upon us, worship is due in justice to him, and as he is the most excellent nature, veneration is due to him in the highnest manner with the choicest affections.1
As you go to corporate worship this morning, go not as a “mad and totally brutish person.” Rather, extol God “in the highest manner with the choicest affections.”
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. Mark Jones (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 1:312.