Jesus is the Answer! | Westminster Catechism | Q 22-28

Hello friends and welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It is a joy,
privileged to have you with us here today as we
continue on in our study here of the Westminster Catechism,
which is of course a summarized version,
a teaching version of the Westminster Confession.
And to be honest with you,
Clint, we had a little bit of a tough conversation as we made our way through sin.
Last time we were together, you know,
an important conversation.
And if you are a Reformed individual,
you understand that this is a foundational building block of the Reformed family that we have from the very
beginning taken the reality of sin and the impact of sin incredibly seriously as we have formulated
both our biblical understanding of the problem and then very much so as we transition here today,
allowed that to become the place where we find the depth of our need so that therefore we see
the significance of God’s solution.
And of course,
a Christian couldn’t possibly see that solution
without turning to Jesus Christ.
And so indeed,
we ended last time together with just sort of the
tip off of who the elect was,
who the Redeemer is,
that being Jesus Christ.
And today the creed
is going to begin to flesh out the specificity,
the particularity of who Jesus is and what makes Jesus
in particular significant for our understanding of God’s solution to the problem.
Yeah, I think in some ways,
Michael, this is the most difficult ground for the catechism
in terms of being succinct,
in being brief.
Because with sin, we get the general idea and
five or six questions.
I think the catechism does a nice job of showing us the theological
pinnings of sin and the experiential aspect of sin.
But now we turn to the person of Christ and
the work of Christ, which is overwhelming.
I mean,
millions upon millions of pages have been
written in sermons.
The entire history of our faith is anchored in these questions,
who is Jesus and what has Jesus done?
And I think, therefore, that the creed has to cover
a lot of ground very quickly.
And as we’ve said along the way,
this catechism doesn’t really take the opportunity to dig deep necessarily.
The answers are designed to be memorable,
to be memorized, to be easy and quick.
But we have much to talk about as we turn to question 22 here,
having expressed the problem which is sin,
having said that the answer is Christ,
we now move to who is Christ and how it is that Christ answers the problem of our human
sinfulness.
So question 22,
how did Christ,
being the Son of God,
become man?
We’ve made this claim
already in the catechism that Christ is man and God.
And so here’s the answer.
Christ, the Son of God became man by taking to himself a true body and a reasonable soul,
being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost in the womb of the Virgin Mary and born of her,
yet without sin.
So some jargon here,
a true body and a reasonable soul,
you may or may not know that that
gives indication of past theological arguments.
Early in the church’s history,
there were these ideas that Jesus looked like a person but didn’t have a real body,
wasn’t a real human being,
or that Jesus was somehow animated without the spirit of a person
because the divinity of God replaced the humanness of his existence.
And this is just a very quick
way of saying fully human,
true body, an actual body with all of its frailties and a reasonable
soul, an actual living human spirit,
being conceived by the power of the Holy Ghost,
which is language straight out of the Creed,
the womb of the Virgin Mary.
In other words, Jesus had a physical mother and born of her,
yet without sin.
In other words, and I think to some extent, Michael, this is the crowning moment of this statement.
Having expressed that the problem of being human is being sinful,
the Creed now says that the
opportunity for Christ is to be born as a human through the power of God and yet without sin.
So Christ alone stands outside of that respect of the human family and the Creed will go on to tell
us what that allows him to do.
Yeah, right.
Jesus Christ, we’ve already been told, is the Redeemer,
but one who has been touched by sin is going to be unable to redeem or to make amends for the problem of sinfulness.
And so therefore,
the Creed or the Catechism here makes very clear
that this entire foundation is built upon mystery.
It’s built upon a statement of faith,
that Jesus Christ is truly human as a reasonable soul.
But unlike every other human has been born
in such a way,
conceived in such a way that he is not marred by that original sinfulness.
And this is, we call ourselves the Christian faith.
This is very deep down the road to the depth of what
we mean when we say faith,
that Jesus Christ is fully beholden to what it means to be human,
straight with the body and with the emotion and with the realities of being human.
And also that in some mysterious way,
he stands outside of the problem that has beset all humanity
and by his own willingness to offer himself.
And that’s going to be explained more as we keep going here.
But because of his willingness to stand in the middle,
Jesus is able to do for his
brethren what we couldn’t have done for ourselves.
And so there’s this beautiful tension,
I call it a mystery happening here at the center.
Right.
That Christ,
unstained by sin,
is unlike every other human in that regard,
but like every human in every other regard.
And that is,
mystery is the right word.
We do so by faith.
We move on then to the next question,
which is going to sound a little
strange, maybe to modern years.
What offices does Christ execute as our Redeemer?
Let me go on to the answer and then we’ll talk about the question.
Christ as our Redeemer executes the
office of a prophet,
of a priest,
and of a king,
both in his estate of humiliation and exaltation.
So,
when we talk about offices,
there is this idea biblically that has been noticed in Scripture,
and primarily we see this in the Old Testament,
not exclusively, but we see in the Old Testament
the idea of God moving in prophets,
in priests,
and in kings.
That each of these groups of people
represent a specific way in which God tried to lead and speak into the lives of the people.
That these figures were each endowed with some aspect of leading people in faith.
Priests had a religious function,
prophets had a function to call toward justice and righteousness,
kings to govern and protect.
And that in Christ,
we see Jesus fulfilling all three of these offices,
all three of these roles.
That Jesus as the Redeemer is the prophet,
the priest, and the king,
not separate but together.
And Michael then at the end here,
both in his humiliation,
in other words, what Jesus is,
he stands as priest,
prophet,
and king fulfilling all three of those roles in one person.
I’m not going to belabor this because we’re actually going to go through these
individually here as part of the Catechism.
I only just want to note that this is,
to your point,
very much a reflection of their reception of the biblical witness.
So, in other words, this is the
authors are saying we think that this is essential to our understanding of what the Bible
shows us as God works in the world.
The only thing I would note in addition to that is that the early church,
and by that I mean the church from Jesus’s resurrection all the way for a couple hundred years,
spent a great amount of time reflecting upon how Jesus Christ is pre-envisioned
in the Old Testament.
How the Old Testament read unto itself just appears to be the story of Israel,
but if read through the eyes of faith in Jesus Christ is actually transformed into this really
story that builds and makes its way culminating in the life and death of Jesus Christ so that
these figures we see in the Old Testament, the prophets,
the priests,
the kings,
they are both a telling of the people of Israel who God called and covenanted with with Abraham.
You know, if you are not familiar with that story we would invite you to go to our Genesis study,
but even more than
that we find that as that story builds that Jesus not only fulfills the spiritual duty that these
groups have in the Old Testament,
Jesus does so perfectly and there you would turn to a book like
Hebrews to see how that is all culminating in the life and experience of Jesus Christ.
So, what we have here is a statement of faith in the biblical witness,
but it is admittedly a Christian
rereading of that witness with Jesus Christ at the center and that may strike some as being
uncomfortable because you say well don’t the Old Testament texts and those stories just mean what they mean.
Christians have really never been shy of saying that Jesus Christ is the interpretive
touchstone for those stories and we can learn something even deeper through those stories if
we see Jesus at the center and I think as we go through these,
you know, that will be at play.
Yeah, and I think along those lines Michael,
it is important to say that the catechism here is not
saying that Jesus replaces those previous iterations.
It is simply saying that in Jesus
we see the fulfillment of those roles.
There were prophets that called the people to faithfulness
that stood outside and thundered away at the people when they were unjust or unrighteous.
There were kings who were charged with governing in a way that honored God and kept the standards
of God in the government and the governing of the people.
There were priests whose job it was to
keep the rituals and the sacrifices and the awareness of God alive and living through the
people and we see in those patterns of those offices something of the work of Christ.
This isn’t necessarily claiming that Jesus is those Old Testament roles.
It is to say that in those
Old Testament roles we see an aspect of part of what Christ does in His own work and I think, you know,
that is a helpful lens that the New Testament shares with us.
So, let’s go into the first one here.
How does Christ execute the office of prophet?
Christ executes the office of a prophet in revealing to us by His word and spirit the will of God for our salvation.
So, when we think of prophets,
we think of those primarily but not exclusively men in the Old
Testament who called the nation,
who called the people to faith.
They cared about the poor.
They cared about the weak.
They cared about the outsider.
They cared about righteousness.
They hated hypocrisy.
They cared about the people when the people said one thing and did another thing
and we see this passion in the work of Christ.
Christ executes the office of prophet by revealing.
The work of prophet is primarily revelation to show people what God desires,
to show people God’s will and to call them to account when they have disregarded it and to call them to faithfulness in following it.
And I think, Michael, fairly easy to equate this with what most people know
of the work of Jesus.
Yeah, I think so.
I think my only note and this is,
I think, referenced by what you said but I want to make it explicit here, Clint,
because maybe those of you joining us for
the conversation might be surprised that the word salvation here is much broader than what we often
have in our common discourse.
If you think of salvation and what you think of is maybe a personal conversion,
you think of a personal hearing of the gospel,
maybe you even think of
that publicly, like lots of people being converted,
but you think of that mostly as a spiritual
reality that opens to us the possibility of eternal life,
the promise and hope of God’s eternal resurrection power,
then that is a true part of what is intended here.
But that’s a much,
much smaller segment than what is intended.
When here we see the word salvation,
what is in mind is all of the things that stand in between us and the reception and understanding
of God’s justice and righteousness and will and ultimate will for humanity.
And that includes the oppression in our current world of the lost and the least.
That includes those who go without
shelter and who are hungry.
I mean, this includes this part of life.
The prophets were famously
caustic in the words that they had to share with the powers of their day.
But it also has to do
with calling people to the way of life beyond the life that we see.
And so I guess my encouragement would be,
as we think of Jesus Christ as the culmination or the ultimate holder of the office
of profit, we need to understand that salvation is huge.
It encompasses everything.
It means humanity being turned back to the original way that God intended for it to be,
and that touches every part of our past,
present and future lives.
And I just think it’s worth bringing that out.
Yeah, I think that’s a good point,
Michael.
The sense of wholeness is a significant
part of the word salvation.
It doesn’t simply mean to be saved or “go to heaven.” It is not
exclusively concerned with what happens on the other side of death,
though that is a part of it.
There is the reality of our wholeness and our completeness and our righteousness in the here and now,
and Christ does that work in and through us.
The will of God is for that end
in all of our lives.
The next one, Michael, may be a little tricky because of the way the word has
been used in other traditions.
How does Christ execute the office of a priest?
And maybe,
well, let’s read the answer and then we can talk.
Christ executes the office of priest
in his once offering up of himself a sacrifice to satisfy divine justice and reconcile us to God,
and in making continual intercession for us.
I think perhaps the most helpful on-ramp to this
conversation is that in the Old Testament,
in the biblical narrative,
a priest is the one
who essentially stands between the people and God.
When there have been failings,
the priest offers sacrifice.
The priest approaches God,
hoping for a word for the people.
The priest,
yes,
they moderate rituals and festivals and some of those things,
but that in the life of the Old
Testament, Israel, is a way of being faithful.
It is a way of living out discipleship,
and so the priest has primarily in those moments to do with the standing between and the moderating
the sort of interceding in the relationship between God and the people.
Where the prophet calls them to faithfulness,
the priest administrates a sort of way back to God when the people have
failed, and this is one of their primary roles,
and it has to do with sacrifice,
it has to do with
offering, it has to do with their own holiness, their own discipleship.
And I think, Michael,
perhaps that’s the best on-ramp here,
the best way into understanding this answer.
Absolutely, and I think maybe the most important small word in this entire section
is where it says that he offers up himself as a sacrifice,
and because the sacrificial
part of being a priest is always offering up something else,
whether it would be a fruit or an animal,
or this idea is that there’s something given,
and the priest is the one
who’s responsible for giving that thing up.
In the case of Jesus Christ,
he himself, himself is the key word,
is the sacrifice, that ultimately we see he’s not only the priest who stands between,
but he’s the only one who is able to ultimately be the sacrifice.
Once again, a reference to the book of Hebrews and the New Testament.
We don’t need to spend a lot of time
here, it’s just to say that while the priests and the Old Testament were essential to the people’s worshipping of God,
Jesus Christ is essential because he’s fundamentally different.
He’s not just a human, this goes back to that thing that started our conversation today,
Jesus is fully God but also fully human.
Jesus is fully God to the extent to which he can actually be the sacrifice
and that being the perfect sacrifice.
So it’s taking this idea of priests,
Clint, and it is really putting it in a class of its own while also relating it to this office that we see in the Old Testament.
It is, and I think theologically this is a rich answer,
Michael.
I think there is
a lot packed into these three lines.
So the other word that I would point to is “once” because
in the priesthood of the Old Testament,
in the priesthood of the New Testament,
sacrifices needed to be repeated.
They did not have an ongoing effect.
In fact, they generally looked backwards over the past sins.
Here we see that Christ,
as he offers himself,
does it only once,
necessary only once.
It is effective eternally.
And what does it affect?
It satisfies divine justice.
In other words,
it assuages,
it satisfies God’s wrath.
It reconciles us to God by doing that and in making continual intercession for us.
So Christ’s sacrifice continues in our future to be effective to bring us back to God in spite of our sin.
And this priestly role is one that is ongoing.
It is continual.
It is eternal.
And I just think,
Michael, that this is an exceptionally well-written theological statement if you sort of understand
where the various parts come.
They say a lot here in a very short span.
Yeah, absolutely.
And they’ll continue to do that,
Klann, as we move on to the king here.
Yeah, how does Christ execute the office of king?
Christ executes the office of king in subduing us to himself,
in ruling and defending us,
and in restraining and conquering all of his and our
enemy.
So not surprising in a question about king from the Middle Ages or an ancient part of our
world.
What does it mean that Christ rules?
What does it mean that Christ has authority?
It means that we stand under that authority.
He rules us and he defends us.
These are the primary
callings of a king.
And he restrains and conquers his and our enemies,
that being primarily anything that transgresses or leads away from the will of God,
the powers that seek to subvert
God’s authority and God’s governance in our own lives.
So, you know,
I suppose, Michael, to modern ears, maybe this question is a little uncomfortable because it does have to do with
power dynamic, with authority, with conquering.
That kind of language is out of vogue right now.
But again, I think properly understood this is saying some really good things.
Well, and it can only be properly understood if we put it back in its context,
because this is actually a quite shocking statement, if you remember,
that these folks are literally surrounded
by the political upheaval of the royalty.
I mean, there’s actual warfare happening as this is being
written regarding whether the king is going to be the rightful heir,
whether it’s going to be a
different form of government.
And there are people taking sides on both sides of this.
So this is going to anger everybody who’s on the king’s side,
because it essentially says that
Jesus Christ is the only true exalted king.
And it’s going to anger people on the other side,
because they’re trying to get rid of the king completely,
they think the royalty should be
done with.
So if it strikes us as odd or disconcerting or uncomfortable,
then good.
I mean, I think you’re receiving it properly.
Maybe we’re receiving it for very different reasons.
But the point here is ultimately,
and I think a fair biblical point,
Clint, if you look to Scripture,
Jesus Christ is shown numerous times to be the heir of David,
who is the king of Israel.
He is the one who comes with power.
Now,
I’m not going to belabor
this, because note that it says,
as we continue on here,
the very next question is going to use
the word “humiliation.” So don’t get in your mind abusive earthly power that seeks its own gain.
That’s not what’s being talked about.
Don’t import that on this text.
What is being talked about is a
perfect divine power that seeks to make right what was wrong.
And to whatever extent we can
understand that, hold it in tension,
Clint, we’re getting closer to the original intent.
Yeah, and of course, as Americans, “king” is not a word that we use often,
though we in regular
language refer to Jesus as “Lord.” And remember that that, too,
echoes some of this sentiment.
So we do, I think, resonate with this theological affirmation nearly every week when we do something
like “the Lord’s Prayer,” or any time in our liturgy we refer to Christ being Lord.
This is essentially what we’re saying.
So we have then gone back to the previous question,
question 23.
He is these things in both his humiliation and his exaltation.
Having now looked at each
of the offices, we look at what it means that he is so in both of those states.
So wherein did Christ’s humiliation consist?
What does it mean that Christ lived in humiliation?
Christ’s humiliation consisted in being born and then in a low condition,
made under law,
undergoing the miseries of this life,
the wrath of God,
and the cursed death of the cross in being buried
and continuing under the power of death for a time.
This one’s interesting, I think, Michael, because if we asked people about Jesus’ humiliation,
I think most of them would be
inclined to say “the cross and the grave,” but it might not occur to them to say everything else,
the being born,
having a body that gets hungry,
having weakness,
bleeding when he was cut or whipped.
The very experience of life,
if you understand Christ’s
exaltation, is a step down.
The idea that the Son of God
becomes human and lives that life as a human with all of its faults,
with all of its frailties,
with all of its problems,
that he lives under a religious system,
that he lives under a political
system, that he lives under the scorn of people who disagreed with him,
that he ends up beaten
and punished and crucified,
that the catechism has more in mind here than that last weekend of
Jesus’ life.
It certainly has in mind all of Jesus’ life and all of the frailness that he
took upon himself that wasn’t naturally his condition.
Right, and I just want to point out very briefly that as we’re going to move on here in just a
speaking of the exaltation,
note that the framers of this have a few more words to say about
humiliation than they do about exaltation,
and this is almost taken verbatim from Philippians
chapter 2.
I mean, there’s a few things that are added in here that come from other sections of
Scripture, but this idea that Jesus Christ is humbled is a substantial part of our understanding
of how he is Lord,
to use the language of King,
how he stands apart from us as prophet,
how he intercedes for us in the middle as the priest.
Everything that defines who Jesus is has to
come through the lens of first his humiliation altogether,
and then ultimately his exaltation.
This is the antidote to Christians who err,
and if we’re honest,
we err very often
in making Jesus into our own image.
Jesus becomes a symbol of self-advancement,
of a grandizement, of our own success in life.
That is an amazingly tempting way to understand Jesus,
but if we’re to
understand the Jesus as presented here by the catechism and deeply rooted in the Reformed
Faith is to understand it’s the Jesus Christ who lets go of everything so that we might have a
awareness of the grace that has come to us,
so that we might have the possibility of reconciliation,
that he might be the one,
we’ve used this word, who redeems us.
So we have to understand that this
is a core defining center of what it means to know who Jesus is.
He is the humbled one,
and any theology that starts on exaltation is no longer in the bounds of the historic Reformed Faith.
Yeah, to some extent,
I think, Michael,
we can say that we can certainly affirm that Christ
began in a state of exaltation,
and that Christ ends in a state of exaltation.
But if you want
to talk about what Christ did,
what his work affected for people,
I agree 100%.
We have to begin with
what does it look like that Jesus was lowered.
And the word “humiliation” is tough because it
has such negative connotations.
Brought down,
the root of humble,
the root of humiliated,
the root of humility is to be lowered.
So what does it look like that Jesus lowered himself?
Maybe humiliation is a dated and difficult word,
but we start the only way.
It can’t work in reverse.
We can never understand Christ’s exaltation first.
We have to understand what it is that
he did for us so that we understand how incredible that work is.
And so then we move to the next question,
wherein consists Christ’s exaltation.
Christ’s exaltation consists in his rising again
from the dead on the third day,
in ascending up into heaven,
in sitting on the right hand of God the Father,
and in coming to judge the world at the last day.
This is probably easier language
for us, Michael.
This is the kind of thing we’ve heard if we’ve grown up in church our whole life probably.
Christ is exalted in defeating death,
in rejoining heaven,
moving back to God,
sitting on the throne at the right hand of the Father in his rightful place,
and one day
returning to judge the world because now Christ stands as the line,
as the evaluator, as the one who can—the one who has the authority to judge the place and the work of all people,
of all creation.
And that needs to be fleshed out at some point further down in the Catechism,
but I think we’ll leave that there for now,
so that Christ is exalted in everything that is connected with
and results from his humiliation.
You know, Clint, what I think is so important that we not rush by
here is that we see that in Jesus Christ’s exaltation he has—and we have this word—coming
to judge,
judgment. And note that Jesus is the one who the Catechism tells us is the judge.
This is essential because exaltation follows humiliation.
The great good news of the gospel
is the judge was humiliated for us,
or he was humbled for us,
that his grace extended all the
way in in his willingness to die.
So the judge is the one who died.
The judge is the one who had
grace.
The judge is the one who has mercy.
The judge’s orientation to the judgment is the very
one whose character has been seen in that previous question.
And it is essential that we
don’t rush past this,
that we emphasize this,
because, you know, we have someone like
Jonathan Edwards and his famous sermon,
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Certainly sin,
as we’ve already seen it,
Clint, is judged severely because it is a severe problem.
But the one who is judged is the one who has already taken on the deepest pain,
the deepest price for that sin.
So it’s not that we should allow either the humiliation of Christ
or the humbling of Christ and the exaltation of Christ to be isolated.
It is that they need to
live in perfect unity and tension,
much like we said that the mystery of faith that Jesus is fully
one.
Both of these are true.
Both of them must be held together inextricably.
And in the midst
of that mysterious union is the fullness of truth.
Yeah, I think that’s well said, Michael.
I think, you know,
of the of the various things we say about Jesus in which we put two things that seem
incongruent, that don’t seem to fit together,
another one of them is exactly here, that the one
who is merciful,
the one who gave his own life,
is also the one who will be judged.
And so sometimes we put Savior and judge over against one another,
but I think the catechism
here tries to pave for us a way that keeps them together,
that like the divinity and the humanity
of Jesus work together in one reality.
Our judge is also our Savior,
and our Savior is also our
judge.
And that is both a sobering thought that we will be judged,
but it is a gracious thought
that the one doing it is the very one who went to the cross for our salvation.
And so I think,
you know, in a way that creates hopefully a humility in us,
there is both a reality of
seriousness and a promise of graciousness.
And the church and Christians do best when we hold
those two things together,
even though at times we do so with some tension.
I think Clint, if I remember properly in our last conversation,
we talked about how the topic of sinfulness in the catechism is so hopeless.
It puts us in a hopeless position.
And here we see that the antidote to the hopeless position is the hopeful
reality of Jesus Christ,
that to whatever extent we went into darkness in the reality of the depths
of our problem, we now experience the opposite fullness of light in the hopefulness of the one who was exalted.
The judgment that comes on our sin is not just related to the stuff we do or don’t
do.
We know from our last conversation,
our sinfulness is way beyond just the stuff that we do,
but rather it is the hopefulness that comes from the one who literally gave up everything and even taking on life.
Jesus was giving up everything so that we might know the hope and promise of eternal reunion,
eternal reconnection with the loving God.
And so what we find I think here is
just a plurality of these tensions.
They’re all there on purpose because fundamentally,
though we go very far in our understanding of sin,
we go equally far in our understanding of the solution
to the problem of sin.
And that should not be missed in the midst of the Reformed conversation.
Yeah, in fact,
it’s a restatement, but one can only understand the extent to which God is gracious
by also understanding the extent to which we stand in need of grace.
We must understand our
sinfulness in order to understand what mercy looks like.
So in this section of the Creed and Michael,
we’ve kind of taken a shot, and again,
it would be impossible to do this justice,
but the writers, the divines, the writers of this catechism have focused us through the idea of these offices,
the humiliation,
the exaltation.
They’ve given us a small snapshot of some of what Christ has done,
the essence of what Christ has done.
In our next conversation,
we will begin to think through with
them what it means for us.
How is that a part of our life,
and what does it mean?
So how do we have
access to these gifts that we’ve been given?
What does it mean that Jesus has done these things on
our behalf, and what does it then call us to do?
How are we benefited in the working of Christ, in the humiliation,
the exaltation,
the offices, and the roles that Christ has played?
How is it that that affects us, changes us,
and redeems us?
And I think, again,
the next section I would
say is perhaps the most theologically loaded that we will have gotten to yet.
You know, Clint,
I don’t think that our Reformed family is often accused of not taking things seriously enough.
And I think that as the conversation progresses in the catechism,
the question “so what?” becomes a really substantial question.
So if all of this is true,
then what does that mean for our lives?
And the Divines, to use that word,
are going to take that very, very seriously.
And, you know, in some ways, it may feel like a breath of fresh air for us to
turn to what may in some ways be a little bit more practical of a section.
But I assure you that
practicality is not necessarily easier.
In some ways,
their seriousness to approach this will
demand much of us.
And so, as you prepare yourself for that next conversation,
do come ready for some challenge.
Well, I think one of the difficulties and one of the opportunities of something like
catechism is that part of its intention is to teach us language that we then go on to understand.
In other words,
as a catechism, the idea would be that you would memorize things that you may or
may not fully understand,
but that you would grow into that understanding.
And I think we’ll get a
pretty good example of some of that next week.
There are some phrases that were used historically in the church,
something like effectual calling.
You’re just not going to encounter that very often,
but I think in the encounter of some language that we may not know is an opportunity to learn
something of the faith.
Not that we’ve forgotten,
I don’t want to say that,
but I think that we now
speak of in different ways,
and I think it’s helpful.
Yeah,
isn’t it C.S.
Lewis who said that
Christians should always be reading someone who is writing today and should be reading someone who
wrote long ago.
I had this idea that we should have two books,
one in each hand.
I think that coming to a catechism like this may seem dated,
but what you discover in the words of the Christians
who have gone long before us is that they have a sophistication that is actually very hard to capture.
I mean,
you’ve been with us at this point close to 40 minutes of the conversation.
Statistically,
a majority of people who started this conversation have already left just because
of the medium and the way that this works,
and we know that.
This is not a simple and easy process.
We understand the sacrifice and intentionality it takes for you to hang on in the midst of it,
but I assure you that the sophistication,
the thought, the seriousness,
the deep faith of those who have prepared this for us has much to teach us if we are humbled enough ourselves
to hear it.
And yes, some of that requires vocabulary work,
but that’s why we’re going
through it together, is we’re seeking to flush some of that stuff out so that we can get that
out of the way and we can see the diamonds that have been left for us as we seek to understand
our faith.
Yeah, and maybe because some people have fallen out,
I can say this,
Michael, but I can imagine that there are many Christians that come to a catechism.
They encounter some difficult language, some things that don’t really make sense,
and they say, “Why do we need to learn
all this?
Why does this matter?
I believe in Jesus.
I live out my faith.
What difference does this make?” And I would argue,
on one hand, maybe not much.
On the other hand,
whatever you mean when you say faith,
whatever you mean when you say,
“I follow Jesus Christ,” stands on the shoulders
of work like this.
It is directly linked in a lineage to men and women who thought deeply
and carefully about the faith and tried to communicate what they understood it meant
so that the rest of us could inherit those ideas in whatever way,
shape, or form we do.
And so I would say that it is never a bad idea to understand
what is underneath your feet.
Absolutely. That said,
I hope there’s been something in this conversation encouraging, challenging.
I certainly hope that you will mark your calendars for next week when we release the
next episode here of the Westminster Catechism Confession Conversation.
Until then, be blessed.
Do let us know what you’re thinking,
questions, comments, right here, wherever you’re watching or enjoying this video.
And we look forward to striking up the conversation again
next week.