Episode 95: Law and Gospel with Tom Hicks

Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

I am well pleased. He is honored, and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better, because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres, down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

The church is not a democracy. It's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

Jesus in a local, visible congregation. I'm not trying to complain,

Eddie, but I'm just gonna be honest, the hot weather is messing me up. We're supposed to get some rain soon,

I've heard. Yes, Lord willing, tomorrow. Here we are, the end of October, and I'm just waking up, and I'm like, the

AC, literally in my office, the AC is on, and we're in the morning. Right. It's too much, brother, it's too much, but God is sovereign, amen?

Amen. Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast. I'm your co -host, your complaining co -host,

I'm sorry. Allen Nelson, one of the pastors of Providence Baptist Church in Perryville with me is

Eddie Ragsdale, one of the pastor, or the pastor, sorry, of First Baptist Church of Marshall.

I didn't mean that as a dig, brother, I didn't. No, no, it's the goal, you know? Yeah, I know, you guys are working for that.

And we're recording, this isn't gonna come out, this'll come out in a couple, probably like November, mid -November, but we're recording.

This is a bad time for you to be complaining, you're supposed to be grateful. Oh, yeah.

It's Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving month, but we're recording, technically on Reformation Day Eve, right?

That's right. So we're grateful today to have our guest,

Tom Hicks from Clinton, not Clinton, Arkansas. Clinton, Arkansas is just near Eddie, actually.

But this is Clinton, Louisiana, which is like, is it in the southwest

Louisiana, Tom? It is, let's see. It is actually southeast of Louisiana.

Louisiana looks like a boot. Uh -huh. Nope, the toe is facing east.

Then we're kind of just south of the shoelaces. Okay, all right.

On the boot. So we're right, we're actually 15 minutes south of the

Mississippi state line. Oh, okay. Yeah, I see, okay. That's, yeah,

I've never heard anyone describe that they were from Louisiana in that way. Just south of the shoelaces, that's good.

That's right, my brother. So, well, you're not gonna come on here and like rag us about LSU -Arkansas game, are you?

That was a long way. No, I'm a Bama fan. Oh, okay. I was born and raised in a household that we had to all be

Alabama fans. So my dad was from Alabama and he was in the

Air Force. So we kind of traveled all over the place when I was young, but no matter where we were, we pulled for the tide.

So I've been a Bama fan, even through the very dark days. It looks like we're entering some dark days again, so.

Well, when you've had as much prosperity as you have had, I mean. That's right.

We're not gonna feel sorry for you. Yes, I'm not asking for pity either, that's for sure.

You merely adopted the darkness. We were born in it as Arkansas. That's funny.

So, okay. Well, I think more people honestly should know Tom Hicks and let's see, we've been connected on social media for a number of years and I was trying to think, was it the, which convention did we talk at just briefly there?

Was it the one in New Orleans a couple of years ago? I think that's right, a couple of years ago.

That's right. Briefly that one. And then just kind of followed you and so I'm appreciative of your ministry.

I think I've told you that a few different times and I just wanted to have you on today and talk about law and gospel and we'll get to that in just a minute.

But before we do, why don't you just tell us a little bit about who is Tom Hicks? Tell us about your church.

Tell us, your town of Clinton is basically the same size as our town.

So we don't always get to talk to a brother that's in a rural world like we are, but tell us a little bit about yourself and your church.

Sure, well, I'm married, we've got four children. My oldest is now 19 years old amazingly.

My youngest is seven and I got, I went through Southern Seminary for my seminary training and have a

PhD at Southern Seminary in historical theology with a minor in systematic theology.

I'm the senior pastor at First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana.

And I've been here now as the senior pastor for eight years. So I thank the

Lord for that. Our church is a second London confessional church.

So we're a Reformed Baptist church. The pastor before me, who's retired, but is still among us and preaches faithfully on Sunday afternoons when he's able is

Fred Malone. So some of the listeners may be familiar with Fred Malone. He wrote a book, The Baptism of Disciples Alone.

But the reason I mentioned him is because he faithfully taught the word of God, the whole counsel of God for about 25 years before I got here.

And so I inherited a church that is well -grounded in the truth, in the Reformed faith and understands the doctrines that we believe and knows how to live on them practically.

And so it's been my pleasure just to take the baton and keep going in the same direction. We have simple worship where we faithfully observe the regulative principle.

We practice church discipline. We have a plurality of elders. We really, we're the kind of church that used to be, if you were to go back probably a hundred years, maybe less than that, 70 years,

I bet it's a hundred years, would have just been the norm, would have been ordinary. Today, we're strange because we don't have any bells and whistles.

We've got nothing attractional. We're just, it's the

Bible, it's Jesus, and we love each other. And that's all we got.

Wow, yeah, that's, I didn't know about that history. That's encouraging.

You got anything there, Eddie? Yeah, I was gonna ask, so you talked about your work in historical theology.

Could you kind of give our listeners just an idea about maybe even a little bit of a definition here?

I think people usually think about biblical theology. They think about systematic theology. Do you kind of speak to that idea of historical theology and kind of what you studied in that?

Yeah, so historical theology is studying how the church studied the

Bible through history. So that's all it is, is it's where historical theology is looking at the great theologians, great pastors of the past, and studying their reflections on the word of God and the conclusions that they drew.

One of the benefits of historical theology is that you can see where the church kind of got off track sometimes, and they went off into potholes, and then the

Lord mercifully, graciously brought corrections back in. So it's this idea of the incursion of the kingdom of darkness into our theology, and then how the

Holy Spirit corrected that through raising up usually faithful godly men to preach the word, to refute it.

My own area of study is related to what we're gonna talk about today, and that is the law and gospel, which leads to the doctrine of justification.

It's only a clear doctrine of law and gospel that leads to the Reformed doctrine of justification, and that emerged, of course, in the

Protestant Reformation. And my study was in Benjamin Keech, one of our early

Baptist forefathers in England, who took on Richard Baxter, and Baxter was teaching essentially that you're righteous based on your works, and you have to keep

God's law personally and inherently to be righteous before God, before the tribunal of God.

And Baxter responded and said, no, that's not, sorry, Keech responded and said, no, that's not biblical, and it refuted him because some of his teachings were,

Baxter's teachings were creeping into Benjamin Keech's church.

So that's what I studied was Keech's law gospel theology along with Baxter and their covenant theologies and the way they practically pastorally tried to apply them in their congregations.

So it was kind of a compare and contrast that I did. That's helpful, that's good.

So what about the unbroken line of Baptist churches back to John the Baptist? Man, that would be interesting if that were real.

So we came out of English independency, right? That's what we were is, you know, the first Baptist church emerged.

They didn't even call themselves Baptists. They were first, they were Paedo -Baptists. And then they said, look, this is, baptizing our babies is not biblical, you know?

And so we're gonna be biblical and they formed their own church.

Jacob Lethrop Jesse Church was the first one in England, in London in the mid 1600s or so.

That's good, it's good to know our history there. And then the Southern Baptist Convention can really draw a line to being connected to, you know, to coming out of that.

I know there's different theories on where the Southern Baptist came from, but the roots

I think are undeniably Reformed Baptist. So from that. They really are.

That's right, brother, 100 % undeniable. And you can see that even by looking at Southern seminaries, confessional confession of faith, it's all there.

And it was, if you look at the abstract of principles, what you can see is what nobody disagreed on.

Cause that seminary, that early seminary could never have had a confession of faith that had anything in it that would have caused waves or disruptions in the convention or among Baptists in that time.

And it's clearly Reformed all the way down. Well, the

Southern Baptist Convention is doing a lot, is doing the opposite of what your church is doing right now, which is, you know, where you just say simplicity, faithfulness, and they're doing a lot of bells and whistles and extravagance.

But that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about law and gospel. And you've already kind of answered one question

I had, which one question I had is, hey, what got you into this? You've been posting about it a lot lately, but you've kind of answered that question in that it was your study.

And I was gonna ask you, you know, why do you think Baxter kind of gets a pass?

For me, early on in ministry, I read the Reformed pastor by Baxter.

And I found that, I've actually read through that twice. I found that like very convicting, you know, and like,

I wanna be that kind of pastor. But that was reading that before. And it was like, okay, this guy's one of us.

And then you start learning about him and you're like, wait a second, he's not really one of us.

So why does he kind of get a pass? I think that's it.

I think you just nailed it as he wrote a book titled The Reformed Pastor. But what a lot of people, so they think, well, this guy's reformed, he's one of us because of the title of the book.

But what a lot of people don't know is that that word reformed, as Baxter was using it, doesn't mean

I stand within the Reformed tradition squarely. It means sanctified.

So when he says the Reformed pastor, he means the renewed pastor or the holy pastor, you know?

So in your personal pastoral ministry, you've reformed your errors kind of a deal.

Not claiming anything like what we would mean by the word reformed. And another thing, just on the book,

I mean, Baxter, anybody could have good things to say here and there that are beneficial. And Baxter does.

He's not, he's a genius. Baxter's brilliant. He knows the Bible thoroughly. But I wanna tell you about that book.

You said you felt convicted. What he says is you have to, you know, if you're a faithful pastor, you will visit in the homes of all your people regularly and you will basically check up on them all and make sure they're all living straight as Christians.

And it's actually, I think it's a crushing burden to put on pastors to say, we've got, where does the

Bible say you've gotta do that? Anywhere. How can you prove from Scripture that what you need to do is visit in everybody's home?

It's a legalistic excess. And then if you couple that with, Baxter believed that they really, that a major motive to being justified before God in the present and at the last day is fear of hell, is a legal fear of condemnation.

And it's partly the pastor's job to instill that in the people. So you show up at their houses, your pastor shows up and he's checking on you to see if you know your catechism, to see if you're living a faithfully repentant life.

And he's basically having an in -depth accountability session with you. And the terror that members feel from that, he says is good.

And I think it's not biblical at all. And I can't imagine Paul doing that among all the houses of all the people.

He's certainly warned churches when they're getting into actual heresies and sins against God's law.

And that's faithful pastoring. But just to show up to any given Christian's house, maybe faithful, godly, old women and find out if they know the catechism properly, are they square before the

Lord enough? It's not the biblical method. So anyway. Yeah, just as a pastoral note,

I do think, which I'm in agreement with what you're saying. I do think as a general observation that pastors should know their church members better.

Then I feel like there's a real problem in many churches today that a lot of guys, and you kind of see this,

I guess you kind of saw this with maybe like the Steve Lawson mentality.

But that is, there's a lot of guys that they just want to preach and they don't want to know their people.

And so I think that is a burden that Eddie and I share. And I just wanted to make that clear, for anyone listening that like, yes, there shouldn't be an extra burden here from Baxter, but the point of knowing your people in a way that you love them and want to shepherd them and actually pastor them, not just preach to them, though that is certainly central.

But to know them, I think is an important aspect of pastoral ministry. Well, and Paul said that he had a public ministry and also that he had a house to house ministry.

He said that in Acts to the Ephesian elders, which so, look, I want the people, the members of my church to feel glad that their pastor's coming over.

Amen. To see them and be like, oh good, the pastor's coming and not feel afraid. And when

I have visited members in my church and I do try to visit in their homes personally, as a pastor,

I totally agree with what you said that we need to know the members of the church. I just read them a passage of scripture.

I ask them how I can pray for them. And I try always to encourage them in the gospel.

And then that's it. I'm not trying to shake them down or grill them or find out how, if they're sanctified enough, you know?

So I agree with you, brother. There's way too much non -pastoring, just preaching.

And that's too much in our reformed circles, that reformed pastors have been taught, and I mean that in the sense that we would normally mean it, but a lot of guys like us who are reformed have heard from people like Steve Lawson that pretty much preaching ought to be your ministry.

And that's not true. Our ministry is to shepherd the flock of God. And that's, preaching is one very important part.

But the other part, I totally agree with you, is being personally available to them and trying to know them individually so that you can shepherd their souls.

But that's, you know, under the gospel, not under the threat of the law.

Amen, yeah. You know, I was just thinking about how, you think in Hebrews chapter 10, we often go to verse 25 to talk about it.

People should come to church, right? Not neglect the gathering of the believers.

But there we're told that we ought to be encouraging one another and stirring one another up to love and good deeds.

And if we think about all that the ministry is, it is the preaching or teaching ministry.

Or if we go the other way, this kind of legalistic, you gotta do it exactly this way, be in every home and make sure that they're meeting all these different things.

It's becoming this work that you've got to accomplish. Instead of stirring one another up to love and good deeds, it's this kind of fearful thing that you were talking about,

Tom. So really encouraging to just point our people to, let's love one another.

Like if we're really understanding the things that the Lord is teaching us, the law of Christ, it's gonna cause us to obey his commands and love one another.

Amen. Amen, brother. So yeah, that's good, good, good. And we still really hadn't got to the point.

So I guess, I don't know now, brother, but it seems like I've seen, you correct me if I'm wrong, but it seemed like maybe the last three to four months kind of a re -emphasis on some of your social media stuff on law and gospel.

Maybe I just picked up on it and it's always been that way, but I kind of felt like I saw a renewal of emphasis on tweets and stuff about law and gospel and understanding it.

Is that true or is that always how you are? Or has there been a re -emphasis lately?

Yeah, so that's an interesting question. I think law gospel are the two parts of the word of God.

And so anytime we're getting off on something, it's always ultimate, it's gonna have something to do with a misunderstanding of the law and the gospel.

And of course, that's downstream from the doctrine of God himself, right? So God is central, who

God is and his triune essence and the Lord Jesus, but then one step downstream is gonna be law and gospel.

And so I've really seen all these social political issues, which I've also engaged as misunderstandings of law and gospel.

So as I've engaged that sphere, it's a law gospel problem. And problems in the church, misunderstanding women in the ministry and all this,

I see that also as law gospel. The left wants to frame it as, well, they're saved, they have grace, women do.

And so we should, God can call who he pleases and so we should let women in them.

Well, this is a misunderstanding of grace and it's a misunderstanding of law. So I frame everything in my own thinking as in law gospel terms.

And so, I see the progressive covenantalists over on one side,

I see their problem as a law gospel problem. I see the people over on the other side, our

Presbyterian or Paedo -Baptist brethren who are more like Doug Wilson types as that's a law gospel problem.

And so here recently though, it kind of kicked up again with I think a dear brother,

Mike Abendroth said that Baxter was a kook and you had some reform guys really responding negatively to that comment.

I think Baxter is actually being retrieved partly in his name being sanitized right now, partly for retrieving his political theology.

And so they're wanting to kind of bring him up again and say he's a good guy and let's look at his political theology.

And so we're not allowed to speak negatively of Baxter right now because of his repurposing.

And so there was a reaction against calling him a theological kook, but he was a theological kook.

I mean, he's brilliant. He's a brilliant kook. I'm not diminishing his intellect, but he was this eclectic amalgamation of basically every kind of theology you could imagine that he personally put together that is

Baxterianism. I mean, the Armenians wouldn't own him. The Calvinists, the real Calvinists wouldn't own him.

He wrote a book at the end of his life called, it was about how he titled it,

The End of All Controversy, as though his position was the ultimate and final solution to everything.

Anyone who's analyzed him says he's standing in the middle of everything in a bad way. So he's like, he's not an

Armenian, but he's not a Calvinist, you know? And he's really,

I think he's confused and ultimately is inconsistent. So he is a kook.

And so I basically jumped on Twitter and defended the statement that he was a kook. That's why

I saw it kick up again lately. And what's underneath that is a misunderstanding of law gospel. He blended them.

So if you blend the law and the gospel, what do you get if you mix two things together? You lose them both.

So to say law gospel theology isn't to say law bad, gospel good. No, law good, gospel good.

That's why we need to distinguish them so we can keep both and not lose them both.

We want both law and gospel. That's the whole counsel of God. So can you just, hey, like I said, we're a simple folk, simple podcast.

We got several various types of people listening. Could you just break that down for us from a lay level perspective?

Like you talk about law, gospel, okay. You wait, but you don't blend them, but you keep them.

Okay, could you just kind of walk through that from like a lay level perspective and just help our listeners to understand these categories, these biblical categories and how we avoid conflating them and how we rightly keep them distinct.

Yeah, so I guess I'll start with how it sounds kind of when you blend them. It sounds like God will give his grace to those who try their hardest or do their best.

God will accept you if you try. But then the word try is, first of all, it's wrong that God's gonna accept you if you try.

But what are we supposed to be trying to do? And this is where law gets messed up is sometimes a lot of fixations that God put there.

So try not to lust, try not to be angry in your heart.

Other times it becomes like try to be a good wife by learning how to make the blents or souffle.

You need to try to do something that God's word doesn't even say you need to try to do. And that's how you're godly.

You need to substitute a man -made standard that's keepable for God's law.

So the word try is wrong. Instead, the biblical word is do.

And what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to do God's law. And where is his law summarized is in the 10

Commandments. The 10 Commandments summarize the moral law of God.

And then we have also positive laws of the new covenant that we're supposed to keep like be baptized, take the

Lord's Supper, participate in the church in the way that the new covenant prescribes it.

And so the law of God is really the 10 Commandments as they're explained by the

Bible, but then also the commandments of the new covenant that are distinct to the new covenant.

All of that is law. And it doesn't say try. God never says, just try to do these things.

He says, do them, do them. And when you don't, you're in sin. Even if you don't do them a little bit, means truly we're always in sin.

And that's clearly what the Bible teaches. We all have remaining sin in us, which is why at any given moment, we still need, that's

Romans 7, where Paul's talking about that, that when he wants to do good, evil lies close at hand, and he does the thing he doesn't wanna do.

And so Christians are always still sinning against the law, which then throws us out of ourselves to the gospel.

So what is the gospel? The gospel is a pure indicative statement of what

Jesus has done. So if the law says do, the gospel says done.

Amen. It's done by Jesus. And what did Jesus, Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.

He was buried and he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. It's done. What is done? Well, your total redemption from sin against the law.

And he justifies you through his work of the gospel.

He declares you to be righteous, not based on your own righteousness, but on his, which you receive by faith only, not by works of the law.

But then also his redemption of people on the cross, the inward dwelling of the spirit to actually change you and reform and renew your heart so that you can learn to keep his law more and more, though never perfectly.

Right? And so that's sanctification. But in our sanctification, the standard is not try because how do you even know if you've ever done that?

The standard is do the law. And yet you're always falling short, but you can always be growing toward it, continually seeing your sins exposed, continually at the same time, going back to Jesus and putting on new obedience out of gratitude and joy, but not to be accepted by God or to be righteous before him in any sense, which is what

Richard Baxter did teach. And so - I think we might've lost you.

Can you hear me? You got me? Am I back? Yeah, I got you back now. Sorry, brother. What's the last thing you heard me say?

You had just talked about Baxter again, and then he just froze. Okay, so yeah, so we're supposed to be sanctified with God's good law as our standard, but it's his law that's our standard, not some relaxation of his law, which makes it easier to keep, you know?

Like, you know, I mean, examples of this would be, well, the Bible says not to lust. Okay, but that means never.

It doesn't say, now, it might be a good idea for you not to go see movies at all, maybe if you know that tempts you to lust, but if I make a new law that says no movies, that's legalism.

You're creating a human law. And if the standard is, you know, try not to lust versus do not lust, that's also a new standard.

So the Bible says, you know, don't commit adultery, don't lust, that means never. But if you do, what do you do with yourself?

You don't just try harder so that God will accept you. You go to Jesus who forgives your sins, you remember the cross, and then you seek to keep the absolute standard in your sanctification by grace through faith out of gratitude for the joy set before you.

So in short, here's what I would say, that a correct understanding of the law and the gospel humbles the sinner, and it shows us that there's nothing we can do to save ourselves, and we need

Jesus alone to save us. But also a correct understanding of the law and the gospel provides the right motivation to grow as a

Christian, to become more like Jesus and more obedient to his law. And what is that motive?

Well, the gospel is the motive. So why am I trying to obey God? Not so I won't go to hell, not so that I can save myself or be right before God, but my right motive in keeping the law is gratitude for all that he's done, joy in Christ, to grow in obedience to Christ so that I can enjoy communion with him more and more, the fullness of life more and more in his presence, and also to reflect his goodness and glory to those around me, and to do good to those around me in his name, so honor his name.

And so those are the right motives to obedience, not to save yourself, to avoid hell, or to be righteous before him.

So I'll give a little illustration of you're asking practically why this is important or how it works.

But so in the Christian life, the law gospel distinction sounds something like this. Imagine a sailboat.

Well, the sail on the boat is like the gospel that the wind of the

Holy Spirit utilizes to propel the boat. The rudder on the back of the boat is like the law that directs the boat.

Now, the thing to notice here is the rudder cannot propel the boat. Maybe just a little.

Like if you were to swish that rudder back and forth, you would not be using it for what it was designed for, and you might get some motion in some way, but it's not gonna really be the forward motion that you need.

The gospel is the means of propulsion by the Spirit, and the law guides and directs us in our

Christian life. And so we should never, as Christians, use the law to move us, like beat myself up.

Don't become angry. Don't become angry. Don't become angry. What's wrong with you?

Are you a real Christian if you're losing your temper? That's not how we motivate ourselves as Christians, by just beating ourselves with the law.

Yes, we need the law. Don't become angry ever, actually, not even a little bit in your heart. That's the law.

But the gospel, which says Christ died for that sin, and He's forgiven you of that sin, and He's never angry with you, and He's praying for you, and He's promised you an eternal inheritance, and He's given you

His Spirit. Don't you love Him? And won't you grow out of love for God, love for Jesus and all that He's done for you, and learn how to love like Jesus instead of be angry at others?

You see? And so, it's the gospel that propels our obedience, not the law. Yeah, no, that's encouraging to hear.

I grew up in kind of a context of, we want preachers to step on our toes, and it's like people want to feel convicted, but then it seems like their lives don't change, you know?

It's just kind of, I don't know if it's like that where you grew up or rural Louisiana, but that's kind of like the mentality in a lot of places.

And then, of course, the other, people wouldn't articulate it this way, but the other thing that we deal with, too, is antinomianism, just basically people, hey, look,

I've got grace. Jesus died for me, so it doesn't matter if I go to church.

Me and Jesus are good. It doesn't matter if I, you know, how I live, the things I put in my body, who

I sleep with, it doesn't matter, because I know the gospel. But actually, rightly understood, both antinomianism and legalism have the same problem.

Yes, and a right understanding of the law and the gospel that center us on Jesus refutes both antinomianism and legalism.

I mean, we believe in the law, the law of God says you must obey the

Lord as a Christian and learn to grow in your obedience. And if you trust the

Lord Jesus to save you from your sins, then you're gonna trust that his commandments are for your good, they're for your good.

Where does his law come from? It comes from his heart. He gives you his law as a gift of love to show you the best way to live before him and as a human being.

What it really means to live as a human is described by the law.

It says, I love you. And if you're persuaded, you'll be persuaded his law is good and good for you and a reflection of his own good character.

And so you'll be convinced that you'll wanna keep his commandments. That's so, it totally undermines antinomianism.

And then it undermines legalism because it says, basically all legalism does is it makes the law so that you can obey it to feel righteous.

So legalists are like, I come to church on Sunday, I don't go with the girls who do, I don't drink.

It makes up all these standards that are keepable, which is actually antinomian.

But then it feels righteous for keeping these standards. And the law and the gospel come and demolish that and it says, you are not keeping the standard of the law.

You're doomed. You are not obeying sufficiently, ever. Jesus, you need his mercy, you need his grace, every single moment of every day.

And so it humiliates the legalist and the proud legalist or the discouraged legalist says, here are all these standards that I could keep, but I'm not and so I'm depressed about it.

Well, the law and the gospel fix that too because it comes in and it says, no, you can't keep it.

And it's actually worse than you think. You can never keep it. You can never keep it and nobody around you is, but Jesus saves sinners.

And so you can trust in him and be encouraged. You talk about the idea of trying, trying your best.

There is a religion that teaches that. Mormonism teaches, try your best and Jesus will do the rest.

Grace will do the rest after you try. And that's not at all what the gospel is teaching.

That's not at all what Christianity is teaching. If there really is a sense, especially

I think in America today, maybe not just America, but especially here where we've got this contrast between kind of what you were talking about,

Quatro, this kind of subjective goodness. I'm a good person. I don't have to go to church.

I don't have to do righteous things. I'm a good person and the

Lord is gonna see that. And so I'll be okay. And then the contrast to that is we see this society just full of people that feel all of this privilege, right?

All of this idea of I'm entitled to, I can just do whatever

I want and I'm entitled to be accepted by God or I'm entitled to God accepting me, whether they're thinking into heaven or whatever their concept is, they've got this sense of, well,

I must be okay because I think I'm okay. And I think that's really, like you said, we miss that when we don't understand the distinction between the just requirements of the holiness of God and the offer, the true transformative power of the grace of God in the gospel.

Yeah, that's good. I think we could talk about this all day. There's so many thoughts I have, one about in the gospel,

I think a lot of things that we miss, rightly and I'm talking about the rural area of Arkansas is like we rightly emphasize, well,

Jesus died for my sins, he rose again. Amen, that's good. We should absolutely emphasize that.

But we fail at times to talk about, well, listen, before he died, he lived.

He fulfilled all righteousness. He kept the law of God, something that we cannot do and would not do, but Jesus has done that for us.

Another thought I had and any of these things you guys wanna weigh in, you can, but another thought I had is the very promise of the new covenant is that God will write his law on our hearts and by the way, when he says he'll write his law on our hearts, it's not some new law.

It's not like the law of Christ that is now different than the moral law as summarily contained in the 10 commandments.

That's what he's written on our heart. That's our desire. That's what we want to do even though we fall short and you mentioned

Romans seven and we fight the flesh every day, but that's our desire even as we rest in the finished work of Christ.

So all this I feel like is very practical in our preaching, for pastors listening, but it's also very practical in our

Christian walk. I think of the homeschool mom listening to this. God does not accept you based on your homeschooling -ness or your crunchiness or how much sourdough you're baking or whatever or dads.

God is not accepting you based on how well your children can recite the catechism or whatever.

God is accepting us on one basis only and that is the finished work of our

Lord Jesus Christ. So those are just several thoughts. We could talk hours on any of those, but anything you guys want to say to any of that?

No, brother, I think that's just fantastic. I completely agree with you and I'll just highlight the one thing you said about how in the new covenant, which

I think the right way to see the new covenant is that it is the gospel as a covenant.

So it is the gospel covenant. It's this covenant that redeems us. It's the covenant in which

God saves us and so it is the gospel covenant and in the gospel covenant,

God writes his law on our hearts and so this is an important thing to point out that we are not trying to separate law and gospel.

We're trying to preserve them both and they're intimately connected, you know? And so in the gospel covenant, one of the gifts of the gospel is you're going to want to keep the law more and more and you're gonna feel the conviction of the law actually more strongly under the gospel, but your motives are gonna be right or being renewed to keep it.

It's only by faith that you do it and amen to everything you said about it's not a new law.

It is, I mean, the context of that in Jeremiah 31, the writer of the

Hebrews is quoting in Hebrews 8 is that Hebrew would have understood that as the 10 commandments and in fact, if you look at the way it's written in Greek in Hebrews 8, when he says,

I will write my law on your heart, the word write is carve. You can set that up in Greek.

He will carve it. Well, what laws carved on anything? It was the 10 commandments.

Amen to all that, my brother. And that's a very important message and I really think that in Baptist circles, we have forgotten the 10 commandments, but the 10 commandments are

God's law. Yeah, we don't like the fourth one. That's what I've always found is like, everybody likes the 10 commandments except the fourth one, you know, and it's like, well, wait a second.

Anyway, that could be a whole nother episode too, but Eddie, you got anything? Oh, go ahead. Just say one thing about that.

Isn't that, wouldn't that be what the devil would do? He's an enslaved. Yeah. He's a tyrant.

He's a slave driver. And so the commandment the devil would attack would be the one that says, your

God tells you that you get to rest. Amen. Yeah, amen.

Eddie, you got anything? I do have one more thing I wanna bring up, but Eddie, you got anything? Well, one question,

Tom, and this may be too big thing. We may not have time for it. And if we don't, we can just, maybe we'll have back on to talk about it in the future.

But you mentioned kind of the different ways that these things have been thought about wrongly.

And we've talked a lot about the differences in Baptist covenant theology and Presbyterian covenant theology, but you mentioned progressive covenantalism.

So could you kind of not give a full definition of that, but just kind of what you were referring to as the distinction in the way you're thinking about the law of gospel and how the error you would see with the progressive covenantalism.

Yes. So one thing about that I've learned, just from my own studies and from talking to people about progressive covenantalism is that the thing itself is progressing.

So you can talk to progressive covenantalist A versus progressive covenant theologian, and you're gonna get some slightly different things going on there.

Some are better than others, frankly. You can't really paint with a very broad brush because it's a movement that appears to be in development still.

It used to be called new covenant theology, and now it's progressive covenantalism, and even there's a range there.

But the short of it does relate to the fourth commandment about the Sabbath, if you wanna get right to the root.

And it's that they do not hold that the moral law of God is summarized in the 10 commandments, such that all 10 commandments are perpetual, including the fourth commandment, which requires one day in seven as a day of physical rest and public worship.

They don't believe that. And some of the better ones will say, yes, that's a moral law, but the fourth commandment is moral, but they will relax it to the point of there's no day anymore.

This is not a day that's required. It's instead you're resting in Jesus and just rest physically whenever you want to, but you need to.

But God has designed one in seven as the cycle from the beginning to the end.

And I don't believe the New Testament authors ever envisioned that no longer apply, or said that, so I studied at Southern Seminary, and I was taught that all, that nine of the 10 commandments are repeated in the

New Testament, but the fourth commandment is never repeated. But I would challenge that.

I would actually say Jesus said. Yeah, sorry.

Yeah, I mean, the Lord Jesus Christ said, the Sabbath was made for man.

And technically in the Greek, it's the Sabbath was made for the man. And he didn't say for the

Jews, the man. And in Greek, I mean,

I think it implies the Sabbath was made for Adam, not

Adam for the Sabbath. And since we're all descendants of Adam, Jesus says,

I'm the Lord of the Sabbath. And all through the New Testament, he's talking about why would he spend so much time on the

Pharisees teaching them how to correctly keep the Sabbath instead of saying, well, it's abolished.

It's about to be abolished. And as soon as I die, it's going away. Instead, he spent a lot of time correcting misunderstandings about Sabbath keeping that were legalistic.

So I cannot comprehend that the

New Testament doesn't teach the Sabbath commandment because it very clearly seems to do so.

Well, it's interesting how one, I don't mean to speak of it negatively, but when

I say one little thing, but it's interesting how one little thing, not that it is a little thing, but it's interesting how one little thing, like you said, well, just one commandment, and that can actually set you on a trajectory to misunderstand so much.

And I love our progressive covenantalist brothers. I'm grateful. I link arms with them in many ways.

I'm not trying to cast them outside of Christianity or something like that. But it does become a serious problem.

It has, I've noticed, in some circles, and again, I can't paint with a universally broad brush, but there has tended to be a negative kind of view of the law in general.

One of the problems, if you have a negative view of the law, and I don't wanna, we could talk a long time about this, but if you kind of are reluctant to speak of law or to clearly define what the law is, is that some kind of standard has to take its place.

That's right, yep. God's law there, clear, here's what it is, then there's a vacuum that's created, and there's some sort of standard that implicitly starts to take its place, and God's law is replaced.

And then you have man's law in there. And so that's a concern, a practical concern

I have about New Covenant theology, is not defining the law leaves room for something else to come in.

Yeah, that's right. Well, the last thing I had, and you may not be able to talk about this much, but I know,

I don't know if release and all that kind of stuff, but I know a few weeks ago we had on Dr.

Sam Waldron, and I was very excited to learn about, you guys have a book coming out, so are you able to talk a little bit about that?

Tell us when that's coming out and what it is. Yes, this is a book titled

Theonomy, Old and New. And it's another law gospel issue, at least as I see it.

And it's being published by G3 Publisher, Scott Anuel asked us to write it, and it's some of the old stuff

Sam Waldron has done. And then I have a smaller section, a second part in the book at the very end, which is about Theonomy, New.

So the new versions of it, in which I address what's going on today.

Dr. Waldron addresses more of the historical problem, and I'm addressing the current one.

And basically, Theonomy is the idea that the Old Covenant judicial law is a universal blueprint for all nations.

So the United States ought to adopt the principle of the Old Covenant judicial law to have a perfect blueprint for government, and the legal system of the

United States. And the problem with that is that it neglects basically what we've been talking about, that actually

God's universal blueprint for human beings is the 10 Commandments, summarized in the 10

Commandments. And there are elements of that we can find in the judicial law, but we have to begin with the 10

Commandments and look for that in the judicial law, and not say that the judicial law is itself moral.

And so my critique would be a threefold division critique of it, that they're not accepting a proper distinction among the aspects of God's Old Covenant law, but then

Sam Waldron takes them on about their post -millennialism, and shows how biblical, and then he also takes on their alty view of the kingdom of God a little bit as well, which is that they have this view that if we were to adopt

God's Old Testament law in the United States, and there are enough people converted that we could kind of have the kingdom of God on earth here in some way, and that's not what the

Bible teaches. Jesus says, you can't say, if anyone says, look, the kingdom of God is there, it's there, don't believe him, because it's not visible, you know?

So I think the theonomists provide an easy solution that's simplistic to complicated problems in the

United States, and that's why it's so attractive. Now, when does this come out again?

Oh, it should be coming out early next year. I think probably by, should be coming out.

I have another book, actually, that's about to come out. I don't know if you know this, but it's titled, What is a

Reformed Baptist? And Founders Press is putting that out. And that's gonna, actually already up on the website.

And so it's gonna be part of their Reformation Day sale, and it's gonna start being publicly advertised very, very soon, probably today or tomorrow, even.

Yeah, that's great to hear, brother. And I deal a lot in it with these issues that we've been talking about, the moral law of God, the threefold division of the law, and I have a whole chapter on the law gospel distinction and continuum, and so I hope that can be useful to God's people.

Yeah, that's good. And you wanna give, just, you know, we're wrapping up, we've gone a little long, that's okay, that's how pastors do.

Do you wanna just give a quick plug for Covenant Con coming up in March?

People listen to this, it'll be November, it'll be a few months away, and you're one of the speakers this year.

So that's encouraging, that's exciting. You wanna give a plug for that? Absolutely, that's the

Covenant Conference put on by Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary, and it's on the law of God.

That's March, on March 13th, 15th, you can find, you can just look it up, type into Google, you know,

Covenant Conference, the law of God, you can find any other information. It's in Montgomery, Alabama, at Morning View Baptist Church, and Joel Beeky will be there,

John English Lee, of course, Dr. Waldron, Sam Waldron will be there. We'll have John Miller, who will also be speaking, and so I'm really looking forward to it, it's gonna be a great time.

Yeah, they got some of those lesser guys, but they got Tom Hicks, you know, so.

Right, yes, one of these does not belong, it's probably this one, actually. No, that's encouraging,

I'm grateful that you're going to be able to do that. I know you recently spoke at the, oh, is it, what's the church name?

Is it Grace Family, or what's the church? Baptist, yeah. Grace Family Baptist Church.

Right, yeah, and that's in Houston, Texas, and that was the Semper Reformanda Conference, and I spoke with James Dolezal on the doctrine of Christ, and the links to that should be up for watching those sessions.

We just went through the confession and talked about the doctrine of Christ person and his work, and it was a good time as well.

Well, thanks for coming on here with a couple of nobodies, we really appreciate you doing that and your time today.

I know as pastors, we only have so much time, but thanks for just speaking into our lives, as it were, and also to our listeners, and hopefully this has been a helpful episode.

I sure enjoyed it, brother. Thank you guys so much for having me. What a blessing to fellowship. I appreciate both of you brothers, in your heart and your faithful laborers in the trenches of pastoral ministry, that we need more men who wanna believe the

Bible faithfully and preach as in everyone like you out there, who's listening. Well, we wanna be churchmen, and I think we need more of those.

So may God use that for his glory. You have anything else, Eddie? That's all

I want. Yeah, I just wanted to say thanks. Thanks for the conversation, Tom.

It was good to meet you, and we really enjoyed it. All right. Amen, my brothers.

Amen as well. Sign us off, Eddie. We'll see you guys next week. If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

God's doing. This is his work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the poemos, the masterpiece of God.