Second London Baptist Confession of Faith 2.2

Truth for Life  •  Sermon  •  Submitted   •  Presented
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-On Wednesday nights I have used this time to give solid, doctrinal truths that Christians need to believe to have truth and faith. I started calling this series Truth for Life because doctrine (our beliefs) are not boring, but are essential truths that lead us to true life. To say that doctrine is boring would be like saying that the air that we need to breathe is boring, or water we need to drink is boring. Air and water are life-giving and essential. Doctrine is essential in that it gives us truths about the Life-Giver.
-Scripture is our ultimate authority for faith and practice, but there is so much in it the church has used creeds and confessions to summarize what is found in Scripture and to define the important doctrines of our faith. Ultimately, Christianity is not just another ethical system among many. Because of the truths of what God has revealed, we first see the truth about God’s goodness, our lack of goodness, and God’s provision in Jesus Christ. From there, it is God that defines our ethics. First comes the doctrine, and then comes the morals.
-Lately I have spent time in the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith to spur our study of what Scripture says about important doctrine, and spent a lot of time on how it summarizes the teaching about the person of God. God is great and eternal and everything that could be said of Him is just overwhelming. God is just awesome (for a lack of a term to truly describe Him).
-There was a point where only God existed in His eternal state. We use terms related to time (although God is outside of time), but there came a point where God decided to create things outside of Himself. The fact of creation and how God interacts with His creation is intertwined with His character and attributes that Chapter 2 paragraph 1 described in such detail. Now, in paragraph 2 of Chapter 2, we summarize what that relationship is in light of His attributes. We want to take this paragraph bit by bit.
Confessing the Faith: The 1689 Baptist Confession for the 21st Century (II. God and the Holy Trinity)
God has all life, glory, goodness, and blessedness in and of Himself; He alone is all-sufficient in Himself. He does not need any creature He has made nor does He derive any glory from them. Instead, He demonstrates His own glory in them, by them, to them and upon them.
-The puritans who made this confession started by making sure that we understood that there is a distinction between God and His creation. The Creator is of a completely different level of existence than anything else that was created, whether it is visible or invisible, whether it is of heaven or it is of earth. While the creation may reflect some of the character and attributes of God, they do not relate all the characteristics and attributes, and those that they do reflect are a pale comparison to the grandeur with which God holds them. There is nothing and no one like God. The most stunning archangel is no more like God than the worm that crawls through the ground. There is no comparison to the levels of existence.
-This is important for us to remember because (to put it rather crudely) humans need to be reminded that they aren’t God. You are not God. I am not God. That means we need to stop thinking like we are and acting like we are. At all times we need to remember the distinction between Creator and creation.
-The writers of this confession demonstrate this by distinguishing between God independence and self-sufficiency as opposed to the utter dependency of His creatures. God needs nothing from anybody else, but we need everything from God. Nothing we do or say affects God in any way—He does not change.
Job 22:2–3 NET 2nd ed.
2 “Is it to God that a strong man is of benefit? Is it to him that even a wise man is profitable? 3 Is it of any special benefit to the Almighty that you should be righteous, or is it any gain to him that you make your ways blameless?
-What a creature is like or does or thinks does not add to or take away from God in the slightest. And because God is independent and self-sufficient, He is never in need for His creation to do anything for Him. This is quite unlike the pagan gods over the centuries. If you look at the Greek gods or the Roman gods or others, they needed humans to do tasks for them that they themselves could not do, or even to provide for them food or sustenance. The true God needs us to do nothing for Him.
Acts 17:24–25 NET 2nd ed.
24 The God who made the world and everything in it, who is Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by human hands, 25 nor is he served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives life and breath and everything to everyone.
-God may not need us, but He desires to use us. We may not be able to add anything to Him, but how the paragraph summarizes it, God desmonstrates His glory in them, but them, to them, and upon them.
Psalm 19:1 NET 2nd ed.
1 The heavens declare the glory of God; the sky displays his handiwork.
-But the paragraph continues:

He alone is the source of all being, and everything is from Him, through Him and to Him. He has absolute sovereign rule over all creatures, to act through them, for them, or upon them as He pleases.

-This tells us that God has complete dominion over every aspect of His creation, even the parts of creation that are in rebellion to Him. God is the source of the existence of everything that there is, and everything is under His sovereign command. God did not have to get voted into a position of power. He was not given His throne. By virtue of His very nature and position, He is the potter that has complete control over the clay. He is called in Genesis 14:19 Lord, Most High God, the Creator/Possessor or Heaven and Earth.
-All of creation belong to Him, so He has the right to do with His possessions as He sees fit—and it is all according to His good character and sovereign purposes. After King Nebuchadnezzar was driven insane for a time by God to humble him, Nebuchadnezzar finally understood God’s sovereign reign and dominion over everything, even him (because up to that point he thought he was the all in all). And this is what he declared:
Daniel 4:34–35 NET 2nd ed.
34 But at the end of the appointed time I, Nebuchadnezzar, looked up toward heaven, and my sanity returned to me. I extolled the Most High, and I praised and glorified the one who lives forever. For his authority is an everlasting authority, and his kingdom extends from one generation to the next. 35 All the inhabitants of the earth are regarded as nothing. He does as he wishes with the army of heaven and with those who inhabit the earth. No one slaps his hand and says to him, “What have you done?”
-God has complete dominion over His creation. But the paragraph continues in telling us that God has absolute knowledge over His creation:

In His sight everything is open and visible. His knowledge is infinite and infallible. It does not depend upon any creature, so for Him nothing is contingent or uncertain.

-Scripture teaches that God knows all things at all times about everything. God has a thorough knowledge of Himself and He has a complete understanding about all of His creation. This goes against certain teachings that would deny God has such knowledge. As one author describes such teaching:
human beings are truly free; if God absolutely knew the future, human beings could not truly be free. Therefore, God does not know absolutely everything about the future. Open theism holds that the future is not knowable. Therefore, God knows everything that can be known, but He does not know the future.
-But, as the confession says, His knowledge is not dependent upon the creature, meaning that it doesn’t matter what man chooses to do or not do, God knows what actually happens and what will happen. God is not waiting for man to do something in order to know it, but God already knows what His free creatures are going to choose to do. This is also opposed to something called Molinism that believes God knows what would happen if people choose to do something, but He doesn’t know the choice until someone makes it. God knows the choices of free creatures and what the results will be, and it takes nothing away from the freedom of the creature. This is a mystery of His eternal state.
We believe that the Scripture clearly teaches (as one person summarizes) that: God’s understanding is infinite, extending to all times and places, and is always infallible, absolutely correct, and independent, not relying on the collecting of information from external sources. God doesn’t have to do research (unlike what we had to do in school). God just knows. He knows our thoughts and what we will say before we even say it.
Psalm 139:4 NET 2nd ed.
4 Certainly my tongue does not frame a word without you, O Lord, being thoroughly aware of it.
-God’s knowledge of what His creatures do and what will happen is complete. The paragraph goes on to talk of His holiness before His creatures:

He is absolutely holy in all His plans, in all His works, and in all His commands.

-Everything that God wills and demands is in line with His holy character. And the paragraph concludes:

Angels and human beings owe to Him all the worship, service, or obedience that creatures owe to the Creator and whatever else He is pleased to require of them.

-God has a claim on His creation, and He is due anything and everything He demands of His creation just because of who He is. And so we join the angel chorus in recognition of this:
Revelation 5:12–14 NET 2nd ed.
12 all of whom were singing in a loud voice: “Worthy is the lamb who was killed to receive power and wealth and wisdom and might and honor and glory and praise!” 13 Then I heard every creature—in heaven, on earth, under the earth, in the sea, and all that is in them—singing: “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be praise, honor, glory, and ruling power forever and ever!” 14 And the four living creatures were saying “Amen,” and the elders threw themselves to the ground and worshiped.
-We are the creatures and He is the Creator. Since this is our relationship, as His creatures, this is what we owe to Him. Our prayer is that we would all so follow and obey. We might not agree with all of the summaries given by a confession, but the ones that we do agree with ought to guide us to worship, service, and obedience. And we want to pray that the truths of these doctrines would be made known to the lost so that they too would worship, serve, and obey.
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