October 25, 2023 Show with David Reece on “Christ the Second Adam”

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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer

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George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend

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Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors,

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Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have an imbuing conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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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.

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And now, here's your host, Chris Arnzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming,

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Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 25th day of October 2023.

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And I'm absolutely thrilled on the program with Pastor of Puritan Reformed Church of Phoenix, Arizona, and also the founder and president of ArmoredRepublic .com.

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ArmoredRepublic .com, I'll explain that business very shortly.

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And we are going to be following up on an interview we did very recently, conducted our last interview

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Thursday, October 12th, and this is a follow -up to that discussion.

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Today, we are going to be focusing primarily on Christ II, his deity in Christianity and hypostatic union.

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But I do urge you, after this live program is over, to go to the IronSharpensIronRadio .com

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website and click on the past shows section, which is where all of our previous broadcasts are archived in MP3 format, and you can hear our discussion that was focusing upon the

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Trinity heresies that are associated with that glorious doctrine.

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But it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David Reese. Thanks for having me on.

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I'm excited to be here, to be able to talk about the doctrine of Christ and his humanity and divinity, and to be able to talk about the hypostatic union.

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And I hope that this will be edifying for your listeners. And thank you again for having me on. For that, and once again, for our listeners, especially who have not yet heard you on this program, tell our listeners about Puritan Reformed Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Puritan Reformed Church is a church that is a reformed church. We are very concerned to maintain the infallibility of the scriptures, to preserve the gospel of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, and to see that God is the one who is glorified in the gospel.

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And we are concerned in good doctrine, but to also see right worship and right government according to scripture alone, and to see the fruit of the spirit manifest in the lives of our members, to see love pour forth.

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So we seek to be a church that is honoring to the Lord in all those ways.

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And if anybody's in Phoenix, on the Lord's Day, we have a service at 10 a .m.,

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and we also have an evening service at 4 p .m., and so we'd love to see you there.

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Amen. And for more details, go to puritanphx .com, puritanphx .com.

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Now you can tell our listeners also about this fascinating business that you own and operate,

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Armored Republic. Why don't you let our listeners know more details about that? Absolutely. So Armored Republic is a business that manufactures body armor.

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And so ArmoredRepublic .com, individuals can buy that. A lot of body armor, they go, is that for individuals to own?

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And in America, every state except for Connecticut and New York has basically the ability for anybody to buy that.

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But in New York, you're not able to buy law. And in Connecticut, you buy it in person or buy someplace else and bring it in.

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And so those are some of those things. But basically, body armor is a tool of liberty so that free men can defend their God -given rights against tyrants and criminals.

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And the Bible plainly teaches the right of self -defense, plainly teaches to be prepared and to see trouble before it comes.

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And so body armor is a useful tool to have. If you already own a semi -automatic rifle, like an

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AR -15, the second piece of equipment to get is to get body armor. And if you're looking at something against common criminals, one of the neat ways to have body armor on your person and have it be very convenient is to have a backpack that has armor built in, which we sell.

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But also, you can just get a little insert that you can put in any kind of bag. I encourage everybody to go to ArmoredRepublic .com,

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see if there's anything useful there for that. We also sell things like hydration pouches. Some of this stuff is very useful to train in.

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And first aid kits that help with traumatic injuries, the kinds of things that we use.

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Just as a quick note, I'm also very close to closing out the purchase of another company. And we are always looking for investors that are interested in helping us to acquire new businesses, to become

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Christian businesses that explicitly teach Christian doctrine as a part of the policy of the company, and to be able to see the culture of the company transformed internally, but to also seek to find ways to honor the public -facing elements.

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So I'm looking at that, always looking at that. And if anybody wants to reach out to me, I'm on Twitter at realDavidReese.

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People can reach out to me there if they're interested in learning more about opportunities there. Reese is spelled

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R -E -E -C -E, unlike the spelling that many people have. And please, seriously consider, if you are financially able to invest in these projects that is spearheading,

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I would urge you to do so if you love Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio, because Puritan Reform Church and also

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Armored Republic are very generous donors, financially, of Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio.

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In fact, they just prepaid an annual advertising contract with us.

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So if you love the show, please also demonstrate your love for those who make this show in existence through their financial support.

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And that would include Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona and Armored Republic.

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And we'll be repeating their contact information. Let me also just announce our email address.

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If you have any questions you'd like to ask, either about the topic we began a couple of weeks ago on the

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Trinity, or if you'd like to ask questions more specifically on today's topic, the second

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Adam and his deity, his incarnation, and his humanity and hypostatic union, our email address is

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C -H -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Give us your first name at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

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Would you mind starting the program explaining this concept of Christ being the second

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Adam? It may be for new Christians, something that they're not very familiar with.

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In fact, we do have some who are not Christians at all. On occasion, we have heard from atheists, we have heard from Muslims, we have heard from Orthodox Jews and others in the past, so why don't you explain, because some might be confused, as to why

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Christ, the perfect, sinless, spotless Lamb who is also fully

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God and fully man, why he would be in any way compared to whose sin is the ruin of all humanity on the planet

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Earth? That's a great question, Chris. So, I think one of the things that's very important to understand is that the

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Scriptures the idea acts as a public person.

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He acts as a representative in covenant with God, and he represents all of his descendants that proceed from him by ordinary generation.

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Now, people that are born through the natural process of conception and birth that are his descendants, they are all represented by him.

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So, he's a public person, he's a representative, he's a federal head, those are different ways of talking about it, but the point is he's a legal person.

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He's sort of an attorney. He's acting on behalf of the people that he represents, and that, again, is basically the whole human race with the exclusion of Christ.

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Now, Christ comes and he fulfills a role as a representative person.

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In a covenant, representing other people in that covenant, and so he is called a second

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Adam because he is fulfilling a role to represent certain people, and those people are

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God's elect. So, Adam is representing the whole race of man that's born as his descendants with the exception of Christ, and Christ is representing all of the people that God sent him to.

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And so, if you want to understand this in more detail, Romans chapter 5, the last kind of two -thirds of the chapter basically explains this idea of the first Adam and Christ being to this principle that comes out of Romans chapter 5.

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So, Paul is explaining that. Now, when we think about the first Adam, we think about Adam, he comes and he's entered into a covenant.

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That doesn't mean that he accepts or imposes these terms on him. And the terms of the covenant are, essentially,

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God gives him the dominion mandate, says, you know, you need to glorify me by subduing the earth.

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And then he also tells him to eat of all the trees, but you may not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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And so, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil is given as a thing that's forbidden to eat of. Now, Eve eats of the tree of Satan, and then of the tree, and Adam breaks the covenant there.

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And so, the covenant was a promise that if you do what God commands, the positive reward would be life.

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You break the command. God says, in the day you eat thereof, dying you shall die.

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And so, that idea that there's a death that's initiated, a spiritual death and physical death, and it's also a process.

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So, it begins with unbelief, and it can continue to cascade down into a more and more dead state.

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We call it suppressing the truth and unrighteousness. And so, the apostle Paul talks about that process in Romans 1 and 2.

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But there's also this idea of the spiritual deadness. I'm sorry, the physical deadness, the old age, the decaying of the body, and we have sickness and various other harms.

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There's eventual physical death. So, those are the consequences of the covenant of works is there's a spiritual death, and there's a physical death that are a part of that.

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And Christ comes, and he, second Adam, the debt that we owe of death.

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He owns his own life, and he lays it down. And so, he makes the debt payment to deal with the death that we owe.

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He keeps the law for us and earns reward.

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And so, he provides for us a solution to the guilt problem of Adam failing, and for us righteousness that Adam.

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And so, he gets for God's people, for those who understand and believe the gospel, the message of the work of the second

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Adam, that those people that believe in faith by God receive forgiveness of sins, and they receive a justification.

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They're counted as righteous. They're declared righteous by God on the basis of what

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Christ as the second Adam. Amen. Well, some of the other aspects, as I've already mentioned when

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I introduced you, of Christ that we are going to be addressing is deity incarnation, the union.

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His deity is something that he always possessed. He, from eternity past and through all eternity in the future, was always an deity or God.

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There are some heretical movements that teach that Christ became deity or that he is deity after the...

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But please set this record straight about this. People sometimes, especially those that have been deceived by cults, understand that the true aspect of what even cults occasionally teach is that Jesus was truly human, but not to the extent of the heretical belief that he was not also fully

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God or that he somehow ceased temporarily to be God. This is absolutely a damnable idea, isn't it?

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Absolutely. And so, we started last time with the Trinity is to try to make very clear when we say that God the

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Father is God and God the Son is God and God the Holy Spirit is God, what are we saying there, right?

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And so, what we're saying of one essence, they share the same substance and glory.

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They are of equal power. And so, those three persons of the Trinity are equally

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God. They share the one definition, the one essence of the Trinity. We talked about the shorter catechism.

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Question four says, well, what is God? Well, God's a spirit that's infinite, eternal, and unchangeable in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.

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So, that's true of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. So, when we think about him being eternal and infinite and unchanging, right?

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He doesn't lose that. He doesn't change to become changeable and lose his unchangeableness.

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That would be a contradiction. We have is God the

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Son does not lose his divinity. Sometimes that view is called the kenosis theory, that he empties himself of his divinity.

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And that is not to lose his divinity. What we have is God the

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Son takes to himself a human nature. And so, the

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Holy Spirit creates a human nature by this conception work in the womb of the

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Virgin Mary. And that is united to the divinity. And so, this is important to understand the structure of the

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Trinity. We have three parts of one essence or who equally share the essence of divinity.

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So, each of them is equally God. And then we understand they take on particular roles. The Father gives not because the

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Son is created or in any way lesser as God, but rather by agreement. And the Holy Spirit takes commands from the

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Father and the Son by agreement, not by some sort of essential inequality. And so, that there's an equality there.

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The roles are by agreement. And so, when we deal with the humanity of Christ, it's very helpful to have a clear definition there.

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And so, I'll pause there, Chris, before I jump into the humanity. Well, we do have a listener.

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We have Ramona in Ashwaubenon, and please forgive me if I'm mispronouncing this city in Wisconsin, Ashwaubenon.

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And Ramona says, I know that in Luke chapter 252, we read,

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Jesus kept increasing in wisdom. The fact that he kept increasing in wisdom must obviously mean that in his humanity, he did not know everything while he was growing up.

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That led me to a question, did Jesus at times do things imperfectly in his life that did not involve sin?

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For instance, if he was a carpenter alongside of Joseph, did he make mistakes?

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Furniture, et cetera. That's an interesting question.

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I don't know if the scriptures give us the information to answer that perfectly.

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Any idea? Great scripture text. I think that Luke text is a very important one to demonstrate the humanity of Christ.

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So, first of all, let me emphasize that. Because obviously, in his divinity, God the Son knows everything and therefore learns nothing.

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So, to have him grow in wisdom is not occurring in his divine mind, but is occurring in his human mind.

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So, that's a great point. That listener had a very short reading that text. He illuminated out of the text.

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So, then we think about this. When we think about moral perfection, obviously, the listener also suggested, obviously,

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Christ was morally perfect. But the issue, if there's a growing in Christ in the womb, didn't have perfect carpentry capability.

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He didn't come out with the ability to plane things perfectly or anything like that.

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So, what we're learning, he's still gaining capabilities. And so, it would seem that he must apply his mind perfectly to his work and therefore be always making decisions to do things well.

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But that doesn't mean he's had all the skills. So, he has to learn. So, doing practice would be kind of optimal practice, if you think about it in that way.

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If the Lord Jesus Christ in his humanity was morally perfect, that would mean learning skills, he does it wrong.

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It's not so much that he's doing it with any sort of moral failing. It would be he is doing something that allows him to then learn and effectively grow in the next step.

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So, let me give you an analogy. You are firing. Historically, what has been done is the goal is to fire beyond the target.

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Because your goal is to be able to have a round hit the ground behind the target, comparison point, so you can start.

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And then your goal in the second shot is to either hit the target or to be a little bit too short on the target.

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And that way, by the third shot, it's very easy to be able to hit the target, comparison points, and you're able to far more easily tell what proportion of the change of angle do you need to hit the target with that third shot.

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So, if Jesus Christ were doing something in his humanity to learn a skill, kind of, he's so rational as to always pick into intelligently and efficiently figure it out.

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He might not hit on the first shot, but he's always going to intelligently figure it out to do it efficiently.

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That way, he's applying his mind with working on dominion and not being lazy, not failing.

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And that's what I would say there is there's no moral failing and missing the first artillery shot or the second artillery shot.

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But if he were kind of randomly firing, it would be wasteful. The analogy is a helpful thing.

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Well, thank you, Ramona. And before I go on to any other listener questions, why don't you continue on the thread of where you wanted to,

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I believe the last you wanted to continue to be more detailed on Christ's humanity, if I'm not mistaken.

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Right. So, if we think about the Trinity, where we talk about Christ having, about God having three, there are three persons, one nature or essence.

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Now, we talk about Christ and we talk about Christ as having two natures or essences, a human nature and a divine nature or essence.

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And so, we're talking about the definition of humanity and the definition of divinity.

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So, these are mutually exclusive categories, right? That Christ's divinity, he's infinite, eternal and unchangeable.

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Christ's humanity, well, he's finite, he's temporal and he's changeable.

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So, we have infinite, eternal, unchangeable versus finite, temporal, changeable. So, are we talking about the same particular object?

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And the answer is no. We have a human nature, everything that's necessary for a man, we have a mind and we have, and then in addition to that, we have an eternal spirit, the divine son.

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And so, these are two separate things to be talked about in terms of distinctive things that can be, there's a way that there's a unity is that we call this one person.

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And so, in the sense that we're talking about all the parts that are necessary, everything that's necessary for a man is there.

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The fullness of God is there and everything that's necessary for a man is there. The fullness of God and the unity that we call this the hypostatic unity is, this unity is the idea that there's one person.

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So, that the actions are counted to the divinity, the actions of the divinity are counted to the humanity.

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So, for example, when we talk about Christ's blood, we can talk about how Christ bought the church with God's blood, 20.

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Well, but no, God doesn't have a body. Well, but he does in Christ because there's a unity of the humanity with the divinity.

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And this doesn't mean that we've got one mind that's just sort of three things.

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There's been this discussion of does Christ have one will or two wills? And this is a very important part of recognizing his human nature, that he has a human will.

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And so, for example, in the garden, you know, Lord, take this cup from me, but not my will, but yours be done.

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Well, this communicates not that God and God, the son and his divinity had a different desire than God, the father, because that would be everything he wants, everything he pleases in Psalm 115 and Psalm 135.

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And so, if that's the case, if he does everything he pleases, then if God, the son wants one thing and God, the father, wants another thing, and there's a metaphysical paradox and we've got like a little problem or whatever, this issue of how do you have two omnipotent wills desiring contradictory things?

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So there's no disagreement there. But in the human nature of Christ, whereas in the divinity of Christ, he once happens and therefore desires.

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In his humanity, he might say, you know, I'm hungry and I want to eat food, but I also want to, you know, help this other person.

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And so I'm going to not eat right now to solve my in order to accomplish, right?

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So he might say in his humanity, and he says this plainly in the Garden of Gethsemane, he says, I don't want to suffer the cup.

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I don't want to suffer the cup of the wrath of God. I don't want to suffer the curse, but I do it in order to and in order to accomplish the mission.

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And I'd rather suffer it in order to accomplish the mission of the glory of the triune God in order to save the elect than to not suffer and not save by the father.

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So not suffer, but he desires to not suffer less than he desires to suffer in order to accomplish the goal.

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And so in his humanity, we have this idea of a human will, a human mind, and their mind.

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And so we could say, we historically want to say that there's two natures and one person.

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And when we define the word person, there becomes another, because we kind of have definitions of the word person.

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And so normally when we're talking about the Trinity, for example, we're talking about there are three persons is in there's three minds.

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But when we come to talk about hypostatic union, we which basically means person or personal in Greek.

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And so we get to this idea of the personal union. And what we have is we have all the things that are a divine person that are necessary for a human person, and they're counted as one person.

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And so that personal union, we could say that there's all the stuff that's necessary for a human person, but in the creation of God and under the law order to make it so that things are working in accordance with the way that God has designed, he has caused there to be this union, this covenantal union.

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So ontological union, there's everything persons. But we want to talk about the union there because there's this covenantal union of the two person,

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I mean, of the two natures into one person. And so we have two, which normally we would talk about a mind, but we're talking about the union and that union of the two minds is so that the actions of one are counted to the other.

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And that language is very similar to the kind of language we see in terms of marriage, where you talk about the flesh union or the sacraments where you say,

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Christ says, this is my body. And well, it's not literally his body. It's bread, but it's representing his body.

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And so this idea of the blood of God, well, it's not literally blood that's divine, spiritual blood, but it's human blood that is united to the second person of the

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Trinity. And so it's the blood of God in a special way that's different from the blood of other persons.

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Let me ask you some may add controversy to our discussion about the very thing that you just said.

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One of my greatest modern day heroes, although I do have agreements with him on a number is

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John MacArthur. I love John MacArthur. I disagree with his dispensationalism and, you know, don't believe in every single word that flows from his mouth or pen.

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But I still view him as one of my heroes of the modern day.

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And years ago, he got himself into a bit of controversy with fundamentalists who to this day, many will regurgitate and disapprove because John had said, and I'm paraphrasing,

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I don't have it right in front of me, but he was basically teaching that there was nothing uniquely, innately physical blood.

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It was his death that brought about the redemption of his people.

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And of course, since the old covenant scriptures, the Hebrew scriptures, prophesied that it would be by the ship.

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That that had to happen in a way that blood was shed.

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But at the same time, would you agree with MacArthur?

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The fundamentalists who revolted against him over this were saying that there was something actually in the physical blood, apparently, that had innate power to its essence.

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Good question. So I think it's important that we understand that there's not something about the human nature of Christ that is somehow magical or different from our own natures.

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He is like unto us in every way except one. And so this, the blood is, the value of the blood is the blood is used as a symbol for life, right?

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We're told in Genesis that the blood is a symbol for life. And so when it talks about the shedding of blood, yes, his blood was, but it's not the blood.

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It's the fact that the shedding of the blood is about his giving of his life. So the terms of the covenant are he dies, he gives his life as payment to remove our sin debt.

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We have a sin debt from our own corruption, sins, and the death of Christ pays a debt payment to remove our guilt.

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The technical term is expiation, right? And so this expiation is removal of the guilt. His perfect obedience, what's sometimes called active obedience, this idea that he fulfills the positive demands of the law, makes it so he earns our reward.

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And so we are able to receive by faith the righteousness of Christ. So there's the, you know,

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Adam's sin is imputed to us. Our sin, including the sin of Adam, is imputed to Christ.

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Christ dies to pay for that sin debt. His righteousness is imputed to us.

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It's a legal transaction with the fulfillment of the terms of the covenant, and it's not some magical thing about the blood.

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I can recall. I don't even remember what movie it was years ago about the death of Christ, but there was a scene where when a

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Roman soldier thrust the spear into Jesus's side to make sure he was dead, the blood inside showered the

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Roman soldier on his face and, you know, practically his whole body. And it was that very thing in the eyes of the

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Roman soldier who was truly the son of God. And so it made it appear like it was a magical thing, like you were just saying, like the blood itself was showering this man.

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Yeah, and I think that this comes down to some sort of a failure to understand the human nature of Christ.

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I think that when we think about Christ's two natures, one of the things we should talk about when we go over the next break is talking about the nature of Chalcedon.

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And I think that the way Chalcedon helps us to think about the nature of Christ in terms of his humanity and his divinity would be really helpful to avoid a lot of the errors and little things that are superstitious pieces to be able to figure out how to avoid heresy in our own minds.

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And so just I want to make sure that people realize that, you know, even though the Trinity, we have one essence with three persons in the in the we have is we have person with two essences and we have all of the ontological components of two persons, but there's that union of the two minds.

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So we call it the hypothetic. So that's important to understand.

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And in order to understand that, you really have to understand the relationship of the two natures properly. Well, we will proceed with the four knots of Chalcedon when we come back commercial break, which we are now.

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Please remember that if you have a question and we do have some people waiting to have their questions asked and answered, if you want to join them and wait in line, our email address is

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Chris Arnzen at CHRISZEN at gmail dot com.

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Give us your first name, at least city and state and country of residence. We'll be right back. Don't go away. Puritan Reformed is a

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Bible -believing, kingdom -building, devil -fighting church. We're devoted to upholding the apostolic doctrine and practice preserved in Scripture alone.

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Puritan Reformed teaches men to rule and lead as image -bearing prophets, priests, and kings.

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We teach families to worship together as families. Puritan is committed to teaching the whole counsel of God so that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of God as the waters cover the sea.

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We sing the Psalms, teach the law, proclaim the gospel, make disciples, maintain discipline, and exalt

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Christ. This is Pastor David Reis of Puritan Reformed in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Join us in the glorious cause of advancing Christ's crown and covenant over the kings of the earth.

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Puritan Reformed Church. Believe. Fight. Puritan PHX dot com.

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If you love Iron Sharpens Iron radio, one of the best ways you can help keep the show on the air is by supporting our advertisers.

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today, Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We are now back with my guest today,

43:45

Pastor David Reese, who is the pastor of Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

43:52

He's also Armored Republic. We are discussing

43:57

Christ the Second Adam, his deity, incarnation, humanity, and hypostatic union.

44:03

And you wanted to begin this next show today by discussing the four knots of the

44:13

Council of Chalcedon. And before you even do that, there are those, perhaps even especially our fundamentalist friends, who will say,

44:25

I don't really believe in sola scriptura. That's why you keep alluding to your confessions.

44:30

You keep alluding to councils to back up.

44:38

So therefore, you're not you. How do you respond to people who say things like that? So what

44:43

I would say is, if you look at the end of the book of Ecclesiastes, so Ecclesiastes chapter 12, in the beginning of Ecclesiastes, Solomon talking about life.

44:56

And at the very end, you have the exact opposite, where he says, look, everything is infinitely meaningful.

45:01

As opposed to everything being vain, everything is meaningful because God will bring everything into judgment. What he communicates is that the word is like goads that cause people to think by being prodded.

45:13

And he also says the masters of assemblies are men who organize information under one shepherd.

45:21

And he said that this, what they do is the masters of assemblies organize words and they place them well, like well -placed nails of a master's craftsman.

45:34

And so what we're doing with the church, the office of pastor teach given to edify the church.

45:40

So just like I would say, a pastor should give a sermon and that's an exercise of authority that you don't believe the sermon because the pastor said so.

45:50

You believe the scriptures say so where to see if what's taught in the sermon is so.

45:56

And whether it's the apostle Paul or an angel of light or a council, you should always judge what's taught by the scriptures.

46:04

And so scripture is the judge councils by scripture. But at the same time, the teachers of the church getting together to talk and to organize information is exemplified for us in Acts chapter 15.

46:18

And we see the work elders and the brothers of the church through the question of circumcision in the early church.

46:27

And so what they get is they write a letter and that letter is the decree of the council of Jerusalem. And so it's this work of the church.

46:36

Scripture is the authority. Church has an obligation to work ministerially under the authority of scripture to make pronouncements about the truth.

46:45

So just like a sermon is an authoritative teaching, so would be council, but you sermon and you judge the council by scripture alone.

46:56

Yes, these things are gifts from God. They are blessings to us.

47:03

The scriptures even command certain qualifications for which reveals that we need teachers.

47:10

But at the same time, they are not 100 percent absolutely essential for us to understanding the scriptures.

47:18

We just believe them immensely. If you want to continue now with the four knots of Chalcedon.

47:25

And just emphasize that. Absolutely. You can pick up the Bible and read it. And if you use the ordinary rules of reading, you know, for literal meaning context, you're applying the rules of grammar and you're reading the scriptures in such a way that they do not contradict themselves.

47:43

And if you do that and you by study will come to know the truth, if the Holy Spirit illuminates your mind, what we ought to do.

47:50

So we don't need church officers to understand the Bible. We need the Holy Spirit and we need the Bible to interpret the

47:56

Bible. Amen. So we're not going to be able to get through all four before the midway break, but why don't you start with four knots.

48:06

Basically, the idea is that there's two natures. We're not saying that there's when we talk about the two natures of Christ, he's he's he's truly

48:15

God and he's truly man. And to communicate the idea. Christ as truly

48:22

God and truly man, he doesn't become man by converting his divinity into humanity.

48:29

So the first one is without conversion. We don't have him

48:35

God and then becoming man. He is truly God and truly man, the fullness of divinity and the fullness of humanity without changing, without that transformation from.

48:47

He doesn't lose. The next one is without confusion.

48:53

And the confusion idea is imagine you have a glass full of, you know, one substance in a glass full of another.

49:00

If you put them in together into a mixing and it's not like a mixture of humanity and divinity, that's sort of the

49:08

Greek idea of like Hercules. You have like a demigod, right? So it's not like it's a mixture into one glass.

49:14

Rather, what we're talking about is we're talking a distinction of the without confusion, without mixture.

49:22

And so how are we in time there? Let's see. Well, you can continue with another point for about two more minutes.

49:31

So is the next one conversion without confusion, without composition and composition.

49:38

What we've got is this idea that it's not slapping parts together. So, you know, it's he's not like a collection of joining together with a piece of humanity and a piece of divinity.

49:51

You're not slapping the parts together. And so it's not like we have, well, here's two thirds of divinity and here's one third of humanity, and we're going to put them together to make a

50:02

Lego collection. What we're doing when we talk about that, we're avoiding the parts of each. And the most famous error that was this composition view is called

50:11

Apollinarianism. Apollinarianism was this doctrine, and frankly, a common doctrine in modern evangelism, is this idea that you've got a human body and you've got kind of the feelings that a human would have, but then you've just got this

50:24

God mind. And so it's just sort of like, you know, Jesus walking around with glowing eyes, having just a

50:32

God mind. He grows in wisdom. He says in Matthew chapter 24 that he doesn't know when he's going to return, only the

50:41

Father knows. Now we know that the divine mind of the second, because he knows everything.

50:48

So saying only the Father is not a divinity of Christ or a denial of the Holy Spirit, knowing when Christ would return, but rather in his humanity, he doesn't know.

50:57

And so he grows in wisdom. He doesn't know when he's going to return, and we have to. So the composition is, it's not like the divine mind is in a body.

51:07

Rather, what we have is the divine mind plus a human mind, a reasonable soul that's created as well as the body.

51:14

And so there's a humanity that's added. And then forever, this doesn't end. It's without a change in the sense that there's not an ending to it.

51:21

So those are the four knots of Chalcedon, and there are some implications we're throwing out when we get back, but it's without conversion, without confusion, without composition, without end.

51:31

We have time before the break to answer another question from Burke in Flowing Wells, Arizona.

51:43

How close are you, Pastor Reese? I'm sure where Flowing Wells is.

51:48

Well, perhaps Burke will let us know, but he says, when some pastors and preachers present the story of the

51:59

Garden of Gethsemane that you mentioned earlier, they present it in such a way that gives the hearer the understanding that it was being nailed to the cross and being tortured,

52:13

Jesus was fearing. That might be a part of it. Wouldn't you say that the thing he was fearing most was having the wrath of his own father poured upon him?

52:24

Yeah, that's a great point. And I think that when we talk about the cup, right, he's going to drink, this idea that he's drinking the wrath of God.

52:34

We're not saying, it's not like God the Father's attitudes change. He doesn't go from loving the

52:40

Son to hating the Son, right? So when we talk about wrath, we're talking about the effects of wrath. Curse is another way you could refer to it.

52:47

And so the idea that all of the curse in terms of the punishments for sin are taken on Christ.

52:55

So God the Father never hates, but all of the hatred of his wrath, all of the curse is poured out on him.

53:04

And that's certainly worse. And we see him sweating blood over it. And so that's certainly worse than simply the nailing to a cross or the thorns on the head or the whipping of the back.

53:16

And as far as the sweating of blood, there are disagreements amongst even our fellow

53:22

Reformed brethren. Some will say that was just a picture of what it looks like. Some will say that it actually is a literal phenomenon where he was sweating blood.

53:31

Which do you side on when it comes to that? Yeah, so I think it's a literal sweating of blood that's occurring.

53:38

I think it's a part of like intensification of curse. It's so intense transference of blood through the skin.

53:49

He is suffering the curse of God in an intensified way starting there. Now, he's suffering under the curse through his whole life, but it goes right there and goes until he finishes the work when he says it is finished.

54:04

Great. Well, we have to go to our midway break now. And by the way, Burke in Flowing Well, Arizona said that it's very close to Phoenix, so I'm not sure how close that is to Phoenix.

54:16

Maybe about 100 miles. Wow, that's not too close. Please be patient with us, folks, because as always, a bit longer show because Grace Life Radio 90 .1

54:30

FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show because the FCC requires of them to localize this program to and they do so with their own public service announcements.

54:46

On the other hand, we simultaneously air our globally heard commercials. Please use this time wisely.

54:51

Write down as much of the contact information as you many of our advertisers so that you can more frequently and successfully respond to our advertisers.

55:01

And of course, send us your questions to Pastor David Reese, the Chris Arnzen at Gmail dot com.

55:06

We'll be right back. Don't go away. You notice the gap that Sunday morning sermon and the

55:14

Sunday school classroom or the small group study. So often we experience great preaching from the pulpit, but when it comes time to study

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God's word in those smaller. Well, let's be honest, we desired it seems like it is nearly impossible to find good curriculum out there today that is true to the word of God and it's built upon sound doctrine.

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Much less it's hard to find curriculum. People how to study the. Hi there, my name is

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The Baptist. Dot com. May God bless you. It's such a blessing to hear from Iron Sharpens Iron radio listeners from all over the world.

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Here's Joe Riley, a listener in Ireland who wants you to know about a guest on the show he really loves hearing interviewed

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Dr. Joe Moorcraft. I'm Joe Riley, a faithful Iron Sharpens Iron radio listener here in a tie in County Kildare, Ireland, going back to 2005.

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One of my very favorite guests on Iron Sharpens Iron is Dr. Joe Moorcraft. If you've been blessed by Iron Sharpens Iron radio,

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Dr. Moorcraft and Heritage Presbyterian Church of Cumming, Georgia, are largely to thank since they are one of the program's largest financial supporters.

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Buttafuoco demonstrating the reliability of scripture. To advance the cause of the gospel, they created a beautiful perfect facsimile of the genealogy of Jesus Christ from the original engravings contained in a first edition 1611

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01:14:04

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01:14:17

Hello, Chris Arnson at Gmail. I need a church in the subject line. That's also the email address where you can send in a question to Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona, as we continue...

01:14:32

discussion on Christ and Adam, His deity, incarnation, humanity, and hypostatic union.

01:14:40

That's ChrisArnson at Gmail .com. Give us a first name, at least, your city and state, and your country of residence.

01:14:47

If you would like to... where we left off before I proceed to any other listener questions,

01:14:54

I would love to hear what you have to say, Pastor David. Absolutely. So, first of all,

01:14:59

I wanted to just say I appreciate... listeners to support the show... are trying to avoid any sort of unbiblical guilt, and at the same time, that's a marker for you that other people should pay attention to, that this is the kind of show they should want to support.

01:15:14

So, if this is... in truth, being able to... not some sort of unbiblical guilt imposition should be something that hopefully encourages your listeners to see the faithful work that you're doing, and to be able to be encouraged to be able to...

01:15:30

support the operation. Go into talking about the incarnation. We've already talked about, again, the doctrine of Trinity in terms of the one essence or nature and three persons, and so there's a...

01:15:46

in the Trinity, so there's a same definition or essence of each three persons.

01:15:51

We talked about how they agree in all things, and that they have a distinction of roles by covenant. We talk about the incarnation, and we talk about how the second person...

01:16:00

makes to himself a human... so there are two ontological persons, but one legal person, so in other words, we have one person that is the hypostatic union, and then that formation of human nature...

01:16:17

confusion, composition, or end, and so what I wanted to also remind listeners of is the fact that we talked last time about some of the

01:16:27

Trinitarian heresies of Arianism, and Arianism is the... in his divinity is created.

01:16:35

Modalism is the heresy that the three persons of the Trinity are just three different actions of God, essentially

01:16:41

Him acting three different ways, but there are some distinct logical heresies to be able to talk through those as we have opportunity, and so we've already talked about Apollinarianism, which is the idea of kind of a composition where you have the divine mind in a human body as opposed to having a sort of...

01:16:58

that's one error that says to be avoided is called Nestorianism, and Nestorianism is where you have the two natures of Christ separated as two persons without a hypostatic union.

01:17:12

Now historically Nestorius has any sort of... where he plainly teaches that, and he claims to actually agree with Chalcedon after it was published, but Cyril, who was the significant prosecutor of Nestorius, had expressed his...

01:17:28

way, and so that is... the record was sort of Cyril's prosecution of Nestorius, and so that's where we have the record.

01:17:36

So whether Nestorius was teaching what we call Nestorianism or not, the heresy called

01:17:42

Nestorianism is... two persons of the two natures being two distinct persons that have no point of union, and so the hypostatic union is a teaching that they are one person, there's a legal union, so the actions of the one are counted to the other.

01:17:58

There are some other and get dealt with down the line. The last one before we move on,

01:18:03

I'll get to two more later on in the show, but the last one I mentioned... what I mentioned right now is the error of Adoptionism, which is the idea that Christ was was created in a human nature, then this sort of human nature that is adopted later, that he wasn't

01:18:19

Christ to begin with, that he was just sort of Jesus of Nazareth as a man going around and then later on gets adopted as the

01:18:25

Son and made the Christ. We know that the Scripture is plainly eternal, God the

01:18:31

Son is planned to come as the seed of the woman, and we know that the

01:18:37

Incarnation is a miraculous work of the Holy Spirit, so that there is a human nature from the conception in union with the divine nature, and so that there is not some point in time later on in Christ's life where he becomes the

01:18:53

Christ or becomes the Son, rather there is a moment of always planned, and so that would be the error of Adoptionism.

01:19:03

So hopefully those are some of the errors that people can avoid falling off into, and we can go into the other ones later on.

01:19:10

Okay, we have another list, his name is

01:19:16

Tito in Whitefish, Montana. Tito says, I was observing a disagreement between two pastors on social media over the wills of the individual persons of the

01:19:33

Trinity. One of these pastors said that each member of the Trinity had his own never in any tension or disagreement with the wills of the other members of the

01:19:47

Trinity. The other pastor insisted that this was heresy to believe that there are three possessors, one for each member of the

01:19:59

Godhead. Where are you on this? So the historic language is to say that the

01:20:06

Trinity has one will. The problem is, what does that mean? So what we mean by that is that they agree on everything.

01:20:15

So we talk about the three types of unity that the Trinity has. Unity has an essential unity, a shared nature.

01:20:21

It has intellectual unity, or you could say unity of will, say the idea of a unity whereby the roles are distinguished.

01:20:30

So the Trinity has one will in the sense that each member of the Trinity decrees the same things, chooses the same things, agrees in all things.

01:20:40

Logically, the Trinity are persons, and there are three wills.

01:20:46

So they each are a mind, they each are a spirit, and have a will.

01:20:52

They are choosers, they are thinkers, and they agree about all things. One will in the sense that they agree about everything, but ontologically, each one has a will.

01:21:04

And so I think it's important that we be willing to say that the three persons of the Trinity are choosers.

01:21:10

Each decree about everything. So you would be siding with the pastor that did say that there were three wills present in the

01:21:20

Trinity, but they were all in perfect harmony. And you would disagree with the pastor that was heresy to say that there were three wills?

01:21:29

I would. Okay. And thank you, Tito. Excellent question.

01:21:36

We have Sheila from Mapleshade, New Jersey. And Sheila says,

01:21:43

I know that since Jesus Christ did not inherit the sinful nature of Adam, that he lived for all eternity without ever dying, because it was only the sin of Adam that brought about death into the human race.

01:22:02

But I was wondering, is it because that Jesus Christ believed the

01:22:09

Father and was treated just as if he were a sinner by the

01:22:14

Father, if that is the reason he physically died on the cross? Well, when we talk about reasons, the question can be what the reason is, and what's the goal or the ultimate purpose.

01:22:27

And we can also talk about the ultimate cause, which would be the decree.

01:22:34

There's the decree of God. So there's the ultimate cause is the effectual cause. The ultimate cause is the goal.

01:22:39

The effectual cause is the decree of God. And then there's second causes, instrumental causes, for example.

01:22:45

And so we might say, Jesus died because Judas betrayed him. Jesus died because the Sanhedrin convicted him.

01:22:52

Jesus died because Pontius Pilate chose to kill him. Jesus died because the Roman soldiers nailed him to a cross.

01:22:58

So what is the reason he died? Well, those things are all reasons that he would die, planned for him to die in order to bring about the display of his glory.

01:23:14

And the death is by the use of these other human means.

01:23:21

But we are told that Christ had legions of angels at his command. If he wanted to, he could have called them to resist.

01:23:29

And I think the question the viewer, the listener might be asking is sort of, is it possible that snails and thorns would have killed

01:23:39

Christ in his human nature, had it not been for the fact that he was laying down his life and suffering under the curse or wrath of God?

01:23:48

And so if that's the question, I think my understanding is that Christ is under the curse from his conception, not because he's guilty, but because he's suffering things that he doesn't deserve all through his life.

01:24:06

You know, taking his hands, doing carpentry work, you know, that kind of thing. And so whatever the suffering is, the hunger, the tiredness, the emotional strain of having unbelief around him, when people, when he says that, you know,

01:24:24

Lazarus is going to be resurrected and people don't quite get it. And so he weeps because of this unbelief around him.

01:24:30

That's all suffering and pain and curse that he's under. So I think his humanity had curse because of the fact that he was coming to represent us in the beginning, which means he was always sort of mortal in his humanity in the sense that he was going to die.

01:24:47

He was destined to die. He had a mortality curse on him, not because of anything he did, but because he came to represent us and to suffer for us in our place.

01:25:01

And so the fact that he's undergoing pain before, simply, you know, at Gethsemane, for example, is why that.

01:25:11

So the short answer is, yes, it's because of the wrath or curse of God that he is mortal and that he dies.

01:25:23

The instruments like a spear or the nails, they work because of the fact that he is under the curse.

01:25:33

That curse you just said began at his incarnation.

01:25:38

It was not something uniquely that happened when the father poured his wrath upon Calvary.

01:25:45

This was already a condition of his. And that's because, again, I think under the curse throughout his life in terms of dealing with, you know, toil and strife and old age, sickness and death.

01:26:03

Those things unified and intensified throughout his life. But there is an important cutoff when he's at when he's at Gethsemane.

01:26:12

And there's this sort of there is this intensification that occurs. And so I all of his all of his obedience and suffering important throughout his life, his whole life, obeying in every detail up to the point of his death, obeying even to the point of dying.

01:26:32

Obedience whereby for us as a representative and all of his suffering throughout his life until it's finished is associated with his dying and the expiation of our sins.

01:26:46

And so obviously, the cross is and where there's the most intensification of that.

01:26:52

But but he is suffering under curse and dealing with that throughout his life from his conception until the cross.

01:26:59

And it's finished there when he dies on the cross. Now, this may be a rabbit trail for me or too much speculation, wanting information that's not in the

01:27:11

Bible. But was the curse brought about all where we physically will die?

01:27:24

Was that intended to give us the information that would die eventually in all of sickness of some kind?

01:27:37

Or would that actually mean now this may seem irreverent or comical, but just to get the idea across, send

01:27:48

Eve got angry with Adam for forgetting her birthday or something.

01:27:54

And she picks up a rock and she throws it at Adam and hits him on the head.

01:28:00

Would it be to have died from the fall? So my understanding is that it would not be possible to kill

01:28:08

Adam or Eve before the fall. And it would be similar after the resurrection that we to die, that we will be old.

01:28:18

And so there is a there's a preserving of our lives, a preserving of our bodies that will occur forever after the resurrection.

01:28:26

And so I think that that's sort of the glorified resurrection. We have a sort of indestructibility of the body.

01:28:37

And so I think that the curse brings about the possibility of death. And the language of the curse in Hebrew is interesting.

01:28:45

In the day you eat thereof. And so there's sort of this idea that there's a there's a death process and death.

01:28:58

So there's an actual process at the curse and it's both spiritual and physical.

01:29:04

It's spiritual because unbelief is the root of all sin, right? If we are not glorifying

01:29:09

God as we ought, we are not believing what we ought to about God and all of our flow and all of our goals, beliefs.

01:29:17

And so the knowledge of God is eternal life. And the knowledge of God is the root of goodness and the unbelief of God and not believing his truth, not believing him.

01:29:29

But the root of. And so out of that unbelief, there is the performance of this deceitfulness of sin.

01:29:37

And so what we have is we see that there's spiritual death with that unbelief.

01:29:43

So death of belief in the true spiritual life. And there's a physical body where the physical body begins to corrupt and get older and to have sickness and to die.

01:29:55

And so those are all a part of that. So death enters and physically. The idea of death in a more, you know, a cumulative form or that's not a cumulative, a more consummate form in terms of the actual separation of the body and the soul or the idea of the second death.

01:30:13

Right. And so those are Max is sort of this you've died and you've gone to hell and and that would be sort of the maximal death.

01:30:22

And so the the reality of maximal life is having a resurrected state where we hold and kept from sin and all that.

01:30:32

So I think that we have to use the future glorified body to help to inform us about this idea of what was lost in paradise.

01:30:42

Cindy and Finley was up with a question that you may have just answered, but I'll ask it anyway.

01:30:52

Would Christ have died a natural death had he not been? I think the idea that he was already he had the curse on him.

01:31:04

He would not have merited death. He would. There have been no reason, no basis for him to die in terms of the meritorious.

01:31:14

But so the but he has curse on him because God's rational.

01:31:21

He puts curse on him with the goal of having him ultimately. Now, if God did all of him dying, he could have simply had the incarnation come where Christ comes in a body with zero curse.

01:31:36

And so he could have done that, but because God sent Christ to die, the curse now.

01:31:44

A nonsense sort of thing, right? The idea that if God changed his mind and didn't have the goal anymore and which is impossible because God cannot change his mind, would

01:31:53

Christ have then died? Well, sure. Having him, that would include part of the curse.

01:31:59

So that would that would occur, but that's impossible, right? God cannot change his mind. He cannot give the curse for the purpose of having him die and then say, oh, never mind.

01:32:07

I don't want to have him be slain on the cross as a. So, but includes the idea of death.

01:32:15

God could supernaturally, of course, remove that curse after the fact and cause him to simply live forever like he did when he pulled.

01:32:25

Or when he pulls up, he simply spares them from death and causes them to essentially be translated into a glorified condition, apart from die.

01:32:36

He has them be ascended without some sort of. And so. Example where God chooses to spare two of his servants from death, and we have an anonymous listener in Paradise, Zona.

01:32:57

Anonymous listener asks, I have been finding myself very intrigued and much in agreement with most, if not all of what you had to say today.

01:33:09

Self -increased disagreement with my own elders. Do you have recommendations for a book or books, plural, that would help me further understand these discussions that you are having?

01:33:24

Be able to share them with my own. So, some of the best places that I know of to look at this are systematic theologies that have sections on the incarnation.

01:33:35

So Calvin's Institutes has a great chapter. I don't know. Charles Hodge both do an excellent job talking about these things in their systematic theologies.

01:33:48

The London Baptist Confession and the Westminster Confession of Faith and the Savoy Declaration. I don't know if your elders are congregationalists, but all of those have excellent chapters.

01:34:00

Chapter 7 is Of Christ the Mediator and does a wonderful job of laying out these things.

01:34:06

Chapter 2 is on Trinity. Those chapters lay these things out.

01:34:14

And so I would say the systematic theologies, if I had to pick one little short book for you to read on the

01:34:20

Trinity, it would be Gordon Clark's and then a short book on the incarnation, it would be

01:34:26

Gordon Clark's book on the incarnation. I think those two books are both excellent and they're both very short. They're both less than 200 pages long.

01:34:32

They do an excellent job of pulling together all the scripture texts that are together there. It's a very good, great book on the

01:34:41

Trinity. And so those are ones that I can think of that are kind of broadly available. Now, who publishes those works by Gordon Clark that you mentioned?

01:34:51

So there's Trinity Foundation. You can get them on Amazon. They're also available as digital format,

01:35:00

I think, at least on trinityfoundation .org. Okay.

01:35:08

And let's see here. I want to make sure we have enough time for another listener question.

01:35:16

We have Tulip in Mineola, Long Island. It's a great name, whether it's a nickname or the real name.

01:35:29

And Tulip asks, can someone who has been poorly taught and naive about the deep truths of your discussion be saved?

01:35:42

For example, if someone has not yet understood or embraced the Trinity, not that they are an enemy of the

01:35:49

Trinity or opposing the Trinity, but just a young Christian who does not yet understand or believe in the

01:35:58

Trinity be truly born again? Yeah, that's also a very important question.

01:36:03

So the answer is absolutely without understanding the content that I've just laid out.

01:36:10

The smallest seed of faith is sufficient for justification. God gives to us the smallest of seeds of faith.

01:36:20

And then he develops at different speeds. And so what is necessary for justification is believing the promise of God's mercy to us in Christ.

01:36:35

And then you have to flesh that out, and so you could say you have to believe the claim

01:36:42

Jesus Christ is Lord, that you can kind of capture a very small amount there of words and you're going to get the answer.

01:36:50

So how do you unpack that? There's a lot that you can kind of lay out.

01:36:55

So when you're talking to a person on a basic level about what they need to believe, you want them to understand their sin, their need of a

01:37:01

Redeemer, and you want them to then understand who God is and what he has done to them in the work of Jesus Christ.

01:37:09

And you can unpack that more and more. And so to grow in the Christian life, we need to know more truth.

01:37:15

John 17, 17 says, sanctify them by your truth. Your word is truth. Christ tells us the way we're is by the knowledge of the truth.

01:37:24

And then furthermore, how do we get the knowledge of the truth? We get it out of the scriptures, and we're caused to believe it by the work of the

01:37:30

Holy Spirit. And the work of the Holy Spirit but then also grows us as the author and the finisher of our faith.

01:37:38

So the smallest faith is sufficient to save a person in terms of justification. But at the same time, we want to maximize.

01:37:46

Christ came to give us abundantly. What we want to do is to pursue, to know

01:37:53

God as much as we can and to obey him as much as we can for his glory.

01:37:58

We do not want to try to minimalistically figure out what's the minimum amount to know in order to be saved.

01:38:06

Okay, that's a question to figure out what's the minimum somebody has to know to be saved. But there's a difference between that and what we should be striving for.

01:38:14

So the short answer again, the smallest seed, the revealed truth of the gospel, the smallest seed is enough to save a man.

01:38:23

But in that salvation, we should be striving to know the most that we possibly can. Well, we have to go to our final question.

01:38:32

If you want to get in line and send in your question immediately because we're rapidly running out of time, chrisarnson at gmail .com,

01:38:41

chrisarnson at gmail .com. As always, give us your first name at least, city and state and country of residence. We'll be right back.

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Our quarterly curriculum is titled The Baptist Expositor, and for good reason, we are

01:46:42

Baptist and we exegete the scriptures. If you want to have a curriculum that teaches your people how to study the word of God, I invite you go to our website, download a free study, baptistpublishinghouse .com.

01:46:55

May God bless you. Hello, my name is Anthony Eugenio and I'm one of the pastors at Hope Reform Baptist Church in Corn New York and also the host of the reformrookie .com

01:47:05

website. I want you to know that if you enjoy listening to the Iron Sharpens Iron radio show like I do, you can now find it on the

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01:47:29

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01:47:38

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01:47:51

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01:47:57

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01:48:03

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01:48:14

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01:48:24

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01:48:57

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01:49:04

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01:50:02

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01:50:22

We're now back with David Reese. And before I go to any of our additional listener questions,

01:50:31

I really want you to make sure to take a moment to who most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners regarding this topic today.

01:50:41

Thank you, Chris. So what I want to make sure that people get is the fact that the doctrine of the Trinity is more basic than the doctrine of God.

01:50:49

We need to understand the doctrine of God is one in nature and three in persons. And then when we think about the

01:50:56

Trinity, we need to understand that unity of nature or essence, that there's an intellectual unity or unity of will where the three and furthermore function of rules by covenant.

01:51:09

When we think about the incarnation, we think about the second person of the Trinity having a divine nature, but then he takes to himself a human nature, conception of a human there, and that there's a unity of these two ontological persons to be one legal person.

01:51:26

And that's the hypostatic union. And when we think about the incarnation, it's important that we remember the four knots of that when

01:51:34

Christ, and when God the Son becomes man, it is without conversion.

01:51:40

It's not a change from God to man. He's taking a human nature to himself. It's without confusion.

01:51:45

There's not a mixing of the two. It's not slapping parts. It's without a conclusion or end.

01:51:52

In other words, from the point of conception onward, there's a union of the human nature with the divine nature so that there's not an end.

01:51:59

And so we've talked about a number already, and I wanted to add just to make sure that everybody heard the ones that I had promised to give.

01:52:08

And the last two heresies are monophysitism, which is the idea that Christ has one nature.

01:52:15

And that would sort of be both in the version of where there's a changing of the divine into the human, but also the other way that error could work is by a confusion, like we talked about the

01:52:26

Hercules type of error, where you're mixing them together. So there's not one nature. Christ has one nature.

01:52:32

There's a few systems for nature, and mono is one. So we have a biblical doctrine, historical

01:52:39

Christian doctrine, is that there's two natures, duophysitism. The last error is called monothelitism, one -willism.

01:52:48

We only have one will. His historical language is duothelite, so there's two wills, thelite, will.

01:52:56

So we have two wills. He has a human will, and he has a divine will. And we've already talked about the idea of the divine mind part of the debate.

01:53:04

So historically, these are things that have been worked through. We want to guard all of these things, not abandon any of the

01:53:09

Scripture truth. And so these are some of the historical errors that have existed. And the biblical view of Christ is that two natures with two minds or wills, and that these two are united as one person.

01:53:26

So there's a hypostatic union, one legal person. So the actions of the human are the divine, and the actions of the divine are the human.

01:53:33

And so we can say things like the blood of God. Oh, well, we do have time for a question from a listener, and we probably should have asked this we didn't have the question yet.

01:53:47

We may not have enough time for you to sufficiently answer the question, but we have

01:53:54

Grant in Lenox, California, who says, I have friends on the war that's raging between Reformed Christians as to the place and role, if any, of Thomas Aquinas in our theology and understanding of God.

01:54:16

What is your position on Thomas Aquinas? Should he be embraced and lauded, or should he be avoided?

01:54:24

So this is something that if you're at all interested, I'd be happy to do a show on it. Really? But the reality is that we have to ask ourselves at a basic level, how do we know truth?

01:54:39

And Thomas Aquinas is a defender of the view that our knowledge of the truth comes from our sensory experience.

01:54:48

So when we talk about being a Thomist, first and foremost, we're talking about how do you know?

01:54:55

And so Aristotle was a teacher of what we would call theologianism, or how do you know the answer of your sensory experience, and Thomas sought to integrate

01:55:05

Aristotelian thought into Christian thought, and so the Thomas Aquinas project,

01:55:11

Thomism, is integrating Aristotle with the Bible. And so that's his entire effort in the

01:55:18

Summa Theologica, is to find ways of taking the Aristotelian methodology and applying it there.

01:55:25

And so I think that how we know is a really big... I reject the answer that empiricism, or the sensory experience, is how we know, and I believe that knowledge in terms of the strict definition of that which we can with certainty know, that which we can with certainty is true justified belief.

01:55:47

It's a true opinion with an account of how you know that is actually rationally defensible.

01:55:53

And so I would say that Scripture is the highest authority and is the bedrock of... and so that's...

01:55:59

with scripturalism, or presuppositionalism, or dogmatism, or whatever pejorative you want to throw at it, but I think that the

01:56:07

Word of God is the highest authority, and it is the thing from which...

01:56:12

able to demonstrate any of... and so I would oppose Thomism, natural theology, and natural law as things that are derivable from experience, and would present...

01:56:27

that would be suppositionalism. Now wouldn't

01:56:32

Aristotelianism be the basis that Rome defends things like transubstantiation?

01:56:40

It is, and Aquinas, for example, takes the doctrine of the...

01:56:46

what are called accidents... not accidents, accidins, the external sensible things.

01:56:56

He talks about this idea of the substance of the material, that there's a retaining of the accidins, the external sensible things of bread and wine, but the changing...

01:57:13

...into... blood of the human nature of Christ, and this also has to do with their view of the nature of Christ's humanity, that they think that they can take the attributes of the divinity of the humanity, so he's locally present as a human, but also his body can be present throughout the world because of his omnipresence, and that's a confusion of categories, as that's what a breaching of one of the five knots of Chalcedon, so I think that's a big deal.

01:57:44

Yeah, in fact, no matter where you place him in your own life, as far as your study, and as far as understand the things of...

01:57:57

anyone who is theologically reformed should realize that they should definitely be at least tapping the brake pedal when it comes to Aquinas, because he did not believe in the biblical...

01:58:12

the same gospel that was centuries later defined and declared dogmatically at the

01:58:18

Council of Trent. Yes, absolutely, and so his theory of...

01:58:24

is something that it... he makes it so that justification is not by faith alone, but that it includes love, and that there's a merit that has to be brought by us apart from the merit of Christ, and so it's another gospel, absolutely.

01:58:39

Well, I just want to remind our... the website for Puritan Reformed Church of Phoenix, Arizona is puritanphx .com,

01:58:49

puritanphx .com, and also don't forget about the website... run...

01:58:57

armoredrepublic .com, armoredrepublic .com. Pastor Reese, I am always so blessed and edified by your presence here on Iron Trip and Zion Radio.

01:59:07

I look forward to many... interviews with you, and hopefully... will be very soon.

01:59:12

I hope you pick a date for that very soon. I want to thank you again. I want to thank everybody who listened today, especially those who took the time to write in questions.

01:59:20

I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that... the far greater Savior... you are a sinner.