The God of All Comfort {Lord’s Day 1} by William Boekestein for Core Christianity
Q. 1. What is your only comfort in life and in death?
A. That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has delivered me from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, also assures me of eternal life
and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.Q. 2. How many things must you know to live and die in the joy of this comfort?
A. Three: first, how great my sin and misery are; second, how I am delivered from all my sins and misery; third, how I am to thank God for such deliverance.
“What is your only comfort in life and in death?” That’s a question everyone asks, even if they use different words. We all believe in something we think will make the world okay, something about which we say, “Take away everything from me, but not this.” That thing is what the Catechism calls “comfort.”
The Only Comfort
The Heidelberg has been called, “The Book of Comfort.” “Comfort” appears in the lead question to establish “the design and substance of the catechism.”[i] The way the catechism uses “comfort” is not to be confused with synonyms like “coziness” or “convenience.” The word assumes pain, trouble, doubt, fear, weakness, sadness, and a host of other dark words. True comfort results from opposing evil with a good truth that “mitigates our grief” and equips us to “patiently endure the evil.”[ii]
Sin brought physical and spiritual death—complete misery—to God’s good world. Sinners are enslaved to the devil (2 Tim. 2:26), and dreadfully alone, suffering without reason to believe their pain fits into any grand, positive scheme. But from the very beginning God “comforted [Adam and his wife Eve], promising to give him his Son, ‘born of a woman,’ to crush the head of the serpent, and to make him blessed.”[iii] At the end, in Revelation; evil is trapped outside the holy city in which God’s children will “see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads” (Rev. 22:4).
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The comfort we need is found only in union with Christ. “For as we share abundantly in Christ’s sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too” (2 Cor. 1:5). Believers belong to Christ—body and soul, in life and in death. We are his beloved bride bought with his precious blood (Eph. 5:25) who become with him one flesh (31–32).
