The Church – Protestant and Reformed
The Presbyterian Church is often described by the terms Protestant and Reformed. But what are we to understand by that, and in what sense is it true of us today?
The ultimate realisation of life is to live to the glory of God
There were 5 solas which summed up the biblical theology recovered and proclaimed in the Reformation:
- Sola Scriptura: The Bible is the sole written divine revelation and alone can bind the conscience of the believer absolutely.
- Sola Fide: Justification is by faith alone. The merit of Christ, imputed to us by faith, is the sole ground of our acceptance by God, by which our sins are remitted, and imputed to Christ.
- Solus Christus: Christ is the only mediator through whose work we are redeemed.
- Sola Gratia: Our salvation rests solely on the work of God’s grace for us.
- Soli Deo Gloria: To God alone belongs the glory.
Each Sola is important, but as R C Sproul rightly observes, the first four really exist to preserve the last one, namely, the glory of God.
By sola Scriptura, we declare the glory of God’s authority by noting that only His inspired Word can command us absolutely. Sola fide, solus Christus, and sola gratia all exalt God’s glory in salvation. God and God alone—through His Son, Jesus Christ—saves His people from sin and death.
I’ve said more than once that if our god is not sovereign, our god is not God. But I must go further. If we don’t acknowledge the sovereignty of God, if we don’t acknowledge the justice of God, if we don’t acknowledge the omniscience of God, the immutability of God, then whatever god it is we are acknowledging, it is not God. We’re not glorifying God as God, we’re glorifying something less than God as if it were God, and to glorify something other than God or something less than God as if it were God is the very essence of idolatry.
Every day we hear one of the great pernicious lies about God, namely, that we all worship the same god. We all worship the same thing. To that I reply, “No, we don’t.”
The whole goal of our salvation is to bring us to a place where we worship God and we honour Him as God. In all that we do, the driving passion of the Christian must always be Soli Deo Gloria, to God alone be the glory. And the only way for this passion to be realized is to honour God as God, to understand Him as He has revealed Himself in His Word and not according to the mere opinions of fallen creatures.