The Whole Christ (part 3)

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The Whole Christ (part 4)

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So, as you know, we are going through this book by Sinclair Ferguson, The Whole Christ.
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I got copies to put on the book table, so if you are interested in the book, it is in – thank you to one
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Joe DiFilippo for ordering those. I couldn't find the little stickers to actually put them on the book table, so they're in the office right now, but I ordered a dozen copies.
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They're $20. Do you know where the stickers are? Maybe you could help me out. Well, I appreciate the affirmative acknowledgment anyway.
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So, if you would like – the book is excellent. As I was studying for today,
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I basically just said, you know, if I just stand here and read Chapter 3, I think that we'll be in a good place.
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It's a very, very well -written book. Sinclair Ferguson is an excellent writer. I pulled some quotes out of Chapter 3 this morning because he does such a good job in being concise and really nailing the issues that we're talking about.
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So, I love this book. So, let's talk about review a little bit, and I think we're going to continually do review as we go through this and, you know, spend less time as the weeks are further in history, but it is kind of confusing, some of the stuff that we're talking about, and so review is going to be something that we consistently talk about.
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So, this controversy, the Marrow Controversy, began in Octorotter Scotland with what became known as the
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Octorotter Creed. Now, this was really just a question that was supposed to be asked as a formality to William Craig as he was preparing to be credentialed to be a minister of the gospel in the
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Presbyterian Church. And essentially, it was this just really poorly worded postulate, right?
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Here's a statement, you either agree with the statement or deny the statement, and that statement is, I believe that it is not sound and orthodox to teach that we forsake sin in order to our coming to Christ and instating us in covenant with God.
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What does that mean? The simplified version is that the presbytery was essentially saying that when presenting the gospel, you should tell the hearers that they need to forsake sin in order to be saved, right?
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And that matters, the way that I said that matters, to forsake sin in order to be saved.
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And so initially, Craig agreed, and then later on, he came back and said, well, hold on a minute.
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We need to talk about this because you guys can't speak at the same time. No, he didn't say that. No, he said, it's more nuanced than that.
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And there's, in spirit, there's something to agree with, but there's a problem in the statement and we have to address it.
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Did anybody not get the handout? Are there extra handouts somewhere? Do I need to have someone print out some more? They're at the two doors.
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Okay, great. I thought I saw some people come in and not grab handouts. It's a two -page handout, if you could grab that. Larry, there's handouts.
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Don't miss your handout. I don't know where. Okay, awesome.
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Perfect. So here's the question. Was the presbytery right when they said, when presenting the gospel, you should tell the hearers that they need to forsake sin in order to be saved?
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Was the presbytery right? See? It's a hard question.
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No. Right? And as we look at the order solidus, which we'll look at a little bit and we'll really nail this down, it is not our actions that save us.
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And so if we present the gospel as something where you must do this in order to be saved, that's works righteousness.
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And that's a problem. But it's like a, oh, I see where they're coming from. I kind of understand this issue.
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But it is so critical for our theology. And as we'll talk about today, the downstream effects of it are profound.
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And it's something that we really, really need to be careful about it. So there was this back and forth.
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Eventually, the presbytery revoked the license of William Craig to preach. So he appealed it to the
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Presbytery General Assembly, which is basically the Supreme Court of, one of the things they do is, you know, they're the
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Supreme Court of the Presbyterian Church. And so there was this hotly debated thing. They went back and forth.
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And this guy was sitting in the audience named Thomas Boston. Now, a lot of people have called
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Boston, I think the term was like a great divine. He was a great mind of theology.
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I think Jonathan Edwards referred to him as a great divine, which is just kind of one of those weird terms.
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I don't know. It's a weird term to me. Anyway, so Thomas Boston is sitting next to John Drummond. And he just starts chatting up John Drummond in the 16th century and says, hey, you know, in thinking about this, it reminds me of this book that I read called
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The Marrow of Modern Divinity. And he begins to talk to John Drummond. And they come to an agreement.
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And they start to form this thing called the Marrow Men. And as we talked about this, and I know this is still review.
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So what was this all about? The Christian faith requires a balance between two things, right?
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And it was the misunderstanding of this balance that was the failing of the presbytery.
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So we talk, well, what are the two things that need to be in balance here that we need to kind of grapple with? Does anybody remember?
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There we go. Legalism and antinomianism. So the great legendary scholar,
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Pastor Stephen Blaine Cooley, coined what might be my favorite biblical illustration of all time, which was the bowling lane, right?
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And he said that one gutter is legalism. And the other gutter is, as he referred to it, freedomism.
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I guess when you're a great theologian, you can make up words. And the Christian life is the bowling lane, right?
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So I'm a bowler, as I've previously copped to. And we kind of have this joke that there's 59 boards on a bowling lane.
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If you look at it, there are these narrow little things, right? And so we always kind of make this joke, because good bowlers have hook and all that nonsense, that you can't hook back from the gray board.
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Because once it goes in the gutter, it's over, right? And so if we think about this, we've got legalism, we've got antinomianism or freedomism, and then the
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Christian life is the bowling lane on which you navigate through life.
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So we talked about legalism. Legalism is preoccupation with form at the expense of substance, right?
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Who can think of some examples in scripture of that? Preoccupation of form, preoccupation with form at the expense of substance.
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I can't recall the same person all the time, but go ahead. The Pharisees. Totally the Pharisees, right? Jesus calls them whitewashed tombs, who look clean and pure on the outside, but inside they're full of dead bones, right?
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This is external obedience, no internal submission, right?
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That's legalism. We also talked about another definition, which was the one who brings the law into the case of justification, right?
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And that's kind of what we're talking about here, what we're grappling with. One who brings the law, these are the rules that you must abide by, into the case of justification, the process by which one is declared righteous, right?
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And so if it is necessary to obey the law in order to be declared righteous in the context of our faith, in the context of our position with God, this works righteousness.
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And then we talked about antinomianism, who remembers what antinomian means? Not you, anyone else? Anti -law, exactly, right?
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This is free grace, this is easy believism, this is this idea that Paul rails after in Romans of, well, we can do whatever we want because God is powerful enough to forgive us, so who cares?
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Whatever, live it up, right? And so there's this sort of undercurrent idea of, well, if you're a
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Christian, then you're going to want to obey the law, so you don't really, you don't have to be conscious of those things, and you can sin kind of all you want to, but you're going to want to be righteous, so it's okay.
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And that's that struggle that exists in the antinomian context.
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And so that was what we talked about in week one. Week two, last week, Corey sort of took this and dove a little bit more into the ramifications of this, and the first thing that we looked at was how this theology affected the way the
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Presbyterian ministers would preach, right? And by the way, it affects the way that people preach now.
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So how is it that these Presbyterians would present the gospel, and what's the problem with that? So let's baseline this, what is the gospel?
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Everybody here should be able to answer this question, so hopefully not just Miss Brown. Oh, Mark, I already called on you too, come on, somebody, help me out, what is the gospel?
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Becky, come on, good, don't forget the resurrection. Yes, yes, and Brian Bartlett made an excellent point last week, and he's not here, so I can't call on him, but what did he say wasn't the gospel?
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Does anybody remember? Anidra? The gospel is not repent and believe.
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That's interesting. The gospel is not repent and believe. The gospel is the good news. The gospel is what Jesus Christ did, what
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Jesus Christ accomplished. Repent and believe is a response to the gospel. But if you're confused in the
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Presbyterian church 400 years ago, I can do math, and you think that there's works in the justification, or you have to repent before you can be offered
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Christ, then maybe you're a little confused about what the gospel is, because the gospel now contains repentance.
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So the Marrow men, Thomas Boston and his associates, were sort of combating the
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Presbytery and saying, look, it's not repent and believe and then be offered
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Jesus Christ, but rather, Jesus is to be offered to all men everywhere without exception or qualification.
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Why? Because Jesus Christ is the gospel.
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It's no accident that scripture refers to Christ and refers to the gospel, refers to the word, almost interchangeably.
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We see this in the gospel of John. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was
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God. We even see it in, and I think Corey read this last week, 1 John 1, that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life, the life was made manifest and we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the father and was made manifest to us.
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Well, what is that? That's Jesus Christ. And we looked at this kind of syllogism that the
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Presbyterian church would be working through to come up with their conclusion. The saving grace of God in Christ is given to the elect alone.
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True. No, that's true. The elect are known by their forsaking of sin.
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True. Sure. Therefore, forsaking sin is a prerequisite for saving grace.
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Right? Wrong. I apologize to whoever is editing this. So what this does is it creates this separation.
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It creates a false bifurcation between the work of Christ and the person of Christ.
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And it leads to this fundamentally broken theology, which necessarily leads to fundamentally broken preaching.
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So we've got over here, we've got Jesus work in justification, reconciliation, adoption.
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And then over here, you only have kind of the people who are allowed to sit under the pleat, the preaching of the blessings of Jesus Christ.
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Now you've got these things that are separated from each other. And this very simple thing, it's not really that difficult to imagine somebody crossing over this divide.
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It's incredibly dangerous. And I touched on this before. If these two things are separated, if the work of Jesus Christ is separated from the person of Jesus Christ, and repentance has to come before the benefits of salvation, then how is that repentance even happening?
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If that repentance isn't happening because of a quickened heart, of a changed soul, that repentance is happening because of something that the person has done.
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Works righteousness. I told you I was going to read out of this book, and I'm going to read out of this book.
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Listen to this. Ferguson talks about John Calvin and the way that John Calvin describes the gospel, and he says this.
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He says, what was at the heart of the gospel message? Calvin has a beautiful expression that summarizes it. The gospel is
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Christ clothed with his gospel. They're inseparable. And then he says, well, we can distinguish
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Christ's person and his works in analytical theological categories. They are inseparable from each other.
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Since there is no work of Christ that takes place abstracted from, and in that sense, outside of his person, the blessings of his work cannot be appropriated apart from receiving
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Christ himself and all of his benefits. What God has joined together, we must not put asunder.
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Yet, that is precisely what had happened, and continues to happen. The result was that the benefits of Christ's work were being offered only to those who saw signs, listen, in themselves, that they belonged to the elect.
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We recognize that the righteousness we have is what? It's an alien righteousness. It's a separate righteousness.
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It's an external righteousness. It is something that is imputed to us, not infused within us.
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And then he draws out this parallel, which as I kind of thought about it and contemplated on it and masticated on it, whatever word you want to use,
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I thought it was really profound. Us, Christians, what do we call ourselves? We call ourselves
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Christians, right? Well, what does that word mean? Anybody know what the word Christian means? Little Christ.
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Christ follower, right? Little Christ. It's this idea of, I don't want to say
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Christ Junior, that sounds kind of blasphemous, but you get the idea, Christ follower, little Christ, right?
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What does that imply? It implies imitation through self -derived action, right?
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Leader is going forth, right? Make way for ducklings. There's one mama duckling and four,
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I don't remember, little ducklings behind, right? But they're separate. They're following, but they're separate.
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How do the Christians of the New Testament describe themselves? Anybody know? Do they call themselves
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Christians, by the way? No, they don't. What do they call themselves? The way?
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Servants? They talk about themselves in Christ. Those of us who are in Christ.
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It seems like a minor difference, but what does that imply?
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What does it imply if you're in Christ? There's imitation there, but there's imitation there because of your nature.
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You are fundamentally different when you are in Christ, right? It's an embodiment that represents something a little bit different than being a
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Christ follower, right? And then, like I said before, it's a theological question.
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It's something that we have to grapple with. Did anybody not get the handout? There's handouts. I just want to make sure everybody gets them. There's two sheets.
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They're on the stools. If somebody doesn't have one, I literally gave out all of mine, so I'm sorry.
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I made 30, I think. So, if you can get them or look on with your neighbor, get close, cuddly.
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It's a little cold this morning. It has preaching implications.
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When these things are separated, Christ and the benefits of Christ, right? Now, you have to figure out what the hook is.
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How do you explain this thing? How do you preach this thing? Instead of saying, how do I preach Christ?
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It's, how do I offer the benefits of this thing, right? And then for the listener, it's, do you want to know him better?
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Do you want to be in him, or do you just want to know what he's got to offer, right?
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Pastor Steve talks about when he goes to funerals that are ostensibly
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Christian funerals, and I think he told the story of a police officer who died or something like that, and the guy up front who was preaching or whatever said, well, try
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Jesus. What does that mean? What does try Jesus mean? Like a little sampler at Sam's Club?
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Like, well, I don't know what that is. Try Jesus, right? And it's this fundamental difference. Like, you've got to get the hook, right?
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And what's the hook? The hook becomes, it's not so hard. Give it a shot, right?
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We chuckle, but that's what it is. And it's a problem.
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So Ferguson says this. He says, Christ himself ceases to be central and becomes a means to an end.
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That's a problem. That's a really, really big problem. And then he goes on to say, he's talking about, not just back then, but in evangelicalism today, he says, this is accompanied by an increased, tell me if this sounds familiar, an increased stress on our experience of salvation rather than on the grace, majesty, and glory of the
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Lord Jesus Christ. Right? The experience of our salvation. Right?
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I don't know if that's like braying like wolves in the back of the sanctuary or whatever the fun experience thing is.
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This is accompanied by an increased stress on our experience. It's profound,
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I think. And that's where this whole controversy, confusion, whatever, came from.
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The separation of Jesus Christ and his works. Right? When the idea is put forth that you can repent, something that we understand to be possible only through Jesus Christ, but then you say that you should only preach
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Christ after those people have shown repentance, then you're separating these things. Ferguson again says, at no point do the apostles preach the gospel in these terms believe because Christ died for you.
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Instead, it is that Jesus Christ is able to save all those who come to God through him since he is the only name given under heaven whereby we must be saved.
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Christ himself is the gospel. End quote. There is no separation between those two things.
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And so, as we wrapped up last week, we're almost done review. As we wrapped up last week, we talked about marrow.
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What's marrow? What's bone marrow? It's inside your bones.
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What does it do? I don't know, Chuck, if there's any handouts left. There were some. They might be gone. I have no idea.
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Okay. What does it do? What does it represent? It makes blood, supplies life.
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What about in a more abstract sense? What is the marrow of something? The bottom line, the center, the core, right?
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And so when we look at this book that we're kind of talking about here, that this whole thing came from there, marrow controversy came from the marrow of modern divinity.
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What is it? What is the marrow? Like we're talking about this book. Oh, this marrow controversy. Okay. What does this thing actually mean?
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All right. What are the pieces? There's a controversy. I think we know controversy. What is the marrow? Hint, we've used this word a lot.
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And what is it? Jesus. Jesus Christ is the marrow of modern divinity.
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It is the marrow of our faith. The centrality of Christ is critical to our understanding of our faith, of our preaching the gospel to other people, right?
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Of the Bible, right? He is the marrow of all divinity, whether it's modern divinity or not.
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P .S. the book was written 500 years ago. I don't know how modern the divinity is at that point. But anyway, I digress.
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So now we come to our new content for the day. All right. So we've looked at sort of these definitions.
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We've understood what we're talking about. We've looked at this separation and a little bit of the consequences of that.
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We're going to dive even further into that. We're going to look at some of these consequences.
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So, naturally, I had a terrible week at work and the first thing that I thought about as I was studying this is, huh,
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I can relate this to a work topic. Great. I need you. He's laughing at me. All right. When you have a single unit, right, in this case
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Jesus Christ, you cannot mess up on a flowchart how that single unit is sequenced, right?
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It's just there. It's on the flowchart. There it is, single unit, right there. We're building out these process laws at work and the first thing that we have to do is break things down into their fundamental indivisible parts, right?
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That's step one. Okay. What is every point in the process? Once we have those, then we can sort of figure out the right order for these things to go in and we can make this pretty chart and we can submit it to the boss and say, look at my
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Visio, right? That's what I do. So assuming you define your processes correctly, it is clear what each one of these processes is doing.
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So you do all this stuff, you present this document and then the boss says, because bosses know best, see this process right here?
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Break it in two pieces. Okay. There's ramifications to doing that.
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There's a lot of ramifications to doing that. Not only can you now mess the order of those two things up, but an individual process, if you break it into two component parts, well, how do those two parts now relate to each other?
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It's not as simple as doing one and then doing the other, right? That's why they're indivisible, boss. I hope this is empathy and not sympathy.
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Or both. Or both, right? When you separate two things that should not be separated, you create dependencies between them and those dependencies can be broken or misordered or misunderstood or missed completely.
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And that is the issue that we see in prevailing theology over time.
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Now, when I walked in, Joni said to me, I still have my notes on Ordo Salutis, which made me, you know, warmed my heart.
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I taught on, I think, like five parts or something like that on the Ordo Salutis two years ago. You can go to bbcchurch .org.
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They're all there. Okay. So what is the Ordo Salutis? Does anybody know what the
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Ordo Salutis is, other than a fancy Latin word? The order of salvation.
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And this is something that's really interesting and really important. By the way, there was supposed to be a third handout, which was something
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I got from the Christian Apologetics and Research Ministries. CARM, is that what CARM stands for? I think so. Which has the
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Calvinist Ordo Salutis, the Arminian Ordo Salutis, and the Roman Catholic Ordo Salutis on it.
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It's sort of this three -part thing. If you would like it, just send me an email. I would be happy to send it to you.
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It would have been just for reference and so I figured since I was already running late, can that one. Okay.
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So what I thought we were going to do today is go over that, but I ended up with so much content that I just got rid of it.
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So you have some sheets in front of you, hopefully. If not, please look on with someone else.
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And the first one should be, if they're stapled, you're good. If they're not stapled, just make sure you're looking at the right one.
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Perkins chart of the golden chain of redemption. They look very similar, so just be careful.
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But the first one should be Perkins chart. I wish I had a copy. I would hold it up and you could see it.
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They're very, very similar. I think it's got a picture of him on the right side. If yours doesn't have a picture of a dude on the right side, it's the wrong one.
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Okay. There you go. Is that the left side? I can't even, I don't know. Anyway, that's Perkins chart. Okay.
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William Perkins was a 16th century Puritan theologian. He created this first chart and it starts with the
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Trinity as it should and walks through the order of salvation. We see it kind of splits. On the left side, you've got election.
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On the right side, it's got reprobation. It breaks out various pieces. I understand it's hard to read. I'm sorry. Again, I can send you these links if you want them.
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I would be happy to do so. Especially the Bunyan one. It's really big image online.
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So I know you can read it. I don't know what that says about my vision. Okay. The next chart, the other chart, is from John Bunyan.
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We know John Bunyan. Come on, Pilgrim's Progress, right? They're very similar charts.
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Extremely similar charts. They both start with the Trinity. They both break out election and reprobation.
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But there's one fundamental difference between both of them. I'll give you guys a couple minutes, maybe a minute, not too long, to take a look at those two and see if you can figure out what the difference is.
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Don't worry, I'll tell you if we don't figure it out. It's hard to read. I'm sorry. I will give you a hint.
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You can figure it out from the process flows and then once you figure out what's very different between these, just visually, then you can kind of read it.
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It's not like the third word of the second circle. It's not like that. That keeps touching thing.
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Okay, good. So that ball of yarn. Let's focus on that ball of yarn. This is right in the middle of your picture. There's all that stuff going back and forth.
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Now, if you look at the top of that little section with all the stuff going back and forth, what do you see? What does it say? Christ is the mediator.
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And if you look at all those circles in the middle, what are they all referring to? They're all referring to the actions of...
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poor Tom, I'm sorry. Well then, can I borrow yours so that way
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I can talk through it a little bit better? Yeah, that's fine. Okay. So right at the top it says,
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Christ, the mediator of the elect. You see that? And then you see that big group of...
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it looks like one of those things where you draw the lines and you keep drawing them and you get the nice curve because you didn't want to pay attention in science class.
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It looks like kind of one of those things. So what's happening on this graph? On the left side, we see the actions of people.
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These are the things that people do. And then you've got the decree of election at the top, where the first thing goes out.
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And then straight below that you see all the actual ordo salutis, this idea where you see the theological doctrines of salvation as they progress through.
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And every single one of those circles right in the middle there, underneath the love of God to the elect in Christ, which is this is the part that happens in time, has some sub circles and then they go into that rat's nest of lines.
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Right? Everybody following along? Again, after I would be happy to help you. All that stuff in the middle, at the top it says
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Christ, the mediator of the elect. Every single one of those things ties directly back to the work of Jesus Christ.
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Every single one. When it says effectual calling, effectual preaching and hearing, the mollifying of the heart and faith.
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And then you see faith goes to every single one of those circles in the middle and says, oh, you have faith because Christ is a mediator.
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You have faith because of the holiness of his manhood. You have faith because of his fulfilling of the law. You have faith because of his accursed death, of his burial, of his bondage under the grave, and so on and so on and so on.
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Every single one of those things is tied to Jesus Christ. Now look, let's look at Bunyan. Where is
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Jesus Christ on this graph? That's the answer. He's at the top. Right? So theologically, yes.
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I mean, he says he's at the top. All these things happen because of the Trinity and the perfect work of the Trinity and their cooperation together.
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But what it doesn't do is continually remind the person who's reading this and studying this chart that every single thing that happens in the life of the believer happens because of the person and work of Jesus Christ.
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Right? They should know it. And in truth, it's a very small representation.
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Right? But this is only 60 years later. Bunyan was born in, I think, 1625.
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Perkins died in 1602. Right? So it's a very subtle shift.
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But it's not like John Bunyan was like, oh, I'm bored. I'll just kind of whip this up in an afternoon. There was a lot of thought that was put into that diagram that he put together.
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And in all that thought and all that study, and this isn't a knock on John Bunyan, all that study, he didn't think maybe it's important for us to relate every single thing that happens to the personal work of Jesus Christ.
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Oh, it does. Every single thing spills out of the sun. Right? Right. But I think it's a lot clearer when we look at this, when we look at Perkins' chart, to understand exactly how
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Jesus Christ relates to everything that happens. I bet you they didn't disagree significantly.
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No? Well, he does have cooler pictures. Yeah. Well, he paid the illustrator,
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I guess, instead of something. So probably not. But so, and this is another thing
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I learned from work. Thanks for bringing me back to work. If I put a process flow out there and I don't give it any context and somebody else goes and reads that, they've got a self -derived context from the process flow.
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Right? They don't have the context. And so, which one of these charts is going to lead somebody back to a better understanding that Jesus Christ is central to every single thing that happens in the life of a believer?
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Right? Again, I know this is minor. I'm not dumping on Bunyan, but I'm trying to paint a picture of how a very, very small difference can lead to big changes.
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And we slowly begin to see how maybe another tiny change, who knows what it might be, could further separate these things.
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And we start to understand how the confusion or the matter of controversy could begin. Right? I mean, it's a theological watershed, right?
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When you don't continually drive yourself back to Jesus. I mean, Mike even said, over the past maybe five years, Mike has said,
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I have a renewed focus on preaching Christ every single Sunday. Well, it doesn't, I don't think it's theology changed.
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But it was recognition that we need to be continually reminded, all the time, of the centrality of Jesus Christ in our worship, in our faith, and in our lives.
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Right? That's the difference. I'm not, again, I'm not knocking the theology of John Bunyan. I just thought it was an interesting difference that Ferguson brings out.
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And there's another consequence to the separation of the work and the person of Jesus Christ that is,
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I think, even more dangerous than this legalism idea. Remember this idea that law is incorporated into justification.
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It's even more dangerous than that. Right? So Romans 5 shows us clearly, clearly, the actions of God and the actions of Christ were performed while we were useless, basically.
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It says Romans 5, it says, for while we were still weak. Right? Not when we had become strong.
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While we were still weak at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die.
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But God chose his love for us in that when? While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
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It goes on, verse 10, for if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more now that we are reconciled shall we be saved by his life.
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God's work was accomplished while we were weak, sinful enemies of God.
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Right? God's work is a work of grace. Ephesians 2 .8, for by grace you have been saved.
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But wait, there's more through faith. And this is not your own doing. It is a gift of God.
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How much more clear could Paul possibly be about how this is not something that derives from us?
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And so now what we see is that this separation that we talked about before, it's not just kind of warping our perspective of legalism, which may
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I remind you was a term that was introduced by Edward Fisher when he wrote Marry to Begin With, but it actually warps our view of grace.
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Question. Who would affirm this question? God loves you because Christ died for you.
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I'll give you a second to mull that one over.
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God loves you because Christ died for you. Who agrees with that? Who disagrees with that?
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Okay, I have more hands. I saw hands on both sides. I'm not going to name names. But I saw more hands on I disagree with this question.
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Okay, since more people said they disagree with this question, presumably you have an answer as to why.
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I saw lots of hands. So now, why? None of the hands go up.
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This is amazing. Sharon. Okay, good.
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Good. That's true. That's not why. Why do you disagree with it?
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Like what factual thing? I mean, I agree with you 100%. I do. I do. I'm not giving you a hard time just for the sake of giving you, well, maybe.
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No. Totally. So first we looked at something that I think is really easy for us to say, oh, that doesn't make any sense, which is we're introducing, the
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Presbyterian Church is introducing human work into the order of salvation. That's clearly wrong. Well, now we're talking about divine work.
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Right? Was there another? Did I see another? I thought I saw another hand. Did anybody want to add anything to that, by the way, before I continue? Did you want to add something else, or was that pretty much it?
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Nailed it. Alright. So now we're like, okay, well, so, but this is divine work.
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Like, can we really separate? How do we grapple with this thing? Is it okay? I mean, what's the problem with that? Well, the first problem is that that's not what scripture says.
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So that's a problem, right? What does John 3 .16 say? For God so loved the world, he loved the world in this way, that what?
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He gave us, he gave his only son. He loved, so he gave. Right? Not he gave, and so he loved.
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And what this does is it creates a transactional relationship.
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Even if it's divine, it creates a transactional relationship between us and the love of God. Right? Here's a question.
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This is a harder question than you think. Why does God love us? Was that your answer?
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Because he does? That's who he is? His choice?
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Sure. For his glory? These are all good answers. It's his nature.
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It's his nature to love. R .C. Sproul, Jr. said this, it is because of the remains of his image in us, in ourselves, apart from his grace and bestowing on us his image, we are but dust and rebellion.
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And that's a general love, right? That's sort of a love for all of creation. And then specifically on the love for the elect, he says, of those who are elect but who have not yet been blessed with the gift of regeneration, we could say that God has a love for them grounded in compassion for them, a benevolent pity.
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Without regeneration, we are still in our sins, still in a sense under his judgment, but the very act of regeneration is an act of love, a rescuing of us in our rebellion.
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We are not worthy of his love, but he casts his love upon us out of his infinite compassion for us.
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What part of that, based on everything that we've looked at before, is based on what we've done? Zippo, just like the letter, exactly.
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And if John 3, 16 is to believed, yes, what part of God's love is because of Christ's death, right?
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So this idea of transactional grace or transactional love is incredibly dangerous.
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Ferguson says this, he says, we must not confuse the truth that our sins are forgiven only because of the death and resurrection of Christ with the very different notion that God loves us only because of the death and resurrection of Christ.
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No, he loved us from the first of time and therefore sent his son who came willingly to die for us.
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So we have a couple of minutes left. We'll cram this in. I think we'll be okay. Let's consider the alternative.
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It's a thought question, right? This is how I like to study sometimes. What are some potential consequences of presuming a transactional love of the
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Father? That is to say, if the Father only loved us because of Christ's mediatorial work, which we know is perfect, right, and in complete accord with what the
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Father would have had him do, what will that do to the conscience of the Christian with regards to God the
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Father, right? That's a great bifurcation, by the way. A lot of people say, like, oh, the Old Testament God and the
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New Testament God, right? You know, that's an excellent point that I don't even have written down until then. Anything else?
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You were asleep, so I know you're not cheating. Sure. Sure.
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Let me ask the question like this. How would the dynamic in a family change if a child knew that their father was going to die, that the only way that they could receive love from their father was through the mediatorial work of their mother?
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This is not a Mary thing. I'm not getting into that. I'm not doing that. How would the child look at the
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Father? Not good. It'd be a weird relationship, right?
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Are we called in Scripture to worship the Father? So what happens if the only way that we can receive love from God the
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Father is through the work of Jesus Christ, is through the mediatorial work, the thing that Jesus has done to accomplish our ability to come to the
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Father, right? If that's it, if that is the... Now, again, I don't want to confuse this with forgiveness of sins.
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That is a different thing. We're talking about the love of God, right?
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We'll be driven to praise the Son, and only the Son, at the expense of the other members of the
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Trinity. We would be suspect of the Father, right? Because now there's a transaction that everything is hinged on, right?
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Our fellowship with him would be broken. How can we have fellowship with someone through whom we need something else to even make whole?
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It doesn't sound like a good view of this perfectly equal
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Trinity. And so, hopefully that you're starting to see that this separation that happened back then, when they started to separate the work and the person of Jesus Christ, creates this perspective of conditional grace, this transactional grace and conditional love.
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And it's fundamentally at odds with the nature of God as he presents himself in Scripture, right?
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His love is not transactional or conditional, or any of those things. So, what we've done,
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I hope, is that we've seen this poorly theological question turn into a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of God in three easy steps.
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It is a dangerous doctrinal error, and it still matters. We'll close with one more quote out of the book.
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This is what Ferguson says, Confessional orthodoxy, coupled with a view of a heavenly father, whose love is conditioned on his son's suffering, and further conditioned by our repentance, leads inevitably to a restriction in the preaching of the gospel.
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Why? Because it leads to a restriction in the heart of the preacher that matches the restriction he sees in the heart of God.
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A ministry rooted in conditional grace has that effect. It produces orthodoxy without love for sinners and a conditional and conditioned love for the righteous.
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When people are broken by sin, full of shame, feeling weak, conscious of failure, ashamed of themselves, and in need of counsel, they do not want to listen to preaching that expounds the truth of the discreet doctrines of their church's confession of faith, but fails to connect them with the marrow of gospel grace and the father of infinite love for sinners.
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It is a gracious and loving father that they need to know. That's why this is important.
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Any other thoughts before we close? Speak now or forever hold your peace until next week.
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All right, let's pray. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the opportunity to look at this doctrine, at this idea of your son,
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Jesus Christ, and how complete and whole he is, and how he is inseparable.
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His work is very much a component of exactly who he is. I just pray, Lord, that as we go through this day and this opportunity to worship you in church this morning in a corporate setting, that you would bless our lips, that you would bless our ears so that we can hear the preaching of Pastor Steve, and that you would encourage us to know that you, your son,
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Jesus Christ, is at the center of our lives as Christians who are in him.