Sun worship.
When Ezekiel, in his visionary visit to the temple, came upon the last scene of horror, and beheld the greatest of all the abominations therein committed, he saw twenty-five men performing rites of worship before the rising sun.
I. SUN WORSHIP IS MOST FASCINATING. This was the most common, and perhaps also the most primitive, heathen cult. It was very prominent in the ancient Egyptian religion—the rising, the midday, and the setting sun being honoured with separate names and rites; it was the essential idea of the Canaanite Baal worship, as well as of the Babylonian religion; and it lies at the heart of the Aryan mythology in Sanscrit, Greek, and Teutonic forms. If any material object should be selected for worship, it is natural that the earth's great source of light, power, and life should be the universal favourite. Our modern idolatries do not reach this material form, but they contain the same ideas.
1. The worship of light. This takes two forms.
2. The worship of power. The sun is the great motive power of the universe. Latent sun heat in coal drives our steam engines. Direct sun heat lifts the water from the sea, that afterwards descends in avalanches and mountain torrents. We do not prostrate ourselves before the sun, the source of all this force, but we do magnify the virtue of the power itself. Yet material resources are not the highest good.
3. The worship of life. The sun is the great fertilizing influence of nature. The return of its warm rays awakens nature from the death of winter, and creates the new life of spring; its great heat makes the tropics to teem with swift growing vegetable and insect life. The most modern idolatry is the deification of the vital powers—the idea that, as all natural instinct is pure, the indulgence of naturalism is commendable. This is just the old Canaanite abomination.
4. The worship of the future. The sun worshipper turned to the east and hailed the sunrise. There is something fascinating and exhilarating in this anticipation of the morning. Christianity consecrates hope. But it is a mistake to believe in the future as in a fate of coming good. The future can only be good because God is in it, and blesses it.
II. SUN WORSHIP IS MOST ABOMINABLE. It includes many evil things.
1. Departure from God. The sun worshippers stood with their backs turned towards the temple. Their attitude was most significant. All idolatry must be practised with the back turned towards the truly Divine. We cannot serve the false and the true at one and the same time.
2. The degradation of God's greatest works. The more beautiful and powerful and fruitful the sun is seen to be, the more shameful is it that men should degrade their thought of it into idolatry. When we abuse God's best gifts by idolizing them, we turn what should occasion our deepest gratitude and admiration for God's goodness into an occasion for departing from him.
3. The consecration of sin. Sun worship began in adoration of the lord of day. But it descended into gross licentiousness, through the selection of the fertilizing power of sun heat as a special object of adoration. Thus sun worship became the worship of lust. This will be the inevitable effect of naturalism regarded as a religion. The worship of nature powers pure and simple involves the consecration of the lowest of those powers, so that what should be kept down as a slave claims to rule as a master, with obscene effrontery.
CONCLUSION. The rescue from nature worship—modern as well as ancient—is to be found in the revelation of One infinitely greater than nature. No wonder men who had no vision of the spiritual God selected the sun—so powerful in his southern splendour—as the greatest object of adoration. But we have "the Sun of Righteousness," before whose glory all physical brightness grows pale and fades away.