Question 153: What does God require of us, that we may escape his wrath and curse due to us by reason of the transgression of the law?
Answer: That we may escape the wrath and curse of God due to us by reason of the transgression of the law, he requires of us repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, and the diligent use of the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of his mediation.
Question 154: What are the outward means whereby Christ communicates to us the benefits of his mediation?
Answer: The outward and ordinary means whereby Christ communicates to his church the benefits of his mediation, are all his ordinances; especially the Word, sacraments, and prayer; all which are made effectual to the elect for their salvation.
–The Westminster Larger Catechism, and worth keeping min mind I think as Lent approaches in 2009
Kendall, I have pondered this entry of yours with some dismay. Is this really an accurate picture of God? Does God curse? I hauled out my concordance and found plentiful OT refs; very little in the NT, with the exception of Galatians 3.10-13, which is where the Westminster reference would seem to originate. The NT does not abrogate the OT (we are not Marcionites) and certainly in our day and in our Western culture we need to meditate on Deut. 11.26-28. But I am still uneasy: this language of cursing seems too anthropomorphic to be applied easily to God.
Terry, I think Genesis 3 is more to the point. God’s wrath and curse are the result of the sin of humanity, in transgressing the God’s law that precedes Mosaic Law.
“Transgressing [i]the[/i] God’s law” is, of course, my clever formulation for “transgressing God’s law.”
Yes Don, obviously I know that. But given that we read the Hebrew scriptures in the light of the Christian scriptures – where cursing hardly appears – is it right to see this as a defining characteristic of God?
More radically, given that Genesis is a compilation of texts (J, P and E) how do we read a text like Genesis 3.14-19? Biblical scholars would see this text as aetiological, more as how the ancients explained reality than any account of how God views humankind. Would you, for example, take this text to teach among other things male headship? And before you say Yes, reflect that if so then it is in the nature of a curse. Now that is a really interesting thought.
Well, a [i]defining[/i] characteristic? Certainly and important one, and defining in terms of our relationship to God. Maybe that’s quibbling, but I don’t see how it necessarily overrides the claim that, “God is love.”
As to its being a compilation, that line of thinking always seems to be an artifact of our modern or post-modern preferences for materialist explanations, especially when we look at Scripture as some sort of relic that we need to understand from a sociological or anthropological perspective. I think it’s simpler than that, but we dive into distracting analysis of irrelevancies because of our own cultural predispositions. (And I [i]do[/i] include myself in that “we”; I continually catch myself doing this.)
I agree about questions of headship being interesting exactly as you’ve put it. It seems perfectly in keeping with Adam’s attempt to evade responsibility for his act: the woman (her fault!) whom You gave me (Your fault, too!). Whether it’s conclusive in the matter of headship is a larger topic of course.