Spending the week with great Kids!

This week my congregation is helping kids discover the love of Christ. Each night they enjoy dinner together, participate in the Bible Story, sing and do craft projects. Our nick name for this week is "Grandmothers' Bible School!

Our need for a peacemaker between us and God

Heidelberg Catechism

18 Q. Then who is this mediator – true God and at the same time a true and righteous human?

A. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was given to us to completely deliver us

and make us right with God.

19 Q. How do you come to know this?

A. The holy gospel tells me. God began to reveal the gospel already

in Paradise; later God proclaimed it by the holy patriarchs and prophets

and foreshadowed it by the sacrifices and other ceremonies of the law;

and finally God fulfilled it through his own beloved Son.

Stain glass window in First Presbyterian Church Charlotte

Our Sinful condition according to the Heidelberg Catechism

14 Q. Can another creature – any at all – pay this debt for us?

A. No. To begin with, God will not punish any other creature for what

a human is guilty of. Furthermore, no mere creature can bear the weight

of God’s eternal wrath against sin and deliver others from it.

15 Q. What kind of mediator and deliverer should we look for then?

A. One who is a true and righteous human, yet more powerful than all creatures, that is, one who is also true God.

16 Q. Why must the mediator be a true and righteous human?

A. God’s justice demands that human nature, which has sinned, must pay for sin; but a sinful human could never pay for others.

17 Q. Why must the mediator also be true God?

A. So that the mediator, by the power of his divinity, might bear the weight of God’s wrath in his humanity and earn for us and restore to us righteousness and life.

Reformation Theology

THE HEIDELBERG CATECHISM - historical background

The Heidelberg Catechism was written in Heidelberg, Germany at the request of Elector Frederick III, ruler of the most influential German province, the Palatinate, from 1559 to 1576.

This pious Christian prince commissioned Zacharius Ursinus, twenty-eight years of age and professor of theology at the Heidelberg University, and Caspar

Olevianus, twenty-six years old and Frederick’s court preacher, to prepare a catechism for instructing the youth and for guiding pastors and teachers. Frederick obtained the advice and cooperation of the entire theological faculty in the preparation of the Catechism.

The Catechism was soon divided into fifty-two sections, so that a section of the Catechism could be explained to the churches each Sunday of the year.

The Heidelberg Catechism has been translated into many languages and is the most influential and the most generally accepted of the several catechisms of Reformation times. Recently in an ecumenical effort, the Heidelberg has been updated. This new version has been approved by the Presbyterian Church of USA in 2014.

10 Q. Does God permit such disobedience and rebellion to go unpunished?

A. Certainly not. God is terribly angry with the sin we are born with as well as the sins we personally commit. As a just judge, God will punish them both now and in eternity, having declared: “Cursed is everyone who does not observe and obey all the things written in the book of the law.”

11 Q. But isn’t God also merciful?

A. God is certainly merciful, but also just. God’s justice demands that sin, committed against his supreme majesty, be punished with the supreme penalty—eternal punishment of body and soul.

12 Q. According to God’s righteous judgment we deserve punishment both now and in eternity: how then can we escape this punishment and return to God’s favor?

A. God requires that his justice be satisfied. Therefore the claims of this justice

must be paid in full, either by ourselves or by another.

13 Q Can we make this payment ourselves?

A. Certainly not. Actually, we increase our debt every day.

 

{US Supreme Court Building, Washington DC}

HEIDELBERG CATACHISM

7 Q. Then where does this corrupt human nature come from?

A. The fall and disobedience of our first parents,

Adam and Eve, in Paradise, his fall has so poisoned our nature

that we are all conceived and born in a sinful condition.

8 Q. But are we so corrupt that we are totally unable to do

any good and inclined toward all evil?

A. Yes, unless we are born again by the Spirit of God.

9 Q. But doesn’t God do us an injustice by requiring in his law

what we are unable to do?

A. No, God created human beings with the ability to keep the law.

They, however, provoked by the devil, in willful disobedience,

robbed themselves and all their descendants of these gifts.

 

 

5. Q. Can you keep all {the law} this perfectly?

A. No, I have a natural tendency to hate God and my neighbor.

6 Q. Did God create people so wicked and perverse?

A. No. God created them good and in his own image,

that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that they might

truly know God their creator, love him with all their heart,

and live with God in eternal happiness, to praise and glorify him.

7. Q. From where, then, did man’s depraved nature come?

A. From the fall and disobedience of our first parents,

Adam and Eve, in Paradise, for there our nature became so corrupt

that we are all conceived and born in sin.

 

(Sin distorts the image of God imprinted on each of us.)

 

 

 

Heidelberg Catachism

3. Q. From where do you know your sins and misery?

    A. From the law of God.

4. Q. What does God’s law require of us?

A. Christ teaches us this in a summary in Matthew:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart

and with all your soul and with all your mind.

This is the first and greatest commandment.

And the second is like it:

Love your neighbor as yourself.

All the Law and the Prophets hang on these

two commandments.

Old Testament scrolls from a Jewish Synagogue in Pittsburg, PA