Catechetical instruction should be covenantal. By covenantal I mean:

• God has placed the children we teach in the Covenant of Grace, a very special relationship.

• God requires us to teach them His covenant Word, the Bible.

• God demands that His covenant children make a response of faith as confession in answer to this Bible teaching.

Covenant Children⤒🔗

In teaching then, we must view the chil­dren and talk to them in the same way God does. He makes clear that He views children of the covenant as those to whom He brings His redemptive word and work. God's salvation through the flood and in the Exodus clearly shows He embraces children. When He reached into the world in His only begotten Son, God did not shorten His arms, for Jesus took little children into His arms, and John says, "...little chil­dren ... your sins are forgiven you for His name's sake" (1 John 2:12).

Let us not be fearful of echoing our heavenly Father because of a misunder­standing or misapplication of the doc­trines of regeneration and election. Be content to be His disciples, wary of being wiser than God, comfortable in telling His children about the glory of their Father in heaven.

What do we teach? We must teach the Bible and the confessions; the Bible, because it is God speaking to His people; the confessions, because they are the church speaking to God, answering His Word.

Teach The Word ‑What God Says To Them←⤒🔗

To teach the Bible is to give children their inheritance. They inherit God Himself for this is His Word, "I am your God, and the God of your chil­dren." In all of Bible teaching we must never forget that we are cate­chising in the Word, in the Truth. This must always be very personal, for we are not aiming to produce a little tribe of precocious Pharisees who trot out a long list of Biblical facts and who lay out the five points of Calvinism with theological nice­ness and yet never know their Savior. Rather, the Word and Truth confront them with the persons of their God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Word IS Jesus Christ.

Knowing Their God←⤒🔗

Bible study begins with the Old Testament, the divine record of at least 4,000 years of the covenantal words and works of our God. Must our children know these historical facts? Certainly, for these works of God reveal His char­acter, His faithfulness to His Word, His judgment and His redemption.

Little children begin learning and form personal attachments, not by learning abstract doctrinal statements, but by liv­ing and walking with their God through the pages of sacred history. Then, when you come to teach them doctrine in older years, you won't need so much to proof-text, for example, the doctrine of election, because they will have seen God coming in grace — to Adam in hid­ing, to Abraham, to Israel in Egypt. The doctrine of total depravity and man's complete inability to save himself are plainly illustrated by Old Testament his­tory. God saved Israel from Egypt with­out their cooperation, yes, even in spite of their resistance.

They won't have to proof-text infant baptism from the New Testament because they will recognize that God works that way; He delivered Noah and his family, and saved the whole covenant family of Israel from Egypt, baptizing every one of them in the Red Sea. I cannot emphasize enough how important it is for covenant youth to know their God, to know His mind, what He says, what He does, and how He does it. The right way to do this is through a mastery of the Old Testament.

Thoroughly and rightly understood then, the Old Testament will lead them to the New Testament, give them an understanding of the Christ, and open up to them the teaching of the apostles.

Where does the Teacher Stand?←⤒🔗

How do we teach the Scriptures? (This is not a question of methodology. We will deal with that in a later installment.) What is our framework? What is our approach to Scripture? For obviously our teaching of the Bible will be differ­ent than the Roman Catholics or the Mormons.

We don't pretend to teach from a neu­tral position — for there is none. First of all, the teacher is a child of God by faith in Jesus Christ through the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit; or he is an unbeliever and should not teach. So the teacher believes what he teaches.

Secondly, we teach the Bible from the framework — perspective — of the church's confessions. In other words, we teach it from a particular doctrinal view­point. That's nothing to be embarrassed about, for everyone teaches from a par­ticular doctrinal position; it's just that some will not admit it.

Doctrine is the map that guides the teacher through the Biblical terrain. Without a doctrinal guide we are like the Ethiopian eunuch. We may be impressed with the scenery but we will often find we don't know where we are or where we are going.

Learning to Answer←⤒🔗

From the years of teaching them what God says, we now teach them how to answer God. Now we teach them the confessions of the church that they may know how to answer the God who has spoken, and speaks to them.

However, when the transition is made from teaching Scripture to teaching the Confessions, some important points need to be made.

• The catechumens are moving from God's Word to man's word.

• Yet, they must know that God's Word demands an answer and it is that answer we will be studying.

• Their answer must be in union with (agreeable to) God's Word; in union with the historic Christian church; and in union with the church where God has placed them.

• They must know that although you will teach them the confes­sions of the historic church and their own church, desiring that they make this confession their own, they must still personally give account to God for their confes­sion. We do not believe our con­fessions because the church teach­es them but because God's Word teaches those truths.

I sometimes tell my catechumens that if I were a Mormon, and they accepted my teaching and then pre­sented it to God as their answer to His Word, He would grade it with an "F", and that would mean hell.

"So, my dear students," I say, "although I will teach you the Heidelberg with the greatest confi­dence that it faithfully reflects God's Word, you must personally know that it does; not because I say so, or because the church says so, or because the Reformation said so, but because God says so. You must know your Bible. If you do not you cannot confess with honesty."

Wrapping It Up←⤒🔗

The content of the church's catechism program then should consist of two parts; first imparting to our children the knowledge of the Scriptures; and sec­ond, leading them to become familiar with the confessional answer of the church past and present.

Under the promised blessing of God then, we look forward to seeing them arise in the congregation and take their stand, confessing their faith in the Word of their God in unity with the saints who have gone on before, and united to the saints who yet are pilgrims waging the good fight of faith.