The High Places
There is a phrase in the Old Testament that I used to read without giving it much thought: “the high places were not taken away.” It appears once in Kings and again in Chronicles. Sometimes in accounts of kings who otherwise seem to have been trying to do what was right. Idols were destroyed, worship was restored, and reforms were made, yet the writer would add that frustrating qualification: the high places remained. Once I started noticing the phrase, I couldn’t stop noticing it, and eventually I began wondering why these places were so difficult to get rid of.
Before Israel ever entered Canaan, God had already addressed them. Deuteronomy 12:2 says, “Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree.”
These were places where the people of Canaan worshiped their gods. Altars, pillars, images, and other objects associated with their worship could be found on mountains and hills and beneath prominent trees. God’s instructions concerning them were thorough: Israel was to destroy the altars, break the pillars, burn the groves, and remove what had been associated with that worship.
Despite those instructions, the high places kept coming back.
Israel did not enter Canaan intending to adopt the religion of Canaan, and Judges describes something much more gradual than a sudden rejection of God. The Israelites lived among the people of the land, relationships developed, and marriages followed. Eventually Scripture says, almost matter-of-factly, that they “served their gods” (Judges 3:6). By Solomon’s reign, the situation had progressed considerably further. First Kings 11 records that Solomon actually built high places for the gods worshiped by his foreign wives. Something Israel had once been commanded to destroy was now being constructed by Israel’s own king.
That progression changed the way I thought about the high places because an altar could apparently be torn down much faster than the desire for one could disappear. A stone altar could be dismantled in an afternoon, an image could be smashed, and a wooden object could be burned, but the affection behind those things was another matter. Perhaps that helps explain why the high places appear so persistently throughout Israel’s history. Removing what existed on the hill did not necessarily remove what existed in the heart, and if the attachment remained, eventually something could be rebuilt.
It was Jeroboam’s story, however, that caused this study to take an unexpected turn for me.
After Solomon’s death, the kingdom divided. Jeroboam became king over the northern tribes while Jerusalem remained in the southern kingdom of Judah, creating a political problem for the new king. If the people under his rule continued traveling to Jerusalem to worship, Jeroboam feared their loyalty might eventually return to the house of David. His solution was to establish alternative places of worship at Bethel and Dan.
The reasoning he presented to the people is what caught my attention:
“It is too much for you to go up to Jerusalem.”
— 1 Kings 12:28
I kept coming back to those words: “It is too much for you.”
Jeroboam was offering something easier. The journey was shortened, the inconvenience was reduced, and the people could worship closer to home. Convenience was not his true motivation; his concern was political control. Still, convenience helped make his alternative attractive, and that made me wonder whether convenience can begin changing worship before we realize anything has changed.
Convenience itself is certainly not wrong. Much of modern life has been improved by removing unnecessary difficulty, and churches make use of those improvements every week. We use microphones so people can hear, screens so people can read, and recordings so sermons can be heard again. Technology has allowed churches to reach people who once would have been completely beyond the walls of a local congregation.
That is where my thoughts landed somewhere I had not expected when I began studying an Old Testament practice: I started thinking about the church livestream.
Before anyone comes after me, I should probably explain that I have worked on our church’s production team, and I have also watched our livestream myself. I understand both its reach and its usefulness, and I don’t believe a livestream is a modern high place. That comparison would go much further than I think the biblical text allows. Livestreaming can be an extraordinary ministry tool, allowing someone who is sick, hospitalized, homebound, traveling, or genuinely unable to attend to hear the preaching and remain connected to what is happening in a local congregation.
Still, Jeroboam’s words made me ask a question I had never really asked before: Can something designed to make church accessible eventually make gathering seem unnecessary?
For a period of time, particularly during the COVID pandemic, livestreaming became the primary way many congregations maintained some form of connection when gathering normally was impossible. Churches adapted because circumstances demanded it. Eventually the doors reopened, while the cameras stayed. There is nothing inherently troubling about that; the circumstances changed, but many of the benefits of livestreaming remained. What interests me more is the possibility that somewhere along the way our understanding of attendance may have changed as well.
It is now possible to wake up on Sunday morning, remain at home, turn on a television or phone, watch an entire worship service, hear exactly the same sermon as everyone sitting in the sanctuary, and afterward describe the experience as having gone to church. That description would have made very little sense to most Christians throughout history, yet today it sounds perfectly normal.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the question is not really whether a sermon can be delivered effectively through a screen. Clearly it can. The more difficult question is whether hearing a sermon is the same thing as gathering with the church.
Acts 2:42 describes believers continuing together in the apostles’ doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayers, while Hebrews 10:24–25 describes believers assembling together and encouraging one another. There is something inherently relational in both descriptions. A screen can reproduce some parts of a church service remarkably well. It can carry a preacher’s voice across the world, allow someone hundreds of miles away to hear a song being sung in real time, and preserve a message long after the service has ended. Other parts of gathering, however, are much harder to transmit.
No one notices through a television that I walked into church unusually quiet. I can hear people pray without anyone praying beside me and watch people worship without standing among them. I can close the stream whenever I want, become distracted without anyone knowing, and receive everything being transmitted without ever being required to participate in the life of the congregation. None of that makes livestreaming bad; it simply means that watching a church service and gathering with a church are not exactly the same thing.
That distinction brought me back to Jeroboam. He did not ask Israel to abandon worship; he offered another place to practice it. The argument he presented was not that Jerusalem was evil or that worship was unnecessary. His argument was far easier to accept: the journey is asking too much of you.
That may be why this old story has stayed with me. When I first taught about the high places, I mostly thought about them as a picture of the things we elevate above God. Money can occupy that place, as can career, reputation, comfort, entertainment, pride, and any number of other things that can gradually assume an importance they were never intended to have. I still think there is truth in that application, but returning to the subject has made me notice something I missed the first time.
The high places were not always evidence that people wanted nothing to do with worship. Sometimes worship was still happening. What had changed was where it happened, how it happened, and who determined the terms. That makes the story more complicated than a simple lesson about idolatry, and it also makes me reluctant to answer the livestream question too quickly.
I am not convinced churches should turn off their cameras. There are people being served by them who might otherwise have no connection to a service at all. At the same time, I am not sure that “we can” is enough reason to stop examining what a technology may be teaching us about church. Perhaps the more useful question is not whether churches should livestream their services, but what we believe the livestream is for.
If it extends the reach of a gathered church to someone who cannot be there, that is one thing. If it gradually teaches someone who could gather that gathering itself is unnecessary, that is something different.
I don’t think Bethel and Dan give us a simple answer to a twenty-first-century question about cameras, internet connections, and online church, nor would I expect them to. What they do give us is an old example of how easily convenience can become part of the way worship is reshaped. After following the high places through Israel’s history, that leaves me wondering about something I had never considered when I first taught this lesson:
When does making worship easier begin changing what we believe worship requires?
