Worship As God Commands It

The Regulative Principle of Worship and Its Historical Roots

Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do.
You shall not add to it or take from it. – Deuteronomy 12:32

Once upon a time, in history and recorded in Scripture, two of Aaron’s sons died on the very day the priesthood began. Not later, when the worship of Israel had grown incredibly careless. On the very first day. Nadab and Abihu took their censers, put fire in them, laid incense on the fire, and offered it before the LORD. The book of Leviticus tells us plainly what was wrong with what they did:

Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the LORD, which he had not commanded them. And fire came out from before the LORD and consumed them, and they died before the LORD. – Leviticus 10:1–2

Unauthorized fire. The two offered fire that God had not commanded them. That’s it; the whole of the indictment. Their offering was not idolatry, at least in any obvious sense. They were priests at the altar, burning incense to the true God. So what was so bad? The problem was not in their sincerity but in their warrant to act. They didn’t have permission to do that. No warrant. God had not asked for it, and that was enough to make it deadly.

Here, at the very beginning of Israel’s worship, we meet the conviction that the Reformers would later call the regulative principle of worship. Stated simply: in the public worship of God, we are to do what He has commanded, and only what He has commanded. The Word of God does not just forbid what is wicked in worship; it positively prescribes what is acceptable. What He has not appointed, we have absolutely no liberty to bring. It is similar to that old saying, “Where Scripture has no tongue, we should lend no ear”.

What the Principle Says — and What It Does Not

It is easy to caricature this principle, so let me be careful with it. The regulative principle governs the public worship of the church, that is, what we do when the people of God gather together to offer Him praise. It asks one question of every element of that worship: where has God commanded this? Preaching, the reading of Scripture, prayer, the singing of praise, the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the giving of our gifts, each of these we find appointed in the New Testament, and so each belongs in worship.

What the principle does not do is bind the conscience over every circumstance of a gathering. Whether we meet at nine or at eleven, whether the room is lit by candle, sunshine or fluorescent light, whether the song is pitched high or low, these are what our forefathers called the circumstances of worship, common to human actions and ordered by Christian prudence. The principle concerns the elements, the substance of what we offer God, not the incidental arrangements that any assembly of people must agree on.

This is what divides the regulative principle from what is sometimes called the normative principle, held by other godly Christians, which permits in worship whatever Scripture does not forbid. The difference is not small. The one asks, may I do this? The other asks, has God asked for this? Nadab and Abihu could have pleaded that no law forbade their particular fire in their pan. However, Leviticus answers that the absence of a prohibition never permitted them; it was never their warrant, and the presence of a command was.

Where Scripture Teaches It

Now, the principle does not rest on one text alone, but the second commandment is certainly its foundation. Notice where the divine name sits prominently. The whole Decalogue stands on the self-identification of verse 2, I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and that identity carries straight into the warning that follows. God does not say He is jealous of rival gods. He says I the LORD your God am a jealous God. The jealousy is provoked by an image used, and get this now, in relation to Him, not by Israel running after some other god’s name. The first commandment had already settled whom Israel may worship. The second settles how the LORD, already named, may be approached:

You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them, for I the LORD your God am a jealous God… -Exodus 20:4–5

Now, get this and listen carefully. Israel tried and experienced this text within forty days. At the foot of the very mountain where this word was given, Aaron built a golden calf, and the people said, These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:4), the same language God had just used of Himself. Aaron then built an altar before it and proclaimed, Tomorrow shall be a feast to the LORD (Exodus 32:5), using the covenant name, not the name of a foreign god. There, do you see it? Israel was not defecting to Baal. They were attempting to worship the LORD by an image, a means He had forbidden a few weeks before. It is the same indictment that fell on Nadab and Abihu at the altar: the God in view was the right God. But the means was not the commanded means! That is the error the second commandment was written to prevent, and it is the error the regulative principle still guards against.

Moses pressed the same charge upon the people again and again. To the whole law of worship, he attached this:

Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it. – Deuteronomy 12:32

Do not add, and do not take away. Simple, and yet our instinct in worship is almost always to add, isn’t it? We add to improve, to enrich, to make the service more moving, and sadly, more entertaining to us than God Himself thought to make it. Scripture treats that instinct with more than suspicion. When Saul spared the best of the spoil to sacrifice it to the LORD, Samuel did not commend his zeal, pat him on the back, and say, “Well done, Saul!” No, he said, to obey is better than sacrifice (1 Samuel 15:22). And our Lord laid the same axe to the root of Pharisaic worship: in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men (Matthew 15:9).

Paul names the exact same danger by name. He warns against what he calls self-made religion, will-worship, the older translations have it, worship that has an appearance of wisdom but no commandment behind it (Colossians 2:23). And the Lord Jesus, speaking to the woman at the well, settled the matter for the age of the gospel: God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:24). Truth, here, is not merely sincerity. It is the truth God has revealed about how He will be approached.

A Reformation Conviction

This principle was not invented in the sixteenth century, but it was recovered then with great force. The medieval church had buried the simple worship of the New Testament under a thousand years of accumulated ceremony, relics, processions, the mass, images, and the veneration of saints. All kinds of garbage. The Reformers looked at all of it and asked a single, searching question: where did God command this? And allow me to digress here for a moment. We have so many splits and denominations in these modern times (so-called) because somewhere along the way, we have missed the simplicity that is the Gospel and the worship of God.

John Calvin made this principle a centerpiece of his defense of the Reformation. In his treatise The Necessity of Reforming the Church, written for the Emperor in 1543, he confessed how hard the doctrine was to receive and held to it anyway. God disapproves, he argued, of all modes of worship not sanctioned by His Word, for God is better pleased by obedience than by sacrifice, and what seems right in our own eyes is the very thing He has not asked. In Geneva, Calvin stripped the worship of the church down to what he could find appointed in Scripture: the Word read and preached, prayer, the singing of psalms, the two ordinances Christ gave.

John Knox carried the same conviction into Scotland with his characteristic bluntness, holding that whatever is not commanded in worship is forbidden. It was a hard saying, and it cost the Scottish church dearly in conflict with the crown. But it gave the Reformed churches a worship of remarkable simplicity and reverence, a worship governed not by the preferred taste of the age but by the will of God. Would that American churches take note!

The English and Scottish Puritans inherited this and pressed it yet further. Their long struggle against the imposed ceremonies of the established church was, in the end, a struggle over this very question of warrant. When at last the Westminster Assembly gathered in the 1640s to set down the faith of the Reformed churches, it framed the principle in words that have never been improved upon:

…the acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men, or the suggestions of Satan, under any visible representation, or any other way not prescribed in the Holy Scripture. – Westminster Confession of Faith, 21.1.

When the Particular Baptists drew up their own confession in 1677, published in 1689, they took over this chapter almost word for word. The Second London Baptist Confession, which this ministry holds, says the same in its twenty-second chapter. The Baptists differed from the Presbyterians on baptism and on the gathered church; but on the manner of worship, they stood on the same ground. The God who will not be worshiped by men’s devices is the God we still gather together to worship.

Why It Still Matters

You might think this is an old quarrel, settled long ago and of little use to us. You would be mistaken. Every generation of the church faces the same temptation that took the lives of Nadab and Abihu: the temptation to bring God fire He never asked for, and to call it devotion. The forms change, but the desire does not. We are forever tempted to make worship more impressive, more suited to the hour and to the age, than the God of heaven thought to make it Himself. If you have read this far and use a fog machine on stage during the ‘praise’ portion of your morning service, I pray you’ll reconsider its use.

The regulative principle is not a hard, cold rule that drains the life from our gathering together for worship. It is a mercy. It means that when the people of God come together, they are not at the mercy of the cleverness of men or the worldly trends of the moment. They are given what God Himself has appointed, His Word, His table, the prayers and praise of His people, and they may rest in it, knowing it pleases Him because He asked for it. There is freedom in that. The conscience is not left to wonder whether it has done enough or the right thing because, brethren, the right thing is the commanded thing.

So we come full circle back to where Leviticus began. God is holy, and He is not approached on our terms. But the wonder of the gospel is that He has told us the terms, and they are terms of grace, centered on His Son, who is Himself the great High Priest and the one acceptable sacrifice. We do not need to invent a way to Him. He has already given us the way. To worship Him as He has commanded is simply to take Him at His word and to come. Nothing added, nothing taken away. It’s just that simple.