After decades and even centuries of neglect, the doctrine of the Trinity has become the focus of attention for theologians in recent decades. It is to be hoped that this interest of theologians will trickle down to ordinary Christians. The doctrine of the Trinity is of enormous practical importance to the serious Christian.
In a passage like this we see the value of two contexts of interpretation. One, we see that the entire book of Micah and the oscillating themes he employs provide interpretive direction. Two, we see the importance of the larger canonical context of doctrine as each text contributes to the body of doctrine and at the same time yields to its instruction.
Modern men and contemporary theologians find it difficult in their minds to reconcile the classical theism of the Christian tradition and the Scriptures with a God who is relational. The fault is in their minds and logic not in classical theism. Paragraph 2 of Chapter 2 has for its explicit emphasis the relations of God to the world and mankind.
This essay seeks to answer three questions: What is a missionary? What is the missionary’s task? Why is holiness essential to the missionary and his task?
Rather than making God an impersonal thing with whom it is impossible to have a relationship, we saw that His simplicity means that His character and affection toward us His people will never change. This is the theme of the next cluster of attributes mentioned in the Confession.
The Bible prohibits unclean language. This includes all language that society understands be obscene or dirty. Obscenities and vulgarities refer to things that are offensively revealing, disgusting, dirty, ugly or crude.
It seems to me that there are few things of which the Christian church and, indeed, our society, in general, need more than a return to the majestic view of God taught in the Scriptures and confessed in Chapter 2 of the 1689 Baptist Confession.
Although there are myriads of angels of the LORD, there is only one called “The Angel of the LORD”. The OT usually refers to Him when it speaks of a single “Malak” or messenger, especially under the designation “angel of the LORD” or “angel of God”. This is the messenger we want to focus our attention on in this study. As we will see, He is not a human nor an angelic messenger. Instead, He is a messenger in a category all His own!
The first and most basic question answered by the Confession is the question, For what are the Scriptures sufficient? The Confession makes clear that the Scriptures are not sufficient for every conceivable purpose in human life. They are sufficient for “all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life.” The sufficiency of Scripture is vertical in nature. It has to do with our relationship to God. It tells the Christian how to glorify God, what he needs to do to be saved, what He must believe as a matter of Christian doctrine, and how he must live in order to please God. There is nothing that we need about those matters that are not in Scripture. Still, the Scriptures are not a math, biology, or Spanish textbook.
Why does Scripture have authority with the Christian? The Confession answers that is not because of the testimony of any man or church, but because it is the Word of God. Last time we saw that this means that the Scripture is self-authenticating. It does not need the authentication of a supposedly infallible church, because it is itself the infallible Word of God. Rome’s claim to authenticate the Scripture to the Christian (and thus claim final authority over the Christian) is wrong because it usurps the authority of the Word of God over the Christian.
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