WSC Q&A #54

Q: What is required in the third commandment?
A: The third commandment requires the holy and reverent use of God's names, titles, attributes, ordinances, word and work.
Revelation 15:3-4 And they sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying, "Great and amazing are your deeds, O Lord God the Almighty! Just and true are your ways, O King of the nations! Who will not fear, O Lord, and glorify your name? For you alone are holy. All nations will come and worship you, for your righteous acts have been revealed."

As I write this, I am sitting in my easy chair at home listening to the new David Bowie album, "Black Star". As many of you know, Bowie passed away earlier this week. Now, what does that have to do with this week's catechism question? Only this. I want you to notice how people speak of David Bowie now that he has died. Whatever people's thoughts are on his music, generally, people speak of him with reverence. They speak of this artist in a way that reflects a deep respect and awe. And this little cultural example reflects on this week's catechism question because what this catechism is addressing is the issue of reverence.

How are we to speak the name of the LORD God? With reverence. How are we to speak of God's attributes, his works in creation, etc.? We are to speak of it all with a deep seated respect and awe. How are we to approach the LORD God in worship? With reverence. 

Reverence, I think, is not as subjective as our current culture wants to make it sound. We instinctually know when someone is being irreverent. We know when something is done in an irreverent manner. When talking with others about reverence in Christian worship, I often hear the argument that reverence is relative. And while I agree that there are different expressions of reverence, I think we can all agree that there are appropriate ways of showing respect and awe, and inappropriate ways of doing so. No one, for example, would walk up to the President of the United States, slap him on the back, and say, "Yo dawg. What's happenin!?" That would be considered highly irreverent, incredibly insulting and disrespectful. And yet, why do we tolerate people approaching the holy God in this manner? 

The posture of a Christian must always be one of reverence. Whatever we do in worship, whenever we speak of the LORD God, whenever we speak of his mighty works, observe his ordinances, speak of his nature, we are to do so in a way that reflects a deep seated respect and awe. 

WSC Q&A #52&53

Q #52: What are the reasons annexed to the second commandment?
A: The reasons annexed to the second commandment are, God's sovereignty over us, his propriety in us, and the zeal he has to his own worship.
Psalm 96:9-10 Worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness; tremble before him, all the earth! Say among the nations, "The Lord reigns!" Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved; he will judge the people with equity.

Q #53: Which is the third commandment?
A: The third commandment is, you shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain: for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that takes his name in vain.
Psalm 29:2 Ascribe to the Lord the glory due his name; worship the Lord in the splendor of holiness. 

Yes I'm behind again with the blog, so with this blog post I'll wrap up the second commandment and introduce the third just to help catch us up with the catechism memorization plan. Remember, these first four commandments all fall under the category of how we are to worship and glorify God. So all of these commandments are inter-related and serve a purpose in helping us realize what it means to truly worship God properly in the whole of our lives. 

As we wrap up the second commandment, this question, just like the catechism does with the first question, wants us to understand why it is that God should be worshiped as he commands. First, God is sovereign. God is over us. We are his creatures, and we must be obedient to him and his commands. If he tells us how we are or are not to worship him, we must be obedient. We can trust that the sovereign God knows better than we do what will bring him glory. Secondly, God's propriety in us. This is, again, reemphasizing the fact that because we belong to the LORD God, and because we are not sovereign over ourselves, we are to follow the practices and set behaviors of worship, both public and private, that he has prescribed to us in his holy Word. And thirdly, the catechism reminds us of the zeal God has for his own glory. This goes back to the question about whether or not God notices when he is being robbed of glory. Yes, he notices. He is a jealous God, jealous for his glory and for the fame of his own name. 

Now we can turn our attention to the third commandment, the command to not take the LORD's name in vain. This is a commandment that I look forward to studying. It is one that, perhaps, I understand the least. What is entailed in taking the Lord's name in vain? Why is it so important that we follow this commandment? As we explore this commandment, let us first chiefly remember that God is a holy God, and he alone has revealed his name to us in his holy Scriptures. This is important. God wasn't named by anyone else. No one but God declared his name. He alone, the holy, eternal God, has declared his name to us, his finite creation. Therefore, we must remember that his very name itself is indeed holy. To use his name in vain is to not only trivialize his name, to discredit it's holiness, but to trivialize God himself and discredit his holiness. 

The Mortification of Sin

I say, then, we must by faith consider the supply and fullness that we have in Christ Jesus, and how HE can at any time give strength and deliverance. If you do not immediately find success in your battle, you will at least be secure in your chariot, and you will not flee from the field while the conflict continues.

Once again, I have the privilege of filling in for Troy this week. This week, it truly is a privilege to write the blog on "The Mortification of Sin", as the last chapter in Owen's book is perhaps the most encouraging and sweetest of all his chapters. (Troy said this was his favorite chapter in the book.)

Chapter 14: The Work of Christ and the Power of the Spirit

It's easy, I think, to read through Owen's work and feel utterly discouraged. It's easy to feel crushed, inadequate in our battle against indwelling sin, even in danger of eternal damnation. This stems from the fact that all of us fail daily in our battle against remaining lusts. But here, Owen recognizes that this, in fact, is the regular experience of all of God's children. 

This chapter reads as great encouragement in our battles against indwelling sin. Are we weary in this battle? Do we feel beaten down? Do we feel crushed? Take heart, because the grace of Jesus Christ and the working of the Holy Spirit will preserve us in this fight! Owen reminds us that as we abide in Jesus Christ, Christ gives us "purging grace", and to trust in the fullness we have in Christ "for our supply is an important part of our abiding in Christ". In other words, as we are united to Christ in faith, not only can we be assured that we are eternally safe in his arms, but we can also be assured that Jesus Christ himself will carry us, arm and equip us, give us the strength and grace we need to mortify our sin. Owen encourages us all to dwell on this great truth!

Let your soul, by faith, dwell on such thoughts as these: I am a poor, weak creature; unstable as water, and I cannot excel. This corruption is too hard for me, and is the doorway to the ruin of my soul. I do not know what to do. My soul has become parched ground, and a habitation of dragons. I have made promises and broken them. I have made vows, but did not keep them. Many times I have been persuaded that I have gained the victory, and that I should be delivered, but I was deceived. Now I plainly see that without some great help and assistance, I will perish and be forced to abandon God.
BUT YET, though this is my state and condition, I will lift up my hands that hang down, and strengthen my feeble knees, for, behold, the Lord Jesus Christ has all the fullness of grace in His heart, and all the fulness of power in His hand. He is able to slay all of these enemies. There is sufficient provision in Him for my relief and assistance. He can take my drooping, dying soul and make me more than a conquerer!

What a beautiful and encouraging promise! It is as I quoted above, though we may feel weak, tired, worn down by this fight, we can be assured that our chariot, Jesus Christ himself, keeps us secure and we will not flee the fight against sin. He will sustain us!

Owen also encourages us in this chapter to make use of EVERY means available to us by which Christ reveals Himself.  Here is a great reminder to participate as often as we can in what we would call the "ordinary means of grace". 

The ways and means by which Christ usually communicates Himself are His ordinances. He that is seeking help from Christ should seek Him in these! As our faith looks to Christ for help, it sets our hearts to work. It is not an idle, groundless hope. If there is any vigor, efficacy, and power in prayer or sacrament to help in mortifying sin, a man will assuredly be interested in it all, because of his expectation of help...All these are of great use when they are based on the expectation of help from Christ and spring from this root...

I wonder how many of us participate in these "ordinary means of grace" (prayer, the reading and preaching of the Word, the sacraments, the gathered worship of God's people) expecting to receive the help and grace we need in our battle against indwelling sin. Do we come to the Word with the expectation that through it, Christ will work in and through us? Do we come to the Lord's Supper fully expecting that, as Calvin said, just as our bodies are nourished by the bread and wine so too is our soul nourished by the blood and body of Jesus Christ?

Two final points Owen touches on are this. First, mortification is tied to our union with Christ in his death and resurrection. Owen points to the blood of Christ as the source of our "washing, purging, and cleansing". We can be assured that the old man was crucified with Christ, and therefore because we participate with Christ, because we are united to him, how can we go on living in sin? We are dead to sin, and just as Christ was raised up to glory, we too are and will be raised up to grace and newness of life. Secondly, and finally, Owen encourages us to remember the role of the Holy Spirit in mortification. The Holy Spirit convicts us of our sin, he reveals the fullness of Christ for our assurance of victory and salvation, he "brings the cross of Christ into our hearts with its sin-killing power", and he IS the Author and Finisher of our sanctification.

WSC Q&A #51

Q: Which is forbidden in the second commandment?
A: The second commandment forbids the worshiping of God by images, or any other way not appointed in his word.
Leviticus 10:1-2 Now Nadab and Abihu, the sons of Aaron, each took his censer and put fire in it and laid incense on it and offered unauthorized fire before the Lord, which he had not commanded them. And fire came out from before the Lord and consumed them, and they died before the LORD. 

The Scripture reference this week is absolutely chilling, and yet we need to read it. We need to be reminded of the God that we worship and serve. This holy God is jealous for his glory, and he is a God who can strike us down, and has every right to do so, should we fail to worship him as he commanded. We take it for granted, I think, that God will not strike us dead for offering up strange fire. However, we need to remember that God is not obligated to be merciful to us. We need a healthy fear of the Holy God, all the while praising him for his grace, mercy, patience, and faithfulness to us. 

Why do we think we can come up with better ways to worship God than how he has commanded? Do we really believe God cares about our personal creative inventions when it comes to worshiping him? Do we really believe that fallen man can somehow create a way of worshiping God that would actually please and glorify him? Ultimately, by rejecting the God-ordained methods of worship and embracing our own inventions, we are saying we know better than God about what brings him glory and honor in our worship of him. 

Worship is about giving God the glory he is due. It is not about our freedom to "worship God however we want", it's not about giving ourselves a creative outlet, it's not about pleasing the culture or entertaining our congregants. When those things become our motive, when those things become what drives us in worship, when we abandon the Biblical methods and patterns for worship, we too are guilty of offering strange fire up to God, and that is no small offense. 

Let us all strive, then, to worship God as he has commanded. We all need an iconoclast in our hearts. We all need to have the idols, the graven images, the man-made attempts at worshiping God (which are, if we are honest with ourselves, really attempts at satisfying our own desires rather than God's), smashed to bits. Let our personal lives of worship and our corporate life in worship together truly be a sweet aroma of praise to our great God and King.

WSC Q&A #50

Q: Which is required in the second commandment?
A: The second commandment requireth the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and entire, all such religious worship and ordinances as God hath appointed in his word.

Deuteronomy 12:32 Everything that I command you, you shall be careful to do. You shall not add to it or take from it.

The verse for this week's catechism comes from a section of Deuteronomy that is full of instruction for the Israelites to guide them in their worship of Yahweh, particularly as it concerns their lives in the Promise Land. If you take the time to read through the 12th chapter of Deuteronomy, you'll notice a few phrases that are repeated. First, the phrase, “you shall not worship the LORD your God in that way” is repeated twice in the chapter, and both times it is in reference to adopting cultural methods for worshiping Yahweh. The first time it is stated is in 12:4. This comes upon the heals of a command by God that when the Israelites go into the promised land, they are to destroy the Canaanites' places of worship, their altars, and their carved images representing their gods. Yahweh is very clear to the Israelites, they are not to attempt to worship Yahweh using these pagan places, altars, or symbols in their worship of the true and living God, even if they are adapting those things as a way to worship Yahweh. The second time this phrase is used is in 12:31. Again, the command is given in response to the idea of adapting pagan methods for worshiping Yahweh, “take care that you be not ensnared to follow them, after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods saying 'How did these nations serve their gods?-that I also may do the same.' You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way.” What is God commanding here? What he is commanding is that his people worship God as he has commanded. The pagan worship belonging to the inhabitants of the Promise Land were not to be contextualized so as to be used in the Israelite worship of Yahweh. This is not how God desires to be worshiped, and this prohibition leads us to the second phrase that we see repeated throughout this chapter. The phrase, “You shall do all that I am commanding you”, or some sort of variation of this command, is given at least four times in this chapter. Not only is Yahweh giving a prohibition to the Israelites concerning their worship, he is giving them instruction on how they are to worship him.

These two commands, to “not worship the LORD your God in that way”, and “You shall do all I am commanding you” highlight a very important truth concerning the worship of God. They show that we are not free to invent ways of worshiping God. God alone knows how he is to be worshiped, and we are not free to adopt new methods of worship or adapt cultural practices in our worship, nor are we free to neglect elements or methods of worship that God has specifically commanded. This is what the Reformed tradition calls the “Regulative Principle” of worship. To understand this better, it's important to contrast this with other views of worship. Many Christians, for example, believe that when it comes to worship, unless the Bible specifically forbids something, we are free to, in all practicality, use it in our worshiping of God. In other words, we can invent how we worship God so long as it does not violate a prohibition of Scripture. However, the Regulative Principle says just the opposite. The Regulative Principle states that unless something is clearly exhibited or commanded by God in Scripture as being appropriate for use in our worship of God, we are not to free to make use of it. In other words, when it comes to worshiping God, we can do only that which God tells us to do. Nothing more and nothing less.

This week's catechism is essentially a summary, then, of the Regulative Principle of worship. Now, it may be difficult for us in the 21st century to connect this to the second commandment as it concerns the use of graven images, but we must put ourselves in the shoes of the Reformers to understand how this all connects. The Reformers were thinking specifically of the worship practices of the Roman Catholic churches of their day. The problem with Roman Catholic worship was not that it was too liturgical, or that it was too traditional, it was that it was, in the minds of the Reformers, full of man-made inventions which led to idolatry. The use of icons, the veneration of saints, the use of rosaries, etc. were all extra-biblical, man-made methods of worshiping God. And for the Reformers, all of these man-made methods of worship led to idolatry, usually in the form of breaking the second commandment, the command not to use images and other visible representations of the Triune God. So this is why the Westminster Divines, when writing the confession and catechism, connect the Regulative Principle to the second commandment.

Certainly in our day and age, we can see the connections here as well between the second commandment and the Regulative Principle of worship. Even in the Evangelical camp, a camp made up of Christians who state a devotion to the Bible as the inspired, infallible, authoritative word of God, we can see how this understanding of the second commandment has gone by the wayside. Abandoned are the God-ordained methods of worship. They've been cast aside as being dusty, old, and irrelevant. The pulpit and Lord's Table have been moved to the side, or removed all together, no longer the centerpiece of our worship. They've been replaced with rock bands, loud sound systems, and stunning light shows. This is not merely coincidental. It highlights a shift in our thinking of worship. The Word and the sacraments are no longer central to the gathered worship of God's people. Exegetical, Christ centered preaching like what we see in the sermons of Peter or Paul in the book of Acts have been replaced with warm, fuzzy, topical sermons which reduce the gospel to a means to living our “best lives now”. The Lord's Supper, which stood as the climax of Christian worship for two millennium, has been relegated to a rare occurrence. We have, in many ways, done exactly what God had commanded the Israelites not to do. We looked at how culture worships their gods, and we attempt to worship the true and living God in the same manor, forgetting his words to Israel, “You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way”. We haven't torn down the altars and idols of our culture, we have simply moved them to inside the church walls and have attempted to contextualize them to the worship of Yahweh. The challenge for us in this age then is whether or not we will cast off our idols and return to the LORD. Brothers and sisters, we are NOT free to invent ways of worshiping God. When we do, we will inevitably fall into idolatry. We will inevitably build up graven images, either literally or in our minds. Instead of remembering we are made after God's own image, we will make God after our own image. The truth is, God alone knows how he should be worshiped and glorified, and he has not left us to guess. His holy Word will teach us how to worship him, and his holy Word will guard our hearts against idolatry. We don't need to rely on pragmatism, our own creativity, or cultural technique when it comes to worship. Let us look to the Bible, cast aside our idols, our graven images, our concern to be hip and cool (besides, those efforts aren't really effective. In the infamous words of Hank Hill from the TV show King of the Hill, "Can't you see you're not making Christianity better? You're just making rock and roll worse!"), and instead, let us trust the eternal, living Word of God to guide us in our worship and praise of the great and holy Triune God.