Note: The afternoon sermon last Sunday at CRBC was a meditation on Question 23 in our Spurgeon Catechism Series on Jesus our Prophet. I closed with a summary of Thomas Watson's applicatory "usages" from this question:
After Thomas Watson addresses this catechism question in A Body of Divinity, his study of the
Westminster Shorter Catechism, he offers three practical usages or applications
on Christ as our Prophet:
1.
It is useful for information. That is tells us more about Christ, “who is
the great doctor of his church.”
2. It tells us that we are to labor to have Christ as our teacher.
“A man can no more by the power of nature reach Christ, than
an infant can reach the top of the pyramids, or the ostrich fly up to the
stars.”
“Knowledge is in Christ for us as milk in the breast for the
child. Oh then go to Christ for
teaching. None in the gospel came to
Christ for sight, but he restored their eyesight; and sure Christ is more
willing to work a cure upon a blind soul than ever he was to do so upon a blind
body.”
Christ can take the dullest man and make him “a good scholar’
so that “they know more than the great sages and wisemen of the world.”
Watson also points out that Christ does this through his
appointed means. “Ministers are earthen
vessels, but these pitchers have lamps within them to light souls to heaven.
Christ is said to speak to us from heaven now, by his ministers, as the king
speaks by his ambassador.”
3. It tells us to be thankful: “If you have been taught by Christ savingly,
be thankful.”
Watson draws on an ancient analogy. He says if Alexander the
Great expressed thanks that Aristotle had been his teacher, then, “how are we
obliged to Jesus Christ, this great Prophet, for opening to us the eternal
purposes of his love, and revealing to us the mysteries of the kingdom of
heaven!”
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