Where God communicates His will it is my duty to not just be quiet, but to desire obedience unto His word and to lovingly follow as a sheep following my Shepherd. Both the 2nd and 4th Commandment have become provocative in our Reformed circles, and they should not be. This is a case where our forefathers were not necessarily “more holy” than us, but they were in this situation without a doubt wiser.

I am going to do my best not to make our walk through the commandments boring and/or monotonous. Whenever you start a long journey it is best to mentally prepare yourself for the length. I often joke that in a former life I was a long-haul truck driver because I can get in a car and zone out and make a ten-hour drive feel like a half-hour. However, not a lot of people are like that (ask my kids). The hope is by the time we get to the Tenth Commandment you have not completely checked out and are not pulling a Roberto Duran chanting NO MAS! NO MAS!
My goal is to help you see the beauty of Christian ethics. It is where our faith meets real life. We need to understand that it is worth the effort to examine what God would have us to do and to be, because as we seek to obey the Lord we will begin to experience a devotional peace in which by submitting ourselves to Jesus and confessing that as we see the wisdom and attractiveness of the way He has ordered His creation with more clarity, our hearts will be tied to Christ as a wife is to a husband. There is a lot to be said for that type of loyalty. Fidelity to our confession of faith matters. Our belief that there is no hope outside our Redeemer is worked out in what we do when we make decisions and act in the world. While it may seem as if that kind of moral principle is really for the second table of the law, the first table is just as practical for our day-to-day.
Let’s go ahead and get to our catechism questions for this morning as we start to get into how that works:
Q. 49. Which is the Second Commandment?
A. The second commandment is, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.
Q. 50. What is Required in the Second Commandment?
A. The second commandment requires the receiving, observing, and keeping pure and en­tire, all such religious worship and ordinances as God hath appointed in his word.
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One of the greatest assurances of salvation that we can have during our pilgrimage in this world comes from our knowledge of the definitiveness of our redemption in Christ. The fact that Jesus’s death actually atoned for our sins, produces a confidence in believers that nothing will separate them from the love of God. If Jesus died for us, who can undo what Christ has done?

What is the central message of Christianity? This is a subject of timeless importance in a day when many insist that the central message is kindness in interpersonal relations; or that it is justice in its variegated societal implementation. However compelling the case may be made for either of these, the Apostle Paul gave us the divinely inspired center of the Christian message when he wrote, “I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:2).
It is quite clear that the atoning death of Jesus stands at the center of the Christian message. “Christ died for sinners” is, in the words of Geerhadus Vos, “the center of gravity” in Christianity. But, this opens another question, namely, “How then should we view the resurrection?”
As a young Christian, I had a number of impassioned conversations with close friends about this subject. I would insist that the message of the cross was the center of the Gospel. They would insist, with the same emotional forcefulness, that the resurrection stood at the center since it culminated in the new creation. Citing Romans 4:24-25, one friend went so far as to say that the resurrection of Jesus was more important than His death on the cross. A number of years later, several colleagues in ministry encouraged me to read more Richard Gaffin, since he argued more persuasively that the resurrection, rather than the crucifixion of Jesus, was the epicenter of the Christian message. Interestingly, as I read Gaffin, I came across statements that seemed to go against that idea. Reflecting on Paul’s teaching in 1 Cor. 1:18-3:22 and Galatians 6:14, Gaffin makes the following assertion: “Paul’s exclusive and comprehensive epistemic commitment is to the crucified Christ.” This, of course, doesn’t mean that the cross is more important than the resurrection. In fact, I was imbalanced in my own understanding of the central message as a young Christian, because I didn’t yet understand that the saving work of Christ couldn’t be bifurcated without doing damage to the message of Christianity as a whole. This is why the Apostle Paul summarizes the heart of the Christian message in the following way when writing to the church in Corinth:
I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures (1 Cor. 15:3).
The wrath-propitiating, sin-atoning, Satan-conquering death of Jesus on the cross, together with His burial and His resurrection form the central message of the Christian faith. When the Apostle Paul said, “I determined not to know anything among you expect Jesus Christ and Him crucified,” he was utilizing a theological synecdoche (i.e. the part for the whole). Apart from the death of Jesus, the resurrection is a legal fiction. Apart from the witness of His resurrection, the death of Jesus is a tragic failure.
One of the greatest assurances of salvation that we can have during our pilgrimage in this world comes from our knowledge of the definitiveness of our redemption in Christ. The fact that Jesus’s death actually atoned for our sins, produces a confidence in believers that nothing will separate them from the love of God. If Jesus died for us, who can undo what Christ has done? Jesus would have to be dethroned and His body put back in the tomb, for His saving work to be emptied of its efficacy. The work of redemption can never be reversed or overthrown because it was accomplished by the infinite and eternal, sinless Son of God whose death on the cross was a perfect sacrifice of infinite and eternal value. The efficacious death of Jesus is captured by the writer of Hebrews in the benediction he pronoucnced over the members of a church that was tempted to turn away from Christ.
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Since the debut of Darwin’s work in America, views in the church have been diverse; there has never truly been one single perspective that could be described as “the American Christian position” on evolutionary theory and the proper interpretation of the Genesis creation narrative.

In the decades leading up to the 1859 publication of Darwin’s magnum opus The Origin of Species, much of the scientific community in the United States (which included numerous sincere Christians) had already embraced the idea that the earth’s history involved long geologic ages during which many biological species had appeared and later become extinct. Geologists cited the patterns in the fossil record as evidence for long epochs punctuated by sudden changes in the earth’s flora and fauna. Some Christian geologists interpreted these relatively abrupt transitions as markers of divine intervention by which God had specially created new species following population collapses caused by ice ages and cataclysmic floods. Leading academics, such as geologists James Dana at Yale and Edward Hitchcock at Amherst College, believed that Christian teachings on creation could be harmonized with the scientific data by interpreting the “days” of Genesis 1 as representing long ages (the so-called “day/age theory”) or by assuming that there was a long period of time between God’s initial creative act recorded in Genesis 1:1 and the divine activity described in Genesis 1:2 and beyond (the “gap theory”). These ideas contrasted sharply with Irish Bishop James Ussher’s seventeenth-century calculation of the earth’s age—roughly 6,000 years—which was based upon a literalistic understanding of the biblical genealogical records. Thus, prior to the rise of Darwinism in American scientific circles, a diversity of views already existed about how to best understand the early chapters of Genesis in light of scientific evidence.
When the British printing of Darwin’s Origin made its debut in America in late 1859, the majority of scientists had yet to embrace any theory of biological evolution, even though such ideas had been discussed in academic circles for quite some time. It should be noted that skepticism toward evolutionary thought was not always connected to religious convictions. In fact, some devout Christians in the scientific community readily embraced it. Darwin’s greatest American champion, Harvard botanist Asa Gray, was a deeply devoted Presbyterian who disagreed with the claim that the theory of evolution by natural selection was inherently atheistic. Gray, who had corresponded with Darwin on scientific matters since 1855 and went on to facilitate the American publication of the Origin in 1860, argued that natural biological mechanisms of evolutionary change exhibit God’s design just as much, if not more than, instantaneous acts of creation. He used the analogy of cloth woven by hand compared to cloth made by a power loom; both are obviously the product of mindful design, and the latter is even more impressive because of the level of intelligent contrivance involved. Creation is all the more impressive, Gray explained, if God engineered an evolutionary mechanism to accomplish it.
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