Show Notes
Westminster Shorter Catechism Q/A 7 and 8
Pastor Christopher Chelpka
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Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Father, we do thank you that your word brings to us comfort, and we ask that you would do that here tonight. As we consider the decrees that you have made from all eternity, as we consider means and ends and very complicated and heavy things, we ask that you would help us to submit to your will and to be humble in our own understanding. We ask that you would use your word to give us confidence in you and the things that you are doing and humility in ourselves. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
[00:00:41] Well, so tonight, as you see on the, in your bulletins, we are thinking about the decrees of God.
[00:00:49] The decrees of God. There's two questions that come to us in our shorter catechism regarding the decrees of goddess.
[00:00:58] Let's read them together. I'll read the question, and then let's read the answer together. What are the decrees of God? The decrees of God are his eternal purpose according to the counsel of his will, whereby for his own glory, he hath foreordained whatsoever comes to pass.
[00:01:21] Good. And then we have a few verses from scripture, and then a second question.
[00:01:26] How doth God execute his decrees? God executeth his decrees in the works of creation and providence.
[00:01:35] Wonderful. So in the coming sermons, I'm going to talk then, after we talk today about God's decrees, we'll think about those two big works that he does. First the work of creation and then the work of Providence.
[00:01:52] A lot of people have questions about these things.
[00:01:57] They have questions. We have questions about the role of God in our lives. How powerful is God? How control. How in control of God? How in control is God? How free is God? And we can ask similar questions of ourselves or animals or plants or other things. How powerful are we? How in control are we? How free are we?
[00:02:24] And these are really important questions.
[00:02:29] What we learn from the scriptures, as is described and so accurately summarized in these questions, is that from all eternity God has decreed whatsoever comes to pass.
[00:02:42] And when scripture gives definition to this whatsoever, it is very broad. In fact, it is comprehensive, totally. There is nothing in all of God's creation or providence that is outside of his decree. There's nothing in all of the world or all of the happenings in the world or anything else that we might imagine that is somehow outside of God, outside of his purpose, outside of his plans, outside of his will.
[00:03:20] We learn from the scriptures that not only where things are going and where they will go, but also how they get there that's under the control and decree of God. The very big, big things that happen down to the tiniest little details of life. In Matthew chapter ten, Jesus says, even the hairs on your head are numbered.
[00:03:46] Amazing, amazing thought.
[00:03:48] The big things, the little things, where they're going, how we get there, the means, the ends, all of it tied together for good.
[00:03:59] God working all things together for good.
[00:04:05] Now, that verse that I just cited from Romans chapter eight goes on to say, for those who are called according to his purpose, right? So those of us who are called by the Lord and see how all the things in our life end in good.
[00:04:22] But I think we can say that all things end in good, not just as we experience them, but as God intends them.
[00:04:31] God is good and loving and just, and all of these other things and all things work together for good as he sets them for all things. These are very comprehensive, very big claims, and scripture speaks to them a lot, and that's very helpful to us, as we'll see in a whole bunch of ways.
[00:04:55] One of the ways scripture speaks to this comes from Matthew, I'm sorry, mark 737.
[00:05:01] We read they were astonished beyond measure, saying, he has done all things well. He even makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.
[00:05:12] Here are people who are seeing the work of God through the ministry of his son, the incarnated second person of the Trinity here in this world, opening people's ears and opening their mouths, and they're amazed, astonished that God not only has done these things, but that he does all things well.
[00:05:37] So if we think about where we're at in the catechism for a moment, you can think of this as a little bit of a transition point. We've been thinking very much about who God is as trinity, and soon we are moving to what God does in his works of creation and providence. These questions provide a link, in a way, between the two, not an ontological link, but a kind of intellectual link from thinking about God to thinking about the works of God.
[00:06:11] And so it's something of a transition.
[00:06:15] Another way we can think about the decrees of God is as a foundation for everything. Again, the comprehensive nature of this in creation and Providence, there's something that undergirds all of that, and it is God according to his decrees.
[00:06:35] What are the decrees of God?
[00:06:38] Well, the answer the catechism gives says, first are his eternal purpose.
[00:06:45] It's sort of an interesting grammatical thing there, right? You expect it to be purposes, maybe, right. The decrees of God are his eternal purposes. Right. The plural matching a singular there that says his purpose. What the catechism is trying to do there is capture these two truths.
[00:07:04] On the one hand, just as God himself is not. And we've talked about this built of all of these different parts, right? Like legos, this piece and that piece and that piece, all coming together to make up God. He is singular, one in his essence.
[00:07:22] We at the same time recognize that we experience him in a variety of ways, right? We can. And we can talk about his decrees in these various ways. The decree of creation and the decree of Providence and all the things that are in them. Let there be light, let there be land, let there be sea, let there be salvation for Israel, right? These specific decrees, we can think about all the various ways that they affect us and our impact our lives, but at the same time, we always want to remember that they hold together perfectly unified in God.
[00:08:02] These are hard things to sort of comprehend, but it helps to contrast with ourselves.
[00:08:07] So when I think about me, when I think about myself and my decision making and those processes, it's a lot of little pieces all put together. Consider the act of reading. For example, you see this letter and that letter and that letter all put together, right, to form a word and then a space and then another word and a space and another word, and all these little parts begin to form a meaning. Similar thing happens when we make decisions. We consider, how will this affect my family and how will this affect my work and what's the right time, and blah, blah, blah, blah, and on and on. And then that's when I'll get the car fixed, right? And we kind of pull all these things together, and each of those parts has the possibility to be fallible, wrong, missing and affecting either, well or not well the other parts. That's not true of God. God doesn't sort of like a giant supercomputer, compute all the possibilities and figure all the things out and then sort of make this calculation. And then after all of the work is done, sort of come to a conclusion.
[00:09:17] He just is.
[00:09:20] It's hard to describe it, right? It's hard to use human language to describe the divine nature, but it's much like the rest of scripture. When we think of God's feelings as being not like ours, the same is true of God's thinking. It's not like ours. We have to talk this way because we have to describe somehow these things, but we always want to remember how approximate they are, how metaphorical they are, how analogical is maybe a better word, and how much of a gap there is between the creator and the creature.
[00:10:02] Well, as we think about these things and the unity of God's decrees and his purpose, his objectives, his goals. That reminds us of another difference between us and him. Our goals, our objectives, right? They come together through all of these complicated decision making processes, and then we make them, and then we often change them and we get them wrong and we say, ah, why did I take on so much? Or I could have done so much more, or why did I pick that? Or I'm standing in the way of sinners or whatever, right? We find our objectives and our goals as missing, ignorant, problematic, less, too little, too much, all kinds of things. And God's not like that.
[00:10:46] Another way in which God is not like us is that when we make all of our decisions, we make them based on learning, right? And you can start in the moment that you're in and the things that you know and you're trying to figure out, but you can also work back all the way to the very beginning of your life where you learned things sometimes through your own experiences, right? You fall and you get up and you see what it's like to hang on the table as you walk, right? And you do all these different things. We learn from our parents, we learn from our teachers, we learn from books, podcasts, all kinds of things, right? And we accumulate all this information. We take it all in and we make these decisions. We take counsel, right?
[00:11:33] Notice what the catechism says, by the way, reflecting exact language we find in scripture. It says, the decrees of God are his eternal purpose according to the counsel of his will. Now that's an amazing statement, isn't it? Right? He takes counsel not in men, not in maps, not in plans, not in books, not in podcasts, not in conferences. He takes counsel according to himself, again, not like us, unless you're a fool.
[00:12:04] God takes counsel in himself. We are fools when we don't seek advice. We are fools when we don't seek counsel, when we don't seek help, when we don't try to learn. But God is eternally wise, and the depths of his wisdom know no bounds. So there's only one place he could go, or should go. We could say, depending on how we're thinking about this, there's only one place he does go, and that's to himself. His decrees are his eternal purpose, according to the counsel of his will.
[00:12:39] Amazing, amazing statement. This is so helpful to understand, because it means that God's not going to mess up. He's not going to learn something wrong or get advice from the wrong person, or read the wrong book or get steered on the wrong path.
[00:12:54] He simply is wise in every way at all times.
[00:13:01] He's not like us.
[00:13:04] Whereby for his own glory he hath foreordained made decisions, decided, planned, chosen everything whatsoever comes to pass.
[00:13:20] Declaring the end from the beginning from the ancient times, things not yet done, saying, my counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish my purpose. It's Isaiah 46 ten declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times, things not yet saying, my counsel shall stand and I will accomplish my purpose.
[00:13:47] That's the decrees of God. Isaiah 46 ten.
[00:13:52] Job 20 313 says, he is unchangeable and who can turn him back.
[00:13:59] What he desires he does.
[00:14:03] What he desires that he does.
[00:14:12] All these things happen according not to human wisdom or authority or power, but according to him and him alone.
[00:14:21] So this is the express testimony of scripture. We're just looking at a few verses. There's hundreds of specific verses you could look at as well as whole chapters and books. And it all testifies to this in a number of numbers, various ways.
[00:14:37] One question people often ask when we think about this very clear teaching in scripture is how does that relate to another very clear teaching in scripture, which is free will.
[00:14:49] Right.
[00:14:51] Matthew, 1712.
[00:14:54] Says of people regarding Jesus, they did to him whatever they pleased.
[00:15:02] Take a look with me. Let's turn to another passage in acts, chapter two. Let's read this together.
[00:15:11] Acts, chapter two, verse 23.
[00:15:31] Here Peter is speaking in verse 22. Acts two, verse 22 will say, he says, men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst. As you yourselves know this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God. You crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.
[00:16:02] So what do we notice here about the most important thing that's ever happened? Right.
[00:16:08] We noticed a couple things. On the one hand, we noticed that, as Matthew testified, they did to him whatever they pleased. They worked according to their hands. They were responsible, free and accountable.
[00:16:22] So much so that the people, having heard Peter in verse 37, we'll say, brothers, what shall we do?
[00:16:34] Right. They ask a question about response, right? Feeling the responsibility of having crucified the Lord, they now ask, well, what can we do? Tell us what to do. And he tells them, repent and be baptized, every one of you. Right?
[00:16:52] So these men are clearly accountable. They're responsible. They acted as the scriptures say, according to their plans, according to their pleasures, according to the work of their hands in crucifying the Lord.
[00:17:06] At the same time, we also read that Jesus was delivered up according to what the definite plan and foreknowledge of God.
[00:17:18] Scripture then clearly testifies to two truths and many more, but these two as well, that God is sovereign over all things, he foreordains whatsoever comes to pass. And in his foreordination of all things, in his work of all things, he also gives humans and animals and maybe plants, I don't know, a kind of thinking, right? A kind of responsibility, a kind of freedom to act according to their nature.
[00:17:51] Is it possible if you struggle like I do to understand how these things go together? Exactly. Let me ask you this.
[00:18:00] Is it possible that there can be two truths that are not contradictory but complementary?
[00:18:12] Of course, there's millions of truths, millions of things that are true, right? And don't contradict each other, right? We don't say, well, there's one truth, gravity and anything that's not, that is not true, right? We affirm whatever truths are true.
[00:18:32] That's one thing that's helpful. Sometimes we enter into this discussion thinking, asking ourselves, coming, having maybe predetermined ourselves, that only one thing can be true.
[00:18:46] When scripture clearly testifies that both these things are true.
[00:18:51] Alright, second question. Is it possible that two things are true without, let's say, me, necessarily understanding the exact relationship of those two things?
[00:19:05] Of course, again, all the time with all kinds of things.
[00:19:10] It is true that it takes many, many people and countries and very difficult systems to make a pencil, rubber and wood. There's a whole book about this that you can read.
[00:19:29] Rubber and wood and tractors and farmers and people all over the world coming together to make a pencil, right?
[00:19:36] And yet, how cheap is a pencil?
[00:19:40] How does that happen?
[00:19:42] Maybe some of you can explain it. I don't know.
[00:19:45] I don't know. But does that mean that those things are not true? Just because I don't understand the relationship between the price of a pencil and all the work that goes into it, does that mean that one of those two things is wrong? No, of course not. There's all kinds of things I don't understand. There's all kinds of things you don't understand about your own life, about the way that economies work, pencils, and maybe about God.
[00:20:15] Maybe it's difficult to understand how God, in his infinite wisdom, works all things.
[00:20:24] Maybe I'm understating. Right? Of course it's difficult to understand. Of course it's going to be impossible to understand at every level that you might desire for all kinds of reasons, one of which is that we're not God.
[00:20:41] We don't know how he, quotation marks here thinks we don't know how he works, but we know that he does.
[00:20:51] And so our hearts ought to be humble about these things. This is what I'm encouraging towards. I'm encouraging you to look at the truths of scripture and say, that's true, that's true, that's true.
[00:21:02] And these things are not contradictory against one another. We just don't know exactly how they fit together.
[00:21:09] Now, we and theologians and the church has said a lot more than I'm going to be able to say tonight. More. That's helpful. Questions that are answered. I'm not pretending to be comprehensive in everything this evening, and there are things you can read and things I can point you to that will be helpful in going deeper into these questions. But what I'm telling you ahead of time is that there are real limits to that and you should expect them and you should submit to them.
[00:21:44] There's a goodness in this that I want to encourage you in as well.
[00:21:48] If God were not in control, if God were not wise, if God were not good, he'd be like us.
[00:21:56] He'd be dependent, he'd be trying, he'd be frustrated, he'd be ignorant of. And what would that mean for us?
[00:22:04] It means that we'd be without hope. It means that our hope would be in vain.
[00:22:10] The work that the Lord did, chose to do, determined to do according to his foreordained plans, is a work that saved us.
[00:22:22] It's a work that was began many, many years before Jesus came.
[00:22:28] Prophecies and movements of time and movements of nation, all these nations, all these sort of things to come to this moment. And the scriptures say, in the fullness of time, of the Lord came in the perfect time, according to God's definite plan, according to God's definite wisdom.
[00:22:52] This means that the house of our salvation, if I could put it this way, is built on a really, really, really solid foundation.
[00:23:04] It's not going to get any stronger because it's built on the will of God, a will of God that is unchangeable, that is wise, that is perfect.
[00:23:17] Listen to Malachi. Three, six.
[00:23:20] For I, the Lord, do not change.
[00:23:23] Therefore, you, o children of Jacob, are not consumed.
[00:23:32] I, the Lord, do not change, therefore, you, o children of Jacob, are not consumed.
[00:23:40] Because of God's promise, because of his foreordination, because of his deciding these things that are unchangeable, because he's not dependent on this movement and that movement of history upon this decision or that decision that this or that person makes, because he's so eternally solid, because he cannot be moved because he cannot be changed.
[00:24:05] We are not consumed.
[00:24:10] Our salvation depends on his will, not ours. We can't climb up to heaven. We can't make God do things. We are dependent on him. And this is ultimately a great confidence giver.
[00:24:27] Turn with me to ephesians, chapter one.
[00:24:31] Galatians. I'm sorry. Ephesians, chapter one, verse eleven.
[00:24:39] Listen to how the word of God speaks of our salvation.
[00:24:47] In him that is Christ. We have obtained an inheritance having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be to the praise, his glory.
[00:25:09] You see the foundation that our salvation rests on. The foundation that your salvation rests on.
[00:25:19] One way to put this is because he's not like me. Because he's not like you. You can trust him.
[00:25:27] You don't have to go read a bunch of reviews and talk to people and try. You could just trust him forever, at all times, in all ways. Trust him. Trust him. Trust him.
[00:25:41] Because, as psalm 30 311 says, the counsel of the Lord stands forever, the plans of his heart to all generations.
[00:25:50] Or as proverbs 1921 puts it with contrast, many are the plans in the mind of man, but it is the purpose of the Lord that will stand.
[00:26:01] So when you read verses like ephesians one, when you read verses like acts chapter two, or when you think about other places, like Genesis 49, when Joseph says, what you planned for evil, God has made for good.
[00:26:18] When we think about these things, when we come to see our place in God, our place is safe.
[00:26:26] Our place is safe in him. Our salvation is secure in him. And that's why, because he is who he is. We have confidence in who we are in him.
[00:26:41] As far as applications go, let one of them just be wonder.
[00:26:48] Let one of the applications of these things be praise. Just let your draw your jaw drop and stand in awe of God, who decrees all things and who takes even the most evil plans of men and can turn them to good, who can take the crucifixion of his son in the hands of wickedness and make it the salvation for the world, for all who have been predestined and called according to his purpose, the salvation of his people, a new heavens and a new earth, a glorious kingdom, all accomplished through the cross. Who could do that but God alone?
[00:27:37] One of the applications of these truths in God's word surely must be humility, honor, and praise and awe to the Lord.
[00:27:49] Another is, of course, submission to him in all things and at all times, another is comfort. For even the hairs, even the hairs on your head are numbered. He cares for you. He knows you. He's not blind to what's going on. He's foreordained it all.
[00:28:07] You don't know what's going to happen in your life. You don't know what's going to happen next week, next month, next year. Which is why we sometimes say God willing or Lord willing when we talk about our plans.
[00:28:21] These are good reminders to us, because ultimately the plans of the Lord will stand, and the plans of the Lord are good.
[00:28:32] Let's pray.
[00:28:34] Our heavenly Father, we bow ourselves before you and before your holy decrees.
[00:28:41] We thank you that your eternal purpose, according to the counsel of your will, brings you glory, and that whatsoever comes to pass in both creation and providence, we know that we can look to you apart from you, apart from understanding your sovereignty, the power and wisdom in your decrees, we would surely despair of all things, the vanity of this world, the vanity of things seemingly happening again and again with no reason, good things going nowhere, bad things coming to fruition.
[00:29:19] But Lord, as you give us the opportunity to sweep our eyes across the history of the world, which is to say the account of all of your works, you give us an opportunity to remember that all things that happen under the sun happen because of you.
[00:29:41] So, Lord, teach us to submit ourselves not to the ups and downs and the variants of this world, but to you who are unchangeable and holy and wise and good. To you who have loved us before we loved you, to you who have called us and foreordained us to this calling, that we might walk in the walks that you have prepared for us beforehand. Encourage our hearts, Lord, and help us to trust in you at all times and in all ways. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.
