A Catechism for Girls and Boys

Part II: Questions about The Ten Commandments

44. Q. What is the second commandment?
     A. The second commandment is, Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: thou shalt not bow down thyself to them: for I, the Lord thy God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; and showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments.

(Click through to read scriptural proof.)

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Sundays Hymn: All People That On Earth Do Dwell

All people that on earth do dwell,
Sing to the Lord with cheerful voice.
Him serve with fear, His praise forth tell;
Come ye before Him and rejoice.

The Lord, ye know, is God indeed;
Without our aid He did us make;
We are His folk, He doth us feed,
And for His sheep He doth us take.

O enter then His gates with praise;
Approach with joy His courts unto;
Praise, laud, and bless His name always,
For it is seemly so to do.

For why? the Lord our God is good;
His mercy is for ever sure;
His truth at all times firmly stood,
And shall from age to age endure.

To Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
The God whom Heaven and earth adore,
From men and from the angel host
Be praise and glory evermore.

—Wil­liam Kethe

Every other YouTube video of this song is one man and two women singing this arrangement, so I’m not fighting it, but I will go with the originals.

Other hymns, worship songs, sermons etc. posted today:

• Update: How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sound at Rosemary at Home
• Loyalty to Christ at Conjubilant with Song
• We Praise Thee, O God at Fieldstone Cottage
• Dearest Savior, We Adore Thee at Tried With Fire
• Lord’s Day 34, 2011 at The Thirsty Theologian
• Voices From the Past - August 21, 2011 at The Upward Call
• Your weekly dose of Spurgeon at Pyromaniacs: “Thy Word”—not the voice in my head—“is truth”

Have you posted a hymn (or sermon, sermon notes, prayer, etc.) today and I missed it? Let me know by leaving a link in the comments or by contacting me using the contact form linked above, and I’ll add your post to the list.

The Cross of Christ: The Centrality of the Cross

Today was the first day of the most recent Reading Classics Together at Challies.com. This time around, we’re reading John Stott’s The Cross of Christ, and the assigned reading was the first chapter, The Centrality of the Cross. 

So far, this is one of the most orderly and easy to follow books I’ve read in a long time. Stott writes methodically, and I like that. He starts this first chapter with a section on the cross as Christianity’s symbol. The use of this symbol is early, from the second century at least, and persists to the present day, despite the fact that the cross was widely considered to be “the most humiliating form of execution.” That the cross

became the Christian symbol, and that Christians stubbornly refused, in spite of the ridicule, to discard it in favor of something less offensive can have only one explanation. It means that the centrality of the cross originated in the mind of Jesus himself.

Stott goes on to show that this is exactly what we find in scripture. Jesus knew and taught that dying was his central mission. Jesus knew he was going to die for these three reasons:

1. Because of the hostility of the Jewish leaders. Jesus knew that they would eventually succeed in killing him.
2. Because that’s what scripture said would take place. Jesus understood from scripture that “vocation of the Messiah was to suffer and die…”
3. Because of his own choice. He was resolved to do the work given him by the Father.

So then, although he knew he must die, it was not because he was the helpless victim either of evil forces arrayed against him or of any inflexible fate decreed for him, but because he freely embraced the purpose of his Father for the salvation of sinners, as it had been revealed in Scripture.

Next Stott surveys the teaching on the cross in the New Testament, starting with early sermons of the apostles recorded for us in Acts and on through the epistles of Paul, Peter, and John, to show us that the cross of Christ was also central to the apostles the teaching on the cross in the New Testament. Paul, for example, puts the cross of Christ as a matter “of first importance.” It’s in 1 Peter that we find the words, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” In Revelation, John tells us “nothing less than that from an eternity of the past to an eternity of the future the center of the stage is occupied by the Lamb of God who was slain.”

It’s doubly fitting, then, that the cross should be our symbol and sign, for it was central to both Christ and his apostles. It’s our tradition, yes, but it’s a tradition that is faithful to the priorities disclosed in scripture. 

To Christians, the cross of Christ is a glorious thing, but this is not a view shared by everyone. Writes Stott: 

There is no greater cleavage between faith and unbelief than in their respective attitudes to the cross. Where faith sees glory, unbelief sees only disgrace.

The world in general finds the true Christian teaching of Christ and his cross ridiculous, but believers are compelled, still, to insist on it’s centrality to our faith. “Christian integrity consists … in personal loyalty to Jesus, in whose mind the saving cross was central.”