Tree Worshipers

In reading my title, you might think this post is about people who worship nature, trees, or the environment. But this isn’t about people who only eat organic food and think they are better than everyone else because they drive a Prius.

Rather, this post is about the people who worship an aspect of the gospel and not Jesus himself.

I had a conversation with a man the other day about why we do not use crosses or pictures of the crucifixion of Jesus in our church gatherings on Sundays. He visited RLA and told me his church in Orange County uses them because they point to the glory of God.
Though I think there are better ways of being motivated to worship Jesus, I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong to use images or crosses to remind us of the glory of God.

However, we must be careful with this. We do not worship a cross or an empty tomb, we worship the God-man on the cross, who came out of the tomb after being resurrected from the dead.

If we use images to spur on our worship of God, we must be careful not to make those images the things we worship.

God’s glory is shown to us through the gospel: the life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus in fulfillment of scripture.

We do not worship the cross, we worship Jesus. We look at the cross and praise God for the gospel. We do not worship the resurrection, we worship Jesus who is the resurrection. We praise God for his promise of a future resurrection for those with faith.

If you see a cross, an empty tomb, or any other image that depicts Jesus or any part of the gospel, may that spur you on to worship God and not the image itself.

Our hearts take good things and worship them as supreme things. The cross, the empty tomb, and all of God’s graces that we enjoy daily must point us back to him as the object of our worship.