Deuteronomy 12

The worship of the Lord was the defining purpose of Israel on earth. This must be true for the church as well. All the days that we live upon the earth, we should seek to obey the One who is worthy of worship.

The idea that Israel should imitate the devotional practices of the Canaanites was to be abhorrent to the faithful. The promised land was to be a small piece of heaven. In heaven there could be no false worship. The people of God were to remove every other way of worship from Canaan.

The Lord would choose for them a central place for worship in the land. They were to seek this central place for sacrifice and festal celebration. They were to go there to obey all the ways of worship that the Lord had revealed through Moses.

Eventually the Lord would reveal Jerusalem and Mount Zion to Israel, and the people would build the temple of the Lord there. But when Messiah came in person, He was revealed as the new temple of the Lord, and in Him, the gathered church became the temple of the Holy Spirit. The ascended Jesus is our place of worship. We are called to worship in Him, in Spirit and in truth.

God commanded the people of Israel to make a distinction between the holy things that He told them to bring to the one central place of worship and the common gifts of blessing that they could enjoy in their homes. Today, when we gather as the body of Christ, we celebrate the presence of the Lord with bread and the fruit of the vine which have been set apart from their common use by the Word and prayer. We have homes to eat and drink in every day as we choose, but we gather together in Christ to obey the word of the Lord who said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”

If Israel adopted a compromising plan of worship, accommodating a variety of cultural practices that came from the Canaanites, they would be violating something very central to the Lord, something very sacred, something at the core of their existence as a people.

The Canaanites had many ways of approaching their gods that the Lord could never even remotely countenance. They even sacrificed their own sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. It could never be safe for Israel or honoring to God to incorporate that kind of abomination into their religious practices.

Israel could not dream up worship from their own hearts or discover worship from the people of the land. God revealed to them what worship should be. God's Word still governs our worship today. We gather together on the first day of the week and mark the death and resurrection of our Savior. We are empowered by His presence and enlivened by His truth. He is our Promised Land, our Jerusalem, and our holy temple.