iainduguid
Puritan Board Junior
Daniel, I apologize if I missed the point of the argument. Unfortunately, your explanation doesn't make it any clearer to me. Can you explain a) how the light of nature teaches us that we must gather in corporate worship twice a day (as opposed to teaching us that we should constantly be in worship of our creator every single moment)? And b) can you further help me understand how the command to offer a double sacrifice on each Sabbath commits us to worship corporately twice ever Sabbath, but the command to offer a sacrifice morning and afternoon every other day does not commit us to worship corporately twice every other day? After all in Numbers 28, it is only the amount of the sacrifice that varies on the Sabbath day not the time or procedure.The above dismissal of the argument from the morning and evening sacrifice misses the point of the argument. No one is arguing that it must be followed literalistically. We are merely using it to lend further weight to the contention that the light of nature teaches that God should be worshipped twice a day. Since grace does not abolish nature but perfects it, it is not surprising that the sacrifices were offered twice daily in the temple. It would seem rather odd to jettison this practice with respect to the church's corporate worship on the Lord's Day.
As with many issues, I get the impression that people are all too quick to justify declension and innovation rather than question why the traditional practice has been set aside (and I am using the term tradition in the good sense here, not in the sense of a mere human tradition).
There's no desire here to undercut the spiritually beneficial practice of evening services. Rather, it is a growing concern that often in Reformed circles we aren't actually exegeting the relevant Biblical passages on worship very well; often we get the right doctrine from the wrong text, in a kind of proof texting that rips verses out of their proper Biblical context. And given our strong commitment to the RPW, it is absolutely essential that we have proper Biblical warrant if we are going to bind people's consciences in worship. The best argument in favor of an evening service in my view is that the whole day is the Lord's and there is no more profitable way to show and experience that than by being together with God's people to praise him and sit under his Word. On that view, were it possible to spend the whole day in church, that would be better still! But that's very different from an argument that Scripture somehow "mandates" two worship services - no more and no less - by making verses say something they never intended to convey.