No one goes to Heaven merely because they recognize His existence. There must be, alongside this, a worshipping and glorifying of Him accordingly. There is a fruit born out of love that begins with the eyes opened to see the beauty and holiness of Jehovah. To go back to the preface to the Ten Commandments for a second if God is your God and has raised you from the spiritual dead then how can you fail to “. . .trust, hope, delight, rejoice, highly esteem, honor, adore, choose, love, desire, fear, believe, meditating, remember. . .” His glory in grace? You can’t. These things are so inscrutably linked as to be defined together.
As with when we went through the commandments last year in the Shorter Catechism, I’ll warn you ahead of time that this process will be somewhat slow and unending. Yet, I will do what I can to try and punch up the blessing that is the law of God, even if at some point it may feel like it is getting not only repetitive, but oppressive. Some have criticized the authors of the Larger Catechism for their so-called navel gazing fastidiousness.
However, I think we will find much meat to fill our souls with grace as we spend time considering what our Lord would have us learn.
There is an idiom below that is worth pulling out for some more examination before we read the Q/A’s themselves and that would be “. . .in the whole man”. It is a curious phrase which means not only in our outward obedience, but in the inward as well we are to apply these commands. It is a part of course of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount that we sin not in deed alone. Our minds and affections are as much affected by the Fall as our physical activities. We sweat when we work, yet the truth is that pricking the finger on a thorn results in all types of inward cursing (or outward for that matter) that testifies to the reality of our transgressions before the Lord. So, as we walk through each of the Ten Words let us keep in mind what God is requiring of us.
We open with the first commandment. It is, as you might expect, the foundation for all the statutes that come after and this is why when we read the duties required in Q.104 we see something of all the rest of the Decalogue listed in some form or fashion. It is helpful to remind ourselves that obedience to God is complete and full.
Here are this week’s Q/A’s:
Q. 103: Which is the first commandment?
A. The first commandment is, Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
Q. 104: What are the duties required in the first commandment?