Hello again, friends, thanks for joining us once again for another episode of the Pastor Talk podcast.
We are back again today,
Clint, and we are talking about the Westminster Confession,
looking particularly at the shorter catechism again.
And we’re not going to,
I think, have a very long introduction here today.
I think in some ways last week’s conversation,
the conclusion of that functions as the introduction to this conversation.
So if you missed that,
definitely pause this, go and listen to that other one,
wherever you’re listening.
But we’re going to jump in here to the catechisms laying out of the Ten Commandments.
And I guess the only introductory word maybe to offer here,
Clint, is that as we come into these commandments,
I think the encouragement is let’s see in them the positive guide to life.
This is framed as a gift that we’ve been given,
a way to see God’s intention for the human life,
not as a list of things that humans don’t measure up against.
The list of things humans don’t measure up against is in many ways summarized by sin,
which we had in the very beginning of this catechism.
The quick move to sin makes it clear that at the very core of who we are as humans,
we are beset by our deepest sinfulness.
So the Ten Commandments here do not function,
though they show our sinfulness,
because we as humans cannot aspire to meet them unto our own ends.
Their primary function is not to judge us,
because we’ve already found ourselves a judge.
So instead,
as we turn to our conversation today,
Clint, I think that this is a positive guide,
and we find in it an invitation to live as God intended.
I think maybe people are surprised to see the Ten Commandments show up in a church document,
like a confession, which it wouldn’t be in the confession,
but this, remember, the catechism is a teaching tool,
and as part the writers,
the authors thought that it made sense to include the Ten Commandments,
and there is a kind of formula for each one.
The person reading the catechism is asked,
“What is the commandment?” Then,
essentially, what is required,
what is forbidden,
and what is taught.
And this formula holds pretty true in the presentation of these commandments.
I think, to your point, Michael,
the reason these are in here is not the idea that,
you know, to convict us further,
though they may have that effect.
I do think if we take the commandments seriously,
there certainly is a point where they land on our conscience.
But the idea here is to show the proper response to grace for the believer,
and the path that God has chosen.
Remember, the catechism last week called this the moral law.
How is it we are to live in the world?
And the commandments function as kind of a map toward that end.
So, you’ll see more of that as we go through.
Let’s jump in.
We’re at question 45.
What is the first commandment?
The first commandment is,
“Thou shalt have no other gods before me.”
I don’t think we need to really make a lot of comment on that.
We’ll go on to the next question.
What is required in the first commandment?
The first commandment requires us to know and acknowledge God to be the only true God,
and our God,
and to worship and glorify Him accordingly.
So,
what do we learn from the commandment?
We learn,
we are required to know through the commandment,
and acknowledge that God is the one true God and our God.
And I think this is the most interesting and in some ways the most profound addition,
Michael.
Not that there’s only one true God,
but our God, a sense that God is for us.
And our response to that is to worship and glorify Him.
Accordingly, we saw that all the way back in the very first question of Westminster.
It pervades this document.
But a pretty straightforward,
you know, there are many, many things that we could say
about what is required in the first commandment.
But as they try to boil it down to its essence,
to know and acknowledge God,
to be our God,
and to worship and glorify Him accordingly,
it’s a good answer.
Yeah, and I’m not going to belabor this,
Clint, but if you find yourself tempted to rush ahead and say,
“Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know that,” then you’ve not heard this commandment and you’ve not heard what they mean.
Because the human heart is one that is almost to its very core an idol-making heart.
We, from the very first pages of Genesis,
see how humans are seeking for a way
to put something at the center other than the God who wants to walk with us in the garden.
And Clint,
here we look at a text like this and we see that not only are we called to it
know and acknowledge God,
to be the one true God,
but for Him to be our God.
And that is a beautiful text of aspiration.
It is one that we can claim,
though if we’re honest,
we’re often going to fail to meet through our actions.
And so this is the kind of response here that we would all do well to return to,
to remind ourselves that we are quick and it is easy for us to put things into this spot other than God.
And the first commandment tells us repeatedly,
“Do not do that.”
Yeah, I think you’re right,
Michael.
It would be easy to read past this,
you know, “Thou shalt know the gods before me.”
Yeah, got it, check.
But if you map out this answer,
what is it?
That we acknowledge and know that God is the only God,
that’s the general knowledge,
and God is our God,
there’s a relational promise,
and then our response to worship and glorify Him.
This is a very short encapsulation of the Christian experience,
to know God,
to know God as our Savior in Jesus Christ,
and then to respond by worship and glorifying Him.
So it’s a great answer.
And if we start with the idea that that’s the goal,
that’s where the commandment points us,
then the question is,
where do we go off track?
Where could we miss?
If that’s the target we’re aiming for,
what would it be like not to get there?
So we get question 47,
“What is forbidden in the first commandment?”
The first commandment forbids the denying or not worshiping or glorifying
the true God as God and our God,
and the giving of that worship and glory to any other,
which is due to Him alone.
So somewhat obvious, I suppose, that the opposite of the commandment is to put something before God.
And keep in mind that this is written to people in the church.
This isn’t describing the sin of the world,
though it could probably be applied there.
This is really pointing at believers and the temptation that we,
as believers, have to let other things move into our highest priority spot.
And that is forbidden in this commandment.
We start the Ten Commandments with the assertion that God must be first.
God must be our highest priority, our highest allegiance.
Nothing else should take that role,
and yet we know that it happens,
and so the commandment warns us right at the beginning.
Yeah, I think it’s easy maybe for us to discount writing like this,
Clint, and my only comment here is not so much theological as it is
to try to help us see the context here.
There’s an ancient tradition in the church of spelling things out
in a very clear, delineated,
and some might even say a rational way.
And I think we see a small element of that here.
Here’s the positive.
This is what the commandment says.
And then when it turns and says,
“So this is what the commandment means that we shouldn’t do,”
the opposite of the commandment,
we might find that rather pedantic.
We might think, “Oh gosh, yeah, I obviously know the opposite of the thing.”
But this is somewhat of a genre,
a style, and this is a way of teaching, Clint.
And don’t get hung up on details like style, like that.
Try to hear in it what’s being said and then move on.
Yeah, and it’s interesting that it points to two ways that we can fail.
One is not worshiping,
and one is worshiping something else unduly.
So then we get to question 48,
a sort of specific follow-up on this commandment.
What are we specifically taught,
specially taught, by these words before me in the first commandment?
The words before me in the first commandment teach us
that God who sees all things takes notice of
and is much displeased with the sin of having any other God.
So the idea that this commandment is first,
its place gives precedence to this idea that God in no way, shape, or form
finds being second or further down the list acceptable.
That God’s call to people,
God’s call in the relationship we have with Him through Christ
is to put Him first and keep Him first.
And so no God’s,
nothing before me.
And,
you know, again, my God, I don’t know what we add to that.
Fairly clear.
I think fairly well spelled out.
Yeah, my only comment is here,
just look really closely at this, Clint.
God sees all things, right,
and God takes notice,
and then that phrase is much displeased with.
I just want to make it clear that the framers of this have no idea of an agnostic God
outside of reality who doesn’t care.
The God being described here is a God who not only calls us to a special,
unique relationship with Him,
but that God notices when we stray.
It much displeases God when we break that relationship.
And so that both has this sense of the one who looks down upon the people
and is displeased with their action and their unrighteousness,
that language we’ve already had in this series.
But I think Clint,
there’s also a father aspect to that,
like a father would be displeased when his children go down the wrong road.
God the Father is displeased when we break that relationship in that center.
There’s no place in this,
Clint, in other words, to say,
“Well,
God doesn’t really care,
so He’s just going to miss it.”
Now, when that schism happens between God and the human,
whoever they are, God sees it and God is displeased.
God cares about it.
It hurts God.
Yeah, and I – you know,
Michael, that’s a good word.
Maybe we should have put it even a little earlier.
There is a tendency,
I suppose, to read the commandments
and think of the ways that they are lines that when crossed make God angry.
But really,
the point here is that idea of a pathway that pleases God,
that glorifies God, this is less a yardstick or a measuring stick
to see whether we fail or fall than it is an encouragement
and directions given of how not to fail.
And I think, you know, I think that’s important here.
Which brings us to the second commandment.
Interestingly,
the second commandment is very simple,
but then it has this extra bit after it and they have chosen to include it
and we’ll see why in a moment.
The second commandment is,
“Thou shalt not make any graven image or any likeness of a thing
that is in heaven or on the earth or the water under the earth.
Thou shalt not bow down to them or serve them,
for I, the Lord, am your God, am a jealous God,
visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children
to the third and fourth generation of them that hate me
and showing mercy to the thousandth generation of those who love me
and keep my commandments.”
So, what’s the heart of it?
What is required in the second commandment?
Question 50.
The second commandment requires the receiving,
the observing,
and the keeping pure and entire,
all such religious worship and ordinance as God has appointed in His word.
If that seems like a strange place to go out of a prohibition against idols,
the call here that Westminster hears is to not lessen anything that we’ve been given,
to not replicate, to not imitate, but to keep pure,
to keep unstained,
to keep entire our worship and ordinances as we find them in the word, capital W here,
meaning not only the Scripture,
but specifically the revelation of Jesus Christ as comes to us through Scripture.
And, you know, Michael, I think if you ask people what is the point of
don’t make an idol,
that would seem maybe more surface than this is.
I appreciate that these authors found a way to dig under the obvious
and to come up with something that is broader,
something that is more comprehensive,
and I think more compelling.
So,
it should not strike us that the framers of this and the Reformed tradition
who already have this great suspicion of the human heart
and this deeply held belief that our sinfulness has undone us at a fundamental level,
it shouldn’t surprise us when we get to this commandment,
speaking of the human heart’s ability to desire to create this graven image,
that then they begin to want to talk about purity,
purity of worship, about looking at the very deepest part of our call as God’s children
to respond with thanksgiving and,
as we just had in the previous commandment,
to glorify God, right?
And I think, Clint, what we find in this is this thoroughgoing practical desire
that we must submit everything in our lives to the reality of Jesus Christ’s revelation,
seeking for those impurities to be found and removed from our lives.
And they’re going to speak about that practically outside this question in worship.
They’re going to talk about it in our moral conduct, in our individual,
and in our corporate institutional lives.
I mean, when they’re talking about this graven image,
they’re not thinking little small things that you put on your mantle.
They’re thinking about the things small and large that are going to dominate our imaginations
and are going to lead us away from the only pure worship,
which is the worship of the one true creative God.
And so, Clint,
what they’ve done here is taken something that we may make the mistake of making small,
and they, I think, have appropriately and very wisely seen it as large.
Yeah, I think they’ve drawn a very clear line between the First Commandment and the Second,
Michael, in that regard, that we are not to put anything before God.
And when we do that, that is idolatry.
And the way that we protect ourselves from idolatry is by committing ourselves
to the pure and whole revelation that we receive in His Word.
Now, we move on to the perhaps more obvious,
what is forbidden in the Second Commandment.
The Second Commandment forbids the worshiping of God by images
or any other way not appointed in His Word.
So, this one, I think, is interesting, Michael, and there may be a little bit of our Reformation struggle in the background.
The obvious answer here is that we are not to worship an idol.
The way this is written, though,
forbids the worshiping of God by images
or any other way not appointed in His Word.
So, obviously,
idols here,
graven images, idols,
are encompassed in the commandment.
But there is also here a very specific concern about things that may be called the worship of God
and happen within the community but are instead directed toward icons,
toward people,
toward images,
toward artwork.
This is very much,
I think, more so through the lens of the Westminster Catechism,
a focus on inside the church rather than outside of it.
And there may be a little bit of our tension with the Catholic Church lurking in the background here,
but I think that’s a very interesting way that they’ve answered the question here.
Yeah, I think, Clint, if we’re going to be honest here,
I’m going to just point out one word by God.
Worshiping of God by images is a really key word.
And if you know your church history,
you know that that word is far more all-encompassing
than just, you know, like a picture on the wall.
When they’re talking about images,
they’re talking about a wide variety of things.
And I think you’re right to point out that there’s real historical reasons why this is in play.
I would also point out, though,
that we sometimes do think of this,
especially from the Reformation context,
we think of this as images in worship.
Clearly, there were substantial debates and a lot of concern on that.
I would say that as people who live in a media-driven culture in the 21st century,
people who not only have images sold to us,
but who in some cases create hundreds of images of ourselves in a day,
whether we’re taking selfies or sending Snapchats or posting to Instagram.
You know, I think there’s also maybe a very contemporary reading here,
Clint, if we’re willing to see it,
to be very careful of the images that surround us in society in a digital context as well.
Clearly, I’m not saying that that’s what they intended.
We’re reading this from a different time.
But I wonder if what they’re saying is broad enough to have even implication in our current experience.
Well, I think it would be, Michael.
I mean,
it’s easy to read this and to say, well,
I don’t do that.
I don’t have a Buddha on my shelf.
I don’t have some multi-armed,
elephant-headed God in my living room.
I’m not guilty of idol worship,
but the authors here are conscious of the human heart’s ability to make an idol of anything.
And interestingly enough, they point to things and the danger within the community and not outside of it.
We may think that we’re worshiping God.
We may think that we are engaged in godly things.
And yet,
the thing that we’re elevating in that pursuit is actually what is receiving our attention and our adulation and our worship.
And therefore, that makes it an idol.
Then we get this question attached to this one.
What are the reasons annexed to the Second Commandment?
In other words, what is all of that other stuff that comes after the commandment about?
It said the reasons are God’s sovereignty over us,
His propriety in us,
and the zeal He has to His own worship.
So this is that business in the commandment.
Nothing on the earth,
in the water under the earth,
nothing in heaven.
I’m a jealous God,
punishing for generations, but promising and rewarding for thousands of generations.
And what we see in that,
according to the authors,
are God’s sovereignty,
God’s vestedness in us,
God’s, I don’t want to say ownership,
God’s relationship with us,
and the passion, the zeal God has to make sure that He is the center of the believer’s life.
And so this is in very short form the authors,
the framers of this document’s way of saying that’s what this extra text is about in this commandment.
Yeah, I don’t want to belabor this.
I think the short summary of this,
if you’re looking for the Spark Notes version,
is God is God,
and we are creature.
And in the Second Commandment,
God’s expectation is that we have no other allegiance to anyone other than the one who created us.
And that is above the water,
below the water, in our hearts, outside our hearts, in our mouths, on our hands.
That there is no place,
or there’s no avenue of human life that does not lie within the domain of God’s sovereign control.
And, you know, that is a classic example,
Clint, of easier said than done,
or easier said than understood.
But, I mean, fundamentally, that’s what’s being said here.
Yeah,
yeah, I think Scripture assumes and understands that the only way that we could hope to have an appropriate relationship with God is to make sure that we understand that God is God and nothing else is.
And otherwise, we are deluded, we are deceived,
we are on the wrong track.
So, that brings us to the Third Commandment.
Question 53, the Third Commandment is,
“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,
for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless that takes his name in vain.”
What is required in the Third Commandment?
It is required the holy and reverent use of God’s names,
titles,
attributes,
ordinances,
word,
and works.
I think what makes me smile about this answer,
Michael, is that requires the holy and reverent use,
which says so much in just two words,
reverent and holy use.
That this idea that in any way we talk about God,
it is to be reverent,
it is to mirror God’s holiness.
And then, just to make sure we couldn’t possibly mistake it,
God’s names,
titles,
attributes, ordinances, word, and works.
So, in contrast to the brevity of the first part of this answer,
it’s like they threw in every word they could think of in the back end just to make sure that we got the idea that if you’re speaking to or about God,
it should mirror in any way,
shape, or form you do that God’s own character,
holy and reverent.
And it’s a wonderful answer,
kind of an interesting one.
Yeah, we probably have culturally this idea of using the Lord’s name in vain,
being connected to the idea of swearing,
which has a long historical kind of arm,
and we’re not going to bore you with that,
but there are certainly words in language that carry more meaning or weight than others.
There are some words that we throw around flippantly.
What is happening here,
though, is not really just a warning against using God’s name flippantly.
That is certainly happening here,
but I think that’s the lightest reading of what they’re suggesting.
What they’re pointing to here,
Clint, with these ideas of ordinances,
word,
capital W,
and works,
points us much, much farther down the road to suggest that any way that we align what we have to say,
and I want to point out works also matters here,
to whatever extent our lives align against the works of God through what we say,
and I would argue what we do.
We are also infringing upon this commandment as well.
So there is this much deeper meaning,
a sort of tip of the iceberg situation.
Yes, whatever you think the Third Commandment is describing here, it’s true,
but you might miss the just massive frozen column of water underneath the water.
Because I think what is happening here is a real conviction of the places in our lives where we treat flippantly the things of God.
Not just some words that get strung in there,
but when we have the gall to think that we could use God’s name to our own ends,
or when we have this deep-seated selfish belief that we can manipulate God by what we say or manipulate others with God’s word.
Whenever we find ourselves in those positions,
we’re running afoul of a God who’s perfect and a God who calls us to a much higher order of words than our human words and frail actions.
Yeah, I think that’s a good word,
Michael.
I think if we read this commandment,
and again, I appreciate two things about the authors here.
A, that they could have given us a laundry list of what this means,
but instead they try to point us toward the heart of what it means and let us do the discernment.
But if we read this and think,
“Well, this says I shouldn’t swear,” then we have so underestimated the commandment that we’ve almost missed it.
In the Old Testament,
to prophesy wrongly in God’s name,
to preach wrongly in God’s name,
it was to use God’s name in vain.
It wasn’t just the cursing and the swearing that was considered wrong.
It was the idea that you misrepresented God, and with that,
we profane God’s name when our works don’t match up with our faith.
Do not take the name of the Lord God in vain,
and we think of that almost exclusively as a verbal thing,
but we can misuse God’s name by doing things that are not in keeping with God’s holiness as we are named Christian.
And so this is much deeper,
I think, much more convicting and larger than we tend to think of.
So then we move on,
what is forbidden in the Third Commandment?
And this really is, I think,
a masterful summary.
The Third Commandment forbids all profaning or abusing of anything whereby God makes Himself known.
So again,
rather than the laundry list of don’t do this, don’t do that,
it gives us a beautiful summary,
all profaning or abusing.
The exact opposite of holy and reverent,
profane and abusive of anything by which God makes Himself known.
You know,
again, Michael, I am impressed.
My tendency would be to try and sketch this out and nail it down.
And I very much appreciate that the authors here instead simply point us down the right road and show us a glimpse of all the ways it could go astray.
Well, and Clint, look here.
Isn’t it interesting where they make this case whereby God makes Himself known?
That is everywhere.
I mean, God is making God’s Self known in just a radical number of places.
Every place you can imagine the Creator’s hand is evident.
And I think, Clint,
what this has done is it has called Christians to treat everything as gift and it has called us to a constant posture of humility.
So we don’t often associate the Third Commandment with the idea of a humble spirit, a contrite heart.
We often think of it as like word police.
But if you hear what they’re saying here,
what you do with your stuff,
how you treat creation,
how you behave towards your children,
what you do in the middle of church meetings,
how you behave in the midst of your community.
Yeah,
here I’m making that laundry list,
Clint, that you just said that they chose not to do.
But I only seek to illustrate here, friends,
like what they’re talking about is a revolutionarily wide open field here for us to learn from.
And if you’ve always thought of this or if you’ve ever thought of this commandment as being sort of limited in scope,
hear it again,
because it’s calling you to see and to respect every place where God shows up.
And that is everywhere.
Yeah, and if we were to unpack it,
Michael, I think that’s exactly right.
You know, how we speak to our neighbors,
how we speak about our neighbors,
how we choose to use our words directed at other people by whom God makes Himself known.
And so clearly here,
another road that is often,
that is deeper than people often think.
So then we get this annex question again, 56,
what is the reason annexed in the Third Commandment?
The annexed,
the annexed to the Third Commandment shows that however the breakers of this commandment may escape punishment from men,
yet the Lord our God will not suffer them to escape His righteous judgment.
This is interesting, Michael, because as we get into the commandment,
there are those commandments that are socially destructive.
We talk murder, we talk theft.
There are commandments that are also laws,
and so there is a certain assumption of punishment that goes with them.
But here,
when somebody yells out a curse in the middle of,
when somebody yells at their neighbor who cuts them off in traffic,
when somebody tells a coarse joke or, you know,
they use, they misuse the name of Jesus,
whatever that might be,
we don’t think of that as,
we don’t think of that as somehow socially offensive.
I mean, we might be offended by it,
but we don’t think of it as on the other side of some legal line.
And what the commandment,
what the authors are saying in regard to this commandment is, yeah,
that stuff may not get punished as we live.
But make no mistake,
God takes it vitally serious.
God takes it extremely,
extremely seriously.
And if you get away with doing it here,
don’t count on that being true when you stand before God.
Yeah, and this isn’t really the angry hands of God kind of situation.
I think this is a little bit like,
I don’t know if in science class you ever put sulfur in water as like one of those science experiments.
And when you do,
there’s a violent reaction,
right?
I mean, if you put enough in, it’ll explode.
Am I thinking sulfur or sodium?
Sodium,
yeah, right.
Sorry about that.
But you put that in the water and it explodes.
And that is what happens when the human heart full of sin shows up in God’s presence and suddenly discovers that it has no place there,
right?
I mean, so if we think that we can flippantly throw God’s name around or that we can enter into God’s presence with our own pride intact,
then we have misunderstood the purity,
the perfection,
the all powerful nature of God.
And I think what these writers are instructing us here, Clint,
it’s not a comfortable way to speak.
You know, when you look here and they say God will not suffer them to escape his righteous judgment.
Yeah.
Well, when these two things collide,
the unholyness of humans and the holiness of God,
then judgment is the thing that is happening in that encounter.
And ultimately,
I do think there’s some strong humility implied in this commandment.
And if we don’t have it,
the point is you’re going to find it eventually.
Yeah, it’s interesting that it is often a thing we don’t take especially seriously,
but the commandments seem to remind us that that is not the case for God.
Right. Move on then to the fourth commandment,
which finishes what is called the first table of the commandments.
You may know this,
the first four commandments have to do with our relationship specifically with God.
The second set of six commandments have to do with our relationships in community and family.
So we finish this first table of the commandments with the fourth commandment.
What is the fourth commandment?
Question 57.
The answer,
the fourth commandment is remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.
Six days you shall do all your work and labor,
but the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Lord your God.
In it you shall not do any work,
nor shall your son,
your daughter, your man, servant, your maid, servant, your cattle, your stranger that is within the gates.
For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth to see and all that is in it and rested on the seventh.
Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
What is required in the fourth commandment?
The fourth commandment requires keeping holy to God such set times as he appoints in his word.
Expressly, one day in seven to be a holy Sabbath to himself.
You know, Michael,
yeah,
modern Christians don’t probably have a good sense of Sabbath.
We understand that it’s important.
We think of it as kind of a break or a day off.
It really historically was seen as a day to specifically focus on one’s relationship with God and others,
to withdraw from the world and focus on the word to,
in essence, protect oneself from too deeply embodying the goals of work and money and success and those kind of things.
It is a far deeper tradition than we often live out in our own day and I think,
you know, while we know it’s in there,
I think we generally often don’t exactly know what to do with it.
And on the other hand,
we’ve seen communities where people get in trouble for mowing their yard on the wrong day or going to the grocery store.
And,
you know, I think,
again, it is perhaps easier to make some rules and hold to the legalism of this commandment than it is to truly understand what we’re being invited to do here.
Well,
I’m trying to think there are several commandments where Jesus has a direct affront with religious leaders over debates over what is intended in the commandment.
You certainly have that with adultery.
An example of that,
maybe example par excellence is the times when Jesus gets into conflict over Sabbath law and you have that story of when the disciples are plucking grain and Jesus,
you know, he gets in trouble with Sabbath laws,
yeah, healings.
I mean, just all the time throughout the gospel,
Sabbath, Sabbath, Sabbath.
So maybe there’s a Christian temptation to read in those stories that Jesus is softening the importance of Sabbath.
Maybe I mean, maybe we get this sense that, well,
that one Jesus is trying to make open ended a little bit.
I think that’s probably a substantial misunderstanding of what’s happening in that debate between the Pharisees and Jesus.
I think it is important for us to remember in an always on 24/7 Internet culture that God makes in seven days,
works for six and on the seventh, God rests.
And the extent to which rest does not exist in the middle of Christian community does offer on some level a bit of a dial or a dashboard to show us how well or how thoroughly we’ve heard the word of God.
When God says, trust me, I have you, and we’re unwilling to trust God with one day,
one day that we set aside to not be productive.
You know, I do think there’s maybe a place here where this command,
particularly in the modern experience of the world,
may have a substantial kind of impact if we’re willing to let it speak to us in our own context.
Of all of the commands,
this one, I think, has a kind of translative import that the modern church has yet to see the full extent of, in my opinion.
I think that maybe no other commandment makes us quite as uncomfortable and tempts us to protect ourselves with rules, with rituals,
with guidelines.
You know,
the idea that our pursuits of work become good until we define ourselves with them.
That the idea that for our spiritual health,
we need to step back from whatever it is that we do or think that we have to do,
our to-do lists and our tasks and our accomplishments and our pursuit of wealth and security,
that we need regularly,
not just occasionally, we need regularly to set those down and rest.
And when the Scripture says rest,
it doesn’t simply mean take a break.
It means to renew.
It means to be restored.
It means to be rebuilt into who we are called to be.
It doesn’t just mean get our energy back.
It means to refill our spiritual tank,
to make sure that that rest,
rest in the Bible is always connected to our relationship with God.
It is not simply an antidote to fatigue.
It is more than that.
It is an invitation to relationship with God.
And so when the fourth commandment tells us to keep a day holy,
it is to set aside all of those other things and to put our focus back again and again and again in regular cycle on that sense of nothing else being more important than our relationship.
We move then,
question 59, “Which day of the seven has God appointed to be the weekly Sabbath?
From the beginning of the world to the resurrection of Christ,
God appointed the seventh day of the week to be the weekly Sabbath and the first day of the week ever since to continue to the end of the world,
which is the Christian Sabbath.”
So you may know this,
but the word Sabbath is literally Saturday.
The Jewish faith still considers the Sabbath to be Saturday.
Christians,
because of Sunday being the day of Easter,
the day of resurrection,
moved their day of worship and rest to that day,
to the first day of the week rather than the last.
Obviously, a catechism that comes out of the Christian faith is going to celebrate that move and to claim that Sunday now is to be the day.
Again, I think in the modern church,
Michael, probably some flexibility to that idea in a world that is never turned off,
in job markets that include Sunday.
Our ancestors were willing to argue over specifics like which day in a way that I think most of us don’t necessarily find helpful,
though we should be aware of the conversation, I think.
But the short version of this is that for Christians, the Sabbath has,
since the earliest days of the church,
the Christian church, been on Sunday.
Yeah, it has a day.
I mean, you know,
let’s not get hung up in particular debates.
This is a teaching document.
This is intended for those who are coming up in the faith.
I think the point that’s worth taking ourselves here,
Clint, is simply that there is a day of the week that the Sabbath is expected,
that the Christian day has been the day of resurrection.
And, you know,
wherever we find ourselves in the midst of our professional, personal, vocational identities,
this lands on every single one who’s seeking to follow Jesus.
Whether or not that happens for you on a Sunday,
you know, that’s maybe another topic for another time.
But I think the spirit of this is clear.
Yeah, let’s press on here.
So how is the Sabbath to be sanctified?
That’s the next logical question.
The Sabbath is to be sanctified by a holy resting all that day,
even from such worldly employments and recreations as are lawful on other days,
and spending the whole time in the public and private exercise of God’s worship,
except so much as is to be taken up by the works of necessity and mercy.
So we get close to drawing some lines here,
I think, in a way that maybe we haven’t seen in other ones.
Sabbath has tended to do that through the years.
But it is a holy resting,
even from what we do on other days,
because recreation can be an idol.
The idea of our ancestors was,
this isn’t a day you just go play golf all day because you don’t have to work.
It is to be a spiritual day.
It is to be grounded in our relationship with God.
It is to be centered in worship.
And one is not forbidden from everything.
There are some things that need to be done.
People need to eat.
Livestock needs to be fed.
If someone is hurt,
they need to be tended to.
This isn’t legalism, but generally speaking,
it is to say that the things that are not of absolute necessity,
we have to learn to let them wait as we focus on God instead.
Yeah, and Clay, I think they defined that in the next question,
so let’s just rush in there.
Yeah. What is forbidden?
The fourth commandment forbids the omissions or careless performance of the duties required,
and the profaning of the day by idleness,
or doing that which is in itself sinful,
or by unnecessary thoughts, words, or works
about our worldly employments or recreation.
So, Michael, they cover a lot of ground here.
Yeah, that’s a lot.
The most interesting one to me is that we profane the day by idleness.
And here again, we get the sort of Presbyterian industriousness,
right?
Because a day of rest doesn’t mean doing nothing.
It doesn’t mean,
“Hey, I get eight hours on the couch.
I’m hunkered down in front of the TV,” whatever that is.
It is to be a productive day,
but that productivity is not to be toward our gainful employment or even to be considering what we have to do tomorrow.
It is to be in the moment,
and the moment focused on our relationship with God,
who we are called to be in Christ,
and how we can serve Him more faithfully.
This is really well written.
It is really well written.
I’m only going to add,
it’s also unbelievably challenging in ways that I don’t think we have time to unpack in our own context.
I mean, what we mean by this idea of things that we might do,
which are unto themselves sinful or unnecessary thoughts, words, or works,
worldly employments or recreations.
Whoa,
right?
To whatever extent we’re going to be able to apply this is going to be done with some significant amount of thought, Clint.
I think we don’t have time to unpack exactly what a modern response to this commandment is going to be,
but we need to be clear.
We’re not going to be,
by and large, living in societies that will do this for us.
We’re not going to be living in the midst of communities who are going to create time in the future that are going to naturally make these spaces.
So the question for Christians will be,
how will this shape our Christian communities,
and what impact will it have on our personal lives?
And that’s the kind of thing that’s going to require some real thought and some real intentionality in practice.
Yeah, and, you know,
not to push this too far,
but this is just really interesting,
and I think it gets into the kind of legalism that can happen.
If I have put my work off until Monday,
if I’m not doing the farming or if I’m not going into the office or whatever that may be,
but I spend from 9 till midnight watching the clock and thinking about how I need to go do it,
I’m not keeping the command.
That’s not rest in the sense that the Fourth Commandment invites us to have.
And so, yeah,
very challenging answer here.
Again, I appreciate that they didn’t give us everything that it means,
but they certainly painted with a broad brush all the ways that we could get it wrong.
Let’s finish up here.
What are the reasons annexed to the Fourth Commandment?
The Fourth Commandment,
God allows us six days to work for our own employment,
his challenging of a special propriety in the seventh,
his own example,
and a blessing of his Sabbath day.
So,
no surprise here if you know scripture at all.
We do this because God set the pattern.
We didn’t make this up.
We didn’t come up with this.
God sets for the creation a kind of rhythm,
a kind of circular experience of rest every one day of the week at least,
and we take it directly from that.
Yeah, and you know,
that is a very generous proportion for God to give,
right?
I mean, when you think that you have seven days out of every week,
God gives you six in the language of this catechism for our own employment,
for our own use,
for whatever thing you feel compelled to use that time for.
This has been given to you as gift by God.
When we receive it that way,
all God asks for is one day of complete trust in him in which we don’t try to make stuff work ourselves,
but we trust that on that day,
connection with God is enough.
And that’s a foreign concept,
Clint.
I mean, it really is.
It’s a foreign concept to all people.
It’s also a foreign context or concept in our culture.
And, you know,
relative to the idolatry conversation using God’s name in vain,
there may be a sense in which this particular command may for us be a place of struggle of comprehension.
Not that we can’t get our minds around it,
but comprehension as in how would this integrate into our Christian life,
this is going to take some work.
Yeah, I think we do it a disservice when we make it about all the cans and can’ts of a Sunday rather than the much deeper invitation underneath to experience rest and peace as we focus on God in worship and in life.
And so it’s a wonderful beginning of a conversation.
So there it is, the first table.
Hope there was something in it that you found challenging,
that you found interesting,
that you found helpful.
Join us next week as we circle back and we look at the next six commandments,
the sort of communal and relational commandments that God gives us,
and we’ll continue on with Westminster Catechism.
Thanks, friends.
We’ll see you next time.