Why Does God Desire Worship? –  Guest Writer / Bruce Merz 

      There are many challenging questions people have asked about the God of the Bible. If God is all-knowing, why does He allow evil to persist? If God is complete and self-sufficient, why did He even want to create humans in the first place?

Along those lines, the challenging question I would like to tackle in this article is: If God is not proud, self-centred, or vain, why does He command humanity to worship Him? (Matthew 4:10) Is God egotistical? Does He need something from us? It seems, on the surface, quite self-serving, and yet this doesn’t seem consistent with the rest of Scripture.

Some questions about God are answered explicitly in the Bible, whereas others require a bit of searching out. And some, interestingly, are only answered from the negative, or opposite. Here’s what I mean. An often-asked question is: Why do good people die before their time? God actually addressed this while speaking with the prophet Isaiah: “The righteous perish, and no one ponders it in his heart; devout men are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil.” (Isaiah 57:1) In other words, God is saying that if He had let these good people live longer, they would have been subjected to greater evil, pain, and suffering. The answer doesn’t come by asking “why did God do it that way?” but rather the opposite: “what would have happened if God hadn’t?”

It is with this same approach that I’d like to tackle the worship question. Rather than asking “why does God command us to worship Him alone?”, let’s ask instead: “what happens when we don’t worship God alone?” and see what Scripture has to say.

First, we should define what worship actually is, because it’s more than simply singing songs to God on a Sunday morning. Worship is the wholehearted response to God’s value and worth, expressed through gratitude, love, obedience, prayer, and praise, that places God at the center of everything. – With that in mind, let’s look at what the Bible shows us about creatures who stopped doing exactly that.

One of the first creatures God ever made was the angel Lucifer. Scripture records that Lucifer’s heart became proud because of his beauty (Ezekiel 28:17), and he decided he wanted to be like God (Isaiah 14:13-14), eventually rebelling against Him and even desiring to be worshiped himself (Matthew 4:9). The result was catastrophic. Lucifer, who became known as Satan or the devil, gave himself over to every manner of evil: lying, accusing, stealing, destroying, blinding, imprisoning, and murdering, bringing immeasurable pain and suffering wherever he went. (John 8:44, John 10:10, Romans 5:12) When Lucifer stopped worshiping God and turned his worship inward, he became a slave to destruction, and destruction was all he produced.

The same pattern played out with humanity. When Adam and Eve listened to the devil’s invitation to “become like God” (Genesis 3:5), they effectively dethroned God from the center of their lives and placed themselves there instead. The consequences unravelled slowly at first, then catastrophically. “The LORD saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time.” (Genesis 6:5) Pain, misery, and suffering became the constant backdrop of human existence.

The apostle Paul describes this pattern plainly in his letter to the church in Rome: “When people stopped glorifying God and giving thanks to Him, their thinking became futile and their hearts were darkened. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and began worshiping created things rather than the Creator. And in doing so, they gave themselves over to impurity, degradation, and all manner of unrighteousness. (Romans 1:21-25) Paul puts it even more starkly in his letter to the Galatians, describing humanity’s condition as outright slavery: “Formerly, when you did not know God, you were slaves to those who by nature are not gods.” (Galatians 4:8)

Putting it all together, we see this reality: whatever we worship, we become enslaved to. And if it isn’t God, it will eventually consume us. This is the thread that runs through all of these examples. Humans were made to worship something, that much is clear from Romans 1, because when we abandon worshiping God, we don’t stop worshiping altogether. We simply redirect that worship somewhere else, whether toward ourselves, other people, possessions, pleasures, or power. And whatever sits at the center of our lives will shape us, for better or worse.

So, why does God command us to worship Him? Not because He needs it. Not because He is self-absorbed, or craves our affirmation for His own sake. Rather, He knows that if we don’t worship Him, the result is only ever misery, bondage, and suffering. Whereas when we do worship Him and make Him the center of our lives, something remarkable happens: we begin to become like Him. (2 Corinthians 3:18) Righteous, peaceful, joyful, loving, kind, and pure. Worship, it turns out, is not something God requires for His benefit. It is something He wants for ours.