New Worship

What if I told you that you should worship six gods on Tuesdays? Would you be open to making the transition from a Trinitarian to a Hexadic God? Could you move church services from Sunday morning to Tuesday morning?

**For Jewish people in the first century, it's remarkable that they adapted their strict monotheism to worship the Father, Son, and Spirit as one God in three persons.** It's staggering they gathered to worship on the Lord's Day - Sunday - rather than the Sabbath. And it was socially consequential that they eventually left their synagogues to form churches.

What explains their willingness to adapt such new forms of worship? Perhaps... the resurrection? As the scholar Richard Bauckham writes in From Sabbath to Lord's Day,

"Sunday worship appears, when the evidence becomes available in the second century, as the universal Christian practice outside Palestine. There is no trace whatever of any controversy as to whether Christians should worship on Sunday, and no record of any Christian group that did not worship on Sunday. This universality is most easily explained if Sunday worship was already the Christian custom before the Gentile mission...

Commemorating the Resurrection, if it was a motive, would be the reason for choosing Sunday rather than another day."

Let's also consider how the first Jewish Christians significantly revised their understanding of God.

Deuteronomy 6:4, says, "Listen, Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one." From a Jewish perspective, for an ordinary human being to accept worship would be blasphemy!

But in Matthew 14:33, Jesus' disciples worship him and call him the Son of God. Yet after Jesus is crucified - which for most people disqualifies a person from deserving worship - we find Jewish people claiming that Jesus is God. And they claim that the Spirit of Jesus is God too. **Suddenly, a community that only permitted the worship of Yahweh is gathering each week to worship Jesus, by the Spirit, to glorify their heavenly Father!**

For Gentiles, the change in worship was also dramatic. In Acts 19, so many former worshippers of Artemis of the Ephesians started to worship Jesus that it impacted the city's commerce!

**The willingness of Jews and Gentiles to start worshiping a Trinitarian God on Sundays, instead of Saturdays, in churches, instead of synagogues, requires explanation. Again, the explanation of the New Testament is simple: By the Spirit, God rose Jesus from the dead.**