Is Your Altar Made of Earth? – by Desmond Ford

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Jan 26, 2016 3328

There was a law in Exodus 20:24 saying that altars were to be made of earth. Why were altars to be made of earth?

Altars were made of earth because the root of worship is the awareness of our earthliness and our weakness. Ours is a very sophisticated civilization that has forgotten its mortality. Ours is a very secular world.

The main fight you and I fight is against the secular world. It is so hard for parents because the children are exposed to the secular gods constantly – gods that cry out through the mouths of human beings that money counts, come and have a drink, that jeers at chastity, that makes the use of sex as an obsession.

T.S. Eliot wrote something once in which he described modern civilization dying and he has these lines:

And the wind shall say,

‘Here were decent godless people;

their only monument the asphalt road and a thousand lost golf balls.’

Modern civilization is not productive of faith, hope and love. It rears masonry and steel and it stretches millions to the uttermost with stress and strain as they pursue the modern gods, and then it dies and leaves nothing.

Only when I am aware of my neediness – none of this arrogance of sophisticated moderns – only when I acknowledge my neediness can I worship, only then can I be blessed.

– Des Ford. Rom 8:27–32. Adapted from “The Night of Wrestling.”