Good theology leads to worship when we fully realize more truth about God.
These days, a lot of my theological study gets smashed into a day that is already full of work and grading and spending time with my wife and children.
I recently had the wonderful opportunity to spend eight hours in a car in one day. Four hours one direction and four hours back home. Some people would probably view this as an annoyance, but I love long drives. Especially now with the explosion of podcasts, I found this last trip to be a wonderful opportunity to get some serious theological learning on!
It was great to jump into the deep end, but I also made sure to keep some time open at the end, sans audio, so that I could have time to do some actual reflection and prayer on what I’d been learning. What stood out to me most at the end of the day was how often I had been drawn to worship. How often I would thank God for the way that he created things, or thank God for the way that he chose to do things, or thank God for the way for who he is. As things clicked and as I realized how coherent and wise God is… there’s just so much peace and joy in that.
And this worship was in the face of complex, head-on-table stuff. This is on stuff that our old nature would perhaps declare boring and overly technical, nitpicky type stuff. On the surface, it would seem that you can’t get more nitpicky than the debate of supralapsarianism versus infralapsarianism. But I believe that this is one possible sign of growing sanctification. God changes our desires and rightly orders them to be attracted to learning more about him no matter how minute and finely-tuned.
As examples, I wanted to share a few of those worshipful reflections. These topics all come from the episodes of the Reformed Brotherhood podcast that I was listening to on that trip.
Infralapsarianism
Praise God that we do not serve an arbitrary God or a cruel God, but a sovereign God who did create a wise and righteous plan for his creation. Praise God that we have a loving God who sent his son to save us from our fall, who is a God who saves, who is the God who judges wisely and fairly.
Sabbatarianism
Praise God that we serve a God who knows what’s best for us because he created us. He knows how we function most properly and has ordained the means by which we can function most properly. He’s written it into the heart of man in such a way that even the unbeliever feels the rightness of having time off every 7th Day.
Christology
Praise God that we have a savior who, through his incarnation and through the continuation of that incarnation and the hypostatic union, is able to properly intercede and mediate on our behalf to God! Also, the fact that Christ’s physical body is in heaven in some way (though hard for us to understand) gives us assurance of our own Resurrection. There is in the existence of heaven a characteristic that allows for fleshly creatures to exist there. It is not just a blissful nothingness or an ethereal happiness, but it is in some way a place where our physical bodies will be able to exist.