Chapter 4 — Worship the Lord Your God
The Incarnate Christ and His Critics (Komoszewski & Bowman, 2024)
---
"You shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve." (Matthew 4:10)
When Satan tempted Jesus in the wilderness, this was his answer, a direct quotation from Deuteronomy. God alone is to be worshiped. That's not a footnote in Israel's faith. It's the heartbeat of it. The whole Old Testament turns on this axis.
So when Christians claim Jesus is the proper recipient of worship, they're making an enormous claim. They're saying that worshiping Jesus isn't idolatry, that Jesus belongs to the same category as the God of the Old Testament who commanded that no other be worshiped.
This is either absolutely true or absolutely scandalous. There's no comfortable middle ground.
What Does "Worship" Mean?
One thing that makes this discussion tricky is that the English word "worship" can mean different things. In some contexts, bowing before someone simply expressed respect or reverence, the same way people bow before royalty today. In others, it referred specifically to adoration offered to a deity.
The Hebrew Old Testament word most often translated "worship" (hishtachavah) and its Greek equivalent (proskyneō) both show up in all three settings: bowing before a human superior, worshiping God, and worshiping idols. So we can't just count instances of the word. We need to understand what kind of bowing or reverence is meant in each case.
Here's the key distinction: the Bible absolutely forbids giving to any being other than God the kind of religious devotion that belongs to God alone. When people offered incense, prayed for deliverance, or cried out for salvation to a deity, that was worship in the full religious sense. And the consistent message of the Old Testament is that this belongs exclusively to YHWH.
The New Testament Pattern
What's remarkable is what the New Testament does with Jesus and this category of religious worship.
In the Gospel of Matthew, the magi come and worship the infant Jesus. After Jesus walks on water, his disciples worship him. After his resurrection, the women who encounter him at the empty tomb "took hold of his feet and worshiped him" (Matt. 28:9). At the very end of Matthew, the risen Jesus receives worship from his disciples even as "some doubted" (Matt. 28:17).
John records that Thomas, on seeing the risen Jesus, declared, "My Lord and my God!", a worshipful exclamation Jesus accepts without correction. That matters enormously. Elsewhere in the New Testament, when people bow before angels or apostles, they're immediately told to stop. Peter tells Cornelius to stand up when he bows: "I too am a man" (Acts 10:26). An angel tells John to stop worshiping him: "Do not do that! I am a fellow servant" (Rev. 22:9). But no one ever tells someone to stop worshiping Jesus. The pattern is consistent, and it's deliberate.
Can Jesus Be Worshiped Without Compromising Monotheism?
The critics' challenge here is sharp. If God alone is to be worshiped, and Jesus is worshiped, either Jesus is God, or the first Christians were idolaters.
Some try to escape this by arguing the early Christians were simply giving Jesus a lesser form of honor, something below true divine worship. But the evidence doesn't support that reading. The worship offered to Jesus in the New Testament uses the same language, the same postures, the same emotional weight as worship offered to God. It isn't second-tier reverence. It's the full thing.
The best explanation is also the simplest: the first Christians worshiped Jesus because they recognized him as God. Not a second God alongside the Father, but the divine Son who shared fully in the identity and glory of the one God of Israel.
This is actually a very Jewish idea, once you grasp what the first Christians experienced. Larry Hurtado, in his landmark research on early Christian devotion, argues that this "binatarian" worship, directing to Jesus the honors due to God, erupted with stunning speed after the resurrection and can only be explained by an encounter with the risen Christ that the disciples interpreted in light of Scripture.
For Us Today
Worship isn't something we do to earn God's favor. It's the natural response of creatures who've been encountered by their Creator, especially when that Creator has loved them enough to die for them.
When we sing to Jesus, when we pray in his name, when we fall on our knees before him, we're not performing empty rituals. We're doing what humans were made to do: giving the full weight of our devotion to the one who's fully worthy of it.
The God who became flesh is the same God who commands our worship. And he's given us every reason to give it freely.