REFORMED
CONFESSIONS
Junction
1:
The
The
Heidelberg Catechism was composed in
The
Synod of Dort in 1618-1619 approved the Heidelberg Catechism, and it soon
became the most ecumenical of the Reformed catechisms and confessions. The
catechism has been translated into many European, Asian, and African languages
and is the most widely used and most warmly praised catechism of the
Reformation period.
The
1968 Synod of the Christian Reformed Church appointed a committee to prepare “a
modern and accurate translation ... which will serve as the official text of
the Heidelberg Catechism and as a guide for catechism preaching.” A translation
was adopted by the Synod of 1975, and some editorial revisions were approved by
the Synod of 1988.
The
English translation follows the first German edition of the catechism except in
two instances, in the questions 57 and 80. The result of those inclusions is
that the translation therefore actually follows the German text of the third
edition as it was included in the Palatinate Church Order of
Biblical
passages quoted in the catechism are taken from the New International Version.
The foundation of the
reformed faith
Lord’s
Days 1–7 of the Heidelberg Catechism
explained by D de Jong,
minister-emeritus of a Canadian Reformed Church
LORD’S
DAY 1
1 Q. What is
your only comfort
in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own,
but
belong with body and soul,
both
in life and in death,
to
my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.
He
has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,
and
has set me free from all the power of the devil.
He
also preserves me in such a way
that
without the will of my heavenly Father
not
a hair can fall from my head;
indeed,
all things must work together for my salvation.
Therefore,
by his Holy Spirit
He
also assures me of eternal life
and
makes me heartily willing and ready
from
now on to live for him.
2 Q. What do
you need to know in order to live and die
in the joy of this comfort?
A. Three things:
first,
how great my sins and misery are;
second,
how I am delivered from all my sins and misery;
third,
how I am to be thankful to God for such deliverance.
Introduction
The
catechism is an instruction
in the doctrine of salvation. It
teaches us about the beginning and the outcome of our
faith, or, as Peter calls it in 1 Peter 1:9, the salvation of our souls.
The fact that Peter speaks about the salvation of our
souls does not mean that this is something separate from our bodies. The Bible
clearly teaches that we with body and soul receive salvation, and Peter’s
epistle does not make an exception. Also Peter bases our salvation on the
resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
When Peter speaks about the salvation of our souls as
the outcome of our faith, he means with the word soul our entire person and
personality, as we live here on earth, and and also
as we keep living when our body is buried in the grave until the day of the
resurrection of the body.
The doctrine of salvation therefore regards our entire
existence, nothing excepted. For what is salvation according to Peter?
Salvation is that together with all those who belong to God’s church, His holy
nation, we may declare the wonderful deeds of Him who called us out of darkness
into His marvellous light (2:9).
The purpose and outcome of our salvation is that we
together praise God. Therefore, when Lord’s Day
1 asks the question, “What is your only comfort in life and death”, the answer
can be given in one word: our only comfort is God.
God?
Looking at it superficially it seems that in Lord’s
Day 1 man is placed in the centre. We hear about what is your only comfort, and that I
belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus
Christ, who has paid for all my sins,
and has set me free; and about what I need to know in order that I may live and die in the joy of this
comfort.
However, it only seems to be that way, and those who
have this impression of Lord’s Day 1 are mistaken. There is e.g. no real
difference with the Belgic Confession which starts (in
article 1) by speaking about God.
There is no real difference between our confession of the one and only true
God, and that of our only comfort. –
In question and answer 2 we are told that we need to
know three
things
in order to live and die in the joy of this comfort: our sins and misery, our
deliverance, and our thankfulness.
Three things we must know, three things which we
therefore are
inclined to consider separately, one after another,
and apart from each other. However, if we would do so, we would make it
impossible to receive the right insight into our only comfort.
It is like a room. If you want to know how big the
room is you must consider three things: its height, its length, and its width.
If you would only consider the height of the room, you do not see anything of
the room itself, not even a little part of it. You only consider an
abstraction, without any concrete meaning and shape.
It is the same way with the three things of which the
catechism speaks. If you would only consider the part about our deliverance or
redemption, you will not be able to receive the right insight in it. Then you
see only a theoretical idea which has nothing to do with the reality of our
redemption. And thus it is with the other aspects which are mentioned here as
well.
When therefore the catechism answers the question,
what is our only comfort, all three aspects are taken together in the answer.
The catechism places us in the midst of the building of God’s grace which is
constructed in accordance with the plan of the divine Architect Himself; and
thus the catechism shows us its height and length and width all at once.
Only in this way can we see and recognize the work of
God. Then the question what is our only comfort becomes at the same time a very
down to earth question for our everyday life. For it is a question about what
God means to you, about what God has done for you, and still is doing for you,
and will do for you.
Our only comfort
(a) Jacob’s
comfort, given and sought apart from Christ
We read in Genesis 37, when Jacob came to the
conclusion that his favourite son Joseph apparently had been devoured by a wild
beast, that “all his sons and all his daughters rose up to comfort him; but he
refused to be comforted”.
Why was it that Jacob refused to be comforted? Was
Jacob not a believer? He certainly was. But why did he then refuse to be
comforted? Basically there were two reasons for that.
The first reason was that Jacob’s children did not
come to him with the only comfort. Jacob’s sons had themselves caused Jacob’s
grief. They knew what had happened to Joseph. They themselves had sold him as a
slave. Their comfort was no real comfort, because it was based on a lie, on
deceit; they were false comforters. They could not come to Jacob with the only
real comfort; they came with a comfort apart from Christ and inspired by the
devil: a false comfort.
No wonder that Jacob, who was a believer, and who
looked forward to the coming of the promised Messiah Jesus Christ, could not
derive any comfort from their empty words. It was no comfort at all, because it
was a comfort without Christ; and thus Jacob rightly refused that kind of
comfort.
But there was also a second reason why Jacob refused
to be comforted; and this reason was to be found in Jacob himself. For in spite
of the fact that Jacob was a believer who expected the coming of Jesus Christ,
at that point of time Jacob did not live as a believer; he did not act by
faith.
While his children did not come to him with the only
true comfort; Jacob himself did at that time not know what he (see Lord’s Day
1, Q. and A. 2) needed to know in order to live and die in the joy of the only
comfort.
Jacob did not only refuse to be comforted because they
did not come to him with the only comfort; he himself did not desire the only
comfort either. And why did he not desire this? In the first place because he
did not know how great his sins and misery were.
What then was wrong with Jacob? In the next chapter of
Genesis, chapter 38, we are told about the immoral lifestyle of his son Judah.
How did
We will now for a moment turn to chapters 29 and
What a family to grow up in! No wonder that
What all this comes down to is that Jacob, anyway
partly, had to blame himself for the lifestyle of his sons, and for what they
had done to Joseph. It is also for this reason that Jacob refused to be
comforted. Jacob could not let himself be comforted, as long as he did not know
his real misery.
And due to the fact that Jacob did not know his real
misery, his own sinful way of life, he did not know how he could be delivered
either. Yes, Jacob was a believer; but his religion was still self-centered; his belief in God’s promises did not function.
That’s why Jacob could not be thankful to God either.
For although Jacob always had been interested in the Messianic blessing (he had
deceived his brother Esau in order to get this blessing), he still did not know
what this blessing really meant; not just the inheritance of the promised land
of Canaan, but especially eternal life with God. He did not let the Holy Spirit
work in his heart to assure him of eternal life, and to make him heartily
willing and ready from now on to live only for the LORD. Now he had lost his
favoured son Joseph, even life in
Jacob was really in misery, because he did not see God
at work, nor did he see his own place and calling in God’s work of deliverance
of His people.
But how about us? Do we see God at work in whatever
situation we find ourselves in, and are we always heartily willing and ready to
take our place and fulfill our calling in God’s
church and in this world? Or, do we also have our favourite things which come
first? Do we seek our own comforts in this world, in sex and parties and
watching TV and all kinds of movies, and making money for ourselves, for a nice
car and a comfortable house? How about the Christian lifestyle in our families,
and the Christian influence which we exert in the midst of the nation?
It seemed that Jacob indeed had no reason for
thankfulness at all when he had to conclude that his son Joseph had been
killed; and of course we can sympathize with him. Yet, he had reason for
thankfulness; but he did not know it. He did not know it because he did not
know what his misery was. But God did not forget Jacob and His promises to him.
We read in Genesis 45:5 that Joseph later on said to his brothers: when you
sold me as a slave to
Even though they did not know it because they did not
know their sins and misery, yet the only comfort was there, the comfort that
God preserved them, the brothers and their father Jacob, even in such a way
that without the will of their heavenly Father not a hair could fall from their
head, and that indeed all things worked together for their salvation.
However, in order to enjoy this comfort, they had to
seek it apart from themselves, in the coming Christ!
(b) Joseph’s
comfort, given with a view to Christ
Joseph was in great trouble. His brothers in their
jealousy first put him down in a deep pit, and then sold him to slave traders
who took him with them to
But you know what right away appears and is told to us
in chapter 39:2, 3? Joseph knew the comfort, the only comfort, which we confess
in Lord’s Day 1. Apparently Jacob had been faithful in his education of Joseph,
by giving him what we today call catechism instruction; and Joseph apparently
remembered his lessons. Not only that he still knew it by heart; he also
experienced the truth of it; and, he also confessed it openly, in his actions
as well as by speaking about it.
“The LORD was with Joseph”, this means that Joseph
belonged to his faithful God, who cared for him, and made all things to work
together for his salvation. “And his master saw that the LORD was with him”; he
saw how successful Joseph was in his work, and he must have heard from Joseph
that it was the LORD who made this to happen.
We read in 39:5 that the LORD even blessed the
Egyptian’s house for Joseph’s sake. In this way God assured Joseph. The LORD
did this for Joseph’s sake. Yes, but there is more to it. We must see that here
the LORD already began to make true what He had promised to Abraham: that all
the nations would be blessed in him and his offspring. The LORD did this for
the sake of His Covenant-promises; He did it with a view to the promised coming
of Christ.
Joseph also believed and experienced that last part
which we confess in Lord’s Day 1, Q. and A. 1, that the LORD by His Holy Spirit
makes us heartily willing and ready to live for Him. For when Potiphars wife tempted him to immorality by inviting him to
sleep with her, Joseph resisted this temptation, at about the same time that
his brother Judah fell for it and committed immorality by sleeping with what he
thought to be a harlot.
Does this now mean that Joseph was better than
No! Let us not forget: when Joseph was still at home
he was indeed a spoiled brat who was quite proud of himself (think of how he
went around showing off with his dreams), and was always telling on his
brothers. No wonder that they began hating him; and so he had also to blame
himself for the miserable situation he found himself in.
No, Joseph was not better than
Christ who had to come forth from
(c) The only
comfort, received for the sake of Christ
When Joseph had made himself known to his brothers he
said to them, Genesis 45:5, 7, “Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves,
because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. God sent
me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you
many survivors”.
Joseph comforted his brothers with these words, when
they had learned to know their real misery and had acknowledged their sins, and
therefore were deeply distressed and in trouble. This was the only comfort for
Joseph himself; that’s why he had to go through all those sufferings which his
own brothers had afflicted on him; but this was also the only comfort for the
brothers who had committed that terrible sin.
God let it all happen for the sake of Him who would
come to reconcile Joseph and his brothers with Himself, and thus also with each
other. For that’s what salvation is all about, that we do not do any longer
what Satan wants us to do, but what God wants us to do; that we do not live in
Satan’s slavery anymore, but in God’s blessed fellowship.
Do we too live in that reconciled relationship with
all God’s other children? If not, then we are not reconciled with Him who is
also their and our Father. If not, then we do not yet know how we are to be
thankful to God for our deliverance. Then we are still in our misery. Then we
miss out on the only comfort, in whatever situation we may find ourselves.
If this is the case with us we had better pray that
God give us His Holy Spirit, that He may assure us of eternal life, and make us
heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him. We may be certain that
our God is willing to hear such a prayer. For we confess in this Lord’s Day
that our only comfort is that God has saved us, and this Lord’s Day shows us
that our salvation consists of knowing God like He has revealed Himself to us,
namely as the God who has delivered us from all our sins and misery. That’s
what this Lord’s Day is all about: how I am saved by the Triune God.
How did God save us? He did this by making us to
belong to Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has fully paid for all my
sins, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. Just as I am, a
miserable sinner, I have become the possession of Christ. Just as I am, this
also means that I have completely become the possession of Christ. Not only
part of me, what I perhaps call my immortal soul; for if I would have an immortal
soul, Christ would not have had to die for it. I would live forever anyway. But
no, God has delivered my entire life, my whole existence, everything I am and
everything I have, and therefore nothing in my life is except from His claim on
me.
This is so, because Christ has fully paid for my sins,
and thus my entire existence has been paid for. That’s what salvation is; for
before Christ paid for us, in order that we would be set free and belong to
Him, we did not belong to ourselves. We were slaves, slaves of someone else. We
lived in the tyrannical slavery of a harsh and cruel master, the devil, and our
greatest misery was, that we had to blame ourselves for it.
The fact that we had to blame ourselves for it means
that our existence did not start that way. God had given us a place, a
beautiful garden, where we could feel home right from the beginning, and God
also began to prepare a city for us where we could live together as a community
of all God’s people. But what happened? Even before as it were the first
homestead could be built, we had to be evicted already. Everything which God
had given us we gambled away to the devil, and so we could not pay the fruits
of our work to God anymore. We got bankrupt as it were, and because we had
nothing to pay our debt to God we were put into prison, imprisoned for debt.
And the prison guard was the devil. After all, we rather obeyed him than God,
didn’t we? Alright, then we had to be his slaves.
Thus it is from this great and deep misery that Jesus
Christ has delivered us. He has fully paid for all our sins, for yours and
mine. And He has paid a price for that, so high that it cannot be counted. The
highest price, His own precious blood. Later on, in Lord’s Day 4, we will hear
why this price had to be so high. But here already we are reminded of how
precious this price was, in order that we would realize right from the beginning
how great the salvation is which God has brought about, and how deep our misery
was from which He has saved us. It was so bad, that Jesus’ bitter death at the
cross was necessary in order to get us saved.
Jesus Christ has delivered us as our faithful Saviour.
The catechism calls Him our faithful Saviour, because He had promised His
Father that He would pay for us. And faithfully He has done what He promised;
He has come on earth to be faithful even to the point of dying at the cross.
This is how we have been delivered from the power of
the devil, and been placed under the rule of Jesus Christ. Out of prison we
have been brought home again. We may again live in the House of God, which He
began building in the beginning.
(d) Our only comfort:
that we are God's House again, and that we may live in God’s House again
When Joseph had made himself known to his brothers he
said to them, Genesis 45:5, 7, “Do not be distressed or angry with yourselves,
because you sold me here; for God sent me before you to preserve life. God sent
me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you
many survivors”.
Joseph comforted his brothers with these words, when
they had learned to know their real misery and had acknowledged their sins, and
therefore were deeply distressed and in trouble. This was the only comfort for
Joseph himself; that’s why he had to go through all those sufferings which his
own brothers had afflicted on him; but this was also the only comfort for the
brothers who had committed that terrible sin.
God let it all happen for the sake of Him who would
come to reconcile Joseph and his brothers with Himself, and thus also with each
other. For that’s what salvation is all about, that we do not do any longer
what Satan wants us to do, but what God wants us to do; that we do not live in
Satan’s slavery anymore, but in God’s blessed fellowship.
Do we live in that reconciled relationship with all
God’s other children? If not, then we are not reconciled with Him who is also
their and our Father. If not, then we do not yet know how we are to be thankful
to God for our deliverance. Then we are still in our misery. Then we miss out
on the only comfort, in whatever situation we may find ourselves.
If this is the case with us we had better pray that
God give us His Holy Spirit, that He may assure us of eternal life, and make us
heartily willing and ready from now on to live for Him. We may be certain that
our God is willing to hear such a prayer. For we confess in this Lord’s Day
that our only comfort is that God has saved us, and this Lord’s Day shows us
that our salvation consists of knowing God as He has revealed Himself to us,
namely as the God who has delivered us from all our sins and misery. That’s
what this Lord’s Day is all about: how I am saved by the Triune God.
How did God save us? He did this by making us to
belong to Jesus Christ, who with His precious blood has fully paid for all my
sins, and has set me free from all the power of the devil. Just as I am, a
miserable sinner, I have become the possession of Christ. Just as I am, this
also means that I have completely become the possession of Christ. Not only
part of me, what I perhaps call my immortal soul; for if I would have an
immortal soul, Christ would not have had to die for it. I would live forever
anyway. But no, God has delivered my entire life, my whole existence,
everything I am and everything I have, and therefore nothing in my life is
except from His claim on me.
This is so, because Christ has fully paid for my sins,
and thus my entire existence has been paid for. That’s what salvation is; for
before Christ paid for us, in order that we would be set free and belong to
Him, we did not belong to ourselves. We were slaves, slaves of someone else. We
lived in the tyrannical slavery of a harsh and cruel master, the devil, and our
greatest misery was, that we had to blame ourselves for it.
The fact that we had to blame ourselves for it means
that our existence did not start that way. God had given us a place, a beautiful
garden, where we could feel at home right from the beginning, and God also
began to prepare a city for us where we could live together as a community of
all God’s people. But what happened? Even before as it were the first homestead
could be built, we had to be evicted already. Everything which God had given us
we gambled away to the devil, and so we could not pay the fruits of our work to
God anymore. We got bankrupt as it were, and because we had nothing to pay our
debt to God we were put into prison, imprisoned for debt. And the prison guard
was the devil. After all, we rather obeyed him than God, didn’t we? Alright,
then we had to be his slaves.
Thus it is from this great and deep misery that Jesus
Christ has delivered us. He has fully paid for all our sins, for yours and
mine. And He has paid a price for that, so high that it cannot be counted. The
highest price, His own precious blood. Later on, in Lord’s Day 4, we will hear
why this price had to be so high. But here already we are reminded of how
precious this price was, in order that we would realize right from the
beginning how great the salvation is which God has brought about, and how deep
our misery was from which He has saved us. It was so bad, that Jesus’ bitter
death at the cross was necessary in order that we could be saved.
Jesus Christ has delivered us as our faithful Saviour.
The catechism calls Him our faithful Saviour, because He had promised His
Father that He would pay for us. And faithfully He has done what He promised;
He has come on earth to be faithful even to the point of dying at the cross.
This is how we have been delivered from the power of
the devil, and been placed under the rule of Jesus Christ. Out of prison we
have been brought home again. We may again live in the House of God, which He
began building in the beginning.
(e) Our only
comfort, in this life of sorrow
God lets this salvation which He alone brings about
have its effects already in this life. For we confess that Jesus Christ
preserves us in such a way, that without the will of our heavenly Father not a
hair can fall from our head, but that indeed all things must work together for
our salvation. This is real consolation whenever we notice, every day again,
that we are still sinners in a world which is torn apart by sin and its
consequences. Death and illnesses, natural catastrophes and all kinds of
adversities are what we meet and must cope with as long as we live here on
earth. And often does it appear that we are still open for all kinds of
temptations. We still live in a world in which Satan goes around like a roaring
lion, seeking someone to devour (2 Peter 5:8).
It is certainly necessary that Christ still defends
and preserves us in the redemption which He has obtained for us. For although
the devil has no jurisdiction over us anymore, still there is that horrible
reality that Satan does not accept his dismissal. Still he is God’s opponent,
who cannot stand it that there are people who desire to serve God and who again
may live in God’s house. He tries anything to prevent it or to undo it.
And we, weak sinners as we are, we are not strong
enough to resist him (cf. Canons of Dort V, article 1-3, **). Father, deliver
us from the evil one, this prayer is the only weapon which we can use against
him. But this weapon is also the only weapon which is sufficient; for the
Kingdom and the power and the glory belong to God. Without the will of my
heavenly Father can not even a hair fall from my head.
That’s quite something! This powerful God is for
Christ’s sake my
Father! Like a father protects his children, so He
protects us. He is our heavenly Father; He puts heavenly energies to work for
us, and He lets all things in our life work together for our salvation. All
things. Even our sins and weaknesses and shortcomings He uses in order to
humble us, and thus to make us live by faith alone. He also uses the enmity of
the world around us in order to let His work in the world go on.
Whenever it happens that things go wrong in our daily
work, whenever we fail in our endeavours, or sorrowful events discourage us;
God uses these very same events to lead us back to our only comfort, our only
security: that we, with body and soul, completely, belong to Jesus Christ.
If we, by faith in Him, are sure of our salvation,
then we will also become more sure of its effects in our life, in spite of
whatever may seem to contradict it and to make it doubtful (cf. Canons of Dort
V, article 9, ***).
But how can we be sure of our salvation? We are sure
of it, because it is promised to us, and because God is reliable and Jesus
Christ is faithful. Whoever believes God’s promise, he or she does belong to
Jesus Christ and will keep belonging to Him. Nothing and no one can separate us
from His love, and pull us out of His hands (Romans
This does not mean that all miseries and sorrows all
of a sudden disappear from our life. There are still hardships and
catastrophes, illnesses, and causes for mourning and tears. We still have to
fight against so many sins in our lives, and the temptations which surround us.
They are there, in our personal lives, and also in church life.
But Peter says, in 1 Peter 1:6, “In this you rejoice,
though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials”, for in
this way “the genuineness of your faith” will be tested, and in this way it
will be shown that your salvation has its effects in your entire life.
Salvation is not just a matter of only one time, and
that’s it. No, says Peter in 2:2, we must also grow up to salvation. And how
does this growing up take place? Then we must long for the pure spiritual milk
of the preaching of the Gospel. That’s also why the effects of salvation must
be sought in the community of the church where this Gospel is preached.
Outside of the church no salvation, it means that
without this pure spiritual milk of the preaching of the Gospel we can not
expect to grow up to salvation (cf. Belgic Confession
article 28, *). This is why we also confess that Jesus Christ by His Holy
Spirit assures me of eternal life, and makes me heartily willing and ready from
now on to live for Him.
Here the catechism calls the Holy Spirit the Spirit of
Christ. He is the Spirit who on the Pentecostal day was poured out over the
church. He is also the Spirit who has inspired the Scriptures. He opens our
hearts and enlightens our minds so that we may understand and believe God’s
Word and in that way be assured of eternal life. Very concretely, in every
church-service, and everyday at home, when we read God’s Word or hear it
proclaimed to us.
And this eternal life will in this way have its
effects in our normal daily life, and even on the day of our death. For we also
read in 1 Peter 1:5, that by God’s power we are guarded through faith for a
salvation ready to be revealed in the last time. Today we are guarded or kept
for this salvation, but also on the day that we must die.
Yes, our only comfort is our comfort both in life and
in death. For it says in Romans 14:8, “whether we live or whether we die, we
are the Lord’s”. Here and now we already begin the eternal life which we have
in our Lord Jesus Christ. And we go on living this eternal life when we die. It
does not stop, not even temporarily, until the day of the resurrection of our
body. For Romans 14:9 continues, “For to this end Christ died and lived again,
that He might be Lord both of the dead and of the living”.
Lord of the dead as well!
Indeed, we have reasons enough to rejoice; for we have
the only comfort, the promise that we will attain as the outcome of our faith
the salvation of our souls.
We still have to go through troubles and trials; but
we are not without hope! While we go through them the Holy Spirit makes us
heartily willing and ready to know God, to praise God, and to live for God and
with God, forever!
NOTES
*) Belgic Confesstion, Article 28:
We believe that since this holy
assembly and congregation is the gathering of those who are saved and there is
no salvation apart from it, no one ought to withdraw from it, content to be by
himself, regardless of his status or condition. But all people are obliged to
join and unite with it, keeping the unity of the church by submitting to its
instruction and discipline, by bending their necks under the yoke of Jesus
Christ, and by serving to build up one another, according to the gifts God has
given them as members of each other in the same body. And to preserve this
unity more effectively, it is the duty of all believers, according to God's
Word, to separate themselves from those who do not belong to the church, in
order to join this assembly wherever God has established it, even if civil
authorities and royal decrees forbid and death and physical punishment result.
And so, all who withdraw from the church or do not join it act contrary to
God's ordinance.
**) Canons of
Article 1: The Regenerate Not Entirely Free from Sin
Those people whom God according to
his purpose calls into fellowship with his Son Jesus Christ our Lord and
regenerates by the Holy Spirit, he also sets free from the reign and slavery of
sin, though in this life not entirely from the flesh and from the body of sin.
Article 2: The Believer's Reaction to Sins of Weakness
Hence daily sins of weakness arise,
and blemishes cling to even the best works of God's people, giving them
continual cause to humble themselves before God, to flee for refuge to Christ
crucified, to put the flesh to death more and more by the Spirit of
supplication and by holy exercises of godliness, and to strain toward the goal
of perfection, until they are freed from this body of death and reign with the
Lamb of God in heaven.
Article 3: God's Preservation of the Converted
Because of these remnants of sin dwelling
in them and also because of the temptations of the world and Satan, those who
have been converted could not remain standing in this grace if left to their
own resources. But God is faithful, mercifully strengthening them in the grace
once conferred on them and powerfully preserving them in it to the end.
***) Article 9: The Assurance of This Preservation
Concerning this preservation of
those chosen to salvation and concerning the perseverance of true believers in
faith, believers themselves can and do become assured in accordance with the
measure of their faith, by which they firmly believe that they are and always
will remain true and living members of the church, and that they have the
forgiveness of sins and eternal life.
****) Article 10: The Ground of This Assurance
Accordingly, this assurance does not
derive from some private revelation beyond or outside the Word, but from faith
in the promises of God which he has very plentifully revealed in his Word for
our comfort, from the testimony of "the Holy Spirit testifying with our
spirit that we are God's children and heirs" (Rom. 8:16-17), and finally
from a serious and holy pursuit of a clear conscience and of good works. And if
God's chosen ones in this world did not have this well-founded comfort that the
victory will be theirs and this reliable guarantee of eternal glory, they would
be of all people most miserable.
PART I: HUMAN MISERY (LORD’S DAYS 1–4)
LORD’S DAY 2
3 Q. How do you come to know your misery?
A. The law of God tells
me.
4 Q. What does God's law require of us?
A. Christ teaches us this
in summary in Matthew 22:37-40
Love
the Lord your God
with
all your heart
and
with all your soul
and
with all your mind
and
with all your strength.
This
is the first and greatest commandment.
And
the second is like it:
Love
your neighbor as yourself.
All
the Law and the Prophets hang
on
these two commandments.
5 Q. Can you live up to all this perfectly?
A. No.
I
have a natural tendency
to
hate God and my neighbor.
Introduction
When in Lord’s Days 2‑4
we consider how great our sins and misery are from which God has delivered us,
we will do so in order that we may be thankful to God for our deliverance. We
could say that to consider how great our sins and misery are is in itself a
fruit of our deliverance, and shows how thankful we are for what God has done
for us. These three always go together!
This means that the
consideration of our sins and misery should not make us depressed and bring us
in the depths of despair. The purpose of learning to know our sins and misery
is that we learn to know our God better in His love and grace. Thus this second
Lord’s Day of the catechism does not deal with what we have done or should have
done but did not do; no, also in this Lord’s Day we confess what God has done
for us and still is doing for us.
Also Lord’s Day 2 is part
of the instruction of the church about the Christian doctrine; and this
doctrine is not about people, but a doctrine or teaching about God, as He has
made Himself known to us as our gracious Father, for the sake of Christ His
Son.
Therefore, also when this
instruction of the Christian doctrine speaks about man it speaks about what God
means to him and does for him. When man desires to live and die in the joy of
the only comfort, that’s only possible if he knows God. For only when we have
first learned to know God we can also learn to know ourselves. We then learn to
know ourselves as people who, though sinful and in great misery because of
their sins, nevertheless have been delivered by God, through Christ, from their
sins and misery.
That’s why the catechism in
answer to the question, “From where do you know your sins and misery?”, does
not say, “From looking at yourselves”, but: “From the law of God”.
We may therefore not for
one moment forget that God’s law is a gift of God’s grace. God’s law is not an
instrument of death, but is a law of life. The law of God is God’s Gospel‑message
to us, the glad tiding. Man has brought himself into the misery of death by
falling into sin. And now this Lord’s Day asks us the question: From where do
you know your sins and misery?
The very fact that we may
answer this question by saying that we learn to know our sins and misery from
the law of God makes this answer a joyful answer, a message of joy and hope in
the misery into which we have got ourselves.
The mere fact that God has
given us His law in order that we would learn to know our misery from it is a
fact which is full of comfort for us. We can therefore rightly speak of the
consolation of God’s law.
The consolation of God’s
law
God’s law demands faith
from us, in order that we may experience the consolation which God’s law offers
us. After all, it is the law of the same God who is our Father! From the very
fact that God, in spite of our sins and misery and our rebellion against Him,
still has His law made known to us, it appears that He still is and wants to be
our Father.
So that’s the first thing which we may confess here: in the
fact that God’s law is still proclaimed to us God makes known to us that He
still wants to be our Father.
Therefore, although Lord’s
Day 2 belongs to that first part of the Catechism which deals with our sins and
misery, yet we are not in the first place commanded to mourn because of our
sins, but above all things to believe this message of God’s grace.
Oh no, this does not mean
that we should not sorrow because of our sins. The Bible clearly teaches us
that everyone must mourn because of his or her sins. And besides, are there not
many reasons in our lives for sorrow, for all and every one of us?
Just think of all kinds of
adversities which we meet in our lives. Now the worst in all these troubles and
tribulations is not that e.g. illness causes pain, or that it makes us to
suffer loneliness; neither is the worst thing when someone dies that death
separates us from beloved ones whom we cannot or do not want to miss. No, the
worst in all these things is that they happen to us because of sin, as
consequences of sin. For without our fall into sin all these things would never
have been there in the first place.
There is plenty of reason
for us to mourn because of our misery and sins. For indeed, all and every one
of us must mourn because of his or her own sins.
Yet this is not the first
which we must consider here. From where do you know your sins and misery? From
the law of God? This means that God’s law is still there. God has not taken His
law away from us, but God continues to make His Fatherly will known to us. And
thus we may, in our sins and misery, believe that He is our Father, also after
we have turned into miserable sinners.
Only if we really believe
this will it be possible to mourn as we ought to. Only then will we know what
reason there is to be dismayed. You know why? Because then we do not just mourn
and feel miserable due to all the sorrows and adversities which have become our
portion here on earth as a result of sin; but then we mourn and sorrow because
we find out what disobedient children we are. Then we mourn and sorrow because
as such disobedient children we have grieved our heavenly Father.
Is it not similar with
parents and children here on earth? When a child is disobedient and then at
last gets a spanking, and it starts crying and feeling sorrow because of that
spanking, could you call that real knowledge of its wrongdoings? Of course not.
If the child only keeps crying because of the spanking, but not because of the
reason for it, then this means that it still does not care about its
disobedience. It shows that as long as the child is only warned, it just goes
on doing what is wrong; but when at last the punishment comes, that’s the
reason for tears and sorrow. But then it is not father’s will or law which
makes the child to know its wrongdoings, but father’s punishment. The child
does not cry because it has transgressed father’s will, but because of the pain
caused by the punishment. And instead of a childlike acceptance of father’s
authority the child must be forced to obedience by father’s power.
How childish of such
children! But are not many people often just as childish? Is it not often this
way in our lives as well? This confusion of power and authority, you do not
only find this with many children. Actually, such children show clearly and
openly, what in a carefully concealed way is present in the hearts of all of us
at the time we are born, as we are by nature.
Whenever God makes us to feel, sometimes in a
very painful way, what are the consequences of sin, when we experience illness,
or the passing away of beloved ones, then we mourn, then we shed tears; and as
such there is nothing wrong with that. Yet the great question is: why do we
sorrow; why do we shed tears? Is it because of God’s power and His punishment
which we cannot escape, or, is it because we have not honoured our Father’s
authority over us as we should have?
From where do you know your
misery? From God’s punishment and power? No, from God’s law!
A child that really loves
its father has already sorrow before its father punishes it, because it
realizes that it has grieved his or her father. Such a child has sorrow about
what it has done even if it is not punished at all for it. And even if it gets
punished for what it has done, it may hurt, but even the pain shows the child
that it is his or her father who maintains his will this way. It is not a
stranger who does it; and that is, in the punishment, at the same time the
child’s consolation.
It is a comfort which by
far surpasses the pain of the punishment. The comfort is that the father, in
spite of the child’s disobedience, still deals with him or her as his child,
instead of saying: you are not my child anymore.
Therefore, if we want to experience this comfort in our miseries and sins,
then we must believe that God is our Father. He is our Father, because He has
created us as His children. And when we through our sin made ourselves unworthy
of His Fatherly authority over us, He became our Father again for the sake of
Christ His Son. Then He adopted us as His children. Christ has given us the
right to be God’s children again. That’s what the law of God tells us in the
first place. For this law of God makes us to know our sins as children’s sins,
that is, as sins which do not just deserve punishment, but as sins by which we
have grieved God’s Father‑heart. And the law teaches us to be concerned
about that, about that in the first place. For then we seek, while we are
crying in our misery, our refuge at His Father-heart, in order that there we
may let ourselves be comforted by God’s grace in Jesus Christ.
What is misery?
What is misery? I still
remember from the time that I was a catechism‑student the answer which
one of the students gave when the minister asked that question. It was during
the war, in
Of course the man felt
miserable when at the most unhappy moments his truck stalled, e.g. just when it
was pouring rain, or when he was already behind in his schedule. Yet the misery
which this caused to him was relative. It could have been worse; at least he
still had a truck to drive around in.
Now he might have said,
that’s little comfort when I stand on the road and try to get the thing going
again. But still, it was better than having no truck at all. And besides, there
were always some other things, little comforts which made the situation more
bearable.
I tell this story because
of the question asked by the catechism, question 3, “From where do you know
your sins and misery?” How do you know your misery as a person who is a sinner
in the eyes of God?
The man in the story felt
miserable because he was standing in the rain again; or because again he would
be late at a certain customer. He felt miserable, and that’s why he said: what
a misery! He also knew the cause of his feeling miserable. The cause was the
fuel‑problem of his truck; he knew that this was his misery. And yet, his
real misery was not that once in a while he felt miserable, neither that he had
to drive such an unreliable vehicle. His real misery he knew from the law which
the enemy who occupied his country had laid down. He hated that law which
forbade the use of gasoline, because he hated those who issued and maintained
that law; and it was against the giver of that law that he rebelled every time
when his truck stalled and he felt miserable in the rain. He did not want to
obey that law and he only complied with it because he was forced to.
Of course there were also
times that this man did not feel miserable. When everything went fine he felt
alright. But even then there was still that hated lawgiver, although the man
did not always feel this misery at such times.
So it is with our misery,
the misery of our sins against God. There are times in everybody’s life that we
feel miserable. This is when we suffer the consequences of sin in our life.
Then we blame what we think to be the cause of our feeling miserable. We blame
the illness which afflicts us, or the imperfect laws of nature behind it, e.g.
that law of nature (or is it the curse of nature?) that all that lives once
must die.
The miserable feelings
which make us unhappy might even be guilt‑feelings. Let us say, we have
stolen, and now we feel guilty, and we feel especially miserable about it
because, if we are found out, we might have to go to jail; and the thought of
this makes our guilt‑feelings even stronger.
However, there are also
times that we do not feel miserable at all. That’s when we get better again
from illness; or when everyone seems to have forgotten that we stole something.
Our feeling miserable disappears again, when we do not feel pain or guilt
anymore.
Therefore that question:
from where do you know your sins and misery? Not from looking at yourself and
the situation you are in. Not from going by the feelings you have at certain
times in your life. Not even from knowing that at one time you did something
wrong and transgressed a commandment for which you even could have been jailed;
or from knowing that there is a certain weakness in you which makes you to do
certain wrong things once in a while.
From where do you know your
sins and misery? Not from your feelings or from the situation you are in; but
“from the law of God”.
From the law of God, God’s
law in its entirety. For when you compare yourself and your whole life with
this standard, then you do not just feel unhappy about something in your life,
an illness e.g.; nor do you feel guilty about something which you do wrong. No,
when you compare yourself with the law which in its entirety comes from God,
then you find out that you are to be condemned as an enemy of God, forever.
Then you find out that you do
not want to obey any of God’s commandments, because you hate Him who has issued
this law; and that you cannot even obey His law, because of your hate against
God, unless you are forced to, and only in as far as you are forced to.
When you test yourself by
what the law of God requires of you, then you find out that neither you nor
your children can enter into God’s Kingdom. How could we, as long as we are
enemies of God, hate Him, and side with His opponent, Satan, as his slaves?
The Bible says that whoever
transgresses one commandment transgresses the whole law, because the law in its
entirety is God’s law, given by one Lawgiver; and by disobeying only one
commandment we already express our hate against them all, because of our hate
against God Himself.
Moreover, because it is
God’s law, the law of Him who is perfectly holy, our obedience must be
accordingly; God’s law requires perfect obedience and holiness from us, in our
whole life, and in all of life. Only one disobedience, only one dirty spot is
enough to declare us guilty before God.
Do we now know what our misery is?
The function of God’s law
When we speak about the
function of the law, “since through the law comes knowledge of sin” (Romans
It seems indeed incorrect
to call this the function of the law;
but we should not forget that the part about our sins and misery, and that
about our thankfulness, belong together. They can be distinguished, but they
may not be separated from each other. Also Lord’s Day 44, which belongs to the
third part of the catechism, about gratitude, shows that thankfulness and being
aware of our sinfulness must go together. For while speaking about the 10
commandments as the rule for our thankfulness, Lord’s Day 44 answers the
question, “Why does God have the ten commandments preached so strictly?”: “First, that throughout our life we may more
and more become aware of our sinful nature”.
It is true, Lord’s Day 44
speaks especially about the law of the 10 commandments as the rule of
thankfulness; but even so it says that by its proclamation we first learn to
know our sinfulness. We read the same in the Canons of Dort (III/IV, 5) about
“the law of the Ten Commandments, given by God through Moses particularly to
the Jews, (that) ... it reveals the greatness of sin, and more and more
convicts man of his guilt”.
So, even of the 10
commandments – which are indeed the rule
of thankfulness – it is said that first they make us aware of our sinfulness.
But when Lord’s Day 2 speaks about the law of God, it means much more than only
the 10 commandments. We see this when we look at the first Scripture‑reference,
Romans
What is meant by ‘law’ in
this verse? Paul summarizes by that one word ‘law’ all that he has quoted from
the Old Testament in the verses 10‑18, “None is righteous, no, not one”,
and what follows there.
See? After Paul has quoted
several verses from the Psalms (Psalm 14, 5, 10, 140, 36) and from the
prophecies of Isaiah (chapter 59), he says of these quotations in verse19: “Now
we know that whatever the law says”, etc. So he calls what he has quoted from
different parts of the Old Testament (in this case from the psalms and the
prophets) in one word: ‘the law’.
The law as we read it also
in the psalms and the prophets, yes the entire Old Testament tells us in so
many words how great our sins and misery are. We do not become aware of how
sinful we are by looking at ourselves and in our own heart; we only find out
how sinful we are by listening to what the Word of God says about us.
The law by which we learn
to know our sins and misery is the revelation of God about Himself and about
man as His creation, which we read in the Bible from Genesis to Revelation. By
calling this ‘the law’ Paul means, as does Lord’s Day 2 of the catechism, the
will of God as revealed in Paradise to Adam and Eve, even before they fell into
sin, and as maintained and worked out also after the fall, all through the
history of God’s revealing Himself to us.
From where do you know your
sins and misery? From the original law of God as revealed to Adam and Eve in
Paradise already.
When God revealed His will
or law in
The original law of
How? This law continues to
show us how our relationship with God has been in the beginning, in
To make this clear, let us
again turn to Romans 3:10‑18, but now apply these verses to our situation
before we fell into sin. For then ‘all were righteous, yes, everyone; they
understood, they sought God. Man walked with God; together they went the right
way. They did what is good, both man and woman. Their throat was a source of
life, they spoke the truth with their tongues. The sweetness of honey was under
their lips. Their mouth was full of blessings and gratitude. Their feet were
swift to walk on the way of life, in their paths were joy and happiness, and
they knew the way of peace. The fear of God was always before their eyes’.
This is how it began. Man
lived in the Covenant‑relationship with God as a thankful human being in
accordance with the rules of that Covenant.
If now we look at this
beginning, and at the rules of this beginning, then, and only then will we see
how great our sins and misery are! Then we also see how the original law of
Let me try to make this
clear with an example. When someone who is seriously ill compares his situation
with the joy and thankfulness which he had (or anyway ought to have had), when
he was healthy, only then he realizes what he is now missing. That makes him
really aware of what it means to be sick.
So it is with us. If we look
at the rule of thankfulness which we in the beginning kept voluntarily and with
joy, then we become really aware of the misery we are in since we became
sinners.
Let us return to the
example of someone who is ill. When this sick person was still healthy he could
live a happy life and remain healthy, as long as he kept the rules for living a
healthy life. That’s the function of such rules, that they make us and keep us
healthy and happy.
But now this person has
become ill. What happens? The rules for leading a healthy life are adjusted to
the new situation he is in. Yet, the function of the rules is still the same,
to make him healthy and to protect his health. But what has changed is the
application of these health-rules. First it was good for him to walk and to
work; but now he must lie down and rest. First he could eat all kinds of food,
now he is on a strict diet. By comparing these different applications of the
rules for a healthy life he can clearly see how bad his situation has become.
Now they make him to know his misery.
Of course there is a great
difference between the misery of being ill, and the misery of our sins about
which the catechism speaks. We have not just become ill, but we have become
corrupt in sin and guilt. Often we cannot help it when we get sick; but the
corruption by sin is our own fault; we must blame ourselves that the original
rules for a healthy life which we kept with joy have now become a burden,
because they had to be adapted to our corrupt situation.
Yet this is the point of
comparison: it is the same original law, the original rule of thankfulness,
which now shows us what misery we are in. This law has been elaborated on and
been adapted to our new situation; but it is still the same law, the same life‑giving
and life‑protecting law, the same law of life, even though we now
experience it as a burden, as a law of death.
The law of the 10
commandments as given on Mount Sinai and as elaborated on by Moses and
proclaimed by the prophets, they are all different applications, at certain
dates in the history of the Covenant, of the original Covenant‑rules as
given to Adam in
Alas, the Jews in the days
of the apostle Paul did not see it that way. They did not believe that the law
of Mount Sinai and of Moses which was given to
Of course, we could use the law of God in
the same manner, if we would say: a Christian may not do this, but must do
that, or, if you are Reformed you may not do this, but you have to do that.
For what happens? In that
way we change the law of God from a rule of thankfulness, which keeps us safely
on the road of God’s grace, into safety‑ regulations in the work‑shop
of our own works and merits. But if we would do this, then we obscure at the
same time the light of God’s law, which makes us to see our sins and misery,
with the cover‑up of our own self‑righteousness.
This is, says Paul, what
the Jews have done. They have removed the gospel, the glad message of
Let me again take the
example of a sick person. When he does not see anymore in the diet which the
doctor prescribes to him the same kind of rules for health which governed his
life before he became ill, then this diet becomes a burden to him. He is even
going to cheat, or at least change some of it. What of course happens is that
he himself makes the prescribed remedy weak and incapable for healing him from
his illness.
That’s exactly what the
Jews did with the 10 commandments. It is of this wrongly applied law that we confess
in the Canons of Dort (III/IV, 5b):
“though it reveals the
greatness of sin, and more and more convicts man of his guilt, yet it neither
points out a remedy nor gives him power to rise out of this misery. Rather,
weakened by the flesh, it leaves the transgressor under the curse. Man cannot,
therefore, through the law obtain saving grace”.
It is not the fault of the law but of the flesh, that is, of
our wrong attitude towards the law, our wrong use of the law.
If we want to know what our
sins and misery are, we do not need to know a long list of do’s and don’ts,
taken all by itself and apart from God, but then we must know the God who gave
us His law in the beginning already. Back to the beginning, and back to God’s
intentions with that beginning. Only in that way will we understand the
function of the law, and learn to use the law correctly as the original law of
life, which promises us a life in God’s fellowship. Only then we see as our
misery that we in ourselves are dead, dead in our sins and iniquities, having
lost God’s favour and fellowship.
The law of God makes us to
know our sins and misery. The catechism refers for this also to Romans 7,
verses 7‑25. Let me quote the climax of what Paul says there in verse 24:
“Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death”, from my
sins and misery?
The answer is in verse 25: the grace of God! “Thanks be to God through
Jesus Christ our Lord!” Thanks be to God for His grace in which He came to man when
he fled away from God; the grace of God in which He maintained His law from the
beginning by promising the coming of Him who would fulfill
the law for us, and thus obtain for us the forgiveness of our sins.
The requirement of God’s
law: our heart
We read in Jeremiah 17:9, a
text to which the catechism refers us, "The heart is deceitful above all
things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?"
If the blessing of the
forgiveness of sins only applies to those whose spirit or heart is free from
secret sins and from deceit, who then can be sure of this comfort? Is this not
part of our misery, that our own heart deceives us?
It is; but the law of God
which makes us to know our misery, also proclaims to us the God who knows our
heart. For God Himself answers that question in Jeremiah
The LORD Himself tries the
hearts of all and everyone and He sees that there is nothing good in it. But
now, because He Himself knows that there is nothing good in it which makes us
acceptable and righteous in His sight, because of this He has, in His great
love, given us His Son.
In as far as we by nature
submit to God's law, we do not really mean it, but we do it e.g. in order to
escape the consequences of sin, in order to escape the punishment. Then it is
not Father's authority, but His power which makes us to obey. Yes, so deceitful
is our heart, especially when we have sorrow because of our sins and misery.
What a self‑deceit!
We do what God demands of
us. We do not steal, we do not commit adultery, and we do not kill anyone. But
why not? Because we are forced, or because it is to our own advantage. For when
you kill someone you go to jail, and when you commit adultery you destroy your own
happiness and that of your family. In this way God makes us to obey. But the
question is: do we do it out of love toward our heavenly Father?
God's law makes us to know
our misery; but we learn to know how deceitful our heart is from the fact that
God gave us His own Son in order to teach us the love toward our Father which
the law of God demands from us.
That's why the catechism
puts so much emphasis on the answer to the question, "What does God's law
require of us?": "Christ teaches us this". You can look
it up in Matthew 22. Christ teaches us that we must love God and our neighbour,
and thus must out of love do what God requires in His law.
God tries the heart. And
what is the result of this? It is this, that God among us, human beings, has not
found one heart which is not deceitful. Then He sent His Son on earth, in order
that He would assume our human nature, with a real human heart. Then God tried
Him, and found in Him a heart burning of love toward God and His neighbour.
Now it has become so that
the Lord Jesus Christ, by His obeying the law, has taught us that God asks only
one thing from us: that we love Him like children love their father. For the
Lord Jesus did not obey God's commandments in order to stay out of trouble, but
just the other way around. He was rich, and He became poor. He was perfect, and
He assumed our weakened human nature. He did God's will, and it brought Him
into the greatest troubles and sorrows.
Yes, only God knows the
deceitfulness of our heart, that it is so bad that only the blood of His Son
could cleanse our heart from its deceitfulness. And by faith in Him our hearts
are cleansed from this deceitfulness.
Those who believe this do
not imagine that they themselves are able to do what God requires from us. They
confess that our misery is much more than only the consequences of sin:
illness, and loneliness, and death. No, only those who have learned to know
Christ know what sin and misery is, because they know what they have been
delivered from by Him: from the curse of the law, from the guilt of sin, from
the deceitfulness of their heart.
Now they confess, out of
the depths of misery, that in Christ they may find themselves on the mountain‑tops
of salvation, with hearts which are renewed by the forgiveness of their sins,
and now rejoice in God's law.
Out of the depths they cry:
my heart is black
my heart is red
my heart is hard
my heart is dead;
but from
but every heart
though hard or dead
or black or red
is made white in My death.
(translated back
into English from a
Dutch translation of a
negro spiritual)
The requirement of God’s
law: our love
We read in Matthew 22:34‑40
that once a lawyer of the Pharisees came to the Lord Jesus to test Him. He
asked, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the law?”
We should know that the
Jewish lawyers had calculated that there were 248 prescriptions in the Law of
Moses (as many as they thought that there are parts in the human body), and 365
prohibitions (as many as there are days in a year). In this way they came to a
total of 613, which number is rendered by the same letters which spell the
Hebrew word for law. Understandably they now also made distinctions between
small and great, light and heavy commandments and prohibitions.
And now the Lord Jesus
should tell what really the great commandment is!
Let us pay attention to
what the Lord does. The Lord Jesus does not quote from the 10 commandments or
any other commandment, but He refers them to what they should have understood
from Moses’ words in Deuteronomy 6:5, the words in which he as in a summary
gave the core and kernel of all God’s commandments.
Moses really asked
attention for this by first saying, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one
LORD”. What counts in every commandment is the Covenant‑God who is the
Redeemer of His people, and of this God says Moses, and the Lord Jesus repeats
it, “You shall love the LORD your God”. But neither Moses nor Christ did by
saying this issue a new commandment. For the LORD your God, He is also the God
of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob (cf. Matth.22:32) and of Adam and Eve, their
Creator and their Redeemer.
Him we must love with all
our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our mind. It is an all inclusive
requirement. Our whole life is involved, and you cannot distinguish here
between great and small, heavy or light. When e.g. a boy loves his father it
does not make a real difference whether he is disobedient in some big thing or
in something small; for in any case he knows that he grieves his father by
being disobedient to him.
The commandment to love the
LORD came already to Adam in
Thus follows automatically
as it were that second commandment which is like the first, “You shall love
your neighbour as yourself”. We must love our neighbour as a person to whom the
same love‑commandment has been given as to ourselves.
We must also love
ourselves, because God has spoken to us to have fellowship with us. We must
love ourselves as persons who are loved by God and who love God in return. If only
God comes first, then our love for ourselves is not selfish and egotistic, nor
like the self‑love of humanism.
There is indeed also
spontaneous love for the neighbour with people who do not know God; and we may
and must appreciate this. Yet this neighbourly love has been cut off from its
root, the love of God and for God.
“On these two commandments depend all the law
and the prophets”, on Deuteronomy 6:5, and on Leviticus 19:18 from which the
Lord Jesus quoted the second commandment which is like the first.
We may know much about the
law and the prophets and what later the apostles have written, and we may be
able to talk about it in beautiful and exalted words; but all that they have
written depends on these two commandments, and whether we do justice to the
entire Bible depends on how we live in accordance with these two commandments.
The same message as that of
Moses and of the Lord Jesus comes also to us from the book of the Proverbs. In
Proverbs 1:7 we read, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction”. This is the first and great commandment.
And the second, like it, we find in the next verse, 1:8, “Hear, my son, your
father’s instruction, and reject not your mother’s teaching”.
This fear of the LORD is taught to us by our neighbours, e.g. by our
fathers and mothers in the church who speak to us in the catechism, the
instruction‑book of the church which they have handed down to us. Fools
despise the instruction of the catechism. But for those who study the
catechism, and act on it, this instruction is according to Proverbs 1:9 “a fair
garland for your head, and pendants for your neck”.
To know and to do what the catechism teaches us is an ornament for our
life. It is a life of joy when you live in accordance with the requirement of
God’s law. In this law of God the radiant light of Paradise shines over us; for
what this law requires from us refers us back to our origin, when we could keep
all this perfectly; when this was our life’s pleasure and joy.
The requirement of God’s
law is God’s entire revealed will
When the catechism asks in
question 4, “What does God’s law require of us?”, the answer is not (as we have
seen already): what you find in the Ten
Commandments. Yet the Ten Commandments are what we sometimes call the
constitution in God’s covenant with His people. When you have a constitution
there are of course also many laws derived from it and added to it, to work it
out in more detail.
Why then would it be
incorrect to answer the question of the catechism by referring to the 10
commandments? It would be incorrect, because a reference to the 10 commandments
only would not be sufficient. For the 10 commandments are not a summary of what
God requires from us, but the foundation of it. And a foundation is only a part
of the whole.
If the 10 commandments
would be a summary of what God requires of us, then keeping the 10 commandments
would be sufficient. When once a young man came to the Lord Jesus, and said
that he had kept the 10 commandments from his youth, the Lord Jesus said: Go,
and sell all that you have, and follow me.
The Lord Jesus said this to
him to show him that keeping the 10 commandments was not enough. But again, if
the 10 commandments would be a summary of what God requires from us, then the
Lord Jesus would not have added that requirement of selling all that he had.
But to our comfort the
catechism answers the question, What does God’s law require of us, by saying,
“Christ teaches us this in a summary in Matthew 22, You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall
love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law
and the prophets”.
It is to our comfort that
Christ teaches us this, Christ, who Himself is the gift of God’s love for us.
For God so loved this world, that He gave Him, His only Son, that whoever
believes in Him would not perish but have everlasting life.
It is also to our comfort
that Christ teaches us this summary quoting it from the law. For this is not a
New Testamentical addition to the 10 commandments,
but (as we have seen already), Christ took this from the law of the Old
Testament, quoting it from Deuteronomy 6 and Leviticus 19.
It is also to our comfort
that Christ teaches us this in a summary. It is a summary, which tells us what
the law, – that is the 10 commandments plus all that follows from it, is
derived from it and added to it, the entire Bible – , comes down to. It all
depends on love toward God, and consequently love toward our neighbour.
What a comfort!
This comforts us, because
in this way we are not led into an unwarranted optimism which could make us to
say like the rich young man: I have done all that the 10 commandments require
from me. For in spite of his optimism this young man was lost; for it was not
enough.
On the other hand, this
also comforts us because it does not lead us to the slavery of a legalism which
says: the 10 commandments are the constitution, but we must of course do much
more than what is mentioned in them, there are also many laws which organically
derive from them or which in the course of time have been added to them, and
those must be kept as well.
What a comfort that this is
not so, for then we would be led to a despairing pessimism when it appears that
we cannot really do all these things; and we would still be lost.
But instead of leading us
into an unwarranted optimism or a despairing pessimism the Lord Jesus, in a
merciful realism, teaches us God’s law in a summary. As the Great Physician He
is, the Lord Jesus does not point to all kinds of symptoms of our misery and
sins, but deals with our real misery, the cause of all symptoms, namely the
fact which we confess in answer 5: that the way we are by nature, the way we
are born, we are inclined to hate God, and consequently also to hate our fellow‑man,
and that therefore we fall short of so many commandments.
If only the symptoms would
be pointed out to us, all the occasions in which we one way or another
transgress a commandment of God, then we would be tempted to try to do better,
to improve something here, and to improve something there, wherever we feel
that we as yet fall short.
And either we would become
proud when we think that we are making quite some progress in doing that, or we
would lose all courage and even stop trying. But in both cases we would be
lost; for it is not enough that we keep the 10 commandments and whatever can be
added to it. No, we must love them; we must love the entire law of God, because
this law comes from the God whom we must love!
It is to our comfort that the Lord Jesus
Christ teaches us, in a merciful realism, what our real misery is, namely that
we are inclined to hate God and our neighbour. For now there is only one thing
left, one way to go: to this Great Physician who has diagnosed our real misery,
that He also may give us the only medicine which can heal us from our real
misery, His love toward His Father, and therefore also toward us; the love by
which He let Himself be sent into this world for our redemption.
By teaching us the summary
of God’s law Christ points us to Himself. The summary of the law drives us out
to Christ. That’s why Jesus, when He taught this summary in Matthew 22:37‑40,
right after that, in vss.41‑46, asked the Pharisees that question: “What
do you think of the Christ? Whose Son is He?”
But they were not able to
answer Him. They were not able, because they did not want to be healed by Him
from their misery; and they did not want to be healed by Him, because they
rejected Christ’s diagnosis of what their real misery was: that they hated God
and their fellow‑men. They rejected Christ because of their legalism in
which they made the people to perform all kinds of works of the law, even
things which they themselves did not do because it was indeed too much. They
went into all kinds of details of the law, and the Lord Jesus gives many
examples of their legalism in chapter 23; but, as the Lord charges in verse 23,
they “neglected the weightier matters of the law, justice and mercy and faith”.
“Justice and mercy and
faith”, that’s what the law of God comes down to. We can try to keep all the
commandments, the 1st, the 2nd, the 3rd, the 4th, the 5th, and so on, and many
other rules and regulations added to them; but when justice and mercy and faith
are lacking, if we do not do it all out of love, love toward God and love
toward our neighbour, then we are still in our misery; and the greatest misery
is that we do not even know it.
We can only learn to know
our real misery, when by the summary of God’s law we let ourselves be led to
Christ who is the fulfilment of God’s law, and who has fulfilled God’s law. Not
just the 10 commandments, but all God’s law, the whole Bible.
Then we may still stumble
in many ways; we may still have misunderstandings or questions about what God
requires from us in certain concrete circumstances and situations; yet, thanks
to Christ to whom God’s law has led us, we are delivered from the curse of the
law, and filled with Christ’s blessing.
And thanks to Christ’s love, in which He has fulfilled the law of God
for us we say, even while we still stumble and fall in many ways: Lord, we love
You, because You has loved us so much! We love You, in spite of our natural
inclinations. For You in Your love made us to know our natural inclinations,
our sins and misery, by Your law of love!
The requirement of God’s
law: hope in God
But does not answer 5 of
the catechism spoil everything again, and take away our comfort? For the
catechism answers here to the question, “Can you keep all this perfectly?”:
“No. I am inclined by nature to hate God and my neighbour”.
Is not this an answer to
make us desperate again?
Indeed, for those who do
not believe this answer there is no hope as long as they stick to their
unbelief.
However, for those who let
themselves be convinced and convicted by God’s law, and who plead guilty
because they know that by nature they cannot perform this law, for them there
is hope!
When Jeremiah confessed,
“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can
understand it?”, the LORD answered, “I the LORD search the mind and try the
heart” (Jeremiah 17: 9,10). The LORD Himself teaches us that we are inclined by
nature to hate God and our neighbour. We do not know this from ourselves. We
are often quite satisfied with the way we are.
It is God’s grace which by
the preaching of the law makes us to know ourselves the way we really are. In
this way we learn that in ourselves there is no hope, and that our hope and
expectation can only be sought and found apart from ourselves.
Not in ourselves, for being
inclined by nature to hate God and our neighbour is something which we carry
with us from our birth, from our parents, and they got it from their parents
again, and in that natural causality there is not any hope. All hope is
excluded.
Thus also Jeremiah could do
nothing else but cry out, in verses 13/14, “O LORD, the Hope of Israel”! “Heal
me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved”.
The LORD is the hope of
LORD, You are the hope of
Yes, we confess that by
nature we are inclined to hate God and our neighbour. But this confession we do
not make by nature. We do not confess this by nature, but by the Holy Spirit
who works in us faith, and love, and hope.
The fulfilment of God’s law:
through the Holy Spirit
Only through the Holy
Spirit do we confess that we cannot keep the entire law of God perfectly, but
that we are inclined by nature to hate God and our neighbour. We have to be
taught to confess this, for the way we are by nature we would not be able and
not be willing to confess this.
In this answer we place
ourselves in our misery without any cover-up before the face of God. We also
confess it to each other. We do not cover it up with excuses like, ‘Of course,
we are only human; we are not perfect yet’.
We are taught to be
straightforward about it and to say without any mental reservation that we are
inclined by nature to hate God and our neighbour.
It is indeed a horrible
thing to say to each other, and to teach this to your children, while at the
same time you must teach them to love God and their neighbour. But in this way
we cut off the temptation of saying, ‘well, but something of God’s law we do
right; it is not all that bad. We cannot keep the law perfectly, of course not;
but still, some of it we do!’
But have we not seen that
what the law of God requires from us is what God requires from us from the
beginning: perfect love, a perfect self‑surrender in love? With our whole
heart and soul and mind and strength? When perfection is required, then the
confession that we cannot do it perfectly means that we do not do it at all. It
is yes or no. The law of God is not only total, all inclusive, but also
radical.
But now, let us not forget
that all this is taught to us to our comfort, for our consolation. Therefore,
although we must confess that we and our children by nature do not do what God
requires from us in His law, we draw the conclusion of faith, and thus we do
not say, in despair: but then I and my children are condemned, we are doomed,
and that’s all we know and can say about it.
No, but taught by the Holy
Spirit we joyfully confess as our faith: Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ
our Lord! For although I am inclined to hate God and my neighbour, yet I may
live and die happily in the only comfort in life and death that I belong to
Jesus Christ who has fully paid for all my sins.
I persevere in that
confession while at the same time I sigh and groan because of my sins and
misery and the condemnation of the law. By the same token I praise God that I
have been set free from the curse of the law through Christ.I
am redeemed; now I know my misery!I am imprisoned in
this body of death; yet I have been set free from the power of death and of the
devil.
If I want to see how sinful
I am by nature, I do not examine myself and my nature, but I study the law of
God which tells me how I and my nature became corrupt after we had been created
perfectly.
The law of God tells me
that I cannot do anything for my salvation; therefore, let someone else do it.
There is indeed ONE who can do it, and who has done it. For, say the Canons of
Dort (III/IV, art.6), “what, therefore, neither the light of nature nor the law
can do, God performs by the power of the Holy Spirit through the Word or
Ministry of reconciliation, which is the gospel of the Messiah, by which it has
pleased God to save men who believe, both under the old and new dispensation”.
Through the Spirit of Christ we begin again to live in accordance with
all God’s commandments (cf. Lord’s Day 44). Through the Spirit of Christ we
again begin to love God above everything, and our neighbour like ourselves.
Through the Spirit of Christ we begin to show this in our everyday-life again!
LORD’S
DAY 3
6 Q. Did God create people so wicked and
perverse?
A. No.
God
created them good and in his own image,
that
is, in true righteousness and holiness,
so
that they might
truly
know God their creator,
love
him with all their heart,
and
live with him in eternal happiness
for
his praise and glory.
7 Q. Then where does this corrupt human nature
come from?
A. From the fall and
disobedience of our first parents,
Adam
and Eve, in Paradise.
This
fall has so poisoned our nature
that
we are born sinners;
corrupt
from conception on.
8 Q. But are we so corrupt
that we are totally unable
to do any good
and inclined toward all
evil?
A. Yes, unless we are born
again,
by
the Spirit of God.
Introduction
We live in a world which is
inhabited by people who are corrupted by sin and inclined by nature to hate God
and their neighbour. People who adhere to the Reformed confessions will
immediately admit this. Yes, that’s what the Bible says, that’s what we
therefore confessed in the previous Lord’s Day.
However, it is one thing to
confess this in church, but another thing always to realize this in our daily
life. We do not want to be too pessimistic, especially not when things are
going quite pleasantly. We meet visiting friends and relatives, or are going on
trips to them; there are many things which we still can enjoy in this world.
Also many Reformed believers are inclined to say: life is not that bad. People
are often friendly to one another, we do not lack any food, and there is still
peace in our time (at least where we are living). The grass is green and the flowers
blossom. Life is good.
Of course we know that this
world is not Paradise, that there is always a struggle for life going on; but
did not mankind overcome many difficulties in the course of time, and have we
not in many respects reached a level which
surpasses all that has been before?
Some indeed boast that
mankind has reached such a level that it does no longer need the only comfort
which comes from God. Mankind itself is divine as it were. God is what lives in
the depth of our own hearts, God is what is reflected in our own mind, and thus
we live in a self‑made world which can become better and better by our
own efforts, if only we become wise enough to ban nuclear weapons and other
environmental dangers. But even that is in our own hands.
When we consider all this
it seems that there is a conflict between the reality as it is experienced by
us on the one hand, and what the Bible says about man and this world on the
other.
The reality is that the sun
keeps shining and that we can enjoy the good things of life; and the Bible says
that this world is corrupted by sin and that man is condemned.
The reality is that mankind
lives as if there is no God in heaven, while the Bible says that our entire
life and the whole world depend on God.
Does this mean that
actually we can live two lives, that on Sundays we go to church to satisfy our
religious needs, but that beside this we have another life where we can comply
with the reality around us as something different from what we confess in the
church? Is there indeed a contrast between faith and reality?
Why do we go to church on
Sundays, instead of going out each weekend and enjoy staying in our cottage or
somewhere else? Is there indeed a contrast and conflict between our faith, and
the reality of this world, or can we only understand the reality of life in the
light of the Bible?
It has been said by and to
preachers who proclaim the Word of God as confessed in the Heidelberg
Catechism, that in Lord’s Days 2‑4 may not yet be spoken about our
redemption. At most the door of deliverance may be set ajar; but basically one
should still keep silent in this part about our sins and misery or about God’s
grace in Jesus Christ.
Of course this is not true.
If a minister may not proclaim Jesus Christ as the Saviour, he has no message
at all. In every sermon must be preached about Jesus Christ, crucified for our
sins and to our redemption.
Also what we confess in
this Lord’s Day about how great our sins and misery are we may confess to our
comfort. In Lord’s Day 2 we confessed to our comfort what God’s law requires of
us, not just in the 10 commandments but in the whole Bible. We also confessed
to our comfort that we must say ‘no’ to the question: can you keep all this
perfectly? No, I am inclined by nature to hate God and my neighbour.
What then is the comfort in
that answer? It is this, that if we must say that by nature we are inclined to
hate God and our neighbour, there is the possibility of an alternative, namely
of what we would do and could do if we would not follow our nature, but act differently.
Man’s creation,
degeneration, and regeneration
(a) What
is man?
It is good that we first
face the question: what is man; who are we, human beings? The common way of putting
it is that we differ from all other beings in this respect that we have reason,
and that we employ our reason as highly intelligent beings.
Miracles of art and science
and technology are there to show what man is able to do. Social laws and
humanitarian organizations prove that we also do many good things. The basic
rights of men are formulated in bills of rights and entrenched in our
constitution, and there are courts and police‑forces to maintain them. In
short, we are able to do many good things, and inclined to fight all evil.
Is not this the reality,
also in our country? Sure, we did not yet reach perfection, there are still
many risks in life; but civilization is still going on, and even calamities
like diseases and wars and perhaps death itself will be banned from earth in
times to come if only we handle things right.
And we are working at that
too, by means of protest‑demonstrations e.g. on the streets of our
cities. Therefore, it is frankly confessed: man is capable of many good things
and inclined to fight all evil.
There we are! The world
confesses that man is good, in principle anyway; and the church confesses that
man is entirely corrupt.
Who are we? The answer to
this question shows a contrast and a conflict as between black and white, water
and fire, the stark contrast between belief in the Bible as the Word of God,
and the rejection of any belief in a living God.
But how is this possible?
Do not believers and unbelievers live in the same world, do they not see the
same things, and are not both kinds of people involved in the same process of
civilization, studying the same subjects of science and facing the same facts
of life? They do. But where do the differences then come from? Would it be true
that it all comes from this, that people who believe the Bible do not accept
reality with its bare facts, while on the other hand those who do not believe
the Bible are in accordance with reality and with the facts of reality?
(b) Faith and facts
Would it be true that there
is a contrast and conflict between faith and science, between Bible and
reality? If so, then it would also be true that what is preached and confessed
by the church on Sunday cannot have and does not have any bearing on the things
which we meet and do in our everyday life. Then we should not expect that the
preaching of Gods Word changes anything in our lives.
We will see however that
this conclusion itself is in conflict with the real facts. For we do experience
that the Word of God changes our lives. We do experience that people confess
their sins to God and to each other, also that bad relations are changed into
good relations, and that works of the flesh, sinful acts, are abandoned and
fruits of the Holy Spirit are produced. This is a reality in a church where the Bible is proclaimed and
believed, these are facts which can be seen in our own life and in the lives of
our brothers and sisters, if we indeed want to see them and not only look at
the bad side of things.
Yes, these are facts which confirm
the truth of what we confess here in Lord’s Day 3, that we are incapable of
doing any good, unless we are
regenerated by the Spirit of God. Yes, also the works of the Holy Spirit, who
makes people who are corrupt by sin to be born again, are facts. They are facts
which are experienced; they are facts which are shown in the results.
At the same time it can be
said that this work of the Holy Spirit, that the necessity that the Holy Spirit
works in our hearts to make us to love each other again, proves that we
ourselves are corrupt by sin. Also this is a fact which can be seen in our
daily life. This too is experienced by us, every time when we do not subject
ourselves in our daily conduct to the guidance of the Spirit, when we do not
obey the Bible. Then we experience, as well in ourselves as in our contacts
with our neighbours, how true it is that we are inclined to all evil.
Thus both our sins and our
repentance show the truth of the Bible in all that it says about the reality of
life. And also when we experience the renewal of our life, we see from this how
corrupt our life is by sin. For then we see the difference.
(c) No
evolution theory
Let me make this clear with
an example. When a town is completely destroyed by a tornado, or by an
earthquake or a fire, you can afterwards still see from the ruins that it has
been a town. Perhaps some people still live in the ruins of that town.Now two things are possible. They could say, after all
it is not that bad. We can still live here. After some time they might even
forget how beautiful the town was before it was destroyed and start boasting
about their living‑quarters, e.g. compared with the caves in which people
are supposed to have lived millions of years ago. What a progress!
However, people who somehow
got hold of pictures and descriptions of the original town would not talk that
way. They would say that it would have to be completely rebuilt in order to
become liveable again. You see, it just depends on what is your starting point:
caves, or, paradise.
This is what we confess in
this Lord’s Day concerning the world in which we live, and mankind to which we
belong, what we confess about our own human life. We can only know how
incapable the ruins of our life have become to do anything good as we ought to,
if we read the description and see the picture of our life as it was created in
the beginning. Then we know: it has to be rebuilt completely, or as the
catechism says it, we must be regenerated by the Spirit of God our Creator.
This is the reality. And
how about people who boast that they still live so nicely in the ruins of their
town, who boast about what they have accomplished in this so-called civilized
world? They do not even see the reality of the tornado or fire or earthquake
which destroyed their houses; they do not see the reality of our fall into sin
which corrupted our lives; they do not even recognize that they are living in
shacks instead of in bungalows.
Let me add another example,
now from the Bible, where we read about the situation of the world immediately
before and after that great disaster of the flood of Noah, and also of that
other event, at the very beginning, of Adam’s and Eve’s fall into sin, and how
their lives and this whole world were cursed because of their rebellion.
Two times the house of this
world has been shaken on its foundations. But what happened, already after the
first time, the curse mentioned in Genesis 3? Quite soon most people went on
living as if nothing had happened. When they looked around in the world as it had
become after the fall, a world subject to death and painful labours, they did
not repent from their sins; they did not even realize how that beautiful world
and life as it was experienced in
Then again, the world after
the flood was entirely different from what it had been before. The Bible says,
and the facts show it, that the flood has been an enormous disaster which
changed the world, climate, and every condition of life. Take only man’s life‑span
which was drastically diminished.
The fact that we still live
in a beautiful world where the sun shines and life can be enjoyed and where
people still perform beautiful works of art and technology; this fact is
nothing more than a remnant, a left‑over from what the world has been
before. These facts only show how excellently the world was created by God, how
good it was as the Bible puts it. Still, it has become a far cry from what it
has been.
It is the same as when we
admire the ruins of the buildings which were made by the Greeks and Romans, and
their master‑pieces of art. They are badly damaged, yet they show us how
great they have been. But at the same time they are witnesses of civilizations
which passed away; they are not witnesses of life, but of destruction and
death.
What is man? The world says
that he is the product of his own evolution, and that he still develops himself
to a higher level.
But what is the reality?
Reality is that we live in a world in which millions of people have killed each
other, are killing each other, and will kill one another: with thoughts,
doctrines, knives, abortions, poison, bombs, hijackings, pollution; and all
that because people do not love God and their neighbour. This crazy world, or
rather this entirely corrupted world, they dare to call it a civilization, a
product of evolution and progress. But they deny the reality of which the Bible
speaks, and which is before everyone’s eyes, that this world has gone down,
since our fall in
Man is corrupted by the sin
of rebellion against God, that’s the only explanation for the fact that he is
also blind, so blind that he does not even know how degenerated he has become,
how wicked and perverse.Did God, then, create man so
wicked and perverse? If it would be true that God stands at the beginning of
that so-called evolution of man, yes indeed, then we could blame God for our
wickedness. If mankind would have evolved from lower to higher, indeed, then
mankind itself cannot be blamed, for then our origin must have been really bad.
We must see the religious
meaning of this. People look for an excuse for their wickedness, just as they
started doing in the beginning when they sinned for the first time. But if we
confess that God created man good and after His own image, then we acknowledge
our immeasurable sin of rebellion; then we blame ourselves. The confession that
God created us good is our self‑accusation that we are evil by our own
fault. Any theory which denies the existence of God as the good Creator of all
things tries to cover up the shame of man; it denies the reality, what man
really is.
God created man after His
own image. The beginning of man is not that he has developed from a lower
being, but that he has been created to be the representative of God in this
world. Theories of unbelief have identified man with an animal (“a naked ape”),
contrary to all facts of reality. Then they go on to identify man with
something divine, and again it is in conflict with all reality. The reality is
that God created man as His representative, after His image. Originally man
represented God in true righteousness and holiness. This has changed, man has
degenerated, and he has lost his righteousness and holiness. Yet the command of
God has been maintained: man keeps being responsible for all his deeds, words,
theories, and whatever else he may do.
That’s also why after the
flood the command from the beginning has been maintained that man shall not
kill; for who sheds the blood of man, his blood shall be shed, because God made
man after His image.
All this means that there
is no excuse for our degeneration. No excuse. No humanistic theories can ever
save us from God’s condemnation. No excuse! Yet there is one way to escape from
the burning anger and condemnation which we deserve. It is this, that we are
regenerated by the Spirit of God.
We have become
representatives in unrighteousness and unholyness.
But God has sent His only Son, in order that He as the second Adam would become
His representative in our place, to make us again representatives of God, with
His righteousness and holiness.
There is a way of escape.
Adam and Eve did escape, when God came down to them with the promise of the
coming Christ. Noah and his family did escape, when God made Noah to build the
ark, with a view to His Covenant which He had made with Adam already.
By virtue of the blood of
Christ which cleanses us from our sins we can and may live again as God’s
representatives in this world, in true righteousness and holiness.
Representatives in all of God’s created world, not only on Sunday, in church,
but all the days of our life, wherever we are.
There is no contrast
between believing the Bible, and accepting the facts which we meet in daily
life. For Jesus Christ is, as God’s representative, King of the whole world, of
all of creation. Every sphere of life belongs to Him, and should for this
reason be influenced by the regenerating power of God’s Spirit.
The comfort we derive from
how God has created us
(a) Did God
create man wicked and perverse?
We have confessed in the
previous Lord’s Day that by nature we are inclined to hate God and our
neighbour. However, if nevertheless we love the Lord, and also love our
neighbour, then it is clear that we do not do this by nature, but only by God’s
grace.
Still the question cannot
be avoided: if by nature we are only inclined to hate God and our neighbour,
did God then create man so wicked and perverse?
A Christian can of course
only ask this question with a tone of amazement in his voice. To him, who has
learned to know God as His gracious and merciful Father, it is incredible that
this would be so.
Especially our children can
ask this question with great amazement. You tell them the first stories from
the Bible, how God has created this world, and how God has created us in this
world, and how God repeatedly said when He had created some more, how good it
was what He created, certainly when on the sixth day he had created man. Full
of amazement our children then ask: but how come that now we are sinners, and
every day must pray that God may forgive us our sins?
Therefore, if there is one
Lord’s Day which we can let our children learn because they understand it so
well, it is this one. Did God then create man so wicked and perverse? No, of
course not; on the contrary, God created man good!It
is quite clear that this question does not intend to accuse God of being the
cause of our sinful nature; it is just the opposite. Whatever may be the cause
of it, anyway it is not God’s fault; this is immediately clear from what the
Bible tells us about creation in Genesis 1.
(b) God’s
purpose in creating man and this world
What was God’s purpose, His
intention, when He created man and this world? That we with all that there is
in this world would forever praise and glorify Him, and of course God made
therefore man and everything in such a way that they could do this.
Let me give an example of
this. If a choir wants to be praised for the excellence of its performances, it
will take care that it has both the qualified director and the committed
members who are good for that purpose. Would then God not have made man and
everything good with a view to the purpose which He had in mind? Of course He
did.
God loved the world and man
in it as He had created them, because they answered the purpose which He had in
mind: the praise and glorification of His Name. This applies to each creature,
to man, but also to the clouds, and the trees, and the animals.
The heavens are telling the
glory of God, we sing with Psalm 19. The author of Psalm 65 sees how the hills
and the meadows and the valleys shout and sing together for joy. Also the trees
and the grain and the birds show in accordance with the place which God has
given them in His creation the majesty of God. Also the animals have the
function to be like letters in God’s book of creation (cf. Belgic
Confession, article 2).
This is why we confess in
article 12 of the Belgic Confession concerning the
creation of all things, “We believe that the Father through the Word, that is,
through His Son, has created out of nothing heaven and earth and all creatures,
when it seemed good to Him, and that He has given to every creature its being,
shape and form, and to each its specific task and function to serve its
Creator. We believe that He also continues to sustain and govern them by His
eternal providence and by His infinite power in order to serve man, to the end
that man may serve his God”.
From this confession it
appears that there is a difference between man and all other creatures in this
respect. Moreover, in Genesis 1 it says that God all other creatures on earth
“according to their kinds”. But in verse 26 God says about man: “Let us make
man in our image, after our likeness”.
Man is not created after
his kind, but after Gods image. This means that also mans office or task and
function is different than that of the other creatures. With the other
creatures it is a matter of course, it is as it were automatically, that they
serve their Creator. They do it by instinct; they are as it were programmed for
it. But the difference with man is that he must do it as a responsible being.
We must take the meaning of
that word ‘responsible’ in the most literal sense of the word. It is derived
from the verb ‘respond’. And respond, that’s what you do to words which first
have been spoken to you.
So when it says here in the
catechism, based on Genesis 1:26, that God made man in His image, this means in
the first place that God speaks His words to them, and that He has created them
in such a way that they can understand the words of God, and that they can
respond to what He says to them.
(c) God
made a Covenant with man
In short this means that
God, when He created man in His image, made a Covenant‑relation with him.
He created man as His covenant-partner on earth, His friend or representative.
That’s also why man should never be looked at as just another animal, which in
the way of evolution would have climbed up from an original lower level to his
present higher form of existence. What the Bible says about man’s creation in
God’s image can never be reconciled with such a nonsensical evolution‑theory.
In talking with Adam the
Lord entered into a Covenant‑relationship with him, in which Adam also
received his special office or task and function. He received this task or
function by hearing himself called to it; and he was so created that he also
voluntarily could respond to this calling and accept it in obedient
responsibility.
That’s why it says about man
that God created him good, namely in this very high position which answered
God’s purpose. We cannot overstate or overemphasize this high position that man
was placed in when God created him. No humanist ascribes to man such a high
position as the Bible does!
Thus man’s creation in
God’s image means in the first place that man received a calling from God.
Whenever someone talks about man without considering his calling, man is
de-humanized; it would even be un-natural to speak about man that way.
But when man was created in
God’s image he also received, together with his calling, the abilities which he
needed for his calling here on earth. That’s what the catechism points to when
it says that God created him “in true righteousness and holiness”.This
righteousness and holiness characterized man from his very first beginning. In
everything he agreed and lived in accordance with the laws which God had made
for his being human. This was man’s original righteousness. Mind you, we do not
talk here about man’s original and innate rights, like humanism talks about
that, but about man’s original righteousness.
He was completely open,
eyes and ears and mind and heart, to God’s calling for him; he listened to
God’s holy Word. In his living according to this calling there were no foreign
motivations mixed with it. No, he was completely and purely dedicated to God
his Creator. This was his original holiness.
That’s how God had created
him, both called and enabled to God’s service. All that he needed for being
such a human being was given to him by God, when God created him in His image.
And how did he have to
serve God, how did he have to fulfill this calling
with the abilities given to him? By having dominion over all other creatures.
Man was called to have dominion over the earth and all that is in it, as God’s
representative, to develop it all to God’s glory, and he had received
everything which he needed to perform this work for which he lived here on
earth.
Nothing was lacking;
everything was given to him.
There is good reason to
repeat this and stress this again and again. For all those who, all through the
history of the church, want to belittle God’s grace and who therefore say that
our sins and misery are not that bad, begin with a low view of man as he was
created on the sixth day.
(d) The Arminian view of man as created in God’s image
Let me give an example of
this from the Arminians, in the first place because
they came forth from the Reformed Churches, and secondly because their ideas
are still behind many theories about man and his place in this world. Arminianism is still very strong today.
When the Arminians speak about man being created in God’s image,
they are not so much interested in the fact that this includes man being called
to a task in God’s Covenant‑relationship with him; neither do they say
about the abilities given to man, that they are given to him in order that he
can serve God in this Covenant‑relationship.
The main thing in which the
Arminians are interested when they speak about man as
God’s image is that he has dominion over the rest of creation. Having dominion
is for them the important thing.
However, in this way they
have changed man’s serving God to which God has called him into a struggle for
dominion: a power‑struggle which would be inherent to man’s own nature as
he was created. The error of the Arminians and of all
humanism is not just that they place too much emphasis on what man does, or on what we do, but that
they place the emphasis on the wrong thing,
on man’s own natural power instead of on man’s service to God with God-given
abilities.
Of course, also the
catechism wants to emphasize what we, human beings, must do; this is in itself
not wrong, this is perfectly Reformed. But the Arminians
teach that man, when he was created, did not receive from God the gifts and
abilities which he needed to serve God in true righteousness and holiness, but
that man must try to acquire those abilities by his own power, and then not for
service in the Covenant with God, but for man’s own greater glory (cf. Canons
of Dort, III/IV, Rejection of Errors, article 3).
So again, it is really
Reformed, ‑ and therefore it is also done in this Lord’s Day of the
catechism ‑ , when it is stressed what man does when he serves God in the
Covenant with all the gifts and abilities which God has given him for that. We
should not deny this in false humility. But it would be Arminian
to say that man did not receive these gifts from God, and that therefore he
must strive for them, and by his own power. Modern evolution‑theories are
built on this idea, and it is this idea which gives strength to today’s
theology of revolution. Man uses his own means, to his own glory.
To them righteousness and
holiness are not gifts from God which man received when he was created. And why
do they not want to acknowledge these as gifts from God? The reason is that for
our human pride it is much nicer to acquire these virtues in the way of a
struggle for the survival of the fittest, than that we have to thank God for
them.
Our sins and misery are
consequently not so great that we would not be able to engage in that struggle,
they say. We might need some help for that, but that’s all. We ourselves will
accomplish it; and therefore, we do not need God’s forgiving grace either, at
least not for 100 percent.
(e) The issue is: the glory of God
This is what almost any
conflict in the history of the church is really about: is what we do only
thanks to God’s grace, or, thanks to our own power? Is salvation by God alone,
or by creature?
God’s grace for sinners is
almost always the issue at stake; but when it really comes down to it it goes back to what is the purpose of creation: the glory
of God.
That’s why we must know what
is, in accordance with the Scriptures, the Reformed doctrine of our being
created in God’s image. If we don’t know our origin, how could we know how to
live? How would we know what we live for? How could we ever glorify God with
our whole life?For this is what we further confess
here about why man is created in God’s image: “so that he might rightly know
God his Creator, heartily love Him, and live with Him in eternal blessedness to
praise and glorify Him”.
If we do not know our
origin, neither what has gone wrong and how it went wrong (our sins and
misery), then the danger is great that we also miss the goal. For God wants us
to know and love Him as responsible people, who in our loving Him serve Him in
the Covenant which He has made with us.
Then we put to death with
Christ’s death on the cross our sinful nature and its evil desires like
fornication, impurity, passion, covetousness, anger, wrath, malice, slander,
foul talk, and lying to one another.
Then, thanks to God’s grace in Jesus Christ,
we put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge as it was
originally created after the image of its Creator. Then we desire to show
compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another
and forgiving each other. Then we put on love, let the peace of Christ rule in
our hearts, to which we are called in the one body. Then we are thankful (cf.
Colossians 3:5‑15).
Jesus Christ makes us to
know our origin
Jesus Christ, “who for us
men and for our salvation, came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy
Spirit of the virgin Mary” (Nicean Creed), makes us
by His incarnation to learn to know our origin. For in Him the only man was
born on earth who was in agreement with the purpose which God had in mind when
He created man.
Jesus Christ is the only
one born after the fall to Whom can be applied what is said in answer 6, namely
that He by nature is good, the image of God, truly righteous and holy. Whoever
hears and sees the man Jesus Christ as He is pictured to us in the Scriptures,
hears and sees man as he was in
Of course we are not
talking about His outward appearance in this respect. For as a consequence of
the curse over sin which affects all of creation also man’s flesh, his
existence in the flesh, has been weakened and has lost much of its original
glory. With His incarnation Jesus assumed our weakened human flesh. Outwardly
He was not really different, and for that reason already is imitation of Jesus
as this is sometimes propagated and tried out of the question.
Answer 6 however speaks
about man in his relation to God, as God placed him in
When God created man in
Paradise He said, behold, it is very good the way he is. Jesus Christ is the
first born human being who since then was born of whom God could say: Behold,
He is good, He answers the purpose which I have in mind for man.
For this reason the birth
of the Lord Jesus is at least as important as the creation of man on the sixth
day. Christmas means that God makes a new beginning! A new beginning in a world
and a humanity which are corrupted by sin and which therefore, rather than
experiencing evolution, could only end up in destruction.
Even if no one would ever
believe or have believed in Jesus Christ this would still have been a new
beginning by which the complete destruction and annihilation of mankind is
brought to a halt. For in the birth of the little child Jesus a new mankind
entered into the world, out of the flesh and blood of the old mankind.
The expression ‘new
mankind’ must of course not be understood as if in and with Jesus a mankind,
different from what was there first would have entered this world. If this
would have been the case, then Christ and those who are in Christ would have to
withdraw from this world, like the Anabaptists taught this in the time of the
great Reformation (and their spiritualist followers in our days as well). After
all, did they not teach that the Lord Jesus took His humanlike body along from
heaven, and not from Mary’s flesh and blood?
We can call the birth of
our Lord a new creation; but this does not mean that it is a different
creation. This is also why so-called ‘modern theologians’ are wrong when they
are not interested in the historical facts because according to them God has
nothing to do with our old world. But our salvation depends indeed on the
historical truth of Christmas, that Jesus is born in
From this we learn that God
did not create man wicked and perverse. The re‑creation by God of mankind
through the birth of our Lord in
“Be astonished now, oh
people;
see God’s love here brought
to light.”
See how God fulfils all
wishes;
see this little new-born
child!”
(translated fom an old Dutch poem)
So good, like Jesus, did
God create man in Paradise: “good and in His image, that is, in true
righteousness and holiness, so that he might rightly know God his Creator,
heartily love Him, and live with Him in eternal blessedness to praise and
glorify Him”.
We see our good origin
whenever we look at Christ. And in Him we see God, our good Creator. This is
all thanks to God’s grace; for when we look at each other or at ourselves the
way we are born, the way we are by nature, we do not see God in them or in
ourselves. But now, in Christ, we may learn to know God, and our neighbour, and
ourselves again.
From where, then, has man’s
depraved nature come?
(a) Humanism
and paganism de‑humanize man
As we have seen above, the
corruption of our nature was not originally present with our creation. The
seeds of our corruption have not always been with us. If that would have been
so, then both God’s and our glory would have been irreversibly stained.
Then God would not really have been God; and
because to be human means to be created after God’s image, we would not really
have been human. We would have been beyond repair, right from the beginning of
our existence.
Humanism, which always likes to boast of
man’s dignity, actually takes away the dignity of man which God has given him;
it de‑humanizes man, because it violates the majesty and perfection of
our God after whose image man has been made. That’s why it comforts us that we
are taught to answer to the question, “From where, then, did man’s depraved
nature come?” “From the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam and
Eve, in Paradise”.
This comforts us, because this answer does
not violate God’s honour, but it confirms and confesses it. It also comforts us
because this answer does not cut off the possibility of redemption; for our
redemption would indeed be impossible if the corruption of our nature would
have been the result of some imperfection in creation itself.
This is what pagan religions believe. They
have no real way out of the despair of such a life; and alas, sometimes also
people who call themselves Christians take this over from pagan philosophies.
This world is evil in itself, they say, and that’s why they abandon this world,
and withdraw themselves from it as far as they can, instead of believing, and
acting by that faith, that we have the redemptive Word for the world.
Yes, we confess to our comfort that our
depraved nature comes from the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam
and Eve, in
But how can the catechism put it this way?
The catechism can do so because of the unity
of the human race. As members of the human race we never stand just by
ourselves!
(b) The
promise and the threat of God’s Covenant
Sometimes it is said that grace
can not be inherited. This depends. This statement is not true in every
respect. In His covenant with us the LORD promises that He wants to be our God
and the God of our children. This is the gracious promise of God’s covenant of
grace! This promise is indeed inherited; it is passed on from generation to
generation!
Of course, it is true that not every child
of believing parents receives the fulfilment of the promise of God’s covenant.
But this does not remove the value and validity of the promise. This also
happens with an earthly will or testament. Not everyone who is mentioned in
such a will automatically receives the inheritance. If someone does not care to
contact the lawyer who executes the will, he might lose out on it.
In the church it goes the same way. If
someone is so indifferent that he does not regularly go to church where God’s
promises are made known; or someone goes but does not listen, or listens the
wrong way; such a person is in great danger of losing out on the promised inheritance.
And not only that. As well there is the
threat of the covenant, which always accompanies the promise: whoever does not
believe the promise will perish.
God’s speaking to us always has effect; if
it does not work faith in us, then it hardens us in our unbelief. Then it
appears that also this threat can be inherited. For God visits the iniquities
of those who hate Him to the third and the fourth generation. These later
generations are of course not punished because of what their parents did wrong;
no, they are punished because they join their parents in wrongdoing, and make
it even worse.
When parents do not take the service of the
LORD seriously, we can see before our eyes what happens with their children.
They go much further on that road than their parents ever intended to.
(c) The
position of Adam and Eve in the Covenant is unique
The position of Adam and
Eve in
Adam’s position is indeed unique, because he
is the head of the entire human race. Whenever in a family a baby is born we
are faced with the miracle of blood‑relationship. The fact that a baby
gets his or her flesh and blood from its parents is a miracle which has its
origin in God’s creating it that way. Although nowadays we talk about genes and
DNA, the fact that a baby inherits character‑traits and all kinds of
similarities to the parents is still a wonder of God which He brings about in
this natural course of events. It all comes forth from the miracle of how God
has created us in the beginning in
Because Adam as the head of the entire human
race had received such a unique covenant‑position from God, all of us
were part of Adam already. For that reason it can be said that Adam’s actions
were our actions as well, and that Adam’s original righteousness and holiness
were also our righteousness and holiness. And that’s unique, because you cannot
say this of children with respect to their father and mother.
If a boy has an honest character, and he has
indeed inherited this character‑trait from his father, then the child
still cannot say when his father has done an honest deed: I did it. No father has
such a unique position that what he does is therefore done by his child as
well. What we do may reflect on others in our community, yet everyone is
responsible for his or her own actions, and not for those of someone else. No
child may be punished because of wrong done by its father.
Yet this is different with Adam and his
descendants. We, his descendants, are held responsible for what we have done in
and through Adam. But this is not on the basis of blood‑relationship, not
because we are related by flesh and blood, due to the creation of mankind as
one race. No, this is because God Himself decided it this way that in the
Covenant‑community Adam’s actions would be decisive for all his
descendants. Because God decided it this way He counted all of us as present in
Adam, and as acting in and through him.
This means that in Adam we ourselves
possessed righteousness and holiness. How great we were! We still have reason
to be thankful to God for that. But may we then say that God is unjust when He
also counts us as sinners in Adam, after we fell into sin with him?
(d) Our
conception and birth in sin is not an excuse
We confess with the
catechism that it is our own fault that we are conceived and born in sin. It is
due to our own fall and disobedience in Adam that our nature has become
corrupt; and God is just when He counts Adam’s fall and obedience as our own
sin; because it is indeed our own sin.
The catechism refers for
this to what David says in Psalm 51, “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and
in sin did my mother conceive me”. David does not use this confession as an
excuse: well, that’s the way we are, I can’t help it. No, he says this, because
it makes the sin which he has committed and for which he asks forgiveness even
worse. It is not just that I have done
evil; worse than that is that I am
evil.
This is what the catechism
requires from us, and teaches us and our children, that we must confess that
the sin in which we are conceived and born is our sin, for which we must humble
ourselves before God, and ask forgiveness, every day, together with what are
called our daily, our actual sins.
Now, if indeed we do this,
if indeed we humbly confess our sin which we have committed in Adam in
Still, the fact that a
second Adam had to come means that all our roads have become dead-end roads. We
became so corrupt that only the incarnation of the Son of God as the second
Adam could save us.
This we see when we look at
Christ, the incarnated Word. In Him, the Word, was life (John 1), and the life
was the light of men. This was so from the time of man’s creation, but Adam and
his descendants have lost this life and darkened this light. In
How awesome and horrible
the darkening of this light by our fall into sin has been we see especially in
Christ’s sufferings and death. We see it in the hostility of men against Jesus,
because they could not stand His light. We see the dreadful meaning of our fall
into sin when we see Christ going from
The Lord Jesus has suffered
all this, from manger to cross, because of our corruption and depravity
It is our fault that it had
to become Christmas!
But it is God’s grace that
it could become Christmas!
The door of
self-deliverance closed; only one way out remains
When the catechism says
that we are so corrupt that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined to
all evil, unless we are regenerated by the Spirit of God, the catechism does
two things.
In the first place the
catechism radically closes the door of self‑deliverance; for ‘even if I
would have to add only one sigh to my salvation myself, I would be lost
forever’ (brother Kapinga to Rev. Hendrik
De Cock in Ulrum, before the Secession of 1834).
This way the catechism
wants to make it absolutely clear how totally and radically corrupt we are. But
the catechism does not do this to make us to go down in despair and to lose all
hope. The catechism does this in order that we humble ourselves before God, and
are going to seek our salvation apart from ourselves and from anything of
ourselves. In other words, the catechism puts it this way to our comfort!
For, and that’s what the
catechism does in the second place, it shows us that there is still another
door which is open, and which leads to salvation. Here the catechism follows
the instruction of the Lord Jesus which He gave to Nicodemus. This Nicodemus
was the theologian who in the night came to the Lord Jesus. We read the story
in the Gospel according to John, chapter 3.
Nicodemus was well-versed
in the Scriptures. This is what he thought, anyway; and this is what also the
people thought of him. One thing was lacking however. He did not know his sin
and misery. He did not realize that he was so corrupt, that he could only be
saved by being regenerated by the Holy Spirit.
He thought that for someone
who, like the Pharisees to which group he belonged, scrupulously performed the
works of the law and on top of that some extra good works, the door to the
It is to this man that the
Lord Jesus says, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he
cannot see the
Nicodemus does not
understand a word of this. To be born anew; what does the Lord Jesus mean? Is
this a condition which first must be fulfilled?
Oh yes, Nicodemus had heard
about regeneration. The Jews called the establishment of the
Then the Lord Jesus
rephrases what He has said by saying, “Unless one is born of water and the
Spirit, he cannot enter the
Jesus Christ has Himself
obtained for us this life-giving Spirit. And just like Jesus’ birth was only
God’s work, so the rebirth of men is only the work of God. Man as he is by
nature cannot contribute anything to the gathering of the church, the new
mankind, population of God’s Kingdom.
It is for this reason that
John the Baptist said to the Jews who boasted of the fact that they were
children of Abraham: “I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up
children to Abraham” (Matthew 3:9).
This also applies to us who
call ourselves Christians and members of God’s church. We are so corrupt, says
the catechism, that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined to all
evil. We have become totally inadequate material for forming a new mankind.
Only from the child of
But now let us, after we
have heard John the Baptist, also listen to the apostle John, to what he writes
in John 1:12. “But to all who received Him, who believed in His name, He gave
power to become children of God”. In other words, God is not only powerful to
make children of Abraham from stones; He also can make children for Himself;
and He can do so, if need be, from stones in the desert; but what did He do?
God made Christ to be born in order that all those who receive Him by a true
faith receive power from Him to become children of God.
God so loved this world,
His creation and us with creation, that He sent His only Son on earth, that whoever
believes in Him should not perish, but receive everlasting life. God so loved
this world, that He made Christmas to be followed by
If there had only been Christmas,
we would still die in our sins. For then we would have remained totally unable
to do any good and inclined to all evil. But thanks to God, it also has become
Pentecost, in order that by the Spirit of Christ we would be born again, by
faith grafted into Christ, and thus gathered by His Word and Spirit into His
church, the gathering of the new mankind.
The Spirit of Christ
teaches us as children to say Abba, Father, to God. By this Spirit, who dwells
in Christ as our Head and in us as His members, are we made into brothers and
sisters of Jesus Christ, our oldest Brother. Through this Spirit we belong to
our Father’s Household, Christ’s Body, God’s church.
The Tri-une
God keeps the admission into His House in His own hands. The God who created
this world will Himself repair the road into His Kingdom, and the door into His
House; the road which we, people, have broken up, and the door which we
ourselves caused to be closed behind us when we had to leave
Later on in the catechism
we will hear more about this, in the part about God the Holy Spirit and our
Sanctification (Lord’s Days 20 through 31). But here we hear about it in
advance, in order that right now already we may live and, if this would be
God’s will, die in the joy of the only comfort.
We need to know that God’s
creation-work is restored in our being born again by God’s Spirit. That’s why
we need to be born again ourselves, personally, in order that we, being born
anew, show God’s image again in rightly knowing Him, heartily loving Him, and
praising and glorifying Him.
We were created for this.
By grace we may eternally do this. And by faith the future has started already.
LORD’S
DAY 4
9 Q. But
doesn't God do us an injustice
by requiring in his law
what we are unable to do?
A. No, God created humans with the ability to
keep the law.
They,
however, tempted by the devil,
in
reckless disobedience,
robbed
themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.
10 Q. Will
God permit such disobedience and rebellion
to go unpunished?
A. Certainly not.
He
is terribly angry
about
the sin we are born with
as
well as the sins we personally commit.
As
a just judge
he
punishes them now and in eternity.
He
has declared:
"Cursed
is everyone who does not continue to do
everything
written in the Book of the Law”.
11 Q. But
isn't God also merciful?
A. God is certainly merciful,
but
he is also just.
His
justice demands
that
sin, committed against his supreme majesty,
be
punished with the supreme penalty;
eternal
punishment of body and soul.
Introduction
In the previous Lord’s Day we have seen that the cause
of our sins and misery is not the way God has created us. Not creation is to be
blamed, but our fall into sin.
God created us as
responsible human beings, after His own image, but we did not conduct ourselves
as such. We did not answer God’s speaking to us with the proper response of
praising the LORD; we did the opposite, we disobeyed Him and listened to His
enemy. In short: we did not stay in the position in which God had placed us. And
thus the question arose: what now? How can we go on?
Yes, how can we go
on? We must not forget what also has been taught to us in the previous Lord’s
Day, that we cannot continue in our own power. We have become totally unable to
do so.
But now comes Lord’s
Day 4 and it teaches us to our comfort that God has continued to move us along
on the road on which we ourselves have refused to go, and on which we made
ourselves unable to travel. Thus also Lord’s Day 4 keeps reminding us of our
only comfort in life and death as confessed in Lord’s Day 1.
Man’s responsibility
(a) Man is
responsible for his actions
It seems to be reasonable that if a person cannot do
what is required of him, he is not to be held accountable or responsible for
his actions. In this Lord’s Day we are confronted with the question whether man
is responsible for all his actions.
In psychology there
is a tendency to say no to this question, both because of a person’s genetic
make‑up, and because of the circumstances in which he has grown up. This
psychological approach has very much influenced our judicial system, and it is
also behind the aversion against capital punishment. In short it comes down to
this that one should have compassion and be merciful when someone has committed
a crime, because in the final analysis he could not really help it. Compassion
for the criminal has more or less become the rule in our society.
This psychological
approach is a reaction against the unmerciful and unchristian attitude that
justice must be done, even if the world would be destroyed by it. However, as
is usually the case in reactions against something, it goes from one extreme to
another. The result has become that often no justice at all is done, but that
justice has simply been replaced by a human love and compassion, which is not
really merciful either.
Yes, the world
wants to be even more merciful than God. People are often annoyed when they
hear talk about God’s justice and His rightful claims. If they want to hear of God
at all, then only of a merciful God, a God who is nothing but love. But people
forget that when God in His love for this world sent His own Son into this
world, God in doing so revealed in Christ both His mercy and His justice to us.
When it really comes
down to it the mercies of the wicked are cruel (Proverbs
In this world man
is no longer considered responsible because of all kinds of infirmities and
circumstances, lack of education, poverty, etc. But the remarkable thing is
that often compassion is preached for murderers and rapists at the cost of
their victims and of a threatened society.
Yet this is not the
only draw‑back. It is even questionable whether it is real compassion
toward the criminal himself. Out of compassion with the criminal he is declared
not to be responsible for his actions; but is there not even more reason to
pity him for the fact that he is declared not to be responsible?Actually
such a person is discriminated against; for he is no longer looked upon as a
responsible human being, but as someone on a lower level: not responsible.
Human philosophies
are always changing from one extreme to another. The slogan, justice must be
done even if the world would get destroyed by it, has been replaced by another
ideal: compassion must be shown, even if the society would be undermined and
fall apart as a consequence of it.
This does not mean
of course that it should never be taken into account that someone may have
committed a crime due to illness, a mental disturbance e.g. But there is a
tendency which leads to the conclusion that no one is responsible for his
actions anymore.
At the background
of this tendency is a humanism which boasts of our human dignity as compared
e.g. with animals, but which is doing so thanks to an evolution‑theory
which considers man as nothing else but a kind of super‑animal. Man is a
being who has developed by his own intelligence and strength from a lower to a
higher level.
Such humanism even
boasts of divine powers in mankind and has even come so far that it declares
the God of the Bible to be dead; but in doing so it kills in actual fact
humanity itself.
Saying that man is
not responsible for his actions means that he is degraded from a human being
who has been created after the image of God to the level of just another
animal. A super‑animal may be, but still a beast.
This unmerciful
philosophy which actually declares everyone less accountable for their deeds
has been developed by a man who hated mankind. All human beings are when it
comes to it nothing more but animals. This philosophy is not only a great
insult to man, it is also offensive toward the majesty of God who created man.
It is in a way
amazing that such a philosophy concerning man can become so influential. Yet it
can point to facts which seem to support the theory. For it is true that deep
in the mind and soul of man there live all kinds of iniquities. The Bible
teaches us this, and experience confirms it. Just think of the murder of about
6 million Jews in Hitler’s concentration‑camps in the early forties; or
of the killing of 23 million babies in the wombs of their mothers in the years
from 1968–1988, in
The great mistake
which has been made and which is behind this philosophy is that people tried to
explain man in terms of his depravity, instead of taking their starting‑point
in God his creator. In this way people had to come to their unmerciful view of
man, a view which at the same time is so very unjust as well. For man can only
be known if one has learned to know God.
However, contrary
to this miserable theory of modern man we confess in the catechism on the basis
of the Word of God, that our God is the merciful Judge of men, of human beings,
created after His image.
(b) Because man remains responsible God is
just by requiring in His law what man cannot do
God keeps asking from us what He required before we
fell into sin. God keeps asking from us that we love God above everything, and
our neighbour as ourselves.
In this way God
keeps doing justice to man, also after man has done injustice to God. This is
the comfort which we believe and confess in question and answer 9 of the
catechism: that God keeps doing justice to us, in spite of the fact that we
have done grave injustice to God. By maintaining His law for us God shows that
He does not abandon us and leave us all alone by ourselves.
It could be asked
whether this is really so. Is this indeed what we confess here? But is not this
question, “Is God, then, not unjust by requiring in His law what man cannot
do?”, a rebellious question, and does it not accuse the LORD of injustice?The explanation is indeed given that question 9,
and the questions 10 and 11 as well, are questions of protest; that here it is
our sinful nature which protests against God’s justice and law; and that the
catechism in the answers given to these questions refutes these reasonings and
protests of unbelief.
However, this
cannot be true, this must be incorrect; for in the catechism we ask each other
all these questions as believers! The church puts these questions to her
members, and also teaches the children in the church to ask their parents at
home and their minister in catechism‑class these questions. And the
church does not teach her members to ask questions of protest, questions based
on unbelief, does she? We should anyway hope that she does not do so.
We must remember
that also the questions in this Lord’s Day are asked by people who first have
learned Lord’s Day 1; who have learned to confess their faith in the only
comfort that we may belong to Jesus Christ our Saviour.
But why then are we
taught to ask that question, “Is God, then, not unjust by requiring in His law
what man cannot do?” We are taught to ask this question with amazement, to ask
this question while at the same time we are already convinced that of course
this cannot be true, and therefore with a real desire to understand why this
cannot be true.
People who ask
questions like these in unbelief are not interested in further teaching. Unbelievers
do not ask a question like this with a sound of amazement in their voice. They
protest against God, and accuse Him of injustice. But this question 9 asks for
further instruction in what we believe already, namely that there cannot be any
injustice in God.
This question is
the question of a believer who unconditionally trusts in God, but who in the
brokenness of his life does not yet see how God’s justice is realized here on
earth. One could think of a person like Job in this respect.Therefore,
when we ask this question if God is unjust by requiring in His law what we
cannot do, we must ask this question in faith; then we must trust our God, even
though we do not understand everything which He does.
(c) The Arminians about this question
Yet, within the Reformed Churches criticism has been
voiced about the way in which the catechism has put this question. In the early
1600’s the Arminians said: if what the catechism
teaches here is really true, then the question had better been formulated this
way, “Does God, then, not mislead man by requiring in His law what man cannot
do?”; does God not act in a hypocritical way by asking this while He knows very
well that He asks the impossible from man?
To this question
the Arminians would answer, yes, this would be
hypocritical of God, if, of course, the Reformed churches would be correct in
saying that God kept requiring the same from man as He required from him before
his fall into sin. However, the Arminians did not at
all agree with this. They said: God does not require from man what man cannot
do.
Let us hear this
from their own words as quoted in Canons of Dort, Rejection of Errors, Chapter
II, article 4. Here it says that they teach, “that God has revoked the demand
of perfect obedience and regards faith as such (that is the act of faith) and
the obedience of faith, though imperfect, as the perfect obedience of the law”.
In other words,
they admit that man cannot keep God’s law perfectly, but they hold that he can
do so at least in part. God is satisfied with this; God accepts this as if it
is enough. For God knows very well that this is all which He can demand from
us, because we are not perfect. For this reason they say that the catechism
makes God unjust by teaching that God keeps requiring in His law what man
cannot do.
When you hear this
it seems to be that this criticism against our catechism is correct. It seems
that these Arminians were really concerned about the
holiness and majesty of our God, which they defended against the Reformed
people who seemed to teach an unfair God, a God who misleads His people.
Yes, it seems to be
that way; but it is not really so. It is just the other way around. If God
indeed would have revoked the demand of perfect obedience of the law, that
would have been misleading. Then God would have misled Adam in
For at that time
God did not soften the requirements of His law and give Adam some exemption
from keeping the law. No, God said to Adam when He told him the requirements of
His law: on the day that you transgress this law you will die. See? God did not
say, on the day that you transgress my law I will abolish some of it, and ask
less from you. Not at all!
Therefore, if the Arminians would have been correct in saying that God is
satisfied with less than He originally required from Adam, then God would
indeed have been an unfair God. He would have misled Adam by first demanding
more from him than He would later require from Adam’s descendants. God would have
been an arbitrary God and thus not true God at all.
And we? We would be
the most miserable of all creatures. For we would have been created after the
image of an untrue, an unreliable god, of something demonic, instead of created
as human beings after the image of the one true God. We would not be human
beings at all, but something different, beings on a much lower level.
That Arminian doctrine which criticises the catechism is
blasphemy against God; it is also inhuman, because it teaches that after our fall
into sin God does not treat us as humans anymore.
We had better stick
to the catechism, for it gives an answer full of comfort to the question, “Is
God, then, not unjust by requiring in His law what man cannot do?”, by saying:
of course not! For God so created man that he was able to do it.
d) Man remains
responsible, because God remains the same
God keeps looking at man and dealing with him as He
did when He created him. God did not change. God keeps addressing us as human
beings, also after we became disobedient to His law. No, God did not treat us
as if we were lower beings, like e.g. the friends of Job, especially Eliphaz, were used to teach even before Arminius came on
the scene.
This is the comfort
of Lord's Day 4, that God remained the same toward us, also after we fell into
sin, and that therefore He also maintained us as the same beings we were when
we were created by Him: human beings, with the same responsibility toward the
same law as before.
If it would have been
up to us it would have been different. Remember how Adam blamed God for his sin
when he said, "The woman whom Thou gavest to be
with me, she" tempted me. Adam tried to strip himself of his human dignity
as a responsible human being, created after God's image; and thus he indeed
robbed himself and all his descendants of the gifts of righteousness and
holiness which God had given us; but God let him keep his humanity.
And how did Adam
rob himself and his descendants of the gifts of righteousness and holiness? In
deliberate disobedience, that is, as a human being, using his mind, and with
all his heart.
Sure, it is added
that he did it by the instigation of the devil. But that is no excuse; it only
makes it worse. God had warned Adam and Eve against the devil when He said that
they should guard
Therefore, so bad
was their deliberate disobedience, that they let themselves be instigated to
sin by the devil. They listened to the devil, instead of to God, so bad it was;
and that while they were human beings, responsible for all their actions.
But again, this is
our comfort that God keeps dealing with us as responsible human beings. For it
was the devil's intention to rob us of our humanity, to undo our being created
after God's image, and to remake us after his image. That would have been the
end of God's creation, and yes, of God Himself.
But praise be to
God, that God remained the same. He stayed Himself. Satan thought that this
would be the end of the world, because God would have to destroy man. But this
was Satan's first disappointment, that although man indeed died the spiritual
death, that yet he remained man; it was as man that he died.
Oh, how angry Satan
was! He was so angry, that he now introduced that false teaching of the later Arminians, which comes down to this that God does not keep
His word; that He, in order to keep this world going cost what it cost, even
changed the law and softened his demands, by revoking the requirement of
perfect obedience, by being satisfied with less than that. In doing so he would
have lowered man's status to that of something else, of an animal, or a thing,
of a demon, or of stocks and blocks, or what have you.
Over against this
inhuman theory we may hold on to our comfort in life and in death that God
keeps requiring from us what we cannot do, because God keeps dealing with us as
human beings, while we live, and also when we die. For even when we die we do
not change into something else, but remain humans, our body in the grave, but
our soul with responsibility placed before God, and judged by His law.
Let us therefore
never criticise but always praise God's law. For it is only by God's law that
we learn to know why the Son of God, Jesus Christ, had to come on earth, and
had to be born as a human being. It is God's maintained law which teaches us
that only He, as the only perfect human being since we fell into sin, could and
would fulfill the law which was given for us human
beings.
“Thy testimonies
are wonderful; . . . the unfolding of thy words gives light abounding.
Righteous art thou, O LORD, and right are thy judgments (Psalm 119:129, 137).
God is Judge
(a) God is our
Judge
In pointing out that God is our Judge the catechism is
very strict. God is righteous, He is our just Judge. That's what we confess in
this part of the catechism which still deals with our sin and misery; and we confess
this in order that we may humble ourselves before God.
However, this does
not mean that our confession of misery is for that reason a miserable
confession. That's indeed how many people look at it. They find it humiliating
to be subject to a law which we cannot keep, and to be judged because of
transgressions which we cannot avoid anyway.
This is considered
to be in conflict with our human dignity. Man should be his own judge, and make
his own laws, in accordance with his own possibilities and abilities and
community‑standards. That's righteous or just, that's proper, and in
accordance with the realities of life. It is just that we are not accountable
to a higher being and subject to laws which are imposed on us by someone else,
by God. We should only be judged by standards of truth and justice which we
find in ourselves.
It is also for this
reason that people began to say, even in the church, when they still believed
in a god, that anyway such a god would not be just: "Is God, then, not
unjust by requiring in His law what man cannot do?"
Again we meet here
the teaching or doctrine of the Arminians, who denied
that God had created man in such a way, in righteousness and holiness, that he
was both willing and capable of performing His divine law (cf. Canons of Dort,
Rejection of Errors, Chapter III/IV, article 2). Here we have the beginning of
many further denials of what is revealed in the first chapters of the Bible,
about the creation of man, Adam's fall into sin, and the flood of Noah because
of man's wickedness. Here we also have the Arminian
background of evolution‑theories which are not based on the facts as
revealed in the Bible, but which are the result of unbelief.
The God of the
Bible is not a righteous Judge, such people say. No, we know better; man is his
own judge, with his own laws based on his own human rights. And it is in the
name of their own human rights for which they fight and make propaganda that
they discriminate between men, even when they declare themselves in words
against racial and sexual and social discrimination.
They discriminate
in international politics and in the field of labour and in matters of
education and schools; and especially they discriminate against people who
confess that the law of God should be obeyed in every sphere of life, because
God has created this whole world, and mankind
in this world, to His glory and for His
pleasure.
(b) David's
appeal to the Judge of the earth against discrimination
It is in particular this kind of discrimination
(discrimination against people who confess that the law of God should be obeyed
in every sphere of life), about which David complains in Psalm
In this Psalm David
prays to God because of his enemies and their wickedness. Their wickedness is,
he says in verse 10, that they have rebelled against God and show this in the
way they behave towards David as God's anointed king.
In this Psalm, in
the verses 4‑6, David calls on God as the Judge (cf. also
It is our God who
is the Judge. The judge in a human court is a person who has no relation or
friendship with the man in the dock in front of him. Such a relationship would
even disqualify him from judging in the case. Another person, a lawyer, tries
to defend the accused; but he too is usually a stranger who does this as his
job.
But when we confess
that our God is the Judge of men, this means that there is a relationship of
friendship, a Covenant-relationship between God and us. It means that God at
the same time is not only our Judge, but our Lawyer as well. That's why David
says in verse 11, "let all who take refuge in Thee rejoice, ... and do
Thou defend them".
In God there is no
contrast between justice and love, between righteousness and compassion or
mercy, as there is among human beings. This is the reason that the catechism,
even when it must deal with God's justice, cannot forget, see answer 11, that
God at the same time is also merciful. Also when God's justice is proclaimed to
us, in order that we should humble ourselves before God because of our
sinfulness and shortcomings, it is the proclamation of our gracious and
merciful God, who comforts us in our sins and misery.
(c) Our God is
the Judge of men
Still, what about our confession that God keeps requiring
from us in His law what we cannot do? And also, that “He is terribly displeased
with our original sin as well as our actual sins”, and “therefore .. will
punish them by a just judgment both now and eternally”? What comfort do we get
from this? Is this really at the same time merciful?
Yes, it is! For the
glad message of the Gospel is that God is the merciful Judge of men!
For what is man? We
answered this question when we dealt with Lord’s Day 3. What is man? He is not
a product of evolution, but He has been created after God’s image; he has been
created as a being who is responsible because God entered into a Covenant‑relationship
with him.When we sinned, God could have destroyed us.
Or, another possibility, God could have turned us into beings like animals,
without any responsibility. Yes, God could have done so, if God would not have
made a Covenant with man.
If God would not
have continued to require the same from us in His law as He did before we fell
into sin and became incapable of doing His will, yes indeed, then God would not
have remained Covenant‑God, and man would not have remained a responsible
being. God would have become something like an impersonal divine energy,
something like the heathen believe in, a kind of divine principle of cosmic
order. But again, such a denial of the God of the Bible, the God of the
Covenant, would also imply the denial of our true humanity.
The message of the
Gospel is, that God still maintains and respects our human dignity with which
He created us, in spite of our corruption and rebellion and sin. God did not do
away with us, because He could not do away with Himself as the God of the
Covenant.
God’s Covenant‑relationship
with us is evident in His anger and punishment, of which He had spoken in
But the possibility
of this Covenant of grace (a grace consisting of forgiveness of sins instead of
eternal punishment of sin) is based on the fact that God maintained His
original Covenant, in which we had a blessed fellowship with Him, but in which
God threatened eternal death in case we would not listen to Him and obey His
command.
Therefore, what we
confess in answers 10 and 11, that God is terribly displeased with our sins and
requires everlasting punishment, means that God keeps His Covenant, that He
keeps dealing with us as responsible beings who are created for a purpose, to
His glory.
It is our by God
maintained human dignity as responsible image-bearers of God which makes us
subject to a divine law which we cannot keep and yet are required to obey. God
keeps holding us responsible as image‑bearers. That’s also why capital‑punishment
is required when man sheds the blood of such an image‑bearer of God. That’s
why also judges here on earth must treat people as responsible beings. Only in
this way God paves the way for showing His compassion with man in the
forgiveness of his sins by the blood of Christ.
The preaching of
the strict requirements of God’s law intends to make us humble before God our
Judge; it makes us to learn to know ourselves just as we are; but this should
never make us desperate.
This preaching
shows us that there is no other way to escape the severe judgment and
punishment of God. The only way is to acknowledge that we have sinned, without
seeking for excuses, but that we only commit ourselves to the grace of God via
Jesus Christ, our Lawyer of Defence.
But how do we know
ourselves as men who have sinned against the highest majesty of God and thus
deserve to be punished with the most severe punishment? We do not know
ourselves as we ought to; so how could we know God? This is why Moses asks in
Psalm 90, “Who knows the power of God’s anger, according to the reason there is
to fear God?”
The answer is that
only the man Jesus Christ knows the anger of God according to how God is to be
feared. God’s mercy in His anger has become manifest in this, that He gave us
in our Lord Jesus Christ a human being who alone and really and completely
could know and bear the anger of God. So severe was God’s anger, that His own
Son had to become a man to bear God’s anger for us, in our place.
What a great God we
have who, because super‑human powers were needed, Himself intervened and reconciled
us with Him, in order that we through Chri
st His Son could also call Him our Father.
Refusal to live by grace only is the origin of every
heresy
The origin of every human error and heresy and of all
humanistic philosophies is the refusal to live by grace alone. Humanism teaches
that it is against our human dignity to live by grace alone; that's why they
degrade and devaluate our God‑given human dignity to a level much lower
than and entirely different from the original high position of which the Bible
speaks.
Only the Bible
tells us how great the value and the dignity of man are. It is so great, that
the highest possible price had to be paid in order to redeem man and to restore
him into that high position: the price of the precious blood of God's own Son.
It is because this
price has been paid that we do not have to be afraid of the severe judgment of
God. But we humble ourselves before God, because our human dignity is a given
dignity, given to Adam in
We do not need to
fear the Judge, because the God and Father of Jesus Christ our Saviour is our
Judge; and it is by faith in Him, our Saviour who became man himself, that we,
in and through Him, have borne the eternal punishment which we deserved as
responsible human beings.
This is why David's
prayer in Psalm 5 can be our prayer as well, e.g. when David reckons himself
among those who are righteous. Sure, those who do not believe in the
righteousness of Christ in which we may share by faith, those who believe in
their own human dignity, cannot stand this confession of David and of any
Christian for that matter. They immediately react by saying, 'Do you think that
you are better than we are?'
This reaction would
be understandable and even correct, if our prayer would not be a humble prayer,
and our confession a humble confession. For we are still sinners as far as our
old human nature is concerned, and people look at us and they watch us, and
they notice our attitude, whether we are real Christians or act in a
hypocritical way.
Therefore it is so
necessary that we really believe what we confess in this strict Lord's Day 4;
it is necessary that the law of God is preached to us, and that we are taught
that we by ourselves cannot perform God's will. But if we confess this with a
humble heart, then we may in all the troubles which come over us because of our
sins, and in all the hostility which we meet from the side of unbelievers, say
with David, in Psalm 5:10 and 11:
"Make them bear their guilt, O God; for they have
rebelled against Thee. But let all who take refuge in Thee rejoice, and do Thou
defend them".
Our curse and punishment
(a) Our sins
deserve to be punished most severely
It does not seem to be a pleasant topic when the
catechism speaks about the fact that our sins deserve to be punished, and that
they even must be punished with the most severe punishment that you can think
of.
Is what we are
taught to confess about this not even worse than the Roman Catholic doctrine of
purgatory? After all, purgatory was not the most severe place of punishment,
and it gave only punishment to the soul; and besides, it was only temporary.
But Lord’s Day 4 speaks to us about the necessity of a most severe, that is
everlasting punishment of body and soul.
However, if we want
to make this comparison we should realize ourselves that the difference is that
the doctrine of purgatory is a man‑made doctrine, and that its punishment
is neither necessary nor real. It makes people afraid, but without reason; and
thus it does not make people to seek their deliverance in Jesus Christ, but
rather turns them away from Him. There is no comfort at all in the doctrine of
purgatory.
But what we confess
here in Lord’s Day 4, although it still belongs to the second part of the
catechism which deals with our sin and misery, is at the same time a
continuation of our confession in Lord’s Day 1 of our only comfort in life and
death, that we, body and soul, belong to our Saviour Jesus Christ.
For here we confess
that we are cursed as sinners, because of God’s Covenant with us; and that we
are punished as sinners, because of God’s majesty.
(b) We are
cursed because of God's Covenant with us
“Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things
written in the book of the law, and do them”. God made this rule when He
entered into a Covenant‑relationship with man, as a sanction in case man
from his side would break the Covenant. When indeed man was hit by this curse,
after his fall into sin, it was not God who changed, but it was man who had
changed. Man had promised that he would serve God; and he did not do it. God
had said that He would curse man if he would not keep his promise of serving
God, and He did indeed curse man.
Now the fact that
God did what He had said that He would do is a comfort for us, even though it
means that God’s curse has come over us. This is our consolation, however
strange it may sound. For this means that we can rely on God, that we can trust
Him, because He is not an arbitrary God who says one thing but does something
else. What God says, He does.
I think of what we
read in Psalm 111: “He is ever mindful of His Covenant” (verse 5). “He has
commanded His Covenant forever” (verse 9). “His righteousness endures forever”
(verse 3). “All His precepts are trustworthy” (verse 7).
This is the first
thing which comforts us: while our sin and misery is that we have changed and
have become untrustworthy and deceitful, our Covenant‑God has not
changed, and He keeps His Word.
In the second place
we are also comforted by the fact that God, when He keeps exhorting us and
maintains His threats to us, by this very fact shows us His grace. We also
confess this in Canons of Dort, Chapter V, article 14. There it says that God
maintains His work of grace in us by, among other things, its exhortations and
threats.
God keeps treating
us as human beings, as His Covenant‑ partners; but this means that
whoever rejects God’s exhortations, whoever does not care about God’s threats
and forgets about God’s law, acts inhumanly. For such a person does not show
that he or she has been created as a Covenant‑partner of God. By trying
to push God away, one denies his or her own humanity.
But of course, our
God does not let Himself be pushed away. Even if we do not want to be human,
God still wants to remain God. His will shall be done; therefore, says answer
10, God will punish our original as well as our actual sins by a just judgment
both now and eternally. And we will not escape God’s will! No, not now, in our
earthly existence! But neither hereafter, in our remaining existence!
(c) We are
punished because of God's majesty high above us
“But is God not also merciful?” Sure! However, this
does not mean that we may use the one to out‑balance the other, as if God
would be partly merciful and partly just, and we just would have to awaken His
mercy‑feelings that they may become stronger than His sense of justice.
God is just in His mercy, and He is merciful in His justice. He is both for the
full 100 percent, and in this God manifests His majesty. He does not need us to
stimulate His feelings.
The catechism wants
us to know, in order that we may be comforted in our misery, that God remains
Himself in maintaining His majesty high above us. For it is against the highest
majesty of God that we have sinned. That’s the reason that we must meet our God
as our Judge. As our merciful Judge, alright; but still, as our Judge who
demands that our sin, committed as it is against the most high majesty of God,
must be punished with the most severe, that is, with everlasting punishment.
This is indeed a
matter of justice. For God is not like human beings who e.g. only punish
someone because they have been bothered or annoyed by that person. Or, for
example, who only want to use punishment if it might rehabilitate the criminal,
as an educational measure.
The punishment
which God’s justice requires and about which the catechism speaks is
retribution, a punishment in accordance with the sin which has been committed.
When nevertheless the Bible also speaks about the forgiveness of our sins, this
is only possible on the basis of this retribution; namely that God’s own Son,
Jesus Christ, was punished in accordance with the measure of our sin: sin committed
against the most high majesty of God, a sin which could only be punished by a
death, the death of crucifixion, which was cursed by God.
In following Lord’s
Days the catechism will say more about this. But this basic point must first be
made clear, that God indeed punishes sin in accordance with the seriousness of
our evildoings. Again, this means comfort for us. And we can the better
appreciate this comfort if we think of how the Roman Catholic Church talks
about sin.
Roman Catholics
must distinguish between all kinds of sin, and each sin calls for a different
punishment. They have to go through books with regulations to figure out which
punishment applies to which particular sin. There are also punishments which
people can sustain by their own strength, by which they purge themselves from
sin, and others which they can have removed by paying money, e.g. by buying
letters of indulgences.
Now it may seem
that all this is still better than the sombre language of Lord’s Day 4, which
speaks about everlasting punishment for body and soul. After all, in the Roman
Catholic doctrine you can escape the punishment by either paying money, or by
doing a lot of extra good works, as long as you do not put a hindrance in the
way of God’s supporting grace. Temporary punishment for the body here on earth;
and also temporary punishment for the soul in purgatory.
According to the
catechism however there is no end to the punishment which we deserve.
Everlasting punishment, both for body and soul, both here and hereafter. Is
this not leaving us without comfort? Does this Lord’s Day, as some indeed
understand it, on the Sunday that it is the subject for the preaching, leave
people with the knife on their throat as it were? Must they then during the
week ahead go about their daily work without having received the only comfort
in life and death? But what if during that week they would have to die? Or
rather, should they not be able to live in this comfort during that week? For
to live without comfort is no life; it is continuing to lie in death.
But thanks be to
God, that we may confess in this Lord’s Day that God is merciful as well. This
is to be remembered and must be taken into account over against the unmerciful doctrine
of the Roman Catholic Church by which children of God are enslaved.Our
God is a Judge who takes all circumstances into consideration. He does not let
go of anything; for He is just.
But being merciful
as well, He also considers what kind of beings we are: weak creatures, who by
ourselves do not know a way of escape, nor can make or can find a way of
escape. And thus He has, when He threatened us with everlasting punishment,
also decided to execute that punishment against His own Son. When we fell into
sin, God had planned Christmas already!
When the catechism
remarks that God is indeed merciful, – let us not forget this – , we are being
prepared for that second part of the catechism which starts in Lord’s Day 5,
about our redemption, our deliverance from sin and misery.
For it is thanks to
the teaching in Lord’s Days 2, 3 and 4 that we must know our sins and misery,
that we can sing:
“Out of the depths of sadness, O LORD, I cried to
Thee;
but Thou dost pardon fully all our iniquity”
(Psalm 130).
PART
II: DELIVERANCE
LORD’S
DAY 5
12 Q According
to God's righteous judgment
we deserve punishment
both in this world and
forever after:
how then can we escape
this punishment
and return to God's favor?
A. God requires that his justice be satisfied.
Therefore
the claims of his justice
must
be paid in full,
either
by ourselves or another.
13 Q. Can we pay this debt
ourselves?
A. Certainly not.
Actually,
we increase our guilt every day.
14 Q. Can
another creature; any at all;
pay this debt for us?
A. No.
To
begin with,
God
will not punish another creature
for
what a human is guilty of.
Besides,
no
mere creature can bear the weight
of
God's eternal anger against sin
and
release others from it.
15 Q. What
kind of mediator and deliverer
should we look for then?
A. One who is truly human and truly righteous,
yet
more powerful than all creatures,
that
is, one who is also true God.
Introduction
Redemption! Liberation! What a beautiful topic to hear
about!
In big
letters it is mentioned above this Lord’s Day: the second part, OUR DELIVERANCE.
But then comes the catechism with its first question, and what is the answer?
“God demands that His justice be satisfied. Therefore full payment must be
made, either by ourselves or by another”. Is this not enough to take away our
joy, and to push us right back into despair?
Why must we
be reminded of the price which had to be paid for our deliverance?
Let us
compare this with November 11, Remembrance‑Day. On that day we remember
wars in which our country has been involved, especially the Second World War in
which our country took part by bringing about deliverance and liberation to
countries which were occupied and suppressed by cruel enemies.
That’s what
we must remember on that day: deliverance, and liberation. Yes, but what do we
especially remember on that day? We remember the price which had to be paid for
deliverance, the blood of thousands of young men who as soldiers gave their
lives for the liberation of these countries.
This is what
a real remembrance and appreciation of deliverance and liberation begins with:
the remembrance of the price which has been paid for it; this is the only way
that the real meaning of deliverance can be appreciated, and also the reason we
have gladness and joy about that liberation.
So it is with
our deliverance from the misery of sin. We must in the first place realize
ourselves and remember how high a price had to be paid for it, and by whom. Why
were the people of occupied countries so glad when allied soldiers gave their
lives for the liberation of their country? It was because they could not do it
by themselves. Others had to pay the price.
So we must,
in order that our joy and gladness and our thankfulness for our deliverance
from the misery of our sin be genuine, first remember that the price for our
deliverance had to be so high and of such a nature, that it would be sufficient
to satisfy God’s justice.
This is the
reason that the catechism starts this second part about our deliverance by asking
and answering, how we can be delivered, when in fact we deserve temporal and
eternal punishment for our sin, since this is the only way that full payment
can be made. Full payment, that is, enough to satisfy God’s justice so as to
bring about our deliverance.
In this
Lord’s Day we read that we cannot do this by ourselves. We must do it through
someone else. But by whom? We read who cannot do it. For example, the Dutch had
to realize that they could not do it by themselves, nor with the help of the Belgians
or the French, because just like the Dutch they too were occupied and oppressed
by the enemy.
This is why
this Lord’s Day concludes with the question: “What kind of mediator and
deliverer must we seek?” But in advance we already know that the same God whose
justice has to be satisfied, also has provided us with the means to do so.
Who this
deliverer and mediator is, and how high a price He had to pay is symbolized by
the bread and wine of the Supper of Him who has become our Deliverer and
Mediator: it had to be His body and His blood. He had to pay the price of His
life for it.
This is what
the second part of the catechism about our deliverance is all about!
No payment by outsiders is acceptable to God
The possibility of payment by outsiders is addressed
in the catechism by the following question and answer: “Can we ourselves make
this payment? Certainly not. On the contrary, we daily increase our debt”.
Actually the
question is rendered more correctly in accordance with answer 12 (“full payment
must be made either by ourselves or by another”), if the word ‘by’ is inserted.
“Can we by ourselves make this payment?” Then the answer is: No, we cannot pay
by ourselves. For what is it that we had to pay? We had to pay what was agreed
upon in the stipulations of the Covenant which God made with us. In short it
comes down to this: we have to pay obedience to God’s law, we have to pay
honour to God our Creator, and we have to love both God and His law.
At first we
did all this willingly and joyfully. However, one day we ceased paying to God
the honour and love we owed to Him and His law. But of course, the obligation
of paying honour and love to God did not cease. As we saw earlier, God’s
Covenant with us has not been annulled, nor have we stopped being humans, nor
has God stopped treating us as such.
So, as soon
as we stopped paying the honour and love we owe to God, the more we have
increased our debt, day after day. It has been stipulated in God’s Covenant
with us what the price would be if we did not pay what we owed to God, and that
extra payment is not just interest, but punishment.
However, just
like someone who cannot pay his debts certainly is not able to pay interest on
top of that, so we were not able to carry by ourselves the load of God’s punishment
for our debt. We could not even take that punishment on our shoulders by
ourselves; God had to put it on our shoulders. God just pushed us down with
that punishment, so that we had to succumb beneath it. There was no action yaken by ourselves involved.
In short it
comes down to this. We do not pay our past debts by ourselves, neither what
every day is added to it, nor the punishment which we deserve for it. It is all
heaped upon us and it gets heavier and heavier, and by ourselves we cannot
escape any of it.
This is why
the catechism teaches us as a requirement of God’s Covenant with us, that there
is only one way left to escape God’s punishment and again to be received into
favour. We must pay through someone else, and on that basis we pray every day
that God forgive us our debts!
So it is
possible! Yes, this is the comfort which is always offered to us in God’s
Covenant of grace with us. There is a way out! We may pay our punishment and
debts through someone else.
Still, it
must be our human debt which we pay through someone else, and it must be the
sum‑total of our human debt, because God’s Covenant is different from a
human business‑contract with its stipulations.
Commercial
law provides for the possibility that, if someone who according to a business‑contract
has to pay a certain amount of money cannot do so, then he can declare
bankruptcy.
However,
God’s Covenant does not allow for that possibility. If you break that Covenant
of trust and love, then you break it altogether. God’s Covenant demands from us
full payment, total satisfaction, all or nothing.
It is just
like a marriage‑covenant (and that’s why the Bible indeed calls it a
marriage‑covenant in which God is the Husband and we are the Bride) in
which the marriage‑partners love one another totally, or not. A little
bit of love, only partial love, it simply does not do at all. Neither is it
possible for an outsider to love your spouse for you.
In a business‑contract,
the creditor is satisfied when he gets his money, even if it is someone else
who pays, someone who has nothing to do with the business‑contract, an
outsider. But in God’s Covenant with us this is not possible. No payment by
outsiders is acceptable to God!
Of course
not! In a Covenant between two parties in which you must pay each other
Covenant‑love and show Covenant‑trust and ‑trustworthiness,
only the Covenant‑partners can do that. Think again of a marriage‑covenant;
no outsider can pay the love and show the trust which the marriage‑partners
owe each other.
This is what the
catechism teaches us in Question and Answer 14. It is impossible to find a mere
creature who can pay for us. This is impossible for two reasons. In the first
place because God does not want it. In the second place because such a creature
is not able to do so.
God does not
want it because He made His Covenant with us. God wants us to love Him freely,
as beings who were created after His own image. No other creature can love God
in a manner which reflects the love that God has for us.
This is why
the Bible says that the blood of bulls and goats cannot take away sins. Animal‑blood
is not a legitimate means of payment. It only has value in that it refers to
another means of payment which is acceptable to God.
One could
compare this to paper‑money. It has no value in itself, but it represents
the real value of gold or goods. In the same way, the blood of animals only
represents the blood of Christ.
It is for
this reason that God does not want to punish another creature (whether it be an
animal or an angel) for the sin which man has committed.
On top of
this, other creatures are not able to do it either. For the sin of breaking the
Covenant‑relationship with the eternal God is punishable by the curse of
the Covenant, the everlasting anger of God.
No mortal
creature is able to carry this everlasting wrath and anger of God. He can
forever be tormented by it, and forever keep breaking down beneath it, but he
cannot carry it until the end when the punishment is finished. And because he
can never finish carrying God’s anger and wrath, he can never say, ‘It is
finished’, and thus deliver others from it.
But how, how
then can we escape that terrible punishment which we have deserved?
Lord’s Day 5
has really brought the built‑up tension in this question to a climax. It
began by showing us that there is indeed a way of escape, away from our sin and
misery, and back into God’s favour. Somewhere the light of
All side-roads
have been blocked; all self‑made pathways are destroyed. No human means
and tricks will be of any help to us. We must forget about any means of self‑deliverance
that Eastern religions or Christian heresies teach.
Only one
possibility has been left to us. Only one!
By ourselves
we cannot pay.
We can only
pay through someone else. However, this person cannot be another creature.
What
possibility is left? Only God Himself is left!
However, God
already satisfies Himself for our sins by punishing us, both temporally and
eternally. What then is the answer to that all-important life and death
question on which this whole Lord's Day is concentrated: how can we escape this
punishment and again be received into God’s favour?
For again, we ourselves must pay, both our debt and
our punishment. But we cannot do it by ourselves. Neither can we do it through
another creature. What possibility is left to us? It is only this possibility:
that we pay God, through God!
Only payment through the Covenant-Mediator will be
accepted by God
“What kind of mediator and deliverer must we seek? One
who is a true and righteous man (he must be man because we ourselves must
pay!), and yet more powerful than all creatures; that is, one who is at the
same time true God” (for although we ourselves must pay God, it is through God
alone that we can pay God).
How do we
know that we must seek such a Deliverer and Mediator? Did we figure this out
with our own reason? No, it is God Himself who shows us, as the only way of
escape, the way of giving satisfaction, of paying in full, through the
Covenant-Mediator of His choice.
And why does
the catechism say this? The catechism knows this only from the Word of God. It
is especially the epistle to the Hebrews which speaks extensively about it.
This epistle
deals with the way in which in the Old Testament time the Levitical
priests paid for the people to God, but how their payments did not really bring
anything about. They could not pay for the people because they themselves were
weak and sinful. Also their sacrifices of bulls and goats and other animals
were insufficient.
Neither could
the angels (by whose mediation the Old Testament service had been instituted)
do this. They were no more than ministering servants. And who of all the
believers in the Old Testament time, who are mentioned in the epistle to the
Hebrews? The epistle says that they have waited for the coming salvation, but
that they could neither bring it about by themselves, nor for others.
The entire
Old Testament is there to show that we can only pay through someone else; but
then, someone else who is a totally different priest with a totally different
sacrifice.
And it is of
Him that the epistle to the Hebrews says (and the catechism bases its answer on
this) in Hebrews
Such a
Mediator and Deliverer must we seek, the Bible says, because as man he belongs
to the same Covenant which has been made with man in
Who could
ever have figured this out? No human being has ever been able to engineer this
road of redemption by his own reason, or pave this way of escape by his own
strength. We could only find this way of escape and seek this Redeemer, because
throughout eternity God has planned this road, and anointed this Redeemer. And
we know about it only because God has revealed it to us in His Word.
What kind of
Mediator and Redeemer we must seek? In gratitude for God’s amazing grace
everyone may say, in fellowship with all God’s redeemed Covenant-children:
I will sing of my Redeemer And His wondrous love to
me:
On the cruel cross He suffered, From the curse to set
me free.
I will tell the wondrous story, How my lost estate to
save,
In His boundless love and mercy He the ransom freely
gave.
I will praise my dear Redeemer, His triumphant power
I’ll tell,
How the victory He giveth
Over sin and death and hell.
I will sing of my Redeemer And His heavenly love to
me;
He from death to life has brought me, Son of God, with
Him to be.
Sing, O sing of my Redeemer! With His blood He
purchased me;
On the cross He sealed my pardon, Paid the debt, and
made me free.
(Psalter Hymnal 439)
There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ
Jesus
(a) God has condemned our sins in the flesh of
His Son
There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ
Jesus, because God has condemned our sins in the flesh of His Son.
What a glad
message this is we see when we look at what the catechism starts out with, that
“according to God’s righteous judgment we deserve temporal and eternal
punishment”.
Even little
children can understand this! You may know that you deserve punishment, because
you have done something very bad. But what happens? Your dad comes to you,
picks you up (and now you think that you are really going to get it, a spanking
or something), but what does he all of a sudden say? I love you so much, that I
am not going to punish you.
That’s quite
something! You were terribly afraid and about to cry, and now all of a sudden
everything is changed. You yourself are changed as well. First you wanted to
cry, and now you can smile again. Hurrah! You can go on playing.
Yes, this is
what the message of the Gospel does to a person who knows that he has deserved
God’s punishment, and then you hear that you will not be condemned. Halleluja! You are completely changed by such a message.
You are never finished thinking and talking about it.
Yes, it is
such a wonderful thing that you keep thinking about it and asking yourself how
in the world it is possible. That is what you say when you expect to be
condemned and then all of a sudden you hear, Not guilty, you are acquitted.
Then you say: how in the world is this possible!
Indeed, the
fact that we are declared not guilty when we deserve to be condemned, and yet
this is just – this seems to be impossible; this is only possible with God as
judge.
As a result,
regardless of how much we may think about it, we will never be able to figure
it out with human reason; we will never be able to set up a reasoning which can
make this perfectly clear to us.
Here ceases reason, learning dies and crumbles;
The wise man passes by, the thinker shakes his head
There is no other way: God's love causes this wonder;
Blessed is who believes. There is no other way.
(J. Waanders, Mijn belijden, translated from Dutch)
Sometimes it is alleged that the authors of the
catechism have tried in Lord’s Days 5 and 6 to figure this all out with their
own reason. But rest assured that even the smartest theologian is not able to
do that.
While it is
true that the catechism says that we must make full payment to God (either by
ourselves, or through another), how do the authors of the catechism know this?
Have they figured this out by themselves? No, they only know this because “God
demands that His justice be satisfied”. God demands this, and from where do the
authors know that God demands this? From the Bible, and from nowhere else.
The catechism
continues by asking: can we make this payment by ourselves? Or, can we make
this payment through some other creature? But again, how do the authors of the
catechism know the answer to these questions? How do they know that we cannot
pay by ourselves because we daily increase our debt? How do they know that God
does not accept payment by another creature, and that a mere creature is not
able to pay for us either? Of course, from the Bible again, and nowhere else.
Look up the Bible‑texts to which the catechism refers.
Therefore, it
is true: we cannot through our own reasoning figure out this miracle of our
deliverance. Only the Bible can tell us about it.
How great
this miracle is, and how far it surpasses our understanding, is clearly
confessed in the Canons of Dort. There we read, in Chapter II, Article 2, “we
ourselves ... cannot make this satisfaction and cannot free ourselves from
God’s wrath, God, ... in His infinite mercy, has given His only Son as our
Surety ..., so that He might make satisfaction on our behalf”.
This is the
miracle: God’s infinite mercy. This means that this is a mercy which in no way
can be comprehended by us. It goes beyond us; we can only hold on to it by
faith. And it is only by faith in God’s infinite mercy as revealed in the
Scriptures that the church has been made able to formulate these questions and
answers as we find them in the Lord’s Days.
How difficult
it was to memorize these precise sentences of Lord’s Day 5 when we were in
catechism‑class! Not only were they difficult to memorize, but we found
them to be too strict as well, in telling us that we ourselves cannot do a
thing for our salvation. Yet, these strict and difficult sentences contain
nothing else than the glad message of the Gospel concerning the only way of
escape which God has provided for us by sending His own Son into the world.
It is true
that Lord’s Day 5 is very strict. For here we confess that for those who are
not in Christ Jesus there is only the expectation of a terrible judgment. Those
who are not included in Christ Jesus must pay themselves. No other creature can
do this for them. They are all by themselves, and cannot expect any help from
their fellow‑creatures. This is not because they are any worse than we
are, but because we cannot expect it from ourselves either.
Why then does
Lord’s Day 5 speak such strict language? This is done in order that we may seek
our salvation apart from ourselves and from any other creature, but only in
Jesus Christ. For those who are in Christ Jesus, there is no condemnation.
Does this
mean that those who believe in Jesus Christ are better than other people? Does
this mean that their sins are any less evil than those of others, even to such
an extent that they do not deserve punishment anymore?
No, this is
not what the Bible teaches us. Think of what the apostle Paul said about this
in his epistle to the Romans, in Romans
But then Paul
continues by speaking about those who by faith in Christ have been put back in
the right relationship with God and are justified by faith. How this happened
he tells in chapter 6: We have died with Christ and have been buried with Him,
so that we might be risen with Him to a new life.
Then follows
Romans 7. This is the well‑known chapter in which Paul groans about our
sins which are still at work in our mortal bodies. Yes, Paul knew it very well,
that as Christians we are not yet rid of our sinful existence and that nothing
good dwells in our flesh, since we descended from Adam.
We are no
better than other people. Yet, in spite of this, Paul begins his 8th chapter
with these tremendous words: “There is therefore now no condemnation for those
who are in Christ Jesus”! No reason to exalt ourselves above others, and yet,
no condemnation!
How is this
possible? Paul continues: “because God, by sending His own Son in the likeness
of sinful flesh, and for sin, has condemned sin in the flesh, in the flesh of
His own Son”.
God’s Son has
taken our flesh, for our sake. He has become a true and righteous human being,
for the sake of our sins. But at the same time He is still the Son of God,
because no mere creature can sustain the burden of God’s eternal anger against
sin and deliver others from it.
Thus we have
seen that what the catechism teaches is not based on human reasoning, but that
it simply is a very short summary of the Word of God in Paul’s letter to the
Romans.
While the
church has thought deeply about that great miracle of God’s infinite mercy; and
Lord’s Day 5 is indeed the result of this deep thinking, it is nothing else but
a thoughtful rendering of what God Himself has shown to us in sending His Son
into this world, and of what the epistle to the Romans has taught us about
God’s infinite mercy.
The
formulation of thoughts in Lord’s Day 5 is so very strict, because it wants to
teach us that we must humble ourselves before God. This Lord’s Day teaches us
that we must seek our refuge in the reconciling blood of our Saviour Jesus
Christ, because there is no other way of escape.
God fulfils the requirement of the law in us through
the Spirit of His Son
So there is no condemnation for those who are in
Christ Jesus. Does this therefore also mean that the requirement of God’s law
does not apply to us anymore? Can we now say: if I am baptized, have made
public profession of my faith, and have been admitted to the Lord’s Supper,
then I am free from sin and eternal death, and therefore I can now go on living
a carefree existence?
What do we confess
in this Lord’s Day? “God demands that His justice be satisfied”, and also that
“we daily increase our debt”. We still do this, despite of the fact that we
know that we have been freed from condemnation.
We confess
that to this day God demands full payment from us. What does Paul say in Romans
8? God has sent His Son, and condemned our sins in His flesh, “in order that
the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not
according to the flesh but according to the Spirit”.
God’s infinite
mercy in which He has delivered us also makes His infinite justice to be
fulfilled in us. This is the purpose of our deliverance. This is why He has
given us the Spirit of Christ.
What we
confess in this difficult Lord’s Day has been made visible to us in the signs
of the Lord’s Supper. The bread which is broken makes visible to us the anger
of God under which Christ suffered on the cross; and the wine which we drink
points out to us that only the precious blood of Christ can save us.
At the Lord’s
Supper Table we proclaim the death of Christ for the reconciliation of our
sins. There we also confess that He has obtained for us the life‑giving
Spirit, through which we can live in true fellowship with Christ, and make use
of all His benefits while sharing in His eternal life, righteousness, and
glory.
At the Lord’s
Supper Table we also confess that when we live as redeemed people we keep
seeking our salvation not in ourselves, but in Jesus Christ. For it also
applies to our way of life as redeemed people that we need a Redeemer and
Mediator who is a true and righteous man, and at the same time true God. We
keep needing our Lord Jesus Christ, continually, unto eternity.
He is our
Hope. Therefore, whatever our circumstances here on earth may be, there is no
condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
When pain or sorrow me befall,
I do not fear, but tell it Thee.
How high in heaven, Thou heareth
me,
How far from earth, Thou knoweth
all.
Thou, Son of God, doth not forget
Those whom Thou left on earth.
Thou art my Hope; by baptism made me Thine;
Thou giveth me bread and
wine;
I trust Thy love divine;
Thou art my Hope.
(translated
from the Dutch Hymn
Those who walk in the darkness of their sin and misery
shall see a
great light
“No mere creature can sustain the burden of God’s
eternal wrath against sin and deliver others from it”. This is because God
through His Covenant with Adam threatened him with everlasting death if he
would fall into sin. Eternal death! No finite creature would ever be able to
suffer through that, even if he himself would be without sin. No, it would not
have been sufficient if only Jesus Christ as the Son of man who was without sin
had entered into the circle of the Covenant.
This is what
the Bible teaches us when it places our Deliverer and Mediator before our eyes
as He really is. Read the prophecy of Isaiah as he exclaims it in Isaiah 9:
“The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; ... for to us a
child is born, to us a son is given” (namely Jesus Christ as the Son of man,
the child without sin); “and his name will be called ... Mighty God”.
A son, a
child, and most importantly, Mighty God! God and man in one person! Here, in
the Old Testament already, the mystery of the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ is
revealed. This mystery was revealed (in advance) to a people that walked in
darkness, but might see the light of God’s deliverance shine on them.
This ensures
that the man Jesus who came to bear our human punishment will be able to
conquer everlasting death and to become the Victor of Easter.
It surpasses
human reason that Jesus Christ, – who was born as a child in
It is for the
sake of our redemption that the church must hold on to this confession of
faith. There has been much struggle in the course of the history of the church
about the relationship between humanity and the divinity of Christ. It often
seemed to be a difficult issue for only theologians to quarrel about, and not
of much concern to the common membership of the church.
It was by
God’s grace that common church-people also involved themselves in this
struggle. By God’s grace we also received the Athanasian
Creed which is still our confession today:
(1) Whosoever will be saved, before all things it is
necessary that he hold the catholic faith; (2) Which faith except every one do
keep whole and undefiled, without doubt he shall perish everlastingly. (30) For
the right faith is that we believe and confess that our Lord Jesus Christ, the
son of God, is God and man. (33) Equal to the Father as touching His Godhead,
and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood. (34) Who, although He is
God and man, yet He is not two, but one Christ. (35) One, not by conversion of
the Godhead into flesh, but by taking of the manhood into God. (38) Who
suffered for our salvation.
And we also confess in Article 19 of our Belgic Confession:
“ ... we profess Him to be true God and true man: true
God in order to conquer death by His power; and true man that He might die for
us according to the infirmity of His flesh”.
What we confess in Lord’s Day 5 is the beginning of
the part about our deliverance. It speaks about that plan of God for our
deliverance which no human being could ever have devised himself. The
revelation from this plan is that we need our Lord Jesus Christ. This makes us
more aware of our own weaknesses and miseries. It does this, not to make us lie
down in our weaknesses, but to both receive through faith Him who has come to
pay the ransom for His people, and to look forward to His second coming when He
will make our deliverance complete.
LORD’S
DAY 6
16 Q. Why
must he be truly human
and truly righteous?
A. God's justice demands
that
human nature, which has sinned,
must
pay for its sin;
but
a sinner could never pay for others.
17 Q. Why
must he also be true God?
A. So that,
by
the power of his divinity,
he
might bear the weight of God's anger in his humanity
and
earn for us
and
restore to us
righteousness
and life.
18 Q. And who
is this mediator;
true God and at the same
time
truly human and truly
righteous?
A. Our Lord Jesus Christ,
who
was given us
to
set us completely free
and
to make us right with God.
19 Q. How do
you come to know this?
A. The holy gospel tells me.
God
himself began to reveal the gospel already in
later,
he proclaimed it
by
the holy patriarchs and prophets,
and
portrayed it
by
the sacrifices and other ceremonies of the law;
finally,
he fulfilled it
through
his own dear Son.
Introduction
When there is a dispute between two parties, let us
say a labour‑dispute about certain violations of the contract, it often
appears necessary for the parties to be brought together by a mediator.
Sometimes it
is quite difficult to find a mediator who is acceptable to both parties. Often,
one party tries to gain an advantage by insisting that the mediator have
certain qualifications, for example, must be a labour-union.
If the other party,
for example an employer, gives in to the demand that the mediator must be a
labour-union, then he has already made himself dependent on the other side and
its conditions.
Similarly, in
his relationship with God, man only wants to accept a mediator on his own
terms. Things which surpass his understanding (in particular in his
relationship to God) make him unhappy, and therefore he seeks a mediator who
does not surpass his human knowledge but one whom he has figured out with his
own reason. He must be a mediator who does not require him to put his trust in
him and to receive him by faith, but one who answers to his human reasonings
and feelings and can be comprehended within the framework of his human
knowledge.
It is true that there does not have to be a contrast
between faith and knowledge. Faith indeed requires knowledge; yet it is neither
built on reason nor on feelings.
Faith
requires knowledge, or in Latin, fides quaerit intellectum. This was, and rightly so, the conviction of
Bishop Anselm of
Thus the
philosophy of scholasticism taught that we should only believe what is
according to reason, and the next step taken by the Roman Catholic Church was
that it is the church, i.c. the Pope, who would decide
about that.
Now what was
Anselmus’ mistake? He forgot that sinners never figure out by themselves what
is according to God’s will; they desire and figure out what is against His
will. Moreover, Anselm also forgot that he already had knowledge of the Bible,
and that his reason had been enlightened (at least to a certain extent) by the
Holy Spirit throughout his education.
Anselm was
right in stating that there is no contrast between faith and knowledge. God
does not reveal things which are in conflict with His own creation‑works,
reason included. Yet, because He is God, there are things which we believe
although they go way beyond our reason.
Faith indeed
requires understanding, but only in that our understanding must be perfected by
a faith which is enlightened by the revelation of the Spirit in God’s Word. And
thus, Lord’s Day 6 of the catechism helps us understand God’s way and will for
our redemption in a reasonable way, yet it is not based on human reason.
Thus, in
God’s Covenant with us things are different than in mere human relationships.
God’s Covenant with us was based on God’s eternal love for us. When man
violated God’s eternal love for us, we could not bring forward any conditions
for the mediator to meet. We did not even have the right to ask for a mediator.
We only deserved to be fired and cast into hell forever.
Nonetheless,
the party whose eternal love had been offended decided to appoint a mediator,
and this mediator would be a gift to us, given in that same eternal love that
we had offended. For indeed, if God Himself would not have appointed a
Mediator, we would not even have known about the possibility of being
reconciled to God. But now God appointed as a Mediator one who let Himself be
sacrificed as a Lamb in order to bring about that reconciliation.
If we
ourselves had to supply such a perfect sacrifice, we would have plenty reason
to lose all courage. But God Himself has provided to us His Son Jesus Christ as
the Lamb to be that perfect sacrifice.
We know this
from the Bible. The Bible is the book which from the first to the last page
speaks about the sacrifice which God requires from us in His law, and with
which He Himself has provided us.
First we must ask the right questions
“Why must our Mediator be a true and righteous man?”
Then again, “Why must He at the same time be true God?”
Is it alright
to ask this question?, and even to repeat this question? Children ask their
parents many questions, and sometimes when their patience wears thin they
answer impatiently: Well, because I say so; that’s why.
It not only
happens with little children. You also find it with teenagers, at home and in
the church, especially concerning matters of religion and faith. They ask the
same questions. Why must we go to church twice? Why do we have to go to
catechism‑classes? Then parents, elders, or ministers are sometimes
inclined to answer: because the Bible says so, that’s why.
Very serious
questions about faith are even treated that way. Why is there so much suffering
in this world? Why does God let so many innocent children starve? Why did God
create us in such a way that we had to fall into sin and therefore have to
suffer and die? Then especially we are often tempted to answer such questions
by saying: you just have to believe! You simply have to accept what God does!
But are these
the right questions? If so, then the catechism is doing it the wrong way,
because Lord’s Day 5 said already, in answer 15, that the kind of mediator and
deliverer whom we must seek must be “one who is a true and righteous man, and
yet more powerful than all creatures; that is, one who is at the same time true
God”.
If we simply believe this and do not question it, then
Lord’s Day 6 should right away have continued with what now is question 18:
“But who is that Mediator who at the same time is true God and a true and
righteous man?” This should have been sufficient, and questions and answers 16
and 17 should have been left out. Indeed there are quite a few people who
criticise Lord’s Days 5 and 6 because they reason too much.
I once talked to a man who as a young boy was taught
not to question the religious teachings of his parents and of his minister.
Whenever he did, he was silenced or punished. He was told simply to believe,
and thus he grew up with what is sometimes called “a blind faith”. He made
public profession of faith because that was the ‘in‑thing’ to do, and
because he had to; but later on in life he broke from the church and from faith
and religion.
What a great
danger this is! It is a danger which could easily threaten our young people, if
we are not careful.
One catechism‑student
who came from the Roman Catholic Church told me that when he began reading the
Bible for himself he started asking his religion teachers all kinds of
questions. Quite soon however he was forbidden to question their teachings; he
was told to just believe what the church and teachers said. How thankful this
young man was when he discovered and experienced the Reformed way of religious
teaching; although, to his amazement he sometimes still found this Roman
Catholic attitude amongst the Reformed congregation.
However, we
should be thankful to God for the Reformed way of religious teaching in which
you not only may ask questions, but should ask questions!
Of course, it
depends on how we do so. It is indeed wrong to answer questions with: Don’t
ask, just believe! But then again we should not go to the other extreme in
which we do not believe and do not have to believe, before we first ask all
kinds of questions and have found out that the answers to these questions are
in agreement with the reasonings of our own human mind. Doing this would be
just as wrong; for it would mean that you consider yourself to know things
better than God does.
The right way
to ask questions is so that we may learn what we must believe; and also, why we
must believe. In short, we ask questions because we want to know more about
God, because we want to learn to know Him better as our Creator, Redeemer, and
Father!
The lesson on how to ask the right questions in Luke
24
We read in Luke 24:15 that in the afternoon of the
first Easter two men were walking from
This is what
they had hoped, but apparently Jesus had not measured up to their expectations.
It appeared that He was not in agreement with their thoughts and ideas which
they had formed in their own mind about what kind of mediator and deliverer
they must seek.
And what was
the reason for their being disappointed in Him? We read this in verse 20: it
was because He had been condemned to death by the leaders of the church, and
crucified. They were disappointed despite the fact that Jesus had been, as they
put it in verse 19, “a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the
people”.
Something
else had happened. They add to their story in de verses 23/4; when some had
gone to His tomb early that morning they did not find his body. They talked
about a vision of angels who said that He was alive even though his tomb was empty.
So, although on the one hand they were amazed about this vision they had heard
about, they were still deeply disappointed.
They were
disappointed because their honoured friend Jesus had been crucified. He had
been whipped like a slave, and hung on a cross like a criminal. This was
unacceptable to them, because this was not in agreement with the ideas which
they had formed about Him.
We could also
put it this way. These two men from Emmaus rejected what we confess as the Word
of God in Answer 16 of this Lord’s Day, that the mediator and deliverer whom we
seek must – because the justice of God requires that – pay for our human sin.
But even though suffering and crucifixion pays for our sin, this did not fit
their requirements for the church’s redeemer.
These men
from Emmaus did not accept what we confess as the Word of God in Answer 17
either. They acknowledged in verse 19 that this Jesus of Nazareth was a great
prophet; but still, he was only a certain Jesus of Nazareth, and they could not
understand that death-conquering power was necessary for our redemption, that
He had to “be true God so that by the power of His divine nature He might bear
in His human nature the burden of God’s wrath”.
The ideas
which they had formed for themselves were all too human; e.g. about what we
must be delivered from, our sin against God’s highest Majesty – (they did not
really have any idea about how terribly sinful we are) – ; and consequently
their thoughts about God and His divine justice were too earthly and human and
easy-going as well. This is also why their ideas about Jesus of Nazareth, in
spite of their great love for Him, were too human.
Reasoning
with human thoughts, they had to conclude that their beloved Jesus of Nazareth
was not the mediator and deliverer they had hoped for and looked forward to.
And yet Jesus
said to them, in verse 25, “O foolish men”, because they used their brains the
wrong way, which resulted, as verse 25 continues, in them being slow of heart
to believe all that the prophets had spoken. They let their faith being
suffocated by their logic.
Yet it was
not wrong of them to ask questions and seek answers. Faith is not in conflict
with logic or reason. However, they asked the wrong questions. They did not ask
themselves whether their ideas about the Redeemer were in agreement with the
prophecies in the Scriptures concerning the coming Redeemer.
How did the
Lord Jesus react to this? Did the Lord Jesus say to them: you should not ask
questions, do not come with your ‘why’s’, but simply believe? No, this is not what the Lord said. He did not
say, ask not, but rather ask the prophets what kind of mediator and deliverer
you need. Jesus formulates the question for them in verse 26. “Was it not
necessary that the Christ should suffer these things, and enter into His
glory?”
Beginning
with Moses and all the prophets He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures
the things concerning Himself”. As we confess it in Question and Answer 19 of
the catechism, “From where do you know this? From the holy gospel”. It is the
holy gospel, the joyful message concerning Jesus Himself, that tells us that it
is this kind of Mediator and Deliverer we need.
People often
say that every Bible-reader and every church or sect has their own
interpretation of the Bible. They are right because we are inclined to
misinterpret the Bible out of hatred toward both God and our neighbour.
However, we
must ask the right questions from the only One who can interpret the Bible because He is Himself the Author and the
Subject of His own book. He has divine authority to speak to us. He also speaks
with human sympathy to us. He is the only One who, as portrayed in the Bible,
is acceptable to God.
God has appointed our Covenant-Mediator in His eternal
counsel
The qualifications for the Mediator and the reasons
why these qualifications are necessary were considered by God in His eternal
counsel, even though this is not addressed in Lord’s Day 6. These
considerations were not based on our actions, so that God knew we would do
beforehand. They were based on what God Himself wanted to do in His eternal
love.
God the
Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have together planned both the
creation and the redemption of this world in their eternal counsel and by their
own will. In this eternal counsel God the Son presented Himself to the Father
as the Mediator in God’s Covenant with man by saying: Father, send Me into the
world. And in this eternal counsel God the Father indeed decided to send His
only Son into this world as our Mediator.
God so loved
the world, that He sent His only Son, the Bible says. And why did God love this
world? Because it was His own world, because He made it Himself, because it is
His own creation. God loves this world for His own sake.
Only after we
understand this can we learn about the qualifications of the God-given
Mediator, and the reasons for them. For now we know that they are not human
reasons, but divine reasons. They are reasons which have brought about what did
not and could not enter nor arise in any human heart and mind: the incarnation
of God’s Son; that the Word has become flesh!
It was by the
incarnation of the Son of God that God met the requirements of His own justice
and mercy. Man must pay, and thus, God’s Son takes the form of our human flesh
and blood, by being born out of Mary, as a human being. Man’s payment must be
acceptable to God, and thus, Jesus Christ is conceived by Mary from the Holy
Spirit, so that the Holy One born out of her is a righteous man, a human being
without any sin.
As it is sung
about in the song of Zechariah: ‘Through God’s compassion and His love’;
‘through the tender mercy of our God’. God was moved by His own mercy, God
moved Himself when His Son said, Send Me, and the Father said, I will send You,
and the Spirit said, I will overshadow the virgin Mary. As a result this
Mediator, being God and man in one, could by the power of His divine nature
bear for us the burden of God’s anger.
The catechism
reads that our Mediator did not do this with the support of His divine nature,
but by the power of His divine nature. Had the support of His divine nature
been enough, we could have done it ourselves, with God only giving us a helping
hand by means of the mediator.
This is
indeed how the Arminians and all of us by nature
would like the mediator to be; only a helping hand so that we can do it
ourselves in our proud way instead of in God’s loving way. Think of what we
reject in the Canons of Dort, III/IV article 5. “The corrupt and natural man
can so well use the common grace (which for the Arminians
is the light of nature), or the gifts still left him after the fall, that he
can gradually gain by their good use a greater, that is, the evangelical or
saving grace, and salvation itself”.
But the Bible
tells us that Christ had to bear the burden of God’s anger against our sin for
the full 100 percent, and this He could only do by the power of His divinity.
It is also by
the power of His divinity that our Mediator obtains and restores for us
righteousness and life. Again, if He would have done this with the support of
His divinity, we could have done it ourselves, if God gave us a helping hand.
The Arminians (who also live in our hearts!) wrote,
in article 9: “Grace and free will are ... causes which together work the beginning
of conversion”, but “grace does not precede the working of the will”. Only when
“the will of man moves itself”, does God “help the will of man unto
conversion”.
Man does
everything himself first, and then God is graciously allowed to offer man a
helping hand. But this is not what the Bible teaches us, and that’s why we
confess in this Lord’s Day that our Mediator must be true and righteous man,
but at the same time true God. This is how God decided in His counsel as
revealed to us in the Bible.
God has required our Covenant-Mediator to be a perfect
Lamb
A Christian poet once summed up the message which we
confess in this Lord’s Day in these words: “For blood is but redeemed by
blood”. Is this really true?
In the course
of history, many bloody sacrifices have been made for the salvation of mankind,
and yet, they lacked the power for this. Mankind has shed rivers of the blood
of animals and men for a self-made deliverance of this world.
How much
blood was shed in the French Revolution of
Also the
theology of revolution is a theology of blood sacrificed for an imagined
redemption. Against the redemption and reconciliation by the blood of the Lamb
stands the pseudo-redemption and pseudo-peace by the blood which is shed by the
Beast of the book of Revelation.
Yet it is
true that ‘blood is but redeemed by blood’, and not by power, money, or any
other means. It is only possible through the blood of the Lamb of God, who
takes away the sin of the world. Other means of deliverance figured out by men
either cover up sin, justify sin, or even glorify sin. Only the Lamb of God
takes away the sin of the world.
It was John
the Baptist who said, when he saw the Lord Jesus coming toward him: “Behold,
the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” What is meant by the sin of the world? We have confessed this
in Lord’s Day 4. It is the sin which has been committed against the most high
majesty of God. This most serious sin can only be taken away by a sacrifice
which has the power to take away that sin. The power to do so must be in
complete and perfect agreement with the legal requirements of God’s law
concerning the sacrifices: which is what Lord’s Day 6 deals with.
When John the
Baptist saw the Lord Jesus he said about Him: Behold, the Lamb of God, who
takes away the sin of the world. This means that according to John the Baptist
the Lord Jesus answered the requirements of God’s law concerning the
sacrifices. He takes away the sin of the world. In other words, He does what no
human being or any other creature is able to do. And He does this as the Lamb
of God.
John calls
Jesus the Lamb of God, because he knows God’s laws about the sacrifices. From
these laws he knows that the coming Saviour will completely pay, what through
all the centuries had been paid in a symbolic manner in the temple with the
blood of animals, and in particular that of lambs.
John also
knew from these laws that, when God delivered Israel out of Egypt, a Passover‑lamb
was offered as a symbol which pointed forward to the great deliverance of God’s
people from the power of sin and death by means of another sacrifice. John knew
that the requirements for the sacrifices in the temple were very strict in that
any lamb to be sacrificed had to be complete and undamaged. However it was also clear that in the time of
the Old Testament such lambs still did not meet God’s requirements perfectly.
As is sung about in Psalm 40, “No sacrifice didst Thou, O LORD, require”,
except the One sacrifice of Him to whom all sacrifices referred, and in the
same Psalm, “Take Thou my life and mould it. I come, the book foretold it; ‘Tis written in its roll” (Book of Praise Psalm 40:3).
Here we have
the explanation why John the Baptist pointed to the Lord Jesus as the Lamb of
God, the only perfect Lamb, who came from God Himself, God’s own Son, the
fulfiller of Psalm 40.
Thus it came
to pass that John the Baptist did not refer to the Lord Jesus as a lamb which
points out our sins to us, like the lambs in the Old Testament did, but as the
Lamb of God who takes them away, as the only sacrifice in perfect agreement
with God’s law.
In Lord’s Day
6 we find exactly the same confession as that of John the Baptist. First we see
Jesus Christ, pointed out to us by God Himself as our Saviour. And when in this
light we read the Old Testamentical laws concerning
the sacrifices, we understand the requirements of the law.
The Saviour
must be a true man, because lambs can only point out our sins to us, but not
take them away. That is a requirement that is asked of man.
He must be a
righteous man. If an incomplete or damaged lamb was even unfit for pointing out
our sins to us and the way in which they should be reconciled, how then would
an unrighteous man be able to bring about that reconciliation?
He must also
be true God, because in the Old Testament lambs were offered in order to make
clear that weak and sinful human beings could not do it and that a substitute
was needed.
And now, behold,
there is the Lord Jesus. He is a true man and a righteous human being. But as a
human being he is still too weak to take away the sin which has been committed
against the most high majesty of God!
Yet John the
Baptist said, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”,
and who answers God’s requirements. John could say this, because he had heard
it said by God, at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well
pleased”. This means that He is also God.
We may therefore
simply repeat in our confession of Lord’s Day 6 what John confessed before us:
Behold, the perfect Lamb, who answers all the requirements of God’s law for the
sacrifices.
God has given us our Covenant-Mediator as such a Lamb
in His grace
Lord’s Day 6 is a majestic song of praise to God’s
great love for sinners such as us. The dogmatic language of this Lord’s Day is
filled with the tension and the joy of the song of the Lamb and is a symphony
of God’s grace in which this Lamb is revealed to us.
For who is
this Lamb, given to us as the only perfect means of reconciliation with God?
Who is this Mediator? It is, sings the catechism in answer 18, “our Lord Jesus
Christ, whom God made our wisdom, our righteousness and sanctification and
redemption”.
On the day
that He was born in
God gave Him
to be our wisdom. This means that all teachings of reconciliation must be
tested, to determineif they are in accordance with
the wisdom of God. They must be in accordance with God’s law for the
sacrifices, and can not be based on human wisdom.
This also
means that we must always be prepared to forgive each other for whatever wrongs
they may have done to us, for the sake of Christ’s blood, because we are also
reconciled with God by His blood only.
We must
always be prepared for reconciliation by the blood of Christ. We only call only
sin or apostasy that which is against God’s will. We can not gloss over sins as
if they were not that serious, rather we seek the reconciliation of these sins,
both for others and for ourselves, in the blood of Christ.
In order to
live in fellowship with other believers, we need the wisdom which God has given
us in Christ in dealing with one another. As such we let the reconciling blood
of Christ that washes us also have its effect on our neighbours both in the
church and elsewhere.
The Lamb of
God is also given to us as our righteousness. The same ideas apply to this as
to the wisdom given to us. We are not righteous in ourselves, but rather in
Christ. His righteousness is given to us in spite of our sins.
He has become
our righteousness, for in Him our original righteousness of
Christ has
also become our sanctification, our holiness. In Him our original agreement
with God’s holiness and majesty has again become visible in this world.
Sanctification means that we are made more and more holy. In other words, the
fact that we are reconciled with God must have some effect on our lives. To
stand still means to slide back. Our entire life must more and more become
service to God, a sacrifice of thankfulness which is pleasing to the Lord.
All of this
means that He has become our redemption. He has freed us from the slavery of
sin, the devil, and death. He has become our only Liberator who not only has
the keys to hell and the grave, but also to te gates
to
He is the
only Redeemer for all of us. This is what our fore-fathers confessed when they
were thrown into dungeons, and burned at the stake; and while confessing this
they knew how powerless all earthly and satanic powers are, however strong they
may imagine themselves to be. This may also be the confession of our
brotherhood in the world, in
However, we
may confess the same in the relative safety which we still enjoy in our
country; but even if that were to come to an end we could still confess this in
comfort, on one condition. The condition is that we must believe all that we
confess in this Lord’s Day 6 is our comfort, both in life and death, so that if
need be we would die for this confession.
If we believe
all that we confess in Lord’s Day 6 there is no reason to be afraid. We do not
have to fear anyone, no man, no death, no devil, no wars and no nuclear bombs.
For we know that all things will be right in this world; that it all will be
right in accordance with God’s eternal counsel. For God so loves this world,
that He sent His only Son as the perfect Lamb, that whoever believes in Him as
the only Covenant‑Mediator will not perish, but will receive everlasting
life.
All this
follows from the fact that by God’s grace this perfect Lamb has been given to
us as our redemption; our complete redemption, as the original German text of
the catechism has it. Nothing in our life is except from it, not even the
smallest part of our existence. For if only one little part of a lamb was
lacking, even if it were only a piece of skin at the ear, it would be
unacceptable to the LORD as a dedication and offering to Him. In God’s law it
is everything or nothing.
If we do not
let our entire lives be reconciled and sanctified to the LORD by the blood of the
Lamb which He has given us, then we take something away from the completeness
of redemption, and if we would not repent from that, then nothing will be left
to us in the end.
God has made all this known to us in the holy Gospel
“From where do you know this? From the holy Gospel”.
For it is in the Gospel that this Lamb, our Mediator and Redeemer, is given to
us.
Yes, in the
Gospel Christ is given to us. For even if Christ had been born in
Let me make
this as clear as possible. When here it is asked, From where do you know this,
then we do not talk about knowing a certain truth even as 2 times 2 makes 4.
For that is a statement of truth (or rather a statement of fact) which does not
affect us; it is not a message in which I am involved and on which I build my
trust. Yet this is what Biblical truth is all about.
Let me give
an example of such a message. In the spring of 1945, the allied armies invaded
the occupied countries of
The Gospel,
the good tiding of our redemption, brings us our redemption. In this message of
the Gospel Jesus Christ Himself is brought to us and given to us as our
Mediator and Redeemer.
This message
of our redemption was already proclaimed long before Jesus was born in
Even before
man was driven out of
The same
message is also proclaimed by the patriarchs and the prophets, and foreshadowed
or pictured in advance by the ceremonies of the law. The entire Old Testament
speaks about this; not only the Mosaic laws, e.g. the laws of the book of
Leviticus, but also the historical books, and the prophecies. As it is written
in Psalm 40, “Christ comes, the book foretold it, ‘tis written in its roll”.
Let us look
at the next Bible‑verses to which the catechism refers us. Genesis 12
concerns itself with Abraham in whose seed all the nations of the earth would
be blessed (and not
God also had
this message proclaimed by the prophets, e.g. in Isaiah 53, “the will of the
LORD shall prosper in his hand; by his knowledge shall the righteous one, my
servant, make many to be accounted righteous; and he shall bear their
iniquities”. Jeremiah and Micah, to mention only two more prophets, have also
added to the picture of the coming Redeemer; but it was all the prophets, reads
Acts 10:43, who bear witness to Him, and to the forgiveness of our sins through
Him.
God also had
this joyful message concerning the coming Redeemer foreshadowed by the
sacrifices and other ceremonies of the law; for the Lord Jesus Himself had said
in John 5:46 that Moses wrote of Him. Therefore, the blood of the animals
offered on the altar referred, reads Hebrews 10, to Jesus’ shedding His blood for
our sins; and the rest on the 7th day, the Sabbath‑day, symbolized the
rest of God’s sabbath which was disturbed by our sins
but would be restored by Christ. As Paul says in Col. 2:17, “Let no one pass
judgment on you ... with regard to a festival or a new moon or a sabbath”, for “these are only a shadow of what is to come;
but the substance belongs to Christ”.
Of these
sacrifices and ceremonies of the law we confess in Article 25 of the Belgic Confession, “We believe that the ceremonies and
symbols of the law have ceased with the coming of Christ, and that all shadows
have been fulfilled, so that the use of them ought to be abolished among
Christians. Yet their truth and substance remain for us in Jesus Christ, in
whom they have been fulfilled”.
The entire
Old Testament is filled with Christ, and fulfilled by Him! Indeed, God finally
had the holy Gospel, which He first revealed in
Think of how
Paul puts it in his letter to the Galatians (4:4), “When the time had fully
come, God sent forth His Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem
those who were under the law”, to set them free.
In ages gone
by it was customary to have an hour‑glass on the pulpit. This was,
because ministers sometimes preached too long. The elders then decided that
when the hour‑glass was full the minister had to say ‘Amen’, whether he
was finished or not.
When God’s
hourglass (which He himself had prepared) was full, God said ‘Amen’; but then
God’s sermon was finished as well. For God said ‘Amen’ in sending His Son as
the fulfilment of His sermon. But God also wants the hearers to say ‘Amen’ to
His sermon. How? We can only say ‘Amen’
to God’s preaching by His Spirit. In 1 Corinthians 2:12 we read, “Now we have
received, not the spirit of the world – (for you know, that is a spirit which
makes people to fall asleep during God’s sermon, so that they never get ready
for the hidden wisdom of God) – , but the Spirit who is from God, that we might
understand the gifts bestowed on us by God”.
This
understanding is the same as in Question 19; it is a knowing of the message of
Christ which at the same time is a receiving of Him who in the Gospel is given
to us. It is not just a memorization of Lord’s Day 6, but rather a receiving in
your heart of the only Redeemer and Mediator. It is an understanding such as
the way in which children know their Mother and Father because they love them.
Well, says
Paul in Galatians 4, because you are God’s adopted children, God has sent the
Spirit of His Son into your hearts, who cries in you, Amen, Abba! Father!
Yes, you must
say ‘Amen’ to God’s sermon; that is, you must believe Father’s promises! For
only those who believe will be saved.
Throughout
the Bible it is proclaimed to us that Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God who takes
away the sin of the world which Adam started in
Behold the
Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world! Behold our perfect Covenant‑Mediator!
Behold Him like He is portrayed to us in the pages of the Bible!
There is a Lamb that bleeds
God’s promise of deliverance to Adam and Eve in
Paradise was fulfilled on the cross of
John saw on Padmos, a door opened in heaven. And then he writes, in
Revelation 5:6, “... I saw a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain, with
seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out
into all the earth”.
This means
that John then saw much more than he could see on
The
proclamation of the Lamb that bleeds goes out all over the world. It is not
just a matter for our ‘soul’, but it is of world‑wide importance. For
this Lamb has received the book with the seven seals of God’s world‑government
and judgment. The Lamb who is going to judge the world is the same Lamb of whom
John the Baptist said: Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the
world. The same blood which washes away the sins of believers will by means of
judgment purge away from the earth all who resist and reject the reconciliation
of sin by the blood of Christ.
This is a
serious warning for all nations and all mankind.
There is a Lamb that bleeds.
There is a Lamb that bleeds,
and I, compelled to watch and see,
and who must say: alas, it's me
who causes this to Thee.
And that I saw Thee bleeding there,
will it prevent me for one day
from doing sin again?
I'll wound Thee many a time
and cry out for Thy blood...
What therefore I must say to you,
what I must say to you?
There is a Lamb that bleeds!
(Gerard Wijdeveld,
translated from Dutch)
LORD’S
DAY 7
20 Q. Are all
saved through Christ
just as all were lost
through Adam?
A. No.
Only
those are saved
who
by true faith
are
grafted into Christ
and
accept all his blessings.
21 Q. What is
true faith?
A. True faith is
not
only a knowledge and conviction
that
everything God reveals in his
Word
is true;
it
is also a deep-rooted assurance,
created
in me by the Holy Spirit
through
the gospel,
that,
out of sheer grace
earned
for us by Christ,
not
only others, but I too,
have
had my sins forgiven,
have
been made forever
right
with God,
and
have been granted salvation.
22 Q. What
then must a Christian believe?
A. Everything God promises us in the gospel.
That
gospel is summarized for us
in
the articles of our Christian faith;
a
creed beyond doubt,
and
confessed throughout the world.
23 Q. What
are these articles?
A. I believe in God, the Father almighty,
creator
of heaven and earth.
I
believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord,
who
was conceived by the Holy Spirit
and
born of the virgin Mary.
He
suffered under Pontius Pilate,
was
crucified, died, and was buried;
he
descended to hell.
The
third day he rose again from the dead.
He
ascended to heaven
and
is seated at the right hand of
God
the Father almighty.
From
there he will come to judge the
living
and the dead.
I
believe in the Holy Spirit,
the
holy catholic church,
the
communion of saints,
the
forgiveness of sins,
the
resurrection of the body,
and
the life everlasting. Amen.
Introduction
“There is a Lamb that
bleeds”. This Lamb is our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the perfect Lamb that is sacrificed
for our complete redemption. Does this mean that all men are saved by Christ
just as they perished through Adam? No. “Only those are saved who by a true
faith are grafted into Christ and receive all His benefits”.
Whoever believes in Jesus Christ as the Son of God whom God sent
into this world will not perish but receive everlasting life, life eternal. The
Son of God has obtained this eternal life for us when He was killed as the Lamb
of God on the Good Friday, and He has made it available for all who believe in
Him by His resurrection on the Easter‑morning.
But if this Lamb is perfect in taking away the sin of the world,
how can the catechism say that not all men are saved by Christ? This Lamb is
given as the perfect Lamb by God Himself, and it has been killed for our sins
in complete agreement with the requirements of God’s law, and thus it brings
about a complete redemption. Is nevertheless this sacrifice not sufficient for
the sin of the world?
We may not say that the fact that not all men are saved by Christ
is because He would not be a perfect Lamb. When John the Baptist said, Behold,
the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world, he spoke the truth. The
love of God which made Him to give this Lamb was indeed sufficient. “For God so
loved the world that He gave His only on, that whoever believes in Him should
not perish but have eternal life”, John 3:16.
To this we want to hold on in our Reformed confessions, exactly
because we are Reformed. This is e.g. what we confess in Canons of Dort,
Chapter II, articles 3 and 4, “The death of the Son of God is the only and most
perfect sacrifice and satisfaction for sins, of infinite value and worth,
abundantly sufficient to expiate the sins of the whole world. This death is of
such great value and worth because the person who submitted to it is not only a
true and perfectly holy man, but also the only Son of God”.
The Canons of Dort base our confession that the sacrifice of
Christ is perfect and complete and therefore sufficient on exactly the same
grounds as this was done in Lord’s Day 6.
What then is the cause of it that not all men are saved by Christ
just as they perished through Adam? The blame for this lies not with Christ’s
sacrifice, but with the unbelief of men. Unbelief is the only cause by which
people are lost. It is as we confess this in Canons of Dort II, 6, “That,
however, many who have been called by the gospel neither repent nor believe in
Christ but perish in unbelief does not happen because of any defect or
insufficiency in the sacrifice of Christ offered on the cross, but through
their own fault”.
The same is confessed in Canons of Dort III/IV, 8, “It is not the
fault of the gospel, nor of the Christ offered by the gospel, ... that many who
are called through the ministry of the gospel do not come and are not
converted. The fault lies in themselves. Some of them do not care and do not
receive the word of life. Others do indeed receive it, but not into their
hearts, and therefore ... they turn away. Still others choke the seed of the
word by the thorns of the cares and the pleasure if this world, and bring forth
no fruit. This our Saviour teaches in the parable of the seed. Mt
Had not my heart believed, I would have perished in my sins and
misery.
All this we also read right after those well‑known words of
John 3:16, in verse 18, “He who believes in Him is not condemned; he who does
not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of
the only Son of God”. Because they reject Christmas and Easter they do not
share in the fruit of the Good Friday.
Does the Lord Jesus say this with the intention to exclude a
number of people from His salvation? Of course not. Therefore we do not confess
this with that intention either. It is a horrible fact that not all men are
saved. It would therefore also be horrible if we would exclude others from
salvation, or would talk easily and glibly about this and meanwhile would boast
of ourselves. That’s why we are taught to confess with Canons of Dort III/IV,
10, “Others who are called by the ministry of the gospel do come and are
converted. This is not to be ascribed to man. He does not distinguish himself
by his free will above others who are furnished with equal or sufficient grace
for faith or conversion (as the proud heresy of Pelagius maintains). It is to
be ascribed to God”.
No, the Lord Jesus did not say this with the intention to exclude
them from salvation. That’s why He also spoke these words, in John 3:17, “For
God sent the Son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world
might be saved through Him”. It is therefore a horrible fact that there are
people in this world who do not believe in the Son and thus turn Christmas into
only a day of presents, and Easter into a day of bunnies and eggs.
The Lord said this in order that we and all men would tremble, and
that no one would even have the courage of not believing in Him! For by not
believing in Jesus Christ we would make both Adam’s sin and our daily sins
complete, instead of having them taken away by the Lamb of God.
For this reason we must be careful that we do not too easily say
that we cannot give faith to some one. This is true of course. However, God
says to us and to all, “There is a Lamb that bleeds”, and I have given this
Lamb. Again, although it is true that we cannot give faith to anyone, we should
not say this too easily.
God says to us and
everyone: I have given you My Christmas‑present, when I sent My Son into
the world in order that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have everlasting
life.
Before the Son of God, after His resurrection, ascended into
heaven, He charged His disciples: “Go into all the world and preach the Gospel
to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark
We therefore would take it too easy if we would say that we cannot
give eternal life to some one else. By talking that way we would acquiesce too
easily in that horrible reality that many people will be lost by unbelief. We
must act on what we confess in Canons of Dort II, 5, that “the promise of the
gospel (that whoever believes in Christ crucified shall not perish but have
eternal life) ... ought to be announced and proclaimed universally and without
discrimination to all peoples and to all men to whom God in His good pleasure
sends the gospel, together with the command to repent and believe”.
It is true that we cannot obtain eternal life, neither for
ourselves nor for others. But Christ has come to obtain eternal life for us by
his perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world.
Nevertheless, when the catechism says that not all people will be
saved by Christ as they all in Adam are lost, there is a good reason for that.
We are in
There is only one way in which we can be born again: by faith in
Jesus Christ. There is no other way. But thanks to God, this way lies open for
everyone. For this way has been opened by Christ on the cross. Those who
believe will be saved. Nobody excepted. The way has been opened, and only those
who by not believing refuse to go on that way will get lost.
But now a burning question which might tear the soul is: how do I
become a believer? How do I get faith in Christ? This question has often been
asked, sometimes in almost despair.
The answer to this question is: this faith is worked by the Holy
Spirit of Christ.
We read in John 3 that God
has given the Holy Spirit to His Son, and that He did so in abundance. Thus the
work of the Spirit is also abundant. The Spirit will be given to everyone who
seriously prays for it.
The Holy Spirit will never accomplish part of his work only, and
leave another part for man to be done. This is how people often look at it.
There is an intellectual part in the act of believing by which you know what
God has revealed in His Word; but that is not enough.
It must be a foot lower; you must also feel it in your heart. The
emotional work of the Holy Spirit has to be added to it before it is a real,
complete, and saving faith.
The catechism speaks completely different about it. Both the sure
knowledge of what God has said in His Word and the certain confidence that we
for Christ’s sake are saved are together the true faith which the Holy Spirit
works in the heart by the gospel.
It is this true faith which we confess in the Apostles’ Creed.
In this Creed we confess that God has chosen us to be His children
in unity with His beloved Son.
Chosen? Elected? Yes!
When discussing answer 20 of Lord’s Day 7 that not all men are
saved by Christ, but only those who by a true faith are grafted into Christ, we
could have drawn the conclusion: so this is a matter of election and rejection.
However, this could have led us into a dangerous direction. Alas, often people
went into that direction by believing that we are saved by faith in our
election.
However, we are not saved by faith in our election, but by faith
in Jesus Christ. No one gets lost because he has been rejected, but only
because of his unbelief.
But having arrived at the
end of this booklet about the foundation of faith we may and must speak of our
election. For every believer must confess that he owes his being one with
Christ to God the Father. He has chosen me and given me to His Son, who by His
Spirit has worked faith in Him in my heart.
It is thanks to the Tri-une God who has
chosen me that I in unity with all believers at all places and in all times may
and can confess our catholic and undoubted Christian faith in the Apostles’
Creed.
Had not my heart believed
that in this life of
troubles
The Lord prepared
my way and dwelling-place,
And that my name is in His
book recorded
For glory by His grace;
Had not my heart believed
That He does rule my
seasons,
And without His consent
no hair falls from my
head,
Had not my heart
His constant love
experienced,
Had not my heart believed,
had not my heart believed!
But now my hymn goes with
you
on your path of darkness,
Brothers, silenced by
woes,
struck down in war and
strife:
There is a spring of
strength,
Its fountains are
unfailing,
Salvation is still there!
Had not my heart believed!
–
Lord, after this
confession
Direct my heart and
guide my way of life;
Make thus this hymn,
From times of old
transmitted,
My dying-song.*
For we may believe that in
life and death we belong to our faithful Saviour Jesus Christ, who has fully paid
for all our sins with His precious blood. (Lord’s Day 1)
* Parts from the poem “Mijn Belijden”, by J. Waanders (translated from Dutch)