Meet Yudha Thianto

At the center of the Reformed faith is the strong belief in the sovereignty of God. God the Trinity holds the most supreme authority over all creation. He is the creator, preserver, sustainer, redeemer, provider, and keeper of all. One of the highlights of Reformed theology is the doctrine of election and predestination.

In Reformed theology, the sovereignty of God is directly linked to redemption. Our salvation is sure and secure, because God is sovereign. It does not depend on what we can do to please God, but fully and wholly lies in God who knows us and has chosen us to be his, before the foundation of the world. A good understanding of God’s sovereignty leads us to have the only comfort that we all need, namely, as the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism says, that we belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful savior Jesus Christ. As the Catechism also says, Jesus Christ, who is God incarnate, not only delivers us from sin through his death and resurrection, he also knows us so intimately that nothing that happens in our lives, including a strand of hair falling from our head, escapes the knowledge of our sovereign God and Father.

Another way of understanding what being Reformed means is by looking at our lives and our relationship with God within the contours  of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation. In his sovereignty God has created the entire universe in all its goodness. In Adam we all fell into sin. Jesus has completed the work of redemption and he leads us in the journey that brings us to the new creation. Read together with the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, this worldview shows us that the sovereign God who creates us and redeems us has placed us in the world today to experience the fullness of his work in us as we seek to advance his kingdom here on earth, at the same time that we look forward to the new heaven and new earth where he will make everything new.

The sovereign God goes with us along this journey, for we are bound in a covenantal relationship with him; he is the one in whom we “live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28).