God Speaks T
By Rev. Aaron T. Fenker
he Lord speaks, and we receive His Word. It’s His Gift to us. We confess, (homologoumen, in the Greek, which means “say the same thing”) that Word. We say what He says to us. He speaks, we listen, we speak that Word as He gave it. That’s the way of faith. Faith defends our Lord’s Word, employing other words at times. “I and the Father are One,” (John 10:30) and “I will send from the Father the Helper, the Spirit of the Truth, who proceeds from the Father, whom the Father will send in My Name,” (John 14:26, 15:26) are all ways to confess “the Trinity in Unity and Unity in Trinity” (Athanasian Creed).
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As the Words are, so also are the Gifts: “Baptize in the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” (Matthew 28:19). There, not just Trinity as a concept, as a doctrinal checkbox, but Trinity delivered for you and to you, and you to the Trinity, too, for your help and salvation in His Name (Psalm 124:8). There is unity in His Name, so also in His Word and His Gifts. “One body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one Baptism, one God and Father of all” (Ephesians 4:4–6). It’s not a unity of our own confessing. What good would that do? It’s a “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:6). The opposite of confessing is denying. To deny is to hear what Jesus says but to inject our own fleshly understanding into what our Lord says and gives (Matthew 16:21–23). The way of denying is to talk as if our Lord or His Spirit-filled messengers (apostles) meant something other than what was clearly said (John 20:23; 1 Peter 3:21). Or worse, it’s to discount His Word based on the limits of our categories and thinking (The Words of Institution, John 1:1). Or worst of all, it’s to go all the way to denying that Jesus said it altogether, following the way of various “quests” for the “historical” Jesus. There’s only disunity there, a lack of the Spirit. That’s the way of doubt and unbelief. There’s also the disunity of seeking a unity in our own confessing, because in that sort of unity not only what we say matters but also the exact way we say it. Words do matter. How they are said affects what they mean, but even as we are unified in our confessing, Old Adam rears his head, his thinking: my words are always better than your words. This is the war of words that Paul warns us about (2 Timothy 2:14). So also John said to Jesus, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us” (Mark 9:38). “Whoever is not against us is for us,” Jesus replies. Fighting over words is precarious
