‘O King of the nations!

    Who will not fear, O Lord,
    and glorify your name?
For you alone are holy.
    All nations will come
    and worship you,
for your righteous acts have been revealed.’ 

(Revelation 15:4)

This is the heavenly song of the faithful ‘overcomers.’  They declare the Biblical truth that everyone will worship God in the eternal, even those that rejected and denied His existence.  So, are all the worshippers of one mind?  Are all willing?

The word translated here as ‘worship’ is the Greek verb προσκυνέω proskuneó from pros ‘towards’ and kyneo ‘kiss’.  This describes obeisance, the action of kneeling before or even lying at the feet of another to kiss the ground, not daring to kiss the object of supreme reverence.  

There is an interesting and unexplained incident when Mary Magdalene first recognises the risen Jesus:

Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’ 

She turned and said to him in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means Teacher). 

Jesus said to her, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.  (John 20:16-17)

There may be many reasons why Jesus asked her not to take hold of him, but it was not because his risen body was incorporeal – later he would permit Thomas to handle his wounds (ibid 20:27) – could it be that his transition from Jesus the Nazarene to the King of Kings necessarily prohibited the previous familiarity? 

It also, perhaps, forces us in turn to acknowledge the incongruity that God is both immanent and transcendent; Jesus would have prayer directed to ‘our Father in heaven’; in this paradoxical phrase, we have the intimate and commonplace in combination with the unfamiliar and (given His thoughts are not our thoughts, Isaiah 55:8) the unknowable.

God is control of each person’s destiny.  Jesus does not employ euphemism in describing the correct understanding of this relationship.

… do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.  (Matthew 10:28)

Fear is phobeó and does not mean ‘to revere’, but ‘be in dread’. 

Thus, another aspect of worship is fear; prostration is also motivated by utter terror by the presence of God; even at the very sound of His voice is enough:

… Jesus took with him Peter and James, and John his brother, and led them up a high mountain by themselves. And he was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light. And behold, there appeared to them Moses and Elijah, talking with him. 

And Peter said to Jesus, “Lord, it is good that we are here. If you wish, I will make three tents here, one for you and one for Moses and one for Elijah.” 

He was still speaking when, behold, a bright cloud overshadowed them, and a voice from the cloud said, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.” 

When the disciples heard this, they fell on their faces and were terrified. (Matthew 17:1-6)

Or His messengers, in this example Daniel is unmanned before an archangel:

And when Gabriel came, I was frightened and fell on my face.  (Daniel 8:17)

Even being witness to the miraculous has the power to throw people on their faces:

Then the fire of the Lord fell and consumed the burnt offering and the wood and the stones and the dust, and licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people saw it, they fell on their faces and said, ‘the Lord, he is God; the Lord, he is God.’ (1 Kings 18:38-39)

Worship does embrace love and fear, and at the final judgment all worship in God – if any listen to Jesus, not out of love or fear but in combination of both.  A biblical understanding of worship teaches that love and fear are not mutually exclusive when it comes to God; moreover, to be in the correct relationship requires both.  Before the judgment seat, if there is no love, then all that is left will be terror.