The goal of counseling can be articulated in many different ways. Commenting on Chapter 1 of the Confession, I said, “The goal of biblical counseling is to help your counselee address their problems biblically with an aim to please the Lord, and the only way to do that is to know him for who he is.” Biblical counseling zeroes in on the “problem” aspect, but at the end of the day our aim is the same as the rest of Christian discipleship: Knowing God and walking with him.
Knowing God is central to the Christian life. Not just knowing about God, but living communion with God. Chapter 2 (paragraph 3) puts it this way:
“[The] doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God, and comfortable dependence on Him.”1
In other words, from a counseling perspective, our problems are solved as we come to know and love the Lord, and the foundation for knowing and loving the Lord having a right understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity.
Wait… you’re saying that Trinitarian theology is the foundation for biblical counseling?
Yes. That’s exactly what I am saying.
Trinitarian Triage in the Counseling Room
A common issue we face in counseling is a professing Christian whose life looks no different from the world. He has usually been baptized and can roughly approximate the main gospel points when pressed. According to his PDI he reads the Bible occasionally, attends church occasionally, and has prayed about his problem. But as we get to know him, what we see is a person who is virtually indistinguishable from the world.
Biblical counselors have long recognized the need for triage, where we deal with organ damage from a gunshot wound before addressing the patient’s diet and exercise. But is the gunshot wound the depression or the porn or the marital conflict? Or is the gunshot wound a belief in a god of their own making?
It should not surprise us that a person whose life does not align with Scripture would have beliefs that do not align with Scripture.
As biblical counselors, we proceed in a pretty direct line from communicating the sufficiency of Scripture to addressing the heart. We establish the sufficiency of Scripture in the first sessions when we explain what biblical counseling is, then we use Scripture to help the counselee examine their heart.
But the Confession goes from Scripture to… Trinitarian theology. Chapter 1 articulates the authority and necessity of Scripture, and now here in Chapter 2 we dive into the nature and character of God. Could this be a better way to counsel?2 What does our counselee need most—what is the proper treatment for a gunshot wound?
After all, Trinitarian theology is what distinguishes Christianity from every man-made religion. According to the Confession, Trinitarian theology is the means by which we learn to commune with and depend upon God, while biblical counselors have always insisted that the Bible isn’t to be used for “life tips” but rather to meet the living God and know his will.
We can take instruction from the Confession and recognize that the foundation for what we are trying to accomplish rests on the doctrine of the Trinity. We won’t get far if we encourage our counselees to trust in a God of their own imagining.
Now: How do we do this without losing our counselees? Wisdom—or pragmatism?—says that we should get the counselee to buy in before diving into deeper waters. The buy-in happens once the counselee sees that this Bible stuff actually works… Or so the thinking goes.
Let’s take a look at Chapter 2 before we return to the question of method.
The Who, What, and Threeness of God
The three paragraphs of Chapter 2 each consist of one long sentence.
The first paragraph emphasizes God’s essence; who he is. As the only living and true God, he alone is self-existent, infinite, perfect, and incomprehensible, absolutely free and holy in all his acts of mercy and judgment. As the basic principle of counseling is to get our eyes off ourselves and onto the Lord, opening up his attributes is a wonderful way to introduce your counselee to the living God.
The second paragraph describes what God is like, particularly in relation to his creatures—us. As the all-sufficient source and fountain of all thing, God is uniquely glorious in his independence, power, and wisdom, and he deserves our worship and obedience. Understanding who God is and what he does helps us—and our counselees—recognize our proper place, which is in dependence upon him, and our proper duty, which is to worship, serve, and obey him.
The third describes God as triune; Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The one God is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each having the full divine essence, yet are distinct persons, without dividing the Godhead. Our relationship with God is founded upon the inter-Trinitarian relationship of the Father, Son, and Spirit.
Counseling from Chapter 2 of the LBC
In teaching the attributes of God, the Confession provides an orientation for reality that places your counselee in the path of knowing and fellowshipping with God. Sam Waldron pulls on the thread of communion in the chapter’s closing phrase and finds redemptive blessing:
“Second Corinthians 13:14, the great Trinitarian benediction of the New Testament, calls us to hold communion with each of the three persons of the Trinity in their distinct works in redemption. We are distinctly to enjoy communion with the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ as the accomplisher of redemption; the love of God the Father as the author of redemption; and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit as the applier of redemption.”3
Communion with the triune God results in blessing. “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all” (2 Corinthians 13:14). The Trinitarian blessing of redemption includes the wisdom, righteousness, and sanctification that your counselee needs for the problems they face (1 Corinthians 1:30).
The average counselee will walk into your office believing that he needs the “blessing” of having his troubles go away. His eyes are focused on himself, and he either lacks hope or holds on to a false hope that you can help fix his problems while he continues to hold on to his idols.
The radically God-focused truths of Chapter 2 tell another story:
- They reveal God in his goodness and glory
- They take the counselee’s eyes off himself and onto God and his truth
- They provide hope in the abundant blessings of God’s generosity, forgiveness, and wisdom
How to Counsel from the Confession
Now we can address the question of method. How do you get to the place where you can teach these truths to your counselee? My answer is simple: By whatever means necessary.
By this I mean: As your aims and theological framework and passion for knowing God are shaped and informed by the same biblical truths expressed in the Confession, your specific method may vary according to the need of each individual counselee. But at the end of the day your love for the Lord and your conviction of the sufficiency of Scripture will lead you to teach these things.
This might look like:
- Studying through the Confession with one counselee
- Regularly quoting the Confession to another
- For others, perhaps rarely or never referring to the Confession, but letting its outline guide the focus of your teaching:
- First session, Chapter 1 and the sufficiency of Scripture;
- Second session, Chapter 2 and God’s attributes;
- Third session, Chapter 3 (God’s will in allowing this trial in their lives) and Chapter 6 (the effects of sin);
- Fourth session, Chapter 8 and the redemptive work of Christ;
- Etc
- Studying the Confession in your private preparation
- Assigning portions of the Confession for homework, particularly having them study through the Scripture references
However you get there, the Confession is a wonderful guide to the most important truths in Scripture. After all, it is him—the God described in Chapter 2—that “we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom, that we may present everyone mature in Christ” (Colossians 1:28).
Chapter 2 Outline
- God is:
- The only God
- Separate from us and all creation in his essence: Infinite, self-existent, incomprehensible, dwelling in inapproachable light
- Separate from us and all creation in his character: Holy, perfect, wise, free, working all things according to his will
- The paradigm and source of every relationships: Loving, gracious, good, forgiving, rewarding, judging
- God has what I need:
- Life, glory, goodness, blessedness (and he is the fountain from which these things flow)
- He has no need (while my need is great)
- He has dominion and does what he pleases (while I am welcomed into his dominion to do as he pleases)
- He knows all things (while I understand little)
- He is independent (while I am completely dependent)
- He is worthy of worship (and I owe him my worship, service, and obedience)
- God is Trinitarian:
- Undivided in essence, yet distinct in person
- The Father who is neither begotten nor proceeds
- The Son who is eternally begotten of the Father
- The Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son
- Our relationship with God is founded upon these inter-Trinitarian relationships within the Godhead, and this “doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God”
Assignment: Summarize as You Study
There are few ways better to internalize biblical teaching than to externalize it through writing. The practice of reading, synthesizing, and summarizing doctrinal truth will force your counselee to understand in order to articulate.
To that end, I’ve created a template for study and discipleship, which provides brief instruction on how to study the confession and also provides space for the student write a short, one-sentence summary of each paragraph of the 1689 LBC.
Recommended Resources
Books
- Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves
- The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything by Fred Sanders
- The Attributes of God by A.W. Pink
- The Existence and Attributes of God by Stephen Charnock
- A New Exposition of the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689 edited by Rob Ventura
- A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith by Sam Waldron
Articles
- The Love of God Triune by Stephen Yuille (Article)
- The Comforts and Commands of Our Triune God When We’re Troubled by Robert Jones (Article)
- When Weakness Overwhelms Us by Joni Eareckson Tada (Article) This article is a great example of how the Trinity can inform our personal experiences—in this case, weakness and suffering—which is what counseling is all about.
End notes
- LBC 2.1. ↩︎
- I’m not the first to make this sort of observation by a long shot. My point is not that this isn’t said, but that it is easy to say and difficult to practice. See, e.g., “The Unity of the Trinity” by Kevin Carson and Jeff Forrey in Christ-Centered Biblical Counseling by Bob Kellemen and Steve Viars. More generally, see A Theology of Biblical Counseling by Heath Lambert, particularly chapters 1, 4, and 12; “The Godward Focus on Biblical Counseling” by Douglas Bookman in Counseling: How to Counsel Biblically by John MacArthur; and many other authors and speakers. ↩︎
- From A New Exposition of the London Baptist Confession of Faith of 1689, edited by Rob Ventura, 84-85. ↩︎
