What God Does | Westminster Catechism | Q 7-13

Hello, friends,
and welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
It is a joy to see you again as we are jumping in once again to our Westminster study and Clint today,
we’re going to be jumping into the catechism again,
and in it, we’re going to be looking at a rather substantial shift in the argument that we had looked at previous
with our first questions dealt with really first things dealing with what it means to be human,
how we are to understand God,
of course, it’s doing it in a really big overview
kind of way.
And today, we shift from some of that Trinity,
some of that God substance language that we
were talking about, and we now move into the works of God,
the acts of God,
or as the catechism names it here,
the decrees of God.
And I think what’s interesting to see already is the movement that happens from starting
with who God is,
and then that then flows naturally like a river from the fountainhead,
it flows naturally downstream into the question of if this is who God is,
then how are we
to understand God’s action in the world and what does that action look like and is it
unique to God in this language of decrees,
I think even helps us get into that conversation
because when God speaks,
when God makes a decree,
when God makes a thing happen with
words, then that thing happens.
This is the God who is creator,
and this is the God who we’re going to see very soon here.
The language is also the one who has providence,
so the one who has power.
Yeah, I think in some ways,
Michael, it’s a little hard to chunk up Westminster.
It doesn’t lend itself real cleanly to sections.
Having said that, I do think we see a movement today that begins to build a bridge from the
idea of God to the work of God.
What is it that God does?
We begin to explore how is it that God does that?
What does this partnership?
We looked a little bit in the opening six questions about the interaction of God and
humans, and now we begin to flesh that out.
We begin to see what that looks like,
what are the barriers in it,
what are the opportunities
in it, and I think we move pretty quickly through these next few questions from some
of the kind of maybe esoteric theological truths of God to the real nitty-gritty practical
of what does God do,
what does it mean for people that there is a God,
and what is our
responsibility and really, in some sense, our response to what we then know about God.
I think we see that right away here,
this word decree.
We’re in question seven.
What are the decrees of God?
And Westminster is going to,
at some level, draw a distinction between the things that
God does in unique ways and the things that God does in kind of common ways.
And I think,
to some extent, this idea of a decree is the bigger talk,
the larger premises about God.
The decrees of God, here’s the answer,
the decrees of God are His eternal purpose according
to the counsel of His will whereby,
for His own glory,
He hath foredained whatever comes
to pass.
Now, that’s a lot of jargon.
The decrees of God,
here’s what we learn.
The things God does are in keeping with His eternal purpose,
His purpose beyond time,
according to His will,
whereby, for His own glory,
He foredains whatever comes to pass.
And there would be some things we’d want to parse in that, Michael,
particularly this last phrase,
foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.
That does come from a very particular moment of Presbyterian understanding,
and it represents a very specific stream of the Presbyterian River.
But that is where the church exists,
where the church lives at the moment this is written.
And I think, you know,
the risk we run in a loaded sentence like this is not breaking
it down and seeing the individual things that are proclaimed about God.
What God does is in keeping with His eternal purpose,
according with His will,
and for the glory of whatever comes to pass.
So we have will,
we have purpose,
and we have whatever comes to pass.
And I think our ancestors are bold in saying that we put our firm trust in all of those things.
I think that this question answer needs to be very carefully read with those three,
what may appear to be simple words,
His eternal purpose, because it provides for us the context
of the larger response,
Clint.
What I see in this is when we’re talking about the decrees of God and seeing how God is working in the world,
we see that God has a vision beyond time, eternal.
It reaches beyond our human capacity to register and to navigate.
And when we’re talking about the purposes of God,
we mean that purpose which extends
far beyond just the creation to the fall of creation.
It actually reaches all the way in past revelation to this beatific vision,
the promise of what
God is working and bringing the world to be in the future.
And that is an important distinction when we look at an answer like this,
because we might naturally come to the end of this question and see this language here of foreordained.
And we might begin to directly apply that right away to our own lives and our own experience.
And that’s natural.
That’s what we as humans do.
We live our life,
and then we see how things intersect with it.
But what I think the framers had in mind here was to draw our attention up and beyond our
experience to see that God,
whose arc of will literally spans not just our lives or even
what we might call generations,
but an eternal purpose,
an eternal will.
And towards that end,
everything that’s happening that’s moving along this stream,
God is using or ordaining or enabling to lead toward God’s final purpose.
And so I think it might be a mistake to read too much of that Calvinist kind of free will
versus, you know, predestination kind of stuff.
That does have a stream to your point here,
Clint, that is connecting in the question like this.
But I think we are misreading it to think that that’s all that this is about.
I think ultimately it’s an affirmation that God’s decree is as recorded in Scripture to
bring things to rights,
and God is by the very nature of that decree making that happen.
Yeah, I think maybe the balance I’d add to that,
Michael, is that we can read a statement
like that and we can be drawn to the micro, which is,
does that then mean that God causes everything?
But I think behind that,
and I think it’s good of you to point this out,
I think behind that is the affirmation of just the opposite,
that nothing can undo it,
that God’s purpose is unassailable,
that whatever comes to pass is not somehow going to upset or negate the
purposes of God, that God’s eternal purposes according to His will are unassailable.
They’re unquestionable, and whatever comes to pass for His own glory works toward those
purposes, and that those purposes cannot then be undone by whatever it is that happens.
And I think there is the interesting theological rabbit trail,
but I think the main point is
much closer to that idea,
that God’s purpose is not at risk because of the happenings of
the creation or the creatures.
Some of this, Clint, boils down to knowing who God is,
because this question presumes
here at the sort of middle,
just past the middle section here,
whereby for His own glory,
for God’s own glory.
And Clint,
it totally depends on what you believe glorifies God.
If you believe that God’s glory comes in subjugation,
that God’s glory comes in highlighting the
failures and missteps of others,
if you see God as a judgmental overlord looking for mistakes
just to capitalize and punish them,
then seeing this eternal decree,
God’s glory being lifted up, the idea that God’s foreordained reality will come to pass.
This may not seem like good news.
I think you’re exactly right to point us back to what is intended here is comfort.
What’s intended here is to put humans within this beautiful story in which God is active
and intending good, that God’s glory is the lifting up of God’s creation,
that God’s glory is when God’s people are living rightly and justly and are experiencing God’s love and
compassion and that they’re showing that in their relationships.
If that is how we understand it,
then this is a freeing and then open-ended invitation
to live the kind of life that God would want for us.
And I really think that that’s the spirit of the framers.
Yeah, I agree.
You know,
agree and probably,
you know, again, there’d be places to push back.
But like it or not,
our ancestors in the faith are firmly convicted that if good things happen,
that’s on God.
And if bad things happen,
that’s somehow on us.
And that’s the spirit in which these doctrines are voiced.
That’s a spirit in which these questions are answered.
You don’t have to accept that conclusion,
but that’s certainly where it comes from.
Michael, we’ve probably done enough of that.
Let’s move on to the next question.
How does God execute His decrees?
So if God has these decrees,
how is it that they come to pass?
How are they put in practice?
And a simple answer here,
God executes His decrees in the works of creation and provenance.
And I don’t think we need to spend a lot of time here because we’re going to go on to
discuss both of those things in following questions.
But for the purpose of the question,
there are two ways that the confession teaches,
that the catechism teaches God executes decrees in His creative work and in His providential work.
So that leads to the follow-up question.
What is the work of creation?
The work of creation is God’s making all things by nothing,
by the word of His power in the space of six days and all very good.
So those who did the Genesis Bible study with us,
this is straight out of chapter one of the Bible.
God did creative work.
That was not aided in any way by anything.
It all comes from God exclusively.
It is the work of power and in the space of six days,
all very good.
Again,
we could have modern arguments about six days and all that kind of stuff.
But the point is,
this reaffirms the creation narrative we inherit in Scripture,
that God is the sole author of all that exists,
God created by the sheer power of His will,
and that God declared in that cycle of creation what He had created to be very good.
Clint, maybe one of the things that we have lost for our scientific methodologies and our
obsession with figuring out how things work and how things did work is we may fail to see
the same kind of rigor in what these theological,
biblical-minded framers were thinking when they
turn to the idea of God as creator.
I think if we look at this closely,
what we’re going to discover is it’s not so much interested
in the mechanics of creation,
but rather we move from how God executes God’s decrees,
one of those being the work of creation,
to,
well, what is that work?
Well, it’s God making everything out of nothing.
It’s nothing but God’s sheer word and power,
and it’s happening as the Scriptures tell us in six
days, and all is very good,
and then the next question is going to move back into another
function of God’s creative power,
and what we’re seeing in this,
Clint, is a heavy interest in who God is.
God is creator,
not in the mechanics of how the creator did what the creator does.
That’s a concern that we bring,
and it’s certainly an important one,
but it’s not the concern,
I think, front and center in this moment,
because we’re still not far away from the previous conversation
of who is God.
God is triune.
Well, we move in.
What does God do?
Well, God does the work of
creating.
There is no one who competes with God as the creating force of the universe,
and what does that mean?
It means that our lives are ordered.
It means it’s not some rampant
jumbling together of atoms with no meaning or purpose.
It means that we really,
as Christians, do have a sense that when we talk about what the framers here use that language of foreordained,
that God is ultimately as the one who creates,
the one who then is also the one leading that
creation towards a destination or purpose,
because the creator can instill that purpose.
The creator can ultimately weave together these strands that otherwise we might not see.
It’s,
I think, fundamentally a statement of faith in who God is, Clint,
and not so much a peel back the curtain
and see the machinations of how God works in the world.
That’s just not their intent at this point.
Yeah,
the creed, much like the scripture,
is less concerned with how and completely concerned with who.
Maybe to some extent why,
but it is always about the one behind the creation,
not the way in
which the creation was accomplished.
And I think we see that really clearly,
Michael, as we move to
this next question, a follow-up question on creation.
How did God create man?
And that sounds like you’re going to get the recipe,
right?
But it is a theological question.
It is not a scientific
question.
So listen to the answer.
God created man male and female after his own image in knowledge, righteous,
and holiness with dominion over the creatures.
Notice that that entire answer says
more about what was created than how it was created.
It tells us that humankind is created
male and female in the image, both significantly here,
male and female,
in the image of God.
And we understand and experience that image through knowledge,
through righteousness,
and through holiness with dominion over the creatures.
And again,
this is a pretty clear
lineage from the creation stories.
But this idea that we bear the stamp,
the image of God,
in our knowledge, righteousness, and holiness, connects the life that we are then called to live
with the stamp of the Creator upon that life.
And as we live out the order of being created,
we do so with the express goal of living up to and out of that image in our knowledge
and in the way that we live and in our holiness, our relationships,
our obedience,
and our saving
knowledge of what God has done.
Yeah, it’s interesting.
When you ask a how question like
this, how did God create man,
you don’t immediately think that what we’re talking about here is how
then shall we live.
But that is exactly,
I think, Clint, the right way to lean into this text,
because what we’re seeing here is,
first of all, the biblical affirmation.
That’s what we have in
this language of male, female,
on the image.
This is literally quoting scripture.
And if you have a
study version of the catechism,
you’re going to see the direct links to where that is in the Old
Testament.
But when we move into this,
what is a more descriptive theological type work in knowledge,
righteousness and holiness, here, there’s some interpreting happening for us.
There’s some glossing to let us know that within the subsequent scriptures,
as we see the story unfold,
we see that this is also biblically how the image of God has been instilled.
And this is important if you know the Reformed tradition,
you know that we spend a lot of time as a family thinking about this image
question because of how deeply we believe that image has been marred and scarred by the reality
of sin and the free will that we’ve taken that’s led us down that road.
What we see here is a
picture of the way that God intended.
This is a picture of what God wants for us.
And so, therefore,
as Christians seeking to live faithfully in the world,
seeking to be those who display the goodness that God intended,
then we hope and pray that this might be true of us,
that we might grow in
knowledge in righteousness and in holiness.
And in doing so,
we’re not just living out the spirit
of this question, right here,
how did God create man,
but rather we’re living into the purpose of
why God created man.
And all of that is built into that question.
Yeah, absolutely.
I think in many
ways that ties that perhaps add some information to the question we started with.
What is the chief end of humanity?
What is our purpose?
Well, now, as we continue to move toward clarity,
we learn that our purpose is to reveal the God-given image in us by knowledge,
righteousness, and holiness as we interact with other creatures.
The word dominion can be tricky from a sort of
sense of power relationship,
but really what’s behind that,
I think, is not only do we do that
as we pursue the image of God within us,
but as we are related,
we do not stand apart from the
rest of the creation.
We practice our God and imageness.
We practice the image of God.
We reflect the image of God as we relate to the other things that God has created,
and that gives us a
responsibility.
And perhaps we are more conscious,
more aware of that responsibility in this era
than we’re our mothers and fathers in the faith in their own era.
We might not use the word
dominion, but I think behind that is the sense that we remain connected to the creation.
We do not stand apart from it simply because we are the crowning achievement of it,
if anything, that perhaps gives us more responsibility.
We then move on to the next question,
and we’ve touched here briefly on creation,
so the next decree is providence.
What are the works of God’s providence?
God’s works of providence are His most holy, wise,
and powerful,
preserving and governing all His creatures and all their actions.
And this is,
Michael, it’s not fair to say this is unique to Presbyterians,
but Presbyterians have been particularly interested in the ongoing work
of God as King,
as governor, as sovereign.
The relationship between God and people in a salvation
sense has been important to all Christians of all stripes.
The relationship between God and creation
in a kind of governance sense has been extremely important to Presbyterians.
John Calvin was
deeply invested in this,
and we sort of ran with that torch.
And I think most other denominations
would not find themselves compelled to put a question like this in their catechism.
What is providence?
Providence is the way in which God’s wisdom and power preserves and governs
all creatures and all their actions.
So,
a bold affirmation that God continues to do the work of
creating and preserving creation in His relationship with what He’s made.
It’s not over with.
It’s not done.
God continues to do work in the governing of the creation.
Calvin once said that the sun
didn’t come up just because it was time for the sun to come up,
but that each and every sunrise
is a new act of God’s creative power.
And I think that’s the idea here.
And this has been really important to us.
The reality is it’s easy to lose our footing here,
Clint.
It’s easy to forget that
the way that this is moving is it started with what are the decrees of God.
The first is creation,
that God is the one who stands before,
that God by God’s own virtue of being God makes,
and that that is who God is.
Now we turn to this language of providence.
And our historical forebears,
our mothers and fathers in the faith, meant by this,
that God is active and involved in the world
in substantial,
and when I say substantial,
I mean foundational, I mean fundamental ways
that you cannot understand to use that image of the sunrise.
You can’t understand the reality in which you live,
unless you understand that reality,
to be cosmically bound together by God’s work,
that God continues to work.
So in other words,
it’s to say that God
is the one at the beginning,
and also God is the one now.
And the language of governing is
particularly striking, it’s particularly important to those in the Reformed tradition,
because of how seriously we understand the problem of sin to be.
If our own dominion has caused so much
issue in our souls,
yet alone the world and systems around us that rises out of that soil,
if the problem is so large,
then we absolutely need to care about governance.
And here, when we’re talking about governance,
we’re talking about divine governance,
we’re talking about God’s providential,
beyond time,
spiritual,
fundamental to reality kind of providence.
But we then will
later take that very seriously in terms of our own governance,
or in other words,
how we order ourselves as a human ordering underneath God’s divine ordering.
And all of this concern is not
because we’re just policy wonks and we like legalese,
there’s maybe some of that exactness in our culture.
But it boils down to, in the end,
this constant desire, honestly, to hope that God is providentially at work,
that we’re not held by our own,
that we’re not holding on to sort
of the corner or the side of the universe hoping and not fall off.
No, it’s God who holds us.
God governs, God orders, God is in all and through all.
And that’s not always easy to understand.
Sometimes at some points in life,
it may be impossible to understand,
but that this statement of faith reflects an understanding that God is alive network.
It wasn’t a one and done
creator kind of thing.
And it’s intended to be hopeful,
good news.
Yeah, I think it’s exactly a statement of faith,
Michael, that when things seem out of control,
when the world feels painful and restless,
and hell bent on its own destruction,
that this stripe of Christian has always affirmed that beyond that,
sometimes beyond even our own experience,
we stand convicted that God is at work.
We don’t simply live in the world that God created,
we live in the world that God enlivens,
that God sustains,
that God directs and governs,
that God is active now in the creation,
as in the moments of creation.
And that is a statement of
faith, that is a proclamation of something that doesn’t always seem obviously true.
And I think that’s one of the things that makes it so important.
And it has been extremely important
to Presbyterians.
We’re not the only ones who would say those things.
I don’t want to communicate that.
But we have really dug in there,
and I think that’s been an extremely
important doctrine for us,
the idea of providence.
And again,
we’ve taken it in some ways that people
may or may not agree with,
but behind wherever we’ve gone with it is that fundamental conviction
that God didn’t just make the world and turn it loose.
The world exists only because God continues
to do His work in and through it,
and God is the one who sustains it.
And without God,
it all simply ceases.
It has no life apart from its connection to its creator.
And lest you think that we’re kind of just making this up and pulling it out of thin air,
I just want to remind you of the context of the Reformation.
The very first reformers lived in
a moment in which entire societies were being upheaved.
There was radical social, governmental,
religious transformation happening.
And so as these Protestants are breaking off of the only
church that had ever been considered to be church,
as they go on this very strange sort of journey,
they find the providence of God,
the promise that God is a live network to be very hopeful.
May I remind you,
the framers, to go back to that introductory conversation about Westminster,
the people writing this document are doing so in the moment in which order and governance,
that very language, is completely up in the air.
I mean, there’s literal revolt happening in the
midst of this conversation where these folks are proclaiming that God is the providential,
governing, just overruling reality.
And so,
lest you think that we’re just making this up,
the people who were very much the fountainhead of this emphasis and the people who carried it on
and wrote it for us in these words,
they were not flippant.
I mean, this is carefully chosen.
And in some ways, it’s a reaction against fear and doubt.
It’s a statement of,
no, even in the midst of turmoil and upheaval,
even when things may seem bleak and dire,
we know that God’s character is to create.
We know it is God’s character to rule and to be providentially in the midst of.
And that is a great promise and hope.
We hold onto that because it gives us hope that there might be
order and structure to this chaos that is caused by sin around us.
Yeah.
And that has a relational aspect.
So, not only is God providential in regard to creation,
but specifically in regard to humans.
So, question 12 here, what special act of providence did God
exercise towards man in the estate wherein he was created?
So, in other words,
what did God’s providence look like for people when they were made?
So,
the answer, when God created man,
humans, he entered into covenant of life with him upon condition of perfect obedience,
forbidding him to eat the tree of knowledge of good and evil upon the pain of death.
And so, here we learn
multiple things in the answer.
When God created humans,
there is a covenant of life with them, an agreement,
a promise,
covenant means promise,
a testament of life.
The condition of our life,
is such that we will be obedient,
that our life is found in obeying God.
Our life is found
in reflecting the righteousness and holiness of the Creator.
That’s the life we were created to have.
And the limitation placed upon us was the eating of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil upon the pain of death.
In other words, when we disobey God,
when we leave obedience,
we take upon ourselves the reality of death,
which was not part of the gift of our creation.
It was not part of our original condition.
And clearly,
Michael, we’re using, again, that language of Genesis.
But I think it’s helpful maybe to distance from questions about
fruit and trees and simply talk about this in the categories of obedience and disobedience.
We were created for the perfection that comes in sharing God’s righteousness.
And when we choose to leave that,
we lose the life that God has given us,
which is death, which is literally to forfeit our life by disobeying.
You know,
Clint,
you may disagree with me and push back if you do,
but I think that in some ways it’s worth noting and we should be careful to not rush too quickly.
We should realize that here the catechism starts with the way that God intends before we rush to
the problem of sin.
And maybe at some points in the Reformed family,
we have rushed too quickly
to sin.
We maybe have sort of beaten down the door of the problem so that we’ve even passed
by the window of God’s perfect desire and intention.
Because it’s striking as we talk
about God’s providence and the fact that God is in the midst,
that we talk about the fact that when
God made humanity, this language that God made a covenant of life with humanity,
that in the midst of that moment,
we see that God’s love and perfection intended perfect unity.
It intended perfect order.
It intended this kind of perfect relationship in which humanity understood and
lived into the beauty of what God wanted from the very beginning as creator.
And of course, we know what happens with the tree,
right?
We, of course, we know intuitively because of our
understanding of Genesis and the Christian tradition that that fruit’s going to get eaten,
that sin’s going to happen.
But before we get to the sin,
we just remember that God made this
covenantal promise and that God is going to be faithful to that promise.
So in some ways,
as I read it, Clint,
it helps us to give color to and meaning to what it means that God has
providence, that ultimately God’s providence isn’t over and against as an abusive kind of overlord.
It’s the kind of covenant and promise that lives because of God’s chosen relationship.
God said,
I am for you and with you.
So we know that God’s providence is for us.
And sometimes
it will be against us because we’re against ourselves.
But we know that it’s always to the
end of healing and not hurting.
And so it’s fleshing out the character of God and it’s
showing us how these things,
our relationship with God lives at this busy intersection
of our own brokenness, but God’s perfection,
our own inability to listen,
but God’s perfect ability to speak.
It’s always happening in this creative tension.
And this is the kind of
the thing that they’re trying to describe with simple words,
but with a lot of nuance.
I think that for that reason,
Michael, it’s really important to read this with an understanding
of what it is and isn’t saying.
Because you could come to this and say, “Oh, well, God
created men and women and then put impossible burdens on them and told them or else,” right?
You could sort of see that path.
But if we understand what this is saying,
it is to say
that God in goodness created humans in goodness.
They had all they needed.
They had the righteousness
and the holiness of God.
They had relationship with God.
They had a place within the creation.
They had, in the ancient word, paradise.
And we jeopardize that
in leaving obedience,
in leaving the path that God made for the person,
the man and the woman.
They jeopardize all of that.
And of course, we know where that’s headed.
So, question 13 here, “Did our first parents continue in the estate wherein they were created?”
They answer, “As you know,
our first parents, being left to the freedom of their own will,
fell from the estate wherein they were created by sinning against God.” In other words,
when they had to make a decision between being faithful and unfaithful,
being obedient and disobedient,
our first parents, Adam and Eve,
chose disobedience.
We pursued our own selfish will
instead of being obedient to God’s perfect will.
And the result is that we sinned against God.
And we’ll pick up there,
and we’ll get into lots of sin language.
But essentially here,
if you understand these two questions,
God created us and entered into covenant with us,
and we broke the covenant,
thereby sinning against God.
I mean, keep in mind that this is a teaching
tool, and it is teaching us through the story of Scripture,
the plight of humankind.
I imagine that someone may be joining us for this conversation and want to push back and say
that we’re being a little generous to the authors of this.
They say that this could be read as God
having providence over humans,
and that there’s a sense in which this is all about what God is doing.
There’s this kind of reading of Calvinism in which God is all-powerful and humans have no power.
God is restrictive and vengeful and judgmental.
You made the point,
and I just want to emphasize
it with this question,
that the framers here have in mind a God who is providential,
who has order and governance over reality that is unquestioned.
And simultaneously, I want to point out this
language, that we are left to the freedom of their own will.
That is equally and importantly held as
true.
This is the mystery that God is providentially in control and governing,
and yet God freely by
God’s love gives us real and true freedom.
That is the statement that’s messy.
I can’t break that out for you and show you exactly how that’s constructed in a spiritual blueprint,
but I can tell you both of these are statements that the framers want us to hold in tension,
because they’re both true.
If you know anything of
Reformed theology and Presbyterian heritage,
you would know that you have to take very,
very seriously.
When our Reformed Presbyterian ancestors say,
“Being left to the freedom of
their own will,” that is,
in our context, a monumental statement.
Our people do not use
phrases like freedom of their own will casually.
That is a deep well theologically,
particularly in light of Calvinism,
in light of Reformed theology,
the idea that in the garden,
Adam and Eve really did have a true choice to make,
and they made it improperly,
but it was a
real decision for them.
These are strong words for Presbyterians who would be reluctant to say
anything like that in some sense on this side of the garden.
But for them to say that in this
question, I think it emphasizes exactly as you said,
Michael, that this is a moment of decision
wherein human willfulness, stubbornness, and disobedience rules the day and breaks the covenant by sinning.
One thing that I think that is striking by the way that this catechism is leading us
is it is in some ways framing the creation story against some of the more simplified versions
that I think we take for granted,
because there’s this question that comes up quite often,
how is it that Adam’s original sins use that language,
which by the way,
here we haven’t even
had listed in those exact words,
but how does that original sin pass down?
And there’s all of this
talk theologically about sort of how the function of sin gets handed down.
Fundamentally,
this statement is looking for a more universal perspective than that.
In other words, when it talks about the freedom of our first parents,
I think we see ourselves invited
into that very same freedom that if we’re honest,
and we’re to look into our own hearts and souls,
what we’re going to find is that we,
like our first parents,
had been given freedom.
And in the freedom that we’ve been given,
we choose destruction.
We choose the part that elevates
self and the part that denies God’s providential acting in the world.
And when we do that,
we’re going to commit the thing that we’re going to talk about next time that we get together.
We’re going to dive into this issue and topic of sin,
because clearly the Reformed tradition has
worked that out.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time developing what we understand that to be.
But I want to make it clear here.
Sin from our context only makes sense in the hands of a God
who is just and mighty and providentially governing,
but also a God who’s given true freedom
and love and capacity to the beloved who God has entered into covenant with.
And both of those are significant.
And there’s a lot of words I just threw at you there,
but I think it’s significant
to look at it from this perspective because of what it means is that at the end of the day,
when God invites you into relationship,
when God invites us into relationship,
God’s not doing that as if we are drones.
God’s doing that as someone who truly
honestly cares.
God has from the very beginning desired the promise of love for one another.
God has wanted to be united with God’s people.
And so the problem of sin is going to be a huge
roadblock.
We’re going to spend time talking about that.
But so is the grandeur of God’s
salvation plan to address the problem that we in our freedom create.
God is willing to go beyond
the pale to solve the problem of real free creatures who deny the reality of their creator.
And God will go to the farthest extent to make reconciliation or what we might call salvation possible.
And the framers are giving this to us in a way,
Clint, that I think makes it clear that
this is not just a theological sort of head document.
This is ordered in such a way as to
allow us to use it as a map for our own faith.
We too have been given freedom.
And when we misuse
that freedom, we’re going to encounter the problem of our next conversation,
sin.
And when we encounter
that problem, then we’re going to know that we need the providential God to carry us forward
and out of it.
Yeah. On one hand, Michael, it’s not surprising that in a Presbyterian creed,
we get to sin in the 13th question.
We really only have a dozen questions pre-sin.
Right.
On the other hand,
I respect about the catechism that it started with good news,
the creation of God,
the chief end of man,
the decrees of God,
the providence of God,
and then we get to the bad news,
the reality of sin.
But that’s in order to get us even to the
the good news, the gospel,
which we can only understand having traveled through
what is the now the condition of humankind,
what is the problem of humankind,
and how is it that God in ongoing relationship with now fallen creatures has offered a way back to
what was intended in our creation.
And so there is a kind of roadmap through this catechism that I
really appreciate.
I want to just say thanks for being part of the conversation with us.
We’re making it through.
If you’ve got comments, questions, thoughts,
if there’s anything you’d
like more information or like to hear more about in the comments,
let us know.
Send us an email,
whatever works for you.
We’re grateful for the opportunity to go through here with you.
Hope that there’s something in it that is helpful or educational and look forward to continuing it.
Thanks, everybody.