The Reformed Faith

Regretfully, there are as many versions of the Christian Faith as there are leaves on a tree. To the best of my understanding, that known as The Reformed view is the most biblical.

What is the Reformed faith? To put it briefly, what distinguishes the Reformed Faith from other Christian convictions is its conviction that God is fully God – free of all influences and restrictions apart form his own perfect and eternal nature. He affects all and is affected by any only by condescending grace.

That means that he rules over everything that exists or that occurs, that he is the source, the goal and the ultimate cause of everything. Like every other part of creation, man was made by him and for him, and is subject to him even in the exercise of his creaturely freedom. Man is never from of God.

In hidden, inscrutable ways, God not only uses man's freedom without disaffecting it, but he governs that freedom. Our salvation is the fruit of that inscrutable control: enslaved and corrupted by sin, we cannot choose to repent and believe the Gospel until God moves in our hearts by the Holy Spirit to do so. Faith is a gift of God. Repentance is given to us.

Our security, therefore, does not lie in the measure of faithfulness we are able to maintain. Fickle as weather and firm as water, we would be lost if it were not for the sustaining grace of God and for his kindly stubbornness, leading us on until we are finally redone into the image of his Son our Savior. Our salvation is all of God.

Other aspects of the primacy of God are also vital to a reformed understanding of the Faith. That primacy expresses itself in the fact that mankind as a whole is bound to and will be judged by the moral standards God has established in his word, and that Christians love and seek to obey those standards ad the inevitable consequence of their salvation. It expresses itself in the fact that the word of God, properly explained and understood according to its native meaning, is the means by which Christians come to know God's will, that any other presumed authority is to be measured by that standard and that no other authority can be equal to that of the word of God.

It seems to me that every other view of the Christian Faith diminishes God, reduces his power, limits his government and ultimately transforms him into a heaven lackey of human aspirations.

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