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All right, good Lord's Day, he is risen. So we have the ordination of Mr. Walker today to the office of deacon. We have, just to announce some stuff that's going on in the near future, we have Whiskey and the Word that will probably be here on 12 -5, and then we have our next stated council meeting on 12 -8.
For today, for singing of Psalms, we'll be singing Psalm 119T and 133. The teaching will be broken into kind of two components. I'm gonna be continuing in 1 Timothy chapter six. So 1 Timothy chapter six, just continuing with that idea of knowledge falsely so-called.
So last time we did the text of the end of the book, and what I wanted to do was to spend a little bit of time emphasizing to you some of the ways that we can't get knowledge in the strict sense, to again, have us to hold fast to the Word.
And so we'll be talking about that, knowledge falsely so-called. And then we'll spend a little bit of time on the doctrine of ordination as we deal with the ordination that's occurring. Okay, any other announcements that I'm missing?
Thank you, Exodus 13 is the reading. So you have to bear with me, I'm at the tail end of a cold. And then, I think that's everything. All right, so let's begin with a call to worship. Please stand for the reading of God's holy Word.
Deuteronomy chapter six, verses four through nine. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength.
And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise up.
You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house, and on your gates. You may be seated. This text reminds us that the greatest commandment is to love God, that he is the highest good, that we possess him by knowing him, that we store up his Word in our hearts, and we should seek to teach all those under our authority at set times, and also as opportunity arises, and that we are to take the Word of God, and to bind it on our hand to govern how we act, and to take the Word of God, and bind it on our forehead in order to govern our thoughts, and so the Word of God is to be a sign on the doorpost to govern your household, and a sign on the gates to govern the public government, church, and state, and so we are reminded that the whole of creation is to be governed by God's holy Word.
Let's pray. Father, we come before you now in this time of worship. We ask that you would bless us, that you would cause us to know you more deeply, to grow in the knowledge of you, that your name would be holy to us, that you would use the elements of worship to build up our souls, and to cause us to have a greater zeal for his readiness to enter into public service, and his willingness to go through training, and to be judged and tested by the officers, and by his fellow men in the congregation.
Father, we ask that you would bless him with boldness, and that you would cause him to gain good reputation in office. Father, we thank you that you would provide for us gospel officers. We ask that you would help us more and more to see all of the ordinances rightly ordered, and that you would give to us everything that we need to do our duties in all of our stations.
We ask that you would prosper our homes, that you would give to us good health, that you would heal those who are sick. I pray for my wife, that you would cause her to be healed in her throat. We pray that you would cause us to be able to have curse removed, and to see the truth advanced with bodies in good condition, with minds well ordered, with a zeal and rigor of action.
And so, Father, we pray that you would help us to do what your law commands, that more and more, we would be like the righteous angels in heaven, who promptly and sincerely obey you. Father, we pray that you would give to us everything needful for the performance of our duties, and that we would use it to your glory.
Father, we know that we are breakers of your law. We have sinned against you, broken the whole of your law. Help us to interpret things charitably, and to avoid even having to cover over an offense, but rather to look the better at our neighbor.
Father, we pray that you would help us to remove sources of temptation, and to order the space, and time, and resources around us, and use them well, and that you would subdue the power of evil in us.
Father, we pray all this, knowing that you have the authority and power to grant, and that you work all things for your glory, and for the good of your people. We know that delays in giving what we request or answers of no are ultimately for our good.
Father, we ask, knowing that we have offered up prayers that you have revealed into your Word that are right, we ask that you would give, that you, the God who is merciful and kind, who has forgiven us in Christ, that we ask you by the mediation of Jesus Christ, based upon His merits, that you would give us these things.
We pray all of this in the mighty name of Jesus, amen. Please open now your Bibles to the book of Exodus, chapter 13. Deacon Schaefer, please come forward. Please stand for the reading of God's Word.
Exodus chapter 13. Then the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, consecrate to me all the firstborn, whatever opens the womb among the children of Israel, both of man and beast, it is mine. No bread shall be eaten seven days, and no leavened bread shall be seen among you, nor shall leaven be seen among you in all your quarters.
And you shall tell your son in that day, saying, this is done because of what the Lord did for me when I came up from Egypt. It shall be as a sign to you on your hand and as a memorial between your eyes, that the Lord's law may be in your mouth.
For with a strong hand, the Lord has brought you out of Egypt. You shall, therefore, keep this ordinance in its season from year to year. And it shall be when the Lord brings you into the land of the Canaanites, as he swore to you and your fathers and gives it to you, that you shall set apart to the Lord all that open the womb, that is, every firstborn that comes from an animal which you have, the males shall be the Lord's.
But every firstborn of a donkey you shall redeem with a lamb. And if you will not redeem it, then you shall break its neck. And all the firstborn of man among your sons you shall redeem. So it shall be when your son asks you in time to come, saying, what is this?
That you shall say to him, by strength of hand, the Lord brought us out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. And it came to pass when Pharaoh was stubborn about letting us go, that the Lord killed all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, both the firstborn of man and the firstborn of beast.
Therefore, I sacrifice to the Lord all males that open the womb. But all the firstborn of my sons I redeem. It shall be as a sign on your hand and as frontlets between your eyes, for by strength of hand, the Lord brought us out of Egypt.
Then it came to pass when Pharaoh had let the people go, that God did not lead them by way of the land of the Philistines, although that was near. For God said, lest perhaps the people change their minds when they see war and return to Egypt.
So God led the people around by way of the wilderness of the Red Sea. And the children of Israel went up in orderly ranks out of the land of Egypt. And Moses took the bones of Joseph with him, for he had placed the children of Israel under Solomon saying, God will surely visit you and you shall carry up my bones from here with you.
So they took their journey from Succoth and camped in Etham at the edge of the wilderness. And the Lord went before them by day in a pillar of cloud to lead the way, and by night in a pillar of fire to give them light.
So as to go by day and night, he did not take away the pillar of cloud by day or the pillar of fire by night from before the people. Maybe see.
Please stand and open your Psalters to Psalm 119T. Think of my affliction and save, for I do not forget your law. Defend my cause, deliver me, revive according to your word. Salvation's far from the wicked, for they do not seek your statues.
How great your tender mercies, Lord. Save according to your judgments. Many persecute me as foes, yet from your law I do not shrink. I am grieved by the transgressors because they do not keep your word.
See how I love your precepts, Lord. Save according to your mercy. Oh, the whole of your word is truth. All your righteous judgments will stand.
Think on my affliction and save, for I do not forget your law. Defend my cause, deliver me, revive according to your word. Salvation's far from the wicked, for they do not seek your statues. How great your tender mercies, Lord.
Save according to your judgment. Many persecute me as foes, yet from your law I do not shrink. I am grieved by the transgressors because they do not keep your word. See how I love your precepts, Lord.
Save according to your mercy. Oh, the whole of your word is truth. Righteous judgments will stand.
Please now, either on the handout or in the scriptures, open up. And we're gonna read the very end of 1 Timothy again. 1 Timothy chapter six, verses 20 through 21. Oh, Timothy, guard what was committed to your trust, avoiding the profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.
By professing it, some have strayed concerning the faith. Grace be with you, amen. You may be seated. All right, so last time I reviewed with you sort of the outline of 1 Timothy. We walked through, talked about that, the emphasis of doctrine and the dangers of heresy.
And at the end, we are reminded in these last few verses that we are to, officers especially, elders especially, hold onto the word of truth that was revealed, the apostolic deposit that was committed to your trust, to the trust of Timothy, to the officers, that apostolic deposit.
Now, the rest of this is gonna be a lot easier for you if you've got the handout. So just real quickly, raise your hand if you don't have a handout. Okay, if we can get one to the Nelson family and then anybody else?
Great, okay. So then, the handout, we're gonna be going through more of these things to consider alternate views. We're gonna be, thank you. We're gonna be dealing with alternate views in terms of the word of God being the authority.
We're gonna look at contrary or alternate views. But the word of God is what was given to be held onto by the church. And on the alternative side, we looked at this idea of avoiding profane and idle babblings and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge.
Okay, so profane babblings, remember, they're not holy. Profane is the opposite of holy. To be holy is to be focused on the glory of God. Now, to be idle is to be useless. Okay, to be useful, to be fruitful, to be helpful is to have things that are worth doing, to redeem the time.
Words that are useful, that are healthy, that are good, that build up souls, that cause life as opposed to death. We have profane babblings and there are idle babblings. And there's this ease with which we can drown out the holy words and the useful words with profane and useless speaking.
And then there's that which contradicts the scriptures and that contradicts itself. So much of the speaking that you hear in the public sphere is self-contradiction. How often do you hear the mainstream media supporting one position merely to contradict itself, pretending like this is always the way it was and to just have things put side by side, straight-faced, no acknowledgement, no recognition of the changing that occurs there, just this, we've always been at war with whomever.
We've always been friends with whomever. This classic Orwellian changing of the way things are lined up. This setting up of things in a way that is self-contradictory and there's a straight face just bluster to get past.
So the idea of the profane babblings, the idle babblings, and the self-contradictory mess, these are things that we use to evaluate if someone is holding onto the things that we're committed to the trust of the church.
The words of God are not profane or idle or contradictory. And so uselessness and profanation and contradiction are helpful markers for us to reject messages and messengers. If you look at the very back of the handout, just go to the very last page, you will see there, I've got for you the two texts from Deuteronomy with the tests for false prophets.
The first test, Deuteronomy 13, verses one to five, is this idea that if somebody tells you to go chase after another God, as opposed to the God that has already been revealed, they're contradicting the revelation that's come before.
Okay, so Deuteronomy 13, verses one to five, shows us that this is a test. A test for prophets is have they contradicted the revelation that's come before. And then there's also the Deuteronomy 18, 20 to 22 test, which is the test of presumption.
Do they prophesy something and it doesn't happen? Okay, so when we look at prophets, we have to deal with this idea of the revelation that's given is it something that contradicts prior revelation? Is it something that is presumptuous, that there's a prophecy and it doesn't happen?
So jump back with me, back to the front. I wanna remind you, this idea of contradiction as a hallmark of falsehood is not new to Paul. And we find it back written in what Moses wrote. And when Moses wrote, we're looking at about 1 ,400 years before Jesus.
People like to pretend like Aristotle, who wrote out the laws of logic in a textbook around the mid 300s, right? We look at that idea. Somewhere about 400 years before Jesus, we have Aristotle talking about it.
Moses gave the use of logic to test prophecy 1 ,000 years before Aristotle. We pretend sometimes like logic is an invention of men or something the philosophers came up with. Logic is the way God thinks.
Okay, so when we recognize that the scriptures cannot be broken, they are not self-contradictory, they are a coherent whole, they are systematic, you can draw things out of them. We see the way that the system of truth and its beauty is distinct from the human philosophies that we are so often bombarded with, that are profane and idle and self-contradictory.
So these tests are important. And there's a danger if we pick up the profane words of the world and the idle babblings, talk about useless things, and if we hold on to contradictory things. If you start to contradict yourself and you don't really care, what you're doing is you're erasing your sense of integrity.
People who don't care that they contradict themselves, there's a special name for them and it's technical. I want you to grab hold of this, okay? Here's the word, liars. I know it's a lot of syllables, they're liars.
When you contradict yourself and you don't care, that's a jar. You're erasing a concern for consistency, which is what integrity is. And so if we care about integrity, if we care about being men of integrity, women of integrity, if we care about this idea of holding firm to the word of truth, scriptures cannot be broken.
When you contradict yourself, you've shown yourself to be wrong. And so what you need to recognize is that when you find yourself in a contradictory mess, when you're saying things that contradict themselves, you have a duty to sort it out and to acknowledge that you're wrong about at least one of these things.
Maybe both. And so this willingness to go back and to search the scriptures and see if things are so, even what you're saying is so. And if we hold on to things that are profane, worldly ideas, and we hold on to just talking about useless things and restating the aphorisms of the world and things that are just sort of accepted because that's what's in the culture, even the self-contradictory elements of it, if we hold on to these things and we don't care to replace them with what the word of truth has to say, we will stray more and more concerning the faith.
And so holding tightly to the scriptures as the authority is the thing that allows you to be built up in integrity and to be built up in the knowledge of God and to be strong in the faith. So page two, we talked through some of this last time and I really think that 1 Corinthians chunk of text I'd really encourage you in your private studies to go look at that and also go look at my sermon series on 1 Corinthians chapters one and two.
Those chapters of 1 Corinthians deal so beautifully with human philosophy and with the idea of how we know truth. So we spent a lot of time on these. Now, what I want to do is to jump forward in the handout and I'd like to take you to page four.
I want to talk to you about knowledge falsely so-called compared to knowledge rightly so-called. Now, the knowledge that was committed to the trust of the church, we looked at last time those references to John and the idea of the apostolic deposit that the words of Christ were given to the apostles.
They were given them for the church that the Holy Spirit caused them to be brought to remembrance that we have the apostolic deposit in the scriptures now. And when we try to instead come forward with something else, there are only three places that ideas come from apart from God's mind.
Okay, so there's three. The only places that you can get ideas from apart from what God has revealed are your own mind, which the scriptures are not particularly complimentary of, right? The heart is deceitfully wicked.
Who can know it? The idea that man is incapable of doing any good apart from the regeneration coming from the Holy Spirit that all of his thoughts were evil continuously but that there is one light. The light is Christ and the light of Christ is something that is brought to us.
All right, we see Christ as light in the darkness, not light in a moderately well-lit in place. Our own ideas, our own ideas, if we come up with things, we find in the book of Romans that the tendency of man and not just the tendency but the constant tendency apart from the work of the Holy Spirit to give you spiritual life is to suppress the truth in unrighteousness.
We suppress the truth in unrighteousness and the attributes of God and His law are in our hearts so as to make us inexcusable but we will not rightly come to the knowledge of God. We will not rightly come to an understanding of right and wrong apart from the word from God coming to us.
And the Holy Spirit illuminating us. And so your own ideas, these are any opinions that you invent or hypothesis that you come up with and you can't demonstrate it from some other source. These things are not things that you can have certainty about, things that you just make up are exactly that.
They are things you just make up. Some people love the ideas that they make up and want to defend them vigorously and they want to put them forward. And so we need to be aware of this tendency for people to put forward the ideas that they make up and to try to impose them on other people.
There is another source which is other human beings that came before you. Okay, this often gets called tradition, human tradition. We have a tradition in the Reformed faith, in the Protestant faith, there is an authoritative tradition.
It's called the apostolic tradition and it was captured in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. So human tradition, any opinions that come from other men that cannot be shown to be from a source beyond mere man.
Okay, that's one thing. So the world is a dark place with other men who are like unto you in every way including sin. Jesus Christ was like unto you in every way except without sin. But if we have the words of Jesus, we've just got God's words.
So we're gonna separate that out from just human tradition. Okay, so human tradition, you're gonna have other people who have the same problems as you. And then there are demonic doctrines. You might go, well, what about angelic doctrines?
Well, let me tell you the difference between an angel and a demon. They're both angels and the angels obey God and only carry messages that God told them to carry, God's word. The demons disobey God and they like to make up ideas and impose them on humans.
They find it very fun. They had a wonderful partnership with Joseph Smith. They wrote a best-selling book called The Book of Mormon. They had a really good and effective partnership with Muhammad and wrote a very good-selling book called The Quran.
Demons are very good at this making stuff up thing. And they are very good at getting human beings to become effective messengers of the doctrines of demons. And so the doctrines of demons are something that Americans with our modernist attitudes and our emphasis on physical and material things, we undervalue the terrifying reality of the supernatural.
Demonic doctrines bring about all sorts of horrific falsehood reigning in human society and cause people to waste their lives with very cleverly devised profane babblings, idle babblings, and self-contradictory things accompanied by powerful signs.
So these things, the stuff you make up, the stuff other people make up, and the stuff that demons make up, these are the alternate sources of ideas besides God's ideas. So Deuteronomy 4 verse two says, you shall not add to the word which I command you or take from it that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you.
Isaiah 8 20, to the law and to the testimony. If they do not speak according to this word, it is because there is no light in them. It does not say some light. It says no light. So here is one of the most common Christian efforts to try to say that there's a bunch of information we can get apart from the Scriptures.
They will go to the idea of general revelation, and they will try to say that general revelation gives you an enormous amount of stuff that you can infallibly know and say is certain and put it right next to the Bible and say here are two sources of the information.
Beloved, unless we already have the Bible, we're going to horrifically misinterpret the world which is often put forward. So a Christian worldview, we only interpret the world rightly with a Christian worldview.
And so without first having the Scriptures coming to a person to make you spiritually alive, you're not going to be able to go interpret the world in a proper way. General revelation in the Scriptures, if we look at what God has revealed in his holy word about the idea of general revelation, here's what general revelation is.
General revelation is the light, as we find that in the book of John. It talks about the light that lights the minds of all men. The light that lights the minds of all men. General revelation is the light that illuminates the minds of all men.
This light consists of reason and innate ideas. So in other words, the innate ideas, if you look at the book of Romans chapter one, especially Romans one verse 20, you're going to find that it says that there are certain things written in the heart of man.
These things are the eternal power and divine nature of God. His eternal power is one of his attributes. He's eternal, without beginning, without end. And he has power, he has all power. Those are some of his attributes.
And then it lists next to that, that depending on the translation, it'll say either the Godhead, his eternal power and Godhead, or it'll say divine nature. Those are both fine as translations. The idea of the Godhead is, what are the attributes that are shared by the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit?
The divine nature is the same thing. It's the listing out of the attributes that God possesses that are distinct from creatures. The Westminster Shorter Catechism does an amazing job of giving that as a summary list.
Here's the summary list. Question four of the Shorter Catechism, what is God? God is a spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth. That right there, question four of the Shorter Catechism does an amazing job of giving to us a list of those attributes of God that help him to be differentiated from creatures.
The three key ones there, okay? Infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. Think about this. God is infinite and no creature is. All creatures are finite. God is eternal and no creature is. All creatures are temporal, which means they change.
They're in time. Time is change. And then changeability is, of course, a working off of being eternal or temporal. So God is infinite. Creatures are finite. God is eternal. Creatures are temporal. God is unchangeable.
Creatures are changeable. These are things that are helpful for us to be able to understand the incommunicable attributes of God. God can't create something that's God. That would be to communicate his attributes.
It's not communicate as in like help us to understand it. He clearly communicates in his word by telling us what these things are. The issue is he can't give eternality to a creature because if you're created, you have a beginning, right?
He can't give that without making you God and God is uncreated. So it's a logical impossibility. God, by his very nature, is uncreated. And so we think about these attributes. These are the innate ideas, the ones that are talked about in Romans in man.
These innate ideas, when you talk to unbelievers, you can pull on that stuff that's in their heart. You can pull upon the attributes that exist there and show them that they have made idols in their hearts.
They've made the world eternal or they've made some other thing eternal. They've made something else that is infinite and given that attribute to it apart from God. And so everybody makes idols but only the Christian religion reveals the true God and yet this suppression of the truth and this self-contradictory garbage that we all invent up in our minds and put it forward and live our lives by that junk is the stuff that we believe apart from the Word of God coming to us and the Spirit of God giving us spiritual life.
Now, reason and these innate categories allow us to communicate with other people. Men are inexcusable before they form eyes in the womb. Men are inexcusable before their ears are capable of capturing sound.
Men are inexcusable before their tongues function or their noses function or they have the ability to feel. The moment of conception, David was conceived in iniquity. His eyes didn't function and his ears didn't function but he was suppressing the truth in unrighteousness.
That conceived in iniquity, look, there's the guilt of Adam but we have a corrupt nature where we suppress the glory of God in our minds. We do not believe what we ought to believe and we are idle factories and we need to understand that from our first moments after we are made, we are not glorifying God as we ought and our guilt is rooted there and our guilt is rooted in Adam's sin and every choice we make that's sinful out of that unbelief comes forth.
This is important for us to understand what we're really saved from. We're not just saved from sins or we've broken laws that are particular. We are saved from a condition of not purposefully glorifying God and you need to understand that sin makes life miserable in part because of the consequences of particular actions but beloved, you know that oftentimes your sins that you commit that you are ashamed of flow from being bored.
That boredom comes from the mind not enjoying the beauty and glory of God. If we were sinless, we would always be joyful in the glory of God. Our boredom, our inability to sit in a room by ourselves contemplating the glories of God, that is this thing where our minds are not focused on His glory.
Now I'm not saying you should just sit in a room and contemplate. We are called to go out, to exercise dominion, to build, to cut trees down and turn them into houses, to tear down mountains and turn them into plains.
We take the high places and we raise up the low places and we make these glorious things. We're called to go out and to fill the earth with culture, to build institutions, to have people working hard.
We display the glory of God with all of these things but that stuff comes out of minds that are already enthralled by the glory and beauty of God. The manifesting of external work that beautifies the world and glorifies God comes from a mind that rejoices in the glory of God.
And general revelation is not the thing that is used by God to make men have spiritual life. General revelation is used to hold men inexcusable. The human condition is that we are fallen and we use the light of general revelation to build and defend self-contradictory philosophies and to have profane babbling and to give idle talk.
We can make use of general revelation and show people by pulling upon the information that they can't deny things that they are guilty of. So I go to page five. Special revelation which is now contained entirely in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.
God can, let me give you the definition here. The words from God given either immediately or through messengers, all which are now contained in the Bible as explicit statements or necessary inferences.
True knowledge is justified true belief. That's a technical phraseology. Here's the deal. People wanna talk about what's the difference between a true opinion versus knowledge. Here's the important difference.
A true opinion is something that you don't necessarily know why you believe it, but you believe it. Knowledge is when you have truth in your mind and you can show why it's true. So the ability to show the thing, to give a rational justification, to give a reason for the hope that's in you, an apologetic, a defense.
And so we want to know the scriptures and we want to know how we can show people that apart from scripture, they don't have a certain word. They don't have a foundation to rely upon. Now, the means of revelation.
This can occur through immediate divine illumination as with the prophets or through ordinary means accompanied by divine illumination. So in other words, think about this. We have the prophets received word from God.
Sometimes God spoke to them and they heard a noise, like they heard like a voice talking to them. Sometimes you might just give to them immediately in their mind what it is that they are supposed to write.
You have the example of John the Baptist when he was in the womb and Mary came in to visit Elizabeth. John the Baptist jumped for joy that he was in the presence of the mother of his savior. Right, this, how did he get that?
How did he know that? Because God gave it to him immediately. In the womb. Right, so this idea that God can plant information in your mind. He can give you information. And so we know that now that he has completed his scriptures so we don't have new prophecy, new prophets.
And so what we must rely upon is he has given us his word in a book. But not everybody who reads the book and not everybody who listens to the book being read or hears it being preached believes. Right, so remember, what's knowledge?
Knowledge is when you believe something and it's true and you've got a good reason for it. You can show it. So even if you hear the truth, it requires the work of God to illuminate your mind. As Calvinists, we typically, we're real quick to go, amen, hallelujah, praise the Lord, absolutely.
You gotta have irresistible grace for regeneration. Nobody's gonna believe apart from the Holy Spirit doing that, absolutely. But that's true for every new truth you come to know. It's this illuminating work.
That's true in terms of sanctification. It's not like God resurrects you and then all your sanctification comes from your own power. All the sanctification you have, all the growth you have in the faith is by the work of God too.
Christ is the author of our faith and he's the finisher of it. He builds it and he preserves it. It's work of illumination. So we look to God and his sovereign power over knowledge. He is the one who gives us knowledge and he gives it to us externally with the scriptures and internally, he brings powerfully his work to cause us to know.
Now, when we talk about this from an apologetics perspective, we have to basically come down to saying, well, how do I know the Bible is the word of God? And there's two basic approaches. I'm gonna take something else and I'm gonna use it to prove the Bible.
Okay, so here's the thing. Here's the Bible. I'm gonna prove the Bible from the thing. Okay, that's scenario one. Put whatever thing you want in there. Scenario two, there is no higher authority than the word of God.
What kind of a joke is this that you're asking me to prove the thing that is the highest authority? Were you listening? That's scenario two. The word of God is above everything else. So some people's response to that is to say, that's fideism.
Well, first of all, fideism is just a Latin word for faithism. So I would encourage you to put your faith in the word of God. But secondly, every philosophy has to start somewhere. Now, I would suggest to you that the label fideism is actually best applied when somebody says you should believe the Bible and I can't give you any reasons.
We can give a reason. We can give an argument. We can give a defense of the faith. But it's very different to give a defense of the faith than it is to try to prove the Bible from a higher authority. To give a defense of the faith is righteous and it's a commandment that God gives to us.
To seek to prove the Bible from some higher authority or to say that there's something more certain than the word of God is blasphemous. There is nothing more certain, more authoritative, higher than the word of God.
So here are, here's the thing about the first principle. Everybody has a first principle, whether they want to admit it or not. Here's why you have a first principle. If I ask you, what do you believe?
You go, I believe the Christian religion. I go, why do you believe that? Because the Bible says so. And you go, why do you believe the Bible? And you go, I don't believe the Bible. And you go, well, for these reasons.
And I go, why do you believe those things? And they say, well, for these reasons. Well, why do you believe those things? Do you see how long I could go? We could just put dot, dot, dot there, right? Like, well, why do you believe that?
Why do you believe that? Why do you believe that? You can go on forever. Something somewhere is the starting point because if you prove everything, you can prove nothing because an infinite series of proofs is impossible.
It is not possible for you to complete an infinite series of proofs. It is not possible for anybody to. Every philosophy starts somewhere. The philosophies that the world has, Gordon Clark did an amazing job of organizing the philosophies of the world into three basic efforts to give an answer for how do you know.
The first answer is called irrationalism. And it's basically the idea that, you know, you can't really know anything. And we all know the answer to that one. When you talk to the guy, you just go, well, how do you know that?
And he goes, I don't. And you go, great, maybe you should shut up. And then let's talk. I've got some things I know. I'd be happy to tell them to you. And then you could make some progress in life. The next one is rationalism, which claims that knowledge comes through reason alone.
And we'll talk about that. There's a problem called the problem of antiforms, which when you've just got reason alone, you can't overcome. And so we'll talk about that in a bit. The next one is empiricism, which is very popular in our time, that knowledge comes through sensory experience alone.
And this idea that knowledge comes through sensory experience alone is sometimes called scientism or some sort of idea that you're gonna look out and you're gonna, by observation, figure everything out.
And that idea has a number of problems. And I'm gonna give you a very brief explanation about it right now, because what I'm gonna spend most of the remainder of my time on is actually dealing with rationalism, because it's something that I know many of you have had to run into a lot.
And I want you to really understand the problem with it, which is weird, because we live in an age dominated by irrationalism and empiricism. But it's important that as we realize that philosophies go in cycles in history, in terms of which ones are popular, between irrationalism, rationalism, and empiricism, and the word of God just gets to grind them to dust over and over again until it's conquered all of them.
And so empiricism, here's the problem. Here's some basic problems with empiricism. First of all, truth is universal, and your experience is not. Truth is universal, and your experience is not. Secondly, your sense experience is fallible, therefore it's not infallible.
Stick with me here. Your sense experience is fallible, and therefore not infallible. Third point, there's a problem called the problem of induction. Induction is this. You look around, you see a bunch of particular things, right, I go like, oh, here's a pen, it's orange.
Here's a pen, it's red. Here's a pen, it's blue. Therefore, all pens are either orange, blue, or red. Right, so you go, no, there are other pens. And some of you lift up and you go, I got a pen right here, and this one is not one of those colors.
What if you lift up a yellow highlighter, and you go, oh, there we go. Oh, what was the problem? The problem is I came to universal conclusions based upon a few particular examples. And here's the reality of your experience in life.
Wisdom was not born with you, and it will not die with you. Lots of stuff happened before you were born, and lots of stuff will happen after you die. Your experience was in a very narrow portion of the world during a very narrow portion of time, and any pretense that you have to having a wide breadth of experience is laughable in the face of the whole of creation.
For you to try to come up with universal truths based upon your experience would be like trying to take a microscope to look at one portion of a 747 and come up with a sense of the design of the whole from what you were looking at in the microscope.
We do not have the ability from our experience to draw out universal truths. We must rely upon God who has given universal truths to us in his word. We use the scientific method to make technology, and scientific hypotheses are hypotheses, and they change.
And their changing is a process of we're constantly improving technology. We find stuff that works better than what worked before. We're constantly coming up with new hypotheses, testing new stuff, changing those things, and that is the method of dominion with technology, but it's not how you get knowledge.
So when we talk about certainty, things that we can know with certainty, we're talking about the word of God. So now, you have to pick a first principle. You have to test for coherence. Does it contradict itself?
Does it give meaningful answers? The Bible is consistent with itself, and it provides answers to what's true, what's real, what's good. And then, we have to deal with our own challenges across time, and we need to understand and grow in the knowledge of God, and as we go and face the world, we're gonna be faced with new challenges.
We're gonna find ignorance in our own understanding. We keep returning to the word of God. As we are renewed after the image of Christ in knowledge, holiness, and righteousness, we are matured, we are made bigger and stronger in mind, and that is the work of the Christian life is to keep going back to the word and looking for God to renew us.
And we have to go fight in the world and build things, and our faith will be challenged with all sorts of hardship and difficulty and false doctrines that confront us, and it forces us in our laziness when we didn't search the scriptures to go and search them in new ways.
How many times have you had some subject come up that you found in the Bible that you'd never thought about before? Most people experience it with Calvinism, right? You go, I didn't know about the sovereignty of God, then I believed in the sovereignty of God, and I read the Bible, and I saw it was everywhere.
How many other doctrines have you had that happen with? There's something where, as you start to study a subject, when you read the Bible and you don't have some truth in mind, there's all these truths that we just brush over, that we just don't pick up because we're dumb and slow, and then God opens our eyes, and all of a sudden we're like, this thing is everywhere.
What happened before? Did I have stickers over them that I've peeled off now? It's like, no, same Bible, no stickers. It's just that when you were reading before, you didn't see it because you were ignorant or misinterpreting, and so as we grow, we find that the same passages have deeper and deeper meaning because we see more and more.
We see in higher and higher definition. So go with me to page seven. Okay, I want to, again, because I know a number of you are interacting with this issue, I want to emphasize rationalism. Okay, so I've talked a little bit about empiricism.
We talked a little bit about irrationalism. We had a longer forum that deals with both of those, but this idea of rationalism, human knowledge is through logic alone. Okay, that's knowledge falsely so-called.
Here's why. Logic, when you don't have any other information, is just a set of laws that you have to plug things into. Okay, here's the laws of logic. Law of identity, A is A. Great, a thing is itself.
Truth is true. I mean, you're right. A true statement's a true statement. Fantastic. Absolutely true. You can find it in the scriptures. God reveals the law of identity. When he reveals himself, he says to Moses, I am that I am.
Do you see how God there is using the law of identity and he's showing how I am that I am. He's revealing himself and saying, I am what I am. I'm distinct from everything else. I'm God. And so I am not able to be defined by creatures.
And so we get to the fact that God is holy or unique from other things, and he's showing he was defining himself by himself using the law of identity. Beautiful. Okay. That law of logic, we can find it in the scripture.
There's also the law of contradiction. A statement cannot be both true and false at the same time in the same sense. Seems pretty obvious, right? But the apostle Paul, for example, says the truth is not of a lie.
Does that sound like the law of non-contradiction to you? So then we also have the law of the excluded middle. A statement has to either be true or false. Okay, Jesus says you have to be for me or against me.
Why? He's eliminating a middle ground, the excluded middle. The middle doesn't exist. There's not some space between. We sometimes talk about this as the antithesis, the doctrine that there is no space that's neutral.
Okay, but so this doctrine of the excluded middle, these laws of logic, you say A is A, both, not both A and non-A at the same time in the same sense, either A or non-A. And you go, fantastic, what's A?
We go, well, we're trying to talk about God or we're gonna talk about man or we're gonna talk about trees or we're gonna talk about the world. I'm sorry, where did we get these terms? I thought all we had was logic.
Are you trying to smuggle this in by experience? Are you trying to have definitions that you're positing? Are you trying to pretend you reasoned to like Trinus sitting in a Dutch oven somewhere? Like this idea, people want to pretend like they're so smart and they invent ideas out of reason alone.
Human beings can't do that. You can't just reason from the laws of logic to something being plugged in there. You have to have a place where you're getting definitions. And so human philosophy leads to, once people start to rigorously analyze human philosophy, it leads to this place of horrific depression.
When you read The Republic by Plato, it's super exciting and fun. He's like running around with like young Greek guys arguing about ideas and they're like, hey, what do you think about this or that? And like, let's talk about caves.
And so you get through all these conversations and they have a fun time and it's like really exciting. When he was old, he wrote a book called The Laws. And in The Laws, he was like, I know before I was talking about how we could like contemplate the good and come up with the nature of things and everything, but honestly, I don't think that's true anymore.
So we're just gonna have to make things up and consider if maybe they might be right. And you're like, you know, young Plato was way more fun than old Plato. Young Plato thought you could know things.
Old Plato didn't think you could know things. Why? Because he had challenges from people like Aristotle who said, why are you plugging that in? And Aristotle advocated for it. You've got to pull stuff out of your sense experience.
Aristotle was a student of Plato. And he was like, Plato, you can't just reason all this stuff. You gotta look at the world. You gotta experience things and pull them in to reason about it. You're talking about man.
Where do you even get man to think about? We're talking about birds. How do you get birds to think about? You're looking around at the world. And so we'll define man or bird or whatever by looking around at things and making up a definition based upon our observations.
Remember the problem of induction? Are there any black swans? Not in Europe. In Australia they found one. So is whiteness a part of the definition of a swan? Right, so the problems, you know, well, who cares?
Swans, whether they're white or black. Okay, you still have to deal with the problem that experience can't provide you with certainty. Your experience is limited. You must have a word from God. Human philosophy that tries to build without the word of God.
You can't do that. There are five things that happen when you're a rationalist. You gotta pick one of these five things, okay? Look at page seven. If you've got the laws of logic and you've got nothing else, you've gotta just admit that you're stuck talking about A.
A is A. It's not non-A. And everything's either A or not A. You can say that over and over again until you're tired of talking about A. Or you start plugging things in. Okay, so there's definitions. Where do you get them?
Well, you can just smuggle them in and be like, yeah, this is the definition of these things, don't worry about it. I found them someplace. They were in a corner over there. See, that's why smuggling.
You're illegally bringing them in. You're not paying attention to the rules of logic. You're not thinking about how to validly reason because when you get to a conclusion, you can't logically put in a conclusion that's stuff that wasn't in your prior premises.
Okay, you go, conclusion. Information that wasn't in the earlier argument. That's not how arguing works. So that's why it's called smuggling in. So then you got this idea of, well, let's just mix together our experience and our reasoning, okay?
So when we do that, we still have the problems that apply to the weaknesses of empiricism. It still exists there, and that can be dealt with at a different time if you want to talk more about it, but the blending them doesn't solve the problems that exist in empiricism.
Fourthly, your alternative is to try to do a dialectic, and this is what Plato did. Here's the dialectic. What if I said to you that man is a featherless biped? You think about it, and you go, I don't know of any things that walk around with two legs without feathers except for birds and men.
That seems like a pretty good definition of man, Plato. Let's go with it. And the response of Diogenes, who was a guy who liked to stir things up, he found a chicken, and he took all of the feathers off of the chicken and then threw it onto the floor where debate was occurring, and he was like, this is Plato's man.
So okay, a featherless biped. Okay, so this is the dialectic. The dialectic is to go through a process of positing things and asking people to challenge it, and you just see what happens as you go through the challenging process.
That's the dialectic, okay? The problem with the dialectic is, how many ways could you define God? Are there like an infinite number of ones? How many of those are right? Oh, just one. How about man? How many ways could you theoretically define man?
How many of them are right? Do you see how this problem exists with everything you're gonna define? So if that's the case, then what we're stuck with is that the dialectic is just a process of hypothesizing from an infinite number of possibilities, and unless God tells you the definition of things, you're not gonna have certainty that you've gotten to the right definition.
So the last thing you can do as a rationalist, a lot of people call themselves Christian rationalists do this, we're just gonna acknowledge that we're starting with the Christian system, and we're gonna defend it by answering objections and tearing down the false positions.
And that's exactly the same as being a presuppositionalist. So what's a presuppositionalist? What is it to be a classical presuppositionalist or a rational presuppositionalist or a Christian rationalist?
These are all names that get thrown around, but just most people know this is presuppositionalism, okay? What is presuppositionalism? You start with the idea that God's word written is the Bible. The Bible is God's word written.
As opposed to pretending like you're able to come up with definitions of everything yourself, as opposed to pretending like your experience is infallible and extensive, as opposed to just denying the truth is knowable, you say the Bible is the word of God written, and I'm going to start with it, and I'm going to understand its teachings.
I'm going to draw out its implications. I'm going to apply those things. And that includes logic. Logic is a part of scripture. You remember earlier on I showed you the laws of logic and scripture themselves?
You can also read Jesus arguing with people, and he shows you how syllogistic reasoning works. You can also read the Apostle Paul using complex argument chains in the book of 1 Corinthians in chapter 15.
You have argument after argument after argument where he takes the conclusion of the prior argument and uses it as a premise in the next. This rigorous, logical reasoning. Christianity, the word of God, is an intellectual fortress that men cannot tear down, but it sends out its power to tear down everything that raises itself arrogantly against the knowledge of God.
Christianity cannot be defeated, and when it engages in battle, always wins. The word of God is unbreakable, but it breaks to pieces every false philosophy. The scriptures give to us the thoughts of God.
And it's one thing that people like to try to raise here when emphasizing that scripture, rather than experience or reason or feeling, is the source of knowledge. People will say, well, but don't you have to ultimately experience the Bible as you're reading it?
Like, don't you have to read it with your eyes? Yeah, yeah, that's the ordinary way that God's word comes to us, but it doesn't guarantee it. Just like the preaching right now doesn't guarantee that you'll understand or believe.
It is the word of God coming to us and the Holy Spirit illuminating that gives knowledge. And you have to reason through things, but you won't reason rightly unless the Holy Spirit illuminates your mind.
We are dependent upon God to reason rightly, and we are dependent upon God to understand and believe his word. We get all certitude, all knowledge, from the word of God, which is the foundation. And so I want you to hold onto that which was delivered to us.
Rather than profane babblings, speak the holy words of God. Rather than idle words, speak the useful, healing words of God. Rather than the self-contradictory mess of every human philosophy, hold on to the philosophy of Christ, the love of wisdom that comes from Christ, which does not contradict itself and cannot be broken.
And if you hold firm to that word, you will not stray from the faith. Instead, you will be firmly planted, and you will have an anchor. You will build on foundation as opposed to on sand. It will allow you to have certainty and for your mind to be steady so that you will not be blown around and blown about by every wind of doctrine.
But the certainty of the words of truth will allow you to build in the same direction all your life. If you have ever experienced building and then realizing that all you were chasing after was vain, it is so disheartening.
You could spare yourself that pain by having certainty in the word of God and building consistently toward the glory of God. The law of God teaches us how to build. And the certainty of the words of truth allow us to be stable.
On page nine, I have a list for you of verses that show you that the Father is truth, that the Son is truth, that the Holy Spirit is truth on page 10. And there are a number of arguments that are useful in apologetics that I've laid out on pages 11 and forward.
I don't have time to go through right now. I had not originally, when I finished last week, planned to go through the second part, but I had a number of you ask me to go through it. You saw the outline and wanted me to go through it.
So I hope that part I emphasized was helpful to you. But let me see now, are there any comments, questions, or objections from the voting members? Those with speaking rights. Mr. Nye.
Clarification or just confirmation. So, the thing about sin and the human mind and thoughts. So, would it be true to say that the Christians believe that the human mind and thinking begins at conception?
The human mind begins at conception and so does thinking, yes. Okay. Just as the body does.
In the term theism, when it's used by those who are critiquing scriptural presuppositionalism or our position, can you quickly give a definition of what they mean when they say it's in the Urgent?
Well, I think what they mean is claiming that you should believe the Bible without reasons. And I think that there are reasons why not believing the Bible is absurd. I just don't think I can prove the Bible from higher authorities or prior authorities.
And, you know, one of the things that I would say about Cornelius Van Til, who wrote a lot of great things, but some places in his apologetic that I would, I would say that there are places that can be latched onto to try to attack some presuppositionalists as fideistic.
Van Til taught that logic was created. I think that's not what the scriptures teach. Logic is the way God thinks. The logos is eternal. And so God as the wisdom and logical one is eternal and logic is one of his attributes.
So it's not created. And so as a result, he would say things like, you know, it doesn't matter if the Bible contradicts itself basically, because those things are true in God's mind, even if they're not to us.
And I would just say, no, if your interpretation of the Bible is contradicting itself, you're doing it wrong. You need to examine the premises that you're holding to. The Bible does not contradict itself.
And God is logical and logic is eternal. So that's a big thing that I would want to emphasize as something that is a difference between the idea that you should have faith without reasons as opposed to that you must start with the truth that God reveals and you can defend it from itself and with good reason from it.
And when we talk about the scriptures being the word of God written, and that's the starting point, the idea is it's the explicit statements and the necessary inferences of what the scriptures say. And so it's the whole system of truth there using good and necessary inference.
So logic is a part of God's word and that's what I want to emphasize that I think a lot of times gets missed out on. So hopefully that answers your question.
Yeah, and so the need for an axiom, for example,.
Was given by the absurdity of the alternative, right? So you can show the absurdity of every alternative to Christianity. The absurdity of an alternative called reductio ad absurdum, reducing to absurdity, is something that you can use to prove that something else is wrong.
But it doesn't, it's not a proof in the terms of a prior premise that you can get to the thing. So by defeating all of Christianity's enemies, that's not a prior premise that you prove Christianity from.
You're starting from Christianity and you can destroy everything else. So, okay, anything else? All right, let's pray. Father, we ask that you would bless the teaching of your word and also the defense of the highest authority of your word.
We pray this in Christ's name, amen. All right, so we are about to ordain Clay Drew Walker, is it true, is it really true? Okay, well now I know. What I want to do is to remind you all of a couple of key things.
First of all, I want to give you the word of institution for the ordination of the office of deacon. So please stand for the reading of God's word. Acts chapter six, verses one through seven, reads as follows.
Now in those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplying, there arose a complaint against the Hebrews by the Hellenists, that'd be the Greek-speaking Jews, because their widows were neglected in the daily distribution.
When the 12, the 12 apostles, to the Hebrews, when the 12 summoned the multitude of the disciples and said, it is not desirable that we should leave the word of God and serve tables. Therefore, brethren, seek out from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Holy Spirit and wisdom, and whom we may appoint over this business.
But we will give ourselves continually to prayer and to the spirit of the, and the ministry of the word. And the saying pleased the whole multitude, and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicholas, a proselyte from Antioch, whom they set before the apostles, and when they had prayed, they laid hands on them.
Then the word of God spread, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith. Okay, so you may be seated. So this right here, this word is the word of institution for this ordination.
And what we need to also understand is that when ordination occurs, it's supposed to be accompanied with fasting and prayer. And so the officers have been set apart in fasting. We've encouraged any of you who are able to join in that fast and to spend time in prayer, helping to ask for blessing on that and for us to search out and find things to repent of and blessings to beseech of God.
Now, we have talked about the qualifications of office and you have gone through the process of nominating and examining and testing and ultimately having also the officer's test and electing this man to office.
So this has been a period where he's trained and undergone your questioning and testing and observation. And so now, having received the consent of the congregation, we entered into a religious fast with prayer, and there will soon here follow an imposition of hands for ordination.
And so these are the things that have occurred there. When you think about the office of deacon, we are told there are qualifications to look for, and we have gone through a process of testing of those.
And 1 Timothy 3 lists out those qualifications as a man who's reverent, not double-tongued, not given to much wine, not greedy for money, holding the mystery of the faith with a pure conscience. And we're told also that we should let those first be tested and then let them serve as deacons, being found blameless.
And Mr. Walker has worked hard in that period of testing and has also been tested in terms of examined and been found blameless. We have also, in talking with Mrs. Walker, seeing her, we see that the wives of deacons are to be reverent, not slanderers, temperate, which means to be serious-minded, and faithful in all things, believing, in other words, all the things that are the Reformed faith.
And she is an excellent woman. So we're told to let deacons be the husband of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well. For those who have served well as deacons obtain for themselves a good standing and great boldness in the faith, which is in Christ Jesus.
So we have this work to be done. We have also the joy of the prospect of seeing blessing for Mr. Walker in his service of good standing and boldness in the faith. Now, we are in an unsettled condition.
We don't have multiple elders at this time. So we have deacons serving and doing the work of elders alongside me as an elder. So those sort of interim elders, so to speak, are a thing that we need to understand there's a historical precedent for doing that.
First of all, when we look at the Westminster Assembly, it says in the directory, in the form of Presbyterial government, in extraordinary cases, something extraordinary may be done until a settled order may be had, yet keeping as near as possibly may be to the rule.
There is at this time, as we humbly conceive, an extraordinary occasion for way of ordination for the present supply of ministers. Now, just to remind you, when they were writing this, when the Westminster Assembly wrote the Presbyterial form of government, they had an established reformed church.
There were thousands of Puritan ministers in the land. And they thought because they had not been able to see all the churches properly settled, that it was still an extraordinary situation. At the time, when there were thousands of Puritan ministers in Britain in the 1640s, and Britain's population was six million, and it was about the size of Arizona, they had an established reformed church, they thought it was an extraordinary situation.
There are less than thousands of Puritan ministers in Arizona. Our population is about six million, and the size of our area is about the size of Britain. The similarities are amazing, except for the fact that we don't have the reformed faith established in the land, or thousands of ministers.
So that being the case, I humbly propose to you that we live in an extraordinary situation. So that being the case, we follow the biblical model where we are trying to see a more settled state occurring, and keeping as closely as we can to the ordinary condition.
Second Chronicles 29 gives another key proof text for the idea of the duties that belong to higher offices being performed by lower officers in times when there is a shortage of officers. Second Chronicles 29 verses 34 to 36 reads as follows, but the priests were too few.
They were trying to do the Passover feast, lots of lambs to kill and cut up, so they were too few. All the Israelites had to come to Jerusalem, come to the temple so they could do the Passover, and there weren't enough priests, they were too few, so that they could not skin all the burnt offerings.
Therefore, their brethren, the Levites, and by the way, the office of priest, they are the guys who administer the sacraments, they very closely relate to elders or pastors in the New Covenant, and Levites helped them with all the material goods and dealing with mercy ministry and helping to take care of orphans and widows and do all that stuff, they very closely relate to the office of deacon.
So the overlap between those two relating is very close. But it says, therefore, their brethren, the Levites, helped them until the work was ended and until the other priests had sanctified themselves, for the Levites were more diligent in sanctifying themselves than the priests.
Also, the burnt offerings were in abundance with the fat of the peace offerings and with the drink offerings for every burnt offering. So the service of the house of the Lord was set in order, then Hezekiah and all the people rejoiced that God had prepared the people since the events took place so suddenly.
So it is sometimes the case that there is a shortage of men for offices that need to be filled and people have to stand in the gap. And so these Levites standing in the gap and assisting the priests, it is explicitly forbidden for anybody but the priests to offer these sacrifices and yet the word of God commends it in this circumstance in terms of these lower offices, the Levites, filling the duties of the priests.
So you see how plainly this helps to demonstrate the ability to deal with the devolution of authority when you are dealing with an unsettled condition. All right, so the office of deacon, we are about to go through ordination on and so what I'd like to do is to pray for blessing.
We've already had the reading of the word of institution, so we're gonna pray for blessing on the ordination and I'm gonna call forward the existing officers and Mr. Walker for us to then go through the covenanting process and to have the ordination occur.
So let's pray. Father, we thank you for the gift of ordination. We ask that you would bless this ordination and that you would bless this church and that you would bless Mr. Walker as he soon becomes deacon Walker.
Father, we pray that you would cause this office to be used for the service of your people and for us to all be able to work together well to see things put into good order and the church properly settled.
We pray all this in Christ's name, amen. All right, Mr. Walker, please come forward and would the other officers please come forward. All right, so we have oaths that are the oaths of the ordinant and these are oaths where he is swearing in the sight of Almighty God to perform duties towards you, towards me, towards the congregation as a whole.
Swearing to perform a duty is a grave matter. You call upon the witness of God to observe what you swear and to bless the performance of those duties and to curse not performing those duties. And so the seriousness of this, that this man is willing to swear, do these duties, is grave.
And so you also as a congregation, those of you who are covenanted members will be taking sworn statements of duty as well. All right, so because it's only appropriate that duties be mutual. And so you know we've done these before, but we'll start with the duties of the ordinant.
All right, Clayton Drew Walker, do you believe all of the statements and necessary inferences of the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be the rationally coherent and infallible word of God, the very truth itself and the only rule for faith and life?
Do you? Do you? Do you believe the covenanted uniformity and the reformed faith contained in the confession, catechisms, directory of worship and form of government adopted by Puritan Reformed Church to be true and right according to scripture alone?
Do you? I do. Do you promise in taking this office to seek the good of the congregation and the glory of God? Do you? I do. Do you promise to be diligent in prayer, reading, study, meditation, and all the duties of your office, which are to seek to free the elders to focus on the word and prayer, perform the duties of the church toward them, attend to and assist the elders on all lawful occasions and work at their direction and call, collect, account for, keep, manage, and dispose of the property of the church, maintain the officers of the church, discharge expenses for incidentals to ministry, provide for the place of church assemblies, provide for the elements of the sacraments and assist in their arrangement, distribution, and right use, provide and care for the needy by distributing material aid in the name of Christ with discipleship and prayer?
Do you? Do you promise to seek to keep yourself and your household blameless and exemplary in order to continue in service and encourage the usefulness of your office? Do you? I do. Do you promise to seek to maintain and advance the purity, unity, and peace of the church against all error and schism?
Do you? I do. Do you promise to submit to all lawful admonitions and discipline in humility and meekness? Do you? I do. Do you promise to continue in service against all trouble and persecution, to lead the people and aid the elders through difficult times?
Do you? I do. And for those of you who are in the congregation who have aged to understand, dear covenanted member, I ask you to stand now and to say, I do. It is your duty to take these oaths if you are a covenanted member.
So I will ask you, do you, at the end of it, and then you will say, I do. Congregation, do you acknowledge this man to have been nominated, examined, and elected by this congregation to the office of deacon?
Do you? Do you receive and acknowledge him as an officer of the kingdom of the Lord Jesus Christ with lawful claims on your loyalty, honor, obedience, submission, and defense of his station and person, especially in times of trouble or persecution?
Do you? Do you promise to maintain, encourage, and assist him in all the parts of his office, especially in times of trouble or persecution? Do you? You may be seated. All right, okay. I ordain you to the office of deacon in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
Let's pray. Father, we ask that you would bless this man, that you would bless him in service, that you would make him effective, that you would gift him, that you would cause him to be useful to the church, that you would build him up, that you would cause him to have a great reputation, and furthermore, that you would build up his boldness in the faith.
We ask you to help him to be a good steward and governor, that he would be useful in his role and that you would cause the people to be blessed and prospered under him. Father, we ask that you would cause the people to honor him.
And Father, we pray that you would add to our numbers and that you would increase our effectiveness and that you would help us to bring honor to your dear son. We pray this in the name of Jesus Christ.
Amen. Amen. And Deacon Walker, I extend to you the right-handed fellowship as a fellow officer. Welcome. All right, please now open your psalters to Psalm 133. And stand. All right, Psalm 133 reminds us of the beauty of unity, but also of the strength that comes from unity and the way in which officers are used to help to unify and to direct strength and the blessing of anointing for office.
And so, the Holy Spirit anoints powerfully and effectually, and ordination is used as a way to show this idea of the transferring of gifting and power authority. So, let's read this text. 133, a song of a sense of David.
Oh, truly, it is very good and pleasant to behold when the brethren come together and dwell in unity. Oh, it is like the precious oil poured out upon the head, which does run down from Aaron's beard, even to his garments, as the dew from Hermon descends upon Zion's mountain.
For there the Lord his blessing gave, even eternal life. There's a pleasantness and goodness in unity. The unity is like strength that comes from anointing, and that relates to office. And that anointing reminds us of the dew that points to baptism, this idea of water that comes to bring life from Hermon to Zion.
And so, there's a blessing of the gift of eternal life that comes from God, and the gift of unity is unity in the truth, and knowledge of the truth is eternal life. And so, as we have unity in the truth, there is this blessing that comes from, out of Zion, out of the church, of eternal life.
So, let's sing. Hm. Hm.
Oh, truly it is very good and pleasant to behold when the brethren come together and dwell in unity. Oh, it is like the precious oil poured out upon the head, which does run. As the dew from Hermon descends upon Zion's mountain, for there the Lord his blessing gave even eternal life.
The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you. The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace. We now are about to break the fast of the ordination, and so I'd ask that you stick around and join us in that feast, and also that, yeah, and also just that you help us stay and have enjoyable conversation and be able to fellowship together in the blessing of a new deacon that we have.
