Worship is Warfare

Worship is warfare. The Apostle says that we are to take up the full armor of God in order to do battle with principalities and powers in heavenly places (Eph. 6). Hebrews says that we have not come to a mountain that can be touched, but to the Heavenly Mt. Zion, the city of the Living God, to the saints made perfect, to Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant, whose blood speaks better things than that of Abel (Heb. 12). And from this Mountain, God shakes Heaven and Earth. He shakes all things so that what cannot be shaken will remain. God is the consuming fire that engulfs this Heavenly Mt. Zion, and therefore we worship with reverence and awe. 

In the Book of Revelation, John is granted a vision of the heavenly places by the Holy Spirit on the Lord’s Day. And what he sees is worship in the heavenly places. He sees the elders falling down in worship. He sees the four living creatures crying Holy, Holy, Holy! He sees an eschatological vision of the purified churched, a myriad of peoples from every tongue and tribe worshiping the Lamb who was slain, and as this worship takes place, we see judgments falling on the earth. The horses of God’s judgement riding forth, the cups of God’s wrath poured out, and the New Jerusalem coming down out of Heaven, as a bride adorned for her Wedding Feast. 

Therefore, the central thing we do every week is gather for worship here. We gather here in order to struggle against the principalities and powers in heavenly places. We gather here, lifted up by the Spirit on the Lord’s Day to join the heavenly hosts of angels and spirits of just men made perfect, in order to ask God to shake everything that can be shaken, all the sin and idols that remain in us and all the sin and idols out in the world, so that we, like Moses may have the light of Christ shine on our faces, changing us from glory to glory, that we might be sent back out into the world to take dominion for His glory, asking God that His Kingdom might come and His will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven. 

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