The Glory Due His Name: Review and Related Thoughts

I've been doing some study on the topic of worship recently. Part of that study involved reading The Glory Due His Name: What God Says About Worship by Gary Reimers, part of the BJU Seminary faculty.

Having finished the book a few weeks back, I believe that Dr. Reimers made some helpful points.  For example, he described five key aspects of proper worship in a service: preparation, praise, prayer, presentation (i.e. the offering), and preaching.  These categories were supported from Scripture and carefully explained.

The more intriguing section to me was the second half of the book, which addressed wrong forms of worship.  The first part of that section (Chapter 2) involved exegesis of Exodus 20:3-6 and similar passages in the Old Testament, which according to Dr. Reimers teach a frightening principle: God will punish your children, grandchildren, and even great-grandchildren if you insist on worshiping Him in a wrong way.  I still need to think through the implications of this concept, but it seems to be supported fairly well by contextual and exegetical evidence.

Connected with the above principle, in third and final chapter of the book, Dr. Reimers evaluated the consequences of wrong worship.  What does wrong worship look like?  In other words, "worshipping the right God the wrong way"?  He gives four categories: 1) worship based on imagination (from Exodus 32, the golden calf incident), 2) worship focused on innovation (from Leviticus 10:1-3, where Nadab and Abihu were killed), 3) worship like the world (from Deuteronomy 12:29-32), and 4) worship marketed for convenience (from 1 Kings 12:26-31, where Jereboam started the false worship at Dan/Bethel).

His application of the first category (p. 74) was focused on worshiping God according our conception of Who He is, rather than how the Bible describes Him.  His application of the second category dealt with church marketing approaches and their tendency to assume what is new or different is automatically better.  His application of the third category focused on the use of sanitized rock music by Christians in their worship services.  Finally, the last category was applied in terms of making the main consideration for service times, clothing choices, and similar decisions the convenience or lack thereof for the participants.

I think overall his book was written very well.  I do have some further items to consider in light of his applications of the principles, specifically related to music we use in church.

First, if we should not worship God according to our imagination, then we need to be careful about using songs which do not present a biblical view of God.  For example, singing songs that only present God as love, or more generally, only choosing those kinds of songs to include in our services, will give people a false view of God.

Second, if we should not worship God like the world worships their gods, then yes, we should acknowledge that various rock artists have stated they intended their music to promote sex, drugs, and general immorality.  But we would be wrong to assume that earlier musicians were entirely free of such motives in their works. It's not as though sin was something that began to happen in the 1960s; various musicians and performers in the 1800s participated willingly in the sins of their times, such as adultery and drunkenness.  It would seem reasonable, then, that such themes could have affected their compositions as well.

These are items I need to consider further.