Written by Nicholas T. Batzig |
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
We need to remind ourselves of those precious truths of the gospel—namely, that through our union with Christ in His death and resurrection, the power of sin has been broken, the guilt of our sin has been forgiven and dealt with, and the assurance of God’s presence secured to us.

Today marks 21 years since the Lord brought me to saving faith and repentance. I always find it to be a good practice to meditate on the way in which the Lord draw me out of a pit of sin and misery and to Himself in Christ. Remembering what we once were when we were dead in sins and what God did to mercifully draw us to Himself through the saving work of Christ is vital if we are to make advancement in our spiritual growth in grace. The Christian life is often fueled most of all not by learning new things (although there are always more important truths for us to learn in God’s word) but by remembering those truths that God has already revealed to us.
There are at least three clear places in Scripture that encourage us to remember the truth of the gospel in order to make progress in growth in Christ-likeness. The first passage is Romans 6. There, the Apostle Paul explained that if we are united to Jesus we have died with Him, been buried with Him, and risen with Him. In light of this truth–and the accompanying truths about our having died to the power of sin since He died to it’s power–Paul charges believers with the following words: “Reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:11). Paul was charging believers to preach a specific aspect of the Gospel–what theologians call definitive sanctification–to ourselves. This charge comes on the heal of the question, “Shall we continue in sin that grace might abound?” Through our union with Christ crucified and risen, we have a powerful tool to encourage holiness in the lives of believers. If we are struggling with a particular sin or on the brink of giving into some sin, Paul charges us to preach to ourselves that aspect of the gospel in which there has been a definitive breach with sin’s power.
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In the Christian life we are called to remember that regardless of how forsaken things might seem to the eyes, the heart knows different. We know that whether we are high or low, safe or in prison, to give glory to the Lord. 

Christopher J.H. Wright has described the book of Deuteronomy as the heartbeat of the Old Testament. Along with Isaiah and the Psalms it is the most quoted book by Jesus and the Apostles. It is filled with electric passages that describe the love of Jehovah for His covenant people. There is so much gospel flowing from the fingers of God’s prophet as he writes that the book would not be out of place in the least in the New Testament. Just as Christ has His Beatitudes so too does Moses. With this it also has in its scope a number of warnings from God to the Israelites concerning how they are to behave and believe once they cross the Jordan and go to conquer the Promised Land. Over the next several months we are going to be spending time meditating on what we at Bethany can learn from this portion of Holy Scripture. In the Hebrew the title is literally “These Are the Words”. Our English name comes from the Greek translation of the Old Testament called the Septuagint. There the authors call it, “deuteronomion”, which means the second law. It gets that from the fact that a good portion of it is a retelling of the book of the covenant in Exodus 21-23. There are some added thoughts from Moses to help the generation which had come of age in the Wilderness understand with clearer minds the requirements God provides His people to follow. As we walk through each of the sections every Lord’s Day the goal of the sermon series will be to grow our appreciation for the beauty of God’s law, His wisdom, and how He cares for His Church. Our LORD is as interested in preparing us for our entrance into the Heavens as He was the Israelites to cross the Jordan.
In our first sermon from Deuteronomy we are going to hear a call from Moses to give to the LORD in act of worship the first fruits of the harvests that come from the initial crop which will be produced after the Canaanites, Amalekites, and others are defeated by Joshua and God’s army. As part of his testimony to the Israelites Moses majors on helping the people understand that everything that they now have is a gift of Jehovah. Everything they do in the present and in the future is to be informed by the fact that He has brought their current wealth out of His good will and love for them. There is one particular part of the ceremony of the feast that is worth noting in this morning’s worship and prayer help.
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Our belief in Christ, the call to make disciples, our salvation, and our prayers are all rooted in the triune nature of God. The Trinity, brothers and sisters, is not a doctrine to be left to the theologians for scholarly discussion. This is the nature of our great God and Savior. This is who the one true and living God is. And the Trinity is infinitely practical to us as we strive in all things to know and love Him more deeply through His Word.

After briefly defining what is God, we now come to the doctrine of the Trinity. To be honest, for several years the phrasing of Question 2 perplexed me (which reflects the fourth question of the Westminster Shorter Catechism). To ask what instead of who makes God seem impersonal. However, we must remember that God is a title; therefore, Question 2 is answering what we are describing with that title. Question 3 is essentially asking who God is, for even the question itself ascribes personality to God. In the Old Testament, God revealed His name, Yahweh, to Israel, and in the New Testament, He has revealed a deep mystery behind His holy name. We call that mystery the Trinity: there are three persons in the one true and living God.
Although this mystery is profound, it is not complicated like a sort of divine mathematical formula. As we defined God in Question 2, we believe that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are each fully God. They are the same in substance, equal in power and glory. Furthermore, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three distinct persons, so that the Father is not the Son, the Son is not the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is not the Father. However, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not three Gods, but together are united as the one true and living God. Indeed, as Matthew 28:19 notes, this is God’s name. Yahweh is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
How can three be one and one be three? There is the profundity and the grand mystery that must be received by faith. Of course, if God really is infinite, then we should not expect to be able to fully explain every aspect of His divinity. Rather, we ought to bow our heads in humble gratitude that He would reveal such a marvelous truth to us at all.
Of course, since the Trinity is a mystery that will forever elude our full comprehension, many Christians avoid thinking about it at all.
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