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January 9, 2026
Tom Hicks, author & Pastor of First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana, who will address Part TWO of:
“WHAT IS A REFORMED BAPTIST?”
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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.
This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.
Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this ninth day of January, 2026.
I'm delighted to have a returning guest today who had so much to say about what a Reformed Baptist is that we decided to do a part two of that discussion. I'm speaking of Tom Hicks, who is an author and pastor of First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana, and this is going to be, as I just said, part two of our conversation on a recent book that he has written and has been published.
What is a Reformed Baptist? It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor Tom Hicks.
Brother, it's a blessing to be here with you today.
Amen, and I highly urge our listeners, after this live program is over at some point, to go to the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio website, ironsharpensironradio .com, and you can type in the search engine Tom Hicks, H-I-C-K-S, and you will see our December 2 interview, which is part one of the discussion that we are continuing today.
Well, if you could, once again, let our listeners know something about First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana.
Yeah, well, it is located north of Baton Rouge, and if Louisiana is shaped like a boot, then we are in the shoelaces of the boot of Louisiana.
It's a little bitty town.
I don't know if anyone knows where it is, but it's a nice place to live, and it's a blessing to serve there at First Baptist.
And, obviously, we've already made it clear, since we're discussing what is a Reformed Baptist, that this congregation is a Reformed Baptist church.
Yes, it is.
It's a confessional Reformed Baptist church.
Well, if anybody would like details on the First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana, you could go to their website, which is fbcclintonla .com, fbcclintonla .com, for First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana.
Well, I think it would be helpful, Tom, especially for the sake of those who missed part one of this two-part discussion, if you would give a summary, an overall view, of what we've already addressed, the main primary points that folks need to know on how to identify a genuine, historically and biblically faithful Reformed Baptist church.
Yeah, so a Reformed Baptist church is a church that holds to the Reformed confessional traditions that have to do with our confessions of faith. And so Reformed Baptists have held to different confessions of faith, but the main one is the Second London Confession.
And earlier, before that, there was the First London Confession in England. The Second London Confession was first edited and published in 1677. It was formally adopted by the London Baptist Association in 1689.
So sometimes it's called the 1689 Confession. But that's really what it means to be a Reformed Baptist. And the way it differs from other Baptists, for example, would be, of course, it's Calvinistic in its soteriology, but it goes beyond Calvinism, which is sometimes people, Baptists who are Calvinistic, will identify themselves as Reformed Baptists.
But truly, the term Reformed Baptist goes beyond just having a Calvinistic doctrine of salvation and includes a belief about the law of God, the covenants of the Bible, distinction between the law and the gospel, the regulative principle of worship, and those things.
They all go together. We also are rooted more historically than Baptist churches who are not Reformed. We're more rooted directly into the Protestant Reformation and the theology that flowed from it. Reformed Baptists emerged in London out of English independency.
And so we came from the stream of churches over which John Owen was probably the primary theologian and leader, the congregationalist, the independent. And Baptists emerged from what was the JLJ Church, the Jacob Lathrop Jesse Church, that studied baptism.
And they said, not only are we independent and congregational, but we believe that we should only baptize babies. I'm sorry, believers, not babies. We should not baptize babies. Yeah. And John Spilsbury was a major leader in that movement, and there were others that emerged from the JLJ Church.
And there was the first particular Baptist churches that were formed from that. But one little thing interesting to note is they really didn't think of themselves as Baptists. That's much more of an anachronism.
It's a modern innovation to call it Baptist, really. Historically, when we first emerged, we would have called ourselves independent, who baptized believers only. So that would have been their identity.
And they would not have identified themselves with, say, Arminians, who also emerged. So those general Baptists that are called today that were related to the continental Anabaptists, the English particular Baptists, or Baptistic Congregationalists, as Matthew Bingham calls them, would never have found common cause with them or wanted to be in the same association with them.
You mean with the Arminian Baptists you're talking about?
That's correct. They would never have wanted to be in the same association with Arminian Baptists. They really found them to be grossly heterodox. Like, they had very strong words to say about the Arminian Baptists.
And so our identity, if you were to think of it, is we are not really a branch of the Baptist tree. Rather, we're a branch of the Reformed tree. And we are, first, Catholic Christians, little c. Catholic Christians, second, Reformed, and then third, Baptistic.
So Reformed takes primacy over our Baptistic convictions when you're a Reformed Baptist, although we are very conditionally Baptist as well.
And briefly, if you could define the regulative principle, you happen to mention that. And we sometimes in this program take it for granted that people, everyone listening, understands when we use terms like that.
But we very often have new believers listening. We have those outside of the Reformed orbit listening. So why don't you please define for us the regulative principle?
Yeah, it just says that—so what the regulative principle said was that we should only worship God publicly in the church in the ways that he has instituted in the new covenant. So new covenant worship follows what God has instituted in the new covenant.
And so to understand this better, you can contrast the regulative principle with what's called—what Reformed theologians call the normative principle. And the normative principle says that whatever God has not forbidden is free.
So as long as we can somehow justify it from the Bible, we are free and permitted to do it in worship. So today, you know, there are—just to maybe make this practical and say, those who hold to the regulative principle hold to a simple form of worship.
So it doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles. It's not attractional to the human senses. Instead, it's attractional to those who believe, those who have faith. And it doesn't stimulate human senses.
It stimulates faith. And the regulative principle is basically the Word of God in various modes, because the Word of God is read. It's preached. The Word of God appears in the two ordinances, the baptism and the Lord's Supper.
That's the gospel, both of those. Baptism is a picture of the gospel. The Lord's Supper is a picture of the gospel and thus preaches the gospel. We sing songs that are biblical, that are rooted in Scripture, songs, hymns, spiritual songs.
The prayers that we offer should be offered biblically and in the name of Christ and so forth. And so the offerings that we receive are given to God for His glory. As 1 Corinthians talks about, they took up an offering on the first day of the week.
And so one way to think about the regulative principle is that whatever Christ did not institute in the new covenant is prohibited. So we shouldn't add a bunch of other things to it that Christ didn't say we should do, like a puppet show, for example, or play, or interpretive dance, or mining, or anything else.
I saw one church that had a Wheel of Fortune game, or a big Xbox giveaway for High Attendance Sundays. These kinds of things that are more business strategies to get more people in the door, but they aren't what Christ has commanded.
And they really don't help grow the church or strengthen the church. What grows and strengthens a church is the Word of God, faithfully set before Christ's people. So that's an error of worship in modern evangelicalism, is to not hold tightly to what Christ says to do and really don't add to it.
Because the more you add to what Jesus said to do, the more you're distracting everyone from Jesus himself. Because the means of grace, meaning the Word of God, the sacrament, they point us to Christ most directly and most clearly.
And if we add to that in the public worship, what we end up doing is distracting people from Jesus, from God. And another way that this principle is violated is in the more liturgical traditions. So like Roman Catholicism, even Lutheranism, Anglicanism, they add lots of pomp and ceremony, and sometimes it's called bells and bells, to their worship service.
But it's really very similar to what evangelicals have done with laser lights and smoke machines and big bands on stage and stuff. They're both trying to stimulate senses, human physical sensory experiences, instead of stimulating faith through the Word of God.
And what it's really doing is it's not holding fast to what Jesus has said to do in the Bible and that alone. So that's the regulative principle.
Yes. And basically, if you were to sum it up in a very brief and concise way, would it be accurate to say that the regulative principle responds to the silence in Scripture as prohibitions, and the normative principle responds to the silence in Scripture as liberty and freedom to do things?
Yes. And the reason for the regulative principle's response to the silence of God is because of the Reformed doctrine of sola scriptura. The Bible alone is enough to regulate our worship. And we shouldn't go beyond the Bible in the regulation of our worship.
You mentioned puppet shows earlier, and one of the reasons I chuckled was because I can remember vividly years ago in the 1980s when the church where I was saved, a Reformed Baptist church, was Calvary Baptist Church of Amityville, Long Island, which would later merge with First Baptist Church of Merrick, Long Island, and become Grace Reformed Baptist Church of Long Island.
But in those early days in the 80s before the merger, we had as a conference speaker, Greg Nichols, and Greg, who is now pastoring in upstate New York. And Greg was speaking out against these absurd intrusions into the worship of the church, and he included puppet shows as something, you know, to be avoided and even mocked, the very idea of it.
And I just remember jokingly saying that due to Pastor Greg Nichols' sermon, Calvary Baptist Church has canceled its performance of Bert and Ernie go to Sodom and Gomorrah. But having said everything that you said, that does not mean that a church that is governed by the regulative principle cannot and does not have beautiful worship.
And it's especially beautiful to the ears of those who love to hear biblically faithful hymns and songs of worship sung by God's people and the practice of the ordinances and so on.
Yeah, absolutely. What is beautiful about Reformed worship—and this is not just Reformed Baptist, this is the Reformed tradition as a whole, and it's really only lately that we've gotten away from this—but what's beautiful about it is that Christ is set forth.
I mean, this is what Galatians—Paul says to the Galatian churches that Christ was publicly portrayed before their eyes, meaning their eyes of faith, through the proclamation of the Word and ordinances and the singing of songs and hymns and spiritual songs, is that Jesus is sinful.
God is put on sinful display through the One who explains Him, His own Son, incarnate Son. And so, yes, I don't know that there's something could be more beautiful than a direct approach to Jesus, and that's the point.
Amen. And you mentioned earlier that initially those who were among the sovereign grace-believing Baptists were not yet calling themselves Baptists, they were calling themselves Independents. Approximately when in history did the term Baptist become in vogue?
And, of course, the added word particular to set them apart from the Arminian Baptists, who might not have used that term either, but they were in contradiction to those embracing the theology of the Reformation.
And specifically John Calvin, which they obviously firmly believed was biblical, first and foremost, but particular referring to the doctrine of particular redemption, which is also commonly known as limited atonement and definite atonement.
But when was it in vogue for Baptists to actually call themselves Baptists?
I'd have to go and nail that down precisely, but my instinct is it was in the 1800s, because that's when Baptists really exploded, yeah.
Even though, did they not call it the London Baptist Confession of Faith in the 17th century?
No, they did not. It was just the Second London Confession.
Oh, okay. Interesting.
It's actually incorrect to say. It's just not what the title is. If you go pull up the original, you know, you go to early English books online or something and you look up that confession, look at its title, it just says Second London Confession.
Ah, interesting. Now, when it comes to Baptists, were those of a Calvinist persuasion always numerically dominant, or was it a near 50 -50 split between Arminians and Calvinistic Baptists?
The answer is yes, very strongly so. They were dominant because the Reformed faith and Protestantism in general was Calvinistic. The turn away from that was always viewed as a degradation from the Reformed faith, and so this is why, well, not getting too distracted, but you had the Dutch Reformed Church and then you had the Remonstrants afterward, which were Arminians.
They were looked at as a decline. Numerically speaking, in England, Calvinistic Baptists, particular Baptists, were the overwhelming majority. There was a much smaller group of Arminian Baptists, but they were large enough to where they were on the radar.
But no one called them Baptists. They were the Anabaptists. They really took on a lot of the theology of the Anabaptists, including its synthetic doctrine of justification, doctrine you can lose your salvation, the doctrine of they were suspicious about original sin.
In fact, I'm pretty sure they didn't believe in it. So these were serious departures from the Reformed faith as a whole. Some got cleaner and clearer, and they started to articulate themselves better after their genesis, that's for sure, but they still were not considered mainstream at all in the Reformed faith.
And even particular Baptists were viewed as a departure. However, some heretic hunters, like Daniel Featley, said that the particular Baptists, and they weren't called that at that time, but that they had the root of the matter.
They were really warm-hearted Christians, and he was trying to find a heresy in them, and he didn't. So there was lots of camaraderie and communion between Pato Baptists and Baptists in England. In fact, a lot of our early English Baptist forebears were close friends with Pato Baptists and very open-hearted toward them, lots of unity there, and that was on purpose on the parts of the particular Baptists.
The general Baptists or the Arminian Baptists, that was not the case. They were their own thing, very separate, very much in rebellion against the mainstream of the Reformation trajectory, and actually on the road back to Roman Catholicism in many ways.
And it's interesting that if you read especially older literature from over a century ago, if you read literature featuring the writings of Arminian Protestants, those outside of Baptist circles, Wesleyan, Methodist, and so forth, it's interesting that they will assume in their writings very often, if they're referring to a Baptist, that that Baptist is a Calvinist.
There seems to be an equating of the two automatically.
Oh, yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you can go back to—I'll just say in America, on the American side, all the early Southern Baptist churches, we'll just go there, all, and I really do mean all of them, held to a version of the Second London Confession.
So it could have been the Charleston Confession or the Philadelphia Confession, but it's essentially the Second London Confession. And that was what formed the convention. There might have been one or two exceptions, maybe, that they wouldn't have been Arminian.
They would have been—they just held a different confession at some time. But it was almost universal, and that's the root of the Southern Baptist Convention, despite what many today seem to think. It was never this huge tent that it's—this big tent that it is today, and you have all different mixtures of everything kind of with it.
As long as you immerse, then you can be a part of it, you know, and loosely hold to the Baptist faith and Message 2000. So, yeah, to say Baptist meant Calvinistic.
Now, before we go to the break, I happen to know some—they are a minority, at least in my experience they Know some Reformed Baptist men, pastors, who identify as confessional using the 1689 London Confession.
And they disagree with a requirement of being bound to the regulative principle. Would you say that individuals like that are inappropriately identifying themselves as Reformed Baptists, even though the vast majority of the confession would be something they would echo with us?
Yes, I would, but I'd go further, and I would say even the Arminian Baptists became Baptists because of the regulative principle. So if you want to ask the question, why did Baptists emerge from paedobaptism, what was the catalyst doctrine that caused them to become Baptists rather than paedobaptists, it was the regulative principle.
And so here's a question I would put to any professing Baptist brother who doesn't hold to the regulative principle. I would say, if you don't hold a doctrine that was necessary to the emergence of Baptists in the first place, are you really a Baptist?
And of course, we both know that even churches that adhere to the regulative principle are not monolithic because you have some who take that to mean we are only to sing a cappella in the church or to only sing psalms and not hymns and spiritual songs.
And so you do have differences in the Reformed community when it comes to the regulative principle.
Oh, yeah. I mean, we can duke it out over how it's applied, and that's what we're talking about here. But that's a discussion within the doctrine that only what Christ has instituted is permitted. Well, then you have to ask, well, what exactly did he institute and what did he not?
And that's where those debates come in.
Well, we have to go to our first commercial break, and if anybody, once again, would like to join us on the air with a question of your own for Tom Hicks, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.
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I'm Simon O'Mahony, pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.
At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession, we embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost, and the glory of our triune God.
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We would love for you to visit and worship with us. You can find our details at trbccarlisle .org. That's trbccarlisle .org. God willing, we'll see you soon.
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Welcome back, if you just tuned us in. Our guest today is a returning guest, Tom Hicks, author and pastor of First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana, and we are addressing part two of a conversation we began back in December, What is a Reformed Baptist?
And that is the title of a new book that is in print by Tom Hicks, published by Founders Press. And by the way, Founders Press has a wonderful discount available for you who are listening. If you go to their website, which is press .founders .org, and type in, What is a Reformed Baptist? in the search engine, you can order this book.
And if you use the code BAPTIST, you will receive a 10 discount. I'm getting that right, right, Tom?
That's correct, yeah.
Okay, so we hope that you take advantage of that discount. Let me go, before I go into some questions of my own, let me go to Delmar in Vestavia Hills, Alabama.
And Delmar asks,.
Why did it become so popular amongst confessional Reformed Baptists to eliminate the original clause within the confession that identified the Pope as the Antichrist?
He's asking, why did it become popular?
To eliminate.
For some churches to, like, scratch, edit that part out, right? Right, right. Is that what he's saying? Yeah. Yeah, so I think it's really, I think it's because it's a misunderstanding. And it probably happened, you know, on the heels of a real emphasis on eschatology and dispensationalism.
And, you know, that was in the water when Reformed Baptists in the 20th century were emerging. And so when it says the Pope is that Antichrist, it makes us think, well, he is the Antichrist. You know, this is the Pope is the Antichrist, which obviously he wasn't in the day that the Second London Confession was composed.
But that's not what the confession means. What it means is when it says he is that Antichrist, it means that he is an anti-Christian leader, that he fits the mold of a recurring spirit of the Antichrist that is at times embodied in various figures throughout history.
And the papacy is one of them. And so I would argue that if you would hold that Roman Catholicism and the papacy is anti-Christian, then you hold the doctrine that is taught in the confession, because that's really what it means.
It's not making an eschatological statement. It's instead making a theological statement about the nature of the papacy.
So you're saying that you believe that the Reformed Baptists that diminish the importance or eliminate the importance of that article identifying the Pope as the Antichrist, you're thinking they are in error in doing so.
Well, I think they've misunderstood. I think they've misunderstood the confession because it's not true that the Pope is the final Antichrist. That's just not true. And you might read the original confession and think, well, that's what they thought back in 1677, but they were wrong.
So let's get it out of there or something. Well, that every Pope is the Antichrist or something like that. But that's not what it meant. It really meant it had to do with their understanding of when you look at like 1 John, it talks about the spirit of the Antichrist.
This is there have been Antichrist. And there will be Antichrist. There's not just one. I think they're misunderstanding. I think they're misunderstanding the confession. If they're not, if they really think that the papacy is Christianity, then we have a real difference from them.
If that's what, when they scratch that out of the confession, do they really mean that the papacy is substantially fundamentally Christian? Then that's not what the reformers would have thought. They believe it had so seriously departed from the gospel and needed massive reformation.
Yes.
And of course, many who are dispensationalists and others, not only dispensationalists, misuse the term Antichrist to identify a future figure in Revelation when that term is not mentioned in the book of Revelation.
The beast of Revelation is mentioned in the whole of Babylon and so on, but the Antichrist is not mentioned in the book of Revelation.
Yeah. I do believe there will be a final Antichrist, but I don't think that's what the confession is talking about when it's talking about the Pope. Right. Okay.
Thank you, Delmar. Now, one of the things that is controversial in the distinctives of Reformed Baptists, Confessional Reformed Baptists, is our understanding of the covenant, which not only is in distinction from the non-Reformed, non-confessional, non-Calvinist Baptist churches, but it's also distinct from, to a degree, the Presbyterian understanding.
And of course, there isn't really one Presbyterian understanding. I've interviewed enough Presbyterians to know that they are not in lockstep, you know, identical to one another. But even we who are Reformed Baptists sometimes disagree with our understanding of what covenant theology means and so on.
But if you could tell us, in your opinion, what you think is the most biblical and historically faithful understanding of the covenant.
Yeah, so I'm going to get this from the big picture, and without trying to prove every single thing I say here, you can get the book and see my arguments for that. But when we say covenant theology in the Reformed sense, we're talking about the metastructure of the biblical covenant, the big picture.
And we're particularly talking about the covenants that are about eternal life or salvation. So if you ask the question, which covenants promise eternal life? And there are three that are related to eternal life, okay?
So the first is the covenant of work that was made with Adam. And this covenant was kindly established by God. Adam could never require God to establish this covenant. God did not owe Adam this covenant in any sense.
Rather, this was a kind and condescension of God to the creature, to Adam, to establish this covenant. But then once it's kindly established, you could say graciously here, but sometimes it's probably not better to say gracious because grace really has to do with demerited favor.
But it is nonetheless a gift. The covenant is a gift. Once God gifts this covenant to Adam, the terms within that covenant are terms of perfect obedience for eternal life. Adam had to do this and live.
And we know that because there's a tree of life, a tree of eternal life, right there in the garden. But what do you make of that? And there were no second chances. He sinned once, but he was out forever.
So just understanding that, I mean, if you just back up and look at it, what that is, is it's an arrangement that's unique, where you have an oath, you have two parties, you have God and Adam, and you have terms, which are he had to obey God perfectly, with no second chances in the garden.
And that's the covenant of work. Do this and live. And of course, Adam did not. And so he died. He and all of his posterity. That's the first covenant, is the covenant of work. The second covenant is eternally planned but is formally actually established between God and Christ at the incarnation, and that's called the covenant of redemption.
So there's an eternal council of peace that is established at the incarnation. And this covenant is also a covenant of work to Christ. So Jesus didn't get grace in this covenant. He had to obey God perfectly in terms of the covenant to live.
And we know that he did because he perfectly kept the law of God in his earthly life. He took our sins to himself. He died for them, and we know that he perfectly obeyed and he made full satisfaction for our sins because he was raised to eternal life.
Christ did this, and he lived in that covenant of redemption. And so satisfied, perfectly, divine justice, and when he said it is finished on the cross, he completely accomplished the redemption of his chosen people to whom he would apply it.
So that's the covenant of redemption. The third covenant about eternal life is the covenant of grace. And this covenant, it is nothing other than the application of all the life blessings that Jesus received in the covenant of redemption.
So the covenant of redemption that sees all these blessings, accomplishes them, but the elect now don't deserve them themselves, but Christ deserves for the elect to be given all these blessings. And so the moment any one of the elect in time is joined to Jesus in the covenant of grace, which is formally concluded in the new covenant, then they are regenerated.
They're given the gifts of faith and repentance. They're justified only by faith. They're adopted only by faith. They are sanctified. They are preserved. They persevere to the end, and then finally they're glorified.
And those blessings are irrevocable, meaning they certainly come to pass for the elect who are joined into the covenant. They're the only ones who are joined to Christ in this covenant of grace. So the covenant of grace is not as contrasted with the covenant of work because there's no terms of work to us in the covenant of grace such that we have to remain in it.
Like, it's not as though we're in a new Garden of Eden now where we have to work and obey Christ in order to stay in a right relationship with God, in order to stay in the covenant. It's backwards. Instead, here's the terms of the covenant of grace.
The covenant of work said, do this and live. The covenant of grace says, live and do this. So we're given the free gift of life, and from that free gift of life flows doing. And we keep the commandments of Christ imperfectly, but we do, and we repent, and we persevere, all because of the Holy Spirit's effectual work within us who will finish all that he's started.
Another way of framing this up a little bit is all five points of Calvinism are in those covenants. So if you think of—well, except for unconditional election, which is pre-covenantal, so unconditional election is in the decree, but the covenant of works is total depravity.
Adam sinned against the law, and God cursed the whole human race with total depravity, such that all men are totally unable to do anything toward their own salvation. That's a result of Adam's failure in the covenant of works.
In the covenant of redemption, Jesus definitely atoned for the elect, so that's the doctrine of definite atonement or limited atonement. In the covenant of grace, you have irresistible grace and perseverance of the saints, which the Spirit affects in all of his elect people.
So there's—Calvinism is tightly connected to our overarching covenantal theology, which is a covenant about eternal life. And what I haven't gotten into and what people sometimes want to ask, and I'm happy to if you want to discuss it, but there are biblical covenants, right?
So you have the covenant with Abraham, covenant with—or Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic covenant, and then the new covenant. So what do you do with—what do we do with those? Well, here's where we're getting into the difference between, say, us and Presbyterians.
Presbyterians tend to want to say—the majority report of Presbyterians have said the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, and the Davidic covenants were identical with the covenant of grace. No historic Baptist said that, that they're identical.
Now, that might be a little strong. Let me think. At the beginning, there were certain ones that made that same move, and they were still Baptists, and they held that. But I was too strong when I said none.
But most historic Baptists and the majority view of the historic Baptists was that the covenant of grace is not identical with the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, and the Davidic covenant. Rather, the covenant of grace is either a theological construct—some taught that—or it's just the covenant of—some identified it with the covenant of redemption alone.
But what became the more reigning view over time, the majority view among particular Baptists, is that it was the new covenant. And that's the view that I hold. The new covenant was reaching back into time, beginning at Genesis 3 .15 with Adam and saving all of the elect through time up until Christ came and formally established the new covenant.
That the new covenant was retroactively applying its promises to save all of the elect. But what that means is, if you're in the Abrahamic covenant, that doesn't mean you're in the covenant of grace. So if you're in the covenant of circumcision, you're not necessarily in the covenant of grace.
If you're in the Abrahamic covenant of circumcision, you could also be in the covenant of grace. And that would mean you're in two covenants at the same time, the same with the Mosaic and the Davidic.
And so then that raises the question of what are those other covenants doing? So what's the Abrahamic covenant doing? What's the Davidic covenant and the Mosaic? If they're not the covenant of grace about eternal life, saving people, what are they doing?
Well, they're carrying the seed, the line of promise. They are carrying the means by which, or they're carrying the seed of the Savior who would come and establish the new covenant and save all the elect peoples.
So it's about preserving the line of promise and also revealing both law and gospel, the original covenant of works, and the coming new covenant in Titus' shadows. And so that's what's happening in the Abrahamic, the Mosaic, and the Davidic covenant.
And it's more of a typological kingdom of Christ. It's not the actual redemptive kingdom. It's a shadow of what would yet come in the future. So that's how I would sketch it. Does that make sense? Do you have any guess in ways I should clarify?
Well, let me just follow up with a couple of questions or clarifications. I'm assuming by what you said, you would disagree with a common Pado-Baptist phrase that God has one covenant with his people, but two administrations.
Yes. So the mainstream view of Presbyterian covenant theology and Reformed covenant theology is that God has one covenant with the same substance that is variously administered. So it looks different in these different covenants, but its saving substance or core is the same.
It actually saves people. So the Abrahamic covenant is actually saving the elect, so is the Mosaic, and so are the Davidic. But they look different, slightly. And then you come to the new covenant, and there's a big shift, but it's the same covenant as all those earlier ones.
The new covenant has the same substance as the Abrahamic and the Mosaic and the Davidic. Where I would strongly differ from them, and I think the majority of particular Baptists would, is we deny that the new covenant has the same substance as the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic, and the Davidic.
The new covenant alone has a saving substance, that's the covenant of grace. The Abrahamic, Mosaic, and Davidic covenants do not have a saving substance. Their substance is not about redemption. It's actually about the preservation of the line of promise.
The Abrahamic covenant is a tribal covenant, the Mosaic is a national covenant, the Davidic is a covenant with a kingdom. And it's all about a people that was carrying the line of promise until Christ would come, and it's about revealing the law and the gospel, the original covenant of works and the covenant of grace.
And the substance of these covenants was really, it was works. You had to obey the law of God to stay in them. Like, if you persisted and the nation as a whole rebelled, it brought the curse upon itself.
But we cannot rebel against Christ like that in the covenant of grace, in the new covenant. He keeps us by His power. We cannot break covenant. They could break covenant in the old covenant. It was a breakable substance.
The new covenant has no breakable substance. And, you know, even using the word substance and administration and all that, there's all kinds of debates about this. I might rather use the word essence or whatever, but you get the point.
They're doing different things at their heart. That's the issue.
And to be clear, I know as a Reformed Baptist, you do not believe, unless anybody listening is confused and draws a wrong conclusion, you are not saying that obedience in the old covenant saved anyone.
Absolutely not. I do not believe that. The obedience in the old covenant mostly just kept them alive. Like, God didn't bring a curse temporally. He brought temporal blessings. So, I mean, it's just real clear.
So if you read Genesis 17, if you didn't circumcise your child, you were to be cut off from the people. What did that mean? It mean you would die. So circumcising your child meant you could remain with the tribe.
You see? So it was a work. You know, in that sense, you had to do something to stay in and connected. So the doing was prior to the connection. What you had to do to stay with, to be in the covenant and not to be disinherited from the covenant.
That's exactly backwards from the new covenant. In the new covenant or in the covenant of grace, your connection to the covenant guarantees and produces your doing. And you cannot be disinherited from it.
Right. The old covenants were earthly, fleshly, and temporal, whereas the new covenant is spiritual and eternal.
Amen.
And one last thing that we differ from our Paido-Baptist brethren is that we do not believe, and you could correct me if I'm phrasing this improperly, but we do not believe that the unelect are in the new covenant, whereas many of our Paido-Baptist brethren believe the new covenant includes those that will eventually wind up in hell, even though they have an intercessor and a mediator in Jesus Christ, which to me boggles the mind.
I agree with that. And no, that's true, is that we have, Baptists have from our beginning really emphasized Jeremiah 31 and Hebrews 8, which says, they shall all know me from the least to the greatest in this new covenant.
And so in the new covenant, everyone knows the Lord. And that's presently fulfilled according to Hebrews 8. And, you know, Jesus says this cup is the cup of the new covenant. That's for the church. So right now we're in the new covenant, and it means if you're in the new covenant, you are a believer.
And there are no non-elect people in the new covenant, therefore. So yeah, but we do believe that within a church, so the church covenant has, we're to admit those into the church who credibly profess faith in Christ.
And no one but a believer has a right to join a church. But unbelievers do in fact join church without a right to. And so within the church covenant, not the new covenant, church covenants, local church covenants, there are unbelievers that pretend.
And so it is a nicked body in fact, but not by right. There's no right for an unbeliever to be in the church. And so that's where church discipline comes in and, you know, excommunication and removing unbelievers from it.
But that's another place where we differ from Presbyterians, that not everyone in the church is in the covenant of grace. We don't know who that would be, but only those in the covenant of grace or the new covenant are actually going to push the beard to the end.
And the others will manifest unbelief and may have to be removed from the church covenant, or they go on self-deception and it's not revealed who they are. But so we have something similar to Presbyterians, but we say there's two covenants going on.
So the Presbyterians would say that the new covenant has unbelievers in its outward administration. But we would say no, the new covenant has no unbelievers in it. It's only a believer's covenant and it is not a breakable covenant, unbreakable, and it's absolutely fading.
Yes, I have heard Pado-Baptist friends and brothers, I don't want to use the word mock, but in their disagreement with us, where we say we only baptize believers because we believe that is the biblical example of what baptism is, they will often say, yeah, but you often baptize people who are unbelievers because they prove themselves to be false converts later on in their lives when they become apostate and so on.
But there's a huge difference between intentionally baptizing people who you have no clue whether or not they are regenerate, and the unconscious baptism of those who are giving some kind of evidence that is fooling us that they are saved, and therefore we're taking them at their word that they have repented and everything that we see in their lives, we baptize them because we are not, and no one on this planet is, omniscient.
We can't read the hearts and minds of men like Christ, and so therefore there will be errors made. But this is not done intentionally.
That is correct, and I would say, just kind of playing around with a Presbyterian who would talk like that, sometimes they talk about the presumptive regeneration of infants that they baptize, and I would say we have biblical warrant to presume the regeneration of anyone who confesses Christ because it's all through acts, and it's in Romans.
If you confess with your mouth and believe in your heart, you shall be saved. Well, who's to be baptized in Acts? It's those who profess, those who say that they believe. That's what's going on throughout the whole narrative, and so we actually, as Baptists, we believe in presumptive regeneration of all who credibly profess faith.
But it doesn't mean, it does not mean that an unbeliever has a right, that's the key word, to be baptized. That's where we really differ, that's the real heart of the debate, is that they believe infants who don't believe still have a right to be baptized.
Right. And we don't. That's right. They also believe that, yeah, so they believe the church is rightfully a mixed body. We do not. Right. The church is in fact a mixed body, but there's no right to a mixture of believers and unbelievers in the church.
And we have to go to our midway break right now. And once again, if you have a question, submit it to chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.
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The question is, Is Baptist a denomination? I have heard disagreeing responses to that question from Baptists.
Well, I mean, I would not call Baptists a denomination. Very colloquially and sort of broadly people say that, but usually a denomination would refer to the name of a church, like a name of a church. And so you have the Presbyterian Church of America.
It's really all one church. So there is no Baptist church. If you ever hear anybody say something like, That's the Baptist church, it's not accurate because there are only individual Baptist churches.
So I recoil from the idea of denomination for that reason, but for another reason, and that is that there are many different kinds of Baptist churches almost that are Baptist churches, and there is no hierarchy of authority that is determining the way Baptist churches are.
So you have to judge very carefully each church you visit that's a Baptist church or would look at and try to understand what that particular church believes and how they practice and so on because Baptist churches are not in any hierarchy.
We are instead associational when we're at our best. That is, we associate, but really only to the purpose of doing certain things with other Baptist churches, and those associations have no power to act within individual Baptist churches.
So to discipline within them, for example, or to exercise any kind of power or control within local churches. So you can, I think, call a Baptist a denomination only in the sense that it's describing, in general terms, a kind of church polity or ecclesiology that's distinct from other Protestant churches.
You can call it that, but I would shy away from calling Baptists a denomination. Yes.
One of the tenets of historic Baptist churches is the independence and autonomy of local congregations that are governed only by the Word of God and by local elders and a congregationalist form of government, whereas denominations typically have a hierarchical structure with authority outside of the individual congregations.
Am I saying that correctly, do you think?
I think so, yes. All right.
And now let me ask you, is the Southern Baptist Convention a denomination?
I would call it that, like I said colloquially, but it is not. What's interesting, I mean, if you want to get real technical here, the Southern Baptist Convention only exists for two days out of the year.
The word convention just means big meeting. So it's a massive business meeting, and once the Southern Baptist Convention closes on the second day, it doesn't exist. There are entities that keep on existing, it's established, but it doesn't.
So there are local Southern Baptist associations which really have more substance, supposedly. They don't anymore, they've lost that, but supposedly more substance than the state and the national levels, which is historically how Baptists have run.
So it's been more like we locally associate with other Southern Baptist churches, primarily for the purpose of missions and historically also for the purpose of working out doctrinal issues somewhat and differences among ourselves, practical issues, and that if a church were to become heretical or tolerate some gross sin, you could exclude that whole church from the association, but you couldn't fire the pastor, you couldn't discipline the person that was involved, you could just act to remove them from the whole association.
So that's historically Southern Baptist. Great.
And I want to make sure that you highlight things from your book that we failed to cover during part one of our discussion in December to make sure that those things that you find most important in your own writings will not be ignored.
So why don't you highlight some of those things?
I'm not remembering everything we talked about in December. Did we talk about the relation between the law and the gospel? This is very important.
You know, I don't think that we— I've addressed that many times with different guests, but I'm not specifically remembering us having a conversation about it.
Well, let me hit on that, because that's really very crucial to Reformed Baptist theology and the way that it—and really Reformed theology and the way that it works out pastorally. And so we're thinking maybe in terms of preaching and what this means.
So very practically, I'm going to try to show you how it works out, and that is that when we're ministering or preaching the gospel or just teaching the Bible in any way or even reading the Bible, we're trying to get it for ourselves.
We should think in these terms. Let me give you an example that would be a bad way to teach, okay? So a bad way to teach would be—or preach or even read the Bible— would be something like this. Let's take the law.
So the moral law of God is summarized by the Ten Commandments. And what does it say? The fourth commandment is, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy, which means stop working from your ordinary labors and keep it holy, meaning gather for a holy day, a day of holy convocation, as Leviticus says.
So I could be preaching that, and I could say, okay, if you're not coming to church faithfully, then you're in sin, and there's guilt there because you are not keeping the commandments. You're not missing church for any necessity.
There's not an illness or some emergency. Rather, you just don't want to come sometimes, and you just don't show up because of whatever reason or real light reason, like I'm just a little too tired today or have some other things I need to get done.
And I could say you're guilty for that. Now Jesus commands you to obey him. So you need to stop breaking Sabbath and start coming to church on the Sabbath. And then what are the people going to do? Well, some will think, well, that's really a heavy burden.
I don't like hearing that, and I'm just going to keep doing it my way, but you're making me feel guilty all the time now. Other people are going to say, okay, well, I'm going to start coming to church more often so I can feel less guilty, so I can be less guilty.
But that person is going to become proud. Now he's keeping the law, and he's doing right before God. He's obeying the Sabbath commandment. He's showing up at church now every Sunday, maybe Sunday morning, Sunday afternoon, Sunday evening.
He maybe starts coming Wednesday night, and he just feels so glad of his obedience to God. So there's a real problem with preaching that moves directly from guilt to obedience or that in any way implies that you can overcome your guilt by obeying.
You cannot overcome your guilt by obeying the law. So this is where the law of gospel theology comes in. It says the motion is not from guilt to obedience. Okay, stop doing that, then start obeying Christ so that you're less guilty.
It moves from guilt to Christ and his grace to grateful obedience or gratitude. So guilt, grace, gratitude is the proper motion. So let me redo the scenario with the Sabbath and say it would be right to say, to preach, if you aren't being faithful to keep God's law, there's guilt there.
But not only are you guilty for those who are coming faithfully to church on Sunday, guilty, those who are there on Sunday are still not keeping the Sabbath perfectly because the Sabbath law doesn't just command outward obedience.
It commands perfect worship from the heart, perfect rest in Christ, perfect rest from your labors, perfect faith in Jesus and repentance and love to him and love to the brethren while you're there, prayerfulness.
All these things command such perfect obedience that no one is without guilt. Certainly there's more guilt in some than others, but everyone is laid low beneath the law when it's preached in all of its fullness.
You cannot perfectly obey the law, which leaves you in great need. And there's no way that now changing what you're doing and starting to obey the law can in any way overcome your guilt. This is why Jesus came.
He came and he perfectly kept the Sabbath his whole life. We could do with any of the commandments, but I'm just using the Sabbath as an example. His whole life he obeyed the good law of the Lord and he honored his Father and he worked hard six days and he rested the Sabbath on the Sabbath.
He went to synagogues and proclaimed the gospel. And then having perfectly obeyed the law, he got up on the cross and with love in his heart, he took our Sabbath breaking and every other kind of sin to himself and he died there and he bled and his blood washes all of your Sabbath breaking.
And his righteousness, his perfect Sabbath keeping is imputed to your account so that before God, by faith alone, not because you have changed, not because of your obedience, not because of your repentance, but because of what Jesus did and who he is, you are forgiven, you are accepted, you are righteous before Christ.
And now, having been washed in his blood, don't you love Jesus? Don't you want to worship him on his day? Don't you want to rest as he commands you to? And it's more than just don't you want to. It's more than just you should want to.
And there is that question, don't you want to keep the Sabbath of this great Savior who saved you from the guilt of your sin, the shame of your sin, the hell that your sin deserves? Don't you want to?
But there's more than the question don't you want to. There's the command. This great Jesus now commands you to obey him, but it's for your good. It's not to get rid of your guilt. None of your obedience can clear your guilt.
You don't obey him to get rid of your guilt. You don't obey him from guilt. You don't obey him in order that he'll accept you or so that you'll look good before other people. You obey him because he bought you with a price, because he loves you.
He loves you, so obey him. And he promises blessing to you that is really greater communion with Christ, deeper knowledge of Jesus, more conformity to his image as you keep the Sabbath and all of his commandments.
But as you do this, so obey him from a heart of love and gratitude. And so the law of gospel theology says there's a way to obey the law wrongly, which is legally, so that your heart is still corrupt and proud and thinking, I'm going to, you know, something about my obedience is enough to make me acceptable to God.
That's a legal obedience versus gospel obedience, which says, I'm going to obey Jesus because I'm already forgiven, because I'm already loved, because I've already been accepted, because he tells me to, and what he tells me to do is for my good.
So I'm going to do it because I trust him. I trust him to save me and to command me. And so I'm going to bend the knee to him and I'm going to come to church, Lord's day to Lord's day, because of who he is and all that he's done.
So that is the motion there, the threefold motion that I'm trying to lay out in a practical way. It's from the preaching of the law as a covenant, preaching the covenant of works, really. You have to perfectly obey for life, which none of you can do, to the covenant of redemption.
Jesus did it all for you. He perfectly accomplished your redemption in the gospel, through the obedience and his death and his resurrection proves it, to the covenant of grace. Now, obey Christ in the covenant of grace, under grace, is guilt, grace, gratitude, or law, gospel, gospel, obedience.
And that's how we should think as Christians, so that we're not obeying out of guilt or slavish fear, which would really be a sin, and that's the point. It's not like we're trying to make it—we're not trying to say remove motives to obedience that would be helpful.
Now, I've heard this before, that when you preach this way, you're taking away the guilt motive and you're taking away the fear motive, which could really get people to obey. But no, if you obey from guilt, if you obey from slavish legal fear, you're actually sinning, because you're somehow obeying because you think you can get rid of your guilt, or you're obeying out of a slavish fear as though God is some little pact master who's ready to hit you over the head and, you know, legal judicial anger or something.
That's taking long thoughts about who God is. But it's rather, as our hearts become convinced that God is good, that He is great, He's really, really good, that therefore we can be convinced that His law is good and good for us, and we obey not out of guilt, not out of slavish fear, but out of love and joy.
And there is a negative motive. There is a motive that it's a gospel negative, meaning He will discipline you in love if you don't obey His commandments and the covenant of grace. And that discipline in love is a discipline that says, I love you too much to allow this cancer to keep eating you from the inside out, and I'm going to get it out of you.
So I've got to apply the rod here. But it's all out of love. It's not out of guilt, not because you're guilty. It's from a father to a son. It's not because I want to push you away from me. I want you closer to me.
I don't want to drive you away. I want you to know who I am more fully. I want to build a relationship with you that's closer. That's divine discipline, but it is painful. So there is a negative gospel motive and divine discipline.
There's also the right fear of God, the reverential fear of this God who, can you imagine? God, to my sins, mean that the only way I can be saved is that God the Son die on the cross. That is, yes, it's gracious and wonderful, but if you think about it, it's a bit fearful.
That's what it took for me to be redeemed? With you there is forgiveness that you may be feared, and that's in the Psalms. And so forgiveness, proper understanding of the cross, leads to the fear of God.
So what I'm trying to get at is the right motives to obedience are all found under grace. They're all found. All these motives, the motive of love, the motive of true faith, the motive of joy, reverential fear, the fear of discipline, all of those motives are under grace.
None of them are from guilt or in order to achieve righteousness before God or before men. They're from a heart of faith in Christ and all that he's done. So that's attempting to get at a practical summary of the way the classic Reformed law gospel theology is deployed.
And there's a good book I'd recommend beyond my own on this. I mean, I'm just repeating what others said. My book is an entry-level book, but I would recommend a treatise on the law and the gospel by John Cahoon.
I would even say if there's one doctrine I would love to see recovered in the American church today and in Reformed circles, particularly, it's a robust understanding of law and gospel. I guess the last thing I'll say about it is when we say law and gospel, we mean these are the two good words about God, about Jesus.
Both law and gospel are good. They both reveal him. And so we're not dividing law and gospel. We're rather saying there's a right relationship between them that preserves both law and gospel without destroying either one or collapsing and confusing them.
We have to understand them together. So I would highly commend anyone listening. If you haven't studied the subject, it's really important, and I highly recommend studying it.
Amen. And before we go to our final break, let me take a listener question from Tommy in Kilgore, Texas. Tommy says, from your understanding and knowledge of church history, what percentage of Calvinist Baptists were also confessional?
And he has a second question that'll wait until you answer the first before I get into that.
That's a very good question. So some of them, like Benjamin Teach, he had his own confession for his church, but he also signed the Second London Confession. John Gill had his own Goat Yard Confession, and I'm not aware that he used or subscribed to the Second London.
But if you mean, in a broad sense, confessional, they were all confessional. I mean, they all had their own confessions, and they were pretty close to each other, even if there were some things they wanted to put down in their own church's confession that weren't in the associational one.
But here's really where I want to go with it, and that is the London Baptist Association adopted the Second London Confession. So all of those churches that were in that London Baptist Association, which was all those early particular Baptists, they held to the Second London Confession as a good summary of what they all believed.
So I don't know a percentage, though.
Okay, Tommy, hold on, because I'm going to ask your second question when we return from our final break. And don't go away, folks, because we are coming back right after these messages.
Greetings. This is Brian McLaughlin, president of the SecureComm Group and supporter of Chris Armson's Iron Shopping Zion radio program. SecureComm provides the highest level of security systems for residential buildings, municipalities, churches, commercial properties, and much more.
We can be reached at securecommgroup .com. That's securecommgroup .com. But today I want to introduce you to my senior pastor, Doug McMasters, of New High Park Baptist Church on Long Island.
Doug McMasters here, former director of pastoral correspondence at Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur. In the film Chariots of Fire, the Olympic gold medalist runner Eric Liddell remarked that he felt God's pleasure when he ran.
He knew his efforts sprang from the gifts and calling of God. I sense that same God-given pleasure when ministering the word and helping others gain a deeper knowledge and love for God. That love starts with the wonderful news that the Lord Jesus Christ is a savior who died for sinners, and that God forgives all who come to him in repentance, trusting solely in Christ to deliver them.
I would be delighted to have the honor and privilege of ministering to you if you live in the Long Island area or Queens or Brooklyn or the Bronx in New York City. For details on New High Park Baptist Church, visit nhpbc .com.
That's nhpbc .com. You can also call us at 516 -352 -9672. That's 516 -352 -9672. That's New High Park Baptist Church, a congregation in love with each other, passionate for Christ, committed to learning and being shaped by God's word, and delighting in the gospel of God's sovereign grace.
God bless you.
I'm Dr. Tony Costa, professor of apologetics and Islam at Toronto Baptist Seminary. I'm thrilled to introduce to you a church where I've been invited to speak and have grown to love, Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corham, Long Island, New York, pastored by Rich Jensen and Christopher McDowell.
It's such a joy to witness and experience fellowship with people of God, like the dear saints at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corham, who have an intensely passionate desire to continue digging deeper and deeper into the unfathomable riches of Christ in his holy word, and to enthusiastically proclaim Christ Jesus the King and his doctrines of sovereign grace in Suffolk County, Long Island, and beyond.
I hope you also have the privilege of discovering this precious congregation and receive the blessing of being showered by their love, as I have. For more information on Hope Reform Baptist Church, go to hopereformedli .net.
That's hopereformedli .net. Or call 631 -696 -5711. That's 631 -696 -5711. Tell the folks at Hope Reform Baptist Church of Corham, Long Island, New York, that you heard about them from Tony Costa on Iron Sharpens Iron.
I'm truly grateful for many things that the Trump administration has ushered in, but here's something that seriously concerns me. On July 18th, President Donald Trump signed the Genius Act into law. This new law allows financial institutions to convert your hard-earned dollars into stable coins, a digital token backed by $37 trillion in national debt.
They will not need your approval. You hand over your dollars, and they give you a trackable, programmable, freezable token. This sounds like something out of a science fiction movie. They get control, and you get surveillance.
Stable coins are not freedom. They're a digital leash. This is one step away from a full-blown digital currency. How stable is a stable coin? If your account is hacked, or if the power grid goes down for a period of time, you can instantly be locked out.
It is time to get some of your hard-earned money outside of the traditional banking system and the U .S. dollar. If you want to have a better understanding of stable coins and the future of money, then please call my friends at Gold Wealth Management and request your free report.
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...Grace Church at Franklin here in the beautiful state of Tennessee. Our congregation is one of a growing number of churches who love and support Iron Sharpens Iron Radio financially. Grace Church at Franklin is an independent, autonomous body of believers which strives to clearly declare the whole counsel of God as revealed in Scripture through the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And, of course, the end for which we strive is the glory of God. If you live near Franklin, Tennessee, and Franklin is just south of Nashville, maybe 10 minutes, or you are visiting this area, or you have friends and loved ones nearby, we hope you will join us some Lord's Day in worshiping our God and Savior.
Please feel free to contact me if you have more questions about Grace Church at Franklin. Our website is gracechurchatfranklin .org. That's gracechurchatfranklin .org. This is Pastor Bill Sousa wishing you all the richest blessings of our sovereign Lord, God, Savior, and King, Jesus Christ, today and always.
I'm Simon O'Mahony, Pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist Church in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Originally from Cork, Ireland, the Lord in his sovereign providence has called me to shepherd this new and growing congregation here in Cumberland County.
At TRBC, we joyfully uphold the Second London Baptist Confession, we embrace congregational church government, and we are committed to preaching the full counsel of God's Word for the edification of believers, the salvation of the lost, and the glory of our Triune God.
We are also devoted to living out the one another commands of Scripture, loving, encouraging, and serving each other as the body of Christ. In our worship, we sing Psalms and the great hymns of the faith, and we gather around the Lord's table every Sunday.
And don't forget that this program is also paid for in part by the law firm of Buttafuoco Associates. If you're the victim of a very serious personal injury or medical malpractice anywhere in the United States, please call my very dear longtime friend and brother in Christ, Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law at 1 -800-NOW-HURT, 1 -800-NOW-HURT, or visit Dan's website, 1 -800-NOW-HURT .com.
And make sure you tell Daniel P. Buttafuoco, attorney at law, that you heard about his law firm, Buttafuoco Associates, from Chris Arnzen on Iron Trip and Zion Radio. I also want to remind all men in ministry leadership that you are invited to the next free biannual Iron Trip and Zion Radio pastors' luncheon on Thursday, March the 5th, 11 a .m. to 2 p .m. at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, featuring for the second time as keynote speaker Dr. Conrad Mbewe, pastor of Kibwata Baptist Church of Lusaka, Zambia, Africa, and Reformed Baptist Church Planter in Africa, and the founding chancellor of African Christian University.
Everything is free of charge, including the fact that every attendee will receive a heavy sack and possibly two heavy sacks of free brand-new books personally selected by me and donated by Christian publishers all over the United States and the United Kingdom.
So, if you'd like to register, send me an email. If you're a man in ministry leadership, send me an email to ChrisArnzen at gmail .com and put pastor's luncheon in the subject line. And keep in mind that the night before the luncheon, Wednesday, March the 4th, at 7 p .m., Dr. Conrad Mbewe will be preaching at the church where I'm a member, Trinity Reformed Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
For details on Trinity Reformed Baptist Church and how to get there, go to trbccarlisle .org, trbccarlisle .org. And Pastor Tom, before the break, I asked one of two questions from Tommy in Kilgore, Texas.
The second is, how do you respond to critics of confessionalism by saying it somehow hinders the Berean spirit and duty of Christians?
Yeah. So, I would respond by saying that whether we like it or not, we all come to the Bible with a set of presuppositions. So, we come already with those presuppositions, meaning we think the Bible means something when it says God, when it says believe, when it says justify.
We have some preconceived notion. Well, the confession is the best of the church's tradition, basically, helping to set those presuppositions for you so that you can read the Bible with the church, basically.
Now, that said, that does not mean that if you become convinced that the confession is wrong, you shouldn't believe what the Bible says over the confession. So, maybe I would put it this way, that the Bible has more authority than the confession, right?
So, the Bible has more authority than the confession, but you don't have more authority than the confession as an individual, which means you could come to a place where you differ from your church's confession, but you should only do so after thoroughly understanding it, how they got it out of the Bible, what their arguments were, their hermeneutic to get to this, and then if at the end of the day, you're like, I still can't see them, and I've studied this very carefully from the confessional, either those who edited and wrote it themselves or those who are arguing from it in other contexts, then you can choose a different reading.
So, I would argue that it actually facilitates a Berean spirit, that it starts you off as an advanced Berean, so that you can then dig into the Bible with some knowledge that God has guided the church into the knowledge of the truth over the ages, and that you don't make the same mistakes that everyone through history has always made.
That's a danger, would be like going to the Bible thinking you have a blank slate when you really don't, and then you're going to make the same errors everybody else made throughout all of church history.
So, confession will help you from committing those kinds of errors, but it doesn't hinder a Berean spirit at all.
Yes, and the fact of the matter is every Christian is confessional. Either your confession is true or false, or either it's adequate or inadequate, but even the phrase, I have no confession but Christ, or creed but the Bible, is a confessional statement.
That's true, and it's also just not true. So, it's not only self-refuting, but everyone has a confession.
We have time for one last question from Campbell in Bakersfield, California. How much difference can Reformed Baptists have with one another in order to be truly identified as Reformed Baptists? We did cover this, I think, in the last part one of this conversation in December, but if you want to reiterate that.
Yeah, I mean, I think we can differ within our tradition. So, I mean, that's broad, I know, but I would love to see a spirit among us that says, look, we all agree with the same confession. We're trying to believe it, but then there's disputes about what it means here or there, or other doctrines that aren't in the confession.
Well, let's have a more brotherly discussion about those and not make those kinds of things hills on which to die. Let's keep that stuff at the level of, you know, we're going to have a paternal maybe debate or even argument about this in a formal sense.
We're going to argue about it, but I think that the confession should be our center. You know, what it says, what it means, and then we're all laboring together to try to understand what it means. And as long as we're all aiming in that direction, we should be patient with one another.
But, I mean, for Reformed Baptists, I think the line would be the confession itself. So that's where we would draw the line.
And if you could summarize in two minutes what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today.
I think if we're asking the question, what is a Reformed Baptist? A Reformed Baptist would say that we believe the Bible and Jesus. That's really what we are. But then you have to ask the question, who is Jesus and what does the Bible mean?
And that's where Reformed Baptists try to nail their colors to the mast. And they say, look, we believe the Second London Confession. This is the banner of truth for us. This is what the truth means. And so I would urge that.
But then I would also urge that, you know, if you're out there, you're a Reformed Baptist, I would encourage you to, you know, to build faithfully into your churches. I would love to see more men planting Reformed Baptist churches.
I'd love to see young men raised up to be pastors and deacons, but then Reformed Baptist churches so that the truth can continue to grow. And we're a faithful witness in the world. And so I think that's where I'd want to leave it.
Well, I want to remind our listeners that you can find more information about First Baptist Church of Clinton, Louisiana, at FBCClintonLA .com, FBCClintonLA .com. And you can also get a 10 percent discount by mentioning this interview.
When you order the book, What is a Reformed Baptist by Tom Hecks from Founders Press, their website is Press .Founders .org, Press .Founders .org. I want to thank you so much, Pastor Tom, for just being a wonderful, extraordinary guest, as you were the last time.
I look forward to return visits from you to Iron Shrop and Zion Radio. I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who took the time to send in questions. I hope all of you have a very safe and happy and healthy and joyful and Christ-honoring weekend and Lord's Day.
And I hope you all will always remember for the rest of your entire lives that Jesus Christ is a far, far greater Savior than you are a sinner. I look forward to hearing from you and your questions next week on Iron Shrop and Zion Radio.