“When people come to me with questions about what the Bible teaches they almost always ask about a subject, and I defer to referencing its superb handling in the Westminster Standards. The response is always a smile that seems to say, ‘Eureka!’ How blessed we are with such a resource that answers the common questions about what the Bible mainly teaches.”

If all your paperwork rolled like a sea over your desk, you’d struggle to navigate and prepare your tax returns.  If you blanketed your computer’s desktop with all your digital files, you’d smother the writing of a departmental report.  So is any unorganized library a maze of confusion.

This is why our cabinets, computers, and shelves have filing systems.  And this is why we need systematic theology.

As an amateur photographer, I’ve learned that I need to group my digital picture files by subject and date so that later I don’t have to go scrolling for the big catch that essentially got away from me for lack of hard drive organization.  As well, online tutorials often advise reading the camera’s user manual.  True, the company designed and built the camera into a flow of working parts, yet it has grouped them by category in the manual to help the photographer make it work best.  While we wander down many paths of inquiry we capture and store our discoveries in topical cards of memory along the way; and when it comes time to share we generally access one card at a time.

Our daughters collect shells and rocks while strolling the seashore and they organize and display them by similar types.  This is the way God has wired us to reflect His way of thinking, Who is a God of order (1 Corinthians 14:33, 40).

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, the sea and all that in them is, in broad and specific categories during six literal and topical days of division.  He made organisms according to their kinds.  So Jesus ends the Bible with a retelling of The Revelation in seven related groups of sevens.

To assist us in reasoning and speaking theology we organize it.  We group the main emphases of God’s Word into patterned thoughts and references.  To make the most of the Scriptures for day-to-day use we systematize.  We index by topic.  We place the shells of justification in one bucket and lay the rocks of sanctification in another.  We remember where we found each along the way and talk about them together on the whole within our Father’s World.

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