LBCF 1689 Reflections (part 15).

Happy New Year!

 

Reflections on the Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689. 23 Aug 14 began a perhaps unbroken, orderly, and personal journey through my favorite written confession of faith. This will be my personal reflections on this beloved written codification of the Christian faith according to a Baptist flavor.

 

NEXT-

 

CHAPTER 2

Paragraph 1: “The Lord our God is but one only living and true God; whose subsistence is in and of himself, infinite in being and perfection…”

 

Christianity is decidedly monotheistic (1 Timothy 2:5; Galatians 3:20; Deuteronomy 4:39). The Bible reveals that the God we believe in is the only one who’s ever existed or will ever exist. “You are My witnesses,” says the Lord, “And My servant whom I have chosen, That you may know and believe Me, And understand that I am He. Before Me there was no God formed, nor shall there be after Me.” Isaiah 43:10. Jesus, Scripture says repeatedly, is that God who created everything and therefore is He Himself not created, John 1:3. The Holy Spirit is the God upon whom believers call, and who reveals the Son to the Christian, John 16:14. Christians do not worship three gods, and we affirm that there is only one God.

     Chapter two of the LBCF is entitled, “Of God and the Holy Trinity.” To establish the doctrine of the tri-unified nature of God it must be founded firmly on a monotheistic base. There is no doubt a structure to understanding the Trinity. It is not understood in an hour. Nonetheless, this cardinal doctrine is built upon the fact that, “The Lord our God is but one only living and true God.”

     The sovereignty of God is God’s favorite subject. This is the subject God first used to draw me to Himself. There is more in Scripture to show that God’s throne is established in heaven (Psalm 103:19) than anything else. Ravi Zacharias says, “God is the only being in existence whose reason for existence is within Himself.” Every single thing in creation completely depends on the being of God. You can literally lessen the reality of this by imagining the entire universe, even beyond what we can see, to a device plugged into God like a power source. Planets don’t spin and gases don’t burn without God’s very being…and that being will not be depleted. God is completely transcendent over His creation; He needs nothing from it or us. He is wholly self-sufficient, self-satisfied and self-contained. We are but the overflow of that. He has made the world out of His delight to do so.

     God is infinite. Go right for eternity and He’ll be there. Go left for eternity and you’ve never seen His starting point. God is.

     All of this is biblical doctrine. I had to come to terms with truths like, “All nations before Him are as nothing, and they are counted by Him less than nothing and worthless,” Isaiah 40:17. It can make some men scared to think that they’re not, “The center of God’s universe.” It made me feel as such. The fact is that it’s a gift when God, by His sheer grace and desire, begins to give men the ability to make Him the center of “their” universe. When a man begins to love God he begins to live His almighty sovereignty, His freedom, His perfect and eternal happiness regardless of whether or not he was ever born to appreciate it.

     The fact is that God can rescue me or God can condemn me. God can turn His back from me, or make me the apple of His eye. God is God. I love Him for that. I confess that there is only one God and that He does not need me. He is perfect and therefore never changing. I, on the other hand, love and adore Him in light of the fact that I need Him for my daily food and breath.