Bethel Community Church

Reformed Baptist Congregation Exaltation | Edification | Evangelism

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Calvin’s Fourth Rule on Prayer

Here’s a wonderful excerpt from the Institutes on prayer.

“The fourth rule is that, thus cast down and overcome by true humility, we should be nonetheless encouraged to pray by a sure hope that our prayer will be answered. These are indeed things apparently contrary: to join the firm assurance of God’s favor to a sense of his just vengeance; yet, on the ground that God’s goodness alone raises up those oppressed by their own evil deeds, they very well agree together. For, in accordance with our previous teaching that repentance and faith are companions joined together by an indissoluble bond, although one of these terrifies us while the other gladdens us, so also these two ought to be present together in prayers. And David briefly expresses this agreement when he says: “I through the abundance of thy goodness will enter thy house, I will worship toward the temple of thy holiness with fear” [Ps. 5:7]. [Read more…]

The Knowledge of Faith

Calvin says in his Institutes that “the knowledge of faith consists in assurance rather than in comprehension.” Faith, of course, must also comprehend, for it is not a blind faith that we have. What Calvin means, is that faith grasps that which cannot be seen. He says in the same section that, “faith is so far above sense that man’s mind has to go beyond and rise above itself in order to attain it. Even where the mind has attained, it does not comprehend what it feels.” He uses Paul in Ephesians 3:18, 19 to say that faith “is the power to comprehend…what is the breadth and length… and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge”. This knowledge, he says, is lofty and we are “more strengthened by the persuasion of divine truth than instructed by rational proof.” We thus, acknowledge that we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor. 5:6, 7), and in this we are assured. (See Institutes III.2.14)

Knowledge of Self

I like what Calvin says in his discussion on free will (Inst. II.2.8-11), “whoever is utterly cast down and overwhelmed by the awareness of his calamity, poverty, nakedness, and disgrace has thus advanced farthest in knowledge of himself. For there is no danger of man’s depriving himself of too much so long as he learns that in God must be recouped what he himself lacks. Yet he cannot claim for himself ever so little beyond what is rightfully his without losing himself in vain confidence and without usurping God’s honor, and thus becoming guilty of monstrous sacrilege.”

And is is always good to remind ourselves of 1 Cor. 4:7, “…what do you have that you did not receive? If then, you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?”

A Factory of Fancies

Calvin points out that “man’s nature is a perpetual factory of idols” (Inst. I.11.8). Man’s mind is so full of pride and boldness that it dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity. And that capacity reveals itself in producing statues, pictures and anything else to represent God. Yet we know that God is invisible and cannot be represented by the visible. But we persist in this production, don’t we? Calvin says that man’s mind “sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance…it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God” (Inst. I.11.8). He further says that “to these evils a new wickedness joins itself, that man tries to express in his work the sort of God he has inwardly conceived. Therefore, the mind begets an idol; the hand gives it birth” (Inst. I.1.8). We still see this today in our superstitious culture. [Read more…]

Absence of Religion

Calvin says (Inst. I.2.3) that “if religion is absent from the life of men, they are then in no wise superior to brute beasts, but are in many respects far more miserable. Subject, then, to so many forms of wickedness, they drag out their lives in ceaseless tumult and disquiet. Therefore, it is worship of God alone that renders men higher than the brutes, and through it alone they aspire to immortality.”

Ought we not to pity the unbeliever then all the more and beg God to save sinners (such as we once were)?

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