March 8, 2024 Show with David Reece on “The 5 Solas of the Reformation & the TULIP” (Part 3)

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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

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Jim Thorpe. It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this eighth day of March, 2024.

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Before I introduce my guest and topic today, I just want to remind you that I will be on Long Island, New York next

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Friday, a week from today, at the Coral House Catering Hall in Baldwin, Long Island.

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I am the emcee, once again, for Grace Christian Academy of Long Island, which is a classical

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Christian school operated by the church where I was formerly a member before moving to Pennsylvania, Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island in Merrick, New York.

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And the gala, the fundraising gala, will be held at 7 p .m., as I said, at the

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Coral House Catering Hall in Baldwin, Long Island, New York. I hope as many of you as possible will register for that event, and you could do so at the gala, g -a -l -a, g -c -a -l -i .com

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forward slash gala. And God willing, I'll see you next Friday night at 7 p .m.

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at the Coral House in Baldwin, Long Island. Well, I am so thrilled, as I always am, to have my returning guest today,

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Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona, who's also the

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CEO of armoredrepublic .com. And today we are going to be addressing part three of a three -part series that we have been conducting on an overview of the five solos of the

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Reformation and the tulip as the distinctives of the

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Reformed faith. And it's my honor and privilege to have you back on the program, Pastor David Reese.

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Brother, it's an honor to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm excited that we got to first talk about the emphasis on Scripture and the sufficiency of Scripture, as we talked about solo scriptura in the first show, that we got to then go over the remainder of the solos and really focus on the system of salvation and how we are saved by grace alone through faith alone in the mediatorial work of Christ alone and how it all serves

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God's glory. And I'm excited today to talk about tulip and how it guards those solos.

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Great. And before we get the ball rolling on that, let our listeners know about Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Puritan Reformed Church is a church that's focused on the sufficiency of Scripture for the doctrine, worship, and government of the church.

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Our desire is to make sure that we are teaching what has been revealed and not adding to it or subtracting from it, to worship

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God in the way that has been appointed by the Lord Jesus Christ for the New Covenant era, and to see that government is in accordance with the government appointed by the king of the church.

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And so we seek to do those things carefully and to be able to demonstrate these things from Scripture. And so I would love to have anybody who's visiting the

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Phoenix area or who lives in the kind of Maricopa County, basically, I would encourage you to come check us out and to come worship with us and to have the joyful experience of singing psalms and being able to hear others singing the word of God and being able to teach each other as you're singing by hearing that and being encouraged by the sound of the congregation singing the words of God.

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Amen. And the website is puritanphx .com, puritanphx, abbreviation for Phoenix, .com,

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puritanphx .com. Now tell us about this endeavor that you are spearheading, and it's something that you briefly mentioned not long ago during one of your interviews, but give us a more fully orbed description of exactly what you are doing with this new endeavor.

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So yeah, I'm, so what I've been, I've been realizing is that a lot of people kind of feel stuck in sort of the secular world in terms of not knowing how to invest dollars to seek to see

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Christian businesses advance. They want to be able to put capital into supporting Christian businesses and Christian management and to be able to build a culture that's

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Christian inside of businesses. And they, they also, a lot of them, people are going a lot, I don't know where to, where to work in order to kind of get out of that, right?

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They're either in some sort of weird wokedom or they have to deal with like all sorts of other worldviews that are being imposed and they want to be able to work in a place where they can plainly share their faith and to be able to apply the word of God and to seek to apply the law of God and to not be pushed to work on the

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Lord's day. Right. And so, so those are, I've been really seriously trying to pull things together and to increase that.

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And I think that what I've, what I've done, I have a deal that's closing on March 15th,

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Lord willing. So I'd appreciate prayers for anybody to make sure that goes well and working on that deal for a while. And so I'm excited about that.

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But what I'm generally doing is I'm trying to accelerate the speed that we can do this, that we can pull together, you know, acquiring businesses and helping to fund starting

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Christian businesses and, and seeing those be built out. So reesfund .com,

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and Reese is with a C, so R -E -E -C -E. So reesfund .com is where I'm beginning to deal with that.

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So it's currently on a kind of a coming soon thing, but I, but I wanted to have that there and we'll have a contact page soon there where people can start to reach out.

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But I'm looking for people to start expressing if they have a desire to be able to help to support this by either investing or, or helping to, you know, to help to support us with deals if they've got a business they want to sell, that kind of thing.

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And so people right now, they can just reach out to me at dreese at armoredrepublic .com.

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That's my, that's my email. So it's just D -R -E -E -C -E, or again, that's Reese, R -E -E -C -E. So dreese at armoredrepublic .com.

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And, you know, if you're, if you're interested right now and in the future, we'll have an easier way for people to start getting through things through that website.

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But, but I'm, I'm just trying to help to accelerate this. And I think that an important part of discipleship is not just, you know, we have the

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Lord's day where the church gathers together, but we're supposed to seek to work together as unto the Lord throughout our day.

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And so I'm trying to create environments where that can occur more and to give opportunity to Christians and to seek to relieve some of the oppression of the wicked secular culture around us.

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Great. That sounds like an extraordinary, a phenomenal idea. And I hope that you get a lot more people interested in what you are doing.

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I'll also give our listeners our web, or I'm sorry, our email address for any questions they may have over our discussion today on an overview of the five solas of the

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Reformation and the TULIP as the distinctive, distinctives of the Reformed faith. This is part three, as I already mentioned before.

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And if you have a question, send it to chrisarnsen at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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USA. So please pick up where you would like to begin part three of our discussion.

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Absolutely. So when we talked before, we talked about how our doctrine has to come from Scripture alone.

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We talked about how salvation is by grace alone. We talked about grace being the demerited favor of God.

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It's an attitude of God that He powerfully saves us by His desire for our well -being, for His glory, that He gives the gift of faith, which is understanding and believing the revealed doctrine.

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And so we believe the doctrine revealed in Scripture, and that doctrine is about what

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Christ did and who He is. And so Christ is the only mediator. He's the only meritorious cause of our salvation.

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He's the one who paid for all our sins, and He's the one who provides us with a righteousness to cover us so that we're counted as righteous in the sight of God.

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And then we talked about how all of that works together so that God is the only one that can boast.

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God is the only one who gets the glory for salvation. Now, that is the centerpiece of what we would call evangelical religion.

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And when we think about TULIP, TULIP is guarding the solas against innovations, unbiblical doctrines that were brought in by people called the remonstrants or the

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Arminians who were really bringing in heresies from the Middle Ages. And these heresies are the heresies that seek to undermine salvation by grace.

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And so historically, you have what's called Pelagianism, which is the assertion that ultimately man is born good or neutral, that he is chosen by God because of the conditions that he meets, that Christ either atoned for everybody or there's not really even an atonement.

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But instead, we don't need an atonement. It depends on how you read some of these things. The idea that grace is universal and some people don't even need grace.

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And also this idea that some people, you can lose your salvation. Those are sort of these ideas that are laid out there.

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So semi -Pelagianism kind of modifies and weakens some of those things. And then Arminianism is sort of similar to or a type of semi -Pelagianism.

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These were contrasted with Augustine, who asserted that salvation was all of grace, that sovereignly

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God is the one who graciously saves us, that he chooses sovereignly who he's going to save.

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He powerfully works to save them, that we have no power to save ourselves, and that Christ's death is for the purpose of bringing those whom

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God has chosen to be saved. And also that God upholds his saints.

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These are sort of the key points of dispute. Now what we find is during the 1600s, as this dispute is occurring at the council, the

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Senate of Dort, you have this laying out of a response to an attack.

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So the Arminians or the Remonstrants had posted essentially points of protest against what was then the

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Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism that had been adopted by the

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Dutch Reformed Church. And so these were five points that were objections, and they were objections about the idea that maybe humans are not totally incapable of any good, maybe the election that God does is not based upon his sovereign will, but instead based upon something he's foreseeing in man or something like that.

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And you have this undermining of the various points. So these five responses are five bulwarks or defenses of salvation by grace alone especially, but also they touch on the other solas.

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So for example, when we get to them, one of them is really focused on the work of Christ, limited atonement is focused on defending salvation being by Christ alone, and the perseverance of the saints that we'll talk about is focused on this idea of salvation really is by faith alone, and if you're justified, you can't lose it.

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And so that is also defending the idea of salvation by grace alone. So these are the things that are being defended.

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This is what TULIP is about. So I want to explain the components of TULIP in a very brief way, and then my intention is to sort of go through them in a longer form.

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And so I'll start by giving a brief explanation of the components of TULIP.

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Great. So as we start with TULIP, the first one is the T, and the

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T is total depravity, and total depravity is an assertion about human nature.

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So what's naturally in us, what we're capable of from our own resources. And so what it teaches is the doctrine, first of all, that we are born in sin or we're conceived in sin, right?

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Psalm 51 says I'm conceived in iniquity, as David says, and this idea that we are sinful from conception, our very first moment, the very first moment that we are brought into existence, the first moment of our procreation, we are sinful.

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We are sinful in that, first of all, we inherit guilt from Adam. Secondly, we ourselves have a corrupt nature, so we're not glorifying

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God. We don't have faith. We are in a position of corruption. And then every moment, every moment, we are sinning because we're not glorifying

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God as we ought. So those three categories of sin that we start out in are, again, the guilt of Adam that's credited to us.

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We have the corruption of the nature, and then we have the particular sins we commit. So we're sinful from conception.

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We're corrupt in our whole nature. That means every part. There's no bastion of goodness. There's no island of light.

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There's no preservation of anything good there. Now, one of the things that people will object to there is that they'll say, you know, well, what about the light that lights the minds of all men, like in John 1?

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Well, that's the image of God. That's the basis of accountability, as Paul explains in Romans. And it's not something that is us being good.

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It is instead this idea that we have information and we have thoughts that make it so that we either have truth that we're suppressing or we have the ability with those things to arrive at conclusions that we fail to reach.

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So we're accountable for culpable ignorance, and we also suppress truths as they enter our minds.

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So there's information in our minds that we suppress. And there's failures to draw conclusions that we ought to draw.

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So that's the light establishes our sinfulness, our kind of make it so we're accountable as a part of that.

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So the inexcusability of man. So we have no ability to do any good in ourselves, and we are in constant transgression of the law of God because of our unbelief, because of our failure to glorify

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God. And because of the fact that we're not believing the word generally, and we're not believing the word particularly at like particular commands to apply, and we are not doing particular acts of obedience.

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And so that's the extent of that total depravity. So then we think about the

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U of TULIP. TULIP is total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

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And so the U, people will often cite it as just unconditional election, which is if God chooses sovereignly, but he also reprobates sovereignly.

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So the U, as it's written out in the Canons of Dort, were unconditional election and reprobation.

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And so the idea here is that God, first of all, has no conditions imposed on himself.

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There's nothing except for his own nature and plans, and his own nature includes being logical, right?

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But there's this idea that there's nothing except for God's own nature that is a condition that God is dealing with.

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He doesn't have like this situation he's got to fix. He's not surprised by the fall. He's not cleaning up the mess after the fact.

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He unconditionally, without any conditions imposed on himself, chooses who he is going to create for the purpose of his own glory in showing mercy upon them.

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He also chooses who he's going to create for his own glory for the purpose of justly punishing for sin.

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Now, he also elects angels. There are righteous angels, and for them, he's electing them and choosing them for the purpose of displaying his justice as he rewards them for their good works.

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So he's electing them and then predestining them to do the good works to reward them. So there's election of men for mercy, election of angels for righteous reward, and there's reprobation of men for punishment for the justice of God, and there's reprobation of angels for punishment for the justice of God.

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And so this is also unconditional in the sense that God doesn't look down the corridor of time for the fulfillment of some condition by man or by the angels and choose who he's going to pick.

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Now, even for the angels who are rewarded for their own righteousness, he elects them and upholds them in righteousness so that they'll meet the conditions.

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Man, he elects knowing that we're not meeting conditions, and he elects and has

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Christ meet the conditions. So the unconditional election and reprobation is God's choosing who to save and who to condemn on the basis of what he wants to do and the basis of the sin of people that he has predestined and on the basis for those men who are saved of the righteousness of Christ that he predestines to have be fulfilled in Christ's ministry on the earth.

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So he does this for his mere good pleasure, for his glory, and he chooses whom he will save in Christ and who he will condemn justly for sin.

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Then there's limited atonement, and limited atonement is Christ's work on the cross to redeem his elect, and in this he provides a full satisfaction for those whom

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Christ intended to save. In other words, he pays for all their debts. That's the elect. Everyone that Christ came to save had a sin debt, and he paid that sin debt in full on the cross, and it was only for the elect.

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He didn't pay for anybody else, anybody except for the elect, and he did not pay for any of the sin of the reprobate.

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He didn't pay for any of the sins of the fallen angels either. He only paid for the sins of the elect human beings he intended to save.

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And so this atonement is limited in the sense that it is limited to a full satisfaction for those whom it's intended for.

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Furthermore, the atonement of Christ also involves his perfect obedience, his perfect fulfilling of the whole law, and his perfect fulfilling of the whole law provides a positive basis for counting the elect as righteous.

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So this limited atonement is the full satisfaction of the debts of the elect and providing a perfect righteousness for the elect and for the elect only.

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And then when we get to irresistible grace, the I, irresistible grace is the assertion again that grace is demerited favor.

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It's a love. It's a desire for the good of the object. It's a desire to save the object.

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And so God does all that he pleases. If he desires the good of a person, he's going to bring about the good of that person.

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He's going to bring about the ultimate good. And for a sinner, the good of that sinner would include the salvation of that sinner.

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So God desires to save a person and he will accomplish that goal. It cannot resist. We cannot resist his plans.

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And he is powerful. He chooses us. And if he will effectually bring about salvation of all whom he's chosen.

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So the demerited favor of God is that irresistible thing that brings about the conversion of people.

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Not against their wills. It's by causing their wills to change. God causes people to understand things they previously did not understand, to believe things they previously did not believe.

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That results in a change of desire and it results in a change of choice over time. But faith is a gift that is created in us by supernatural work of God.

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And that irresistible grace is particular and it is effectual. And it causes people to go from darkness to light.

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It causes them to go from blindness to sight. It causes them to go from being dead to being alive.

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This is regeneration. This is the new birth. This is the taking away of the heart of stone and giving a heart of flesh.

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So this is the doctrine of irresistible grace. And lastly, in the Tulip, we get to the perseverance of the saints.

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And God gives the gift of faith and he maintains the gift of faith.

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Christ is the author of our faith and he's the perfecter of our faith. He's the finisher of it. He gives it to us and all those whom he justifies, he will glorify.

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He causes those who get the beginning to get the end. He doesn't start building a tower and then stop halfway.

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God is a wise builder. God is a wise commander. God begins work and he finishes what he starts.

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He always accomplishes the goals that he intends to bring about. And so if he desires the salvation of a man, he gives him faith.

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And then he also preserves him in the faith. And that preservation of the faith causes the man to persevere in the faith.

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So God's preserving work causes the saint to persevere in the faith. And so we think about this idea of the perseverance of the saints.

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It's not just an assertion that people get saved and then they can lose their faith but they're still saved.

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No. It's the assertion that a person when they are given faith will be maintained in the faith.

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They will never lose their faith. They will always have that faith because God preserves it in them.

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And so we can have assurance of salvation knowing that God who saves will not let us go.

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That no creature can take us from his hand and he doesn't change his mind. His compassions change not. And so we can have an assurance of salvation on the basis of the fact that the

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God who saved us is the God who will preserve us. That's the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints.

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So that is a short flyover of the content that we'll be talking about in more detail.

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Great. And this is a great time to go to our first commercial break so I don't have to interrupt you mid -sentence.

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And once again, if anybody has a question about this very important theme and I have seen very recently how angry many of our brothers in Christ who do not agree with us on this, how angry they get and ranging from mild disagreement to nastiness.

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But I hope that some of those folks are listening today and that the

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Lord opens up their eyes so that they may more fully understand and fall in love with these teachings.

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But if you have a question, send it to ChrisArnson at gmail .com. C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Give us your first name at least. City and state and country of residence, please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter, such as you are in a church that is non -Calvinistic or even anti -Calvinistic, but you have begun to become fascinated perhaps by Reformed theology and you're starting to find more and more agreement with it and you'd rather not identify yourself at this point.

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I understand that. You might even be the pastor of the church yourself going through that same journey of theological understanding.

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We would understand reasons like that, would compel you to remain anonymous, but please, if it's a general question, give us your first name at least.

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City and state and country of residence at ChrisArnson at gmail .com. We'll be right back. Don't go away.

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That's royaldiadem .com. Mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

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This is part three of a discussion we have been having on the five solos of the

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Reformation and the five points of Calvinism. And right now we are focusing our attention for this final of the three segments on the five points of Calvinism.

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If you have a question, send it to chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chris Arnzen at gmail .com.

34:18

Give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence. I would like to have you clarify something, if you don't mind,

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Pastor Reese. When you were mentioning earlier, you were actually focusing upon unconditional election.

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You also said God reprobates others that he does not elect and you've used reprobates as a verb.

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Some non -Calvinists and even vehemently anti -Calvinists have a totally false understanding of what that exactly means.

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They seem to think that we are teaching that men who are dead in their sins might otherwise have come to Christ with a saving faith had

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God not stopped them as if mankind was a clean slate morally and that God made the person a child of devil, of the devil, whereas he had an opportunity and a quote -quote chance to come to Christ before that otherwise.

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Let me just quickly quote what the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith says in chapter 3, paragraph 3.

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By the decree of God for the manifestation of his glory, some men and angels are predestined or foreordained to eternal life through Jesus Christ to the praise of his glorious grace.

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Others being left to act in their sin to their just condemnation to the praise of his glorious justice.

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So at least the confession here, the Baptist Confession, and I'm sure the

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Westminster is probably very close or identical, God is merely leaving the non -elect, the reprobate, in their already sinful state.

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And if you want to pick up where I left off there. I think you find both the language of God's decreeing and planning from eternity past, but you also find the idea of the leaving.

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And I think there's a number of important points here. I mean, first of all, nobody who is fallen has anything good in them from which they could do the good work of anything, any good work.

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They can't do the good of believing. Believing is required in the first commandment.

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The first commandment requires us to know and to acknowledge the true God. And so when faith is a part of the basis of our own justification, then it would be a good work.

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So the angels, for example, the righteous angels, a part of why they are justified before God is because of their believing

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God and his word. And so their faith is a part of the merit of their justification.

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For us, our faith is not a meritorious thing. It's a gift that connects us to the merits of Christ.

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And so when we think about faith, even though it's required by the law, our faith is not like an act of obedience that is counted to us itself for us to be righteous before God.

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It connects us to the righteousness of Christ. And so we have nothing in ourselves whereby we could believe.

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And so God must act to give us faith or we will never have faith.

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But I think you'll read in the Confession, this is in both the London Badges and the Westminster, the idea that the decree of God extends even to the first fall.

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And so I think the Arminian might say, OK, well, why did God predestine the fall then? And we go, well,

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God predestined the fall because his intention was to display his justice in rewarding good and his justice in punishing evil.

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And he also wanted to display his mercy in saving some who deserve punishment.

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So that's the purpose for the fall. It's for the glory of God to display his justice and his mercy.

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And so they might go, well, that seems evil. God predestined evil or had the intention for evil to occur in history.

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And so that right there, that's the thing that ultimately I'm objecting to. And so here's the main answer to that.

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The main answer to that is God is the definition of good. You are bringing in a standard of goodness that is foreign to the

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Bible to judge God. God is above the law. There is no law above him and there's no judge to call him to give an account.

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So he's above the law and he's the highest judge. Without God, there is no definition of good.

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So it is good that God predestined for Satan to commit evil, for Judas to commit evil, for men to commit evil, for fallen angels to commit evil.

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And it is good that he punishes it. And it is good that he also forgives some men who are fallen.

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That goodness is defined by the fact that God did it and defined by the fact that it serves his good purpose of displaying his glory.

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Now, people say, well, then that means I can just do good. I could just do things that people would call evil.

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And it's good as long as it glorifies God. Let's sin that grace might abound, for example. Right. I'm going to sin and that'll make

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God's grace more clear. No, that is to confuse yourself with God. God is above the law.

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God kills a man. It's not murder. If he takes property, it's not stealing. So you, on the other hand, are under the law and there's a judge for you.

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God is the judge. The law is the standard. God is above the law and he has no judge above him.

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What he does is, by definition, good. You are a man. You're a creature. And so if you seek to ignore a law that has been imposed on you by God and you ignore the judge,

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God, then you are playing the fool because you are thinking of yourself as God rather than God as God and you as a creature.

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And so the problem that people have with the idea of a predestining of evil and also with a predestining of ultimately men who are going to receive punishment for committing evil to God predestined is this hatred of the idea that God could do that.

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They say it's inherently evil if God were to predestine evil. I'm saying no. And the thing that follows immediately after this is for people to say, well, that makes

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God the author of sin. And the confession plainly says that God is not the author of sin.

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Well, the author of sin does not mean the effectual cause of sin. The author of sin is the responsible cause of sin.

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God plainly predestines evil. The scriptures plainly teach that he predestined

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Judas. Yes. To commit murder. Right. So that's a single example. Minimally, we have lots of other things that are plainly laid out as well.

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But the Judas murdering Christ is the most evil deed ever committed. Yes. That action and that was predestined.

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And so the predestination of the murder of Jesus does not make God guilty of murdering

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Jesus. It makes Judas guilty. Why? Because the author of evil is the one who is the responsible cause.

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Right. And there are preconditions that are necessary for responsibility. Precondition one, a standard by which you can be judged.

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The law of God does not apply to God. God is above the law. But human beings are under the law.

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And furthermore, to be responsible, there must be someone who can call you to give a response.

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Who can call you to give an answer. Who can call you to give charges and require you to give an account.

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God is above the law and there's no judge above him. Human beings are under the law and God is their judge.

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And so God is not the author of sin. What he does is by definition good. He does predestine sin.

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But that doesn't make him the responsible cause. The responsible cause is the party who is able to be held responsible by a law and by a judge.

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Yes, and one of the clearest texts that I have ever found in the

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Holy Scriptures that makes it so clear that God foreordains evil is in 2

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Samuel 12 where you have Nathan the prophet, where God is speaking through Nathan the prophet and letting

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David know how God is going to severely chastise him for committing adultery with Bathsheba and having her husband murdered.

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He says, that is God through Nathan the prophet, This is what the

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Lord says, Behold, I am going to raise up evil against you from your own household.

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I will even take your wives before your eyes and give them to your companion.

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And he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight. Indeed, you did it secretly, but I will do this thing before all

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Israel in an open daylight. So it's clear that God is saying that he is doing these things even though obviously he is not the author of evil, but he has ordained these things to certainly occur.

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Absolutely, and I think there's an interesting text, you know, everybody talks about in Exodus, you know, Romans plainly talks about the

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Pharaoh and his heart being hardened. And they'll say, well, those scriptures say that he hardened his own heart. Well, the first time it talks about God hardening

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Pharaoh's heart is a predicting of what's going to happen before Pharaoh gets interacted with.

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And so in Exodus 4 verse 21, for example, God says, when you go back to Egypt, see that you do all those wonders before Pharaoh, which

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I have put in your hand, he's talking to Moses, but I will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.

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Then you shall say to Pharaoh, thus says the Lord, Israel is my son, my firstborn. So I say to you, let my son go that he may serve me.

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But if you refuse to let him go, indeed, I will kill your son, your firstborn. So we have this curse as a punishment that's brought on Pharaoh and Pharaoh being held responsible for something when

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God has predestined him to sin and has hardened his heart to reject this word.

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And so that is, you know, the scriptures are plain on that. And that's it's inherent in the very definition of God as all knowing and all powerful and creating from nothing.

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If you think about those things, he does all that he pleases. Everything he wants happens, but all powerful means he knows everything.

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So there's no surprises to him. He knows it because he chooses it. And he created things from nothing and he's outside of time.

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So time is from God. He made time and he makes things. So there's no causes that are separated from God.

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So it's not like anything could happen separated from God's plan that it happened. And so just a simple thinking about the very definition of God himself makes that unavoidable.

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Then the scriptures plainly lay out what would be obvious implications by teaching us those particular things in many places.

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Yeah. And it seems very clear to me that those who despise what we believe, it's interesting how even amongst hyper literalist fundamentalists who they rightly take the inerrancy of scripture very seriously, but they even very often, not all of them, but some of them, even overstep the boundaries of how to properly understand inerrancy and they very often will have a wooden literal interpretation of the

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Bible. But even they, with this very strict literal interpretation, when it comes to verses like Romans chapter 9, or when you're citing from 2

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Samuel 12 as I just did, all of a sudden the interpretation is not literal, and it's all boiled down to allegory, and the very thing that they accuse us of doing.

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But I remember one of my pastors years ago, for instance, when you're talking about the meaning and purpose of the death of Christ, he said, what is more important, your understanding of who

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Christ died for, and the meaning of the word all, and so on, or what he actually did, what

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Christ actually accomplished on the cross? What's more important? And obviously, I think any thoughtful Christian would have to conclude what

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Christ did, what he actually accomplished on the cross, is more important than how you interpret the word all.

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Am I making sense here? Yeah, I think it makes total sense. I mean, if a person rightly understands what

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Christ did and thinks it applies to them, they might erroneously think it applies to everybody because they haven't thoughtfully considered verses about hell and so forth, and they might still be saved, whereas a person who doesn't understand what

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Jesus did and doesn't think Jesus did it for them isn't saved. Right.

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And when they jump on our case for interpreting all in certain circumstances as all of God's elect or something like that, they fail to recognize, or at least admit, that they do that in their own way of speech constantly.

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Everybody does. Like, for instance, you may very often see an anti -Calvinist church with a sign outside that says,

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Everyone is welcome. So they actually believe that every single human being can fit in the four walls of that church.

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You know, obviously they don't mean that. And you could go on and on and on with that kind of comparison.

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They allegorize just as much as they accuse us of allegorizing. Yeah, I mean,

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I wonder how they might interpret the heartache of Pharaoh's heart. Maybe it's a cholesterol problem. Well, it has been quite unnerving lately to see how much people who are brethren in Christ hate these things.

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And sometimes it reaches the point where I have to question whether they're my brethren in Christ. Not that you have to have theologically precise, you know, 100 % accurate precision in all of your theology to be saved.

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But when you reach a point when you are so furious over God doing whatever he pleases, when that gets you very, very angry, there's something that you have to wonder about that person.

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Absolutely. And I think I would say, you know, what I typically teach people is that if you really understand

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TULIP and you reject it, what you're doing is you're ultimately denying the gospel because you're ultimately denying salvation by grace alone or you're denying salvation being by the mediatory work of Christ alone, depending on which part you're denying.

50:18

Or, you know, you might be denying, for example, salvation being by faith alone if you ultimately deny perseverance and make it so you can have faith and then lose it.

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And you go, okay, well, justification is not by faith alone. Now it's by your faith and your own persevering, your white knuckling through.

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And so I think that when people really understand TULIP and they deny it, they're ultimately denying the gospel.

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And so I think that TULIP is a defense of the solas and the solas lays that out. When I talk to people about the fundamentals of the gospel,

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I think that what you have is, you know, the doctrine of the Trinity and the incarnation and who God is and who the three persons of God are.

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And then you have, you know, the incarnation, the human nature and divine nature of Christ. And then you've got the solas laying out this path of salvation and how do we know the authority in Scripture.

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And then you've got TULIP defending that. And on a really basic level, I'm not saying that you have to agree with all the details of covenant theology, but if you ultimately reject that Adam's sin is counted to us and he's a covenant representative, if you ultimately reject that Christ as a representative, as a second

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Adam represents us, you know, any denial of any of those things is a denial of really basics of the gospel.

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And not everybody who's saved is going to know all those things. Lots of people are going to be pretty ignorant and they're going to have a little bit of knowledge.

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All you have to really believe is that God's word is truth and that I have mercy by God saving me through the promised

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Messiah. That's the really small kernel of faith that's necessary for salvation.

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But these are all things that if you deny any of them, you're ultimately denying that. And so I think that those things,

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Trinity, incarnation, solas, TULIP, and those really basic elements of covenant theology, Adam and Christ as a second

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Adam, that, you know, those are the structures of what's revealed as the gospel.

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That's the covenant of grace that's given to us and the God who gives the covenant.

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And so I want to tell everybody this is essential stuff. And a hatred of these doctrines is a hatred of the plain teaching of Scripture.

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Yes, and so I was just going to say that people may misunderstand when we cite from the great confessions of the faith, like the

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Westminster, the Second London, the three forms of unity, the Savoy Declaration, the 39 articles of religion, or whatever of the confessions we happen to be citing from.

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These are not something that we put on par with inerrant

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Scripture. What we're doing is we're just citing confessions that summarize what the

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Bible teaches in the understanding of these different Reformed groups.

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Right, absolutely. And everybody does that. Yes, I mean, even if I'm just talking or you're just talking, what are we doing?

53:10

Well, we're confessing our faith. So if anybody were to write it down or record it and maybe use AI to turn it into a transcript, all of a sudden that's a confession of our individual faith.

53:20

And we might more thoughtfully or less thoughtfully lay out what we believe. And if we're trying to see if other people agree with us, we might say, do you agree with what

53:26

I just said? And if they agree, then okay, great, now it's a shared confession. But we want to thoughtfully work together in the context of churches to have the ability to unify around doctrine.

53:38

And so that's what a confession is. It's an effort to say, what do we think the Scriptures teach in a way that's meant to help to divide those who disagree and to draw together those who agree.

53:47

And we have to go to our midway break. Please respond to as many advertisers as you can because they are what's keeping the show on the air through their financial support.

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We'll be right back. Puritan Reformed is a Bible -believing, kingdom -building, devil -fighting church.

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We are devoted to upholding the apostolic doctrine and practice preserved in Scripture alone.

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Puritan Reformed teaches men to rule and lead as image -bearing prophets, priests, and kings.

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Christ. This is Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reformed in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Join us in the glorious cause of advancing Christ's crown and covenant over the kings of the earth.

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Always mentioning that you heard about them from Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Before I return to Pastor David Reese of Phoenix Reformed, I'm sorry,

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Phoenix Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona. Before I return to our discussion on the five points of Calvinism which is part three of a discussion we began not long ago on both the five solos of the

01:09:41

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01:13:00

Absolutely. So we'll jump into total depravity now and spend a little bit more time there. So just a reminder, total depravity teaches us that we are incapable of doing any good works of our own nature.

01:13:12

And so that obviously goes back to Genesis 2 with the fall, which says, you know, in the day that Adam sinned, that if he ate of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, dying he would die.

01:13:23

So there's this idea of the process of dying, dying. And then there's the idea of an immediacy of death.

01:13:31

So death enters in both physical and spiritual. And Adam is dead spiritually.

01:13:38

And he is also has this decay, his old age sickness, death that has entered in.

01:13:45

And so in Genesis 3, he's given the gospel. He's given salvation. He makes confession of faith there, believing the promises by, for example, fulfilling some of the sacramental stuff that's given, the animal sacrifice that's following on.

01:14:02

But he also calls his wife Eve, the mother of all the living. So he's making profession of believing the promise that God gave that she would be the mother of the seed, that she would ultimately be, that there would be a seed of the woman.

01:14:16

And that obviously comes through Mary, but it comes through Eve ultimately, that she's the first mother for the human race.

01:14:23

And also that Christ is descended from her. And ultimately that idea that there is a seed that comes, that crushes the head of the serpent.

01:14:32

So there's this death, spiritual death, and there's spiritual life. And the spiritual death is explained for us in more detail in Genesis 6, verse 5, which talks about the intentions of man's heart being evil continually.

01:14:44

And what happens is a lot of people who, when they reject total depravity will say, well, that's not talking about humans in general.

01:14:50

Let's just talk about humans before the flood. Okay. So humans before the flood somehow are of a different level of evil than the humans after.

01:15:00

People go, yeah, that's believable because God wiped out the earth with the flood. And so things must have been really bad for God to do that.

01:15:07

But what we find is that God tells us that even though man is evil from his youth in Genesis 8, 21, even though man is still evil, there's not a difference that God is not going to bring destruction in the same way anymore.

01:15:26

Not because man has gotten better or man's not going to get that evil ever again, but because of the fact that there's a covenant from God.

01:15:34

So this covenant that God gives to Noah is a covenant to preserve the earth and he restrains evil there with the civil magistrate.

01:15:42

So the context is teaching us that human nature was evil before the flood and it's evil after the flood and it's the same nature.

01:15:50

So man, he thinks evil continually and he's evil from his youth. It's the same before the flood and after the flood.

01:15:57

We're told in Ephesians 2, 3 that the nature of those of us who are saved was the same as the nature of the reparate.

01:16:05

We were, according to our natures, the same as the children of wrath, the people that God hates, wrath, hatred.

01:16:10

Wrath means hatred. So this idea that the hatred of God, that we deserve it, that all the elect deserve it, that our natures were the same, we have all the same evil except that God then gives us a new nature.

01:16:23

He gives us a new life. He renews us, he makes us a new man. We're told in Romans 8 that man is carnal, fleshly.

01:16:33

There's nothing in him that is spiritual, the idea of the Holy Spirit. That we're told in Hebrews 11, 6 that without faith, it's impossible to please

01:16:42

God. In Romans 14, we're told that whatever is not of faith is sin. So if you don't have faith, you're sinning all the time.

01:16:50

Everything you do, not from faith, is sin. So this idea that we only do evil.

01:16:56

So can we from our evil, from our pure evil, from having no good, are we able to generate faith?

01:17:03

We're told in Proverbs 21, verse 4, that the plowing of the wicked is sin. That means the things that externally look good, what some theologians will call civil righteousness or civil goodness, this idea of things that look good on the outside, that for the external order, it looks good.

01:17:22

Things like plowing, doing productive work. That is, even that is sin because it's done not to the glory of God.

01:17:29

It's done without faith. It's done without a general faith in what God says. It's also done without faith that this is a particular good work that God has commanded.

01:17:37

And so the external performance is insufficient for a thing to be good. It requires integrity and faith, doing it to the glory of God out of faith.

01:17:46

So we can't do anything good of ourselves. John 8, verses 43 and 44 says that people don't understand

01:17:56

Christ because they're not able to listen to him. They're not able to hear him. They're not able to understand him because there's a hardening.

01:18:05

There's a darkening. 1 Corinthians 3 teaches us that the thoughts of the wise are futile.

01:18:12

They're foolish. And that's so that, so that we will not boast in man.

01:18:17

So man doesn't have the ability to think himself to faith. He doesn't of himself have the ability to reason to it.

01:18:23

He doesn't have the capacity. He's not able to. He's dead. He's blind. He is in darkness.

01:18:29

And so this inability to do good, the language of a new birth, of a resurrection of the soul, of this kind of, this idea of going from darkness to light, this language is language that shows us our total dependency upon God for faith.

01:18:46

Christ is the author of our faith, and he's the completer, perfecter of it. He's the one who gives it, and he's the one that upholds it.

01:18:54

Now, the reason I'm emphasizing total depravity so much is because once you realize that man is evil to the point of being incapable of any good, you realize that, of course, you cannot believe the gospel.

01:19:06

Of course, you can't do this thing that is good and, therefore, please

01:19:11

God because you have nothing in you that is pleasing to God. And so we need the spiritual.

01:19:16

We need the intervention. John chapter 3 says that what is of the flesh is flesh.

01:19:22

What's of the spirit is spirit. In other words, what comes from ordinary human nature is just more of that ordinary human nature, that this fallen nature is a corruption.

01:19:32

So what's corrupt gives corruption, that a bad tree bears bad fruit.

01:19:38

And so we're taught that what we need is the Holy Spirit to give us this new birth.

01:19:46

And so that goes to God sovereignly knows whom he's going to choose, who he has chosen.

01:19:52

He knows who he's going to give faith to. He's chosen from eternity past. God doesn't change. God is not a man that he should repent.

01:19:59

God is unchangeable and, therefore, his compassions don't change. Whom he loves does not change.

01:20:06

Before Jacob was born, he loved him. And before Esau was born, he hated him.

01:20:13

His choice of who he would seek the good of is from eternity.

01:20:20

It's outside of time. He's not watching and changing his mind as he watches the TV show.

01:20:25

He's not changing which characters are his favorite characters. He planned.

01:20:32

He wrote it. He wrote the play. We are carrying out what he wrote, right?

01:20:39

It is all there in his mind, all of our actions from first to last. And so Romans 9 teaches us, quoting from Malachi 1,

01:20:49

Jacob he loved, but Esau he hated. And everybody wants to say, the Arminians want to go at this, and they want to say, you know, the idea that God sovereignly predestines even before they're born which ones are going to receive good and which ones are going to receive what is bad for them, that idea, they say, well, that's not talking about the individual.

01:21:09

It's talking about some sort of a group. It's talking about a group. It's talking about just the nation. Well, the context is in Romans 9, verse 6, it says, but it is not that the word of God has taken no effect, but they are not all

01:21:24

Israel who are of Israel. The point is to talk about the differentiation of individuals inside of Israel.

01:21:31

Why is it that some people who are part of the nation of Israel are saved and some people who are part of the nation of Israel are not saved?

01:21:37

Because not everybody who's in the group Israel is a part of spiritual

01:21:42

Israel. Not every one of them is elect. And that's what's being explained in Romans 9. That is what's being explained.

01:21:49

That's the context. So it's not talking about, oh, God picked some groups and other groups, you know, don't get the same level of ability to serve.

01:21:57

It's talking about why is it that some of Israel is saved and some is not.

01:22:03

It's differentiating individuals inside of the group. Ephesians 1 teaches this predestination of God of whom he has chosen in Christ.

01:22:13

And Acts 13, verse 48 teaches us that God gives eternal life to all those that he's appointed to life.

01:22:20

So he gives the life. So this is the idea that God chooses who he will save and who he will condemn.

01:22:28

And so would it be better, Chris, if we went to break and then there wouldn't be a limited atonement after that?

01:22:37

Let's see. It's a little early to do our final break. Why don't we just take a listener question first.

01:22:46

Great. Let's see. We have, I was just looking at a listener question that looked very good.

01:22:56

Let's see here. Oh, Justice in Mattatuck, Long Island, New York.

01:23:03

Justice asks, there are some people, even those who claim to be theologically reformed, who will, when discussing

01:23:15

God's sovereignty over all events, saying that he allowed or permitted certain things.

01:23:21

Is this actually proper grammar when understanding God's foreordination of these things?

01:23:31

So I believe it's fine to say that he permitted things, because he obviously does, but it would be wrong to deny that he actively also predestines it.

01:23:43

So Augustine, for example, preferred the idea of talking about permission.

01:23:48

The Westminster Confession and the London Baptist Confession both deny that there's just a bare permission.

01:23:55

It's not mere permission. God actively predestines. So some people want to talk about a mere or bare permission.

01:24:02

That may be Augustinian, but it's not reformed. It's not what you find in the reformed confessions. And so I think it's not biblical either.

01:24:10

But I think that you find a lot of people trying to go, okay, well, God permits it. He doesn't intervene.

01:24:16

And they want to have the fallen nature of man sort of be like this mechanism that's operating outside of God's decreed will, like he's not actively predestining that.

01:24:26

And so I think that's unscriptural. But it is something that you find historically.

01:24:34

But I think it's an error. It's wrong. And God actively causes. So I don't have a problem with the language of permission. I do have a problem with a bare or mere permission.

01:24:42

What do you do then with Job, where we have the devil getting permission as apparent from the dialogue that the devil is having with God?

01:24:56

He's getting permission to do these things to Job. Yes, that's absolutely the case.

01:25:01

That is happening. But God also predestined the devil to come talk to him about it. We know that he works all things according to the counsel of his will.

01:25:07

He does all that he pleases. And everything that happens is what he pleases. And so this idea, you know, it's not as though God is surprised by Job's.

01:25:17

But it is not as though God is surprised by the devil's request. And in fact, God suggests

01:25:23

Job to the devil. Have you considered my servant Job? Yeah, that's right.

01:25:30

Well, thank you, Justice. Love the name, by the way. And now

01:25:36

I think it would probably be a wise time to go to our final break so that we don't have to interrupt you in the middle of a sentence.

01:25:43

And once again, if anybody has a question for Pastor David Reese, please submit it to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

01:25:53

C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

01:25:59

As always, give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

01:26:04

Only remain anonymous. If your question involves a personal or private matter, don't go away. We'll be right back with Pastor David Reese and more of our discussion on the

01:26:13

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01:40:43

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01:40:48

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01:40:56

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01:41:11

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01:41:17

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01:41:25

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01:41:32

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01:41:37

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01:41:43

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01:41:53

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01:42:01

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01:42:12

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01:42:17

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01:42:26

Dr. Joel Beeky, founder and president of the Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

01:42:32

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01:42:50

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01:43:02

and put Pastor's Luncheon in the subject line. Last but not least, I want to inform you that this

01:43:08

Monday I have a first -time guest who I believe will spark a lot of interest in my guest today,

01:43:18

Pastor David Rees's mind. He is going to be conducting this program live from Germany.

01:43:28

His name is Tobias Riemenschneider, and his book that we are addressing is

01:43:34

Resisting Tyranny, a Christian Response to Government Overreach.

01:43:40

That's this Monday on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, March 11th. And now we are back with Pastor David Rees, and would you like me to go to a listener question, or would you rather pick up where you left off and start to delve into one of the points or an overview of all of them?

01:44:03

Yeah, let me try to wrap up limited atonement and irresistible grace here, and then let's try to get some questions in, and maybe we can fit in Perseverance of the

01:44:12

Saints right there at the end before closing out. Sure. So limited atonement, this is the doctrine that Jesus paid for all of the sins of the elect.

01:44:22

And so what I want to first make clear is you talked earlier,

01:44:28

Chris, about this idea that we need to know what Jesus did. So first of all, let's think about this.

01:44:34

If Christ died for all of the sins of all people, then everyone would be saved and the

01:44:42

Bible would contradict itself because it teaches that some people are not saved. Now, some people want to say, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:44:49

Jesus paid for all the sins of all people, but you have to believe in order to accept it. Okay.

01:44:55

Well, if the belief is something that is necessary in order for the payment to be effectual, then the belief becomes something that is rather than a gift, it becomes a part of the basis.

01:45:12

It becomes a part of the basis. If the belief comes from ourselves, it becomes a part of the basis for us being forgiven or counted as righteous.

01:45:22

And so the idea that it's of grace that we will not boast and that it's of faith so that it may be of grace is a theme of Scripture.

01:45:33

And so Christ died for all of the sins of all of his people, and that includes the sin of unbelief, which for part of their lives, at least, they had.

01:45:42

Now, if you paid for all the sins of all people, that includes paying for the sin of unbelief. Right. So if Christ died for some of the sins of all people, well, then great.

01:45:52

Everybody's going to hell because we all have some sins left over that haven't been paid for. Okay, so that's no gospel at all.

01:46:01

If Christ died for some of the sins of some people, well, then still nobody's saved because he only paid for some sins of some people and then other people didn't pay for any sins.

01:46:10

And so nobody's saved still. Okay, so what we're left with is the one scriptural doctrine, which is

01:46:17

Christ died to pay for all the sins of some people, the elect. And this is supported in Scripture.

01:46:25

And what I want to say is what the Scriptures teach over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again is this doctrine that Christ died for his sheep.

01:46:35

He cried for his people. He died for that church. He died for us. And people go, well, well, that doesn't prove limited atonement.

01:46:43

Okay, if we believe in the sufficiency of Scripture, if we believe in Sola Scriptura, then if you're going to teach that Jesus paid for the sins of people besides his church, you need to prove that.

01:46:53

That's your burden. That's right. Prove it. You can't because it's not in the Scriptures. It's a lie.

01:46:59

It's heretical. It's not true. Jesus only died for the sins of his people. I can show you text after text after text that says that.

01:47:08

We're told in Matthew 121, Amen. John 6, 37 and 39.

01:47:19

All that the Father gives me, this is Jesus saying, he will come, all the

01:47:25

Father gives me will come to me. And the one who comes to me, I will by no means cast out.

01:47:31

This is the will of the Father who sent me that of all he has given me, I should lose nothing, but should raise it up at the last day.

01:47:39

John 10 has lots of different texts. I'm going to jump around the chapters. I don't have time to read the whole chapter, but it says,

01:47:45

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd gives his life for the sheep. For whom? The sheep. I am the good shepherd, and I know my sheep and am known by my own.

01:47:55

As the Father knows me, even so I know the Father, and I lay down my life for the sheep.

01:48:00

For whom? The sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold, in other words, that are not just from Israel, so sheep from every nation, the elect from every nation, them also

01:48:11

I must bring, and they will hear my voice. And there will be one flock, that's the church, the universal church that will go throughout the world, and that's the, as opposed to the national church of Israel, now you have the international church, what you call

01:48:23

Catholic or universal. And there will be one flock and one shepherd. But you do not believe because you are not of my sheep.

01:48:34

As I said to you, my sheep hear my voice and I know them, and they follow me, and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, neither shall anyone snatch them out of my hand.

01:48:45

My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all, and no one is able to snatch them out of my

01:48:50

Father's hand. I mean, we basically have all of Tulip to be taught if you just go read John 10, right?

01:48:56

I mean, you have the whole thing there, but I mean, why do they not believe? Because they're not of my sheep.

01:49:02

Who does he lay down his life for? For the sheep, nobody else. There are many, many verses that teach that Jesus came to die for his sheep, and he didn't come to die for anybody else.

01:49:12

We don't find proof of him dying for anybody else. And if the scriptures are silent on it, to teach that he did die for somebody else is to invent doctrines and to add to what has been revealed.

01:49:23

And we are forbidden, it is cursed, it is anathematized, to add to what has been revealed.

01:49:28

You have no right to add that doctrine. We can only prove that Jesus died for his sheep and for nobody else.

01:49:34

So when we consider that and move on to irresistible grace, which is a particular grace, it's

01:49:40

God's love of his elect, and he causes people to be saved. You know, one thing is people come here, they go, well, if God causes people to believe, then that's, you know, he's kind of forcing them to believe.

01:49:52

Well, it's sure he's causing it, but it's not forcing them, since he's causing them to believe against what they want.

01:49:58

He causes them to want it. Proverbs 21 .1 says that the heart of a king is in the hand of God.

01:50:04

He turns it wherever he wishes. Okay. Well, some people go, okay, that's kings. And we go, okay, that's great. Exodus 4 .21

01:50:10

teaches that God controls Pharaoh's heart, and he hardens his heart and all that. Okay. So people will go, well, but that's the big kings, that's the empire, he controls the big things, but not the little things.

01:50:19

Okay. Well, first of all, not a sparrow falls from the sky, apart from the will of the father and the knowledge of the father.

01:50:25

Not a hair falls from your head apart from that. But Exodus 3 .21 says that God controls the commoners of Egypt and caused the commoners of Egypt to favor the people of Israel and to give them gold.

01:50:38

So the idea that God controls the hearts not only of kings, but of individuals of every station, he controls everything.

01:50:46

He does all he pleases. He works all things after the counsel of his will. And so we're told in John 6 that nobody comes to the father and nobody comes to Christ unless the father draws them, that nobody can come to Christ unless it's given to them by the father.

01:51:00

In John 6 .65, Acts 16 .14 says that God opened the heart of Lydia to cause her to believe.

01:51:10

He opened her heart to cause her to believe. Right. So John 3 .3 says that people are born from above.

01:51:17

Where does the new birth come from? It doesn't come from above. It's from heaven. It comes from above. That birth is from above.

01:51:23

Think about the language that's used all over scripture. We're a new creation. Did you create yourself? Okay. So we're a new creation.

01:51:30

In the new creation, do we new create ourselves? Do we renew ourselves?

01:51:35

Do we have the power to renew ourselves? Are we the ones who wash ourselves? Are we the ones who give birth to ourselves?

01:51:41

This is the kind of language that's laid out there is new creation, renewed, washed, born. And we're told in Ezekiel 36, verses 25 and 26, that God's going to take the heart of stone and give us a heart of flesh, that he will cleanse us.

01:51:54

He will do it. He will cleanse us. And Titus 3 .5 talks about the washing of regeneration.

01:52:00

Regeneration is according to the mercy of God, according to Titus 3 .5. So in other words, the mercy of God is the thing that causes, effectually, the washing of regeneration, which is what gives faith.

01:52:11

We are new creations in Galatians 6 .15. There is a circumcision made without hands.

01:52:18

In other words, God's the one who circumcises our hearts. He takes our heart of stone and causes us to have a heart of flesh in Colossians 2 .11.

01:52:25

These are sovereign works of God. These are works done by God and not by man. So this irresistible grace is

01:52:32

God who controls all things, causing us to believe. And what he does is he causes us to understand things we wouldn't have understood otherwise, to believe things.

01:52:41

It changes our desires and changes our choices. So we choose to believe because God causes us to.

01:52:48

And he does it by causing us to understand. And so the work of God, the change of our beliefs, is the thing that makes it so that we are focused on it and we seek for him.

01:52:59

No one is good. No one understands. No one seeks after God. No one chooses what is good. And God causes us not to act according to our old natures, but he changes us so that we do those things because none of us of our own would do that.

01:53:15

So that's what the irresistible grace of God is. And so then, I don't know, Chris, if you had some listener questions that you wanted to jump into.

01:53:22

I just actually wanted to bring into the discussion a text that I use to show biblically limited atonement, definite atonement, particular redemption is a true biblical teaching, and it's not normally a place where people go, but it's

01:53:43

Ephesians 5, 25. Husbands love your wives just as Christ also loved the church and gave himself up for her.

01:53:56

The only reason that makes sense is because you're talking about a very unique and exclusive relationship of a husband to a wife and a very unique and exclusive relationship of Christ and his bride, the church.

01:54:13

Because otherwise, you know, it doesn't make sense because Paul should have said husbands love your wives and every other woman just as Christ also loved the church and every other human being that ever lived.

01:54:25

You know, it just takes away the power of the text if you really believe in an unlimited atonement.

01:54:33

No, that's absolutely right, and that is great, and you get the winner for the best verse on that one right there.

01:54:39

And I want to also point out Romans 8, verses 31 to 33. It says, A God before us who can be against us, he who did not spare his own son but delivered him up for us all, specifically the church, for the elect, how shall he not also freely give us all things?

01:54:57

How does, and so when we think about this, how does, when Paul's thinking about this, if Christ died for everybody, he's going to give everybody everything.

01:55:04

We're all sons now, right? It's at least a universalism. The argument line only makes sense if he died only for those who he's going to give all things for.

01:55:12

I'll give all things to. So it's the same sort of thing and the same thing in marriage. The exclusivity of Romans 8 and of Ephesians 5 and this idea of laying down his life for the sheep.

01:55:21

Absolutely. So real quick on perseverance of the saints. On the perseverance of the saints, you know, this again is necessary for us to have assurance.

01:55:31

But when we think about John chapter 10, verses 27 to 29, what we have is this promise that nothing that he has saved is going to be lost.

01:55:46

So again, that's John 10, 27 to 29. And what the text says there is my sheep, hear my voice and I know them and they follow me and I give them eternal life.

01:55:56

Not just everlasting life, not just temporary life. And they shall never perish. Neither shall anyone snatch them out of my hand.

01:56:03

My father who has given them to me is greater than all. And no one is able to snatch them out of my father's hand.

01:56:10

This idea that there's no creature that can remove you there and God's not going to change. You're never going to perish.

01:56:16

You're going to have everlasting life. And so you can't jump out. He's going to hold you in. There's no way to lose salvation once it's been granted.

01:56:24

So there's a lot there more to be said. I know we're out of time, but I just I wanted to make sure that there's a strong scriptural case laid out here.

01:56:33

And I really want to encourage people to read Brian Schwartley's Sovereign Grace, an examination of the five points of Calvinism.

01:56:38

It's a great book on the subject. Yeah, we've got to get Brian on the show. Perhaps you could pass on his contact information to me.

01:56:45

Absolutely. Let me squeeze in one more listener question before we go off the air.

01:56:51

Bergen in Sandia or Sandia Park, New Mexico. I don't know how the

01:56:57

New Mexicans pronounce it. Sandia Park, New Mexico. He asks or says,

01:57:04

I know that there is disagreement amongst Reformed Christians about how consistent

01:57:09

Andrew Fuller was when it came to the doctrine of particular redemption. But do you find his explanation acceptable that Christ's death was sufficient for the entire world, but only intended for the elect?

01:57:29

So the idea of sufficiency can be interpreted in two ways. And so a lot of the time when you find disagreement, it's just because people are defining things differently.

01:57:37

So in terms of the value, well, Christ's death is of infinite value. You know,

01:57:43

Acts 20 talks about the idea of the blood of God. Well, how valuable is the blood of God? Well, it's infinitely valuable. So how much sin could it pay for?

01:57:49

One infinite amount of sin. So is it sufficient in that sense? Sure. But sufficiency is also sometimes associated with the idea of when it's put into place, does it necessarily result in that effect?

01:58:02

So, yes. Is the death of Christ of sufficient value to have paid for all? Yes. And then, yes.

01:58:08

Did it only pay for the sins of the elect? Yes. So it's sufficient for all, effectual for some.

01:58:15

That's fine. I wouldn't want to necessarily emphasize that other than simply saying, yes, the value of Christ's death is infinite.

01:58:24

And it could pay for an infinite amount of sin. By the way, do you know that if our listener was correct, that that was an

01:58:29

Andrew Fuller quote? I don't know. I was trying to think of the reference there, and I can't –

01:58:37

I've heard that quoted many times, and I do not know the origin of the quote. Okay. Well, I want to make sure our listeners have your website for Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona, PuritanPHX .com,

01:58:49

PuritanPHX .com. For the Body Armor Company, Armored Republic, go to ArmoredRepublic .com,

01:58:56

ArmoredRepublic .com. And can you also quote once again the website for the campaign that you're involved in?

01:59:03

Yes, ReesFund .com, ReesFund, Rees, R -E -E -C -E, ReesFund .com.

01:59:08

And also feel free to just email me if you're interested in helping to either sell a business or to be able to invest in helping with that at DRees at ArmoredRepublic .com.

01:59:17

And we'll have our contact form on that website at a future date. Great. And don't forget, folks, I hope as many of you as possible join me on Friday of next week,

01:59:25

March 15th, 7 p .m., at the Coral House Catering Hall in Baldwin, Long Island, as I emcee the

01:59:31

Grace Christian Academy of Long Island fundraising gala. Go to G -C -A -L -I .com

01:59:37

forward slash G -A -L -A. I want to thank you so much, Pastor Rees and everybody else who listened, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives,