Exactly What Do You Worship?

Saturday of the 19th Week in course 2023

A wise man once told me how to really know another person with one simple question. The question the other person must answer is “what do you worship?” That means, what is the most important thing or process or person in your life? That is what you worship and serve. The Jewish leader Joshua, at the end of a lengthy life and leadership ministry, asked that question of his people. Now don’t get bogged down asking what he means by “put away the gods which your fathers served beyond the River, and in Egypt.” The river he speaks of here is not the Nile; it’s the Euphrates. The implication is that some of the Hebrews had hung onto the gods they worshiped back in the time of Abraham, off to the east in Iraq.

No. Joshua wants them to make a clear and irrevocable choice between the true God, the God of the Covenant, YHWH, and the lesser goods that people make into gods, not just by dropping the second letter “o” in goods, but by deciding that pleasure, honor or power is the most important thing in life. By choosing the covenant God, the only God who is real, they must turn their lives over to His service, and follow His ten commandments, the natural moral law. He’s the One who delivered them from Egyptian slavery; He is also the One who can set us free from our addictions to food, alcohol, drugs, pornography, or even video gaming and gambling. He can set us free from getting so tied up in current politics that we neglect faith, hope, and charity toward the poor and abandoned. In Joshua’s day, the Hebrews promised, by renewing the covenant, that they would follow his example and serve the Lord.

Now they did not do that very well; just read the next book of Scripture, Judges, to see how badly they followed God’s covenant laws. But you’ll also see how God, merciful always, forgave them and took their side, time and again, for generations. They learned that the secret is what the psalmist sings: “keep the Lord always before me.” As St. Paul tells us, Jesus said it another way, “pray always.” And Matthew tells a little story about people bringing their children to Jesus, and the up-tight disciples wanting to shoo them away. Jesus reminds them that all of us must be like children, not childish but child-like, looking to Our Father for everything, and obeying His law for our own good.