In the midst of all of the controversy surrounding Rick Warren as the minister to deliver the invocation at yesterday’s presidential inauguration, Warren delivered a truly Christian prayer. I was so blessed to see a man of God stand before a mixed multitude and humbly pray to the God of his salvation, the only God…”Yeshua, Isa, Jesus…”
Warren’s prayer stood in stark contrast to the benedictory prayer offered by Rev. Lowery who, in addition to several racially motivated comments, prayed these words:
And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship
and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our
workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your
will.
Warren prayed to the one true God. Lowery, attempted a prayer to a plethora of different Gods. The gods of temples (ie. Buddhism, Hinduism, and potentially Judaism), the god of Islam, and the God of Christianity. Of course, the problem in attempting to address so many gods with one prayer is that he effectually prayed to no one. Our God is not the god of Islam, nor Buddhism, nor any other religion. God, YHWH God has chosen to reveal himself in a specific way in his word, the Bible.
He is revealed as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God revealed himself greatest in the person of Jesus Christ. Any attempt to worship God without acknowlegement of who he has revealed himself to be ceases to be worship of God and denigrates to something less, something the Bible refers to as idolatry.
G.K. Beale explains this well:
“God accepts that humans have indeed breached the Crator-creature
distinction. Not that humans have now become gods but that they have
chosen to act as though they were-defining and deciding for themselves what
they will regard as good and evil. Therein lies the root of all other forms of
idolatry: we deify our own capacities, and thereby make gods of ourselves and
our choices and all their implications. God then shrinks in horror from the
prospect of human immortality and eternal life in such a fallen state and
prevents access to the “tree of life.” God has a better way to bring
humanity, redeemed and cleansed, to eternal life. “At the root, then, all
idolatry is human rejection of the Godness of God and the finality of God’s
moral authority. The fruit of that basic rebellion is to be seen in many
other ways in which idolatry blurs the distinction between God and creation, to
the detriment of both (G.K. Beale, We Become What We Worship).”
Rick Warren reminded us that the God to whom we pray is none other than the triune God revealed in Scripture to whom we only have access through the cross of Christ. In the face of controversy, he was grounded fully and faithfully in the God of the Bible. Rev. Lowery, on the other hand, demonstrates the denigration of worship when we reject the “Godness of God and the finality of God’s moral authority;” we week to replace the true God with our own choices for what a god should look like. Lowery’s prayer is to a God of inclusivism and tolerance, unfortunately, the God of the Bible is not an all together tolerant or inclusive God.
Choose you this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord…
