His Attributes
2. The attributes of God are the qualities, elements
and perfections which belong to Him. They belong to Him and are parts of
His divine nature — not that His whole being consists of a combination of the
same, but because they are the forms and expressions of His being which He has
revealed to man.
3. These attributes are natural and moral. The
natural attributes reveal His existence as an infinite and rational spirit; that
is self-existence, freedom, omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, wisdom.
The moral attributes are holiness, righteousness, justice, goodness, love,
grace, mercy and truth.
4. As known to men on earth God is an invisible spirit,
whom no man hath seen nor can see. He is eternal and self- existent.
He creates beings with immortality, but God alone possesses eternity. He
is infinite, filling all space in the entire universe, embracing all worlds.
He is omnipresent, i.e., infinite in power; shown by all His creations from the
infinitely great to the infinitely small. All His acts are done by the
exercise of His volition, and are seen by man in the universality, variety and
multitude of His works. God’s omnipotence is limited only by His moral
perfections. God cannot lie nor do any bad act, although He has the power.
5. God is omnipresent. The creator, upholder, and
governor of all things. He is also omniscient, all things being open and
naked before His eyes. God’s wisdom is infinite, embracing all knowledge
and is independent of all His creatures. We can tell Him nothing which He
does not know, but His intelligent, infinite intuition comprehends all things
past, present or future. This intelligence is perfect and absolute.
Man analyzes things to find out their nature. God knows the nature without
the analysis.
6. The foreknowledge of God is also absolute. How
the foreknowledge of God is to be reconciled with man’s free agency and moral accountability is indeed to men in the world
a dark problem, but in the Scriptures both are clearly taught, and faith accepts
what reason cannot reconcile. Some of the churches on earth have denied
man’s moral freedom. Others maintain that God in the exercise of His
omniscience, like His omnipotence, abstains from knowing what His creatures will
do under certain given circumstances, But the foreknowledge of God itself,
unrevealed to men, does not impose nor even hint to me any course of conduct
whatever; it in no degree affects His liberty of action. Man neither sins
nor follows holiness, as the result of God’s foreknowledge; so notwithstanding
God’s foreknowledge, He has made man in His image, a free moral being.
7. God is infinitely wise, always knows what is best,
always adopts means which will best accomplish His purposes. That is
wisdom; for wisdom is the art of turning to best account our knowledge.
Both in creation and providence God’s wisdom is seen. His wisdom and His
works everywhere confirm each other as being of God. No higher wisdom has
ever been seen or known than God’s wisdom in the plan of human redemption.
It solves the problem of God’s justice in justifying the believer in Jesus
Christ.
8. The perfect goodness of God is seen in the
benevolence which embraces all mankind and provides for their welfare.
His merciful dealings with men declare His goodness; it is also
seen in His unmerited favor, drawing man to salvation and in the
use of so many means to this end, also in the abundant provision which
He has
made for man’s present and eternal happiness.
Moral Evil
9. How sin can exist in the world with all its terrible
consequences in connection with God’s righteous government, is an awful and
difficult problem, the complete solution of which is not possible to man in his
earthly life. But sin does exist, and God permits it for reasons of His
own, not fully revealed to men. In heaven it could not be so. No
taint of sin can ever enter the gates of this city. If an angel should
again sin God would instantly cast him down to hell.
10. Righteousness and justice are divine perfections.
It is holiness exhibited in government. Truth or faithfulness of God is much the same as His righteousness. All He says and
does is true. His veracity is an element of His character. God
cannot lie. As God is eternal His truth remains the same. Whatever
is out of harmony with His revealed truth, the same is a lie. To the
question, "What is truth?" this answer which we repeat in heaven is true: "To
know God as He has revealed Himself to man is truth of the highest order." Our
Lord declared: "I am the way, the truth and the life." All things taught or
believed that are out of harmony with His clear revelations are both false and
misleading.
The Triune God
11. The eternal God has revealed Himself to men as
Father, Son and Holy Ghost. The Son of God is and always was divine.
He is the express image of the Father. There have been many errors and
heresies in the church in past ages. But we worship one Triune God neither
confounding the persons, nor dividing the substances of the same. For
there is one person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy
Ghost; but the Godhead of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost is one God.
The Divinity of Jesus Christ
12. He was the word of God from eternity. In the
beginning was the word and the word was with God, and the word was God.
While on earth we always held Him to be divine and worshipped Him as God; and in
heaven He is confessed by all, both saints and angels, to be God and equal to
the Father. All the hosts of heaven worship Him, He was God manifest in
the flesh.
The Holy Spirit
13. The Holy Ghost is one with the Father and with the
Son. Equal in eternity, power and glory. In creation He moved upon
the face of the waters and developed form and beauty out of disorder and
confusion. He proceeded from the Father and from the Son, and took up His
abode with His church on earth. He has ever been with them since His
coming on Pentecost. He is the comforter, guide and sanctifier of His people.
Man’s Original State and Fall
14. God made man upright. He was both material
and spiritual and possessed of a divine life, and made in the image of
God.
He could hold communion with God, with all that is divine, as well as
with the material universe. He was
made but a little lower than the angels, and was crowned with glory
and honor and had dominion over the works of God’s hands in the earth.
He was a companion of his Father and Creator,
capable admiring, adoring and enjoying God. While he was
material and possessed an animal nature, as he came from the hands of
God, yet he was an intellectual, moral, pure and holy being.
He was placed under law with life and death before him. Adam rebelled;
sin
was born on earth. The glory of the Lord departed from him. Man fell,
and felt his guilt and was
alienated from God. The stream of humanity was contaminated at its
source.
The first pair became sinful. Their descendants of necessity were in
their
image fallen and depraved. So by one man sin entered into the world and
death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have
sinned.
Our nature sinned in Adam and the stream became polluted at the fountain
head.
This depravity became universal for all the faculties and powers of the
soul and
body were brought under the power of evil.
The Atonement
15. We universally believe that the death of Christ was
vicarious and propitiatory and that by it divine justice is satisfied, and God can be just and the justifier of all who
believe in Christ Jesus, and that pardon and salvation is freely offered to all
men, upon repentance and faith.
Election and Foreordination
16. We believe God did foreordain and devise a plan
from the foundation of the world by which He would save man, and further, He did
foreordain from the beginning, all men throughout the ages who would accept and
be willing to conform to this plan, should be saved; so that everyone in harmony
with His power and liberty of choice who shall choose eternal life though God’s plan was foreordained to eternal salvation.
Repentance
17. True repentance is a condition of soul before God
wrought by the operations of the Spirit of God upon the heart and soul of man
whereby he is made to see and feel the sinfulness of his sins, and also to
forsake them utterly and with full purpose of heart to yield obedience to God in
the future.
Justification
18. Justification can only follow true repentance and
is an act of God’s free grace wherein He pardoneth the sins of man, and
accepteth him as righteous in His sight, only for the sake of Christ.
Faith
19. True unfeigned faith in God believes all that God
has said, commanded, promised or threatened. It is dependent upon
testimony, and is valuable to us as the truth itself. We can believe in
men. We are responsible for our faith, for one may believe a lie as he
does the truth. The truth only can make him free. True saving faith
leads the soul to trust itself to the all- atoning merits of the sacrificial
death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Adoption
20. Adoption is an act of God whereby the believing
sinner is received into the family of God, with all the rights and privileges of
His children in which he becomes an heir of God with a right and title to
eternal life.
The New Birth
1. The new birth of which our Lord spoke is that
mighty change wrought of God in the soul of man when He imparts to him eternal life and renews him in the image of God.
This change is the work of the Holy Spirit wrought in man, convincing him of sin, and leading him to repentance and
faith whereby he is born from above with eternal life as a gift
from God.
Go chap 28, The Elders' Creed
