The Whole Christ (part 7)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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So two weeks ago when I was here, it was actually two weeks ago, not two vague sessions ago.

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Two weeks ago when I was here I mentioned that we were really getting to this pivot point in the book where we were going to stop talking so much about legalism, which we talked about for,

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I don't know, six, seven sessions between Corey and I, and start talking a little bit more about antinomianism.

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And that's true, and that's what we're going to talk about today. We're going to start really defining what antinomianism means, looking at it in depth, seeing what some of the ramifications of antinomianism are, and probably

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I will mispronounce that word a few times over the course of the morning. The way

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Ferguson writes this book, he sort of sets the case as we did and explains what happened in Scotland and sort of a little bit of what the ramifications of that were, and then he really like plows down this legalism path for a while.

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And I mean, he's writing a book you have to pick, right? So he talks about legalism, but I think there's actually two reasons why he does that.

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And the first one, I think that any teacher who's being honest will tell you that usually for their first point, they have a lot more material, right?

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If you listen to Pastor Mike or Pastor Steve preach, point one is often like half an hour out of a 45 -minute message, and then points two and three get kind of added onto the end of it.

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And I think that with legalism, it's a lot easier for us to really understand what he's talking about.

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He puts an example out there and you're like, yep, that makes sense. It's concrete. There's particular things that he can look to and explain and stuff like that.

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And so with legalism, there's a lot more there, and it's also easier for us to understand.

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Antinomianism, it's not that it's difficult to explain, but it's a little bit harder to quantify in some ways.

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And so he starts with legalism, and I mean, he's a great writer. So at that point, you're seven chapters in, so you're like, well,

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I'll keep going. But yeah, so we talked a lot about legalism, but now we're going to be switching over and talking about antinomianism.

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So we have talked about it a little bit, and so what I'm not going to do is an exhaustive review of everything that we've talked about for the last two months, but I would like to kind of touch on what we have talked about with regards to antinomianism.

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So I will ask you, what is antinomianism? Who can give me a definition of antinomianism?

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Yeah, essentially, right? So it comes from anti, against, nomos, the law, right?

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So it's the idea of rejecting any role of the law in the life of the believer, right?

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The quote that I had read a while ago was this, it is a form of spiritual anarchy which rejects the law as having any place in the

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Christian life, whether as instructor or as assessor. Paul's teaching that Christians are free from the law is sometimes misunderstood as antinomian, but Paul reveres

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God's law and teaches believers who are free from the law as a system of salvation to keep it out of gratitude for salvation freely given, and because holiness is defined by the law, as defined by the law is the

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Christian calling. Antinomianism as a concept has been around since really the beginning of time.

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Cain rejected the natural law when he murdered his brother, but as a term, as a formal term, and we'll get into this a little bit more, the term antinomianism was coined by Luther during the

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Reformation to criticize extreme interpretations of Lutheran soteriology. Those are some nuggets for us.

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So, how does this manifest in the church? If we look around today or over the last 20 years,

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I guess, how do we see antinomianism manifest in the church corporate? Yep, yep.

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So, free grace, easy -to -believe -ism, non -lordship salvation is often coupled with antinomianism.

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Anything else? Right. Exactly. Right, which is, of course, directly in contrast with what Paul writes about in Romans, but who needs that pesky

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Bible? The idea is that we don't have to submit to the law at all if we have

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Christ because all is forgiven in him. So here's a question.

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When we looked at these two things, when we looked at legalism and antinomianism, and when we looked at sort of the story of the marrow controversy, how did antinomianism manifest in terms of the actual controversy itself?

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Does anybody know the answer to this question? It's kind of a strange question. Right, right.

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So you're getting there, right. So with regards to the Presbytery, we could clearly see legalism in their perspective, in their kind of interpretation, right, and it's exactly what you were saying.

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There was this idea that if a Presbyterian minister is going to preach the gospel to a group of people, those people should show evidence of fruit in their lives before you preach the gospel to them, which is interesting, right?

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And to show the hand a little bit, because I'm not really trying to keep things from you, the laypeople could not receive news about the character of God unless they showed submission to the law of God, right?

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That was the Presbyterian kind of perspective. That was the prescription of the Presbytery to their ministers.

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The idea was that the preacher wasn't to preach the grace of God unless there was evidence submission to the law, right?

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And then we talked a lot about exactly that thing. The character of God and the law of God, right, and this perceived separation between those two.

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Okay, anybody remember that? Separation of the law and the character of God. It's a really important thing for us to keep hold of.

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Well, I mean, there's a lot of problems with separating the law and the character of God, right?

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And so the question became, instead of how do I preach Christ and Him crucified, which would be

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Paul's mantra, right? And instead of that, it was how do

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I present the benefits of Christ, right?

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Instead of what we should be doing, which is how do I present the full, complete, unvarnished truth of the biblical picture of Jesus Christ, the

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God -man, it was how do I offer the benefits, the salvific benefits of Jesus Christ?

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And then when we moved on from that, because I don't want to spend too much time talking about legalism, that's my personal promise today, we found that this separation of law and of the character of God as the root of legalism was also what?

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It was the root of antinomianism, right? And that's why we talk so much about this problem of separating the law from the character of God, because ultimately, even though these two things are on complete opposite sides of the spectrum, they're both the foundation.

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They both have a common foundation. So how could that be? How could that possibly be? Does anybody remember any of the examples that we looked at over the course of a couple of weeks that kind of show that both legalism and antinomianism have the same,

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I'll say dad, because I'm a guy and I don't want to besmirch the moms in the audience, right? So we looked at, for example, the parable of the prodigal son, right?

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And the older son said, you know what, dad, forget it. I'm out.

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Peace out. I'm gone. Give me my money. I'm taking off. He didn't want to deal with the law. He was antinomian.

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And then he wasted all his money. He realized, you know what, maybe I made a mistake. He turns around and he tries to come back.

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And what does he do? He says, well, okay, I will subject myself to the law and I will try harder to work within the context of the law, completely forgetting that his father actually loved him, right?

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It became this sort of transactional relationship. And so his antinomian spirit with the same foundation became a legalistic one.

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And that was an example that we could use to see how both of these things have a common ancestor.

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All right, by separating the law of God from the character of God, we see legalism all over the place. The presentation of joyless submission to the law, right?

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So we saw that with the Pharisees, for example. The Pharisees essentially, just hear me out here.

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The Pharisees essentially idolized the law, the law of God. They idolized the law over the character of God, right?

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You cannot separate the two of these things. Legalism idolizes the law, antinomianism idolizes the free grace, this free grace characteristic of God.

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And they go together, you cannot separate them, right?

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And then we took a look at Adam and Eve and we saw really with Eve what happened. The law was, do not eat from this tree, right?

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Well, that's true. I mean, that's what God said. But when it was presented to Eve, it was presented as,

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I mean, look, it's a nice tree, it's in your garden, it has fruit on it.

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Why not eat from the tree? This seems unreasonable. And absent the context of, P .S. that entire garden that you're in was given to you by God who said, do not eat from this tree.

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It seems kind of harsh, right? Eve's like, come on, man, don't harsh my mellow, I want to eat from the tree.

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So she goes and she rejects God's law, antinomos, her antinomian heart was shown, and she eats from the tree, right?

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But it's, it only seemed like it was this, you know, weight on her because it was absent from the character of God.

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And then last week, Corey walked through some kind of necessary consequences of this, right? Truths and consequences of what this really means, truths that I think we know, but maybe we're not entirely comfortable with.

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We started with a quote from Samuel Rutherford, actually, when

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I was wrapping up two weeks ago, and I was halfway through my notes, we ended with a quote from Samuel Rutherford.

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Does anybody happen to know what this was? This is kind of a rough quote, anybody even remember that we talked about Samuel Rutherford at all?

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All right, at least they have one nod, okay. He said, reprobates, those who are not elect, have as fair a warrant to believe in Christ as the elect have.

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Reprobates have as fair a warrant to believe in Christ as the elect have.

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What does that mean? Sure, absolutely, right? And more to the point, it's talking about when the language is,

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I mean, it's sort of old English language, I suppose, but when the language is, reprobates have as fair a warrant to believe in Christ.

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It's absolutely true that left to themselves, nobody would believe. But what does that mean? As fair a warrant to, well, what is a warrant?

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Like in modern vernacular, when do you hear the word warrant? Yeah, yeah, so the police go get a warrant, and that does what?

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It gives them permission, right? So when Rutherford says, reprobates have as fair a warrant to believe in Christ as the elect have, he's basically saying, look, there is, we don't have more privilege to believe in God because we're elect, right?

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That's not true, right? We are given God's grace, right?

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And obviously when we talk about things like the response to the gospel and things like that, it's a little bit different, but let's not make the mistake of assuming that just because we got dressed up and came to church, that we've got more right to be here than in somebody who didn't, right?

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God alone is the one who makes the determination.

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It has nothing to do with us. There is nothing in us that qualifies us to receive the gospel, right?

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Not at all. And so that, that reminder we saw in the parable of the wedding feast, right?

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It says Matthew 22, and those servants went out, this is after the, the call essentially to Israel when they, you know, when they rejected him.

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We looked at the parable of the wedding feast, it says, and those servants went out, Matthew 22, 10, into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good.

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So the wedding hall was filled with guests, right? The gospel call is not reserved to the special people, okay?

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There is nothing in any one of us that makes us specially permitted, specially warranted to receive the gospel call, the gospel offer.

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So scripture is clear with the prescription that the gospel call is to be made to everyone. So, if that's true,

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I think it is, I think, I think we pulled that directly out of scripture. What can we say to the presbytery's charge that the merriment's position was antinomian?

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What do I mean by that? Let's start with step one. If it is true that the gospel offers to be given to all, what do we say to the presbytery that says, you can only receive the gospel if you've shown fruit in your life?

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Yes, I mean, in a Christian context, that's true, Erickson. It becomes legalistic, absolutely.

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So we see this Presbyterian perspective as legalistic. And the reason why I said from a Christian context is that we just have to be careful when we talk about sanctification, because you can make the argument that the

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Pharisees were looking for sanctification, right? But were they becoming more sanctified? No.

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So we just have to be really careful when we use that word, because the Pharisees absolutely were trying to obey the law, but they were doing it void of the character of God, right?

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So we just have to be a little bit careful when we say that. So the presbytery had a clearly legalist perspective, and they pointed to the merriment and said, you are being antinomian.

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Ferguson, as a matter of historical record, the merriment brethren held tenaciously to the teaching of the confession of faith.

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They believed that God's law remains as a rule of life for the Christian believer.

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So the merriment clearly believed that to some degree, the

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Christian was subject to God's law. And yet, because of their presentation, this group of people who were clearly legalist saw them and said, what you are doing is antinomian.

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Right. Absolutely. And as we go, and we're almost done with our review,

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I guess, we're going to look at three sort of strands of antinomianism, which is three different ways to look at it.

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Some people throughout history and the way that they approach antinomianism.

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And the really interesting one is the one I'm leaving for next week, because there's a lot to it. And I think we could spend an entire session just talking about the exegetical strand of antinomianism.

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That's a mouthful. But yeah, we'll talk a lot about that kind of thing there.

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We'll talk a little bit about it today as well. So perception,

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I mean, and that's really what I wanted to drive to, is that this accusation of legalism or antinomianism very frequently is really all about where you're coming from on the spectrum.

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Right. We talked about how when you're driving, anyone slower than you is a grandma and anyone faster than you is a knucklehead.

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Right. Well, if you're going 70, that's still true. If you're going 50, that's still true. It's all about perception in a lot of ways.

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I mean, there are certainly things where we can say, OK, textbook definition, you're a knucklehead or whatever.

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So here's the question. As we talk about perception, how do you suppose

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Jesus was perceived in the New Testament? He was perceived in both ways. OK, absolutely.

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The Pharisees, which is really, when we look at the narrative gospels of Jesus Christ, synoptic gospels, as it were, that was the word

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I was looking for. The overarching perception that we see is one of antinomianism. Bless you,

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Ferguson, again, Jesus made, here's a word on this one. Jesus made relatively few positive references to the law, ignored scribal shibboleths, on occasion spoke in almost violent language to the

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Pharisees, went to dinner parties with sinners and did not baptize anyone. After all, did he not encourage indifference to the law of Moses?

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So we think of, actually, would someone like to read from Mark chapter 2, verses 23 and 24?

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Right. So, and as this passage continues, we see here that the Son of Man is

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Lord even over the Sabbath, right? Were the Pharisees right or wrong when they asserted that it was not lawful to do this on the

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Sabbath? I mean, in general, we know that they were wrong, but in the context of the law, they were right.

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Exodus 20, do not work on the Sabbath. And Jesus kind of throws it back in its face and says, well, you know,

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David ate heads of grain, right? The Son of Man is Lord even over the

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Sabbath. And so if Jesus is rejecting this law or if he's healing in the temple on the Sabbath or if he's doing all of these things, of course they would think that he's antinomian, right?

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He's rejecting the law. Now, that's the perception. Question. Was Jesus antinomian?

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No. No, he wasn't. In fact, one could make the argument that Jesus is the only one who's consistently throwing strikes on that bowling lane that I will continually refer to because it's my favorite metaphor ever.

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So, as we look at antinomianism and what it really is, it is very easy to, but let us try not to get tripped up by the fact that legalists see anything less than their level of legalism as antinomianism, even if it's actually even more legalism.

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That was a text message. Sorry about that. So, that's review. Not bad.

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25 minutes. Getting there. Laser focused on antinomianism. So, let's dig into this.

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So, the term itself, I mentioned this before, it sprang forth from the time of Luther. Now, again, the concept of antinomianism obviously has existed for far longer, but depending on how much you know about Luther, depending on the person you talk to, some people kind of revere

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Luther, some people respect Luther, some people discard Luther. Nailed it, just kidding.

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But, Luther's theology was a little rough. And that's not to say it was right or wrong about certain things, but it lacked a lot of polish.

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It lacked refinement. And so, if you look at Luther's life,

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I don't know how much you know about him, I don't want to go into a treatise on Martin Luther, but as he was in the monastery, he was convicted and he was crushed by this deep sense of bondage.

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He, in fact, wrote a book called, what, The Bondage of the Will. And, as he began, so he was looking at the law of God and he was absolutely obsessed with the idea that he could not measure up.

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Good, right? But, what happened was, as he began to understand the grace of God, he began to apply this really rudimentary rubric or hermeneutic to his reading where he would read something and look at every passage and say, is this passage law or is this passage gospel?

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And he would really embrace those gospel passages because they gave him perceived freedom from the bondage of the will.

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And so, in his teaching, am I the only person who sees this fly?

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Am I just really tired? Okay. I'm losing my mind.

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As he would teach it, he appeared to be rejecting the law, becoming antinomian.

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Because he was talking about the gospel as freeing us from this law. It's no longer something that is over us.

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And what happened was, some of his contemporaries began to sort of take that and formalize it into a position.

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So, Johannes Agricola defined it as an abolition of any role of the law in the

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Christian life. Which is not necessarily what Luther was saying, but it certainly was perceived from what

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Luther was presenting. So, Agricola, Agricola, that was a great debate in the board game circles, debated at length with Melanchthon, who we've heard of.

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And that actually led these two men, Melanchthon and Agricola, to become sort of almost the figureheads of legalism and antinomianism in that time.

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And then, sort of the fringe groups of the Reformation began to sort of codify these beliefs and these teachings over the next hundred years or so of the

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Reformation. Does anybody happen to know, I have notes, I'm cheating, what the primary verse is in Scripture that the concept of antinomianism relies heavily on?

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There's a lot of sort of different strains of theology that have this verse or that verse and they really rely on that verse.

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Anybody happen to know? This is sort of a... No? Okay. Romans 6 .14. You do?

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Because you read the book? Good for you. Romans 6 .14. For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law, but under grace.

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So, like we said before, quite simply, antinomianism denies the role of the law in the

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Christian life. And there's many different kinds, I mentioned this before, or strands of antinomianism, as Sinclair Ferguson puts it.

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So, we'll look at two of these today, hopefully we'll get through both of them. I think we will. And then next week we'll look at the third.

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So the first strand that we will look at, excuse me, is called the dogmatic strand.

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The dogmatic strand of antinomianism. The formal definition of this, and this will be in the handout

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I promise, is that the proponents of the dogmatic strand of antinomianism, and I don't think they called it that,

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I don't know if these are names that Ferguson came up with, but they're helpful for bullets. They hold the view that the law of God is completely abrogated in its entirety for the believer.

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What does that mean? Abrogated is a fun word that should be used more. It doesn't apply at all.

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It's completely done away with. It's a view that's held by theologians like John Saltmarsh, and hold on,

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I have notes here. John Saltmarsh, John Eaton, Tobias Crisp. If any of those names sound familiar, you're better than me.

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Ironically, Ferguson recounts a story, actually at the beginning of the book, I went back and typed it out so I could read it to you.

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He recounts a story of when Thomas Boston, so we'll remember that there was the great debate at the

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General Assembly about the Presbyterian minister and the back and forth, which started this whole marrow nonsense, and Boston was sitting there with John Drummond and they were talking back and forth, and Boston mentioned that he had this book,

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The Marrow of Modern Divinity, and that's kind of how this whole marrow men naming thing sort of started.

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But the way the story goes, Boston also found a copy of Saltmarsh's book,

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Christ's Blood Flowing Freely to Sinners. And he wrote about finding these two books, and he says this,

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These two books, I reckon, had been brought home from England by the master of the house, a soldier in the time of the Civil Wars.

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Finding them to point to the subject I was in particular concern about, I brought them both away. The latter, a book of Saltmarsh's, I relished not.

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And I think I returned it without reading it quite through. So the leader of the marrow men identified the hyper -antinomian bent of John Saltmarsh and didn't even bother to finish reading the book.

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So, question. How do you think the life of the believer is supposed to be manifest in this dogmatic strand?

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How do you obey Christ if the law is done away with? There's no law anymore.

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So how do you obey? How do you become more sanctified? How do you, I don't know what.

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We talk about this a lot, especially in this age where so many things are fluid.

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How do you talk about, share, and submit to truth if you don't have an objective truth to talk about, share, and submit to?

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Yeah, so my response to that would be, please show up next week. So, yeah, when we talk about the exegetical strand of the law, of antinomianism, we're going to go into a lot more detail about that.

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There's this idea that there's the law at creation, the Mosaic law, and the law through Christ. And so we'll get into that in a lot more detail.

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There's a lot of truth to what you're saying with a little bit of the confusion there. Brian? No, but they're related to hyper -Calvinists, which is my next point.

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I think we'll see that more when we talk about the third strand of antinomianism, which, judging by time, we may or may not get to,

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Erickson. But we will talk about it. Right. So here's the thing about this, and this is why antinomianism is so tricky.

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A lot of the stuff that we can say to describe this belief system or this concept or this idea, unless it's particularly caustic, usually sounds pretty okay.

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And that's the tricky thing. And it's very difficult to make sure that we have a right understanding of the law of God and how we relate to the law of God.

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What's the first thing that people will say when we submit to Jesus Christ and Christ crucified?

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And the Bible's like, oh, do you wear blended fibers? You know, all that stuff. And it's important to understand why that's not a thing that we need to be concerned with.

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And so it's very easy to use the wrong terms or to be tricked, perhaps not maliciously, into using the wrong terms to describe some of this stuff.

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And so that's why this level of detail, while a little bit confusing, I think, and requiring of an outline of which

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I will repent once more, is something that I think is really, really worth looking at.

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So sort of like, do you have anything else, Brian? I mean, your hand's not even up, but I'll ask anyway.

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Sure. Totally. No, I don't think you're way off at all, right? I mean, Brian's hand,

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Brian's got the whack -a -mole hand going now. I think you're right on. I think you're right on,

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Brian. Right. Totally true. Yep. So, okay. So we're getting ahead of myself, which is always a good thing.

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I like that people are thinking past me. It's good. But so most frequently this kind of antinomianism is associated with hyper -Calvinism.

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The idea in this theological perspective was that the spirit indwelled the person to the point where they were doing the things the spirit would have them do.

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It is the indwelling of the spirit, not the written law, that rules and guides the Christian life.

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So, Corey, will you read Hebrews 10, 14 through 16 for me, please, while you're flipping to that?

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As with so much of this, it sounds kind of reasonable that we would say the spirit indwells the person to the point where they're doing something, right?

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Because that's true. But it represents this almost like an... I'm going to get a face from Steve on this one.

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It's almost like an overreaching of God's sovereignty, which is what we see in hyper -Calvinism, right?

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I mean, we are not chess pieces that God moves around on the board, right? He is sovereign over us to that degree, but that is not how we operate.

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Corey? Hebrews 10, 14 to 16. Okay. So, the writer of Hebrews is citing the

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Old Testament prophet Jeremiah in... I think it's 15.

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I don't have the numbers. This is the covenant that I will make down to their minds. And yet, in verse 14, it says, "...for

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by a single offering he has perfected for all time." Who's the he? I'm just making sure we're following along.

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Okay, good. So, Jesus has done this thing that we can relate to with some

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Old Testament scripture. So, there is a clear connection between the first covenant, the

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Mosaic covenant, what we see here, and the Holy Spirit doing what?

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What does it say in verse 16? In verse 16 here, putting the law on the heart.

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That's interesting. So, Romans 7, which

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Brian mentioned before, is basically the chapter that anyone who is arguing with an antinomian should just read and quote.

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It says in verse 12, "...so the law is holy, and the commandment is holy, righteous, and good."

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So, as we talk about the law in terms of the Christian life, I have really one question, which is, and this could have been clearly defined, and I think clearly was defined in the

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Gospels. Did Jesus Christ come to abolish the law? No.

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Did Jesus Christ come to fulfill the law? Yes. He could easily have said,

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I have come to abolish the law. It's one word. There is perspicuity to scripture for a reason.

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He did not come to abolish the law. In fact,

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Matthew 5, Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. Oh, okay.

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I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot will pass from the law until all is accomplished.

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If the law remained, albeit fulfilled through Christ, it must still apply in some way. It could not be, as the dogmatic antinomians would declare, completely abrogated or removed or abolished.

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Ferguson again. Hyper -Calvinistic antinomianism placed such an emphasis on the provenient, eternal, electing, distinguishing grace of God that any emphasis on the place of the law seemed prejudicial to it.

34:36

In one sense, they were operating with an over -realized personal eschatology as though the strong and subtle influence of sin had been destroyed.

34:44

Did you catch that last part? I'm going to.

34:51

In one sense, I think it was you that basically alluded to this earlier. In one sense, they were operating with an over -realized personal eschatology as though the strong and subtle influence of sin had been destroyed.

35:15

Right, exactly. Now, wasn't that, Brian, you were saying that they basically believed they couldn't sin anymore, right?

35:21

It sounds to me like infused righteousness, right? That would be kind of a

35:26

Catholic concept. I mean, it could be kind of hyperbole on the part of Ferguson here. I don't really know.

35:32

But if you think about this kind of thinking, right, what this kind of thinking would lead to,

35:41

I mean, well, you tell me. If these folks believed that there was no sin in their life, that the subtle influence of sin in their life was destroyed, what would that lead them to think,

35:52

Steve? Right, right. And remember how I said before, how are we to subject ourselves to the truth, that the truth is not outside of us, right?

36:03

And then we, you know, this kind of refers in some ways to, I think, this thought experiment that I like to do with myself to remind myself about the character of God, which is, yes,

36:12

I do that, I'm weird. Does God only do right things because God only does things that are right or because whatever

36:21

God does is by definition the right thing? Right? You follow me?

36:28

The answer is yes, right. But on the flip side, we're talking about these people who believe that, you know, if they believe they have no sin in their life, they've polluted their minds to believe that whatever they're doing is fine or they're going to have to convince themselves that whatever they did was fine and it's almost the same thing but in reverse, right?

36:47

So, it's tricky, right? I mean, these people are going to convince themselves that they're not sinning, even when they probably are, and or they're going to see people who are sinning and what are they going to think?

37:02

Total judgment, total judgment, right? They're going to, you know, they'll be the elite or the extra chosen, right?

37:08

Hence this idea of hyper -Calvinism, right? I mean, if I know anything by having children,

37:17

I don't know much, it's that they magnify sin in my own life. It is really easy to see sins in other people, right?

37:28

I won't give you particular instances because, you know, Fifth Amendment and all, but there have been many times when

37:35

I will see one of my kids doing something. I'm like, you're a knucklehead.

37:41

And then Anitra, loving, doting, and wonderful wife that she is, well, without knowing that I'm thinking in this, you know, contemptuous way of my children, say, oh, that's cute, that reminds me of you.

37:56

Right? Dang it. But without that feedback loop and the acknowledgement that there could be sin in our lives, we become sort of blind to this idea, right?

38:12

And we become, these types of people would become incredibly arrogant.

38:20

So, that was the first strand. And we are completely out of time. That's okay. I have next week.

38:26

I'm teaching twice in a row. I got this. Are there any questions? Because I know this is kind of weird stuff, but I think it is very valuable.

38:34

Are there any questions so far? I think it's, I'm going to go with,

38:39

I'm going to punt on it and say case -by -case basis. Steve? You punted too.

38:45

Awesome. Okay.

38:52

I mean, I don't think my, it was extra biblical, but not a -biblical. All right? So, okay.

39:00

So, the next two strands of antinomianism are the exegetical strand of antinomianism and then the experimental strand of antinomianism, which is a little bit less,

39:11

I think, definitive and particular and a little bit more convicting.

39:18

So, there you go. So, I'm going to wrap it up here because it is 10 of, and there is a really unhappy child.

39:26

Awesome. Good job. Well, I'm glad it's here and not at our house yesterday. Any more questions before I close?

39:36

Okay. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for this morning. Thank you that we can come together and look at your word and look at really this idea of legalism and antinomianism.

39:46

I just pray, Father, that you would help us to continue to study this, not so that we would be fatigued by our study, but so that we would have a right understanding of your law and how we are to react to it, how we are to embrace it, and how we are to teach it to others.

40:01

I pray, Father, for this morning, for our worship service, that you would just bless our corporate worship together in hearing the gospel preached from Pastor Steve to the music that we sing.

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I pray that you would give him wise words and that you would watch over him and keep him from saying anything that he should not.