Good Morning!
As we continue to walk through our Confession of Faith we need to remember what the Westminster Confession (and the Catechisms) means to us. It is the summary of what we as Bethany ARP Church believe the Bible teaches us about our God and His mercies to us. In other words if we want a "quick answer" guide to any question we may have about our faith the WCF and the Shorter and Larger Catechisms are a wonderful place to go to help us.
Today we are going to look at Chapter 20. This portion of the Confession is about what the writers have called "Liberty of Conscience" and here is the second section:
"God alone is Lord of the conscience, and hath left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in any thing contrary to His Word; or beside it, if matters of faith or worship. So that, to believe such doctrines, or to obey such commands, out of conscience, is to betray true liberty of conscience: and the requiring of an implicit faith, and an absolute and blind obedience is to destroy liberty of conscience, and reason also."
What this means is that your conscience, that part of your thinking power that tells you whether something is good or bad, can only be made to do anything by God's commands found in the Bible, not by the ideas of men. For instance, a question I have received (that I answered on one of our Ever Wonder Wednesday segment back in February) is about Lent. Lent is a forty-day season of penitence between Ash Wednesday and Easter. It is modeled after Christ's forty days of wilderness wandering.
What does this have to do with liberty of conscience? Well, I'd like you to go to your Bibles and find any command from our Lord to observe this season. What you will find is that there is no command, either explicitly (chapter and verse) or by good and necessary consequence that can be learned from example. So to force, or even observe this season is to violate conscience, that standard by which anyone can tell you that you must do something. The Scriptures take very seriously any attempt to bind men and women to laws and ideas which God has not provided in His Word. This is for our blessing and to protect us from Pharisaical legalism.
In this article from Donald McLeod there is much more to learn about why this freedom and liberty is so important to the Christian faith.
http://www.the-highway.com/articleMar99.html
Blessings in Christ,
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
Pastor, Bethany ARP Church
Comments
No posts