Friends, welcome back to our podcast on Westminster Confession as we make our way
through the shorter catechism of Westminster in our book of Confessions in the Presbyterian
Church.
You can find the shorter catechism online,
lots of places.
We are on question 14.
Michael, we’ve covered some ground.
Interestingly enough, we started with kind of the goodness of God,
the decrees of God,
and that really is the good news.
Now,
I think in typical Presbyterian
fashion, we sort of take a turn to the challenge,
the bad news.
What is the problem
that now stands between God and us?
In the last podcast,
we sort of left off with the fall,
with the disobedience of Adam and Eve.
And in Reformed theology,
you probably know this,
that isn’t just an Adam and Eve problem,
that becomes a human problem.
The disobedience of our first parents becomes a paradigm,
a stain upon humanity that we all then live with.
And that’s largely, I think, the ground we cover today.
It is.
And I want to maybe provide just a short
description of how we get to this kind of emphasis or maybe give us a little bit of a
sense of context.
Just remember that as the Reformed tradition really begins to pick up steam,
it’s happening in the midst of a massive transformation in society.
Of course, Luther stands up to the Catholic Church,
accuses it of all these abuses.
And in the midst of this conversation of the Reformation,
John Calvin is taking very seriously the ways
in which sin has impacted not just the world,
which would be a conversation I think many of us
would be comfortable having today,
but he’s also very taken with the amount of sin that has corrupted the church.
And in the midst of the conversation about reforming or transforming,
going back to the earliest testament of the faith and to find in that inspiration to be the kind of
people called out as God intended from the very beginning,
there’s a natural act of confessing
that sin has hampered this whole project.
And so the creeds that come from the Reformation,
the Reformed tradition that grows out of it does have a special sensitivity to sin.
And so our conversation today is going to walk difficult ground.
I mean, there’s no way of really
starting this conversation without admitting that these folks are very,
very honest in their
assessment of the severity of our situation.
And it does require some humility to be able to enter
into that conversation fully.
But it also comes at a moment in which I think we can understand it makes sense.
And in fact, in our own time,
I think if we’re willing to look around
and to see the world in which we live,
brokenness seeps out in lots of places.
And so to rush past
the hard stuff into what would be much more comfortable is a temptation I think we should resist.
Yeah, and I think, you know,
Michael, this is traveling what I would call classic
Reformed theology grounds.
And in our tradition,
I think the general guiding premises have been
that we can’t really understand grace until we understand sin.
We can’t really appreciate
the gracious answer of God to our problem until we’re honest about what that problem is.
And so
Reformed Christians,
Presbyterians have always, I think, been willing to take a pretty serious look
at the human condition.
And I would say the ground we cover today is pretty vintage,
pretty accepted,
pretty standard stuff, though that doesn’t make it easy.
I do think historically it’s been
pretty well attested and pretty well accepted.
Yeah, and I would agree with that.
Though Presbyterians may have the notoriety for reveling in this,
and I’m not entirely certain that as we
go through it, we should attach that level of excitement.
I mean, the bad news is yet bad news.
So this is just to say as we jump into it here today,
Clint, let’s try to hold on to the good,
and we’ll see in the distinctives that we’re going to discover here today that,
you know, we want to hear what is true and not revel in what is bad.
And there’s a balance to walk there.
Yeah, I think any time you emphasize something,
you run the risk of overemphasizing it.
And there have been times in our tradition we’ve done that,
and we’ll certainly try not to do it today.
We jump in here at question 14,
which is very simple, very straightforward.
“What is sin?” Question 13 mentioned that Adam and Eve had sinned against God,
so the follow-up in 14 is,
“What is sin?” And the answer is,
sin is any want of conformity unto or transgression of the law of
God.
And the word “want” here is Old English.
Maybe the concept is lack.
Sin is any lack of
conforming to God’s law,
and it is any transgression of God’s law.
And if we accept the idea that God’s
law is what God wills for us,
that God’s law is what God desires,
then any time we fall short of
that or outright break that will,
that desire of God for us,
we have sin.
So sin is a falling short.
Sin is a—the word literally means to miss the mark,
to miss the target.
Sin,
I think it’s important to understand, Michael,
is not a thing in itself.
It’s a failing
to what is true.
It is a shortcoming of what God has intended.
In other words,
sin is only a power
when compared to the good thing that God wants for us.
It is always the lesser of what
are options.
It is always the smaller of our choices,
and it is always the thing that is not
in keeping with willfully or unwillfully what God desires for us.
Yeah, I think the image for that might be light and darkness,
right?
Darkness is not a substance unto itself.
Darkness only exists in the absence of light,
and the law of God—and this is—we need to be clear about this—the law of God is God’s gift to humanity.
We shouldn’t just understand that this is a binding kind of contract,
that we were predestined to not be able to hold up to.
It’s the idea that God has
ordered the universe in such a way for human flourishing,
that there is a way of living in
God’s will and God’s best kingdom to the extent to which we could live as God’s people.
We could live with God.
The reality is, though,
we have to go back here,
like you said, Clint, to question 13.
Our forebears chose to transgress that way of being.
They chose to elevate themselves
in the face of God’s own sovereign love and desire for them to be whole and to live as
God intended from the very beginning.
And so, because of that transgression—now,
to use the word we have in question 14—we have irreparably broke the covenantal relationship.
We’ve broken our part of it.
We decided that we wanted it our own way,
and in doing so,
we transgressed God’s way.
And so sin is therefore any moment in which we as humans continue down that path,
when we allow this brokenness within ourselves to reorder our priorities and our lives in such a way
that we become the center and God’s ability,
God’s command,
God’s will,
God’s law,
all of these different aspects of God’s best.
When these things are no longer the central thing,
then Clint, like darkness, settling across our souls,
we’ve lost the light of God’s best,
and now we therefore
find ourselves in the place of what,
you know, the history of the church,
those fathers and mothers
of the faith, they use this word sin to help us understand that.
Right, and simply put,
sin is any point at which we fall short of what God desires.
And so then we move to the next question.
Well, then, what was the sin of our first parents?
What was the sin whereby our first parents fell from
the estate wherein they were created?
So, again, accounting for the language a little bit,
what was Adam and Eve’s sin?
How is it that they failed to conform or that they transgressed what God had
given them?
What, where was it that they fell short?
And the answer is the sin by which our
first parents fell from the estate wherein they were created was their eating of the forbidden fruit.
And Michael,
you know,
when we think of this literally,
we have to be careful because
we’ve seen this picture,
we’ve seen it in children’s Bibles,
we’ve seen it in Christian art,
but the idea of eating a fruit does not lend enough theological weight to the idea of disobedience.
The idea here is that Adam and Eve were given clear instruction by God,
and for their own selfish reason,
they did something else.
And when we draw a cute picture of it with an apple and a person,
I think sometimes we minimize the destructiveness of sin,
the willfulness of our parents in the
faith and of ourselves.
Sin is actively working against what God has called us to do.
And we just have to be careful,
I think, that we don’t kind of soften this in visualizing it in a way that isn’t helpful.
Agree completely.
I couldn’t agree more.
I want to add to this that there’s a sense
in which here the creed is very simply trying to follow Scripture.
Absolutely.
This is a deeply
biblical account, and I want to make it clear that the end here,
it was eating the forbidden fruit,
is what we’re told.
We’re not told how that is sinful.
They’re not giving us a whole explanation
of the spiritual infraction.
We’re simply told the biblical account.
This is what they were instructed.
This is what they did.
And the sparing of words is unbelievably helpful increase like
this because it captures the truth of what has been given to us in the biblical record while also
implicitly allowing there to be some space for people of faith to recognize that we don’t
completely understand the transaction.
We know that there was an infraction that happened.
We know that there are actually many biblical accounts.
You can look throughout the Scriptures
to see different aspects of how this transgression was such a radical breach of following God being
obedient to God’s will.
But here the creed is short.
The creed is to the point.
The creed is
intentionally biblical,
and in that I think the simplicity is very clear about the end of the day.
This is what the Genesis account tells us happened,
and we know with a fuller witness that this sin
was an irreparable breach.
But the creed here,
Clint, is not going to tease that out or fill it
out with paragraphs or books as has been done.
You know, it’s to the point this is the thing that
happened, and we’re allowed some space to really see that there’s a lot of things happening there.
Right, and that’s given to us in a concrete story,
the story of the garden,
the story of the fruit.
But because it is,
I think sometimes, Michael, our temptation has been to put too much emphasis on the thing,
the fruit,
and not enough on the sin.
The idea that Adam and Eve had a clear choice
between what God said and doing something different.
And they chose,
really the way the story is told,
with very little hesitation,
maybe none,
they chose themselves.
They disobeyed what God had said, and they did what God had said not to do.
They transgressed.
And I think when we talk about sin,
that’s far more important than the idea of the fruit.
That’s the concrete mechanism
that the story uses to convey the reality of their choice,
but the sin is in the choice.
They make a conscious choice to disobey God,
so the sin by which they fell was in disregarding
or disobeying God and eating the fruit.
And the fruit of their disobedience is the focus of the next question.
Did all mankind fall into Adam’s first transgression?
So in other words,
is this
sin something that only affected Adam and Eve?
Did it only have an impact in their lives and in their situation?
And of course, we anticipate the answer.
The covenant being made with Adam,
not only for himself,
but for his posterity, all mankind,
descending from him by ordinary generations,
sinned in him,
and fell with him in his first transgression.
So again, it would be nice if we had maybe something a little easier in terms of our
own language, but the answer here is relatively simple.
No, it didn’t simply affect Adam.
It didn’t simply affect Adam and Eve.
As the parents of the human race,
their disobedience stained all of us,
tainted all of us.
They passed down a willful disobedience that now becomes a part of
the human soul and a part of the human experience so that we are all,
by generation after generation
after generation, affected by this act of willful disobedience on their part.
Yeah, this has been given the name by theologians’ original sin,
and so if you ever hear that,
this is the idea that they’re speaking about.
It is a divergence from much of popular culture
and certainly some core assumptions of the Enlightenment,
this idea that we are, as humanity,
simply going from worse to better to better to better,
and that that is being driven by a blank
slate, that every person is a blank slate,
and at our core we’re neither good nor evil,
or maybe even we have good,
and then that is the thing that drives us forward to this sort of constant
progression or evolution of society,
however you want to give that language.
This is a historical,
theological departure from that basic assumption.
It’s to say that left to our own devices,
without revelation or incarnation,
or in some way giving words to God interrupting the human
both choice and its consequences,
without God doing that,
left to our own devices,
this sinfulness would continue to be passed from one generation to the other,
and again I want to point out the
economy of words here,
Clint, that how is not answered here, not really,
but what is said
clearly as a statement of faith,
that we are as humans,
because of the choices made in freedom
by those who have come before us,
we are in a position where we do need miraculous act of God
to break this cycle which left unto itself,
this thing we call original sin,
would keep on perpetuating, and so therefore we as creature stand in need of what we would call salvation,
or what I’ve been calling this interruption by our Savior, by the Creator,
and it is a statement
of the creed, it’s a statement of the Reformed faith,
this is a historic,
it’s an orthodox
belief, it’s been within the fold of the Christian faith,
that humans stand in need of salvation
because of the irreparable harm that we’ve caused,
and that this will pass from one
generation to the next,
until that day in which God writes all that is wrong.
Yeah, and I think we see that,
we can continue this conversation Michael,
I think we see it as
we move into the next question, question 17 here,
into what estate did the fall bring mankind?
So a couple of things here,
notice that fall is capitalized,
now we’re talking about a title,
a name given to a theological reality,
and if we said earlier that they had a good estate,
they were created in a good estate,
they sinned and lost that estate,
and we all fell with them,
what did we fall into?
What is our new reality?
What is our new condition?
And the answer is
fairly outspoken,
the fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery, and misery here
could mean lots of things,
it probably primarily means that there is now a barrier between us and
God, there is a separation,
in other words, it doesn’t mean that all of our days are without joy,
it means that there is now a fundamental problem of being human,
and that problem is
that we have experienced this separation.
Adam and Eve had a choice,
they made the wrong choice,
and the rest of us really don’t have a choice anymore,
we all share that estate with them,
not because of what we did,
but because that’s now what it means to be human.
So our new estate,
our new reality is one of sin and separation,
and this is now the fundamental problem of human existence.
Yeah, and the emphasis here is,
I think, incredibly helpful,
Clint.
It’s a miserable condition.
It is a not intended outcome.
God did not set out from the beginning for all of the
Presbyterian and Reformed emphasis upon sin.
We don’t glory in the fact that sin is the step that
humans chose to take,
even though we believe that God’s glory is going to be seen all the more
because of God’s ability to solve the problem that was created,
but we do not find the condition of
sin to be in any way laudable.
It is a miserable condition for the creature to be schismed or
separated from the Creator.
That is a horrible thing,
and we recognize that misery,
which I think you are right to say is primarily a spiritual condition,
also, though, does have a kind of
social “this kingdom” kind of effect.
In other words, the world in which we live in,
we know all the well,
is filled with misery,
real human suffering, and the kind of suffering that
we see in the midst of our world, I think,
does have connections, as we’ll go further into the
creed, to see how God saves us in Jesus Christ,
that even Jesus Christ is the one who takes upon
suffering, literal physical misery, for the state of the world.
There is a corrective in Jesus’s
offering to the real misery that we experience because of our failure,
which we see in sin.
So, these things have many senses,
and though it may be short sentences here in the catechism,
I think there’s many things being called upon here, Clint, simultaneously.
Yeah, and I think seeing theologically, Michael, misery,
I agree,
is the right word.
Imagine the tragedy of knowing what you were intended to be,
but being unable to attain it,
to be given a vision
of what humanity was supposed to be,
which is now not achievable for us,
not attainable for us.
That is,
it is misery to live in a constant state of being aware of what we were meant to be,
but unable to become that.
That is a miserable condition theologically.
We continue to flush
that out.
This next question, I think, is really strong.
“Wherein consists the sinfulness of the
estate wherein man fell?” In other words,
what is the sinful estate?
What are the markers of the
sinfulness we now live with?
The sinfulness of that estate wherein to man fell consists in
the guilt of Adam’s first sin,
the want of original righteousness,
and the corruption of his whole nature,
which is commonly called original sin,
together with all actual transgressions
which proceed from it.
In some ways, Michael, this is the most theological answer I think we’ve
encountered today.
So, what does it mean to be sinful?
It means to be guilty in Adam.
It means to lack our intended righteousness,
in other words, to fall short of who we were created to be.
And it means to now be corrupt in our nature,
which is predisposed to sin,
to be sinful.
This is what is commonly called original sin.
And notice,
just to be clear,
that doesn’t even count
our actual sins, which are added at the end of the answer here,
together with all the actual
transgressions which proceed from it.
So, it is not our sin that makes us sinful.
It is being sinful that leads us to sin.
And that’s a very important distinction in the
Reformed faith, in the Presbyterian faith.
Sin is not simply the amount of or the weight of the sins we do.
Sin is deeper than that.
It is the stain that now lives in our own spirits.
It is the burden
of our own souls,
which comes to us through Adam,
through knowing that we are not who we are made to
be, and being corrupt in nature.
In other words, being predisposed to follow ourself and struggle
with being obedient to God.
I find it really striking here,
Clint, that in the fullness of the answer,
only one of these
things speaks to the thing that I think we most commonly define as sin.
It’s interesting here that the end,
together with all actual transgressions which proceed from it,
essentially encompasses all the stuff that we worry about.
Did I use the wrong language?
Did I treat my neighbor poorly?
Did I do this thing,
or should I have done this thing?
These are the things that we commonly consider sinful.
But the catechism wants to make it very clear that is like the whole
little pile of stuff that just piles on the backside of the actual problem.
The actual problem is a
nature problem.
It is a fundamental orientation of our hearts.
It’s this inward turnedness,
this constant striving that we have in ourselves,
which we have always had is what this creed is
saying.
It’s saying that the original reality that has been passed from one to the next
is this inward turn,
and that the rest of the stuff that we occupy our attentions on,
these things are just flowing out of that brokenness.
If you really understand that,
I think it should shape our understanding of the problem in a really important way,
because the church should care a lot about sin.
Sin is an unbelievably essential thing to understand
if we’re going to then further understand the solution to it, right?
But we so often fixate
on this last section,
the actual transgressions, we miss the preceding sections,
which is the foundation or the font of all of those following transgressions.
And so, yes, we sin.
We commit sin.
The transgressions are daily,
but they are flowing out of an inner deeper brokenness.
That is the sin
that Christ comes to ultimately solve.
And then these other transgressions,
they are addressed as part of the healing of the actual problem.
And that may, I don’t know if that sounds
maybe like we’re splitting hairs here,
but I think the distinction theologically is unbelievably
important.
Don’t miss it, because if you can see the distinction,
then everything that follows I
think is shaped meaningfully by it.
I think this is, again,
deeply reformed,
deeply Presbyterian,
and I think very important,
and you may or may not agree with this,
but understand where we come from.
When most people hear that we are separated from God by our sin,
they naturally think of those things I’ve done.
They think of my failures, my mistakes,
as if those were the things that has
led me to lose fellowship and communion with God.
But for our ancestors in the faith who sought to understand this theologically,
my sin is really only an expression of my fundamental problem,
which is my sinfulness.
And it is my sinfulness that has separated me from God.
It is the sinfulness
I inherit as being human.
It is the sinfulness inherent to the human condition that separates
me from God, not the things that I do.
The things that I do are born of the deeper problem that I am sinful.
And so the gap between us and God is not lessened when I do some good things,
and it’s not made worse when I do some bad things.
It exists in a pre-existing condition
from the moment I’m born that there is between God and the creature,
the Creator and creature, now a gap,
a chasm.
There is a wound that has severed the relationship because of our
disobedience, and that’s not because of anything I’ve done or not done.
That exists far before
I try to make those choices.
And I think, again,
that may seem overstated.
That’s where we come
from.
That’s where Presbyterian has lived.
That’s the ground in which we grew.
You made the comment
earlier, Michael, about not wanting to go too far with sin,
but I think in a healthy way,
this is the respect our ancestors had for sin.
This is how serious they understand the problem.
It’s not simply saying a bad word or sharing gossip or stealing something from a place.
Those are all sins,
but they’re not our core problem.
Our core problem is that we are sinful in our nature,
and our ancestors wanted to make sure that those who understood the faith in this version of it,
in this lineage of it,
understood that sin is a monumental.
It is not a small thing.
It is an all-encompassing,
horrendous, horrific thing that is part of every human life.
So the ordering of this matters,
and it is really important for how we conceive of the gravity of
God’s solution to the problem.
We did have someone recently make a comment on one of our previous
videos.
It was, I think, a study from Corinthians,
and in it we were talking about some of the lists
of sinfulness that Paul was making there.
The comment that was made was,
“Why didn’t you all
just call this sin?” As far as I understood it,
they were hoping that we would come down more
clearly on that list and on what Paul meant and was laying out there.
I just want to illustrate
with that example that the Reformed tradition would say that,
yes, this is our temptation.
Our is this not?
Because there is a sense to the Christian,
I’m going to use this word of empowerment,
it feels empowering to know this is sinful and this isn’t,
“I’m going to do this and I’m not
going to do this,” and there’s this feeling like I can do something about it.
The true historic
Reformed understanding of sin is,
by many accounts,
disempowering.
In other words,
it is a reality you
can do nothing about.
The depth of our brokenness is outside of our ability to manipulate or to control.
Yes,
that’s true,
right?
That the problem, the chasm to use your language, is so vast
that it can only be repaired by a miraculous work of God.
Yes, that’s the answer.
So,
there is a kind of serious note here which,
if properly understood,
is deeply,
deeply challenging.
It challenges our assumption that if I worked harder or that if I practiced my faith
more faithfully or if I started earlier,
that I could somehow move the needle for God,
that I could find myself on the other side of God’s list,
that there’s this kind of works mentality that is
easily adopted in the Christian faith,
but our Reformed forebears have no place for it.
There’s nothing that can be done that will alleviate the original problem, which is sin.
The sinfulness that follows it is a thing that will be shaped and changed in a encounter with Jesus Christ.
We’ll get to that later in the Catechism,
but I just want to make very clear,
if it feels like this
is disempowering, it’s because it is.
That’s the point.
And the solution is a solution that will
come with a new kind of empowering,
but don’t mistake.
Sin is the problem.
Sinfulness is just an outgrowth or a symptom of that problem.
Yeah, and we see that in the next question as we move
on here to 19.
What is the misery of that estate wherein man fell?
In other words, what’s the result?
If we’re now all sinful,
what is the result?
All mankind,
by the fall,
lost communion with God and are under his wrath and curse,
and so made liable to all miseries of this life,
to death itself,
and to the pains of hell forever.
So this is the misery that was referred to earlier.
We are separated.
We have, by the fall,
all lost communion with God.
And we stand under the wrath
of God who calls us to be righteous,
which we cannot be,
and the curse of God,
which judges us as unrighteous because we are.
And so we are liable to the miseries of this life and to death,
which is not, as we saw, part of the original creation.
It is the result of our sin
and to the pains of hell forever.
Hell being here, I think,
one can imagine it as a place of
torment, but I think better understood in this context is the reality of separation.
To be separate from God is hell.
It is hellish to not be in communion with the one who loved us,
the one who made us,
the one who offers us life.
He is the ground of life,
and to be separate from
him is not only death,
but it is torturous,
eternally torturous.
And so this is now our new future.
In our sinfulness,
this is the future we’ve crafted and created for ourselves,
and it is bleak.
Right.
I would just point out,
Clint, it’s not just the future.
It’s also the past and the present,
right?
Because you have the past and the fact that we lost communion with God
in this act by our forebears.
You have the idea that we now live with the miseries of this life.
We literally have of this life,
the life we’re living, the present.
And then, yeah, to your point, we have that reality of separation,
even forever,
that hellish separation from God,
that schism of communion that we saw not just at the beginning,
but would be our future lot or our future experience.
The reality here is the framers want us to see that the problem of sin is all encompassing.
It touches every part of our human lives,
touches every part of who we were,
who we are, and who we’re becoming.
And it presents this as a universal problem with universal significance.
And they’re being very clear as best as they can use their language to make sure that we can’t get
a shortcut to that problem.
And whether we like that or not,
maybe that’s a different conversation.
But I think they are effectively communicating what they’re trying to communicate.
Yeah.
And so then the question is,
what do we do?
In other words, confronted with this idea that
we are now sinners,
that we have lost communion with God,
that we face the torment of separation
eternally, that we live under now the reality of death and pain,
what next?
What can we do?
So, question 20,
did God leave all mankind,
humankind, to perish in the estate of sin and
misery?
In other words, is this it?
Is death now the last word?
Is lost communion with God now the last word?
So, there’s a lot here, Michael.
This is packed, I think.
So,
God,
out of good pleasure,
God is not compelled to do anything.
God doesn’t have to do anything.
God is in the right to be
separate from us and to judge us.
Sinful.
That is God’s right,
and God is right in doing it.
But out of God’s mere pleasure,
from all eternity,
chose some to everlasting life.
The word elected here
we’ll have to get into at some point.
It’s a somewhat problematic word for Presbyterians,
at least historically it has some baggage.
But I don’t want to get into that yet,
because the point of this is to share good news,
not theological problems.
From all eternity, God chose, God elected some to everlasting life and entered into a covenant of grace to deliver them
out of sin and misery and bring them to salvation,
to being saved by a Redeemer.
Redeemer means one who intervenes, a mediator, an intermediate,
one who goes between.
So, God,
for no other reason than
God is good and wanted to,
made a way to save some from the estate of sin and death and to bring them
into salvation and did so by a redemptive act,
by sending a Redeemer.
Now, this is all going to be
rushed out further down the Catechism,
but this is the original and first pronouncement of the good
news that sin is not the last word.
And it’s a transitional moment in the Catechism.
It is going to become for us the bridge where we leave the depths of sin and we find ourselves walking
towards that celestial city from the Pilgrim’s Progress,
the promise of restoration,
the good news that we even have here explicitly,
that language of salvation.
So, this is a turning
point moment in the Catechism as it transitions from one ground to another.
I want to point out
that there’s some really key words that we’re now seeing for the first time here.
“Grace” is unbelievably important.
“Redeemer” we’re going to see fleshed out.
This idea that there is a state
of salvation which is being given on offer.
All of these are really important.
Their substantial books have been written about each and every one.
So, we’re certainly not going to be able
to plumb the depths of what’s happening here.
But I just want to make the point here, Clint,
that when God offers this gift,
this covenant of grace,
we do tend to get fixated on the “who is
it for?” question.
And you, I think, wisely are advising us to skirt around that for just the
moment and to suggest that maybe if we truly understood the depth of the problem in the
questions previous, the sheer possibility of this great answer,
this solution that God is willing
to offer, is so magnificent in its intent and in its effect that we can do nothing but just be
shocked with the hope and promise that there might be reconciliation on the other side
of rank human disobedience and this sort of disordering of our lives that God is still yet
able by God’s grace and even by God’s desire to make right.
That is a beautiful promise, a wonderful gift.
That is such a wonderful note,
Clint, of hope amidst what has otherwise in the
rest of our conversation today been a lot of darkness.
Here we’re beginning to see the light
shine and that light is grace.
It’s good news,
and we shouldn’t miss that good news.
Yeah, the wonderful proclamation that God was not content that we would be lost to our sinfulness,
though we deserved it,
though we brought death upon ourselves.
God chose to act.
God chose to pursue good, to be gracious,
and to offer salvation by a Redeemer,
which then of course leads us to the question,
who is the Redeemer of God’s elect?
Question 21, it’s the only natural question that follows.
Who is it that redeems us?
The only Redeemer of God’s elect is the Lord Jesus Christ,
who being the eternal Son of God became man and so was and continues to be God and man in two
distinct natures and one person forever.
This question, I think Michael makes me smile because
on one hand, it’s a beautiful proclamation of the one who redeems us.
It is the one who comes
incarnate.
It is the one who is God and man.
It is the eternal Son of God who becomes one of us
and continues to be both God and human.
But then, you know, you are reminded that this is written
by a bunch of theologians who can’t keep themselves from putting in the end here in two distinct
natures and one person forever.
We’ve seen that language already in the Trinity.
They want to reconcile that.
The huge battles have been fought over that language,
and you see here that they
want to make sure that in every opportunity possible,
they continue to clarify where they are on that.
But even having said that,
they add a little theological jargon,
I think, here to the end.
The celebration here is we know the Redeemer.
The Redeemer has a name.
The Redeemer shares the
reality of God and the reality of man.
The Redeemer is of both worlds,
the perfect and the fallen.
The Redeemer understands the nature of both sides of this gap,
this chasm, and the Redeemer comes
to save those who are on the wrong side of that and deliver them back to the one who created them
and has now, again,
claimed them even in spite of their sin.
It’s hard, Clint, with our historical separation to see all of the values that are really enshrined
in some of these particular word choices.
Maybe to pull back just briefly and to try to give some context.
You know,
the conversation about sin is dark.
It is not
shying away from the reality of
how severe the problem is.
And so the light that is being shown here in the promise of the Redeemer,
the fact that God would choose to offer salvation by the covenant of grace to those who don’t deserve it,
it is to whatever extent sin is bad.
This is good.
And I once had a professor who
asked, you know, what,
when you’re putting on your pants in the morning,
which leg do you put in first?
And either way, both legs of the pants are important.
In fact, they’re necessary for the
whole to be put together.
But you have to order them.
One has to proceed the other.
And here, I think there’s something deeply important in how this catechism lays it out.
We start with sin,
and then we come to its antidote,
which is Christ’s redemptive work for salvation that comes through grace,
both of them essential to understand the other,
one not, one not somehow out of field of the other,
right?
I mean, Christ’s redemptive work would not be necessary without sin.
And sin would fundamentally not be conquerable,
if not for the gravity of Christ’s nature as God
Himself, this ability to be the mediator.
And there is in that Clint,
a theological theologians playground,
yes.
But there’s also a deep kind of faith tension.
And I think maybe that’s the point
I want to make here is just that there’s a mysterious,
beautiful flowing into each other
that is preserved in this,
that faith is always a movement,
it’s from our brokenness to Christ’s
satisfaction to Christ’s redemptive ability.
And that is always faith, returning to that.
It is never stationary.
It is always a thing that we can see from a variety of perspectives.
And if we’re humble enough to look at various points in our life,
we’re going to see it from different
perspectives, because it’s this movement from our darkness to Christ’s light.
And it’s always flowing in that direction.
And there’s a beautiful kind of,
I guess I’m looking for the word pattern
in it.
There’s a way of that patterning our lives.
And it’s here in the creed.
I think C.S.
Lewis said that the gospel is bad news before it is good news.
And I think what he
means by that is the reason that we have to travel this hard ground.
People say, “Why do we have to
talk about sin?” Because if we don’t understand the problem,
we can’t be amazed by the solution.
If we don’t understand the depth of our need,
we can’t be moved with gratitude that God would respond.
We have to understand what it is to be in darkness if we then are going to appreciate the
light.
And I think it’s nobody’s favorite,
Michael.
I think talking about how we’re falling and talking
about how we’re sinful and separated from God,
those aren’t the kind of things that
we love to give voice to.
I mean,
those aren’t really the kind of things that the church even
wants to obsess on,
though we have at times.
But if we don’t go through that valley,
we can never understand when we get to the mountaintop.
We can’t appreciate the reality of a new condition.
We have to understand sin in order to understand grace and salvation and redemption and,
most importantly, the work and person of Christ who achieved it on our behalf.
And so,
thank you for sort of bearing with us as we talk about sin.
But there is a reason it comes so early
in the catechism because it has to.
And in order for us to understand the promises of faith,
we have to face the reality of the problem we’re in and what it is that God then has to do
in order to offer us a different future.
And a quick note here, Clint.
Notice how the creed treats sin as a description,
a way for us
to diagnose and understand the brokenness of the world.
It is not a justification.
It never says that so therefore we go out and we commit sin so that we continue the trespasses, right?
There are sometimes when we falsely emphasize sin or when we emphasize sin in the wrong ways,
we can sometimes use it as language to justify bad action or bad intention or continued
allowance for us to hurt ourselves and others.
There’s no justification of self in this understanding of sin.
And I think it’s worth noting,
a world who looks upon the church with
a common critique of we’re obsessed with sin,
I think is a theme that gets spoken often.
To whatever extent there’s truth in that,
I certainly hope that we can find the humility
to confess when we’ve put too much emphasis upon the state of our lives and the actions that we
take rather than the redemptive work of the one who calls us out of that.
There’s more to be said
on that.
There’s more even as the creed continues so we hope that you’ll join us for that.
But I just think at the point at which we’re talking about sin,
let’s be honest about that and say
that even though the depth of the problem is vast,
this isn’t a justification of this problem.
It is a problem.
It is something that should be hated and that we should seek to be away from,
but the depth of our problem is such that we couldn’t do that by ourselves,
if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think it does.
And I think there’s a certain freedom in confession when we start
a document of the faith that reminds us that we are broken,
that we are fallen,
that our very motives,
that our very conclusions,
that everything about us
hangs under the suspicion of something that is opposed to the will of God,
the result should be a great deal of humility about what we think we know and a reminder that
to whatever extent we move toward God,
it’s not because of us.
It is God coming to us,
it is never the other way around.
And again,
these understandings are vitally,
vitally important to Presbyterians, to Reformed Christians.
They’ll come up again and we’ll have
an opportunity to talk about them,
but it does in some ways start with the recognition that there’s
a problem in order that we can receive the good news,
which is the solution.
Well, we hope that there’s been something that’s been encouraging,
certainly challenging in the conversation today.
We would love to continue the conversation and realize there’s lots of nuance
that we could seek on this.
So if you’ve got a question or comment,
definitely put it in the
comments if you’re on YouTube or Facebook.
There is a link in the description of the video if you
want to send us a message.
We would love to have that in a more direct format.
But friends, we’re here seeking to be humble enough to hear and also seeking to be courageous enough to believe the good
news that follows even the hard truths.
And this day, we hope that there’s been something of that
for you in the conversation.
We look forward to seeing you next time.
Until then, be blessed.
Thanks, everybody.