Giving God Back the Worship He Deserves

One of the most powerful weapons of spiritual warfare is, precisely, worship. The most powerful motivation for Satan’s activity in the world is his illegitimate desire to obtain the glory and authority that belong to God alone.

The prophet Isaiah, in a passage that has always been recognized as a prophetic reference to Satan’s origins, describes that insatiable appetite for worship to which he has no right (Isaiah 14:12–15):

12 How you have fallen from heaven, O Morning Star, son of the morning! You have been cut down to the ground, you who weakened the nations.

13 You who said in your heart: I will ascend to heaven; on high, beside the stars of God, I will raise my throne, and I will sit on the mount of assembly, on the sides of the north;

14 I will ascend above the heights of the clouds, and I will be like the Most High.

15 But you are brought down to Sheol, to the depths of the pit.

God casts Lucifer down from his original glory as an archangel precisely because of his pride and rebellion. The root of all the evil and sin that afflict humanity is, precisely, rebellion against God’s lordship and glory. That is why God is so jealous for his glory. Worship addresses that eternal conflict between Satan and God.

Worship, moreover, neutralizes the pride and rebellion in human beings and acknowledges their place of dependence and submission before God. In Romans 1, the apostle Paul points out that humanity has suffered a degeneration similar to Lucifer’s because, like him, it refused to give God the glory he deserves:

21 For although they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or give him thanks, but became vain in their reasoning, and their foolish hearts were darkened.

22 Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,

23 and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for the likeness of an image of corruptible man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.

24 Therefore God also gave them over to uncleanness, in the lusts of their hearts, so that they dishonored their own bodies among themselves,

25 since they exchanged the truth of God for a lie, honoring and worshiping created things rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.

26 For this reason God gave them over to shameful passions; for even their women exchanged natural relations for those contrary to nature,

27 and likewise the men also, leaving natural relations with women, burned with lust for one another, men committing shameful acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.

28 And since they did not see fit to keep God in mind, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do things that are not fitting;

The apostle Paul is clear. Because humanity refused to give God the glory due his name, God abandoned rebellious people to a shameful degeneration of their bodies, emotions, appetites, and minds. Like Lucifer, banished from his angelic glory, human beings, through their rebellion and refusal to give God glory and praise, are also stripped of their dignity and reduced to a shameful and dysfunctional state. Their actions and behavior are “not fitting” (kathēkonta, Gr.). In other words, their acts are harmful, dangerous, and detrimental to their own well-being.

The only thing that can counteract that negative effect of rebellion is humility. That humility is expressed through a decision to give God the worship he deserves. That is why worship is so powerful: it sets right that fundamental injustice committed against God and places both him and his creature (the human being) in their proper positions.