Purpose of worship

Jerubbaal means to contend to be lord.
It was the name given to Gideon, a person in the bible to whom God told to tear down the altar of the pagan god Baal that the people of God, the jewish people, had started to worship.
Gideon contended for God to be Lord.
You can read this in Judges 6

The Israelites (jews) could only be saved from their enemies when they stopped worshipping other gods.
You see this pattern over and over again in the bible, were God gives Israel in the hands of enemies when they worshipped other gods.

Thankfully God was willing to deliver them from their enemies every time they repented and turned away from those gods and worshiped Him again.
Unfortunately they kept going back to worshipping idols (other gods) again and again, even when at times they also worshipped God on the side.
That’s like getting married and having affairs as well…

Sad thing is that we still do the same today, often without realising it because we don’t call these gods/idols that we have by their names.
Baal still contends to be lord.

So what is the name of Baal in modern day language?
It’s called The Fear of Men.
If I let other people determine my value I am my own god, because I’m part of the same creation that the people that I let determine my value are part of.
And in turn I try to give value, or devalue, to others with my opinions of them.
But only God should have that place in our lives.
We can have opinions of things of course and give people compliments or critics, but it should not be tied to our perception of their value. We should love and value them the same.
Yet we rarily do.

I believe satan alias the devil is behind these gods. (bear with me for a moment)
All he wants is to be God and he tempts us by giving us the desire to be gods as well, knowing that when we don’t give God his rightful place he, satan, has that place of power in our lives.

Read also “Saved from what?”

So even as believers we can still worship God to a degree and have idols on the side.
Which means we are still on the throne of our own lives.
God won’t love us any less but we won’t be free from the destruction that the devil tries to bring if we are not 100% surrendered to God. We are still in his power.

It may seem weird that God only protects us when we worship Him.
After all He is God and does not need our approval or compliments to feel good about himself.
He does not need our service to have power.
He can override our free will if He wants. And yet He rarily does.
He really is all for having a relationship with us were we choose with our own will to connect with Him.
Amazingly He takes pleasure in that!

So why does He require our worship if He’s all about free will?
I think He’s protecting us through that.
If God gave men the ability to become their own god without coming under the power of someone else, in this case satan (because he’s the one we listened to), when rejecting God above them, they could never be delivered from their rebellion. They would become through and through evil and would never be able to change and turn back to God. God would have to destroy them forever if He wanted to destroy evil.
And that’s exactly what He eventually will do with the devil but what He doesn’t want to do with us.
He so wanted to give us second changes if we rebelled against Him, that He ordered satan to be lord over us if we reject Him.
Thereby He limited our ability to do and become evil so He could still save us and draw us back to his heart of love towards us.

There’s only one way to defeat the devil and his temptations for us to be lord over our own lives. Not that there really is such a thing as being lord over yourself, since you just hand the lordship of your life over to the devil when you don’t give God the rightfull place in your life.
Like darkness vanishes by turning a light on, we overcome the place and power the devil still has in our lives by giving that place back to God.
Through worship.

Free Gift