Date Night With the Death Box

The relationship experts almost never talk about “working hard for your girl.” I have never once — not once — heard a marriage guru stand on a stage and say, “Guys, you need to provide better.” And there’s a reason: we already feel that pressure. It’s baked in. It is, to be honest, what some may call tautological. A duh moment. A no-Shetland-pony, Sherlock kind of thing.

What they all say instead — every guru, every podcast with two mics and a fern — is: “Date your wife.” They all double down on intimacy. Why? Because that’s the sauce, bro. That’s what women want and need.

It’s funny because Scripture commands husbands and wives to do precisely what doesn’t come naturally to each: for men, it’s romantic love; for women, it’s submit (Eph 5:22, 25). Paul doesn’t waste ink commanding water to be wet. He commands the uphill thing. The command is the diagnosis. The files are IN the computer.

Hold that thought, because it explains one of my pet peeves. When I hear someone announce, “Worship is more than a song — it’s a lifestyle,” you know what I actually think? I think: wow, things are so bad that we have to say that out loud.

We’ve drifted so far from faith-obedience that Romans 12:1 — present your bodies as a living sacrifice, which is your reasonable worship — has become a hot take. That’s not a revelation; that’s remedial. That’s the marriage seminar reminding men that jobs exist — which is probably gonna be a thing for Gen-Z, seeing how allergic many young men are to long workdays.

But here’s the thing the lifestyle-only crowd misses, and it took a thick book from a septuagenarian Old Testament professor to say it with mucho footnotes.

Daniel Block — professor emeritus of Old Testament at the Evangelical Eagle’s Nest, AKA Wheaton — wrote THE book on worship for Evangelicals: For the Glory of God: Recovering a Biblical Theology of Worship. It is thick, thorough, and in stretches, gloriously pedantic — the man exegetes like he’s a lawyer billing by the hour. And Block, even though he’s a bit hostile to modern methodology (he shows his age in the final chapter, where you can practically hear him cursing at a drum set), absolutely crushes this book.

The bridge hermeneutics alone are worth the price: Block’s operating presupposition is that unless the New Testament explicitly abrogates an Old Testament worship expression, it carries into the Church (sound familiar? Yours truly runs that play on the daily). Israel’s worship modes flow into the liturgy of the Body — welcome to the party, professor, us chandelier swingin Penties saved you a seat.

Block is the Hansel to my Zoolander.

But my favorite part is his architecture. Block organizes all biblical worship into two categories: All of Life as Worship and Cultic (Liturgical) Worship. And then — this is the crucial move — he refuses to separate them. He won’t rank them. He insists both are essential, and that God rejects each one when it’s divorced from the other.

Which is exactly like asking a woman: “What’s more important — your man working all day to pay the bills, or your man taking you out to a candlelit spaghetti dinner where you both slurp the last noodle into a sloppy marinara kiss while a blind accordion player squeezes out That’s Amore?”

So let me let you in on a little secret that should be obvious to anyone who knows the text: Leviticus is worship, and so are the Psalms. They are not competitors. They are the two halves of the covenant romance. Leviticus is the Guy With His Sheep Together — giving God your life, your obedience, your ordered days, your holiness in the kitchen and the field and the bedroom. The Psalms are giving God your affection — your voice cracking, your hands up, your tears on the floor.

And it turns out He wants both. He has always wanted both — we don’t need a walk-off.

The mighty Bruce Waltke thunders from An Old Testament Theology — my favorite volume upon graduating Bible college — that Cain’s failure at the altar produced death in the field. That sentence carries weight, so let me unpack the shipping container.

Cain and Abel come to an altar — a cultic altar, the formal apparatus, the date — and they bring offerings of thanksgiving. And Cain does not care about the date. Cain swings through the drive-thru and brings God Wendy’s. Some of his fruit. Whatever was in the passenger seat. Abel, meanwhile, packs a picnic basket, spreads a red checkered blanket on the lawn, and pours Dom Pérignon into two plastic flutes — the firstborn of his flock, the fat portions, the best he owns (Gen 4:3–4). God rejects Cain’s offering not because the produce was defective but because it meant nothing to Cain. It cost him nothing. It was some, and love never brings some.

Now — we have no liturgical rulebook predating this event. No Torah, no Leviticus, no laminated order of service. Which makes the lesson unmissable: before God ever codified the cult, He was already refusing the mailed-in version of it. And note Waltke’s sequencing, because it’s the whole shootin match: the altar failure came first, the field murder second. The cultic collapse preceded the ethical one. Bad date nights make dangerous husbands. Liturgy and life are on one circuit, and Cain blew the fuse at the altar before he ever picked up whatever he picked up in that field.

Fast-forward to David — this will shift your paradigm of worship, because I’m gonna draw some modern parallels that you’ll never be able to unsee again: