Boyce Catechism - Bible 7

CATECHISM of James P. Boyce - THE BIBLE 7
Does it teach us every thing about God?
It does not; no language could teach us the full glory of God, nor could we ever comprehend it.

There are times when I attempt to explain things to my three year old and get cracked up. The effort I go to at times to communicate is hysterical. There is a change in the pitch of my voice. I use over the top facial expressions. It looks like I am signalling a base runner with my hands. And I nod a lot as though to say, "you understand this, right?"

The fact is my boy is three and he has little regard for what I am trying to teach him right now. I hope when he gets older I don't hold out information from him out of spite for these early years when he blows off some big time good information... how to brush your teeth, how to make mommy happy, how to put your underwear on right. I mean serious stuff.

God in His grace has chosen to communicate with us. He is infinite. We are finite. He is creator. We are creature. God made is good, but we turned bad and have a shortage of brain usage and an attitude to boot. And yet, God has still come to us and cared for us. There is a great deal that we can know of God, but it is truly limited. The fact is this, God has shared more than we can understand. So much of what He has told us is still a mystery. The part we do get is because God has mercifully chosen to speak to us in infantile ways.

John Calvin says, "For who is so devoid of intellect as not to understand that God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children? Such modes of expression, therefore, do not so much express what kind of a being God is, as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness. In doing so, he must, of course, stoop far below his proper height." -Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.13.1

No, we don't understand a fraction of the greatness of God, but thankfully we understand enough to worship Him and receive His grace through faith. The Lord has chosen to get down on our level so we can get something of how great He is. We don't fully get it, but what we get when we get it is overwhelming.


James Petigru Boyce (1827–1888) was a Baptist theologian, pastor, and seminary professor. Boyce was educated at Brown University under Francis Wayland, whose evangelical sermons contributed to Boyce’s conversion, and at Princeton Theological Seminary under Charles Hodge. Boyce became a pastor, then a university professor, and finally the founder and first president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, where he taught theology from 1859 until his death in 1888. Throughout his ministry Boyce insisted on the importance of theological education for all ministers. In a preface, he described his Abstract of Systematic Theology, published the year before his death, as follows: "This volume is published the rather as a practical text book, for the study of the system of doctrine taught in the Word of God, than as a contribution to theological science."