This blog covers my pursuit and preparation for pastoral ministry. Lately what that has consisted of is studying and memorizing one of the catechisms of beliefs which unites my denomination (among others): The Westminster Shorter Catechism. Memorization is very often a blunt exercise. The challenge becomes to find ways to impress the logic and structure of what you’re studying upon yourself in such a way as to remember not merely its words but its meaning. Then, new discoveries emerge–well, new to me anyway. I thought I’d share them with you before the Lord.
Q. 19. What is the misery of that estate whereinto man fell?
A. All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all miseries in this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell for ever.
What is this list, but an attempt to itemize human suffering? Everything has gone wrong since we turned from you, God, and this about sums it up. As I piled this question and answer atop the steep mound of facts about what you’ve said in your Scriptures, how men have thought about it and how we ought to do things in your church, a structure emerged.
The misery is two-fold and its consequences three:
All mankind by their fall:
(a) lost communion with God
(b) are under his wrath and curse.
Because of this, we suffer:
(1) all miseries in this life
(2) death itself
(3) the pains of hell for ever.
My eye has always been fixed on the second truth. What is our misery? Your judgment. We defy you. We are acursed and justly condemned to suffer your holy displeasure. This begins the ugly list of consequences, everything that breaks and hurts and causes tears. Worse still, our miserable lives come to an end. Worst of all, death does not quiet our pains if we die in our sin, but tips the overflowing cup of your wrath further and forever. What horror upon horror.
Many here turn from you on account of just this. We question the goodness of a God who condemns, who finds fault, who avenges. But do we prefer the God who lets evil go unanswered? Do we prefer a God who shrugs at murder, adultery, abuse, deception, theft? The oppressed have no hope in such a God. The suffering have nothing to do with him. And it is because your goodness is from eternity to eternity that those who turn from it and war against it should suffer in eternity.
Who can withstand such relentless perfection and justice? Who will stand before you with a life righteous enough to make YOU owe THEM blessing and honor? Our sin has cast us into a pit of infinite depth and we scratch our filthy nails into its walls with our attempts to live well and please you. We point to those laws we best keep in our defense against the lawgiver himself whom we spurn and curse.
Yet, before all this, there is something somehow worse. Before all your wrath, your righteous judgment, your unending justice stands this: we have lost communion with you.
We lost you.
Your voice like a thousand waterfalls bellows words of life to us every moment, and we are deaf to you. We walk into a thousand rooms and neither sense nor see you, nor when we leave them and walk unfettered by the industry of man into the vast, beautiful and natural world you have made beneath heavens which shout your praise and glory do we only seldom detect a whisper of the fullness of your perfection. Your light which knows no shadow shines as a thousand suns upon us and we stumble as though in darkness.
And in that darkness, we question your ways, instead of our own. We think you’re the one who is absent, not us. We ask, with tears and anger “where are you?” when you have been asking us the same since the moment we left you (Genesis 3:9).
Where are we? Gone. Among the thorns, the blood and the sweat. In torment and desperate, desperate need.
Where are you, Father? Where are you?
“But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” Romans 3:21-25.
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