Get With The Times

Every pastor knows the value of a good illustration.  I have a few in my pedagogical toolbox and I use them regularly.  Some are timeless and I’ll likely keep using them as long as I teach and preach.  Others made sense to everybody 10-20 years ago, but fewer people are grasping them with the passage of time.

One of my favourite illustrations has to do with baptism and the covenant promises signed and sealed by God in this sacrament.  I’ve used it countless times in sermons and catechism lessons.  I didn’t come up with it — I don’t even remember where or from whom I first heard it.  It’s the illustration of the cheque.

This is the illustration as used in my book I Will Be Your God: An Easy Introduction to the Covenant of Grace:

We must distinguish between extending the promise and receiving what is promised.

An illustration might help.  It is not a perfect illustration, but it will get the point across.  Imagine if I were to give you a cheque for $10,000.  Another name for a cheque is a promissory note.  It is a promise from me that you will receive $10,000 from my bank account.  But say that you take my cheque and put it in your pocket and then forget about it.  Next week you pull those pants on and you put your hand in your pocket and there is a crumpled wad of paper.  It has been through the washing machine, so you are not quite sure what it is anymore.  You throw it in the garbage.

Did I extend a promise of $10,000?  Yes, I wrote the cheque and gave that promissory note to you.

However, did you receive $10,000?  No, because you did not take the cheque to the bank and deposit it or cash it.  You did not do anything with that cheque and so you missed out on what was promised.

Do you see the difference now?  It is the difference between extending a promise and receiving what has been promised.  It is the difference between giving a cheque for $10,000 and getting $10,000 in your hand.

That is what happens in the covenant of grace.  God proclaims the promises of the covenant to all in the covenant.  Every single person — and that needs to be stressed.  However, not every single person receives what is promised in the covenant: the blessings.  That is because there is a human responsibility within the covenant relationship.  Everybody needs to bring the cheque to the bank, so to speak.  The big question is how.

Do you see a possible problem this illustration might encounter today?

When we moved here to Australia in 2015, we right away noticed that cheques are almost completely extinct here.  It was getting like that in Canada, but Australia is even further along in electronic payments for everything.  In fact, I don’t think I have ever seen an Australian bank cheque.  Still, I’ve kept on using the cheque illustration, banking on the hope that most people still know what I’m talking about.  Most probably do, even the kids in my catechism classes.  Yet the illustration is undoubtedly losing its currency.

I’m mentoring a couple of young men from my church in teaching catechism.  I have a sabbatical coming up shortly and they’ll be taking over my catechism classes.  One of them was teaching on baptism.  Afterwards, we got to discussing this illustration and I asked how it could be updated.  “A gift card,” was the reply.  Hmmm…..

Indeed, if someone gives you a gift card for $10, it’s like a promise for that amount.  However, in order to cash in on the value of the gift card, you need to do something with it.  If it’s for iTunes, you need to get yourself to the iStore.  If you leave that gift card in your pocket and forget about it, it’s given you no benefit.  You have to redeem it.  Similarly, with God’s covenant promises, you have “to redeem them” in order to receive their value and benefit.  The way that’s done is through faith in Jesus Christ.  I think that works to bring the illustration into a new era.

As I intimated in the book excerpt above, it’s not a perfect illustration.  It can only be taken so far.  For example, it doesn’t reckon with the reality that not appropriating the promises for yourself doesn’t leave you in a zero-sum state.  If you don’t deposit your cheque or redeem your gift card, you’re just left with nothing.  There’s no penalty.  But if you neglect or spurn God’s covenant promises, there are serious consequences (e.g. Hebrews 10:26-31).

It’s often said that the best way to teach is to show and not tell.  A well-crafted illustration does exactly that.  “Well-crafted” means also ensuring our illustrations are relevant and easily grasped.

Personal Responsibility

Does calling for personal responsibility make one into an Arminian?  Some Reformed people have real trouble with holding people accountable for the spiritual choices they make.  Some get uncomfortable when Reformed preachers make a distinct call to faith and repentance.  They feel that this somehow undermines God’s sovereignty.  After all, if God wants to save someone, he will do so in his own time and in his own way.  Calling for people to respond with repentance and faith seems to say that human beings may be trying to do something contrary to God’s purposes.  In fact, once I was even told by a Reformed church member that the Heidelberg Catechism is Arminian when it says that justification is mine, “if only I accept this gift with a believing heart” (QA 60).  Apparently, the Catechism is also Arminian when it says that forgiveness belongs to believers, “as often as they by true faith accept the promise of the gospel” (QA 84).  Some folks really stumble over that word “accept.”  How can that be Reformed?

Leaving aside any popular misunderstandings of what constitutes Arminianism, can we speak about the need for all of us to personally accept God’s gospel promises?  Does an acknowledgement of human responsibility add up to a denial of divine sovereignty?  Or, to put it another way, does divine sovereignty mean that we are mere puppets on a string or perhaps pre-programmed robots who can only follow the Programmer’s wishes?  These are important questions and they’ve been wrestled with many times throughout church history.

One path we might take in exploring these questions could take us back to Klaas Schilder (see here for a short bio).  Personal responsibility in the covenant of grace was one of Schilder’s emphases.  Against the background of others who placed everything under the umbrella of divine sovereignty, Schilder sought to drive home the reality of the covenant as a relationship between God and his people, a relationship where human beings are treated as completely responsible for how they respond to divine overtures.

A good summary of Schilder’s approach can be found in the essay of S.A. Strauss in the book Always Obedient: Essays on the Teachings of Dr. Klaas Schilder (yes, as noted before, an infelicitous title).  Strauss noted that Schilder was contending with the covenant views of two theologians in particular:  Abraham Kuyper and Karl Barth.  Writes Strauss:

Schilder observed the same weakness in both schools of thought, even though this weakness arose from different motives.  With regard to the doctrine of the covenant, both reasoned so strongly from the perspective of the eternal decrees of God that man’s responsibility in the covenant was underemphasized.  In contrast, this responsibility was a basic motive in Schilder’s theology: in the covenant God treats man as a responsible being and confronts him with the choice of “all or nothing,” for God or against him!  Schilder therefore did everything in his power always to define the covenant in such a way that justice was done to man’s responsibility. (Always Obedient, 21)

Schilder’s point of departure in this approach was not God’s inscrutable eternal decrees, but his dealings with humanity in history.  God’s decrees are certainly behind all he does, but what is accessible to us and what we experience are his dealings here and now.

There are consequences that follow from this and one of the most marked is going to be found in preaching.  Reformed preaching which acknowledges this reality is not going to allow for or encourage passivity amongst God’s people.  Covenant preaching of this sort will not countenance fatalism.  Strauss elaborates:

…it is Schilder’s view that true “covenant preaching presents the strongest appeal to human responsibility.  This is why such preaching is also so tremendously serious, and revealing…comforting, but destroying all excuses for idleness [maar het stuksnijding van alle duivels-oorkussens].”  Such covenant preaching is a prohibition against imagining going to hell while being on the way to heaven, and it is a prevention against imagining going to heaven while being on the way to hell. (Always Obedient, 25)

Taking Schilder’s approach means that a Reformed preacher is not going to be soft on human responsibility.  In fact, you should expect a preacher who has learned covenant theology from Schilder to emphasize this rather strongly.

What about baptism?  Where does that fit in here?  Strauss explains that Schilder taught that all who are baptized receive a concrete address from God, “a message that God proclaims to everyone who is baptized, personally:  if you believe, you will be saved.” (28-29).  However, if a baptized covenant member rejects God’s overtures in unbelief, such a person will come under God’s covenant wrath and curses.  Greater blessings and promises imply greater responsibility and accountability.  Strauss concludes about what Schilder wanted to emphasize most strongly:

…that the covenant should never be allowed to lead to a false sense of security.  People of the covenant may never think that salvation is already theirs because they have received the promise.  The promises of the covenant are not predictions; they imply demands…

This is, then, the great and lasting signifance of what Schilder taught us about the covenant.  When God establishes his covenant with human persons, he treats them as responsible beings.  As Schilder characteristically put it, the covenant stands or falls by its rule “all or nothing.”  (Always Obedient, 30-31)

The fact of the matter is that no one, least of all covenant members, can use God’s sovereignty to evade their personal responsibility to repent and believe the gospel.  In fact, to do so would be to give in to a Satanic way of thinking.  Satan wants people to stand idly by and be passive before God — because passivity before God always means plenty of activity that pleases the evil one.

So is it Arminian to insist on human responsibility?  If it is, then not only am I guilty, but so is Klaas Schilder.  Of course, the Protestant Reformed allege exactly that.  Followers of Herman Hoeksema, most notably David Engelsma, have insisted that we are essentially Arminians because we hold to the view that there are conditions in the covenant of grace.  This is not the time to enter into a full rebuttal of that view.  Only let me say that their position is the result of viewing everything, and especially the covenant, through the lens of election.  Everything has to fit in a neat system that we humans can comprehend.  Against that, I acknowledge God’s full and complete sovereignty in our salvation in line with everything in the Canons of Dort, but at the same time I stress the human responsibility to repent and believe found in the Heidelberg Catechism and elsewhere.  That is a responsibility far more weighty for those who have been included by God in the covenant of grace.  In the covenant, God treats us as responsible creatures and, as such, calls each one of us to repent from our sins and accept the gospel promises in true faith.

Holy Baptism Signs and Seals the Benefits of Christ

The following is the introduction to a sermon I recently preached at Providence Canadian Reformed Church.  Lord’s Day 26 was the Catechism lesson.

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Beloved congregation of our Lord Jesus Christ,

This afternoon we’re looking at the sacrament of baptism.  There are many wrong ways of thinking about baptism.  The errors tend to go in one of two directions.  In one wrong direction, people say too much about what baptism does.  We can think about the Roman Catholic Church here.  For them, baptism washes away all sins and puts one in a state of grace.  That’s saying far too much.  But there’s another wrong direction where people say too little about baptism and what it does.  For many Christians, baptism is just a statement to the world.  That’s saying far too little.  So there are these two wrong directions that one could go:  ascribing too much to baptism or ascribing too little.  Overstating it or understating it.

We want to avoid the extremes and find the biblical balance, saying just what God says in his Word.  Our Catechism helps us to do that.  It helps us by pointing out that baptism is a sign.  Like any sign, it points to something.  Right there you see that there’s a little warning against saying too much about baptism.  No one who understands what a sign is confuses it with what the sign points to.  No one would confuse a sign that says a certain city is 50 km away with the city itself – that would be foolish.  We say that there’s a difference between the sign and the thing signified.  But baptism is also a seal.  A seal is like a guarantee – it’s something you can count on, depend upon.  When a king puts his seal on a decree, you know it’s genuine and you know it can be trusted.  Right there you see that there’s a little warning against saying too little about baptism.  If baptism is a seal, there’s something very significant going on when it’s administered.  Someone is saying something weighty.

What baptism signs and seals are the benefits of Christ.  As a sign, baptism points to what Christ has done, especially in his death on the cross.  As a seal, baptism says that God makes certain promises in relation to what Christ has done – promises which are trustworthy and dependable.  This afternoon we’re going to explore all this further.  It’s important that we be clear about baptism and what Scripture says about it in general.   We’re going to see that holy baptism signs and seals the benefits of Christ.

We’ll look at baptism and:

1. What it means
2. What it doesn’t mean

Click here to continue reading this sermon…

Baptized Children “Sanctified in Christ”

I’m doing a series of sermons on the covenant of grace and so I’ve been doing some reading again on this subject.  A lot has been written about the doctrine of the covenant in Reformed circles.  J. Kamphuis wrote a little book called An Everlasting Covenant.  It was originally written in Dutch and then translated and published in Australia in 1985.

In our Form for Infant Baptism, the first question asks whether parents confess that our children “though conceived and born in sin, and therefore subject to all sorts of misery, even to condemnation, are sanctified in Christ and thus as members of his church ought to be baptized?”  The words in bold have been controversial and Kamphuis discusses this in his book.  Let me quote what he writes about the views of Klaas Schilder:

K. Schilder…expounded the view of the old Reformed theologians such as Petrus Dathenus and Marten Micronius, and also that of the baptismal form as follows:

a.  ‘Sanctified in Christ’ means: by virtue of the participating in the Covenant, being entitled to the promises of justification by Christ’s blood;

b. This justification, however, in time becomes our share through faith.

c. When by faith the promise of the washing by Christ’s blood is accepted, and in this way the baptized person indeed participates in justification, then the washing by Christ’s Spirit springs from it, sanctification not ‘IN Christ‘ but ‘THROUGH the Spirit.’

d. This is why at baptism — which has the participation in the promise as the foundation of its administration, and itself seals that promise — the baptized person is put under the obligation to believe the promise.

e.  It belongs to the contents of the promise that has to be embraced in faith, that the Holy Spirit desires to sanctify us, (indeed) imparting to us that which we have in Christ (in the promise, by rights). (80)

In other words, baptism does not actually convey the gift of justification, as if all those who are baptized are automatically justified and then might later lose it.  It conveys the promise, but what is promised is only received through faith.  All covenant children are recipients of the promises and all are obligated to believe those promises.  The gospel call to faith and repentance needs to be sounded amongst the covenant people!

Gootjes: the Promises of Baptism

I am getting giddy about this new book, Teaching and Preaching the Word: Studies in Dogmatics and Homiletics.  It’s like re-reading my dogmatics notes from seminary.  Chapter 9 deals with the promises of baptism.  Gootjes tackles the issue of the promises mentioned at the beginning of the Reformed baptism form:

When we are baptized into the Name of the Father, God the Father testifies and seals to us that He establishes an eternal covenant of grace with us. He adopts us for His children and heirs, and promises to provide us with all good and avert all evil or turn it to our benefit.

When we are baptized into the Name of the Son, God the Son promises us that He washes us in His blood from all our sins and unites us with Him in His death and resurrection.  Thus we are freed from our sins and accounted righteous before God.

When we are baptized into the Name of the Holy Spirit, God the Holy Spirit assures us by this sacrament that He will dwell in us and make us living members of Christ, imparting to us what we have in Christ, namely, the cleansing from our sins and the daily renewal of our lives, till we shall finally be presented without blemish among the assembly of God’s elect in life eternal.

He deals specifically with the last part about the Holy Spirit.  He asks, “Can these words be applied to all children that are baptized?  Does the Spirit dwell in all of them?”  He surveys Calvin and Ursinus on these questions and then looks at the scriptural data.  I’m not going to rehearse his entire argument.  Let me just share his conclusion:

…The answer is simple.  The Form does not state that the Spirit actually dwells in all baptized children.  It does not speak of an existing situation.  Rather, this is presented as a promise for the covenant people of God.

That is in complete agreement with Scripture.  The promise of indwelling is first mentioned in Acts 2:39, “The promise is for you and your children…”  It is conditional on repentance and faith: “Repent, and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ, so that your sins may be forgiven” (Acts 2:38).  It is also mentioned in Romans 8:9-11; there, too, it is conditional on faith.  When the Form for Baptism speaks of the indwelling and sanctifying work of the Spirit, it speaks of promises.  These are great gifts of the covenant offered by God and grasped with the hands of faith.

The same promissory character can be seen in the way the Form speaks about the meaning of being baptized into the name of the Father and of the Son.  The promise that “He will provide us with all good and avert all evil or turn it to our benefit” is fulfilled in those who believe (Rom. 8:28 speaks of “those who love him”).  And the covenant promise of the Son is the forgiveness of sins, and is fulfilled through our union with him, as Romans 6:5 says: “If we have been united with him like this in his death…”

The Form for Baptism follows Scripture in presenting the statement about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit as promises.  In baptism, our Triune God promises himself and all his benefits to us.  These are splendid gifts, granted by God and accepted in faith. (192-193)

I hope this book gets the wide readership that it deserves!