Lord’s Day 3
HC6
Q. Did God create man so wicked and perverse?
A. No. God created man good and in his own image, that is, in true righteousness and holiness, so that he might truly know God his creator, love him with all his heart, and live with God in eternal happiness, for his praise and glory.
HC7
Q. Then where does man’s corrupt nature come from?
A. From the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in paradise
HC8
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.
This section of the catechism is entitled Part I, MISERY. The title is not arbitrary or just something the authors came up with to be creative. Misery is in place to tell us first off that we are to encounter How Bad Things Are for us, between us and God. Misery is to drive us to Christ. Not just once, as the anxious bench has taught for ages, but over and over again, we should be driven to Christ. This is why the Church gathers every sunday. We must continually run to Christ and he is given to us in Word and Sacrament, in the Church, week after week, year after year, till he returns or calls us Home. THAT is how miserable we are, how miserable are our conditions, and how gracious, merciful, good, and powerful is our Lord Jesus Christ.
Rev VanderZwaag: The problem isn’t the great list of sins we have, but the great list of goodness that we keep.
The heart is deceitful and desperately wicked. It only takes one sin to receive the death penalty. It is the multitude of self-righteous arguments which prevent us receiving forgiveness.
Rev Borvan: A work that is truly good must be motivated by true faith, conform to the standard of God’s law, and must be done for the goal of God’s glory.
Therefore, the unbeliever does not have the capability to do a good work, due to the standards God has set.
We ran from God before he cast us out. In fact, God cast us out because we ran from him. We were reflections of God’s perfections (not so in appearance, but in actions and thinking, in love and holiness). Colossians 3:14 – Love, the bond of perfection.
Eschatology is wrapped up in the creation of man. It is woven into creation from the beginning. God created us for fellowship with him at the start, and this implies he will do something about the Fall. We are pointed to a redemption, even as early as when Adam sinned, and this is addressed in scripture immediately with God’s response to Adam’s sin in Genesis 3.
“I will put enmity between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and her offspring;
he shall bruise your head,
and you shall bruise his heel.”
Observation: Our culture has lost its sense of evil. The media reports every evil in the spectrum, yet the purpose of the revelation of such events is to further a political goal. How often is a news article about a vicious criminal accompanied by a simple commentary of the evil to which the accused obtained, rather than a redirection to what the individual represented, or the tragic causal factors that prompted the delinquency of the individual? We have movies and other media content which provide us with stories of good vs. evil, but increasingly, the evil, of Cruella Deville, or Loki, is revised to accommodate the background story, the inner thoughts, to explain away or rationalize the evil. Evil is celebrated, though even then, it is not understood. So the evil really is, not that death and destruction trail in the wake of men, but that men don’t even believe in evil anymore.
As a powerful example, as media became ubiquitous and accessible to the masses in modern society, Superman, the original 1978 movie, at 47 minutes in, makes the statement, “Live as one of them, Kalel, …hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage, they can be a great people, Kalel, they wish to be, they only lack the light to show the way, for this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son.” – And at 90 minutes- “Here I am like a kid out of school, holding hands with a god. I’m a fool.” Two fallacies are made here. One, a horrible replication of the Messiah, and the other, the assertion of human-kind’s inherent goodness. Question: Has anyone made a connection between the 1960s-1970s types of overt messianic movie themes, inherent goodness of men and the controversies surrounding mainline protestantism and the related separation of the Reformed from PCUSA, and CRC churches (PCA and URCNA events)?
Adam didn’t just fall into sin. Adam disobeyed, actively, by choice, willfully. And his was public disobedience that introduced sin to the world. In Adam, all have sinned. And we cannot simply blame Adam, for we now do the same as he did. Active disobedience, by choice, willful sin are ours alone. Imputation is a very important term for all Christians. Impute: to credit or ascribe (something) to a person – guilt for wrong action. This is a declaration, in the case of Adam, made by God, not some chance occurrence. Adam chose a course, God judged him, and the course was set for us, therefore God judged us as well. And the curse followed.
Ephesians 4:17-19 affirms that we are both cursed and choose for ourselves to sin, wilfully, and this is contrasted in the following verses that in Christ, the curse has been lifted (insofar as we are condemned and trapped in sin) and that we are enabled to desire the goodness for which we were created in the first place. Our old nature is to hate God and hate our neighbor. Our new nature is to love God and our neighbor.
Canons of Dort Third and Fourth Main Points, Article 3: Therefore, all people are conceived in sin and are born children of wrath, unfit for any saving good, inclined to evil, dead in their sins, and slaves to sin; without the grace of the regenerating Holy Spirit they are neither willing nor able to return to God, to reform their distorted nature, or even to dispose themselves to such reform.
Importance of Q8: We are all sinners, every one. There is none righteous, not one. Romans 3 and Isaiah 64:6 – We are not generally okay or basically good. Only by the restraint of God does anyone not commit perpetual acts of the gravest evil. God’s goodness always gets credit for good acts among men. Even Christians do good, not of themselves, for we would then think we could obtain righteousness on our own efforts, but because of the Holy Spirit who enables our holy deeds and thoughts and desires. We cannot even guess the depths of our depravity and how, without God’s goodness, we would all be terrorists, Hitlers and Christ-killing pharisees.
Sources
Heidelberg Catechism Lord’s Day 3
Canons of Dort
Rev Foppe VanderZwaag Probing the Depth of Our Fall 02/23/2003 Sermonaudio
Faith In Practice Podcast HC Q&A 6-8 03/29/2021
Dr. Zacharias Ursinus Commentaries on the Heidelberg Catechism
Rev Dan Borvan, Grace URC, Torrence CA Not Made for This 01/17/2021
Cold Coffee and Flannel 