Who Do We Truly Worship?

Most Christians can tell you how they worship — the songs, the service, the day — and a companion study asks why God wants to be worshiped at all. Fewer stop to ask the more important question: whom? It sounds too obvious to ask. But the book of Revelation makes worship the central issue of the last days, and when a question is that important, it is worth reading slowly what Scripture actually says — beginning with the one place where we are allowed to watch worship as it is done perfectly: in heaven itself.

A window into heaven’s worship

The word worship runs all through Revelation, the book written for the closing scenes of earth’s history. Near its beginning, John is lifted into the throne room and shown the worship of heaven at full volume:

And I beheld, and I heard the voice of many angels round about the throne and the beasts and the elders: and the number of them was ten thousand times ten thousand, and thousands of thousands; Saying with a loud voice, Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing. And every creature which is in heaven, and on the earth, and under the earth, and such as are in the sea, and all that are in them, heard I saying, Blessing, and honour, and glory, and power, be unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb for ever and ever. And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever.

Count the recipients. Every creature in the universe gives blessing and honor and glory “unto him that sitteth upon the throne, and unto the Lamb.” Two. The One on the throne is the Father; the Lamb is His Son. Then the living beings say Amen — the word that seals a prayer — and the elders fall down and worship “him that liveth for ever and ever.” The scene closes where it began: with the Father.

No one else is named. No third throne, no third recipient, no third song. This is what true worship looks like where nothing has gone wrong. And if we hope to stand there one day, the worship we offer here ought to match the worship offered there. The whole purpose of the great controversy is to bring a rebel world back into harmony with heaven — and that harmony must include agreeing with heaven about whom to worship.

“Holy, holy, holy” — to whom?

And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.

This verse is often offered as a glimpse of a three-in-one God: three “holies,” three Persons. But read the chapter around it. The song is addressed to one Being — the One seated on the throne (Revelation 4:2, 9-10). The threefold holy is the same cry Isaiah heard (Isaiah 6:3), the Hebrew way of giving something the highest possible emphasis. And the verse names whom it praises: the “Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.”

That title is not a riddle. Revelation uses it to set the Father apart from His Son in its very first greeting:

Grace be unto you, and peace, from him which is, and which was, and which is to come; and from the seven Spirits which are before his throne; And from Jesus Christ, who is the faithful witness, and the first begotten of the dead, and the prince of the kings of the earth.

From him which is, and which was, and which is to come — and from Jesus Christ. Two. The everlasting One and His Son. The living beings who never stop crying “Holy” are not counting persons; they are adoring the eternal God on the throne.

One God, the Father

Heaven’s worship matches what the rest of the Bible says plainly. Jesus told the woman at the well, “the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23). Peter identified the God of the Old Testament by the Son He has:

The God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob, the God of our fathers, hath glorified his Son Jesus; whom ye delivered up, and denied him in the presence of Pilate, when he was determined to let him go.

Paul described conversion in the same terms: the Thessalonians “turned to God from idols to serve the living and true God; And to wait for his Son from heaven” (1 Thessalonians 1:9-10). And he put the whole matter in a single sentence:

But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him.

Of whom are all things. The Father is the fountain — the one Source from whom everything that exists ultimately flows, the Son included. “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:6). Worship, at its root, is the creature’s acknowledgment of that: everything I am, and everything there is, comes from You.

Even the Son speaks of the Father this way. Risen from the tomb, He sent word to His disciples: “I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God” (John 20:17). Scripture blesses “the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ” (Ephesians 1:3). And when Satan asked Jesus to bow down to him, the Son answered with the first commandment: “Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve” (Matthew 4:10). The God Jesus worshipped is the God we are called to worship.

Why the Son is worshipped with Him

None of this pushes the Son to the edges. Scripture commands His worship in the plainest words: “And let all the angels of God worship him” (Hebrews 1:6). He is honored not less than the Father, but as the Father:

That all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.

Notice how that honor travels. To refuse the Son is to refuse the Father who sent Him; to honor the Son is to honor the Father. Paul shows the same movement at the end of history, when every knee bows to Jesus: “every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:11). The worship given to the Son rises, through Him, to the glory of the One from whom He came.

Is Jesus God?

People often ask this as a test with only two allowed answers. Scripture gives a fuller one, because the word God is used in two ways. Sometimes it names the one God, the Father — the Source of all. Sometimes it describes a nature: what someone is. The Father speaks to His Son and says, “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” — and in the very next breath, “therefore God, even thy God, hath anointed thee” (Hebrews 1:8-9). The Son is God by nature, fully and without any lesser measure. And He has a God, His Father, who is the one God of the Bible.

John 1:1 says the same thing in its own way: “the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” The Word was with God — so He is not the same Person as the God He was with; and the Word was God — that is what He is. Think of a royal household: in the beginning was the prince, and the prince was with the king, and the prince was royal. Two persons, one royal nature, and no confusion about who the king is.

Divine by inheritance

Where does the Son’s divinity come from? The Jews understood exactly what Jesus was claiming:

Therefore the Jews sought the more to kill him, because he not only had broken the sabbath, but said also that God was his Father, making himself equal with God.

Jesus did not say, I am equal with God. He said, God is My Father — and equality followed from that, as surely as a lion’s cub is a lion. A cub is not a lesser lion, a lion by courtesy, or a lion in some figurative sense. He is everything his father is, because he came from his father. So it is with the Son of God: “For as the Father hath life in himself; so hath he given to the Son to have life in himself” (John 5:26). He is “the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person” (Hebrews 1:3), the One by whom “were all things created” (Colossians 1:16). He stands on the Creator’s side of the line, not the creature’s — and that is why He may be worshipped without idolatry.

What “only begotten” protects

Everyone who calls himself a Christian says Jesus is the Son of God. The question is how. Some say He became the Son at Bethlehem; some say Son is a title given for the work of salvation. Scripture’s own answer is in its most famous verse: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (John 3:16).

He did not become the Son at His birth. He was already the Son when He was sent: “God sent forth his Son, made of a woman” (Galatians 4:4). And He explained His own Sonship in plain words:

For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world: again, I leave the world, and go to the Father.

I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world — two movements, in order. First He came forth from the Father; afterward He came into the world. Wisdom speaks the same way in Proverbs: “When there were no depths, I was brought forth” (Proverbs 8:24) — a coming forth Micah dates to “the days of eternity”. This is what the disciples confessed — “thou art that Christ, the Son of the living God” (John 6:69) — and what Scripture makes the heart of saving faith: “Who is he that overcometh the world, but he that believeth that Jesus is the Son of God?” (1 John 5:5).

Yes, the Son is unique. But He is not unique in some undefined way; He is unique because He alone was begotten of the Father. Angels are called sons of God, and so are believers — by creation and by adoption. Only one Son came forth from the Father Himself and shares His nature. The word only is not decoration. It means there is no second Son, and therefore no other being anywhere who stands where the Son stands.

The oldest denial

The quarrel over the Son did not begin on earth. It began in heaven, in the heart of the covering cherub who said, “I will be like the most High” (Isaiah 14:14). Ellen White describes what that rebellion set out to hide:

Angels were expelled from heaven because they would not work in harmony with God. They fell from their high estate because they wanted to be exalted. They had come to exalt themselves, and they forgot that their beauty of person and of character came from the Lord Jesus. This fact the angels would obscure, that Christ was the only begotten Son of God, and they came to consider that they were not to consult Christ.

This fact the angels would obscure. Not a theory, not a title, not a role — a fact: that Christ was the only begotten Son of God. The first rebellion in the universe was, in part, an effort to blur exactly that.

The same denial followed the Son to earth. In the wilderness the tempter opened with “If thou be the Son of God” (Matthew 4:3); at the cross the mockers repeated it word for word (Matthew 27:40). The leaders did not doubt that God had a Son — the high priest himself put the question, “whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God” (Matthew 26:63). What they refused to accept was that this carpenter from Nazareth was that Son, and they called His answer blasphemy (Matthew 26:65; John 10:36).

Who is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the Christ? He is antichrist, that denieth the Father and the Son. Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father:

A metaphor?

The same blurring continues today, in a gentler form. Much of modern theology — and, sadly, much modern Adventist teaching with it — still calls Jesus the Son of God, but explains the word Son as a metaphor. In 2015 the church’s international magazine put it in so many words, in a Bible-questions column by a former director of the denomination’s Biblical Research Institute:

We are dealing with a metaphorical use of the word “son.” … The Son is not the natural, literal Son of the Father. A natural child has a beginning, while within the Godhead the Son is eternal. The term “Son” is used metaphorically when applied to the Godhead.

It is only fair to say what the article also affirms: that Christ is fully divine, that He existed before Bethlehem, that He was the Son before He was born of a woman, and that He “came directly from the Father (John 16:28).” But notice the reason it gives for calling the Sonship a metaphor: a natural child has a beginning, while within the Godhead the Son is eternal. The Sonship is made figurative in order to protect a prior belief — that the Son has no source and no beginning in the Father. The creed is deciding what the word Son is allowed to mean.

Read the verse the article itself cites: “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world” (John 16:28). Two movements, in order — first from the Father, then into the world. The article explains came forth as being sent on a mission; but the mission is the second clause, not the first. And Scripture is not embarrassed to place the Son’s coming forth in a real past: His “goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting” (Micah 5:2).

Jesus never spoke of His Sonship as a figure of speech. He did not say I play the part of a son; He said “I proceeded forth and came from God” (John 8:42). John calls Him “the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father” (John 1:18). And he warns that this is not a side issue: “He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath both the Father and the Son” (2 John 1:9). The quarrel here is not with the many sincere believers who have simply inherited the metaphor without examining it. It is with the teaching — because a metaphorical Son cannot carry the weight Scripture puts on Him. (For the pioneer confession and the modern view set side by side, see Christ’s True Sonship.)

The Sonship is the safeguard

Why does this matter for worship? Because the Sonship is the reason the Son shares the Father’s worship — and the reason no one else does.

If the Son is the Father’s only begotten Son, everything holds together. There is one Source of all, the Father. There is one Son who came forth from Him and received His life and nature. Honor the Son, and you honor the Father who gave Him all He has. And because there is only one such Son, the list of those who may receive divine worship is closed: the Father and His Son, exactly as heaven sings it.

But take the Sonship away, and something has to fill the gap. If the Son did not come forth from the Father, then He did not receive His divinity from the Father. He simply has it, independently, from no one. That makes Him a second Source beside the first — a second God, however closely the two are said to agree. And once the circle of divine beings is no longer defined by the Father and His only Son, nothing in principle keeps it from widening again. If there can be two independent divine Persons, why not three?

This is not an abstract worry. It is the very path the doctrine of God took in history. The Son was first recast as an equal without a source, and then a third Person was added beside the two — the arrangement the creeds call the trinity, and which the Seventh-day Adventist statement of beliefs now describes as “a unity of three coeternal Persons.”

And the Spirit?

Once the Son is seen clearly, the question of the Spirit almost answers itself. God has one only begotten Son. There is no second Son and no third divine being. So whatever the Spirit is, it is not another person beside the Father and the Son. Scripture tells us what it is, and Paul uses the clearest comparison possible:

For what man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God.

A man’s spirit is not a second man living inside him. It is the man himself — his own inner life and mind. Even so the Spirit of God is God’s own life and presence, not someone else. That is why the Spirit is called by the names of the Father and the Son: “God hath sent forth the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying, Abba, Father” (Galatians 4:6); “the Spirit of God” and “the Spirit of Christ” in the same verse (Romans 8:9). And it is why Jesus, promising the Spirit’s coming, could say of Himself and His Father, “we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:23). The Spirit is personal because God is personal — it is the Father and the Son Themselves, present with us. (More in The Spirit of Truth.)

This is why, from Genesis to Revelation, no one ever prays to the Spirit, sings to the Spirit, or bows before the Spirit. Heaven’s worship in Revelation 5 has no third recipient. Jesus taught us to pray “Our Father.” The apostles prayed to the Father in the name of the Son. Not one verse addresses the Spirit in worship.

Trinitarian writers — Adventist ones among them — sometimes admit this openly. They acknowledge that Scripture gives no example of anyone praying to the Spirit and no command to do so, and then argue that it nonetheless seems logical to pray to and worship the Spirit, since the Spirit is held to be a third co-equal Person. (Readers who want the argument in its authors’ own words will find it in Woodrow Whidden, Jerry Moon, and John W. Reeve, The Trinity: Understanding God’s Love, His Plan of Salvation, and Christian Relationships [Review and Herald, 2002], pp. 272–273.) That reasoning shows exactly where the idea comes from: not from the Bible, but from the doctrine. And worship is the one area where Scripture warns us most plainly against trusting what merely seems right:

There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

In the last days, worshipping the beast and his image will seem perfectly logical to most of the world. True worship is not found by reasoning outward from a creed. It is found by worshipping whom heaven worships.

Worship begins in the mind

Some will say, I believe in the trinity, but I would never pray to the Spirit; I worship the Father and the Son. That instinct is right, and it is worth listening to. But worship is not only the words we address to God. It begins earlier, with the picture of God we carry inside us when we sing, give, rest, and pray.

Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.

With all thy mind. Every act of worship is aimed at the God the worshipper has in mind. If the God in our mind is three co-equal Persons, then that is the God our songs and prayers are reaching for, whatever name we happen to use. The question is not only whom do I address? but who sits on the throne of my mind? Is it the one God, the Father, with His only begotten Son at His right hand — the picture Revelation paints? Or a committee of three that heaven never sings to?

The final question

Revelation ends earth’s story with a contest over exactly this. The first angel’s message calls the world to “worship him that made heaven, and earth, and the sea, and the fountains of waters” (Revelation 14:7). The third warns, “If any man worship the beast and his image” (Revelation 14:9). Two objects of worship, and no neutral ground. In that hour it will not be enough to worship sincerely; we will need to worship truly — the One heaven worships, in the way heaven worships Him.

It is easy to choose what everyone else believes, and to fear being called strange for believing otherwise. But the standard of true worship has never been the agreement of the churches. It is the agreement of heaven. And heaven’s worship has been written down for us, in plain words, so that we would not have to guess.

Further reading

Who God is, how the Son is His Son, and what the Spirit really is.

The God we worship

The only begotten Son

The Spirit and the objections