Second London Baptist Confession 2.1 (Part 5)

-There is a great debate amongst pastors and theologians about what the church needs from its teachers and leaders for the church to grow and fulfill its function. There is the debate on whether churches need expositional sermons or topical studies. (My approach is more in the middle where I preach expositionally on Sundays and more topically on Wednesdays.) But even more important than the style would be the emphasis that is contained within the sermon, often going from one extreme to the other. There are some on one side who say that the only thing you need to preach and teach is the love of God—and they avoid the hard topics of sin and hell and judgment and the like because that would be offensive to some. No doubt the Bible talks a lot about love because God is love.... But, to merely focus on love is skipping over a lot of the Bible. On the other hand, there are those who preach on nothing else but sin and judgment and hell, and never mention God’s love and mercy and grace. The first category we might call woke or soft and the second category we might call fire and brimstone or maybe legalistic. The issue is that preachers on either extreme of the spectrum are not giving the full picture of what the Word of God paints.

-This not only affects preachers and sermons, but it is also an issue within all of Christiandom on the way people believe about and look at God. Many will say that since God is all love, it doesn’t matter what I do or how I live or even what I believe because God is love. A God of love would never punish me or actually expect anything of me. Then there are those who say that God is so vengeful and angry that they make it near impossible for anyone to be saved and go to heaven. But the Scriptures give us a more nuanced picture of God. God has revealed Himself as love—God is love. But God has also revealed that He hates sin. There is a heaven, but there is also a hell.

-It’s been a while, but we’ve been looking at creeds and confessions that help summarize the biblical teaching about important aspects of our faith. I have been on the subject of God Himself, looking at how the 1689 Baptist Confession summarizes Scripture (with the Westminster Confession in the background as well). The confession, as best as it can, summarizes God’s nature and aspects and character, and I believe gives us the balanced view of God that God Himself revealed in His Word...

Confessing the Faith: The 1689 Baptist Confession for the 21st Century (II. God and the Holy Trinity)

The Lord our God is one, the only living and true God. He is self-existent and infinite in being and perfection. His essence cannot be understood by anyone but Him. He is a perfectly pure spirit. He is invisible and has no body, parts, or changeable emotions. He alone has immortality, dwelling in light that no one can approach. He is unchangeable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, in every way infinite, absolutely holy, perfectly wise, wholly free, completely absolute. He works all things according to the counsel of His own unchangeable and completely righteous will for His own glory. He is most loving, gracious, merciful, and patient. He overflows with goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. He rewards those who seek Him diligently. At the same time, He is perfectly just and terrifying in His judgments. He hates all sin and will certainly not clear the guilty.

-Tonight I want to focus in on the last five or so sentences:

He is most loving, gracious, merciful, and patient. He overflows with goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. He rewards those who seek Him diligently. At the same time, He is perfectly just and terrifying in His judgments. He hates all sin and will certainly not clear the guilty.

-Someone looking in from the outside (meaning, someone who is not a Christian and whose mind has not been enlightened to truth) might look at these sentences and think that they are completely contradictory. You say God is loving but also terrifying in judgments—how does that connect? You say He’s merciful but also perfectly just—how in the world can those both be true at the same time?

-But what people need to understand is that this is nothing less than what God has said about Himself. I think of one particular situation in the Old Testament. Moses wanted a fuller revelation of God, wanting to see God. God hid Moses in a cleft of a rock, covered Moses up, and passed by Moses in a special manifestation, but as God was passing by He voiced truths about Himself. And this is what God said:

Exodus 34:6–7 NET 2nd ed.

6 The Lord passed by before him and proclaimed: “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in loyal love and faithfulness, 7 keeping loyal love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin. But he by no means leaves the guilty unpunished, responding to the transgression of fathers by dealing with children and children’s children, to the third and fourth generation.”

-Obviously, a lot of the description in these verses are what is used in the confession. God is both compassionate and just. He has to punish sin but He also is merciful and willing to forgive sin. These are not contradictions, but a fuller picture of the wonder and mercy of God. And the Bible bears testimony of this greatness and complexity of our Creator. Both sides of the coin come together perfectly in a perfect God. Another word we might use is HOLY—God is separate and different from anyone else, and He perfectly blends these wonderful attributes in a mosaic that might be too complex for the human brain to process, and yet everything spoken of here is true.

-And, while (for the unbeliever) these attributes are not able to mesh together in any sort of coherent fashion, we who have the full revelation of God know exactly how God is able to maintain both. God is able to maintain His purity and justice. What we saw in the Exodus verses is that God have to punish the guilty, God has to respond to transgression. He cannot merely turn a blind eye to the sins of the people because it goes against His holy standard. And yet, God is compassionate and gracious and slow to anger and abounding in mercy and loyal love. How in the world can we make these coincide with one another?

-God did so Himself through the cross of Jesus Christ. At the cross of Jesus Christ God’s love and justice, mercy and wrath came together in an act that kept God pure and true to Himself and yet extended deliverance and salvation to mankind. God’s just wrath for sin was satisfied as Jesus paid the cost, God’s love for humanity was satisfied as Jesus’ death gave the foundation and basis for forgiveness of sins. Yes, God is both terrifying in judgment and forgiving. Yes, God hates sin and yet grace is extended to the sinner. You cannot make sense of these seemingly contradictory statements without a personal knowledge of Christ and His cross and His resurrection.

-This balance of truth is testified throughout Scripture, most especially in the words of the apostle of love, who gives this long testimony:

1 John 4:7–19 NET 2nd ed.

7 Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God. 8 The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9 By this the love of God is revealed in us: that God has sent his one and only Son into the world so that we may live through him. 10 In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. 11 Dear friends, if God so loved us, then we also ought to love one another. 12 No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God resides in us, and his love is perfected in us. 13 By this we know that we reside in God and he in us: in that he has given us of his Spirit. 14 And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent the Son to be the Savior of the world. 15 If anyone confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God resides in him and he in God. 16 And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has in us. God is love, and the one who resides in love resides in God, and God resides in him. 17 By this love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because just as Jesus is, so also are we in this world. 18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears punishment has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because he loved us first.

-Because God extended love toward sinners, we are made new and are able to love like we would never have been able to love without Christ. And it all centers on Christ. God’s love and justice are not both satisfied by some fancy philosophy or a mere ethical system. They were satisfied in a person—in Jesus Christ.

-But, let’s make it personal. God loves you, but you are a sinner and an object of His wrath because you are guilty. God is perfectly just and He must punish lawbreakers, and that is all of us. But, as Paul declares:

Romans 5:8 NET 2nd ed.

8 But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

-People think that the love of God means He lets you live however you want. But this is the love of God—He satisfied His own justice. And as Paul says elsewhere, it’s not so you can go on sinning, but it is so you can have a new life. Let me ask you, do you have that life? Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ—by faith accept the gift, because:

John 3:16 NET 2nd ed.

16 For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.

-It is here that His justice and love, His hatred of sin and His compassion, are able to coincide together. But it is a call for faith and belief and obedience to that gospel message...