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