Syncretism (2 Kings 16:10-14)

2 Kings 16:10-14

10 When King Ahaz went to Damascus to meet Tiglath-pileser king of Assyria, he saw the altar that was at Damascus. And King Ahaz sent to Uriah the priest a model of the altar, and its pattern, exact in all its details. 11 And Uriah the priest built the altar; in accordance with all that King Ahaz had sent from Damascus, so Uriah the priest made it, before King Ahaz arrived from Damascus. 12 And when the king came from Damascus, the king viewed the altar. Then the king drew near to the altar and went up on it 13 and burned his burnt offering and his grain offering and poured his drink offering and threw the blood of his peace offerings on the altar. 14 And the bronze altar that was before the Lord he removed from the front of the house, from the place between his altar and the house of the Lord, and put it on the north side of his altar.

            This morning, I find myself working my way through 2 Kings, and this passage about King Ahaz of Judah has my attention. Ahaz visits Syria and there sees foreign religious practices. What does Ahaz do? He sends home to the present priest a copy of the floor plans for worship in Damascus and commands that practices of the Syrian false religion be brought into the worship of God. If you read the remainder of the section on Ahaz, you will see that Ahaz redesigns the way worship was carried out in Judah and the way the temple was laid out in order to mimic what he had seen in Damascus that got his attention so well.

            I think it is obvious what the problem is here. Ahaz was supposed to be following the word of God. He was a king of Judah. He had the temple of God in Jerusalem. No way should he have allowed the temple to be reshaped by foreign religion. But Ahaz left the way of God in order to bring in elements of false religion. This is syncretism, the fusion of multiple belief systems, and it is something that God clearly and wholeheartedly forbids his people to do.

            It is easy today to look at Ahaz and see what he did wrong. To change the temple layout, to remove the altar, to change how the sacrifices were done, this was all clearly against Scripture. But here is the question for us: How do we act just like Ahaz?

            Do we act like Ahaz? Do we look at other religions, false faiths, and find in them practices that we would like to bring into our own Christian lives? Do we look at the world around us and bring in elements of secular humanism? Do we look at the entertainment culture of today and find ways to bring it into our worship?

            The temptation here is to now take the opportunity to point out three or four ways in which we give into culture or bow toward false religion in our own worship. However, I do not know that this will help us much. My goal in thinking this through is not to have a chance to vent my pet peeves about the incorporation of worldly elements into the Christian life—so don’t ask me about pagan mysticism, yoga, eastern religious practices in discerning the will of God, popular psychology, the adoption of modern morality regarding marriage and divorce, the adding of our own rules to God’s clear commands, or the use of fog machines in a worship service. (OK, maybe restraint isn’t my strongest virtue.)

            The thing that I think I would prefer to do this morning is to let this passage cause me to prayerfully seek God’s grace and wisdom in shaping my worship and the worship of the church I serve. I want to be directed by the word of God. I want to be bound by what God commands. I’m not wanting to give up electricity or modern instruments, but I am willing to pray that our worship be the things that God has directed his people to do through the centuries in his word.

            I also want God’s word to be my guide for all aspects of life. God has given us in his book what we need. He has shown us how to know him and to please him. Nothing in that plan to please him has anything to do with reshaping his ways with the ways of other faiths or the world in general. We are not to be pressed into the mold of the world, but we are to be transformed by the renewing of our minds (cf. Romans 1:1-2). May our minds be renewed by Scripture and not by popular practices and catchy ideas from outside the Bible.