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Well, I want to begin this morning
by asking a question to you. The question is, is there a central
message of the Bible? If so, what is it? So to answer
this question, I'm going to go to what is quite literally the
central text of the Bible, at least the way that our Protestant
canon is arranged. This text is Psalm 119. Psalm. This song is the longest of all
the Psalms, and it's actually the longest chapter in the entire
Bible. And the content of Psalm 119
is completely fascinating to me. It's a giant poem consists
of 176 total lines. These lines are subdivided into
22 sections consisting of eight lines apiece. In each of these
22 sections, all eight lines begin with the same letter of
the alphabet. The next section then changes
to the next letter of the alphabet, going all the way through the
22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. And so this makes Psalm 119 an
acrostic poem. So what is the point of an acrostic
poem? Well, besides making it easier
to memorize, because it goes through the whole alphabet. It's
literally a way of teaching you totality. Just like when John
says Jesus is the Alpha and the Omega. Alpha is the first letter
of the Greek alphabet. Omega is the last. So it's like
saying that Jesus is the A and the Z. And thus, the verse continues
that he is the beginning and the end. In other words, he's
the totality. But Psalm 119 is remarkable among
acrostic poems because it has eight lines rather than just
one that each begin with the new letter. And so the number
eight becomes this incredibly important thing for interpreting
the meaning of the psalm. And this will have bearing on
one of its two main messages. So let's look at the explicit
message of the psalm first. It's impossible to miss this
when you read it. Using eight different synonyms repeated over
and over throughout the poem, this is a song about loving God's
law. In fact, he says four different
times, I love your law. So the explicit message of God's
word in its central chapter is loving the law of God. But who
is the he in the psalm that does this loving? Well, this question
cannot be more important He tells us that he is a king who is afflicted
while he's living in great tension with those in authority who want
him dead. He calls them the proud, the
wicked, and the evildoers. It's into this setting that the
psalm gives several references to time. And curiously, these
times go in order of a Jewish day from midnight to the cock
crow to dawn to noon. Now the Jews divided the day,
coincidentally, into eight blocks of three hours each, beginning
with the evening and going through the ninth through eleventh hour
of what we would call the next day. At some point, perhaps even
at the very beginning, a tradition arose among them on Pentecost
to recite one-eighth of this poem at the beginning of each
of the eight blocks of the day. Pentecost was the day that they
celebrated through a festival the giving of the law on Mount
Sinai. So that makes sense that you
would do this. Now our Lord himself may have had this very thing
in mind on that very day when he gave his last words in Matthew
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And
you remember Pentecost in Acts is the day of that ascension
into heaven. Something else also began to
happen in the early church, and this is rooted also in the number
eight that predominates the song. Eight was called by the fathers
the octave, following after musical notes that repeat, just like
the days of the week, on the eighth. The octave, they said,
that is the themes involving eight throughout this and other
places in the Old Testament, foreshadowed the resurrection
of Jesus in the Old Testament. And curiously, there are themes
in each of the eight sections of this psalm that correspond
to the eight stages of the last day of Jesus's life, beginning
on the night he was betrayed and going through the ninth hour
in which he died. And as such, this song's message
is more than just about the law. To put this all another way,
the literary structure and the number eight and the time frames
of a singular day And the context of the psalmist situation in
which the song is sung and the last day of Jesus all point to
an implicit prophetic message of Psalm 119. And that message
is the gospel that focuses on the Lord Jesus Christ. In other
words, you have two central messages to the central chapter of one
of the greatest masterpieces in the whole Bible. And that
is the law. and the gospel. Now given that
we are at that time of season where we remember the Reformation,
I thought it would be interesting for a moment to think about what
they considered the central message of the Bible. The Reformation
was this mighty movement of God where he used many men from all
over Europe to recover truths long obscured in the Roman Church
through suppression, intimidation, and superstition. Or if I wanted
to be a little less harsh, The medieval church had subverted
true religion by appealing to man's fascination with moralism
and mysticism and the miraculous. Three ladders that Martin Luther
said, people climb to glimpse God in the nude or as he is in
his bare essence that is not clothed with the word of God.
As the reformers sought to recover the ground of our faith, this
is what they called Sola Scriptura, scripture alone. In unison, they
taught the central message of the Bible is the law and the
gospel. This perfectly fits with the
central text of the Bible, Psalm 119. In fact, listen to what
Luther himself said about this psalm. He said, we must hear
what God promises, that's the gospel, and what he threatens. This is done with prophet as
the first and the 119th Psalms teach. Theodore Beza was the protege
of John Calvin. And he said, we divide the word
of God into two principal parts or kinds. One is called law,
the other is the gospel. For all the rest can be gathered
under the one or the other of these two headings. Calvin explained
the gospel is the message, the salvation bringing proclamation
concerning Christ that was sent by God the Father to procure
eternal life. The law is contained in precepts. It threatens, it burdens, it
promises no goodwill. The gospel acts without threats.
It does not drive one on by precepts, but rather teaches us about the
supreme will of God towards us. Luther said the law is and teaches
what we should do. But the gospel is what God will
give to us. The first we cannot fulfill.
The second we take hold of by faith. This distinction was crucial
to all of them. Beza said, ignorance of this
distinction between law and gospel is one of the principal sources
of the abuses which corrupted and still corrupt Christianity.
Spurgeon said, some men put the law instead of gospel, others
put gospel instead of law. A certain class maintains that
the law and the gospel are mixed. And then he says, these men understand
not the truth and are false teachers. Yersinus, the author of the Heidelberg
Catechism, said that to confuse them is to corrupt the faith
at its core. As exemplified in Psalm 119,
the reformers came to this position because they were deeply committed
to sola scriptura. They wanted to return to the
biblical message rather than to a message invented or corrupted
or eclipsed by the teachings of men. However, they were equally
committed to recovering the historical Christian message as taught by
the church throughout all her long history. Now that might
sound like a contradiction, but not at all. This was not merely
an awakening, nor a great revival, much less some kind of a cultish
movement infiltrated with unknown doctrines until the cult leader
came along. Rather, this was a reformation.
And to reform, by definition, means to take something that
already exists and make it better without destroying the core of
the teaching. The Reformers insisted that the
message of the Bible had always been with and in the church,
but needed to be revisited in their day because so many other
things were overshadowing and covering it. Now it's into this
that I want to turn to the substance of what's going to be a short
five week series. It will focus on one half of
this central message of the Bible. That half will be the gospel.
Now the law is obviously vitally important too, but since you
have it written on your heart at birth, we can do that another
time. The gospel is this glorious other
thing that comes from a place far outside of yourself. It's
something that God did not put into your conscience by nature
like he did the law. And yet I believe that each man
has a longing that deep down in our hearts we know that we
want to be made right with God and be at peace with him. The
gospel is our salvation. It's how God brings us peace
and reconciles us to himself. So to do this, I'm going to be
looking at four main creeds of the early church, with perhaps
a fifth and maybe a couple of others thrown in at some places.
I'm gonna compare and contrast them, asking ourselves why they've
been so important to Christ's bride for nearly 2,000 years. But just here, I want to address
a problem. I just said that the reformers were not fond of man-made
traditions and the inventions of men. There's an entire swath
of Christians that believe creeds are man-made inventions of men. This makes them, in the words
of one recent online discussion I was coincidentally reading,
quote, satanic. Now that's quite a claim that
even the most anti-credo Christians that I know would not say. But
it does reflect a softer, similar sentiment, and that sentiment
involves a deep-seated belief that creeds are divisive and
tear apart the unity of Christians. In the words of one sectarian
who begat an entire denomination of this thinking, this is what
he says, our opposition to creeds arose from a conviction that
whether the opinion in them were true or false, they were hostile
to union, peace, harmony, purity, and joy of Christians, and averse
to the conversion of the world to Jesus Christ. In other words,
nothing man-made can be unifying. Only the Bible can be unifying. Now the anti-creedal mentality
of our present time has so overtaken our culture that it seems to
me if you were to ask a baby boomer and their children what
creed was, they would probably think of that famous boxer who
fought Rocky Balboa. You could ask a Gen Xer and their
children what creed is, and they'd probably think of a post-grunge
metal band from Tallahassee. A millennial and their children
probably think it refers to a video game called Assassin's Creed. And if I'm right, this is a terribly
sad commentary on our society. Frankly, Americans used to know
full well what the creeds were, but not anymore. In the church,
it isn't a whole lot better. In this case, each of these four
generations, starting with the boomers and their systematic
dismantling of institutions and traditions in the 60s, there's
this mentality that predominates. It's known by a saying, and that
saying is, no creed but Christ. What's ironic is that this is
itself a creed. And even more ironic is that
it's totally man-made. I was listening to a YouTube
video of a pastor in the above denomination that takes great
pride on having no creeds. Sola scriptura, he demanded,
not realizing that this isn't taken from the Bible either,
and it is itself a man-made creed, and one that I agree with, by
the way. But he said sola scriptura as he abused the phrase, and
then in what I viewed as this hopelessly naive, contradictory,
and impossible to live out worldview. He gave an illustration. He said,
a man saying, I believe in the Bible alone, but also having
a creed is like having a Bible. And he pulls out his Bible and
holds it in his hand. And he says, having a Bible that's
weighed down and impossible to open because another book's on
top of it. And he throws this huge book on top of the Bible
so that it makes a loud thud. He says, if you have your Bible
and then read it any other way, then the creed says you're wrong.
Sounds great to a lot of people, right? Scripture alone must mean
that. The problem is it doesn't. First
of all, let's just deal with this. No creed that I have ever
seen is longer than the Bible itself, okay? The creeds that
we're going to be looking at range from around 60 words to
170 or so. That doesn't even take you one
third of the way through the first chapter of Matthew's gospel. So if he's talking about creeds,
he should have put a piece of paper on the Bible rather than
a book that was bigger than the Bible. Second, even if you take
a Confession of Faith, which is a much longer document, even
that pales in comparison to the Bible. For example, our London
Baptist Confession, 1689, it's about 16,000 words, including
the signatures and the introductions. Matthew's gospel by itself is
longer than that. So even the most expansive of
creeds still pale in comparison. He should have thrown a booklet
on the Bible, not war and peace. Third, it doesn't seem to dawn
on people that if they won't use something like a creed to
interpret the Bible, they're still going to use something.
Most often that something is either their own sectarian leader's
interpretation or their own. So I would suggest that what
people are doing in throwing creeds into the dumpster fire,
instead of throwing a piece of paper on the Bible, they're actually
throwing themselves on top of the Bible. And a man is exponentially
heavier and bulkier than even war and peace. If you thought
it was hard to open the Bible with that book on top, try it
with a man lying on top of it. Now, when it comes to interpretation,
every single thought that we have about the Bible is, by definition,
not the Bible. You understand that? This makes
our own thoughts about it identical to the very thing that is supposedly
evil, which are creeds. For the authors of the creeds
are no less human than I am. Now, I'm not saying it's bad
to have your own thoughts about the Bible. I'm saying it's bad
to damn the thoughts of others, especially those thoughts that
are combined views of all the churches coming together to craft
their thoughts, all while saying that your own thoughts are superior
to everyone else's and incapable of being wrong. Fourth, whether
they have a stated creed or not, every church has doctrine. And their doctrine is just as
exclusionary as the creeds, even if they're not written down.
These are the unwritten creeds found in every church. someone
asks us to consider the following hypothetical situation. He says,
if a Baptist and a Presbyterian were to come to an anti-credal
church and say, hey, we're going to teach on the meaning of baptism
today, first from the Baptist faith and message, and then from
the Westminster Confession of Faith, since the anti-credal
has no creed but Christ, we all affirm the Bible, which we can
teach here, right? the duel would quickly be told
otherwise. Why? Because everyone has a creed,
even and especially those who say they don't. And so, as Ligon
Duncan says, no creed but Christ is a lousy creed. Now, before
moving on, I would like to get specific about a friend of mine
and his podcast, which has become very popular in recent days as
it pertains to this. I do this because it's a good
example of how people misread others. His podcast is called
The Naked Bible Podcast. Its self-description is the following,
quote, biblical theology stripped bare of denominational confessions
and theological systems by exposing context. Now, some people have
taken my friend to mean that creeds are evil. It's easy to
see why they would think that based on this description. And
honestly, I'm not particularly fond of the way he's branded
this. This is mostly because of what he himself has said about
this. Here's a quote from him in another
place. He says, there's a pervasive tendency in the believing church
to filter the Bible through creeds, confessions and denominational
preferences. Continuing the quote, this is
not a bad thing. This is a human thing. Creeds
are useful for distilling important points of theology, but they're
far from the whole counsel of God and even farther from the
biblical world. This is something to be aware
of at all times. Now, my friend admits that no
one is an island of pristine neutrality. He admits that we
all read the Bible through filtered lenses. What he's concerned about
is a good concern. Creeds and confessions don't
say everything. But then again, they were never
meant to. But what they do say is something
every Christian really should heed, for their focus is on the
most important things. And that takes me to the heart
of what I want to say about why we're going to look at the creeds
in this series. Putting confessions of faith
aside, since we're not going to deal with those, the creeds
have a very specific focus. And by creeds, I'm talking about
those earliest of church documents that hit specifically on the
nature of God and the person and work of the Son of God made
flesh. Specifically, we're going to look at the Apostles' Creed
and its precursor, the old Roman symbol, that many of you probably
have never heard about, and two forms of the Nicene Creed. Each
of these are built upon the others, except for the first, which is
built upon even earlier teachings that seem to go back to the very
earliest church. Now, these creeds are short statements
about the triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
and their collective work in bringing us salvation. And as
I said, they generally take between 60 to 200 words to do this. What we call this is the gospel. They are nothing short of the
gospel. And as it regards the gospel,
they are all divisible in two parts. This is how you break
apart the creeds. You have a very brief first part
and a much longer second part. These two parts of what I call
the subjective and the objective gospel. The objective is the
content, the meat, the doctrine, the thing to be believed. The
gospel is a message, and this message comes to us through the
Holy Scripture. The creeds take the scriptures
teaching and put them in the form of simple declarations or
statements of doctrine. Those doctrines are the objective
good news of God and what he's done to bring us salvation through
Christ, Christ alone. And that's all they are. The
subjective is extremely important and very short and I think often
goes unnoticed. It comes at the very beginning
of all the creeds. It's usually just two words.
I believe. Or in some forms, we believe. In fact, the word creed comes
from the Latin word credo, which literally means I believe. So you can't have a creed without
I believe. It's not possible. This is subjective
because this is your part. This is faith. This is what you
yourself confess to believe, the doctrines and person of the
gospel. You believe who this God is and
what he's done for you. And through this belief, God
saves you. In a word, this is sola fide,
faith alone. The great Rich Molens, who ironically
came out of a Quaker anti-Credo background, put it this way in
his song that he calls Creed. wherein he literally sings through
the entire Apostle's Creed, and then he has this stanza. I believe
what I believe. It's what makes me what I am.
I did not make it. No, it is making me. It's the
very truth of God, not the invention of any man. I believe it. I believe. Nothing could be more central
to hear, to ponder, to learn, to discuss, or to believe, or
to enjoy, or to love. They are so important that our
church has said one of them nearly every week since we began. And
those weeks that we do not, we're usually confessing the actual
statements that are in them that come from the Bible themselves
in the creeds of the scripture. In fact, yes, the Bible has creeds. Probably the most famous in the
Old Testament is this. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our
God, the Lord is one. And thou shalt love the Lord
thy God with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy
might. This is the Jewish credo, the Shema, which Jews to this
day recite two times a day. It teaches you who God is and
what he requires of you. It is law and gospel. The New
Testament has creeds, too. It has many of them. Peter gave
us a very short one. Who do you say that I am? You
are the Christ, the son of the living God. That's a creed. Paul
tells us one said regularly by the early church in First Timothy
3 16. God was manifested in the flesh, justified in the spirit,
seen by angels, preached to the Gentiles, believed on in the
world, received upon in glory. Philippians 2 gives us one of
the most famous biblical creeds. Though he was in the form of
God, he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,
but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant. Being
born in the likeness of men, being found in human form, he
humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death
on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted
him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name. so
that the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven and
on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. Probably the
creed that most closely resembles the largest portions of our creeds
is found in 1 Corinthians 15. Paul says, I deliver 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,
that he appeared to Cephas and then to the 12. Then he appeared
to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still
alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James,
then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely
born, he appeared also to me. See, this is the gospel, sola
gratia, grace alone, the work of God outside of you done through
Christ that exalts and glorifies God, soli deo gloria, to God
alone the glory, even while it saves sinners from hell by giving
them new life when they look to Christ by faith. So I ask,
what could be more important than that? Now, I want to return
to this idea that creeds divide. Because guess what? In a sense,
they do. But the question is, what do they divide over? There's
a famous saying that over the years I've come to actually like
more and more. I originally didn't like it at
all because of how I saw people abuse it. And it shows a kind of wisdom
that many do not seem to appreciate. The saying goes something like
this. In essentials, unity. In non-essentials, liberty. and
in all things charity or love." Now this saying is often attributed
to Augustine. This is unfortunately a Christian
tall tale. Its origins go back to a Lutheran
theologian in 1626 and to a Catholic archbishop who turned against
the papacy in 1617. Though this saying can, like
anything else, be abused, I've seen that happen personally,
at its best, it teaches us that certain kinds of doctrine should
not divide brothers, while certain doctrine must divide. Those which
must divide are called essentials. Now, unfortunately, I haven't
been able to determine what the original speakers of this meant
when they said essentials, so that kind of leaves it up to
each person. And that isn't a great thing.
Frankly, every person's going to have slightly to hugely different
ideas about what essentials are that must divide. But as I've
thought about this question for nearly 25 years, I've come to
the following conclusion. Splitting churches over the color
of the nursery walls should fall into neither of the two doctrinal
categories, but into the third. In all things, love. Having a
robust confession of faith is a good thing. I believe especially
if we keep the third idea in mind. However, confessions are
not dividing lines between what makes someone Christian versus
non-Christian, save at those essential points upon which they're
built. That was never their intent,
and anyone who uses them that way is turning a force for good
into a weapon for evil and woe be upon them. Those who espouse
the Augsburg Confession, the Westminster Confession, the Belgic
Confession, and the London Baptist Confession, they're all Christians.
And there are many more besides these, including confessions
that do not hail from the Magisterial Reformation. In these, there
should be a certain kind of liberty to disagree on minor details
that do not pertain to the law and the gospel. I think the only
objective way of determining what an essential is, is by going
back to the early church to see what they, together sent their
best ordained ministers who traveled great distances at great cost
to discuss. They spent many weeks and untold
hours debating and finally ended up crafting unifying documents
for the whole church to be most distilled, refined, purified,
extracted, essential doctrine that binds all Christians together
through time and space. And the fact is we have precious
few of these. which makes getting the essentials
relatively an easy thing. Now there have been many, many
creeds penned over the centuries, but there are a select few that
we can count on one hand that fits this bill. These are what
we typically call the ecumenical creeds. You can look that up,
there's a whole Wikipedia on it. Ecumenical is a word that
means representing the whole. And it includes the worldwide
church. Now sadly, like creeds and confessions,
this word has been badly abused in our day, especially by those
who want no creed but Christ. And some of them even then want
to import whatever they feel like into the definition of Christ. So I'm not talking about a heretical
ecumenism here. I'm talking about the councils
and creeds that have been accepted by the entire church, all branches
going back to the beginning. It's easy here to become upset
because some of these branches were and are today in need of
great reformation. And by the way, that certainly
has to include almost all Protestants. Some do not even want to consider
them as churches, and today some of them aren't. But to import
more modern heresies into the early church is anachronistic.
In the early church, there wasn't a Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox,
Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, or Baptist. Those are all labels
that came upon each group later after two or more sides splintered
and split away. It's perhaps closer to the history
of it to talk about how all the known churches of the world came
together to craft or adopt a creed. It's better to think of it this
way. The church at Corinth was represented, the churches of
Galatia, the church at Rome, the church of Antioch, the church
at Jerusalem, the churches of Asia Minor, such as Ephesus in
Philadelphia, the church at Lyons, the church at Hippo, and so on
and so forth. Now, what did they come together
to do? Well, they weren't trying to say everything. They were
crafting creeds that they saw as unifying documents. Documents
that would show people that the entire church agreed that this
is and has always been the apostolic teaching on the nature of God
and the person and work of Christ. They weren't making up new things. They were putting old things
into a simple form so that a person might know what the most essential
truths of the gospel are and what the whole church agreed
upon this. They had to do this because heresies
were attacking the most fundamental doctrines and they were spreading
like wildfire and poisoning like gangrene. And these heresies
are what destroys true unity. As the old song teaches, by schisms
rent asunder, by heresies distressed, right? The church, just like
the apostles in the New Testament, viewed heresies of the first
order of magnitude as essential to fight. The creeds gave us
these few statements as marks of what are essential so that
the unity of true Christians might be preserved instead of
destroyed. The job of the church was to
watch and fight the good fight of faith. That's what the creeds
do at their best. So what are the select few creeds? Well, these are historical documents
of the second through fourth centuries. The Lutherans have
identified three of them. They say the Apostles Creed,
the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. I'm going to be looking
at two of these, and I'll throw the third into the mix only from
time to time. This is because the Athanasian
Creed is most likely much later, 5th or 6th century, and it was
not written by Athanasius, and it's never mentioned in any records
of the ecumenical councils. So if that leaves two, then how
do I get four? Because earlier I said I'm going
to go through four. Well, besides the Apostles' Creed,
we're going to be looking at the Old Roman Symbol, which predates
it, and which stands as the basis of all four of them. And then
besides the Nicene Creed of 325, I'm also going to add the later
additions that came in 381, which makes it significantly longer.
In fact, that's the one that we usually say in our church.
All churches everywhere that are Orthodox accept the Nicene
Creed. All Western churches accept the
other three, though the Roman symbol is the least heard of
and is the least recited. So I'm going to give you a short
history of the four of these. The Old Roman symbol is sometimes
called the Old Roman Creed. In its final form, it's not mentioned
until 340 AD. However, Rufinus, who lived right
around that time, believed that it was the rule of faith composed
by the apostles themselves at Jerusalem. That's what he says.
And whether or not that is true, it is clearly based on the second
century rule of faith, which is stated by Irenaeus a couple
different times. Irenaeus lived from 130 to 202
AD. That's a long time ago. This
is what he says. This then is the order of the
rule of our faith. God, the father, not made, not
material, invisible, one God, the creator of all things. This
is the first point of our faith. The second point is the word
of God, son of God, Christ Jesus, our Lord, who was manifested
to the prophets according to the form of their prophesying
and according to the method of their dispension of the father
through whom all things were made, who also at the end of
times to complete and gather up all things was made man among
men, visible and tangible in order to abolish death and show
forth life and produce a community of union between God and man. And the third point is the Holy
Spirit, through whom the prophets prophesied and the fathers learned
the things of God. And the righteous were led forth
into the way of righteousness and who in the end of times was
poured out in a new way upon mankind in all the earth, renewing
man unto God. So can you hear the tri-part?
structure threefold, Father, Son, Spirit, in Irenaeus' rule
of faith. Now this was also found in Tertullian,
this tripartite structure, and they both called this the rule
of faith. A rule is a standard or an ultimate
authority. And because they're saying, this
is what our rule of faith is, and it's so well defined, this
has clearly been around for a long time, even when Irenaeus wrote
it. I have no doubt that the apostles
themselves had the original hand in what became of all these creeds. Now the old Roman symbol is very
similar, although it's shorter than what I just read, and you
will hear that it sounds quite familiar. And I hope when I read
this that it's sweet music in your ears. I believe in God,
the Father Almighty, and in Christ Jesus, his only son, our Lord,
who was born of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary. who under
Pontius Pilate was crucified and buried, on the third day
rose again from the dead, ascended to heaven, sits at the right
hand of the Father, once he will come to judge the living and
the dead, and in the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Church, the remission
of sins, the resurrection of the flesh, the life everlasting."
That's the Old Roman Creed. Now that sounds so familiar because
the Apostles' Creed clearly reflects its language. In fact, the Apostles'
Creed is 76% identical to it, adding only one line, and that
line is, he descended into hell, and a word or statement here
and there for clarification. In its present form, now, our
earliest account of the Apostles' Creed is 750 AD. However, a similar
tradition to the old Roman symbol is found very early on with the
Apostles' Creed, which is that after Pentecost, the Apostles
composed this creed, which goes by their name, each contributing
a clause. Peter begins, I believe in God
the Father, and Matthias ends in the life everlasting, amen.
Paul is, of course, excluded from this series because he's
not yet a Christian. That's the tradition. This was
written so early on, it was the Council of Jerusalem, and Paul
hadn't even been converted yet. That's amazing. Now, the Nicene
Creed of 325 came out of the first Council of Nicaea that
same year. Now, the Council was called primarily
to deal with the Arian heresy, which had been sweeping through
the churches. The creed that came out of it was the first
to be accepted by all churches, because all the churches participated
in its adoption. It was truly ecumenical in the
best sense of the word, although, of course, Arians would have
disagreed with that, but they were the ones attacking the deity
of Christ, after all. It was Eusebius of Caesarea,
the great church historian, who first suggested the council adopt
the creed that had long been said in his own church. So as they're sitting there arguing,
fighting, what creed should we adopt? He raised his hand and
said, we have a great one in Caesarea. It was a fine and orthodox
creed, but it didn't address the Arian controversy. Instead,
Nicaea continued with the same basic tripart division of all
the creeds, but it expanded the section on Jesus to reflect his
deity and oneness with the Father. They also added a bit about how
Jesus came to save us at the point of confessing his incarnation,
and an anathema at the end for those who deny the deity of Christ. This part is rarely recited in
the churches. Now, in total, this creed, the
first Nicaean, and I'm just gonna use the English, is 171 words.
It's 115 words if you don't include the anathema. That makes it only
two words longer than the Apostle's Creed. Now, if it added so much
to the person of Christ, which it did, how can it be so close
in word count to the Apostle's Creed? It's because like Eusebius'
Creed, it basically stops at confessing belief in the Holy
Spirit. So you say, I believe in God the Father, what He is,
the Son, a whole long stuff about the Son, and in the Holy Spirit,
end of creed. All that comes after in the old
Roman symbol and the Apostles' Creed, that's left off the first
Nicene Creed. This is where we meet our fourth
and final creed, the Nicene Creed of 381. Now this was adopted
at the Second Ecumenical Council held in Constantinople that same
year. It is significantly different
from the original Nicene Creed, although it retains enough of
the language about Christ being Light of Light, Very God of Very
God, that it's still called the Nicene Creed. This creed contains
212 words, as we're going to use it, making it by far the
longest of the four. And it does this even as it eliminates
the entire anathema at the end of the first Nicene Creed. So
what is it doing? Well, while retaining much of
the anti-Aryan language of the first Nicene Creed, it also adds
back a whole bunch of language that we find in the other two
creeds, which was dropped. And then it fleshes out a bit
more in several sections, including a lengthy addition to what we
believe about the Holy Spirit and baptism. This creed adds
a phrase found in none of the others, which is, according to
the scriptures. And this is language lifted right
out of the creed in 1 Corinthians 15. Also, it's so close to the
catechetical lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem that many scholars
believe that this creed is simply a revision of the creed Cyril
was using in Jerusalem. All the churches were already
using creeds, that's the point. I find this one particularly
fascinating because it takes us back to the place where the
Old Roman Symbol and Apostles' Creed were both said to have
originated with the Apostles in Jerusalem. And as such, it
comes as no surprise that it adopts much of the language from
those creeds that were left out of the original Nicene Creed.
Now in the weeks to come, we're going to be looking at these
creeds, reading them together and reading them apart. Rather
than going one creed per week, which you might think I do since
I'm going to go through four creeds, I'm going to divide this
study the way I learned that Calvin divides the Institutes,
which follows the four-part organization of the Apostles' Creed. Did you
know that? And thus, we're going to spend the first week considering
God the Father, the second, thinking about God the Son, the third,
God the Holy Spirit, and the fourth, the remaining truths
about the church and the second coming. We're going to take deep
dives into these doctrines and we'll go to great pains to see
that every word of these creeds is rooted in the biblical teaching. We're going to be using the small
catechism of Martin Luther, who actually has a proof text for
every single line. Fascinating. These are not man-made
doctrines, even if they do reflect later situations and circumstances
that cause them to be written down for us. Now I'm doing this
not merely so that you can know what it is the church has always
believed and confessed. That's important. And not merely
so that you can gain some new information, but because these
creeds give us the gospel half of the central message of the
Bible. And I'm hardly alone in desiring that you see these things.
These are documents that have been written about by many fine
teachers for nearly 2,000 years. They've been preached by many
fine preachers and are worth our finest thoughts and time
considering even in our own day. There can be nothing more important
than thinking about the only message on earth that can save
a person from damnation, sin, death, and Satan, especially
in an anti-credo culture that is hell-bent on overthrowing
Orthodox Christianity. And thus Augustine begins his
own work on the creeds by saying this. I think these are the very
first words. He says, receive my sons, the rule of faith, which
is called the creed. When you have received it, write
it on your hearts, recite it daily to yourselves before you
go to sleep, before you go forth, fortify yourselves with the creed.
No one writes the creed so that it can be read. Let your memory
be your codex that you may be able to review, review it if
you should happen. That forgetfulness effaces what
diligence has given you. You will believe what you hear
yourself saying and your lips will repeat what you believe.
The apostle says truly for with the heart of man believes into
justice and with the mouth profession of faith is made to salvation.
This is the creed that you will be going over in your thoughts
and repeating from memory. These words that you have heard
are scattered throughout the divine scriptures. They've been
assembled and unified to facilitate the memory of dull mankind in
order that everyone will be able to say the creed and adhere to
what he believes. Now, the impulse to rebel against
creeds can be rooted in a kernel of truth. All lies are rooted
in a kernel of truth. We don't want to misuse them.
However, let me put such rebellion bluntly by using our friend who
earlier called the Nicaea satanic. If creeds are satanic, then this
means it's satanic to believe in God the Father Almighty, maker
of heaven and earth. How can this be satanic? If they
are satanic, then it's satanic to confess that Jesus Christ
is God in human flesh, born of a virgin, suffered under an historic
governor who put him to death so that we might be saved, but
was raised to new life and ascended to heaven where he sits enthroned
as king of kings. If creeds are satanic, then it's
satanic to confess that we believe in the Holy Spirit, the giver
of life, whom God sent to create his church and forgive us of
our sins. You want to talk about division,
not unity. If this is what you think, then
you're not a Christian. It's that simple. And you need
to repent and turn to God in Christ for forgiveness of this
most serious of sins. If you do not think this, but
you've never confessed Christ by saying, I believe these things,
then stop wasting time and confess the God of scripture, the God
of the creeds. For these creeds give you the
gospel of the triune God through whom and by which you are saved. If you have confessed, then come
with me on this journey into the central message of the gospel
as found throughout scripture and put so beautifully in the
creeds. Creeds were never meant to force you to believe everything,
only the most basic things. They were meant as things that
bring us together, not that draw us apart. They're meant to show
you the way to God through Christ by the Holy Spirit. Blessed be
the most high for preserving them for his church. And may
he give us a blessing as we dive into them so that we might know
him better. Let's pray together. Father,
I do ask that even though this is introductory, we've certainly
gone over much scripture even today. as it's been distilled
in the creeds and as we've seen it even in the scripture itself.
I would pray, Lord, that you would give us a hunger and a
thirst to know the most essential, important truths that there are
in a new and exciting way. Nothing in this world should
be more exciting to us than the message that created life in
us in the first place. this message of who our great
God is as father, son and spirit and what our great God has done
to bring us salvation. I would pray that you would bless
us as we go forward in this future. But also, Lord, as we hear these
words today, my prayer is that everyone in this room would believe
these things themselves and that they would confess them, that
this would be their credo. And I would ask that you would
open hearts and minds, sanctify us through your word and save
us by your word. For Christ's sake, I pray that
he would gain all the glory for what he has done for us. And
it's in his name I ask these things, amen.
The Creeds Part 1: Introduction
Series A Short Series on the Creeds
| Sermon ID | 10162238291099 |
| Duration | 48:43 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday Service |
| Language | English |
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