Sermon on Lord’s Day 2

3.Q. From where do you know your sins and misery?
A. From the law of God.[1]
[1] Rom. 3: 20;

4. Q. What does God's law require of us? A. Christ teaches us this in a summary in Matthew 22: You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.[1] This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.[2]
[1] Deut. 6:5. [2] Lev. 19:18.

5. Q. Can you keep all this perfectly?
A. No,[1] I am inclined by nature to hate God and my neighbour.[2]
[1] Rom. 3:10, 23; I John 1:8, 10. [2] Gen. 6:5; 8:21; Jer. 17:9; Rom. 7:23; 8:7; Eph. 2:3; Tit. 3:3.

Scripture Reading:
Matthew 19:16-22
Matthew 22:34-4

Also:
Canons of Dort, chapter III/IV, Articles 5,6

Singing:  (Psalms and Hymns are from the "Book of Praise" Anglo Genevan Psalter)
Psalm 147:1,6
Psalm 65:2,3
Psalm 130:1,2,3,4
Hymn 24:1,2,3,4,5
Psalm 95:1,3 & Hymn 54:1

Beloved Congregation of the Lord Jesus Christ!

With Lord’s Day 1 we make confession of our only comfort in life and death. We ‘confess’, and that’s to say (we heard some weeks ago) that we ‘say the same thing as God says’. In the Bible the Lord has told us the good news of His salvation in Jesus Christ, and we respond by saying after God in our own words what He has told us. To repeat this only comfort after God, yes, we find that a pleasant privilege.

Now we come to Lord’s Day 2. As we did in Lord’s Day 1, so also in Lord’s Day 2 we are saying after God what God has told us in His Word. God’s revelation is broader than the fact that we belong with body and soul to our faithful Savior; God has also told us things about ourselves – things that are not so very flattering. Since God has seen it necessary to tell us about ourselves, we shall need not only to accept what He says, but also to confess it, to say these things after Him.

But even as we do so, brothers and sisters, we shall need to realize what the reason is why God has told us these things. We made confession of that in Lord’s Day 1, when we acknowledged that, if we are to live and die in the joy of this comfort, we need to "know" three things. The first of the three was "how great my sins and misery are." With Lord’s Day 2 we begin our confession of what God has told us about the greatness of our sins and misery, and Lord’s Day 2 begins this confession in order that we might be happy. The purpose of the material of Lord’s Day 2 is not to make us depressed; the purpose of drawing out how great our sins and misery are is to make us rejoice the more in the only comfort confessed in Lord’s Day 1. For the sake of our joy in the Lord’s service, then, we say after God in Lord’s Day 2 what He has told us about the law and our inability to obey it.

I summarize the sermon with this theme:

TO REJOICE THE MORE IN OUR ONLY COMFORT, THE LORD TEACHES US THROUGH THE LAW TO SEE OUR SINS AND MISERY.

1. the function of the law 
2. the depth of the law
3. the vanity of the law

The function of the law⤒🔗

We live, brothers and sisters, in a time wherein we know an enormous amount about ourselves. Physicians and psychologists together know so very, very much about the human being, about how the body and the mind works.

These experts on the human being do not mind to tell us what, by their judgment, human nature is really like. Psychologists and social workers alike tell us that human beings are at bottom pretty decent creatures; there is good in every person. Where evil dominates a person, we’re told, we’ve got evidence that his circumstances somewhere along the line were bad; it was the childhood illness, or the poverty of years ago, or the heavy hand of his father, or the bullying of the children at school, etc, that produced the evil in the man today.

The Lord God from heaven above tells people on earth that the doctors and the psychologists have not got it right. God from heaven above looks further into the insides of man than any human on earth can see, and He perceives just how depraved human nature really is. Before He destroyed the world with the flood, He offered the following observation about human nature. I read in Gen 6:

"Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually" (vs 5).

It’s not, says God in heaven about people on earth, that the heart alone is evil, but the thoughts in the heart are evil also. More, it’s not just that the thoughts of the heart are evil, but the intentions behind the thoughts of the heart are evil also. And that’s to say that the source of the thoughts entering our minds is evil; evil exists within us to the very core of our being. See there God’s divine evaluation of human beings.

It’s an evaluation God has told us about. We can, with the learned teachers of our day, ignore that information. But God is so gracious, brothers and sisters, to work in us by His Holy Spirit that we accept as fact the evaluation God has given us about ourselves. That is why, though the evaluation goes against our sinful nature, we accept the evaluation and repeat it after God in our Catechism; this is part of the faith that God has worked in our hearts.

That we accept the reality of our depravity is implicit already in the first question of the Lord’s Day. We ask, "From where do you know your sins and misery?" That question assumes the fact of misery and sinfulness. Notice: we do not ask for evidence whether there is sin in us and misery in our lives, for we have learned from God’s Word that it is so. Question 3 takes God’s Word on the point for granted. Here, then, is an attitude of humility, an attitude of accepting what God says, of not challenging what God says. The very formulation of the question (and it’s true of the answer too) demonstrates the work of the Holy Spirit in our hearts and lives; because of His work in us we acknowledge that God’s Word has something to say to us, yes, that we need instruction from Him – including instruction about our sins and misery.

It is, we say in Answer 3, "from the law of God" that we know our sins and misery. Notice: the answer is not that we know our sins and misery from God. While it’s true that we know our sins and misery from God, what we’re confessing here is that God has told us about our sins and misery via a particular means. That means is the law. That’s what the Lord has said in Rom 3: "by the law is the knowledge of sin" (vs 20). That raises this question: just how does the law generate knowledge of our sins?

The law. Already in Paradise the Lord gave His law. Adam and Eve were created in the image of God, and that means that they were to image God, to act as God acted. So, as God did not lie, Adam and Eve were not to lie. As God did not steal, so Adam and Eve were not to steal. The law was in force for them, written on their hearts. So it was too that the Lord gave a particular command in relation to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They could eat of all the trees of the garden, but of that one they were not to eat. This was part of God’s law to them.

As long as Adam and Eve obeyed the law, there was no misery in their lives. That law gave them freedom (cf James 2:12). Like a fish is free as long as it obeys the law God has ordained for it (a fish is to stay in the water, is not to try to climb the sand dune), so Adam and Eve were free as long as they remained within the borders God ordained for them, free as long as they obeyed His law. As a fish looses its freedom as soon as it runs itself onto the beach, so Adam and Eve would loose their freedom as soon as they transgressed the law. You see, that law gave them freedom, it set the borders within which God gave man ability to enjoy life.

But Adam and Eve transgressed the law. Like beached whales, they found their freedom gone, found their lives miserable. They were suddenly aware of their nakedness and so sought to cover themselves. They heard God coming to them in the garden, and fled in fear. They had stepped outside the borders imposed by the law and so were miserable. So Adam could say with Question & Answer 3 that he knew his misery "from the law of God." He could recall distinctly how that law had protected his happiness as long as he obeyed it, and he could taste in his fallen life the bitter results of disobeying that law.

God came to the fallen creature man, to those two in the Garden who –like the beached whale- had gone outside the borders God had set. What God did with the law? Did He tell Adam and Eve that He would set the law aside since Adam and Eve had disobeyed it anyway? Did God –if I may stretch the analogy of the beached whale for a moment- change Adam and Eve so that they could live happily on the beach instead of in the water where they’d been created to live? No, brothers and sisters, God maintained the law. That’s to say that God kept the borders for Adam and Eve as He’d created them – despite the fact that they’d sinned, that they’d beached themselves. God maintained the law, and insisted that the borders God had created for Adam and Eve remain as they were. That’s why Adam and Eve’s lives remained so uncomfortable. God maintained the law, and that law drove home to Adam and Eve how great their sins and misery were. That law reminded them where their freedom really was – in the water. That law drove home the reason why there was so much misery in their lives now; they’d insisted on disobeying, on living on the beach instead.

God maintained the law. That’s why Noah and Abram and Judah afterwards were also not permitted to give themselves to lying, to stealing, to serving other gods. God maintained the law, and that’s why, when He adopted Israel to be His special people by covenant, He repeated for them the same law as was valid in Paradise and valid in the years after Paradise. At Mt Sinai He wrote on tablets of stone for Israel’s benefit the same law that had been valid for all men ever since the creation of the world.

Christ Jesus did the same. He told His disciples that they were "not [to] think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill" (Mt 5:17). In other words, Christ did not set aside the law, did not turf it out as something from the Old Testament. "I’ve not come to destroy the law," He says, and that’s why the commandments of God to Israel are repeated time and again in the course of the New Testament for the sake of the New Testament church – with repeated insistence that God’s people obey that law. Yes, Jesus adds that He came to "fulfill" the law, and Jesus’ point is that He came to obey that law perfectly. So, in the course of His 33-year sojourn on this earth, Jesus never once disobeyed the law of God, never once sinned against His God and Father; God maintained the law, and therefore Jesus had to obey it.

Think not, therefore, brothers and sisters, that the law has no relevance today, or has but secondary importance. The devil would dearly love us to ignore the law, to downplay the law, to cease reading the law in church, no longer to preach the law. But God insists that the law of the beginning remains in force – even though we’ve stepped out of the water and try to survive on the beach. God insists on us keeping the law, and so rubs under our noses that we belong in the water and not on the beach.

Then it’s true that we might get used to existing on the beach, might conclude that being as limited and miserable as a beached whale is simply the way life is, and so we may as well accept it. But the Lord says No, the Lord would set before us the freedom we had so that we might realize how great our sins and misery are. That is why we need to keep hearing the law, so that we impress it on ourselves that the lives we now live are not according to what God created us for, our lives are miserable now because of our own transgression.

I move on to our second point:

The depth of the law←⤒🔗

In the second Question & Answer of our Lord’s Day, we ask what it is that God’s law requires of us. At first glance, we puzzle at the question. What God’s law requires of us? Easy, we say; God requires obedience. But what, brothers and sisters, is the obedience God requires?

The rich young ruler of Mt 19 wanted to know what he had to do in order to inherit eternal life. Jesus’ reply was, "Keep the commandments" (vs 17). Jesus proceeded to list them: "‘You shall not murder,’ ‘You shall not commit adultery,’ ‘You shall not steal,’ ‘You shall not bear false witness,’" etc. The response of the young man was this, "All these things I have kept from my youth."

It’s an interesting response, congregation. "You shall not murder," Jesus says, and the young man maintains he kept this law, and he meant with that that he’d never stuck a knife in anybody. "You shall not commit adultery," Jesus says, and the young man maintains he kept that law, and he meant with that that he’d never slept with anybody except his wife. Etc. Now the question is whether this is the sort of obedience God demands. The answer is No because this man could still not inherit eternal life. To inherit eternal life this man –Jesus says- had to sell all that he had and give the proceeds to the poor and then follow Jesus (vs 21).

The point? God does not require a shallow obedience to His law, a superficial obedience, an obedience that satisfies the outward look of things. God maintains the law and requires obedience to the very heart of the law.

That’s Jesus point a couple of chapters later when the Pharisees ask Him "which is the great commandment in the law" (Mt 22:36). The point is that the Pharisees had listed all the laws they could find in the books of Moses, and then proceeded to tick off the ones they kept. But in so doing they thought they found some laws which, if you kept the one, meant that you disobeyed the other. If, for example, you sought to obey the command to admonish your neighbor, you could end up working on the Sabbath. Hence their question: which law is more important? And the big question: which law is most important?

Jesus in His reply invited the Pharisees to look at the law not just skin deep, superficially; in His reply He asked the Pharisees to look down to the very depths of the law. Jesus told them that the first and great commandment of the law is this, that "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." And a second commandment of the law is like it; "you shall love your neighbor as yourself."

Love. Says Jesus: love does not replace the law, as if the law is now outdated and in its place comes love. No, says Jesus, love is the heart of the law, love is the essence of the law, love gets you to the depths of the law. Then Jesus adds that the love God demands in the law is not something shallow; the love God demands in the law is a love "with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind." That’s to say that it’s a love that requires your whole being, from top to toe, all the time.

Jesus Himself had earlier said that He had not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it (Mt 5:17). That word ‘fulfill’, we’d said earlier, meant that the Lord had obeyed the law perfectly, never sinned in the slightest in the 33 years of His time on earth. What example, then, did Jesus give as to what love really is? He Himself once said:

"Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends" (Jn 15:13).

After all, in such self-sacrifice there is no advantage for the self, no selfishness. And precisely that is what the Lord Jesus did. He gave up the treasures of heaven to become a man, to enter our sinful world. On this earth He gave up all, even went to the cross, in order that the undeserving might have life, life eternal. So John is moved by the Holy Spirit to write:

"In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (I Jn 4:10).

That is the love God demands in His law.

Now we need to think for a moment, brothers and sisters. Give it some thought: when was the last time that you displayed that sort of love – be it to your spouse or your brother in the church or your companion at work? Sure, by the working of the Holy Spirit there is love in our lives – and we praise God for it. But when, congregation, when was the last time that you showed love as Christ did? When did you lay down your life for the benefit of the other? For that’s what the law requires! And on that point we draw a blank because we simply are not able to produce this sort of love. That’s to say: we draw a blank because we simply are not able to obey the law as God wants us too. You see, God wants obedience to the law, total love for God with all our heart and all the soul and all the mind, and for the neighbor the same love as God wants for Himself. Total self-emptying, even to death, for the benefit even of the ungodly: that’s what God requires. And we can’t produce it! God wants us to swim freely in the water, but we can’t because we beached ourselves.

That brings us to our last point:

The vanity of the law←⤒🔗

"What does God’s law require of us?" Total, absolute love – as Christ showed love. "Can you keep all this perfectly?" "No," we say in Answer 5, "No." In fact, we continue, "I am inclined by nature to hate God and my neighbor…."

In His law God demands love. In my life I produce hate. That reality, beloved, points up the vanity of the law. There are those who think that by obeying the law they can crawl their way into God’s favor; the mindset of the ruler of Mt 19 is around us and in us. The Arminians of long ago argued that fallen man could use the Ten Commandments to attain salvation; by doing your best to obey the law you could impress God. In answer to the Arminians the fathers put into the Canons the confession we read from chapter III/IV. They said:

"[the law] neither points out a remedy nor gives him power to rise out of this misery. Rather, weakened by the flesh, it leaves the transgressor under the curse. Man cannot, therefore, through the law obtain saving grace."

That confession expresses clearly, brothers and sisters, the vanity of the law. So high are God’s demands in the law, so profound its essence, that any attempt to satisfy God’s wrath and win His favor through obedience to the law is doomed to failure from the start. That law serves only to spell out that we are guilty before God, cursed (cf Rom 3:19f). Sunday by Sunday we hear the law, and so Sunday by Sunday we’re confronted with the need to love God with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind, and to love our neighbor also. But the mirror of the law God keeps holding before us drives us to the awful conclusion that, when all is said and done, we do just the opposite of what the Lord requires, and so we’re lost, lost.

Now the question, beloved, is this. Does all this mean that we are to be depressed about the material of Lord’s Day 2? The answer, beloved, is No! God from heaven on high has told us in His Word how great our sins and misery are. We might prefer to be left in ignorance of such black facts, yet we know full well that ignoring the reality helps us nothing. So we do well to thank God for telling us how things really are. Why? Because if we want to overcome our misery, we do well to understand what the essence of that misery really is. Now that God has told us, we can see what we can do about it. What we can do about it? Nothing! All we can do is cry out to God for mercy!

And see: God has given that mercy already! The Lord God sent His only Son to obey the law for us, that there might be redemption for the undeserving. Canons of Dort, chapter III/IV, Article 6:

"What, therefore, … the law can [not] do, God performs by the power of the Holy Spirit through the word or ministry of reconciliation, which is the gospel of the Messiah, by which it has pleased God to save men who believe, both under the old and under the new dispensation."

That this redemption was for us is something we confessed in Lord’s Day 1 already, and that’s why we could embrace the only comfort there is in life and death. To appreciate how wonderful this comfort is I needed to know –we said in Question & Answer 2- "how great my sins and misery are." Well now, I’ve heard from God’s word how great my sins and misery are, and the Holy Spirit has worked in my heart so that I repeat after God –with the words of Lord’s Day 2- just how awfully great my sins and misery really is. The Spirit makes me repeat those words not so that I might end up in a depression, but rather so that I might recognize the more how wonderful it is that God sent His Son to redeem sinners as depraved as the mirror of the law shows us to be. What a God this is; it’s not for the righteous and the good and the noble that He gave His Son, but for sinners, for a wretch like me.  Amen.

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