This week we will begin the second part of our catechetical sermon series. In part one (questions 1-38), we focused on “what man is to believe concerning God”; now in part two (questions 39-107), we will focus on “what duty God requires of man.”
We start with the law. This week we’ll think about the moral law — what does God require of everyone?
Then we’ll turn next week to Jesus’ summary of the law — “Love the Lord your God with all your heart… and love your neighbor as yourself” — and we’ll talk about how that relates to the Ten Commandments. Why does Paul sometimes speak so highly of the law and yet also insist that we are not under law?
Then we’ll go through the Ten Commandments and look at how they apply to the Christian life.
The last part of the catechism then works through the Way of Salvation: faith and repentance, together with the word, the sacraments, and prayer.
It’s worth pointing out that the Christian life is firmly grounded in the story that was told in part 1 of the catechism. I like J. Gresham Machen’s way of putting it in Christianity and Liberalism. The modernists wanted to say that “Christianity is a life, not a doctrine.” Machen replied:
“From the beginning, Christianity was certainly a way of life; the salvation that it offered was a salvation from sin, and salvation from sin appeared not merely in a blessed hope but also in an immediate moral change. The early Christians, to the astonishment of their neighbors, lived a strange new kind of life — a life of honesty, of purity and of unselfishness. And from the Christian community all other types of life were excluded in the strictest way. From the beginning Christianity was certainly a life.
But how was the life produced? It might conceivably have been produced by exhortation. That method had often been tried in the ancient world; in the Hellenistic age there were many wandering preachers who told men how they ought to live. But such exhortation proved to be powerless. Although the ideals of the Cynic and Stoic preachers were high, these preachers never succeeded in transforming society. The strange thing about Christianity was that it adopted an entirely different method. It transformed the lives of men not by appealing to the human will, but by telling a story; not by exhortation, but by the narration of an event. It is no wonder that such a method seemed strange. Could anything be more impractical than the attempt to influence conduct by rehearsing events concerning the death of a religious teacher? That is what Paul called ‘the foolishness of the message.’ It seemed foolish to the ancient world, and it seems foolish to liberal preachers to-day. But the strange thing is that it works. The effects of it appear even in this world. Where the most eloquent exhortation fails, the simple story of an event succeeds; the lives of men are transformed by a piece of news.” (pages 47-48)
