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 which is according to a Baptist flavor.
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Chapter 7, part 1: “The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to him as their creator, yet they could never have attained the reward of life but by some voluntary condescension on God’s part, which he hath been pleased to express by way of covenant.”
Let me first begin today by just saying how much I love the way they said this. This is so very important to confess as Christians. God must come to us or even in hell we never would have come to him. Many things in modern science have helped us greatly as believers. We’ve learned, for example, just how far the stars are from the earth. This helps us see things from God’s vantage a bit better when he says, “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” Amen. This is perhaps the best cosmological object lesson. God is that much smarter than us.
God has given his own the concept of covenant. Even from our first parents, the idea of covenant is made a staple in our understanding as image bearers. God has come to us in covenant. He has approached and chosen his bride from among men. We owe him obedience, but don’t render it without God “…amending our will and turning it from unbelief to faith and from godlessness to godliness…” (As Canon V of the Council of Orange declared in AD 529).
Christ’s love toward his church is so covenantally expressed in the new Testament that it is in fact exactly compared to a marriage in Romans 7:1-6. This is how much we can know he loves us. This is how much we can hope to know him. God had to come to people or people would not have known who God was. There are certain things we can learn about an artist just by looking at his painting, but we cannot “know” the artist unless he introduces himself. God has.
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