“We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God—eternal, incomprehensible, invisible, unchangeable, infinite, almighty; completely wise, just, and good, and the overflowing source of all good.”
You can know about a man without knowing him at all. I know that actor Tom Cruise is 5 foot, 7 inches tall. That doesn’t mean I know him. I know that he is a Scientologist. That doesn’t mean I know him. You can know all about a man without knowing him at all.
However, you can’t know a man without knowing anything about him. You won’t find one good friend of Tom Cruise who is unaware that the man is short. You won’t find one good friend of Tom Cruise who is ignorant of his religious views. They know these facts because they know their friend.
You can know all about God without knowing Him at all. However, if you do truly know God, you know something about Him. All God’s friends know that He is all powerful. All God’s friends know that He is holy and merciful. Knowing God is in our mission statement. Knowing Him involves knowing about Him, and that’s what this first article of the Belgic Confession is all about. It teaches us about God and to know God, we must know about God. That’s the claim of this sermon: to know God we must know about God.
We will study this in three points. First: believing in God. Second: simple. Third: spiritual.
First: believing in God. The Belgic Confession is the earliest of our Reformed Confessions. It was written two years before The Heidelberg Catechism and nearly sixty years before The Canons of Dort. Its author, Guido DeBres, grew up in the Netherlands. His dad was a “blue painter,” meaning he painted glass and pottery in a style that evolved into delftware, in case you are into Dutch pottery.
DeBres was in the process of becoming a blue painter himself when someone gave him some religious pamphlets that led to his conversion and to him going to Geneva where he studied under John Calvin. That’s a good reminder for us who work with the audio/visual ministries here. We never know when someone is going to stumble across what we put online and be changed by God as a result.
After studying with Calvin, DeBres moved back to the Netherlands which was under Spanish rule at the time. The Spanish government was staunchly Roman Catholic and persecuted groups that separated from the Catholic church. DeBres wrote an explanation of what the Reformed churches believed to explain that they weren’t a sect but were rather urging a reformation of the church along the lines of the Bible. He threw this explanation over the wall at the governor’s castle. That explanation got him executed by the Spanish Inquisition. That explanation is what became known as the Belgic Confession. So, if you are ever tempted to think that the confessions are just dry, dusty theology, consider whether dry, dusty ideas have ever gotten anyone killed. It’s worth considering how tightly we hold to our beliefs about God. Are we willing to die for them? If so, why? If not, why not? That’s especially worth considering as we teach catechism and send our kids to catechism.
DeBres opens The Belgic Confession not by trying to prove the existence of God but by assuming the existence of God. In this, he borrows a page from the Genesis playbook which begins not by trying to prove the existence of God, but rather by assuming His existence, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”
DeBres began his explanation of the Reformed faith by underlining its similarities with Catholicism. “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God.” The Reformed church was accused of being full of, and I quote, “disobedient rebels, intent only on the destruction of civil government, throwing the world into confusion and disorder…” Now, as an aside—that’s a fair description of what we’re up to here tonight, right—trying to throw the world into confusion and disorder.
DeBres wanted to make clear to the Spanish authorities that the Reformed churches were not what they were slandered to be. They too sought to follow the God of the Bible. “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God.”
This first line cut to the heart of the debate between the Roman Catholic Church and the Reformers. The Roman Catholic Church said that there was no salvation outside their church. The Reformers, for their part, appealed to Romans 10:9, ‘If you declare with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.’ That’s what deBres had in mind when he said, “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths…” He was communicating that the church had no right to damn them because they were doing what Scripture said to do.
Now, in case you are tempted to scoff at this back and forth between Protestants and Catholics, please recognize that we don’t live in a more enlightened age. We just live in an age that falls off the ditch on the other side of the road. We deny differences in any number of areas of life for the sake of false unity. Us scoffing at the religious debates of the sixteenth century is naïve as hearing about the divorce of someone we barely know and assuming that everything would have been fine if only the man emptied the dishwasher a bit more often.
DeBres wanted the Catholic Spanish government to understand that the Reformed church stood squarely in the line of church tradition. They weren’t teaching a new God. They were teaching the God of the Bible—the only God, “a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God,” as He put it. In other words, they believed in the same God as Moses, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.” They believed in the same God as David, “How great you are, Sovereign Lord! There is no one like You, and there is no God but you…” They believed in the same God as Asaph, “Let them know that You, whose name is YHWH—that You alone are the Most High over all the earth.” They believed in the same God as Jesus, “I and the Father are one.” There is one God and only one God—the God who reveals Himself in Scripture. That’s the God of the Belgic Confession, “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God.”
The question for you, or for anyone, is not whether you believe in God. That question is too mushy to be all that meaningful. The question is whether you believe in the God of Moses. The question is whether you believe in the God of David. The question is whether you believe in the God with whom Jesus is one. The word “God” doesn’t mean much of anything, but saying “the God in whom Abraham trusted,” or “the God who raised Jesus from the dead,” has some edges too it. That is the God in whom Guido DeBres believed. I hope that is the God in whom you believe.
This God is simple. “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God.” That’s our second point: simple. By saying that God is simple, the Confession is saying that He isn’t divided within Himself. Now, we are divided within ourselves. Parts of us war against other parts of us. None of our virtues are pure. They all have their shadow sides. For example, it’s very hard for us to know where our proper desire for justice ends and our craving for revenge begins. It’s hard for us to see how when sacrificial love for someone turned resentment of that very person. We are terribly mixed bags.
God isn’t. He never needs to check Himself to ensure that His love doesn’t veer into resentment. His justice is never tarnished by petty cravings for revenge. He never finds himself torn between speaking the truth and speaking from a place of love. He does both perfectly and simultaneously.
He is never divided within Himself. This means that He is never in a position of being torn between mercy and justice. Justice is always part of His equation and mercy is always part of His equation. He wasn’t somehow less loving at the time of Sodom and Gomorrah and more loving at the time of the cross.
We have a hard time understanding this because even our virtues conflict with one another. For example, our proper desire to treat everyone equally comes into conflict with our wisdom that not everyone is equal in terms of capabilities, intelligence, mechanical ability, or emotional stability. Not treating everyone equally drives us nuts because we like justice. Treating everyone the same drives us nuts because we know that not everyone is the same. We are divided within ourselves and I dare say that if you think about your life, the most difficult decisions you’ve had to make are those in which different virtues came into conflict. God never suffers such difficulties.
We find God’s consistency in all areas hard to understand because we are so woefully inconsistent. That’s why we tend to prioritize one attribute of God to the exclusion of the others. We read 1 John 4:7-8, “Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love,” and then set God’s love against His wrath—“How could a loving God send people to hell?”, His love against His commandments—“a God of love would never judge anyone for who they decided to love or how they decided to love.” We are inconsistent and so we assume that for God to be 100% loving, He must be less than 100% just in certain circumstances, and less than 100% committed to His commandments in another situation. That’s often what people are saying when they say, “I believe in a God of love.”
That’s not the God of the Bible. The God of 1 John 4:8, “God is love,” is the God of Psalm 25:8, “Good and upright is the Lord; therefore He instructs sinners in His ways,” and the God of Psalm 7:11, “God is a righteous judge, a God who displays His wrath every day,” and the God of Psalm 23:6, “Surely Your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life.”
DeBres stressed this simplicity because the danger for the church is rarely total ignorance of God. We’ve got devotionals coming out of our ears. The danger is that we will fail to appreciate the simplicity of God. Our age stresses “God is love,” and forgets that “God is a righteous judge, a God who displays His wrath every day.” Other ages remember quite well that, “God is a righteous judge, a God who displays His wrath every day,” but forget that this same God is a God of love. The danger is always that our picture of God is distorted. He looks as if He’s in a fun house mirror. We, who are divided within ourselves, have remade Him in our image. The Belgic Confession reminds us not to do that. Bringing up church history as we’ve been doing in this sermon reminds us not to do that.
So to know about God, we need to recognize that He is simple. We also need to recognize that He is spiritual. “We all believe in our hearts and confess with our mouths that there is a single and simple spiritual being, whom we call God.” That’s our third point: spiritual.
The fact that God is spirit means that He has no form. He has no body much as a goldfish has no soul. A goldfish is purely physical. God is purely spiritual. This makes questions about where God is located as meaningless as questions about the length of a goldfish’s prayers. That’s why when Solomon dedicated the temple, he prayed “will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain You, how much less this house which I have built!”
We are the only beings who are simultaneously physical and spiritual. Angels are purely spiritual. Animals are purely physical. We are the oddity. CS Lewis said that we are a bit like frogs in this way. Frogs live in both the water and on land. We live in both the physical and the spiritual realm. It is being spiritual that allows us to communicate with God. As Jesus said, “God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in Spirit and in truth.”
Now the Bible uses physical language to describe God—“no man can see face of God and live,” “Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord,” “You brought your people Israel out of Egypt with signs and wonders, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm.” These are poetic and obviously so. Nobody thinks that the arrangement of God’s nose, cheeks, and eyes is somehow so terrifyingly hideous that no one can see it and live or that a giant, muscular arm appeared at the time of the Exodus cutting a swath through sky. Seeing God face to face is just a poetic way of referring to an encounter with Him with nothing in between. Speaking of God’s mighty hand is just a way of talking about His power.
This is just God’s way of explaining to us what would otherwise be unexplainable. Think about it in terms of me and a parakeet. Growing up, we had a parakeet named Peachey. When my sister agreed to take care of Peachy, I don’t think she expected that bird to live for decades. Peachey’s cage was in the living room, and he could watch us at the dinner table. Now imagine me as a teenage boy, sitting at that table, and calling a girl for a date for Friday night, and striking out. Bear with me here, but if I wanted to, how could I begin to explain to Peachey what it was like for me to strike out on getting a date on Friday night? I couldn’t use words because birds don’t understand words. The best I could do is build a giant birdcage, put on a parakeet costume, jump from perch to perch and bob my head like male parakeets do to impress the females, and then fall off the perch to show that I struck out. That might put it in terms that her birdbrain could on some level understand. That’s a bit of what it’s like for God to use phrases like, “no one can see my face and live,” with us and our brains, which are birdbrains compared with His. He is always taking real pains to speak with us.
He took real pains at Christmas. He took on flesh so that we could capture with our senses exactly the spiritual was like. Wouldn’t it be great to have video footage of Jesus—to see whether he smiled after saying, “Lazarus come forth,” to see what was in his eyes when he said, “The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.” To see that would be to see the smile of God and eyes of God. That’s what John said, “No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, he has made Him known.”
God obviously wants to be known. Part of knowing Him is knowing about Him. We have to get to know Him as He is otherwise rather than us being made in His image, we will remake Him in our image. We will make Him like us. Don’t do that. Let God be God. You do that by knowing Him. Amen.