1689 Class Session #4

Covenant Baptist Church

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All right, welcome to the continuation of the 1689 Confessions series.

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Today we've got a myriad of topics. Josh decided to just go ahead and pile on all of them for me, so, no, just kidding.

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So today we're going to go over chapter 4, which is of creation. We're going to have chapter 6 of the fall of man, of sin, and the punishment thereof.

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We have chapter 16 of good works. We have chapter 17 of the perseverance of the saints.

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And we have chapter 18 of the assurance of grace and salvation. Josh and I were talking a little while ago, and we want to make sure we stay within kind of like layman's terms, practical application on how we're teaching and what we want to emphasize.

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So it's a little bit of preaching to myself. So if you got some highbrow stuff, you might dumb it down a little bit, so that I can at least know what you're talking about.

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And so that our peers can too. Not an insult to anyone's intelligence, it's just who has the time to go over all these different Christian dogmatic statements of soteriology and all the fun stuff to get into.

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So let's go ahead and reserve our questions for the end. I'm going to jump in prayer, and then we'll go over this.

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And yeah, I look forward to your questions. Father God, we thank you so much for your kindness and grace.

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You are holy and above us. Lord, we have nothing to offer you but our sin, and you have covered us with the blood of Jesus.

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Lord, I ask that you would give me the gift of teaching tonight, or that this would be edifying for the body.

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That we would all dive deeper into your word as a result of this and give you more glory.

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We thank you so much in the name of Jesus, amen. So actually a big reason why

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Josh put quite a bit in here is because most of this is really easy stuff.

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You're going to be in alignment with all of it as you're Baptist. But it's really easy to go over.

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There's a few parts in the confession that I actually want to read verbatim, just because they're way better than whatever

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I would come up with, and just way more detailed, more thought out.

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But if it seems a little fast, you're going to notice that in your confession, there's not a whole lot of paragraphs in a lot of these sections, so there isn't too much to dive into unless you have questions at the end, okay?

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So we'll go ahead and get started in chapter four, paragraph one. I think one of the best ways to just summarize this is that the

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Trinity made the universe in six days. It was by all persons in the

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Godhead involved, right? And it was all good. All things were created, whether they were material or immaterial.

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So the laws of physics were established at that time. Grass was established at that time.

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But we have both things being made at this time perfectly in God's sovereignty.

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Paragraph two, God made man and woman in his image with knowledge, righteousness, and holiness.

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He equipped them to be capable of following his law, but they were also capable of transgressing that law.

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And in paragraph three, while we kept the command of not eating of the tree of knowledge, we were blessed with happiness and dominion over creatures.

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And what seemed to be a much easier dominion. And you will find the consequences of breaking that in Genesis, obviously.

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That was a pretty quick chapter. Not a whole lot of dispute there. This next one is a little bit more detailed.

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You might have some thoughts on, well, can someone be Reformed Baptist if they don't hold to a six -day physical creation?

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This in the London Baptist Confession says six days. The interpretation issue with different ideologies on it is that, well, is that six -day seasons?

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Is that six literal days? What have you? I've done quite the deep dive for a long time.

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I used to be hard on one side, hard on the other. And I think at the end of the day, for me, what it seems to be is as long as you are with an orthodoxy, we don't have this random evolution happening.

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That does have to be disregarded. That does not have any place in canon. Intelligent design, if you want to go that route, that can fit in.

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But if you're looking at the 1689 Confession, that's not something that was really talked about at that time, so you're not going to find it here.

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But if you're wondering, well, I hold to an Old Earth intelligent design, you're not kicked out of the kingdom, but you do have to reconcile a lot of questions, right?

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Was death involved, entropy? There's a lot of factors that Old Earth creationists kind of have to deal with when considering that alternative point of view, rather than it being a six physical days of creation, that it would be longer seasons, or what have you.

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So, chapter six of the Fall of Man of Sin and Punishment Thereof, paragraph one.

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I think the easiest way to teach this is that Satan tempted Eve in subtlety.

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And Eve tempted Adam by seducing. They broke the law in their own will, under no compulsion.

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So they weren't forced to break this law, because what you might have, you might have a little bit of a divergence when you think of God's sovereignty,

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Him preordaining all things. Well, did God make Adam and Eve break the law? Nothing in scripture, nor the confession tells us that He made them break the law.

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But He did ordain for it to happen. He didn't know that it would happen, and we wouldn't know

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God's grace, God's mercy, God's justice, any of that apart from sin.

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So, and God preordaining these things to happen, we do get to glorify

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God all the more with knowing what those things are. And a plethora, a myriad of other aspects of God's character that we would never see on display if sin didn't enter the world.

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That was my tangent. So they broke the law under no compulsion, yet God in His sovereignty permitted and purposed this to order the fallout to His glory.

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Paragraph two. This outlines an idea of federal headship.

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They don't go into detail into this paragraph of the confession.

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What you need to know is going to kind of be highlighted afterwards about federal headship, but I'll revisit in a minute.

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So, whereby we inherit the sin Adam committed, all are dead in sin.

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We know this as the doctrine of total depravity, as you've heard of the acronym

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TULIP. That's the first acronym of it, is total depravity. And so I think the reading of this next paragraph is going to give us a little bit of insight into this.

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Sorry, I'm dealing with an iPad, so give me just a second. Oh, I don't have internet reception.

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Does someone have a confession I can borrow for a second? Thank you, Eleni. Appreciate you, brother.

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Okay, so chapter six, paragraph three. I thought this would just be better for us if I just read it.

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By God's appointment, there were the root and the representatives of the whole human race.

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Because of this, the guilt of their sin was accounted and their corrupt nature passed on to all their offspring who descended from them by ordinary procreation.

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Their descendants are now conceived in sin and are by nature children of wrath, the servants of sin and partakers of death and all other miseries, spiritual, temporal, eternal, unless the

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Lord Jesus sets them free. This is the idea of federal headship. So one person, our federal head of a covenant, we would call this the

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Edenic covenant, he commits a sin and then we're represented with him in that sin.

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That's the idea of federal headship. It happens with Abraham, so the tribes from him are under the

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Abrahamic covenant, that same idea. So that's just a little bit of it.

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I don't want to extrapolate it too deeply or else we're just gonna keep on going on a lot of tangents because there's a lot of doctrinal input here that I'm just gonna have to touch base on a little bit at a time.

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So why does this matter for you in your scope? Who would you encounter that doesn't believe in total depravity?

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Catholics, Methodists, Church of Christ, Orthodox, they don't believe in total depravity.

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These are some people that you'll encounter. They believe in other doctrines to counter them.

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In short, they can be named wonderful but not corrupted. Some of them title their arguments grace and free will and others infused grace.

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Infused grace is more of a Catholic and Anglican kind of idea. That one's a little tough to extrapolate.

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But the first one to touch on wonderful, not corrupted, this is the idea that yes, we're fallen but we're not incapable of doing good.

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We can still present good works to the Lord even in our fallen state.

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As Reformed Baptists, we would vehemently disagree with that. We would adamantly disagree with that.

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We are not capable of doing anything good. There's plenty of scripture to back this up. They're footnoted for you in this paragraph as well.

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Paragraph four is short and easy. Basically, the thing to know here is there's no hope of doing good works before a perfectly holy

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God. So you're gonna take an unholy vessel, present something that's marred and corrupt and present it to a holy

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God and just because you think it's good and just because God has prescribed or described for you to do this, doesn't mean that it's presentable for a holy

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God, especially not for conditions like our salvation. Paragraph five,

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I think the easiest way for me to sum this one up was after faith in Christ, we still battle with sin.

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This is where Paul talks about wrestling with flesh and we're often gonna lose, but don't be disheartened.

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We're gonna toil with our sin and this is what the process of sanctification is called, where God continues to refine us like gold.

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Our impurities will rise up and he'll dispose of our impurities as we become more and more in the likeness of his son

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Christ. All right, that was an easy chapter. So we're gonna go ahead and flip over to chapter 16.

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This chapter is of good works. What are

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Roman acronyms? There we go, thank you.

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I am a little slow. So paragraph one, good works are defined descriptively and prescriptively in God's word alone.

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We don't get to add what are good works unto the Lord. They are described and prescribed for us.

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We do not outshine God's holiness with our zeal. That's just a fact of the matter.

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I'm gonna go on a quick detour on pietism. A popular frame of mind within Christianity is pietism.

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It's tailed Christianity since its founding. The early Gnostics reconciled it with total rejection of the mental and physical flesh in pursuit of and total embrace of the spiritual and ethereal truth, right?

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They wanted to dispose of the flesh and all fleshly matters, including relations with your wife.

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They wanted to detest those things and they wanted to lift up all spiritual and ethereal truths.

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The problem with that is that it also goes against God's design for what he has for us. Not a great thing.

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There's also, this one's a little contentious depending on how you look at the history of it, but we even have what you call desert fathers.

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And if you know what they are, you're probably doing a little bit of this with me. They were mostly outside of Egypt and they would live such pietistic lives that they would live on top of columns, isolated on a pad that's a four foot by four foot.

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And they would sleep, eat, go to the bathroom up here. And all the while up here, they're professing that they're battling with their flesh.

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Or they would live in caves and do a similar thing. And they're fighting with demons and they're trying to have the spiritual rule over the fleshly.

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And they would utterly isolate themselves from the community other than for the poor guys that had to go there and change out their waste bucket and feed them.

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That followed early on, all for the sake of conquering flesh.

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Today, it's evolved into an extreme micro examination of self and going above the law to extra degrees of holiness.

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This is usually accompanied by means for us to communicate to others of what we're doing and that it's a holy thing.

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So if I can snap that on, what are the people use?

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TikTok and got my coffee and Jesus on my Bible and in the coffee shop kind of thing.

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And we just wanna tell everybody about our holiness. We wanna go above and beyond.

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I promise you, you can't tell anyone about your holiness. That doesn't work. It's shown, it's not told.

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But that goes into other extremes. It's big into Big Eva right now.

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I think Gospel Coalition focused on it probably starting 12 years ago, real hard.

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Piper has been pretty big into it. And I like Piper, some things. I like a lot of Piper, we'll say that.

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But there's just this extreme emphasis on self and every little bitty thing that you could have ever got wrong on this impossible expectation.

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You're always measuring against perfection. So it makes every bit of obedience to scripture look like you're absolutely disobeying scripture all the time.

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It really kills this idea or this thought process of growing into holiness.

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Now, I will say on the other side, it can be a really good thing to examine yourself obviously against a holy

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God, right? But I think we need to be a little bit more objective about it rather than going over every single little nuance of what's going on there.

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That's my little detour there. I'll get off of that.

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Main point is that you cannot outshine God's holiness with your zeal. That's the main point.

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So no matter, if you just wanna be extra godly and it's not in scripture, I would be very cautious and so were our forefathers.

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Paragraph two, good works are fruits of true faith. These are the purposes of good works.

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Manifest thankfulness. And that's the only time you can use manifest in Christian dogma, by the way.

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The second point is strengthen assurance. And we'll go over assurance in a little bit.

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We'll talk about that a little bit more. But one of the purposes is to strengthen your assurance in the grace that God has given you.

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To edify other brothers and sisters, to adorn the spoken gospel, to stop the mouth of enemies, and most importantly, to glorify

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God. Paragraph three, we run through and I think a simple examination of it would go along the lines of good works come from the spirit, not ourselves.

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We don't generate them ourselves. Our duty is to good works. And we aren't to grow weary in doing them.

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Paul instructs us in that. We are to be diligent in stirring the grace God has given us.

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Paragraph four is short. We will never pass a threshold of what God requires.

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This goes along to earlier. You cannot outshine God's holiness. We will never attain perfect works before glory.

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Short tangent. I gotta do it, because it's just short. I lived in Searcy years ago.

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And this is Church of Christ headquarters. And I was working at Harps as a customer service manager.

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And I started building a little bit of rapport with a guy who was a volunteer firefighter.

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And we would just share different takes on the Bible together. And we were super excited. And he's like, hey, you know, come to church with me.

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We got this thing going on. So I'm like, cool. Driving up this mountain, down a gravel road, another gravel road, down another gravel road.

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And I get to this complex. It is a complex. There are like, there are dormitories.

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There's like all kinds of like, huge community living there, right? And I get in there and I start listening to this guy who's preaching about the 1611

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Bible, KJV. And he starts going over numerology. And I immediately knew, uh -oh, what is this?

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And what have I gotten into? He is talking about numbers associated with scripture. I've never heard of any historical document being interpreted or extrapolated this way.

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And so, you know, we have lunch. And he's like, how was it? I was like, yeah, that was a little concerning.

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I've never heard that. I need to look into that. And we had a later meeting.

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And he said, well, our apostle, he thinks that you can be holy enough in this life to where you no longer sin.

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And that's when I realized, oh, people really think that. People think that you can become so holy in this life that you'll never sin.

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And it kind of opened my eyes to a horizon of things. Church of Christ would fall in that category, along with thinking that you can lose your salvation.

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They think that babies are pure and that they're only corrupted over time by influence from the world, but that they're without sin when they're born.

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So that was a really interesting thing for me to experience. And it's interesting that our forefathers would encompass this in our confession.

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I just thought I'd add in a random story. Paragraph five. Our works will never open the doors of heaven to us, nor will they save us from the damnation that we deserve.

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We are obliged to good works, not in scope of these things, but in scope of the things that were mentioned earlier in paragraph two.

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Strengthen assurance, edify brothers, adorn the spoken gospel, stop the mouths of enemies, glorify

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God, manifest thankfulness. And then we get to paragraph six.

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Our good works are only accepted in the sight of God because we are accepted by Christ.

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Our works, along with us, with us, in conjunction, are covered by the grace of Christ, which then make them presentable to God.

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And then paragraph seven. Works by reprobate. This is an interesting topic.

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Works by reprobate are not pleasing to God, but they are still expected.

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God's order and decree are for theirs and others' good, though not from hearts purified in Christ.

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It is much more detrimental and harmful to a people to not abide in the oracles of God than to obey them.

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Do you want your neighbor murdering your neighbor? Of course you don't. Do you want them plundering?

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Of course you don't. God's laws are good for society. God's laws are good for people, and they're good for avoiding his wrath.

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Those are also good things. This brings me onto a topic that some people may not like.

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Christian nationalism. Christian nationalism has been growing in popularity.

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It holds reprobate accountable to the law of God, and they believe it's a good thing, even if they are kicking and screaming along the way.

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No, it doesn't help that reprobate souls perform good works, but it does make for a society that expects and delivers just laws.

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The predominant outlook of public morality has largely been abdicated to moral secularists, who themselves say there is no objective morality.

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We are trusting people to come up with the morality of our society when they, from their own mouths, say there is no objective morality.

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And when cornered with a question that you ask them, such as, in what circumstance is rape ever okay, they have no answer, because they have a subjective morality.

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They'll say, well, it's wrong for this culture. It may not be wrong for that culture. It's a hideous way to run a society.

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The common position of Christians regarding unbelievers is that pagans are gonna peg. Because unbelievers murder, should we not enforce murder laws?

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Because they steal, should we not enforce property laws? No. Evangelicalism has handed the power of the people who are largely

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Christian to those who will not yield it justly, because we take a hands -off libertarian approach, unless it has to do with abortion.

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And for some reason, we wanna get involved with that one. Pagans can peg until it comes to abortion.

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I can't reconcile anything until it gets to abortion. That is not a good way to align a society, nor did

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God think so in the Old Testament. When people committed heinous things,

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God had judgment on them. Why would we think that it's an okay thing for our country to practice in such hideous actions that displease our

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Lord and think that that doesn't have consequences? What has changed? What has changed from the ordering of society then to now?

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So we tend to care about the less abominable acts.

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And I digress from that one. Chapter 17. Perseverance of the saints.

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I think we're all gonna agree here. And I think they felt like everyone was gonna agree.

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They didn't have too many paragraphs on this. But I really like paragraph one.

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This is one of those that I'm going to read verbatim. Those God has accepted in the beloved, effectually called and sanctified by His Spirit and given the precious faith of His elect can neither totally nor finally fall from a state of grace.

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They will certainly persevere in grace to the end and be eternally saved because the gifts and callings of God are irrevocable.

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Therefore, He still brings about and nourishes them in faith, repentance, love, joy, and hope and all the graces of the

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Spirit that lead to immortality. Even though many storms and floods arise and beat against them, yet these things will never be able to move the elect from the foundation and rock to which they are anchored by faith.

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The felt sign of the light and love of God may be clouded and obscured from them for a time through their unbelief and the temptations of Satan.

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Yet God is still the same. They will certainly be kept by the power of God for salvation where they will enjoy their purchased possession for they are engraved in the palms of His hands and their names have been written in the book of life from all eternity.

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I think you can see why I felt like I couldn't really go anything less with that one.

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This one brings up the question, the visible and invisible church.

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So what do we do with the visible church when they act in ways that are not in alignment with scripture?

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Well, we have a church discipline process, but if they act in these ways continually unrepentant, unfortunately, there is not a place for them among the fold and they're handed to Satan so that the

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Lord may still save them, right? Because we can't discern who the invisible or visible church is.

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We can see actions of fruit, mind you, we can. And with those who aren't bearing that fruit, unfortunately, there are those consequences that they can't be in with the sheep.

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So even though they might be part of the invisible church, the visible representation that they have right now does not look like the elect.

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And so they can't be with the elect. And upon repentance, of course they can.

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But we can't discern. We can do the best we can with confession, with examining fruits, which if you haven't read anything from A .W.

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Pink, he is awesome. Spiritual growth is,

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I believe the book I'm talking about, so many editorial errors, have a lot of grace with it, but very, very awesome.

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He does great work with talking about where scripture tells us to examine fruit.

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So that's where I digress with that part. Paragraph two, salvation is not retained or protected by our adherence or faithfulness, but by Christ alone.

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This is the nature of the covenant of grace whereby God has always had a means of salvation for his elect, which is fully revealed in the

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God -man, Jesus the Christ. He's always had a plan for the elect, right?

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Even Samson. Samson shows no bearing of being a faithful Jew whatsoever.

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And he is part of the hall of faith, right? We have to reconcile these things.

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Abraham, saved by faith, not by the commands that God gave him. The elect has been preordained before the foundation of the earth.

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Paragraph three, though we may be extremely unfaithful, we know God will be faithful to save those he has called into everlasting life because they are preserved in Christ Jesus.

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Simple enough, chapter 18. The assurance of grace and salvation.

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This is what I was talking about earlier when we were talking about the products of good works.

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One of them is to strengthen assurance. And if you didn't really have an idea of what that means, this does such a wonderful job in laying it to bear for you.

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Paragraph one summarized, there are many obvious reprobate, but many deceive themselves of faith in Christ, yet they will both perish.

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The elect can walk in full confidence and assurance of salvation. Paragraph two, assurance is based in the promises and actions of Christ, but there will also be inward evidences, evidence, evidence, for knowledge of the holy

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God who has redeemed you. And so we'll kind of walk through some of that in paragraph three.

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First point, infallible assurance of salvation is sealed by the spirit and isn't represented by the strength of your faith.

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Point two, those who are elect were established before the founding of the world. Many elect will tarry on in life long before regenerated by the spirit, yet they were elect regardless.

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They were elect before they were ever even regenerated. Three, it is every believer's prerogative to seek assurance of grace and salvation and should be done at large by what

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Christ has done, but also evaluating the fruit of the spirit that is evident in our lives.

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And my last point on paragraph three, as we rest in the blessings of assurance, it's not acceptable to incline ourselves to sinful and fleshly desires as if we get to stretch

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God's grace. We don't get to stretch His grace. If sin abounds, should grace abound more?

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Of course, grace abounds more, but sin shouldn't abound. And then lastly, paragraph four, partaking in season of sin doesn't mean

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God isn't faithful to save. Find great comfort in this particular paragraph and this whole chapter as it takes great details of personal trial and sins that our holy

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God will still prove faithful through. So you go through a trial of time where it feels like the

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Lord is far from you. I've been there. Happened to me in my freshman year in college. And one day in my little crappy car,

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I'm heading back to college, and I just, I know we're in a

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Baptist church, but I just feel like He's there again. And it was just wild.

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It was utterly thankful. And it was a really challenging time. I think this also gives a lot of comfort to mothers and fathers with sons or daughters that have gone astray.

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I think it gives a lot of comfort there. I think it's really helpful for confessions that were given earlier on and seeing fruit and then not seeing fruit, seeing fruit, not seeing fruit.

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So I would just end with this chapter on the Lord desires your holiness and your child's holiness more than you do and take great comfort in that.