1689 Session #5

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Josh Rice: 2LBC Chapters 19, 21-24.

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Chapter 19, the law of God. Understanding the law of God has fallen by the wayside in modern
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Christianity. What happened is we've had several movements that talk about the law as being a thing that's only valuable to people who are not saved, and there's an idea that we're saved and then separated from the law, and that is not what our confession says.
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And so as we look through the law, there's only four paragraphs, there's only four parts to this, and it traces the way from Adam until where we are here, and it has something to say about civil magistrates, and then we're gonna end tonight talking about the civil government and matters of law.
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So I'm gonna cut that short, don't get frustrated in this section. So if you look at paragraph 1, 19 .1,
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here's the basic idea, is that there is this critical to understanding being a
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Christian, is that to be good has always meant to be lawful. In fact, that's the only meaningful definition of being good, is to be lawful.
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Anyone who does not follow the law is by definition not good, and anyone who does follow the law is good.
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And so the perfect man, Jesus, is perfect, and that's not an ethereal thing, he's not perfect because he was oh -so -nice,
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Jesus is perfect because he perfectly followed the law, which means he's perfectly righteous, and there is nothing evil or wicked in him.
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There is only one other person who's ever lived who was not inborn with wickedness or original sin, and that is
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Adam. And so we know that Adam had the law of God written on his heart.
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He knew how to walk with God, he had fellowship with God in the garden, and so as Adam was walking with God, we see from that, and we can by necessary inference say that Adam understood the law, even though the law had not been given in a written form, we know from early writings that the law was still on the lips of God's people, and then it was codified with Moses at Sinai.
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So that's a new covenant promise that Adam had, because the new covenant was made necessary by Adam's lawlessness.
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His act of lawlessness plunged everyone into the position where a new covenant was the only way that there could be final, eternal salvation.
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So what paragraph one is essentially saying is that Adam could have followed the law, but Adam did not.
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The particular precept that Adam had was to not eat the fruit.
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So that was the law that was given to Adam, was do not eat the fruit, be fruitful, and multiply.
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And so Adam, as long as he obeyed God to not eat the fruit that was forbidden from him, then he was walking in righteousness.
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And so what we get from that, and it sounds cruel, I think the world doesn't understand the treason that Adam did, if they even believe that Adam existed.
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The idea is it seems very harsh to us that all of humanity fell, and in all humanity we have sinned because Adam disobeyed this one law.
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But that shows our misunderstanding of the law, because the standard that God exacts on law is constant, exact, eternal obedience is necessary for fellowship with God.
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All three of those things, constant, exact, and eternal obedience.
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You can never fall on the wrong side of the law ever. You have to constantly follow it, and you have to exactly follow it.
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And so you can see right away the hopeless position that we find ourselves in as people who have original sin.
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By the age of three, we've fallen. We don't exactly follow the law at all, because we were fallen to start with.
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So that's what paragraph one is saying, is that Adam was a different kind of man, but it's really setting the stage for what the law is, and what the law requires.
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So paragraph two says this, and it's interesting,
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I think a lot of Christians don't know this either. This law was always the law, and it was made manifest in written form at Sinai.
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So the law that was given to Moses was not a new law, it was always the law. There has never been any other kind of law than the law that was given to Moses.
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And it was given in revelation at Sinai, but the Sabbath was being obeyed before Moses went up on Sinai.
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And we know that murder was also forbidden, and that property rights were in place, like all of these things were happening as civilization was happening.
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And in God's kindness, he gave the law written down with the moral ceremonial and the civil parts of it.
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So the summary of the law that we get from paragraph two is that loving God and loving your neighbor is all of the law.
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Everything in the law can be summed up in those commands, love God and love your neighbor.
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All right, so now in paragraph three, we start to unpack. So what we've done is we've summarized, Adam was obedient,
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Adam fell, so we're all disobedient. Jesus had to enact a new covenant to secure righteousness for us.
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The law never changed. It was always the law. Guess what? The law still has not changed. The law never will change.
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What will make us righteous in heaven is that we will, or in new earths, is we will constantly, eternally follow this law.
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That is what humans are made to do. That's what we do. But there's what's called, here's your word, tripartite, okay?
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Tripartite means there's historically conceived that there's three divisions of the law or three ways that the law is characterized.
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Now, it's not as neat as that, okay? It sounds like that's really simple.
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You know, there are these three little boxes and this law I get to put in this box and this one. It's not like that.
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There are laws that weave between ceremonial, civil, and moral, which are the three distinctions, okay?
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So, the moral law, according to our confession, the moral law is always in effect, always must be followed, never abrogated.
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It has to be exactly followed today. And the moral law is really summed up in the Ten Commandments, okay?
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That is the moral law. There are two other kinds. The ceremonial laws, so if the moral law is always in effect and we're following it today and we're following it to the letter, right, that is what
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Christ calls us to in the Christian life. That's what sanctification is. Again, not an ethereal thing. Sanctification is being changed to the likeness of Christ, which means that we follow the law.
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That's what it is. But ceremonial laws, which were a lot about the temple worship cleanliness, the way that the sacrifices happened, the way that the priests were dressed, and the makeup of the tabernacle, and all of those kinds of things, those laws were completely abrogated through the fulfillment of Christ.
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And abrogated is a fancy word that means that we're done with them. So, we do not have to follow the ceremonial laws, but it's not quite that simple either.
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It is that simple in the fact that we don't have to follow ceremonial laws. It's not that they disappeared, though. They were fulfilled on our behalf in Christ.
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It would be blasphemous for us to try to follow the ceremonial laws today because Jesus once and forever, according to Hebrews, fulfilled every one of those laws.
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And so, we walk in them. And what they always did is the ceremonial law, and why it's still profitable for us to study the
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Pentateuch today, is they pointed towards the complete spectrum of our salvation in Jesus' person at work.
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And that's going to be very important for us as we understand conscience in a later chapter, is that ceremonial pointed us to the breadth of what salvation means.
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Imagine all of the stuff that had to happen, these external things that had to happen to come in the presence of God every once in a while, like on a schedule, has been made to where we enter into the holy places when we pray every single day, multiple times a day, because of what
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Christ has done. And the answer and what we would get from the confession on point three, if I was summing up point three, it would be, do not go back.
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And we see that this is a problem. There are all kinds of sects within the church who want us to go back, who want us to start to practice
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Hebrew ceremonial laws and feasts. And this is something that our forefathers, especially during the
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Reformation, were fighting all the time. And they were fighting them from the beginning up until today.
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Still going on. There is a tremendous desire to go back, to grab onto external things, and we shouldn't do that.
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We should never do that. And our confession says that. Now, it ends on the law with this thing, and I'm going to throw a bomb, and then
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I'm going to try to tighten it up later, okay? So point four, he gave to Israel judicial laws.
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This is the civil law. So we have the moral, the ceremonial, and we have the civil. And it says, our confession says that those expired together with the state of that people.
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So the view of our confession is the civil law of God, and the demand for a nation to adopt those civil laws expired when
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Israel expired. And we know that would be AD 70, right?
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Done. But really, Hebrews would tell you that it was when the resurrection happened and Christ ascended, that that was the end of civic nation
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Israel and the end of the civil law and the requirement on a nation to follow those laws. So we would say, by our confession, that judicial laws of Israel are not binding on nations today.
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Okay? If you're not alert to what is going on in the reformed world, like, that is a very controversial thing to say.
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And I say it proudly, and I'm going to defend it later. The judicial laws of Israel are not binding on nations today. The general equity of those laws is of good moral use, and will always be of good moral use.
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So the general equity, a good example, it's the one that always gets used, is something like, you know, the law tells you to build a fence around your roof so that people can't fall off of it, okay?
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The general equity would be that we should look out for our neighbor's safety to a reasonable degree. That's a good thing to do.
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But we don't have to make a law in America that you have to have fences around your pool and claim that we're following the law of God by doing that.
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There is no need to do that. So nations are not required to adopt these, but nations could if they desired.
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That is a national decision. But this idea is largely...
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Okay, here's the bomb. I'm going to have to clean up a mess later. This idea is incongruent with Bonson's and Rushnuni's flavor of theonomy, and that is because of our understanding of the old and new covenants, okay?
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So we're a lot of open -handed stuff today, all right?
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We really are. Like, when we start talking about government, this is not issues of salvation and court of the faith.
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In fact, you can be a happy member of this church and disagree with confession on these points, and I know that there are some that will.
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I will defend this part of the confession and say that a Baptist understanding of the discontinuity between old and new covenants gets wildly inconsistent if we go from there and think every nation needs to adopt the laws of Israel, because that is a
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Presbyterian understanding of the old covenant, and I reject that. Okay, chapter 21.
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That's the bomb that I give. We'll clean that up later. I want to save a lot of time for the last chapter of this. Okay, conscience.
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Super important in the church. Chapter 21, man, this one comes up. It's marriage issues and conscience are the two things that get dealt with all the time pastorally, and I think it's because people don't really understand conscience.
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So here's what point one essentially says. It's a lengthy one, and it says this.
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There was always freedom. Always freedom. The Old Testament saints had freedom in faith because the love of Jesus compelled their obedience to the law instead of slavish fear, and this is where our confession is much better than the modern conception of Baptists that think that the
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Old Testament saints were somehow saints because they followed the law, and they had to follow the law or they would die. That's the idea, but our confession says, no way.
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Everyone was always saved the same way. The Old Testament saints had freedom just like we do because they followed the law because they loved
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Jesus, not because they had slavish fear. Okay? That's one thing that number one is saying.
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But then it goes on from that and it starts to talk about a discontinuity and a difference in the new covenant. So the new covenant saints have even wider freedom because of the abrogation of the ceremonial law.
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So with the ceremonial law being taken out and abrogated, we have even more freedom in our conscience and in worship because we don't have to dress up this certain way to worship and to be renewed covenantally, which is going to come in the
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Sabbath stuff. Also, point three out of this paragraph that I took out is the unmixed nature of the church, as opposed to the ethnostate in Israel in the
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Old Testament, leads to greater boldness of access to grace with unity and greater revelation. So here's the idea.
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The fault in the Old Covenant, if you read it in Hebrews, the fault in the Old Covenant was that it was shown by physical sign, that you were circumcised and you were a member of Israel, right, by blood, by family.
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And so because of that, there was a bunch of interlopers mixed in always, and that's the fault in the Old Covenant. The reality of the new covenant is that we can have unity because we can have boldness in all following together because presumably there's no one mixed in, right?
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There's no bad guys mixed in to the mix, and we know they are, but they're not identified by blood, okay?
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It's by confession and then by fruit. So that's what point one is. It's basically the greatness of the new covenant and how that's going to deal with the conscience.
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Point two, this is so Baptist. God alone is Lord of the conscience, okay?
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So what they're doing, and this is very Baptist, but it's also anti -Romanist here because the idea that comes into play is that we are free of the doctrines and commandments of man.
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That's very important. So in 2020, I'm not even...we
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should have, and I'll argue that later, but by conscience, we absolutely could have told anyone who told us to stay in our house to pound sand because we are not subject to the doctrines and commands of man.
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That is a Baptist distinctive, and that is part of our confession. So with that comes a side note, and you can almost hear them as they write this.
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There's going to be a counterpoint to that in paragraph three. But in paragraph two, what we have to understand very simply is
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God's plain commands are not conscience issues. You don't get to decide whether you follow God's commands based on your conscience.
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If your conscience tells you you shouldn't follow God's command, your conscience is ridiculous, and it needs to be fixed. So conscience, what people will do is they'll try to take their conscience and say,
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I can't do that according to my conscience. We're like, well, the Bible plainly says that you have to do this. Well, it's like, well, then our conversation is you need to stop sinning.
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Okay, you're breaking God's commands. Everything else, this is important, everything else is conscience, and God is in command of your conscience.
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So if it's not clearly laid out in Scripture, if it's not a plain command of God, everything else is conscience.
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That makes us uncomfortable because we like rules, right? And we like prescriptions.
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We like to be told what to do, even while saying we don't like to, again, go back to 2020. We love being told what to do, okay?
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Anything, and the limiting factor is anything that's done outside of faith is sin.
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So the liberty of conscience is there, and we should not abuse it. And this also points at some arguments that get made against some of the government positions we'll have later.
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Are you saying that you can go in and force convert people? No Christian that I've ever heard of has advocated that, okay?
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There is no desire to force people to conversion. We know that that's not possible anyway. We can force people to behave certain ways.
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The question is, should we do that? Yeah. And we all agree. So at best, we're inconsistent because we all agree we should force people to behave in some ways, and it's just how far does it go?
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But that's, in the end, a topic for later. Last thing, abusing liberty, this is paragraph three, abusing liberty to gain license to sin is completely against the design of grace.
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If you are abusing your Christian liberty in order to sin, then you are basically blaspheming
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God and you're blaspheming His grace, and you should never do that. We are made with a telos or a purpose.
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Our end goal and the reason for our design is to serve Jesus. And our conscience should always align with that purpose.
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So if you're wondering, how sticky should my conscience be? Think of it this way.
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The purpose of your conscience is to align you to serve Jesus. So if what you're struggling with in your conscience, and you can take it out and say, is this helping me to serve
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Jesus? And if the answer is no, then don't do it. And so that gets, you can see, so let me sidebar here for a second.
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And why the conscience is so important. We all think that everyone else should have the same conscience we do, okay?
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And it's just not that way. Should we watch this certain television show, okay?
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There are things that your conscience has nothing to say about that because it's evil, all right? And we can point them out.
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Why should you not watch this show? Well, because it does this, this, and this that are sinful and wicked, and you shouldn't do that, okay?
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Should I watch this show though? And the question becomes, well, is it outright sinful to watch it?
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I can't point at it, so the answer is no, and now we have to have a conscience discussion.
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And we are required in our conscience to have patience with each other and to not try to demand others follow our conscience.
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And you can probably see how this causes a lot of trouble in the church. Like, can you believe they were watching that?
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Or that guy smoked a cigar, or even worse, right? I saw that guy smoking a cigarette, you know, and can you believe he would treat his body that way?
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And what you have to do is you have to go, do we have a clear command not to do that? If we don't, then this is a matter of conscience, and we can persuade each other, but at the end of the day, we can't break unity over conscience.
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And that's going to be very important when we talk about Sabbath in the next chapter, which
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I think we're there. Chapter 22, trying to hum along here. I am doing good.
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I'm doing really good. So chapter 22 is about Christian worship and the
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Sabbath. All right, so number one, we do not get to make up how we worship
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God. You don't get to worship God going to church in the bass boat on Sunday morning.
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We do not really, according to our confession, we don't really get to willy -nilly just pick what day of the week that we have the
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Lord's Day, even though it might really benefit us to have it on a Saturday night. According to our confession, that's not something that's really in balance.
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Now, does that mean you're a heretic if you have Saturday night service? No, I don't think so, but our confession holds against that.
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So if we're confined to worship Him, what point one really tells us is we are to only worship the way it's prescribed in Scripture.
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Now, here's a word for you, and it's important because you'll hear it said a lot, that is the regulative principle of worship.
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The regulative principle of worship is the idea that we are only allowed to do things in the service or at the
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Lord's Day gathering that are prescribed or ordered by Scripture, okay? The opposite of the regulative principle is something called the normative principle, which means if it's not specifically forbidden in Scripture, then it's okay.
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And that's where you get weird people dressed in ballet suits, miming up on the stage, and strobe lights.
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I mean, the Bible never says you can't use strobe lights, right? The Bible never says you can't thrash on the electric guitar and, you know, play some movies, you know, up on the screen and that kind of thing.
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So what we would say is our confession says you can't do that. You can only worship in the way that God has prescribed us to worship, and here's what
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He's done. And hopefully, you're going to see why we do what we do at the Lord's Day here, right? So what are we allowed to do in worship?
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What's prescribed by Scripture? Well, 2 Timothy 4 -2, and many other places, tell us that we are to preach the word, okay?
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That's one thing we do. Ephesians 5 -19 tells us that we are to sing songs, psalms, and spiritual songs.
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Some translations will say hymns there. In reality, we're probably talking about singing psalms in that passage.
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So we should sing psalms, and that's prescribed. Another thing we do that's obvious, but we should not just assume it's obvious because we have good traditions.
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1 Timothy 2 -8 talks about how we should pray. We should pray.
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Ezra and Nehemiah, among many other places, show us that we should read Scripture out loud in the gathering of God's people.
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And we also know from the ordinances that Jesus instituted that we talked about last
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Sunday, but also many passages on baptism, that we are to worship God by having baptism in the
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Lord's Supper. Those are the elements of the regulative principle, okay?
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Now, is it wrong to read catechisms, creeds, confessions? No, and I think there is some room for that also.
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I don't think that that would fall outside of the regulative principle, just like everything we do is reform people. There are degrees of the regulative principle too.
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Some people would say, you can't have a Christmas service. Even if you do all these things in your
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Christmas service, they would be like, that's super strict regulative principle, and I don't fall there.
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That's right. But our confession does not get specific enough to disallow that kind of stuff.
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What it says is we can't be innovative in worship. And that's really what number one is about. And you can read in this, like you can see the fight with the
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Romanist as this goes on, right? It's really pointed. Number two is talking about how...yeah,
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this one's pointed. Like, it's basically, hey, Rome, what you're doing is wrong, and we're going to stop doing it.
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Because essentially what this is doing is using 1 Timothy 2, 5, and it's saying, Jesus is the only mediator. We do not confess our sins for mediation to other people.
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If we have wronged our brother, we can confess our sin to him or her so that we can seek reconciliation, but that's not how we are made right with a holy
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God. Jesus is our only mediator. And I will tell you this. So we don't have problems,
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I don't think, in the church with wanting to build a booth in here with a screen on it so that I can sit in there and, like, you can come in the other side and confess your sins to me.
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I don't think we have a problem with that, but I will say that we do have a real problem with elders acting as mediators in the church by mediating church discipline and confession.
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And what I mean by that is you come to me and you say, hey, this person is doing this to me, and I'm like, okay,
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I'll go punish them. Right? And essentially what you've just done is used me as a mediator, okay? Because church discipline is not about going to the elder so that the elder can, like dad, go spank somebody.
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That's not the way it works, all right? So at the end of the day, elders are not mediators in people's marriage either, okay?
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We can help, we can provide counsel. We do not have coercive power in that realm, and that's really important for elders to remember, and it's really important for congregants to understand, is that we are not mediating anything, really.
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We're here to preach the word, we're here to counsel, that sort of thing. Lots of misbehavior. I've seen increasing examples of it even in the last six months.
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Elders who try to go outside of their church and bring other people to heal, just a bunch of bad stuff. And I think it's this idea of being kind of a priest or a pope.
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Also, in this, it's a warning. I don't want to, you know, I hold to no enemies on the right, to the largest sin.
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And I will say this, there is a danger, and I'm not saying not to listen to it, I listen to it. There is a danger in stuff like haunted cosmos in the sense that our confession warns us about not being too fascinated by other spiritual beings.
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We can easily be captured by being really, really interested in angels and demons and the
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Nephilim and all this kind of stuff. And what can happen is, at best, it can be a distraction.
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And it's harmless when it's just kind of a funny, lighthearted distraction, but it can lead to a lot of false worship and misunderstandings and wasted time.
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So I like haunted cosmos, I think it's fine. I think it is a rabbit hole that you can go down, and our confession warns against being too fascinated by stuff like that.
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These beings are cloaked in mystery for a reason. We're not to know. Some of these mysteries belong to God. All right, point three, we're getting to the spicy stuff.
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Not yet though. Point three is, I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time because I'm going to do a lot this
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Sunday on it, but we have to publicly pray in a language that we all understand.
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Okay? So no ooga -booga, sugar daddy, wumpa -bumpa. Okay? None of that, that's not what we're doing.
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Okay? That was kind of a Flintstones tongue. Yabba -dabba -doo.
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So first of all, it's because we want to have clarity and order in worship, but also because there is an idea of reverence and understanding that goes with prayer, and we should pray corporately.
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And what we do in the reform, and this is a big problem we have, we teach doctrine in order to connect the mind and the emotions in worship, and both of those things are important and good.
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The mind is super important. It has to be transformed in order to be conformed into the image of Christ.
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And the way that it's transformed, the means, is by hearing the word of God and by reading it. But your emotions are important, and we all know this, your emotions are very powerful.
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So excuses on both...excesses on both sides of this, we have what's called the frozen chosen. Okay? Have you heard that before?
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Do you know...we know what that means? I used to not. I used to think that what that meant was that there's like a frozen number of people who would say, no, frozen chosen means no emotions at all, right?
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Then the other side, we have flag -waving charismania where we're blowing gold dust out of the ceiling and, you know, pulling people's legs longer and all that kind of stuff.
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So not to sound like Tim Keller here, but there's probably some wisdom in the middle of these two camps.
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There's a third way. The third way is this, right? Emotions are important, but they need to be controlled, right?
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We need to be orderly, and we need to not neglect our mind for emotions, and we need to not neglect emotions just to be frozen and sing songs with mumbling.
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We should sing them loudly and passionately. Okay, point four, there is no such thing as purgatory.
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Okay? There's just not. Prayer is necessary for men who live, but not for the dead.
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There's no reason to pray for the dead. Their fate is sealed. It's done. It's appointed a man wants to die.
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And there is no amount of prayer that is going to change the eternal destiny of a man who has died. So we pray for families of those who have passed, right?
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We pray for peace for them, and we leave the rest up to God, and there is no such thing as purgatory. That's a heresy.
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Don't get into that. Okay, point five, we need to use things like scriptures, preaching, hearing the
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Word of God, teaching, singing, admonishing each other, administration of baptism, the
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Lord's Supper, all of these things, all of these regulatory, regulative principle things, that what we do is we use these things oriented to God, not ourselves.
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And it's easy to orient them to ourselves. We should not do that. The preaching of the Word is not about the preacher.
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It's about God. The singing of songs is not about the talent on stage or in the pews. It's about God.
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So we need to do all of these things in order for the church to be healthy and on mission. If we're neglecting any of these things, then the church is going to be unhealthy.
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So if you walk into the church and the preaching is phenomenal, and they don't pray a single time, and when they sing songs, no one's singing anything, unhealthy church.
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If they sing like the world's on fire, and the preaching is amazing, and they pray, and they never take the
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Lord's Supper, and when it's over, everybody just leaves and gets out in their car, unhealthy church. Okay? We can get out of balance.
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All of these things need to be in place, and that's what that part of the confession says. We have to gather.
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This is point six. Very Baptist again. Okay? We have to gather.
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We don't have a choice about this. That's what the church is. It's a gathering. We do not require cathedrals.
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So the building is not super important to the mission of the church. Private and public worship are different things.
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You should worship privately. You should worship with your family privately. Private family worship is not church.
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They are different. Public worship is different. And they are not confined to one place or the type of place.
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If this church was meeting at different buildings because we had to, you know, every other week, that would not change the mission or what this church is.
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It would just be inconvenient. All right, now to the Sabbath. This is going to take a little work.
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And maybe...I'm not going to even...I'm not going to try to reconcile. I'm going to tell you what it says very plainly, and then where I fall on this and try to give some justification.
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The fireworks don't start in seven, but seven is important. Okay? So if you look at seven, it will say something like, it moves the
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Sabbath to the Lord's Day, to Sunday. Now, right off the bat,
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I will tell you, that is extra biblical. Okay? It is a church tradition.
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I think it's a good church tradition. I do not have any exception to the confession on this point.
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I think it's true. I think that by necessary inference of what Scripture teaches, that it's rightly done.
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You're not going to be able to get a proof text on it, but I do think it's there. And I think it's taught. Okay? But that's one of those areas where we have to hold that as a doctrine that is not extraordinarily clear from Scripture.
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And so when people practice something different... So if a church has Saturday night services, we don't start, you know, throwing fireballs at their, you know, in their yard and petitioning them and calling everybody how they're not a church and that kind of thing.
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We shouldn't do that. It is a little bit unclear. But then it says this movement, which we kind of just take de facto, right?
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Like Sunday's the Lord's Day because church tradition has uniformly beat that drum, and it's good.
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But then it does this thing. It's to be continued to the end of the world as the Christian Sabbath, the observation of the last of the week being abolished.
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The observation of the last day of the week is abolished. So according to the confession, we do not celebrate the
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Sabbath on Saturday. Okay? So you're starting to see we're getting a little bit more pointed.
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Now, I'm going to take a step back and we're going to try to understand the Sabbath. What is the Sabbath? Okay? A couple of passages that are really critical.
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If you want to write those down, it is Exodus 31, 12 through 17, and Hebrews 4, really all the chapter, but I'm going to do 1 through 3.
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So Exodus 31 explains what the Sabbath is. And there's components to Sabbath that make this very difficult.
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Okay? And I'll try to explain those as we get to the next point. Yahweh spoke to Moses saying, But as for you, speak to the sons of Israel saying,
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You shall surely keep my Sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, that you may know that I am
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Yahweh who makes you holy. Therefore you shall keep the Sabbath, for it is holy to you. Everyone who profanes it shall surely be put to death.
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For whoever does any work on it, that person shall be cut off from among his people. Six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a
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Sabbath of complete rest. Holy to Yahweh, whoever does any work on the Sabbath day shall surely be put to death.
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So the sons of Israel shall keep the Sabbath to celebrate the Sabbath throughout their generations as an everlasting covenant.
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It is a sign between me and the sons of Israel forever. For in six days
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Yahweh made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day he rested and was refreshed. So if I was to ask you, according to that passage, what is the observation of the
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Sabbath? This gets fancy, right? Did you hear it? What is it? Yeah.
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Yeah, and the sign of which covenant? So this is where it gets strange, right?
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So the institution of Sabbath by God resting is natural law, okay?
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This is given in the civil law, because notice the penalty, right? You can be put to death. So that's, again,
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I told you, the tripartite's not super clean, right? Because there's a moral law component to the
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Sabbath, for sure. It's in the Ten Commandments. There's also a civil law component to it, because you can be killed if you don't do it.
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So what I advocate, must a country kill someone who doesn't honor the Sabbath? And I would say, according to our confession, no, because that civil law has expired with Israel.
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A theonomist of the Rushduni yoke will say, yeah, yeah, they should die, okay?
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Look, is a nation doing something wicked if they implement that law? I would say, no, they're not.
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But they don't have to do that. The important thing to see here is, though, when the civil law is brought forth, this is known as a sign of the
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Mosaic covenant, and signs are very important. The sign of the Abrahamic covenant was circumcision.
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The sign of the Mosaic covenant is Sabbath, okay? So it pictures and puts in the sign.
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And the law of the land, this was basically God giving Canaan to the people, and this was to be their law, their government.
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It's almost like their constitution, in a sense. It forms a people in Canaan. So you can see how I'm getting controversial, right?
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So if it's a sign of the Mosaic, then we get this, Hebrews 4, 1 through 3. Therefore, let us fear, lest while I promise remains of entering
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His rest, any one of you may seem to have fallen short of it. For indeed, we have had good news proclaimed to us, just as they also.
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But the word that was heard did not profit those who were not united with faith among those who heard. For we who have believed enter that rest, just as He has said, as I swore in my wrath, they shall not enter my rest, although His works were finished from the foundation of the world.
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Now, this is where an argument comes in, that one of the blessings of the new covenant is that we have entered rest.
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So there is an understanding. So Sabbath is rest. Sabbath is God -ordained,
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God -commanded rest. There is the idea in Hebrews that you have obtained Sabbath.
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And when you harmonize that with Jesus saying repeatedly that Sabbath was created for man, not man for the
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Sabbath, we start to get a different picture. Okay, so now we get to the flamethrower paragraph.
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All right, number eight. Okay, number eight says that the Sabbath is kept holy unto the
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Lord. And in the version I read, I was trying to get in my computer, so I'm on a slightly different version than this better version.
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It's easier to read version. Here's what the one I had says. It says, when men, after due preparing of their hearts and ordering their common affairs beforehand, do not only observe a holy rest all day from their own words and thoughts about their worldly employment and recreations, but are also taken up the whole time in the public and private exercises of His worship and in the duties of necessity and mercy.
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So what does that say plainly? I mean, we're kind of in this bi -vocational world again, right?
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What it plainly says in the confession is that you need to think ahead about Sunday.
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You need to think about what you're going to do, how you're going to abstain from work and worldly recreation so that you can exercise public and private worship on that day.
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That's what it plainly says. Now, so does it leave us any interpretation?
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So if we take this confession, does that mean that I must take exception to the confession if I go play golf on a Sunday after church?
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Right? I don't know. I don't know.
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There is some nuance, and I know we'll get into it in questions. I'm going to tell you where I land, and I'm going to give you guys some stuff that people will hate me for and some stuff that you guys might think, oh, that's great.
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This stuff that we know, like, this causes division, right? It causes all kinds of division. Colossians 2 .16
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says, Therefore, no one is to judge you in food and drink or in respect to a festival or a new moon or a
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Sabbath day. Now, what Paul means by that is that we're not to be judged by doing these old festivals and rituals, okay?
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No one can make you go to the chili cook -off. Even though that's not an Old Testament ritual, you don't have to do that.
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You don't have to be here tonight, right? No one says you have to be here. You do have to assemble with God's people on the
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Lord's Day, and I fully agree with the confession on that. Mark 2 .27, Jesus said the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the
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Sabbath. So the question is, what do we do? What do we do? Well, here's what I prescribe. Here's what
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I think. I think we need to advocate for good laws that protect the ability to worship publicly on the
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Lord's Day. I'm unabashed about that. Those laws, so -called blue laws that we had until 10 minutes ago, those laws that shut down businesses and make it to where people do not have to work on the
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Lord's Day, they orient and tutor society to the good of the church. So they should.
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I think that I would advocate stores being shut down, golf courses being closed on Sunday mornings.
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I would be for all that. They orient. The Sabbath is written into natural law and the Ten Commandments.
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Men need rest. We need rest. We should plan for the rest, but we should also understand that the
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Lord himself did good deeds on the Sabbath. Okay? So you're not precluded from doing good deeds. Preachers are not breaking the
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Sabbath by preaching on the Sabbath. And we are working, right? So there's obviously some deeds that can be put into play.
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It's distrusting to God, just like it was in the Old Testament, to orient your life away from the
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Sabbath and forsake his gathering. So the strictness of this paragraph is open to some interpretation.
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It does go well with the conscience earlier. So here's what I would say. Pray for conviction and a clear conscience on matters of the
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Sabbath. Pray for conviction and a clear conscience. If you think you're doing something wrong, stop doing it and start going along with your conscience.
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Study the issue and settle your conscience, and then it will be settled.
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If you become a Sabbatarian out of that, that's inbounds. And it might follow the confession more closely than I do.
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Okay? If you don't become a Sabbatarian, then what is mandated is that you take
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Sabbath seriously and plan to worship God and to give yourself rest. Okay?
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And do not place heavy burdens on other people. Don't blow up churches over it. Bad idea.
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Really bad idea. Okay. Quick chapter. I know I'm wrong. I knew this was going to be a monster this week.
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I shouldn't have done it this way. Here we go. We can blow through 23 quick, though. Here's how we use oaths and vows in marriage, baptism, and ordination within the church.
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We take vows on those things. We should not take the Lord's name in vain in order to spice up or amplify our rash expressions.
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That's paragraph two. We should not invoke God's name to bolster our arguments. That's in number two.
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There is huge gravity, paragraph three, in swearing an oath before God, so don't take it lightly. An oath is to be taken in the plain and common sense of the words without equivocation or mental reservation.
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Don't play word games, semantics, or wiggle room in situations where you're promising and giving a vow or an oath.
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You're not crossing your fingers behind your back. We take these things very seriously. And then number five, super important.
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This is also Romanist, but we see this stuff. Don't take vows to asceticism, which is a fancy word of meaning like neglecting the body and being super pious.
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Don't take vows to be a monk. Your vows have to comport with God's word, and we need to be careful that our vows are in line with virtue.
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Do not make rash vows that we saw several times in Scripture that put people in really bad situations where they should have broken their vow to follow a greater law, to not murder.
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We saw it in Judges. Okay. Civil magistrate. Here we go. We're going to spend most of our time on two.
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So I'm going to do one, three, and then come back to two. Here's what one essentially says, 24 -1.
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Evil is obvious. Evil is obvious, and the civil government should be a terror to evil.
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I mean, you should be afraid to do evil deeds. Good, promoting good, implies broad powers depending on the nation.
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There's a lot of things that are in purview for the civil magistrate to promote good, and we can have Christian debates over what those things are.
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But evil is obvious, and the government needs to be a terror to evil, and our government's not.
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That's why people are walking around doing whatever they want that's obviously evil. Point three, paragraph three.
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We have to be in subjection to all things that are lawfully commanded. God has put our rulers in place for His purposes.
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Conscience is crucial. Romans 13 talks about, for conscience's sake, we follow our leaders, and what that means is if your conscience is binding you to follow those commands, even if you think you're iffy, you should follow the commands of the leader, for conscience's sake.
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But we should not obey tyrants. Tyrants are made by stepping outside of their jurisdiction or by enacting wicked laws.
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So we don't follow wicked laws, and we don't follow tyrants. We should not follow them.
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We do not have to pull over on this road if a
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Prairie Grove policeman comes here and turns his lights on. He has no jurisdiction to pull us over. He can call his
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Springdale buddy, and he can pull us over. We don't have to follow those kind of laws. All right, point two.
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Here we go, and I'm going to do a little teaching. So here's the deal. What do we do as a government?
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That's essentially the question, and our confession rightfully leaves that wide open. So I'm going to tell you what we have right now.
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We have liberalism, and I'm not talking about leftists. I'm talking about our country is liberal, and what that means is we have this idea that there is essentially a neutral public square that promotes religious liberty.
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You will hear things all over and over again about how important democracy is, our democracy. And so what happens is we've gotten globalism through propositional nationhood, right?
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Liberalism says anybody who wants to be here can be here, because why shouldn't they be? And they have as much right to anybody else to worship their gods, and they can build statues anywhere they want to, because if you want
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Christian Ten Commandments, then we need 100 -foot Hindu statues. And many, this is, let me make this clear.
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This is the dominant position of the Christian church in America, dominant. And when
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I say dominant, 95 % plus, probably 99 % plus. Most pastors in this country would think that I'm a raging lunatic for what
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I'm about to propose tonight, okay? Liberalism is in power, but it is fraying even as we speak.
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So that's what liberalism is. Neutral public square, religious freedom, all that kind of stuff.
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Then there's two responses to that that are basically out there. Theonomy. Theonomy is a fancy word that means
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God's law, okay? This idea was to bring Israel's civil law into the nations intact as much as possible.
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New theonomists will say general equity, which brings interpretation, and they're not theonomists at all. That's just weak sauce.
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There is no general equity theonomist. That's just do whatever you feel like and try to connect it to a law.
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Classic theonomy is simple, but it holds no particularity for nations. Every nation has to have the exact same laws.
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It smooths all cultures and nations into one set of laws. This is when I knew that I had to jump off the theonomy train, okay?
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And it is this. If every culture has the exact same laws, then essentially what we've done is we've just become a global empire.
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I think what it is is immunitizing the eschaton, and that's why theonomy is very mixed in with post -millennial theology or eschatology, because it champions an exclusively bottom -up approach to the law.
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You will hear this over and over again from new wave theonomists, Doug Wilson, David Bonson, Joe Boot, guys like this.
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What they will do is they will say, we need God's law, but we're never going to get it until everyone repents of their sins, okay?
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And I would argue, and this is where I started jumping off the train, because I'm like, that makes no sense, right?
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Except they'll never say that with abortion, okay, never, because we need to stop that now, now, now. We have to mandate by law that we stop abortion, but all the rest of the sin, we need repentance in order for that to happen.
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So what I started to see was inconsistency. And then we have the new kid on the block. It's actually very old when you look at its underpinnings, and that is
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Christian nationalism. So Christian nationalism is the idea that there are classic two kingdoms, that there's essentially a church and a civil kingdom, and that they both have their jobs.
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The church administers grace and sacraments, the civil administers law through the sword. There's particular laws for particular people, and here's the key.
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The distinctiveness of Christian nationalism is that Christianity is promoted and other religions must be private and discouraged by law.
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No public expressions of other religions, no temples, no
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Mormon temples, no synagogues, no Hindu statues, those are against the law.
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Top -down is encouraged, but not exclusively, okay? We are not a global people in the natural realm.
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The universalist Christian verses are about the oracles of God and salvation, like Galatians 328, there's no
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Jew or Greek, that's talking about the gospel. That's not talking about the governments of men, or that we all need to be one blob of people.
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So that's what I would advocate. I think there's a lot of good in theonomy. I think if they would wake up, they would realize that we don't have, there's a lot of similarities there.
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People are confused by it. Eschatology really doesn't play into Christian nationalism at all.
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Basically the idea is we should honor God with a government, and we should punish evil, and do it as Christians.
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That's really it in a nutshell. So that's what I got. Sorry I went way long, I knew it was going to happen, but that's, them's the breaks on this one.