Doctrines of the Church

Excerpt from the book: Paradise, the Holy City, and the Glory of the Throne by Rev.
Elwood Scott.

1. There is but one living and true God.

His Attributes

2. The attributes of God are the qualities, elements and perfections which
belong to Him. They belong to Him and are parts of His divine nature — not
that His whole being consists of a combination of the same, but because they
are the forms and expressions of His being which He has revealed to man.

3. These attributes are natural and moral. The natural attributes reveal His
existence as an infinite and rational spirit; that is self-existence, freedom,
omnipotence, omnipresence, omniscience, wisdom. The moral attributes are
holiness, righteousness, justice, goodness, love, grace, mercy and truth.

4. As known to men on earth God is an invisible spirit, whom no man hath

seen nor can see. He is eternal and self- existent. He creates beings with
immortality, but God alone possesses eternity. He is infinite, filling all space in
the entire universe, embracing all worlds. He is omnipotent, i.e., infinite in
power; shown by all His creations from the infinitely great to the infinitely
small. All His acts are done by the exercise of His volition, and are seen by
man in the universality, variety and multitude of His works. God’s
omnipotence is limited only by His moral perfections. God cannot lie nor do
any bad act, although He has the power.

5. God is omnipresent. The creator, upholder, and governor of all things. He

is also omniscient, all things being open and naked before His eyes. God’s
wisdom is infinite, embracing all knowledge and is independent of all His
creatures. We can tell Him nothing which He does not know, but His
intelligent, infinite intuition comprehends all things past, present or future.
This intelligence is perfect and absolute. Man analyzes things to find out their
nature. God knows the nature without the analysis.

6. The foreknowledge of God is also absolute. How the foreknowledge of God

is to be reconciled with man’s free agency and moral accountability is indeed to
men in the world a dark problem, but in the Scriptures both are clearly taught,
and faith accepts what reason cannot reconcile. Some of the churches on earth
have denied man’s moral freedom. Others maintain that God in the exercise of
His omniscience, like His omnipotence, abstains from knowing what His
creatures will do under certain given circumstances, But the foreknowledge of
God itself, unrevealed to men, does not impose nor even hint to me any course
of conduct whatever; it in no degree affects His liberty of action. Man neither
sins nor follows holiness, as the result of God’s foreknowledge; so
notwithstanding God’s foreknowledge, He has made man in His image, a free
moral being.

7. God is infinitely wise, always knows what is best, always adopts means
which will best accomplish His purposes. That is wisdom; for wisdom is the
art of turning to best account our knowledge. Both in creation and providence
God’s wisdom is seen. His wisdom and His works everywhere confirm each
other as being of God. No higher wisdom has ever been seen or known than
God’s wisdom in the plan of human redemption. It solves the problem of
God’s justice in justifying the believer in Jesus Christ.

8. The perfect goodness of God is seen in the benevolence which embraces all
mankind and provides for their welfare. His merciful dealings with men
declare His goodness; it is also seen in His unmerited favor, drawing man to
salvation and in the use of so many means to this end, also in the abundant
provision which He has made for man’s present and eternal happiness.

Moral Evil

9. How sin can exist in the world with all its terrible consequences in
connection with God’s righteous government, is an awful and difficult problem,
the complete solution of which is not possible to man in his earthly life. But
sin does exist, and God permits it for reasons of His own, not fully revealed to
men. In heaven it could not be so. No taint of sin can ever enter the gates of
this city. If an angel should again sin God would instantly cast him down to
hell.

10. Righteousness and justice are divine perfections. It is holiness exhibited in

government. Truth or faithfulness of God is much the same as His
righteousness. All He says and does is true. His veracity is an element of His
character. God cannot lie. As God is eternal His truth remains the same.
Whatever is out of harmony with His revealed truth, the same is a lie. To the
question, "What is truth?" this answer which we repeat in heaven is true: "To
know God as He has revealed Himself to man is truth of the highest order." Our
Lord declared: "I am the way, the truth and the life." All things taught or
believed that are out of harmony with His clear revelations are both false and
misleading.
The Triune God

11. The eternal God has revealed Himself to men as Father, Son and Holy
Ghost. The Son of God is and always was divine. He is the express image of
the Father. There have been many errors and heresies in the church in past
ages. But we worship one Triune God neither confounding the persons, nor
dividing the substances of the same. For there is one person of the Father,
another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost; but the Godhead of the
Father, Son and Holy Ghost is one God.

The Divinity of Jesus Christ

12. He was the Word of God from eternity. In the beginning was the Word
and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. While on earth we
always held Him to be divine and worshipped Him as God; and in heaven He is
confessed by all, both saints and angels, to be God and equal to the Father. All
the hosts of heaven worship Him, He was God manifest in the flesh.

The Holy Spirit

13. The Holy Ghost is one with the Father and with the Son. Equal in eternity,
power and glory. In creation He moved upon the face of the waters and
developed form and beauty out of disorder and confusion. He proceeded from
the Father and from the Son, and took up His abode with His church on earth.
He has ever been with them since His coming on Pentecost. He is the
Comforter, Guide and Sanctifier of His people.

Man’s Original State and Fall

14. God made man upright. He was both material and spiritual and possessed
of a divine life, and made in the image of God. He could hold communion with
God, with all that is divine, as well as with the material universe. He was made
but a little lower than the angels, and was crowned with glory and honor and
had dominion over the works of God’s hands in the earth. He was a companion
of his Father and Creator, capable of admiring, adoring and enjoying God.
While he was material and possessed an animal nature, as he came from the
hands of God, yet he was an intellectual, moral, pure and holy being. He was
placed under law with life and death before him. Adam rebelled; sin was born
on earth. The glory of the Lord departed from him. Man fell, and felt his guilt
and was alienated from God. The stream of humanity was contaminated at its
source. The first pair became sinful. Their descendants of necessity were in
their image fallen and depraved. So by one man sin entered into the world and
death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, for that all have sinned. Our
nature sinned in Adam and the stream became polluted at the fountain head.
This depravity became universal for all the faculties and powers of the soul and
body were brought under the power of evil.

The Atonement

15. We universally believe that the death of Christ was vicarious and
propitiatory and that by it divine justice is satisfied, and God can be just and the
justifier of all who believe in Christ Jesus, and that pardon and salvation is
freely offered to all men, upon repentance and faith.

Election and Foreordination

16. We believe God did foreordain and devise a plan from the foundation of
the world by which He would save man, and further, He did foreordain from
the beginning, all men throughout the ages who would accept and be willing to
conform to this plan, should be saved; so that everyone in harmony with His
power and liberty of choice who shall choose eternal life though God’s plan
was foreordained to eternal salvation.

Repentance

17. True repentance is a condition of soul before God wrought by the

operations of the Spirit of God upon the heart and soul of man whereby he is
made to see and feel the sinfulness of his sins, and also to forsake them utterly
and with full purpose of heart to yield obedience to God in the future.

Justification

18. Justification can only follow true repentance and is an act of God’s free
grace wherein He pardoneth the sins of man, and accepteth him as righteous in
His sight, only for the sake of Christ.

Faith

19. True unfeigned faith in God believes all that God has said, commanded,
promised or threatened. It is dependent upon testimony, and is valuable to us
as the truth itself. We can believe in men. We are responsible for our faith, for
one may believe a lie as he does the truth. The truth only can make him free.
True saving faith leads the soul to trust itself to the all- atoning merits of the
sacrificial death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Adoption

20. Adoption is an act of God whereby the believing sinner is received into the
family of God, with all the rights and privileges of His children in which he
becomes an heir of God with a right and title to eternal life.

The New Birth

21. The new birth of which our Lord spoke is that mighty change wrought of
God in the soul of man when He imparts to him eternal life and renews him in
the image of God. This change is the work of the Holy Spirit wrought in man,
convincing him of sin, and leading him to repentance and faith whereby he is
born from above with eternal life as a gift from God.