The Fall and Sin: Theme #4 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism

Nov 17

Nov 17 The Fall and Sin: Theme #4 of the Westminster Shorter Catechism

“The conviction of our sin against a holy God is the starting place of all true religion.”

The heart of Christianity is not following rules to earn life, it is looking to God for the forgiveness of sins through Christ, crying “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” (Luke 18:13). This is good news in a world where we can’t help but look around and say, “this is not good.”

Apart from the most starry-eyed idealist, everyone knows that the world is not as it should be…According to Scripture, the world’s problems can be traced to sin. This unpopular message is actually good news. Unlike a naturalistic worldview, Scripture can account for sin’s origin. Sin intruded into a good world, a world God still cares about and is restoring to an even grander state of perfection. The Bible teaches that sin is deadly but also that it can be forgiven and defeated.

The Shorter Catechism addresses this theme in several places, covered in no less than four chapters in Glorifying and Enjoying God.

Q&A 12 speaks of the covenant of life (or, as the WCF calls it, the covenant of works) that set Adam as mankind’s federal head and freighted his actions with significance. The sad result of this “covenant of life” was death—mankind plunged into sin and misery. Questions 13-16 address these, explaining sin and its consequences.

Questions 17-19 continues to focus on the fall and its misery. “All mankind by their fall lost communion with God, are under his wrath and curse, and so made liable to all the miseries of this life, to death itself, and to the pains of hell forever” (Q&A 19).

Thankfully, these potentially disheartening sections are bracketed by hope—question 11 points us to the providence of God, “his most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all his creatures, and all their actions.” And on the other side, question 20 promises a covenant of grace whereby God delivers believers “out of the estate of sin and misery, and to bring them into an estate of salvation by a Redeemer.”

The sinfulness of sin comes up again much later in the Shorter Catechism, after all the questions on the Ten Commandments but before the section on the means of grace and the Lord’s prayer. Here questions 82-84 sober any Christians who might slip into believing the lie of perfectionism. Even those being sanctified by the Holy Spirit continue to need God’s grace their whole life: “No mere man, since the fall, is able in this life perfectly to keep the commandments of God, but doth daily break them in thought, word, and deed” (Q&A 82). Though some sins are more heinous than others, as one of the Puritans (Thomas Brooks) points out, “There is no little sin, because no little God to sin against.”

The good news is that sin has met its match in Christ. He “bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness -- by whose stripes you were healed” (1 Peter 2:24). He “was delivered up because of our offenses, and was raised because of our justification” (Romans 4:25). His resurrection signaled his vindication and our justification (Rom. 1:4); as 1 Cor. 15:17 confirms, “if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!” But Christ is risen—and that enabled the Apostle Paul to taunt the whole complex of sin and death: “‘O Death, where is your sting? O Hades, where is your victory?’ The sting of death is sin, and the strength of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Cor. 15:55-57).

Sin’s power and bondage has been broken, and one day soon it will be exhausted. Those who have rested on Christ will dwell forever with Him in heaven, with clean hands and pure hearts, unstained by sin. This is Christ’s accomplishment—with love He presents the church to himself as an unblemished beautiful bride (Eph. 5:25-27). If anyone is in Christ, new creation (2 Cor. 5:17)!

Praise Christ! As the old hymn puts it, “What can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus!” Or as one biblical scholar artfully noted of Zechariah 3’s prefiguring of Christ, “Strange detergent, staining blood. But such is the forensic chemistry of the justification of God’s chosen priesthood.” Strange detergent indeed—like the mystery of God’s grace to sinners like me and you. All we can do is “Love and Sing and Wonder” (Newton). “To Him who loved us and washed us from our sins in His own blood, and has made us kings and priests to His God and Father, to Him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (Rev. 1:5-6).

For more like this, see Glorifying and Enjoying God: 52 Devotions through the Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Andrew J. Miller