Emmaus City Culture Q&As | Part 1: God, Creation and Fall, Law Continued
Each week, we are adapting Redeemer's New City Catechism with modern language, including the questions and answers, along with the commentary and prayer. Our goal is to make these easily accessible for all ages, as well as those with various levels of education in Worcester.
Since we don't want this to be just information transfer, but life transformation by God's Word and Spirit, we purposely changed the word catechism to culture as we pray for God to help us creatively display and declare the good news of Jesus in our communities.
Here are the previous weeks' Q&As:
- Q&A 1: What is our only hope in life and in death?
- Q&A 2: Who is God?
- Q&A 3: How many persons are there in God?
- Q&A 4: How and why did God create us?
- Q&A 5: What else did God create?
- Q&A 6: How can we glorify God?
- Q&A 7: What does the law of God require?
- Q&A 8: What is the law of God stated in the Ten Commandments?
- Q&A 9: What does God require in the first, second, and third commandments?
- Q&A 10: What does God require in the fourth and fifth commandments?
- Q&A 11: What does God require in the sixth, seventh, and eighth commandments?
- Q&A 12: What does God require in the ninth and tenth commandments?
- Q&A 13: Can anyone keep the law of God perfectly?
- Q&A 14: Did God create us unable to keep His law?
- Q&A 15: Since no one can keep the law, what is its purpose?
- Q&A 16: What is sin?
Cheers to 2014 and many becoming more like Jesus together. For other updates, like and follow Emmaus City on Facebook.
Emmaus City Culture | Part 1, Q&As 17 & 18
Question 17
What is idolatry?
Answer 17
Idolatry is trusting in created things rather than the Creator.
Romans 1:21, 25
For although they knew God, they neither glorified Him as God nor gave thanks to Him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. … They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator.
Commentary
What is it to have a god? Or, what is one's god? Answer: To whatever we look for any good thing and for refuge in every need, that is what is meant by "god." To whatever you give your heart and entrust your being, that is really your god. A person imagines that he has God and everything he needs, provided he has money and property. He relies upon these, boasts about them, and feels immovably secure. … But look, he too has a god, named money, that is the money and property to which he has given his whole heart. One who has money and property has a sense of security and feels happy and fearless. Similarly, one who congratulates herself on her great learning, intelligence, power, special advantages, family connections, and honor and trusts in them also has a god, only not the one true God. The evidence for this appears when people are arrogant, secure, and proud because of such possessions, but desperate when they lack them or lose them. I repeat, to have a god means to have something on which one's heart depends entirely. The true worship and service of God takes place when your heart directs all its trust and confidence only toward God and does not let itself be torn away from Him; it consists in risking everything on earth for Him and abandoning it all for His sake. Everyone has set up for himself some particular god to which he looks for benefits, help, and comfort. For idolatry does not consist simply in setting up an image and worshiping it; it takes place primarily in the heart, which looks elsewhere than to the one God, seeks help and comfort in created things. Besides there is also that false worship, that height of idolatry, which involves those who seek comfort and salvation in their own works and presume to capture heaven by putting God under the pressure of an obligation. What is this but turning God into an idol, into a plaster image, while the worshiper actually is setting herself up as her own god. However … We are to trust in God alone, look to Him, and expect to receive nothing but good things from Him. Question and explore your own heart thoroughly, and you will find out if it embraces God alone or not. Do you have it in your heart to expect nothing but good things from God, especially when you are in trouble and in need? And does your heart in addition give up and forsake everything that is not God? Then you have the one true God.
Adapted from Luther’s Large Catechism, translated by F. Samuel Janzow (St. Louis, MO.: Concordia,
1978), 13–17.
Prayer
God, the light of
every heart that sees You, the life of every soul that loves You, the strength
of every mind that seeks You, grant me to continue in Your holy love. Pour Yourself
into my heart, and let it overflow, and be so filled with Your pleasures, that
there is no room left for the vain things here below. I am ashamed and tired of
living after the way of the world … help me, my God … and be the joy of my heart:
take it all, and keep Your continual residence there … that I may leave all here
below, and serve and live through You alone.
Adapted from Pious Breathings: Being the Meditations of St
Augustine, his Treatise of the Love of God, Soliloquies and Manual, translated by Geo. Stanhope
(London: J. Nunn & Co., 1818), 29–31.
Question 18
Will God allow our disobedience and idolatry to go unpunished?
Answer 18
No, God is righteously angry with our sins and will punish them both in this life, and in the life to come.
Ephesians 5:5-6
For of this you can be sure: No immoral, impure or greedy person – such a person is an idolater – has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of such things God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient.
Commentary
If Jesus Christ did not secure us, we would fall to our ruin. Adam fell, and we fell in him … " … What is sin but a breaking of the law; "the wages of sin is death;" every transgression of the law incurs damnation. We must die, we are legally dead. We have broken God's law, and deserve eternal condemnation, every one of us without distinction; we are all on the same level playing field. It is not greatness or external differences, that make a difference in the internal state of the soul. This is our state towards God: we have lived in sin, [and] are legally dead now. … But, besides this legal death, there is a spiritual death, and the consequence of that is eternal death; if I die spiritually, I must die for ever, I must live eternally away from God. It is impossible to know, or to value, that life that Jesus Christ came into the world to give to us and provide for us without considering the nature of the death He delivers us from.
Adapted from
“Sermon LXXI: Neglect of Christ, The Killing Sin” in Sermons on
Important Subjects by the Rev. George Whitfield (London: Fisher, Son & Jackson, 1832), 741–743.
Prayer
Did the Son of God
become incarnate, and die on a cross, only to lay the foundation of a new
religious denomination in the world, and to become the subject of occasional
conversation? Or was it that He might be the hope of the guilty, and the Savior
of sinners – the object of their confidence, of their love, and of their
obedience? If Jesus is not yours; if your hearts are not devoted to Him; and if
you die in your sinful condition, you had better never have been born. May the
Lord save you from the wrath to come, and prepare you for the heaven instead!
Amen.Coming next week: Q&As 19 and 20: Is there any way to escape punishment and be brought back into God's favor? and Who is the Redeemer?
– Sully
Curiosity piqued? Something inside you being stirred? Let's connect.
Curiosity piqued? Something inside you being stirred? Let's connect.
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