If you were to paint a picture of John Calvin in your mind and he was holding a book in his lap what would that book be? If you have learned about Calvin through a public system of education it may be a book many are sure he wrote, but none can find “Predestination; Crushing Man’s Freedom”. If you have been taught some church history by the media or read an encyclopedic entry on Calvin it may be a book many are sure he wrote but none can find, “The Church’s Guide to the Burning of Heretics”. Or if you are reformed you may picture him with his “I Am a Calvinist and Your Not” t-shirt on holding the “Institutes of the Christian Religion” in his lap which he did write and many can find. My examples may be narrow but so are many of our views of the humble 16th century French pastor – theologian.
Though his reading was extensive, I would picture John Calvin holding a Bible in his lap. Everything that John Calvin wrote that we have in our hands today to read bleeds the Bible as his primary source. He said, “We owe to the Scripture the same reverence which we owe to God, because it proceeded from Him alone, and has nothing of man mixed with it.” He believed that the great proof of the Scripture lay in the fact that God Himself speaks in it. Therefore Calvin would teach us to know and enjoy God we must seek Him where He has revealed Himself primarily in His Word.
He began his studies of the Scriptures while a student in France. His father first employed him as a student of the church but soon his father insisted he study law. But it was during this time that the teachings of the reformers began to reach France and God called Calvin to himself. He said of this time in his life, “My father had intended me for theology from my early childhood…then, changing his mind, he sent me to learning law…until God at last turned my course in another direction by the secret rein of his providence. By a sudden conversion he tamed to teachableness a mind too stubborn for its years, for I was so strongly devoted to the superstitions of the papacy that nothing less could draw me from such depths of mire.” God had brought about his conversion while still in France but because of persecution he fled France for Switzerland. Upon his coming to Basel in 1534 he assisted Peter Robert in his French translation of the Scriptures, studied Hebrew and finished his first edition of the Institutes or the Instruction in the Christian Religion. This work was written to instruct the persecuted French church and also as a defense of the protestant Christians before the King of France. He then sought to go to Strasbourg as a place of peace where he could study and write, but by God’s providence he was routed southward on his journey and passed through Geneva. There in Geneva he was confronted by William Farel, whom Calvin said was “a Frenchman who burned with an extraordinary zeal to advance the gospel”. He pressed Calvin to stay in Geneva and even insisted that if Calvin went on to Strasbourg for peace and study that “God would curse [his] retirement and the peace of study that [he] sought.” At the age of 27 Calvin began his ministry in Geneva as a professor, preacher and theologian. After only a year and a half in Geneva Calvin and Farel were run out of town by the city fathers and they fled to Strasbourg. There Calvin became a pastor to French refugees and a teacher of New Testament for three years. It was during this time he met his wife Idellete. They later had three children all whom died shortly after birth. Idellete became ill after the birth of her children and died in 1549, Calvin never remarried. Calvin returned to Geneva in September of 1541 and remained there serving until his death in 1564.
John Calvin devoted his life to the study, teaching and preaching of God’s Word. His Institutes have over 7,000 references to Scripture. He wrote a commentary on most every book of the Old and New Testaments. He was writing a commentary on Ezekiel when he died. He preached expositional sermons from the Scriptures ten times every two weeks. He was exiled from Geneva on Easter Sunday, 1538 after preaching at St. Peter’s, he returned in September 1541 and began preaching on the very next verse he had left off at three years before. He studied and taught Hebrew and Greek and taught many others who became pastors preaching the Word of God. Why was John Calvin so devoted to the spread of God’s Word?
He was devoted to God’s Word because God is devoted to the spread of the glory of His name in the earth through His Spirit and by His Word. He lived in a time where God’s glory in Christ had slipped from the center of the churches teaching and he knew the only way to recover was in the reclamation of the Word of God. The glory of God in Christ was being extinguished by false doctrines and the Word of God preached and taught would reform doctrine and lead men to perceive the glory of God in Christ. He said, “Thy Word, which ought to have shone on all thy people like a lamp, was taken away, or at least suppressed as to us.” Today man is at the center of the church and the glory of God in Christ is supplanted by man’s desire to make a god of his own liking and experienc. But God is not interested in man being titillated by His existence, He is interested in man being overcome by His majesty. God is not interested in being an addendum to man’s life, He is interested in His glory in Christ being savored at the center and spreading out through all of man’s life. God is not interested in being man’s lover who satisfies him for a breathless moment, He is interested in being his covenantal Head who is praised, thanked, trusted and obeyed. Let us return and do all according to God’s Word. Semper Reformanda…Always Reforming let us be.
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