Reformed Baptist Distinctives

Reformed Theology and Baptist Distinctives

Every Sunday from the pulpit I say, welcome to Hope Reform Baptist Church. And I use that word, two words, reformed and Baptist. So the question becomes, what does the word reformed and Baptist mean? Okay, so I use the term reformed and Baptistic, right?

So everybody thinks that, oh, if you're a Calvinist, you're reformed. So what is Calvinism? Calvinism is holding to the doctrines of grace, to TULIP, total depravity, unconditional election, limited atonement, irresistible grace, and perseverance of the saints.

That's Calvinistic theology, okay? But reformed theology goes much further than Calvinistic theology. So Calvinistic does not necessarily mean reformed, okay? All reformers have Calvinistic doctrine. They are all Calvinists, but not all Calvinists are reformed.

And we're gonna go through what the distinctives of reformed theology are this morning. So there's gonna be seven distinctions that I make. Actually, there's an eighth one there, and I couldn't come up with a C.

It's called the regulative principle of worship. So all reformers hold to the historic creeds of the church, so we're creedal. The historic confessions of the church, so we're confessional. They hold to covenantal theology, Calvinistic theology, TULIP, and the five solas.

They are Christ-centered. Christ is the center of all of our theology. We hold to keeping the commandments, not for your salvation, but as a reflection of the change that God's done in your heart. We're cessationists, which means that we believe that the apostolic sign gifts that were throughout the book of Acts and the New Testament have come to a close.

We have the completed canon of scripture that gives us everything that we need for salvation and life in Christ. And then we hold to the regulative principle of worship. Now, just to let you know, we could do a complete whole lesson on each one of these topics, and we have done some of these in the past, the five solas.

In fact, I did a series on, if you go onto the Reformed Rookie website, you can go through the five solas. I'll put up a link in the description so you guys can follow along. So those are the distinctives of Reformed theology.

The Creeds and Confessions of the Church

Now, why are we Baptistic? The three Baptistic distinctives are, again, three Cs. Credo, stands for believer, I believe, that's believer's baptism. Congregational, which is in terms of church government, and complementarian, okay, as opposed to egalitarian.

So we don't believe that women can hold the office of pastor. It doesn't mean that women are not equal to men. Men and women are equal in God's sight. It's just the role that office of pastor is not to be held by a woman.

The same way the role of mother is not to be held by a man, even though the world is trying to change those distinctions and redefine what God has defined already. All right, so we got a lot of ground to cover, and I pulled this information from a lot of different sources online.

It wasn't just one source. It was from Lagos and several online articles. So I didn't footnote all of them, but just know that this is from several different sources. So the first distinction is credo.

We hold to the historic creeds of the Catholic Church, like the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Chalcedonian Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. Now, first, you might get upset that I used the term Catholic.

The word Catholic means universal. We are not Roman Catholic. I call them Romanists because they are not the Catholic Church. They are the Romanist Church. They departed from the faith, not us. There's nothing in the scriptures about purgatory.

There's nothing in the scriptures about worship of Mary. There's nothing in the scriptures about the bodily ascension of Mary into heaven and all these other things that they add, the teaching magisterium of the church being infallible.

These are all things they add to the scriptures. So we hold to, we are the Catholic Church. Don't give them the benefit of saying that they are the Catholic Church. We are. They've departed from the faith.

So we hold to the creeds, the historic creeds of the church, and we recite the Apostles' Creed the first Sunday of every month. The term creed is derived from the Latin word meaning I believe, credo. Creeds are considered authoritative pronouncements that set forth the central article or tenets of the historic Christian faith.

They are what you must believe in order to be orthodox. In order to be an orthodox Christian, you must hold to the creeds of the church. The creeds of the church are not infallible, but they are correct in as much as they reflect the infallible teaching of the scriptures.

The creeds were written with several purposes in mind. First, they corrected various heresies, profound doctrinal deviations from scripture that had arisen at the time. The Athanasian Creed was written in response to Arianism.

That's what Jehovah's Witnesses believe, that Jesus is not God, okay, he's just a man given authority by God. So the creeds actually were written sometimes in response to doctrinal levers that were being put forth in the church.

Second, the creeds affirm essential Christian truths. The Athanasian Creed, which I just cited, affirms the truth of the Trinity, Christ's incarnation, his resurrection, ascension, his second coming, and final judgment.

Creeds, therefore, have an appropriate and critical use both in Christian instruction as well as in worship services. Creeds also help us to identify what is essential doctrine from peripheral doctrines.

There are secondary doctrines that are not essential to salvation. We're gonna talk about one of them, baptism. We baptize believers, Presbyterians, and other denominations, Lutherans baptize babies. That's not an essential Christian doctrine, okay, so we'll go through that.

So that's the first distinctive, reformers are creedal. The next distinction, where is it? There we go. The next distinction is confessional. Reformers hold to one of the historic confessions that came out of the Reformation.

In other words, the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Belgic and the Heidelberg Confession of Faith, reformers hold to one or another one of those confessions.

So let's learn what a confession is. The reformed confessions represent the considered, prayerful, exegetical, redemptive, historical, theological, and practical judgments of the reformed churches on the most important issues facing the churches in the 16th and 17th century.

You gotta remember, the Reformation happened because there was an issue with the Roman Catholic Church. They were putting forth doctrines and holding people to things that were not in the scriptures. In fact, they burdened John Knox for printing the scriptures in the language of the people, to stop the spread of the scriptures.

So Romanists usually tell you, the only reason you have a Bible in your hand is because we gave it to you. And I say, no, you burned John Knox at the stake for trying to print Bibles. You didn't want it in our hands.

So this was a move back to the scriptures. The confessions are not systematic theologies in miniature. They are conclusions and statements about what Christians ought to believe and how they ought to practice the faith.

So the creeds tell us what essential doctrines are, what you must believe. The confessions tell us what you ought to believe. Within Christianity, there are differing opinions about some things in scriptures.

That's why you have different confessions. We hold to the 1689. So the confessions are what you ought to believe. The creeds are what you must believe. They represent theology, piety, and practice of the Reformed churches across Europe and the British Isles in the classical period of Reformed theology.

Many of these documents have been adopted and modified by contemporary Reformed churches as they continue to confess and practice the historic Reformed faith. We hold to something called semper reformanda, always be reforming, always be moving back to the scriptures if you see that the church is straying or certain people are moving away, you bring them back to the scriptures, semper reformanda.

Covenant Theology and the Federal Headship of Adam and Christ

So we have creedal, we have confessional. Next, we're gonna have covenantal. The Reformers are covenantal in their theology. In other words, they view the Bible through the covenantal framework that God established in his dealings with mankind.

God deals with mankind through covenants, not periods of time or dispensations. And this comes into sharp contrast with dispensationalism, which deals with periods or dispensations of time rather than covenants.

So we look and we see the covenant with Adam, the covenant with Noah, the covenant with Abraham, the covenant with Moses, the covenant with David, and then finally, the covenant with Jesus and the church.

And we see that God deals with us through covenants. They look at it and they look at Adam and they say, well, that was the age of innocence. And then Moses is the age of the law. And then David is the age of the kingdom.

And now we're in the age of grace. They see the different ages where God never talks to us with regards to ages, he talks to us through covenants. And Jesus doesn't fulfill the ages, he fulfills all those covenants.

They all point to him in some way, shape or form. So we see this as a big distinction. They also see a difference between Israel and the church. We look at the church and we recognize that within, I'm sorry, we look at Israel and we recognize that within Israel, there were believers, the called out ones.

It's the same thing when we get to the new covenant, we have the called out ones. The church is spiritual Israel, the Israel of God. Now they were still the nation of Israel, they were still bloodline Jews, okay.

There's a distinction that way. But as far as the church is concerned, Acts chapter seven, Stephen says, as they stoned him, he talked to them about the church in the wilderness. There was a church, a set of called out believers in the old covenant that now gets passed on to the new covenant under the new covenant regulations, not the old, okay, enough of that.

So they hold the covenant theology, which is also called federal theology or federal headship. And it's a hermeneutical framework that seeks to understand the Bible according to its covenantal structure.

As Dr. Sproul frequently observed, reformed theology is covenant theology. Every time you hear something in the scriptures, you're hearing you are either in Adam or you are in Christ. All right, they're the federal heads.

Adam is the federal head of the fallen human race. Jesus is the federal head of the regenerative, a regenerated human race, okay, those born of God's spirit. Reformed theologians have historically identified three overarching covenants in the Bible, the covenant of redemption, the covenant of works, and the covenant of grace.

And I don't have enough time to go through all these. Like I said, we could do sessions on each one of those covenants. Books have been written on each one of those covenants. So finally, in brief, covenant theology teaches that God has established two great covenants with mankind and a covenant within the Godhead to deal with how the other two relate.

The first covenant in logical order is called the covenant of redemption. It is the agreement within the Godhead that the Father would appoint to his son Jesus who would give up his life for mankind and that Jesus would fulfill that.

So what we have is God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit covenanting together before the creation of the world. The Father gives the Son a group of people. This is, in old covenant terms, a way of betrothal, a covenantal marriage, an arranged marriage.

So the Father chooses a bride for his son and gives those people to Jesus. Jesus willingly comes into the world, dies on behalf of the bride he loves, and takes their wrath upon him. And the Holy Spirit regenerates them and metaphorically walks them down the aisle in preparation for the wedding supper of the Lamb.

It's Father, Son, and Holy Spirit working together to bring about the salvation of his people.

And it's unbreakable.

It's beautiful.

It's the greatest love story you'll ever be a part of. Whereas in other theologies, you have God the Father who chooses a group of people in Christ before the foundation of the world. Then you have Christ dying for all of mankind, trying to save them, and the Holy Spirit wooing whoever he can to Jesus in hopes that they repent and trust in him.

It's a fractured Godhead. In reformed theology, you have a cohesive Godhead that does not try and fail to save his people. I never saw the word God and try in the same sentence in the scriptures. God has never tried anything.

You know what God does? Whatever he pleases in the heavens and the earth and beneath the earth, and none can stay his hand or say, what have you done? This is a God who doesn't take no for an answer. He conquers, he subdues your heart and brings you to Christ.

Praise God, because we never would. That was a little preaching in the middle of this, right? Covenantal, so we're covenantal. So we're creedal, confessional, covenantal. Next, we're Calvinistic, and this is the one where everybody thinks, oh, all Calvinists are reformed, and that's not necessarily true.

So commonly known as TULIP, the doctrines of grace are what define a believer as Calvinistic. They highlight the inability of man and emphasize the power and the glory of God. So every time I read the scriptures, I see over and over and over again what man cannot do, right?

Man cannot submit to God's law, nor will he do so. Man cannot do good. Man cannot seek after God. Man cannot, cannot, cannot, and I always see what God can do. God can do whatever he pleases. God turns the king's heart in his hand like a watercourse wherever he pleases.

I see what man can't do and what God can do, and that's what the doctrines of grace represent. However, there's competing doctrines that keep telling me about what man can do. Men can repent, men can believe, men can keep God's commandments, and God's a gentleman.

You know, he can't violate their free will. So any theology that tells you about the power and the ability of man and diminishes the power and ability of God has to be rejected.

Reject that.

God does whatever he pleases, period, end of report. How can the impotent, sinful creature do whatever he wants and make salvation possible in and of ourselves? We can't. It's the pride of man that wants to push that forth.

Read the scriptures with a critical eye and see all the inabilities that God portrays on man and all of the ability and the sovereignty and the power that we read about God in the scriptures. There's no comparison.

So Calvinism is the theological system associated with the reform of John Calvin that emphasizes the rule of God over all things as reflected in its understanding of scripture, God, humanity, salvation, the church.

In popular vernacular, Calvinism often refers to the five points of Calvinistic doctrine and in its broader sense is associated with reformed theology. So in order to be reformed, you would need to be a Calvinist but you don't, if you're a Calvinist, that doesn't necessarily mean you're reformed.

You may not hold to a creed. You may not hold to a confession and some of the other things we're gonna go through. In fact, a new term came out in the last 25, 30 years called New Calvinism. So you could be a Calvinist and charismatic.

You could be a Calvinist and egalitarian. You could say that women could hold the office. That's not reformed. Could be Calvinistic but it's not reformed. Big difference. The doctrines of grace were not created to summarize what the reformers believe.

Rather, they were created to refute the five points of Arminianism put forth in the remonstrance. And the word remonstrance literally means an expression of opposition or protest. So where did Arminian doctrine come from?

Jacob Arminius. He was a teacher in Germany somewhere and what he did was he was teaching his students about his understanding of theology and they came up with the five points of Arminianism. Now, the church heard these five points and disagreed with them and said, no, no, no, we have to have a meeting, a synod.

So they had a synod, they examined all the doctrines that Arminius was putting forth and came up with five points of refutation to each of their five points of doctrine. So the five points of Calvinism are not what Calvinists put forth to express their doctrine.

It's the five points that they put out to refute the errors of Arminianism. So don't let an Arminian say, oh, you guys created this system. You guys created this system. We just came along and corrected you.

That's all, nice and easy. These five points are a summary of the canons of Dort which in turn were the judgments of the synod of Dort in opposition to Arminian teaching. Any questions about that?

Okay.

All right, so that's another distinctive, the doctrines of grace. Next is the five solas and we went extensively through this. I did a five-part series. Again, I'll put the link in the description if you wanna go through them.

They write books on each one of the solas. So the five solas of the Reformation which distinguish the reformers from the teaching of Rome, remember this was in opposition to Rome, and they include sola scriptura, scripture alone, sola Christus, Christ alone, sola fide, faith alone, sola gratia, grace alone, and soli deo gloria, to the glory of God alone.

So the doctrines that Rome was putting forth became known as the plus doctrines. So you needed scripture plus the teaching magisterium of the church. You needed Christ plus the intercession of Mary. You needed faith plus some kind of works.

You needed grace plus what the church taught in addition to that. And it wasn't to the glory of God alone because if man has some part in it, he shares in some of the glory. So the reformers were emphatic that God gets all the glory because God did all the work.

He's the one who redeemed you. You don't add to the finished work of Christ. The moment you do, you ruin it. You ruin it. So these five statements of the evangelical faith lay at the center of what distinguished the theology of the Reformation from the theology of the Roman Catholic Church in the 16th century.

The five solas form the nucleus of the evangelical faith. They not only capture the gospel of Jesus Christ and explain how the gospel takes root in the sinner, but they also define where the authority of that gospel resides and to what end the gospel is preached and proclaimed.

Now we have what's known as the formal cause of the Reformation and the material cause of the Reformation. The formal cause of the Reformation was what? Sola Scriptura. It was a question of authority.

Who has ultimate authority? We say the scriptures. They say the Roman Catholic Church. Scriptures are infallible. The Roman Catholic Church isn't, although they claim it is. The second cause of the Reformation is called the material cause of the Reformation.

This is how a sinner is made right in the eyes of God. We say it's by faith alone. They say it's by faith plus works. Works are roundly condemned as the basis of salvation in the Bible. You are not saved by your good works.

Your good works are a reflection of what God has done in your heart. You were saved for good works, but not by good works. Taking flight in the 19th and 20th centuries, the five-fold summary became shorthand, the shorthand version of what is known as Reformed theology.

This description of the Reformed faith came later, but it still captured the core of the gospel in all its graciousness and Christ-centeredness just as it is revealed in the scriptures. So you want your doctrines to give glory to God and keep Christ at the center.

And I think that's actually our next distinction, distinctive. Reformers are Christ-centered. The Reformed doctrine emphasizes and highlights the person and work of Christ over and above the efforts, works, or will of mankind.

Jesus himself said, the scriptures testify of me. Moses wrote about me. So when we see on the road to Emmaus, Jesus speaking to them and opening their eyes and explaining to them everything that the prophets wrote and how it all pointed to him, we now look back in the Old Testament and the prophets and the law, and we see how Moses and the prophets wrote about Jesus.

Everything points to him. Jesus is the end of the law for all who believe. That doesn't mean the law's gone away. That word end means the target. In other words, all these things were pointing towards a target.

Jesus was the target and he's here. So he was the fulfillment of the law and the prophets. Everything is centered on him. Christ is everything to the Reformed believer. Christ is all and in all. The Holy Scriptures teach us to count all things but laws for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my Lord.

Anybody wanna tell me what the definition of eternal life in John 17 three is? This is eternal life that they may know you, the one true God in Jesus Christ whom you've sent. So the sum and substance of eternal life is knowing God and Jesus as Lord.

Where Rome wants to win you to their church, an evangelical Christian wants to win you to Christ. Now where you fellowship is very important but I'm not looking to win you to my church, I'm looking to win you to the Lord of my church.

Reformed theology is entirely God-centered and here we clarify that it is centered on the triune God who comes to us through the only mediator, Jesus Christ. Rome would set up another mediator, a mediatrix, Mary.

The Puritans portrayed the gospel as the greatest love story ever told, the Father's heavenly match of his perfect son with his fallen sinful bride, the church. They traced in glowing detail Jesus' mediatorial office as the prophet, priest, and king of his people.

The knowledge of Christ is a topic of immeasurable glory and as Ephesians three says, the unsearchable riches of Christ. Why would you stop studying about Christ and start studying about his mother.

When his riches are unsearchable?

Continue to pursue Christ and no one else. He is preeminent before all things. He is what we are focused on. Thank goodness. Okay, so that was another distinctive. The next one is gonna be commandment keeping and the law.

Commandment Keeping and the Law

Now we're not saying that you have to keep the commands in order to be saved. The Reformation was founded on grace and not upon law, yet the law of God was not repudiated by the reformers. John Calvin, for example, wrote that what has become known as the threefold use of the law in order to show the importance of the law in the Christian's life.

So the moral law or the 10 commandments that God reveals in scripture is always binding upon us and includes the Sabbath, the Lord's day. So when we look at the moral law, we recognize that that was a creation ordinance and it includes the Sabbath day.

That's why we're here on Sunday, right? That's why we encourage people to come out on Sunday. If you're avoiding the Lord's day, when are you gonna eat the Lord's supper? On the Lord's day, right? Our redemption, remember, is from the curse of the law, not from our duty to obey it.

So we are redeemed from its consequences and its penalties, but that doesn't mean the law goes away. Oh, we don't need to keep the law anymore.

Wrong.

We are justified, not because of our obedience to the law, but in order that we may become obedient to God's law. To love Christ is to keep his commandments. First John, John says, sin is lawlessness, right?

Do you think people still sin today? Yes, that's called lawlessness. So the people who are telling you that there is no more law, you could tell them, great, that's lawlessness. That's sin. The law is in play in the sense that that is our standard.

Our standard doesn't go away. The consequence for not hitting this standard goes away. Praise God, because nobody can fulfill it. Reformed theology is not antinomian, anti-no more, no most law. We are not no law people, okay?

The law serves as a restraint, a rule, and a reflection. And again, I did a 45 minute video on the threefold use of the law, and I'll put that in the description box. So we have covenant, covenant keeping, I'm sorry, commandment keeping.

Cessationism and the Sufficiency of Scripture

The next one is cessationism. Cessationism refers to the theological view that certain spiritual gifts mentioned in the New Testament, specifically gifts such as prophecy, healings, tongues, discerning of spirits, have ceased or passed away at some point in antiquity, usually at the closure of the canon or the death of the last apostle.

Now, some who are Calvinists and hold to the ongoing gifts of the spirit would say, no, no, no, we're still reformed. But we would have to say, how can you still hold to the gifts of the spirit and the revelatory gifts if we have the completed canon?

If we have the completed canon, we don't need any more revelation to tell us what we need to do. If that's true, then Paul's letter to Timothy, where he says, all scriptures God breathed and useful for teaching, reproof, correction, training and righteousness, that the man of God may be equipped for every good work is not true.

It's not sufficient. We need extra biblical revelation. Now, here's what I have to tell us, tell all of us. It doesn't mean that God is not supernatural. It doesn't mean that God doesn't still heal today.

We pray that God heals people, right? We have a long prayer list and lots of people on it. We pray that God would heal them, why? Because God can heal them. Oh, isn't that the ongoing gifts of the spirit?

No, that's God intervening and healing somebody. So when somebody tells me, oh, so-and-so has the gift of healing, I say, okay, give me so-and-so's name because I want to bring him to the Stony Brook PQ unit or to Veterans Hospital and see what they can do.

And they say, well, you know, he'll pray.

I say, no, no, no, no, no,.

You told me he has the gift of healing. Anytime the apostles laid hands on somebody, they were healed. If he has the same gift, he should see the same results. Well, he sees more healings than most, then that's not the gift of healing.

All you have is what I have. You have access to God, your father, who you can petition and ask him to intervene and heal people. But know this, just because we're cessationists does not mean that God isn't active in the world today.

His spirit is active, his spirit regenerates people. That's a miracle. Bringing a dead heart to life is a miracle. Healing people is a miracle, and God still does that. What we're talking about is the apostolic sign gifts, the gifts that confirm the authority of the apostles when they were writing the New Testament and bringing the church to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the outer parts of the world.

So this is a controversial topic among reformed Christians and not all hold to cessationism, but most do because they hold that the scripture is sufficient to equip the man of God for every good work.

Phil Johnson says we're obligated to the word of God as confessed by the reformed churches. Scripture alone is canonical. There's no truth, okay, prophetic truth, revealed truth that we need to know that's not in the scriptures.

The point of Sola Scriptura is to say that it is the unique and unnormed norm for the Christian faith and the Christian life. And we confess that unique canonical authority for faith and life over and against Rome and the Charismatics and the Pentecostals of all ages.

We hold to the sufficiency of scripture. That's all we need, that's all we stand on. Okay, we have another distinction. This is the last distinction for being reformed. It's called the regulative principle of worship, and you see how I put the C in there so you remember it's another C.

The Regulative Principle of Worship

It was funny yesterday. Anyway, the regulative principle of worship is a teaching primarily emphasized in the reformed churches that the public worship of God should include only those elements that are instituted, commanded, or appointed by command or example in scripture, okay.

So the scripture, when we worship God, we have to do so based on what the scriptures tell us. They tell us how to worship God. This is in distinction, contradistinction to the normative principle of worship, which we're gonna go over in a second.

Can anybody give me an example from the scriptures of somebody who worshiped God not with the regulative principle of worship? Strange fire, Nadab in a bayou. They saw God consume the sacrifice, and then all of a sudden they're like, oh, let's do that again, and they brought strange fire to the altar and God consumed them.

They did something that was not authorized by God. So our confession, the 1689, says this. The acceptable way of worshiping the true God is instituted by himself and so limited by his own revealed will that he may not be worshiped according to the imaginations and devices of men, nor the suggestions of Satan under any visible representations or any other way not prescribed in the holy scriptures.

So this is the benefit of having a confession. I could point you to the confession and say this is what we hold to as a church. It's spelled out clearly. By contrast, the normative principle, which is what most other churches do, teaches that worship must consist of that which is commanded by God, but also may include that which is not specifically prohibited by scripture, so long as it is agreeable to the peace and unity of the church.

And peace and unity of church is gonna be subjective to the pastor and the congregation, so they can bring in all kinds of stuff. You have people doing dances and movie themes and all kinds of stuff on the altar of God that are not prescribed by scripture.

You have to be wary of that. All right, so that's the last distinctive of the reformed distinctives, things that make us reformed. Now we're gonna go to the things that make us Baptist. So we're Hope Reformed Baptist Church.

Believer's Baptism and the New Covenant

So the next C would be C for Credo, which stands for Credo Baptism or Believer's Baptism, and that's the practice of baptism in which the participant publicly professes faith in Christ as Lord and Savior and as an admission into the local community of faith.

So when somebody is baptized, it's because the elders believe that it's a credible profession of faith, God has moved and changed their minds and hearts, and now they're being admitted into the body of Christ that we have here.

They would become a member of the church and come under the, not discipline of the church, it would be the discipline of the care and concern of the church, of the elders. The word baptizo means to immerse or dip, not pour, not sprinkle, not splash, and it's understood as a sign of obedience and allegiance to Christ, okay?

Our confession, I'll point you right to the confession. Baptism is an ordinance of the New Testament ordained by Jesus Christ to be unto the party baptized, a sign of his fellowship with him in his death and resurrection, of his being grafted into him, of remission of sins and giving up into God through Jesus Christ to live and walk in the newness of life.

Babies cannot repent, babies cannot believe, babies cannot confess Jesus as Lord, and nowhere does the scripture ever describe an infant being baptized. Now Presbyterians are gonna say, well, that refers to household baptism, but it never says those households had infants in them,.

Okay?

Elsewhere, it says that the whole household served the Lord. I never saw an infant serving the Lord. Now, I wanna know how an infant can be in the new covenant, have all their sins wiped away, okay, have them be born again, and then fall away from the faith.

You would have to jettison the P in the perseverance of the saints. So now your doctrines of grace are gonna be incomplete because people can fall away from the faith because they were in the covenant and now they're not in the covenant anymore.

It's real important that we listen to this. Entrance into the new covenant is done by God alone. In fact, the scripture says it is because of him, God, that you are in Christ Jesus, 1 Corinthians 1 .30.

And it's permanent. You cannot be lost and you are continually kept by God. So once God puts you into the new covenant, you are a member of that covenant. And like this says, baptism does not replace circumcision in the new covenant as the Holy Spirit circumcises all of God's children and places them in Christ.

So circumcision in the old covenant is likened to circumcision in the new covenant done not by the hands of man, but done by the Holy Spirit. So they wanna say baptism replaces circumcision. I say, well, what about the circumcision of the new covenant?

What does that replace in the old covenant? Circumcision in the old covenant is done by the parents circumcision in the new covenant is done by the parents. God, your father circumcises you and brings you into the body of Christ.

It is because of him that you were in Christ. If not, then it's something that mankind can do to put somebody in the new covenant. Why wouldn't we just baptize everybody we saw? They're in the new covenant now.

They can't be lost. Perseverance of the saints is not once saved, always saved. Perseverance of the saints is once a son, always a son. Once a daughter, always a daughter. You'll never be lost by God.

Jude tells us, to him who was able to keep you from falling and present you before God without spot or blemish. That is a God who begins the work, continues the work and finishes the work, not done by the hands of man.

Okay, that's the first Baptist distinctive. The second Baptist distinctive would be congregationalism. And this addresses church government. We reject the idea of a presbytery or synod overseeing and ruling over the individual congregations and held that individual congregations were independent, autonomous and responsible directly to God himself.

In other words, the local bodies are responsible to God, not to bishops, not to presbyters above them. We believe in associations, not denominations. So congregationalism speaks of a form of church government.

Episcopal church government is ruled by bishops. And I learned this, that it's Episcopal and the bishops become bishops by the laying on of hands. So that's different than Presbyterianism. In Episcopalism, in order for somebody to become a bishop, the other bishops have to lay their hands on him.

In Presbyterian church government, it's ruled by elders. And in congregational church government is ruled by the congregation. That's why the elders of the church are chosen by the congregation, not the bishops or the presbyters.

So the congregation recognizes the giftings in the body and puts forth men who can be elders, men who could be deacons. But that has to be recognized by the congregation, not people outside the congregation.

In fact, in Presbyterianism, the pastor of the church is not a member of the church. He's a member of the presbytery. So he doesn't fall under the discipline of the church, he would fall under the discipline of the governmental body over the church, which is again, not biblical.