Devotional 121: The Binding of Vows: They Cannot Be Set Aside Lightly

The Confession Read

It is not to be made to any creature, but to God alone: and, that it may be accepted, it is to be made voluntarily, out of faith, and conscience of duty, in way of thankfulness for mercy received, or for the obtaining of what we want, whereby we more strictly bind ourselves to necessary duties; or, to other things, so far and so long as they may fitly conduce thereunto.

— Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 22, Section 6

Introduction

The year is deep in the period of the judges, and the tabernacle still stands at Shiloh. A woman has come up to worship, but she is not like the others who cluster at the gate with their lambs and their measures of grain. She is Hannah, and her heart is broken. Year after year she has come to the feast with an empty womb and a full sorrow, and the cruel rivalry of her husband's other wife has ground her down until she cannot bring herself to eat. Now she stands before the LORD, and her lips move, but no sound comes out. Eli the priest, watching from the doorpost, mistakes her for a drunken woman; but she is not drunk, she is praying out of the depths of her anguish. And in that anguish she does something that will echo through the whole of Scripture as the pattern of a vow. She makes a promise to God. What she promises deserves our closest attention, because it displays, in miniature, everything this section of our Confession is teaching. "O LORD of hosts, if thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid, and remember me, and not forget thine handmaid, but wilt give unto thine handmaid a man child, then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life, and there shall no razor come upon his head" (1 Samuel 1:11). Here is a vow addressed to God alone, made freely and not under compulsion, arising from a heart that trusts Him, offered partly as a cry for what she lacks and partly as the overflow of gratitude for what she hopes to receive. The entire doctrine of Chapter 22, Section 6 is already breathing in that one quiet scene at Shiloh. We have travelled a long way through this searching chapter. We learned first what an oath is, and why it belongs to the worship of God. We learned that the name of God alone is the ground upon which a man may swear. We learned that the oath is a weighty thing, to be taken in the plain sense of the words, and that it binds a man even to his own hurt. Then, in the last study, we learned what a vow is: "of the like nature with a promissory oath," to be made with the same religious care and performed with the same faithfulness. Now this section turns from the nature of the vow to its direction and its manner. To whom may the vow be made? To God alone. How must it be made? Voluntarily, out of faith, and from a conscience of duty. To what end? As thankfulness for mercy already received, or as a means of obtaining what we still want. And to what does it bind us? To necessary duties, or to such things as serve those duties, and only so far and so long as they truly serve them. Each of these clauses is a guardrail, and each is a comfort. The vow, rightly understood, is not a trap set to catch the careless, but a steadying hand by which a believing soul draws itself nearer to the God who has already drawn near to it. The world imagines that a vow is a prison; the Scriptures teach us that a vow made in faith is a fixed point for the soul, a mooring in a life otherwise carried by every wind. We do well to sit quietly before this teaching, for it touches the innermost movements of our devotion.

Scripture Foundation

The Scriptures set before us a vow that has one single, unmistakable direction, and they never tire of pressing that direction upon us. The psalmist sounds the keynote in words that could stand as the text of this whole section: "Vow, and pay unto the LORD your God: let all that be round about him bring presents unto him that ought to be feared" (Psalm 76:11). Notice the sharpness of the address. The psalmist does not say, "Vow to whatever seems fitting," nor "Vow to whatever will help you most." He says, "Vow, and pay unto the LORD your God." The vow is directed to one Person and to one Person only, because a vow is an act of worship, and worship has only one lawful object. When the psalmist adds that all who stand round about the LORD should bring presents to Him "that ought to be feared," he is reminding us that the fear and reverence which belong to God alone are the atmosphere in which a vow is breathed. A vow offered to any creature, however exalted, has already missed its mark before it is spoken. The Hebrew behind "pay" in that verse is shalem, a word drawn from the family of shalom, peace. To "pay" a vow is to complete it, to make it whole, and in the completing of it the soul is itself made whole. There is a quiet irony here that the psalmist would have felt deeply: a vow that is left unpaid is an open debt and a broken word, a thing that gnaws at the conscience; but a vow that is paid brings the one who made it into a settled peace. The direction of the vow toward God, and the completing of the vow in payment, belong together. Half a vow, aimed at the wrong object, is no vow at all. But why would a soul ever bind itself in this way? The psalmist's own life supplies the deepest answer, and it is the answer our Confession puts first: thankfulness for mercy received. "What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits toward me?" (Psalm 116:12). The word translated "benefits" is gemul, a term that carries the sense of dealings, of a full and finished treatment, of all that God has done for the psalmist in the way He has carried him. The psalmist has just been delivered from death, from the cords of the grave, and now he stands on the far side of his deliverance asking a question he cannot answer. What can a man give back to God? Nothing that God needs; yet the psalmist knows there is an answer, and the next verses give it. He will take up the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the LORD, and so make the whole of his spared life an offering of thanks. Gratitude, when it is real, does not sit still. It looks for some way to give itself away, and the vow is one of the appointed shapes that gratitude takes. Hannah's vow, which we have already seen, shows us the other motive the Confession names: the obtaining of what we want. Her vow was not the overflow of a mercy already received but the earnest plea of a woman who desired a mercy not yet given. "If thou wilt indeed look on the affliction of thine handmaid . . . then I will give him unto the LORD all the days of his life" (1 Samuel 1:11). Here the vow is joined to petition, as a hand stretched out empty before the throne. And mark the beautiful balance of it: she asks for a son, and she promises to give that son back to God. The thing she longs to receive is the thing she vows to surrender. This is not the bargaining of a merchant, for Hannah has nothing with which to bargain; it is the confidence of a child who knows that the God who gives is the God to whom all must be given back. And God, who delights in such faith, opened her womb and gave her Samuel, whose name means "asked of God" — a name that will forever testify that the Lord hears the vows that are laid before Him in faith. The Confession insists that the vow be made voluntarily, and the law of Moses had taught this long before. When God gave Israel the regulations for the offerings, He carefully distinguished the vow and the freewill offering from every kind of obligation. "Whatsoever he be of the house of Israel . . . that will offer his oblation for all his vows, and for all his freewill offerings, which they will offer unto the LORD for a burnt offering" (Leviticus 22:18). The Hebrew for the freewill offering is nedabah, from a root that means willingness, spontaneity, a gift that no law compels. Israel was commanded to bring certain sacrifices at certain times; the freewill offering was different. It was the overflow of a willing heart, something offered not because it was demanded but because the worshiper wanted to give it. The vow belongs to this family. It is not a tax laid upon the reluctant but a gift brought by the willing, and a gift, as every child knows, is not a gift at all unless it is freely given. And because the vow is a gift, it must arise from faith. The writer to the Hebrews gives us the principle that governs everything a soul brings to God: "But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him" (Hebrews 11:6). The Greek word here is pistis, faith — that living confidence which not only assents to the truth about God but casts the whole weight of the soul upon Him. A vow made without this faith is worse than useless; it is an insult, a piece of superstition dressed in the clothing of devotion. The man who vows in unbelief is like a labourer who toils through the long night for a master he does not believe will pay him at the dawn. But the man who vows in faith believes two things at once: that God is, and that God is a rewarder. Hannah believed both. She believed the LORD was there at Shiloh, and she believed He would answer her. Her vow was the outward form of an inward trust, and that is the only kind of vow that ever reached the heart of God. Finally, the Scriptures show us what the vow does once it is made: it binds us more tightly to the duties we already owe. The psalmist resolves, "I have sworn, and I will perform it, that I will keep thy righteous judgments" (Psalm 119:106). Here the vow does not invent a new obligation; it fastens the soul to an old one. The psalmist was already bound to keep God's judgments, for they are righteous and God is his King. But by swearing — by laying a vow upon his own soul — he has taken an ordinary duty and sealed it with a fresh and personal resolve. The vow is the clasp that closes the covenant of obedience around his own neck, and he does it willingly, because he loves the law he has sworn to keep. This is exactly what our Confession means when it says the vow binds us "more strictly" to necessary duties: the duty was always there, but the vow makes our hold upon it tighter and our walk in it steadier.

What the Divines Meant

When the Westminster Divines sat down to set this teaching in order, they were not writing in a vacuum. They were men who had themselves bound their souls to God by a solemn national covenant, and they knew from the inside what it meant to bind the soul to God. They wrote, therefore, with a pastor's precision, anxious to fence the vow on every side so that it might be a help to devotion and never a trap to the conscience. The first fence is the sharpest, and it comes first because everything else depends upon it: the vow is "not to be made to any creature, but to God alone." The reason is not arbitrary. A vow is a religious act, an act of worship, and worship has a single object. When a man vows, he is doing something more than promising; he is ascribing to the one to whom he vows the power to receive his devotion and to hold him to his word. Only God can receive such homage. Only God is present to every vow, able to witness it wherever it is made and to call it to account at the last day. To vow to a saint, to an angel, to a relic, or to any creature whatsoever, is to give to the creature the worship that belongs to the Creator. The Divines had watched Rome multiply vows to saints and shrines until the whole devotion of the soul was scattered across a thousand unworthy objects, and this clause is their protest: gather the vow back to its one true home. The heart was made for God alone, and the vow, which is the heart's most solemn gift, must go nowhere else. The second fence concerns the manner of the vow. It must be made "voluntarily, out of faith, and conscience of duty." Each of these three words is a guard against a particular corruption. Voluntarily guards against coercion and superstition: no man may be dragooned into a vow, for a vow wrung out by fear or by the pressure of men is no freewill offering, and what is not free is not accepted. Out of faith guards against the dead formalism that vows without trusting: a vow is not a charm, a thing that works by its own weight, but the expression of a heart that rests upon God, and without that rest the vow is empty. Conscience of duty guards against the rash and the impulsive: a vow is a serious act of religious obedience, undertaken because a man judges it to be his duty, not a hasty promise blurted out under the heat of emotion. The three together describe a vow that is at once free, trusting, and deliberate — the opposite of both the superstitious vow and the thoughtless vow. The third part of the clause sets out the two legitimate springs of the vow, and here the Divines are at their most pastoral. A vow may be made "in way of thankfulness for mercy received, or for the obtaining of what we want." The first is the vow of gratitude, and it looks backward. When God has delivered a man, healed him, forgiven him, carried him through a dark valley, the natural and fitting response of a renewed heart is to give something back, to bind itself afresh to God in thankfulness. The psalmist's "What shall I render unto the LORD" is the cry of every grateful soul. The second is the vow of petition, and it looks forward. When a man desires a mercy he does not yet have — deliverance, provision, a child, grace to overcome some sin — he may lawfully lay a vow before the Lord, as Hannah did, promising to give back to God what God shall give to him. The Divines are careful to place these two side by side, for between them they cover the whole of the Christian life: every mercy received calls for thankfulness, and every want felt calls for petition, and the vow may serve both. There remains the question of what the vow binds. Here the Divines are wisely restrained. The vow binds us "more strictly" to "necessary duties" — that is, to the duties we already owe to God by virtue of His law and our relation to Him. The vow does not create new moral obligations; it confirms and strengthens the ones that already exist. And when the vow extends beyond these necessary duties to "other things" — to matters indifferent, such as the use of our time, our goods, our liberty — it may do so only "so far and so long as they may fitly conduce thereunto," only insofar as those things genuinely help the duties to which the vow is joined. This is the clause that keeps the vow sane. A vow is a means, not an end; a servant of duty, not a master of it; a helper to obedience, not a substitute for it. The moment a vow ceases to conduce to duty, it has no further claim upon the conscience. Put the whole section together and you have a doctrine of the vow that is both lofty and safe. Lofty, because it lifts the vow into the worship of God, a gift offered freely to Him alone. Safe, because it surrounds that gift with such care — faith, duty, gratitude, and a wise limitation — that no man need fear the vow he makes in accordance with it. The Divines have given us a vow that is all devotion and no danger.

Theological Depth

The doctrine set down here did not spring new from the pens of the Assembly; it stands in a long line of Reformed teaching, and the theologians who walked that line fill out its meaning with a depth that rewards slow reading. Consider first William Twisse, the prolocutor of the Westminster Assembly itself, the man who presided over the very debates that produced these words. Twisse was a man of prodigious learning and of a fearsome precision in the things of God, and he never allowed that worship might be directed anywhere but to God as He has revealed Himself. For Twisse, religion in its very essence is the bond of the creature to the Creator, and every act of religion — prayer, praise, oath, and vow alike — must terminate on God alone. To direct a vow to any creature is to loosen the bond of religion, to worship the gift in place of the Giver. Twisse would have us understand that this first clause of our section is not a piece of mere polemic against Rome; it is the logic of creation itself. Because God alone made us, God alone may receive our worship; and because the vow is worship, the vow is for God alone. When a man vows, Twisse would say, he is returning to the fountain from which he came, and no stream can stand in for the fountain. Thomas Boston, the gentle shepherd of Ettrick, brings us from the direction of the vow to its manner, and especially to its voluntariness. Boston knew the human heart as few men have known it, and he knew how easily devotion curdles into legality. A vow made to purchase God's favour, or to appease a guilty conscience, or to earn what can only be received as a gift, is not the freewill offering the law describes. Boston insisted that the vow is the act of a heart already at peace with God, a heart that binds itself not to be loved but because it is loved. The nedabah was his favourite image here: God does not wring the vow out of us as a tax, but receives it as a freewill gift, and He will have no gifts but the willing ones. Boston's warning is as tender as it is searching — a Christian may make a hundred vows in a legal spirit and find them all worthless, and one vow made freely in the joy of sonship and find it sweeter than honey. The difference is not in the words but in the spring from which they flow. If Boston teaches us the voluntariness of the vow, John Flavel teaches us its gratitude. Flavel, whose Mystery of Providence taught a whole generation to trace the hand of God in the smallest mercies, understood that thankfulness is the fuel of devotion. He would have loved the psalmist's question, "What shall I render unto the LORD for all his benefits?" because it was the question of his own life. Flavel urged his hearers to keep a register of God's dealings, to mark the deliverances and the providences, the mercies public and private, and then to let that register warm the heart until gratitude overflowed into some concrete return. The vow, for Flavel, is one of the great shapes that overflow takes. When a man has been spared from death, or converted, or carried through a sore trial, and the memory of it lies fresh upon him, what more fitting than to bind himself afresh to the God who spared him? Flavel would say that a gratitude which never promises anything has not yet felt the full weight of what it has received. The vow is thankfulness made articulate, mercy answered by devotion. Finally, Herman Bavinck, whose Reformed Dogmatics gathered the inheritance of the Reformation into a single comprehensive synthesis, places the vow where it belongs in the architecture of the Christian life. Bavinck saw clearly that the vow is not an extraordinary or marginal thing, reserved for monks and heroes of the faith, but a natural expression of the covenant relation in which every believer stands. The covenant is itself a bond, a mutual engagement between God and His people, and the vow is the believer's personal and voluntary echo of that bond. Bavinck is careful to guard the freedom of the vow — no man may bind himself where God has left him free, nor lay upon his conscience what God has not laid there — yet he insists that this freedom exists precisely so that it may be laid back at God's feet. The Christian is free in order that he may freely give himself. The vow, then, is not a renunciation of freedom but its highest exercise: the free soul, moved by faith and gratitude, binding itself to God and to its duties, so far and so long as those duties are served. Bavinck joins together everything this section teaches — the Godward direction, the willing heart, the believing trust, the grateful motive — into a single luminous truth: the vow is the covenant life of the soul, spoken aloud. Between them these four witnesses — Twisse on the object, Boston on the will, Flavel on the gratitude, Bavinck on the covenant — carry the teaching of Section 6 to its full depth. The vow is worship, and therefore for God alone. The vow is free, and therefore the willing heart's own gift. The vow is grateful, and therefore the echo of mercy received. And the vow is covenantal, and therefore the believer's voluntary Amen to the bond in which God has already bound Himself to him.

Puritan Application

The doctrine is rich and steadying, but it was never meant to remain on the page. Let us bring it down into the plain texture of our days, where vows are made and kept and broken, and let it search us. First, learn to distinguish a vow from a wish, and keep the distinction before you at all times. A wish is the soul wavering; a vow is the soul binding itself. The world is full of men who wish to be better, who wish to pray more, who wish to overcome their temper or their lust or their sloth, and who never do because a wish exerts no claim upon the will. But a vow, made to God alone and in faith, fastens the wandering desire to a settled purpose. When you find your heart stirred by some good resolve — to rise earlier for prayer, to mortify some besetting sin, to give a portion of your substance to the poor — do not let it dissolve into a wish. Lay it before the LORD, in the name of Christ, and bind yourself to it as a freewill offering. The act of vowing, of speaking the resolve to God, gives it a purchase upon your conscience that a silent wish will never have. A wish is a drift of smoke that one breath of wind carries away; a vow is a knot tied in the rope of your own life, tied by your own hand in the presence of God, and tied in fair weather, so that it may hold you fast when the storm comes. Second, since the vow is made to God alone, keep it out of the hands of men. This is a real temptation, and it takes many shapes. Some make vows to men, or to themselves, in a religious spirit — promising this or that to a friend, to a church, to a cause — as if the creature could be the object of that homage which belongs only to God. Others, more commonly, make their devotions a performance before men, vowing and resolving for the eyes of others rather than for the ear of God. The remedy for both is the same: whenever you would vow, retire into the presence of God, and ask yourself whether this vow is being made to Him and for Him. A vow made in the sight of men only, and kept for the praise of men only, has already received its reward. But a vow made in secret to the Father who seeth in secret, that vow He will not forget. Hannah's vow was made with no witness but the LORD, and the LORD alone heard it; and that was enough, for the LORD alone was enough. Third, let gratitude be the ordinary spring of your vows, and let the memory of mercy keep it flowing. We are, every one of us, richer in mercies than we remember, and our poverty of devotion is largely a poverty of remembrance. Set aside some time, perhaps at the close of a year or upon some anniversary of deliverance, to reckon up what the LORD has done for your soul. How He found you, how He kept you, how He has borne with you, how He has fed you and led you and answered prayers you have long since forgotten. Let that reckoning warm you until you cannot help but ask, with the psalmist, "What shall I render unto the LORD?" And then let your answer take the form of a vow — a fresh dedication of yourself, a new and specific resolution of obedience, a pledge of time or substance or service laid upon the altar of gratitude. Such vows, born of thankfulness, carry their own strength within them, for they flow from a heart that has already tasted the goodness of God. Fourth, guard the freedom of your own conscience and the consciences of others. The Confession says the vow must be voluntary, and this is as much a warning against binding others as it is against being bound ourselves. Parents, pastors, and those in authority are sometimes tempted to exact vows from those under them — to compel a promise that only a free heart can truly give. This is a cruelty in the dress of godliness, and it produces only hypocrisy. Let no man be made to vow what he does not himself resolve; and when you are urged toward a vow, examine whether it springs from faith and a conscience of duty, or merely from the pressure of a man and the fear of his displeasure. The vow that is wrung out is no freewill offering, and God will not have it. And by the same measure, when a brother or a sister has freely vowed something to the Lord, honour that vow; do not despise it, and do not entice them to break it, for you would be tempting them to sin against the God to whom the vow was made. Fifth, and above all, perform what you have vowed, and perform it by the strength of Christ. A vow unpaid is a wound that festers; it is a promise left to rot in the field of the conscience. The psalmist's word is shalem — complete it, make it whole — and there is no peace until the vow is finished. But here we must be very honest with ourselves, for many a sincere soul has made a sincere vow and then despaired of keeping it, and has either abandoned it in shame or kept it in a spirit of grim self-dependence. Neither is the Christian way. The vow is made out of faith, and it is kept out of faith as well. The same grace that moved you to vow will enable you to pay, if you go on trusting the Giver. When the strength of the resolve begins to fail, do not fling the vow away; carry it back to the One to whom it was made, confess your weakness, and ask Him to complete in you what you promised in His name. Christ, who ever lives to make intercession for His people, will not leave a sincere vow to die in the dust. He will make it whole, and in the making of it whole, He will make you whole as well — for that is the deep and hidden promise beneath every vow we lay before our God.

Prayer

O LORD, our God, to Thee alone we come, for Thou alone art worthy, and to Thee alone may the soul bind itself in the solemn gift of a vow. We bless Thee that Thou art not a God far off, but a God who stoops to hear the silent prayer of the broken in heart, as Thou didst hear Hannah at Shiloh and remember her. We praise Thee for the mercies that already lie heaped about us, mercies we have neither counted nor deserved; and we ask Thee to loose our tongues in thankfulness, that gratitude may overflow into a life more wholly given to Thee. Teach us, we pray, to vow only as Thou hast commanded — freely, in faith, and from a conscience of duty — and never to scatter our devotion upon any creature, however fair, when Thou alone art its true and only object. Keep us from the rash vow and from the vow made for the eyes of men; and when in sincerity we have bound ourselves to Thee, give us grace to pay what we have vowed, for Thou knowest our frame and rememberest that we are dust. Where we have promised and failed, O Lord, forgive us for the sake of Christ; and where our vows yet lie unfinished, revive them by Thy Spirit, that we may complete them and be made whole in the completing. And this above all we ask: that the whole course of our lives may become one unbroken vow, a freewill offering laid daily upon Thine altar, since Thou hast first bound Thyself to us in the covenant of grace, sealed in the blood of Thy dear Son. In His name, who vowed to drink the cup for us and drank it to the dregs, we bring these our poor offerings. Amen.