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 3a: “This covenant is revealed in the gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by farther steps, until the full discovery thereof was completed in the New Testament…”
I think it’s safe to say that the first part here where it says “This covenant is revealed in the gospel” is that with the New Testament comes the full disclosure of God’s purposes of redemption in this world. The Old Covenant was like the first part of a book saga that remained incomplete until part two, the New Covenant was penned. The amazing part is that we couldn’t have really understood that in any full sense of the idea until part two actually came.
What’s called the protoevangelium or the “first gospel” is heard in Genesis 3:15 when God announced to Satan before them all, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your seed and her Seed; he shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.” This is the first announcement not of a way in which man could hope to earn salvation, but a proclamation of how salvation will be accomplished by God himself. The Seed alone would do it! We fill in the pieces of this enigmatic statement through the New Testament’s revelation like the DNA of the frog filled in the genome sequence gaps of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park part one. The rest of the Book of Genesis begins to trace the fulfillment of this promise of the Seed throughout its pages. Jesus, pertaining to his bloodline, is a descendent of Adam, and furthermore a descendent of Abraham through Mary. Apostolic revelation reveals the mindbogglingly intricate details of this promise in all its fullness as a promise made to mankind contingent only upon Jesus’ much later fulfillment of it through his birth, life, death, Resurrection and Ascension. Galatians 3:16-26 (emphasis on vv. 16 & 26). Cf. 1 Peter 1:12. Amazing! Such is a complexity no Bible scoffer will ever understand. Only God can write such a book as the Bible’s 66 books. Anyone with a pen and time to spare could accomplish absolutely any other.
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