WORSHIP NOTES
Volume 20, No. 9 (September 2025)
When many of us think about worship in the Old Testament, our minds go first to the Tabernacle/Temple and its sacrifices, rituals, ceremonies, and festivals—the external trappings of worship under the Mosaic Covenant. However, these externals are actually of secondary importance when it comes to the worship that God desires from his people under the Old Covenant (and New Covenant!). He is looking for an inner reality, without which the external observances are of no value to him.
A Surprisingly Common Emphasis
This unexpected truth is nevertheless plainly evident throughout the OldTestament. Many passages show this; here are a few:
Samuel said, “Has the Lord as much delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams.” (1 Sam 15:22)
For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. (1 Sam 16:7)
Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgivingand perform your vows to the Most High. . . .The one who offers thanksgiving as his sacrifice glorifies me. (Ps 50:13–14, 23a)
For you do not delight in sacrifice, otherwise I would give it; You are not pleased with burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God, you will not despise. (Ps 51:16–17)
I will praise the name of God with song and magnify him with thanksgiving. And it will please the Lord better than an ox or ayoung bull with horns and hoofs. (Ps 69:30–31)
Then the Lord said, “Because this people draw near with their words and honor me with their lip service, but they remove their hearts far from me, and their reverence for me consists of tradition learned by rote . . .” (Isa 29:13)
For I delight in loyalty rather than sacrifice, and in the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings. (Hos 6:6)
Tear your hearts and not your garments. (Joel 2:13)
So we see that, even in the Old Testament with all its external rites and practices, God places priority on the internal reality of worship, on sincere devotion as a necessary prerequisite. As H. H. Rowley shows, the heart of sacrifice in the Old Testament was its expression of the worshipers’ self-surrender to God:
The efficacy of the ritual act was believed to depend on its being
the expression of the spirit of the offerer. . . . It must be the organ
of the approach of men to God in the sincerity of their confes-
sion before it could be the organ of God’s approach to them in
delivering them from their iniquity and in restoring them to
righteousness. (Worship in Ancient Israel, 113, 143)
New Testament Continuity
The priority God places on the worship of the heart continues of course into the New Testament. Jesus often severely criticized the Jewish leaders for the externality of their worship expressions without the internal reality (and applied the words of Isaiah 29: 13 above to them).
But a wise scribe in Mark 12 is commended by Jesus for his spiritual insight (seeing things according to God’s own priority):
“ . . . to love him with all the heart and with all the understanding and with all the strength, and to love one’s neighbor as oneself, is much more than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.” (v. 33)
A Remarkable Example
One more remarkable passage along these lines is found in 2 Chronicles: King Hezekiah (one of the declining number of kings in Judah who “did what was right in the sight of the Lord” [2 Chr 29:2]) led the people in a revival of devotion to God and reinstituted the Passover after generations of neglect. But we read in ch. 30:
For a majority of the people, many of them from Ephraim, Manasseh, Issachar, and Zebulun, had not cleansed themselves, yet they ate the Passover otherwise than as prescribed. For Hezekiah had prayed for them, saying, “May the good Lord pardon everyone who sets his heart to seek God, the Lord, the God of his fathers, even though not according to the sanctuary’s rules of cleanness.” And the Lord heard Hezekiah and healed the people. And the people of Israel who were present at Jerusalem kept the Feast of Unleavened Bread seven days with great gladness, and the Levites and the priests praised the Lord day by day, singing with all their might to the Lord. (2 Chr 30:13–21)
We see that a majority of the people had not followed God’s explicit instructions for ritual cleansing in preparation for taking the Passover, yet had taken it anyway (“otherwise than as prescribed”; “not according to the sanctuary’s rules of cleanness”). However, Hezekiah boldly asks God to forgive them on the basis of their zeal for worshiping the Lord through the Passover (“everyone who sets his heart to seek God”).
And, astonishingly, God overlooks his own rules! And shows clearly the priority he places on sincere hearts of worship.