This last Sunday, I encountered a couple of tough and embarrasing questions. Not that I didn’t know the answers to them, but was just caught off guard by them and didn’t want to answer. The questions were from children in our sunday school classes. The first question came in the middle of my telling the story of David and Bathsheba. “She was naked? Eeewwwh”, said one of them. I didn’t answer. It was too awkward. I just continued with my edited PG story. What does a sunday school teacher or parent do with adult content in the bible? The second question also caught me off guard. It came after class was over. “Who are you going to vote for?” I give him a funny, confused look. This isn’t the kind of question normal seven year olds ask. I danced around it, and didn’t say because I’m not sure myself who I’m voting for. Then there was the sunday before. Another teacher came up to me for help. One of her middle school students asked that “if we are heirs with Jesus, did that mean God had to die?” I couldn’t help her with that either. I should just start deferring all questions to either parents or elders. Children are simply amazing. It’s been a joy teaching and learning from them.
September 23, 2008
May 16, 2008
Baptismal Efficacy
Question: How do you know yourself to be a son of God in fact as well as in name?
Answer: Because I am baptized in the name of God the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. (Calvin’s Strasbourg catechism)
Rich Lusk provides fascinating insight into John Williamson Nevin’s assessment of baptismal efficacy. I would be interested to hear what you think about it. Here is what he says:
“According to Nevin, children of Christian parents were not conceived or born as Christians in the full sense; rather they were made Christians at the font… Prior to baptism, the children of believers were entitled to all the rights and privileges of the covenant promise, but those blessings did not actually become their true possession until baptism. Grace was bestowed not naturally, through conception by regenerate parents, but supernaturally and sacramentally, through the new birth of baptism.”
Wow. Does that sound consistent with our Reformed Tradition or too close to Rome? What do you think?
January 22, 2007
Children in the Church
What I want to do in this article is briefly discuss the place of children in the church. In other words, how does God view our children? Are they pagans? Christians? Or something else? To begin, I want to clarify that when I speak of children, I am talking about the children of believers. Where do they stand before God? What I want to argue for in this article is that our children belong to God, members of the covenant. This is an important issue because it has huge practical implications for the church. I will not attempt an exegetical dissection of a passage, rather, I would simply like to offer some theological reflections about the place of baptized children in relation to the covenant. Although this is not an exercise in exegesis, I do have a few passages in mind as I think about this topic (Mark 10:13-16, Acts 2:38-39, Deut 5:8-10). It is clear that the God of the Bible is a covenant making God. And whenever God calls people into covenant with Him, He always includes their children. God promises to be a god to them and to their offspring. In this way, the children are both heirs of the covenant promises and stipulations. Children are real members of the covenant community, set apart from the rest of the pagan world. In fact, Jesus makes this emphatically clear in Mark 10. This is the scene where Jesus sharply rebukes his disciples for hindering children from coming to Him. The reason for His rebuke, Jesus declares, is because “the kingdom of God belongs to such as these”. The reason I bring this topic up is because I want to encourage christian parents about the status of their children. Our God looks upon them with favor. We need not seek their conversion as though they are pagans until such a time as they make a profession of faith, but rather, we can be assured, because of God’s faithfulness, that they are “christians”. It is so easy in our day and age to plant seeds of doubt, sometimes unknowingly, in the minds of our children by our emphasis on professions of faith. Sometimes our children feel left out enough when the tray passes them by. Let us not distance them any further. Rather, let us place our confidence in the God who has promised to be the God of our children for a thousand generations.
