In his groundbreaking book, “No Place For Truth, Or Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology?,” David wells calls the modern Evangelical movement to return to its roots of a Biblical view of God. While concluding the book, in a chapter titled: “The Recovery of God,” Wells writes, 

“God has not been lost, of course, and it is not in this sense that we might think about the need for his recovery. The problem is that all too often he has been lost to us, because his truth, which is objective in character, is often lost on us. It does not fit within the modern psyche at all, and it rests uneasily in the modern evangelical psyche.”

Wells contends that Evangelicalism in a similar, but different, way to Liberalism has lost the knowledge of the God of Scripture. 

The truth is every generation of Christians must guard against the tendency to drift away from God’s objective self-revelation found in Scripture and in Jesus Christ. Idols are but a psychological projection of what we desire a god to be. Scripture reveals God for who He really is and not who we would rather He be. True Biblical worship adores God for who He presents Himself to be and humbly believes and follows what He says as in the text above. This is what the writer to the Hebrews is getting at when he explains the nature of faith.

Contrary to what is often thought, faith is not blind trust. Biblical faith is knowing and trusting wholeheartedly in what God has said in His Word. Proof of what He said He will do may not be present, neither may there be any scientific “evidence” to establish that God is dependable. Faith, as is indicated in verse 2, trusts that God’s Word is powerful. By His Word, the universe was created and therefore, by it, He will bring to pass all that He says. Faith rests upon Scripture alone, sola scriptura, as the Reformers like to say.

This discussion moves, quite naturally, to the subject of worship in verse 5 and 6. Worship at it’s barest essences is pleasing God. We are told by the writer of Scripture that this is exactly how Enoch pleased God. Enoch walked with God according to His self-revelation. The result was that God was pleased with him and he was raptured up to be with God. If we are too enraptured with God in our worship of Him, spiritually speaking, we must follow Enoch’s example of complete delight in God’s Word (Psalm 1). Verse 6 completes this concept by summarizing this understanding of faith as the knowledge of and obedience to Scripture by declaring that this is the only way God will be found by anyone who seeks Him. 

That God’s truth is the foundation for worship may be seen in Psalm 19:7-14 and Hebrews 1:1-4. In the first section of Psalm 19, we learn that the existence and power of God may be observed in nature. By this, the heathen will be judged because they denied the clear evidence of Him as Creator which is daily before their eyes. But it is in the second section of Psalm 19 that we learn that to know who the Creator is one must look to the writings of Scripture.

It is because of this that the connection of Jesus Christ, God’s Son, being the “Living Word” is made. Hebrews 1:1-4 make this connection plain when the writer instructs his readers that not only was God revealed through the inscripturated Word but also God is now revealed through the Living Word, His Son Jesus Christ. 

We see that the truth of God is the foundation for worshiping God. Now let’s consider how this unpacks in our worship gatherings.