Written by R. Scott Clark |
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
The [Westminster] Divines confessed that inward images are forbidden: they are the root of the external images that are obviously forbidden. The rejection of internal images is a good and necessary consequence of the rejection of external images. The god we fashion in our hearts and minds are just as idolatrous as icons of the Father, the Son incarnate, and the Spirit.

Q. 109. What sins are forbidden in the second commandment?
A. The sins forbidden in the second commandment are, all devising, counseling, commanding, using, and any wise approving, any religious worship not instituted by God himself; the making any representation of God, of all or of any of the three persons, either inwardly in our mind, or outwardly in any kind of image or likeness of any creature whatsoever; all worshiping of it, or God in it or by it; the making of any representation of feigned deities, and all worship of them, or service belonging to them; all superstitious devices, corrupting the worship of God, adding to it, or taking from it, whether invented and taken up of ourselves, or received by tradition from others, though under the title of antiquity, custom, devotion, good intent, or any other pretense whatsoever; simony; sacrilege; all neglect, contempt, hindering, and opposing the worship and ordinances which God hath appointed (Westminster Larger Catechism, 1647
After the fall we humans are all idolaters at heart. By nature, our first instinct is to fashion gods for ourselves with our hands or in our hearts and minds. When the committee that produced the Westminster Larger Catechism got to the exposition of the Ten Commandments they re-articulated the Reformed rule of worship (i.e., the regulative principle of worship): we may worship God only in the way he has authorized. This rule is biblical and connects us to the ancient Christian church. Other traditions (e.g., the Lutherans, Anglicans, and Evangelicals) ask first whether God has prohibited something in worship. We ask whether God has authorized it. These are distinct views with different outcomes and consequences. Thus, following the consensus of the ancient church, which prohibited images of Christ until the iconodules overthrew that consensus in the eighth century, the Reformed churches across Europe and the British Isles removed images of the holy Trinity, including images of God the Son incarnate, from the Reformed churches and forbid their use.
However much even Reformed people continue to chafe under the rule of worship and the ancient iconoclast position, judging by the objections I have heard from seminary students, fellow ministers, and by the correspondence I have received over the years, one phrase in particular troubles critics and even those who would otherwise subscribe the Larger Catechism: the prohibition of mental images: “either inwardly in our mind…”. Is this phrase warranted or is it an example of over-zealous “Puritans” going just a bit too far in their desire to purify the worship of the churches and prosecute sin to the inner reaches of every man?
The English Reformed gathered at Westminster, who commissioned and comprised the committee did not go too far in Q/A 109. Wilhelmus à Brakel (1635–1711) agreed with the divines:
The seventh sin is to make physical representations of God in our minds. God reveals Himself to the soul of men as a Spirit, doing so in a manner much more devoid of the physical than can be expressed. When the natural man initially thinks upon God, however, he spoils this initial reflection upon God and changes that which is spiritual into something physical. One will either seek to maintain this physical representation of God, finding delight in creating various representations of God in the mind, or it will be contrary to the will of the person engaged in thought, who wishes to have spiritual thoughts of God but cannot do so—this being caused either externally due to people speaking of God, or due to Satan’s influence upon the imagination. The latter is not the sin of the person, but of Satan; that is, if the person is only passively involved, abhorring this, and laboring to resist it (John 4:24).1
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Written by T.M. Suffield |
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
To keep the sabbath, or the Lord’s Day, will require that we fence some things, and decide that we don’t do this or that on the day of rest. This is why wise societies often have Sunday trading laws, for instance. But, even saying that, for Christians the Sabbath is not a law but an invitation.

Last week I wrote a rambling exposition of some of the features of Genesis chapter one, but to keep to a reasonable length I didn’t attempt any application.
I thought I’d take some time to tease out these ideas in a little more depth what that means for our lives.
I’ve written previously that rest is not relaxation but is about stopping to realise that you’re a creature. Rest is not recharging, as though we were mechanical units with batteries, but about realising that we are not God and cannot carry on without stopping. Resting gives us more energy because when we work as we are designed to, we work better.
Rest is settling into the order we have made with our hands; or being in the ‘right place’, which is the place that God has placed us, that we have then formed carefully and diligently out of the chaos by the sweat of our brow. Or at least, that’s what rest is for now.
As we pursue our daily work we search for rest, and we choose to rest one day in seven to enjoy the fruits of our labours. Work is not the opposite of rest, though they are different things. The opposite of rest is the curse.
Our future is rest, and our future involves work, so we should stop thinking of them as concepts in opposition to each other. Before the Lord cursed us and commanded the ground to fight us back, it did not resist. Our labours in the age to come will be easy, and our successes surprising beyond our abilities.
It’s only after the curse that we need to let the ground rest from its labour (in Hebrew, literally ‘slavery’) in order to keep being its master. This practice is supposed to teach us to co-operate with the land as we grow up into wisdom and the knowledge of good and bad. When the earth enters its Sabbath rest we will still work the ground, but as Jon Collins likes to say, it will be the equivalent of dropping seed on the ground by accident and the ground springing forth into glorious abundance wherever they fell. Our productive activity won’t be laborious, but joyous. To cease is to experience a taste of the joyousness of age to come.
If the farming metaphors don’t work for you, imagine work that does. In your bridge-building or story-telling, your song-writing or city-administering, the ground will not fight back. Everything will flow as it is supposed to, as though creation were a harmonious whole that worked together to achieve your ends. Because it will be.
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Do not let the world around you move you off of the unshakable promises that God has made to his church. Pray for the next generation. Pray that God would convert our children.

Several months ago the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus provoked the ire of many with their controversial song, “We’ll Convert Your Children.”
You think that we’ll corrupt your kids,if our agenda goes unchecked.Funny, just this once, you’re correct.
The song continues,
We’ll convert your children.Happens bit by bit.Quietly and subtly.And you will barely notice it…
We’ll convert your children.We’ll make them tolerant and fair…
Your children will care about fairness and justice for others.Your children will work to convert all their sisters and brothers.Then soon we’re almost certain,your kids will start converting you.
In response to the tidal wave of criticism, chorus members released a statement claiming that the song was mere satire, tongue-in-cheek humor that was obviously lost on their hysterical traditionalist objectors. However, further comments demonstrate that lurking behind this veil of “humor” is indeed an agenda that has its sights set on the children of believers:
After decades of children being indoctrinated and taught intolerance for anyone who is ‘other,’ from using the Bible as a weapon to reparative therapy, it’s our turn. We have dedicated ourselves to being role models, teaching, spreading the message of love, tolerance and celebration through our music.[1]
Before the shock of this event wears off on us completely (if it hasn’t already), we would do well to stop, reflect, and ask ourselves the evaluative question, “What can we learn from this?” In the moment, we all felt a great deal, everything from righteous indignation to fear for our children’s future, but what are we to do now?
First, we need to remind ourselves that there is no reason for the church to fear or despair even in the face of such pervasive wickedness. The LGBTQ+ message is radically opposed to our own and holds more sway in our post-Christian culture than ever before—but it isn’t altogether new. What we’re seeing now is nothing but another wave of Romans 1 idolatry dressed in 21st century clothes:
“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done…Though they know God’s righteous decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them but give approval to those who practice them” (Romans 1:28, 31).
None of what we’re seeing today takes God by surprise. This alone ought to comfort the fearful parent and concerned church member. Yet God’s Word doesn’t just describe the problem, but prescribes manifold ways in which the church can forewarn and forearm its children against the lofty opinions raised against the knowledge of God (2 Cor 10:5). God has not left us to fend for ourselves. He has given his church grace to endure before, and so we are assured that the immutably holy, wise, and gracious God will give his 21st century church everything necessary to flourish even in the midst of cultural upheaval.
How then should the church respond to the mounting pressure being applied to our children? Using the baptismal vows provided in the PCA Book of Church Order (BCO) as a guide, I want to address two groups—those parents whose children are still living under their roof and those who either have no children of their own or whose children have grown and since left the nest—and provide concrete ways for all to participate in this work of discipleship.
Christian parents need to take seriously their responsibility to train their children to be mature men and women in Christ. “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it” (Proverbs 22:6). The members of the men’s chorus are right—the slide into sin and apostasy happens “quietly and subtly”, so subtly that we “hardly notice it.” Due to the Fall, by nature we all tend toward spiritual declension, not improvement, and our children are no exception. Growth in godliness on the other hand is anything but subtle or passive, it is a supernatural work of God’s grace in the heart that works against the grain of our sinful nature. Thomas Watson reminds us, “Weeds grow of themselves; flowers are planted. Godliness is a celestial plant that comes from the New Jerusalem.”
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Written by Carl R. Trueman |
Wednesday, September 29, 2021
The slavery of colonial and antebellum America was tragic but there is nothing we can do to change that history. The present is a different matter. That is our responsibility. No amount of indignant finger-pointing at the world of three hundred years ago will cleanse us of our present-day complicity.

Winston Churchill famously quipped that history would be kind to him, for he intended to write it. That line came to mind last week when I saw a tweet about America’s slave-owning past. It pointed out the rather obvious fact that Jonathan Edwards was only able to study as long and hard each day as he did because he had slaves to do the drudge work necessary for the material maintenance of his household. Whether this comment was intended to prove that Edwards’s theology was fundamentally unsound, or to demonstrate that Edwards (like me and, presumably, the author of the tweet) was morally flawed, or merely to point out that Edwards lived in the eighteenth century rather than the twenty-first was unclear.
The transatlantic slave trade was an evil. And it did enable men like Edwards to enjoy the leisure from physical work that then allowed them to study. But it was—and is—not the only evil that enables one class of people to enjoy life at the expense of another. Early critical theorist Walter Benjamin, using the idea of the spoils of war to reflect upon history, memorably commented:
[Cultural treasures] owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.
Benjamin’s point is simple: The things we admire in culture are often built on the back of exploitation. And one does not need to be a Marxist to see that there is much truth in this claim.
Take, for example, companies currently involved with China—companies whose products we all use and that make our hi-tech lives, including those of the tweeting class, possible. In 2020 the Australian Strategic Policy Institute produced a report on the forced labor of Uighurs under the Chinese government and identified 82 companies that potentially benefit, directly or indirectly, from this. That list included Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung. Apple was among the companies that did not respond to the report. Last year, the New York Times reported on the efforts of American companies, including Apple and Nike, to weaken the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act, which would ban imported goods made with forced labor from the Xinjiang region of China. In May of this year, Business Insider reported that seven Apple suppliers had links to forced labor programs in China, including those that abused Uighur Muslims. In short, if you walk to work in Nike trainers or use a smartphone or computer, you can probably only do so because somebody in China has been enslaved and exploited. And that is before any consideration of how buying Chinese products in general supports a nation engaged in genocide and racially profiled forced sterilization, all enabled via a system of government concentration camps.
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Reductionism is killing us because it’s killing our conversations. It’s killing open, receptive dialogue. It’s polarizing the nation, even the world. For our part, we have to start identifying and assaulting reductionism whenever it crops up in our conversations.

I hate conflict. And it’s not just a hatred that festers into frustration; it has bodily symptoms: a tightening throat, shortness of breath, increasing heart rate. I’m sure it’s related to my anxiety, but it appears to run deeper than that. It’s a Matthew 5:9 reaction, a visceral response to discord, a response that seems mysteriously rooted in the heart of God. I don’t know how else to explain it.
But this can make it tough to live in our world, since we have so very much conflict these days, over COVID and climate change, politics and personal freedom, meaning and morals. But beneath all that conflict, there’s a disease. It’s what we might call a mental disease: reductionism.
What’s Reductionism?
So, what is reductionism? It sounds like one of those academic terms that’s too abstract to be of any use. But that’s part of its danger. It’s quite simple to break down, but to do that, I need to tell you where it came from. Are you ready?
Satan. There. I said it. I’ll give you a minute.
Reductionism is the stepchild of our desire for mastery (complete control), which emerged from the ancient evil of autonomy, and autonomy comes from the heart of the father of lies (John 8), Satan. I realize I’m making things harder for myself by continuing to introduce terms that may not be widely understood. I’ll pause. Autonomy is “the idea that you are a law unto yourself.” In other words, it’s the idea that you’re completely and utterly independent. Here’s how John Frame puts it:
Sinners at heart do not want to live in God’s world, though they have no choice about it. They recognize the truth to some extent, because they need to get along and to make a living. But they would very much like the world to be different, and often they either try to make it different or pretend that it is. In the unbelieving fantasy world, the Lord of the Bible does not exist, and man is free to live by his own standards of truth and right. In a word, the unbeliever lives as if he were autonomous, subject only to his own law. Nobody can be really autonomous, because we are all subject to God’s control, authority, and presence. But we pretend that we are autonomous; we act as though we were autonomous, in the unbelieving fantasy world.John M. Frame, A History of Western Philosophy and Theology, p. 22
Satan, you’ll remember, wanted to be completely independent, like God. He wanted to be autonomous. And he convinced Adam and Eve that this was worth a shot in the dark. In fact, it ended up sending them into the dark. It sent them into a lie, because no one can be autonomous except God himself.
Now, if you’re trying to be God (despite the laughable futility of that), what do you want to do? You want to master your life. You want full control. The thing is, you can’t have that…you know, because you’re not God. You’re limited by nature. That’s how you and I were made. But we’re so stubborn that we don’t accept limitation. We refuse to think we can’t master our own lives. So, within what Frame calls the fantasy world of autonomy, we chase after mastery, and when we can’t get it (again, we never will get it), then we pretend to have it with…reductionism.
I promise we’re getting closer to the definition of reductionism now. If we can’t master our lives, then we can simplify them and make it seem as if we’re in full control. We can reduce the complexity of our own lives, the people in them, and the problems that surround us. We can take, in other words, an issue or person with a thousand dimensions and pretend that there’s only one dimension. That’s reductionism. Put differently by my friend and teacher, reductionism happens when people “reduce the world to one dimension of the whole…But reductionism is poverty-stricken, not only in its threadbare endpoint consisting of only one dimension, but also in its explanatory power” (Poythress, Redeeming Philosophy, p. 111).
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The King’s Speech won the 2010 Academy Award for Best Picture. It is the story of the future King George VI of England, who reluctantly ascended to the throne after his brother abdicated. The king had a significant struggle with a stuttering condition he had developed as a child. A successful speech therapist, Lionel Logue, helps the king overcome his problem. The king is enabled to address the nation via radio at the outbreak of war with Germany in 1939. This was a speech given in a great historical moment—thus the movie’s title.
In many ways, the film—which I can’t wholeheartedly endorse due to some strong language—is not so much about a king giving a speech as it is about an unlikely friendship that served two men and a nation. It was a friendship developed between the king and Lionel. At one point in the movie, the king and Lionel are talking, and for perhaps the first time George VI shares painful memories of his childhood. He thanks Lionel for his listening ear, and Lionel replies, “What are friends for?” The king sadly replies, “I wouldn’t know.”
I’m afraid the king’s response is one many of us would give. We have lost the gift and glory of friendship. This is due to a number of factors. We’ve traded talking for texting. We’ve abandoned fellowship for Facebook. Social media has, in reality, become anything but. The season of COVID-19 has pushed many people further away from each other, and we’ve lost our grip on the gracious blessing of friends. Men, in particular it seems, have lost the gift of friendship.
The Scriptures have a lot to say about friends and friendship. First and foremost, we are struck by Jesus’ words in John 15:15: “No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.” Jesus calls His disciples His friends. This is powerful. This gives great weight to the entire concept of friendship. Jesus says we are His friends so that we can understand a little better what it means to be in fellowship with Him. He shares with us the truth of the kingdom. To be Jesus’ friend is to be let into the eternal relationship of love within the triune Godhead. Ultimately, we are brought into this relationship by virtue of the fact that Jesus, our King, laid down His life for His friends. He died in the place of His people on the cross to be raised again on the third day.
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