Devotional 119: The Acceptable Vow: Made in Faith and with Prudence

The Confession Read

A vow is of the like nature with a promissory oath, and ought to be made with the like religious care, and to be performed with the like faithfulness.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 22, Section 5

Introduction

There is a scene in the book of Genesis that has lingered in the Christian imagination for thousands of years. Jacob, fleeing from the anger of his brother Esau, has stopped for the night in a solitary place with only a stone for a pillow. He dreams, and in his dream he sees a ladder set up on the earth, the top of it reaching to heaven, and the angels of God ascending and descending upon it. When he wakes, he is afraid, and he says, "How dreadful is this place! This is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." Then, in the morning light, he does something striking. He takes the stone that had been his pillow, sets it up for a pillar, pours oil upon it, and makes a vow: "If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat, and raiment to put on, so that I come again to my father's house in peace; then shall the LORD be my God: and this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God's house: and of all that thou shalt give me I will surely give the tenth unto thee" (Genesis 28:20–22). It is the first recorded vow in Scripture, and a daring act. Jacob, newly awakened to the presence of God, binds himself by a solemn promise to the God who has just appeared to him. He sets terms, and he pledges a response. He is making a vow. The Westminster Confession, in the section now before us, turns from oaths to vows, and it does so with a brevity that belies the importance of the subject. The entire section is a single sentence, but that sentence draws a line that had been much contested in the centuries before the Assembly. It declares, first, that a vow is of the like nature with a promissory oath; second, that it ought to be made with the like religious care; and third, that it ought to be performed with the like faithfulness. It is a short sentence, but it is packed with doctrine, and it opens up a side of the Christian life that we often neglect in our day. The vow, as the Divines understood it, is not a quaint relic of a more superstitious age; it is a living act of worship, a voluntary binding of the soul to God, a channel through which gratitude flows and devotion takes shape. But what exactly is the difference between a vow and an oath? The answer is simple, and worth stating plainly. An oath calls God to witness what we assert or promise in our dealings with other men. It is fundamentally a transaction between persons: the swearer, the hearer, and God as witness and judge. A vow, by contrast, is a promise made directly to God Himself. It is not addressed to another man, nor does it primarily concern our obligations to our neighbour. It is a voluntary engagement with the Most High, a pledge that we make to Him of something that lies within our power to give or to withhold. John Gill, the Baptist divine, put it this way: "A vow is a promise made to God, and not to men; for though a man may vow to perform something that respects men, yet it is made to God, and not to them." The vow rises from the soul toward heaven; it is the creature speaking directly to the Creator and saying, "I will do this thing for Thee, because Thou art worthy." The Divines add that the vow is of the "like nature" with a promissory oath. This means that the same principles that govern oaths also govern vows. The same care, the same reverence, the same truthfulness, the same binding power. The vow is not a lighter thing because it is made only to God and not in the presence of men. On the contrary, it is heavier, for its sole witness is the God who sees in secret, and its sole enforcer is the holy will of Him who will by no means clear the guilty. When a man makes a vow to God, he is not merely making a promise to himself or to his church; he is binding his soul with a bond that carries the full weight of the divine presence. And it is because of this weight that the section ends where it does: "to be performed with the like faithfulness." The vow, once made, must be kept, not grudgingly or partially, but with the same unwavering truthfulness that God requires of every oath.

Scripture Foundation

The first text to which we must turn is the passage of Deuteronomy concerning vows, where the law of God addresses the making and the paying of vows in terms that leave no room for evasion. Moses writes: "When thou shalt vow a vow unto the LORD thy God, thou shalt not slack to pay it: for the LORD thy God will surely require it of thee; and it would be sin in thee. But if thou shalt forbear to vow, it shall be no sin in thee. That which is gone out of thy lips thou shalt keep and perform; even a freewill offering, according as thou hast vowed unto the LORD thy God, which thou hast promised with thy mouth" (Deuteronomy 23:21–23). The language is emphatic: "thou shalt not slack to pay it." The Hebrew verb for "slack" carries the sense of delaying, putting off, letting the thing slide through neglect. God will not accept a delayed vow, a half-kept vow, a vow that is honoured only when it is convenient. And then the text adds a provision that is easy to miss: "If thou shalt forbear to vow, it shall be no sin in thee." The vow is voluntary. No one is commanded to make a vow. The silence of a contented heart, the simple obedience that does not need to add promises upon promises, is perfectly acceptable to God. But once the vow has been made, once the words have crossed the lips, they have crossed a boundary from which there is no return. "That which is gone out of thy lips thou shalt keep and perform." The spoken word, once uttered before God, becomes a debt that must be paid. The Psalms are filled with references to vows, and they show us how central this practice was to the devotional life of the Old Testament saints. The psalmist Asaph, in the fiftieth psalm, writes pointedly: "Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High" (Psalm 50:14). And the context is telling. God is addressing His people in judgment, declaring that He does not need their sacrifices as though He were hungry for the flesh of bulls. "Every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof" (Psalm 50:10–12). But then, when He has stripped away every pretence that the sacrifice is needed for His sake, He commands this: "Offer unto God thanksgiving; and pay thy vows unto the most High." The vow and the thanksgiving are joined together. The vow is the form that true gratitude takes. It is not that God needs our promise; it is that our hearts need to express their devotion in a binding form, and He honours that need by accepting the vow as an act of worship. The psalmist who penned the hundred and sixteenth psalm gives us a personal testimony that brings this truth home. He has been delivered from affliction and distress; he has called upon the name of the Lord, and the Lord has heard his voice. In his gratitude, he turns to the vow he had made in the day of trouble: "I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his people" (Psalm 116:14). And he repeats it, as though to seal it with a double affirmation: "I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his people, in the courts of the LORD's house, in the midst of thee, O Jerusalem" (Psalm 116:18–19). The vow was made in secret, in the privacy of his distress, but it is paid openly, publicly, in the congregation. This is a principle worth keeping. The vow is a personal transaction between the soul and God, but its performance often has a public dimension. The gathering of the people is the place where vows are paid, because the community witnesses the faithfulness of the individual and is encouraged by it, and because the public payment of a vow honours God before the assembly in a way that secret gratitude cannot. The book of Jonah provides a glimpse of vows made by those who had not yet come to a full knowledge of the true God. When the storm threatened to break the ship, and the mariners discovered that Jonah was the cause of their trouble, they cried out to the LORD in their terror, and "the men feared the LORD exceedingly, and offered a sacrifice unto the LORD, and made vows" (Jonah 1:16). It is a scene worth a second look. Pagan sailors, who had been crying each to his own god only moments before, now offer sacrifice and make vows to the God of Israel. Their vows were the spontaneous response of hearts terrified by the divine power that had been manifested in the storm. They had seen the wind and the sea obey the word of Jonah's God, and they could not help but bind themselves to this God who commanded the elements. The vows of these pagan sailors stand as a testimony that the impulse to vow is woven into the human heart, that even those outside the covenant know, in the depths of their being, that a solemn promise made to the Most High is a bond that cannot be broken. In the New Testament, the practice of vowing continues, though it takes on a new character now that the shadows of the old covenant have given way to the substance of Christ. The apostle Paul himself is recorded as having made a vow. Luke tells us that "Paul having shorn his head in Cenchrea: for he had a vow" (Acts 18:18). The reference is almost certainly to a Nazirite vow, a temporary period of special consecration to God that involved letting the hair grow and abstaining from wine, and that concluded with a ritual of shaving the head and offering sacrifices. Later, when Paul arrived in Jerusalem, he was asked by the elders to join with four men who were under a vow and to purify himself with them, "that they may shave their heads: and all may know that those things, whereof they were informed concerning thee, are nothing; but that thou thyself also walkest orderly, and keepest the law" (Acts 21:23–24). Paul consented, and the vow was performed. This is plain evidence that the early church, even after the coming of Christ, did not abandon the practice of making voluntary vows to God, so long as those vows did not compromise the freedom of the gospel. The vow, for Paul, was a means of expressing his devotion and of identifying with the Jewish believers who still observed these customs of consecration. It was not a matter of necessity, but of voluntary devotion, and it was performed with the same faithfulness that the Confession requires.

What the Divines Meant

The Westminster Divines, in declaring that a vow is of the "like nature" with a promissory oath, were making a claim that had both a theological and a polemical edge. Theologically, they were insisting that the vow is not a merely human resolution, not a pious aspiration, not a good intention that we may set aside when it becomes inconvenient, but a solemn act of worship in which God is directly engaged. The same reverence that must surround an oath must surround a vow: the fear of God, the truthfulness of heart, the certainty of performance. The vow is not less binding because it is made only to God; if anything, it is more binding, because the witness is the Most High, the judge is the all-seeing One, and the one who will require it is the God who searches the heart and tries the reins of the children of men. The Divines were also taking a position on a matter that had been hotly disputed in the Reformation era. The Church of Rome had multiplied vows of every kind: vows of perpetual celibacy, vows of poverty, vows of monastic obedience, vows to saints, vows to go on pilgrimages, vows of fasting, vows of wearing a particular habit; and had taught that these vows were a higher form of Christian devotion, a way of attaining to what they called "perfection." The Reformation, by contrast, had insisted that the monastic life was not a higher stage of Christianity but a departure from the liberty that Christ had purchased for His people, and that many of the vows imposed by Rome were unnecessary, and positively sinful, because they bound men to things that God had not commanded and that often hindered the duties that God had commanded. The Divines do not explicitly reject popish monastic vows in this section (that work is done in Section 7) but by declaring that a vow is of the "like nature" with an oath, and therefore subject to the same conditions (truth, justice, possibility, ability to perform, nothing contrary to God's Word), they were laying the foundation on which that rejection would rest. A vow to do what God has forbidden is no vow at all. A vow to do what a man cannot possibly perform, and for which he has no promise of ability from God, is a snare and not a bond. A vow that binds a man to a state of life that is contrary to Scripture and to the created order is not a vow of perfection but a yoke of bondage. The section also carries a pastoral weight. The Divines were not writing in a theological vacuum; they were addressing the consciences of real men and women who had made vows: vows of marriage, vows of church membership, vows of office, vows of thankfulness for deliverance, vows of dedication in times of distress. They knew that the human heart is quick to make vows in a surge of feeling and slow to keep them once the feeling fades. They knew that the conscience, once it has been bound by a vow, can carry a burden for years if the vow is not kept. And so they wrote what they wrote both to protect the saint from rashness and to require faithfulness. The vow, once made, must be kept. It must be performed. The same faithfulness that God requires in the keeping of an oath, He requires in the keeping of a vow. The "like religious care" that the Divines demand means that the making of a vow is not to be entered upon lightly. It requires self-examination. It requires a clear understanding of what is being promised and a sober assessment of one's ability to perform it. It requires prayer. It requires a settled persuasion that the thing vowed is lawful, that it is within the vow-maker's power, and that it is for the glory of God. The rash vow, made without thought, is not released from its obligation by the rashness with which it was made; it is still a vow, and the God who heard it will require it. Better, as the Preacher says, not to vow than to vow and not pay. And for that reason, the wise Christian is slow to make vows, careful in making them, and scrupulous in keeping them.

Theological Depth

Thomas Manton, the Puritan expositor whose works fill twenty-two volumes in the standard edition, gave considerable attention to the nature of vows in his sermons on the Psalms. Preaching on Psalm 50:14, "Pay thy vows unto the most High," Manton observed that the vow is the language of gratitude, the form that thankfulness takes when it rises above mere sentiment and becomes an act of the will. He wrote: "Gratitude is not a good word, but a good deed. To tell God we are thankful is easy; to bind ourselves to something that will cost us is the proof." Manton distinguished between the ordinary vows of Christian obedience (the general dedication of oneself to God that is implicit in conversion) and particular vows made on specific occasions. The general vow is the once-for-all surrender of the soul to Christ. The particular vow is a voluntary engagement added to that surrender, a fresh expression of devotion arising from a fresh sense of God's mercy. Manton insisted that the particular vow, while not commanded, is a legitimate and powerful means of strengthening the soul against temptation and of channelling gratitude into concrete action. But he also warned that the multiplication of vows without the grace to keep them is a form of self-deception. "One vow kept," he said, "is worth a hundred made." Jeremiah Burroughs, in his work Gospel Worship, treated the vow as a part of that worship which God requires of His people. Burroughs was concerned with the spirit in which worship is offered, and he argued that the vow, like every other act of worship, must proceed from faith. "A vow made without faith," he wrote, "is but a natural man's engagement, which he will break as soon as the pressure of his affliction is removed." For Burroughs, the vow was not a meritorious work by which a man earns favour with God; it was the response of faith to grace, a voluntary binding of the heart to God that grows out of a sense of God's goodness already received. He pressed the point that vows are not to be made out of fear or superstition but out of a deliberate, intelligent faith that knows what it is promising and trusts God for the strength to perform it. And he insisted that the vow, once made, must be paid with joy, not with reluctance, because it is an offering to the God who has already given us everything. "If we be backward to pay our vows," he said, "we show that our hearts were never truly engaged in making them." Samuel Bolton, a member of the Westminster Assembly and a careful thinker on Christian liberty, addressed the relationship between vows and the freedom of the Christian conscience in his masterwork The True Bounds of Christian Freedom. Bolton argued that while the vow is a legitimate expression of devotion, it must never be imposed as a condition of salvation or as a ground of justification. The vow proceeds from faith and is kept by grace, but it adds nothing to the standing of the soul before God. Christ is the only ground of acceptance, and the vow is not a new righteousness but a new engagement. Bolton also addressed the question of whether a vow can be dispensed or annulled, and his answer was careful: a vow that is lawful and possible is binding absolutely; a vow that has become impossible through no fault of the vow-maker may be set aside, but a vow that has simply become inconvenient may not. The difference between impossibility and inconvenience is the difference between a released prisoner and a deserter. "The conscience that is truly free," said Bolton, "is free to bind itself, and once bound, is not free to unbind itself without the consent of the God who was called to witness the binding." Jonathan Edwards, whose Religious Affections remains a searching analysis of the nature of true religion composed by an American theologian, considered the vow as a test of the genuineness of religious experience. Edwards observed that true affections always express themselves in action, and the vow is one of the most concrete forms that action can take. When a soul is truly moved by a sense of the glory of God, it naturally seeks to give expression to that movement in a binding form. A vow is what a heart that has been touched says. But Edwards also warned that the making of vows can become a substitute for the keeping of them, and that a person who is always vowing and never paying is deceiving himself. "The person who abounds in vows while he abounds in neglect of them," Edwards wrote, "has evidence that his religious affections are nothing but a flash of lightning, which makes a sudden blaze and then leaves the soul darker than before." True religion, for Edwards, is not measured by the number of vows a man makes but by the faithfulness with which he keeps the vows he has made. John Gill, the Baptist theologian of the eighteenth century, wrote extensively on the subject of vows in his Body of Divinity and in his commentaries. Gill was careful to distinguish between vows taken under the Old Testament and those proper to the New. Under the old economy, there were vows that God commanded, the Nazirite vow for example, and these were binding by divine institution. Under the new covenant, no such institutional vows remain, but the liberty of the Christian to make voluntary vows remains, and the binding force of those vows is not diminished. Gill argued that the New Testament nowhere forbids the making of vows, and that the examples of Paul and the early Christians are sufficient warrant for the practice. But he insisted that the vow must be made in faith, must be for a lawful end, must be within the power of the one making it, and must be performed with exactness. "God is not mocked," he wrote, "and a promise made to Him is as binding as an oath sworn before a magistrate, for the same God is witness to both."

Puritan Application

First, let the making of vows be deliberate, not impulsive. The human heart is prone to make rash promises in times of distress and to forget them in times of ease. We have all done it. Caught in a moment of fear or desperation, we have cried out to God, "Lord, if Thou wilt deliver me from this trouble, I will serve Thee as I have never served Thee before," and then, when the trouble has passed, we have quietly allowed the edge of that promise to grow dull. The Puritan remedy for this is to make vows slowly, with counsel, with self-examination, and with a sober estimate of our own weakness. Before you vow, ask yourself: Can I perform this? Am I promising something that is within my power, with the help of God? Or am I speaking in a rush of feeling words I will regret when the rush is over? Remember the words of the Preacher: "Better is it that thou shouldest not vow, than that thou shouldest vow and not pay." Second, keep your vows publicly when they ought to be public. The psalmist said, "I will pay my vows unto the LORD now in the presence of all his people." There is a place for secret vows, promises made in the privacy of the closet between the soul and God alone, but there is also a place for open vows, vows that are paid before the congregation as a testimony to God's faithfulness and as an encouragement to others. If you have made a vow in the day of trouble, do not be ashamed to acknowledge it before the church when the Lord has granted you the deliverance you sought. Let your thanksgiving be known. Let your faithfulness be seen. The open payment of a vow is not ostentation if it is done for the glory of God; it is a confession of God's goodness and a witness to the truth that He keeps His promises and that His people keep theirs. Third, do not multiply vows beyond what your faith can bear. There is a temptation, especially among those who are earnest in their devotion, to bind themselves with many vows. They vow to pray at certain hours, to read a certain number of chapters daily, to give a certain portion of their income, to abstain from certain lawful pleasures. And these are not wrong in themselves. But the multiplication of vows can become a form of self-righteousness, a reliance on our own resolution rather than on the grace of God. Samuel Bolton warned that the conscience that is overloaded with vows is in danger of becoming scrupulous and fearful, and that the soul that trusts in its vows more than in Christ has missed the whole point of Christian liberty. Better a few vows faithfully kept than many vows broken. Better a single promise made in faith and performed with joy than a hundred promises made in presumption and abandoned in despair. Fourth, when you have failed to keep a vow, do not despair, but repent and renew your resolution. The Christian life is not a life of perfect performance. We have all made vows that we have not kept, promises that we have broken, engagements with God that we have neglected. The Puritan writers were not legalists who crushed the bruised reed. They knew that the best of saints are sinners, and that the grace of God is greater than the failures of His children. If you have broken a vow, do not add to the failure by despairing of God's mercy. Confess the broken vow. Acknowledge the dishonour done to God's name. Seek His forgiveness through Christ, who has kept every vow that we have broken. And then, strengthened by grace, renew your resolution, not in your own strength but in the strength that God supplies. The vow that is made in faith and kept by grace is acceptable to God. The vow that is broken and confessed and renewed is the mark of a soul that is still walking with God, even through its failures. Fifth, let your marriage vow be the model and pattern of all your vows to God. The marriage vow is the most familiar of all vows, the one that touches every married person's life most directly. It is a promissory oath made before God and witnesses, "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part." It is a vow that binds the soul for life, that holds even when the better has become worse and the richer has become poorer. And it is, in a profound sense, a picture of the vow we make to God in Christ. The covenant of marriage is a mirror of the covenant of grace. The faithfulness that a husband owes to his wife and a wife to her husband is a reflection of the faithfulness that we owe to God. If you honour your marriage vow, you are learning how to honour your vows to God. If you neglect your marriage vow, you are damaging the very image of covenant faithfulness that God has set before you. Let every married person see in the wedding vow the pattern of every other vow: made solemnly, kept faithfully, broken only by death.

Prayer

O Lord, the living God, before whom every vow is made and by whom every promise is witnessed, we draw near to Thee with humility and thanksgiving. Thou art the God who hast bound Thyself to us by covenant, keeping faith through all generations, forgiving our unfaithfulness and renewing Thy mercy every morning. Teach us, we beseech Thee, to make our vows with the same truthfulness with which Thou keepest Thine. Let not our mouths speak what our hearts do not intend, nor our lips promise what our hands are unwilling to perform. We confess that we have often made vows in haste and forgotten them in ease. We have cried to Thee in trouble and pledged our devotion, and when the trouble passed, our devotion waned. Forgive us, O God, for the vows we have broken, for the promises we have left unpaid, for the engagements we have treated as though they were nothing. Cleanse us from this unfaithfulness, not for our sake, not because we deserve to be cleansed, but for Thy great name's sake, and for the sake of Jesus Christ, who kept every vow that we have broken. Grant us wisdom to make vows slowly, with the fear of Thee before our eyes. Grant us grace to keep them faithfully, with the help of Thy Spirit. Grant us humility to confess them when we have failed, and faith to renew them when we have fallen. And when at last we stand before Thy throne, may we hear that word which is better than any vow we could ever make or keep: "Well done, thou good and faithful servant." For Thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.