BAPTISM SEMINAR (Session 1) Baptism and Covenant Theology

All right. Let's go ahead and get started. I just want to say thank you so much for coming and thank you for just being here.

There's going to be a lot of information that's shared. It's going to be like trying to drink the Atlantic Ocean in three hours, and that's okay.

We're going to record it. It's going to be available to you as a resource, and any ongoing questions or conversations you have, direct those all to David.

No, I'm just playing. I'll be happy to answer this as well. I want to introduce my friend David. About, I don't know, 18 months ago,

Derek started talking about covenant baptism, and as a cantankerous reformed

Baptist, I dismissed him entirely. And over the course of the last,

I don't know, nine months or so, I've been thinking, praying, reading. All the books that are out on the table, by the way, are recommended resources.

And all of those books I read in the last six months, which that's why

I was up at night. That's why I didn't get a lot of sleep. But anyway, as Derek and I both became convinced of the position that we're going to share with you today, we reached out to some local men who were currently holding that position just to learn, just to grow.

And the Lord, by his providence, connected David and I, David Booth. David has been an excellent mentor and friend to the

Shepherd's Church, to me, to Derek, and we visited his church. We've just been so blessed by this brother who has come here today to share with you the first and the third session.

So, he's carrying the brunt of the work today. So, I'm thankful for David, and I'd like for all of us to welcome him to share with us about the covenant of baptism.

So, if you will, let's welcome David. Don't run away yet.

I need you to do something for me. As your pastor mentioned, there's going to be a lot of information here today.

And if this is new for you, it may seem a bit overwhelming. So, when he asks about, you have questions, ask them to me.

Well, by all means, ask Kendall, ask Derek. But I gave you my email address on here, and I mean this very, very openly.

I would be happy to try to answer any questions that come up. We could dialogue for months about these topics.

I love to talk about theology. In this particular topic, we're going to talk about this morning, and covenant theology is very near and dear to my heart.

I should say that I've really enjoyed getting to know Derek and Kendall over the past few months.

They're really dear brothers. You're very blessed to have them as your pastors here in this church. And I hope over time that I will get to know some of you as well.

I'm also glad that you're willing to give up half a Saturday to try to learn more about this really important doctrine of baptism.

Now, if you read through the New Testament, which I trust you're all doing, you're going to discover that the New Testament treats baptism with a greater degree of seriousness of importance in the

Christian faith than is common in North American evangelicalism.

And so it's a really important topic. That said, your pastor had mentioned that he's been reading all these books.

You're not going to get this all down in three lectures. But these are going to come at you a bit like a fire hose.

So buckle up, hang in there, I trust that in time this will be useful to you.

Now, you may be puzzled why if we're going to start a series on baptism. But the very first lecture, a third of what we're going to talk about is on covenant theology.

I mean, why can't we just dive right in, cut to the chase, and look at those

Bible texts that deal with baptism? Why can't we do that? And the answer is, if it was that simple, we wouldn't have a divide in the church.

Remember, this is not a divide between people who believe the Bible and people who don't.

This is a divide that takes place between brothers and sisters who equally love the Lord, study the

Bible, try to put it into practice. And yet have come to different conclusions. And so why would that be?

And the answer is, we read the Bible differently. One view sees the

Bible as an organic whole. That's my view, that's the traditional reform view, and it's actually the majority view in the church.

Whereas when Baptists read the Bible, they tend to see a much bigger break between the old covenant and the new covenant.

So you have discontinuity. What I want to show you this morning, I'm going to hope to lead you at least in part, a great deal more can and should be said, is to see the

Bible as an organic whole. And I know in my own life, even before I came to a conviction about baptizing covenant children, this was an extraordinary blessing to me.

Because when I was in my early 20s, I'd pick up the Bible and I'd read Micah or I'd read Ezekiel, and I'd have no idea how it fit together with my life today.

Because I saw it as all these discrete chunks. And coming to see how the Bible fits together as an organic whole, now when

I read Micah, I can see it's part of a grand story. It's part of a single message, a single revelation that God has for us as his people.

So we have to ask the question, how do we know the will of God? I trust that your goal, otherwise you wouldn't be here this morning, is not to follow me.

It's not to follow even those wonderful men that your pastors have on their shirts of Owen or Spurgeon or whatever.

Your goal is to follow the Lord. So we have to ask, how do we know the Lord's will for my life, but also for whether or not we baptize covenant children?

The traditional Protestant view, summarized in the Westminster Confession of Faith, but actually this particular statement would cut across basically all

Protestant denominations that take the Bible seriously is simply this, and I've quoted it in your handouts.

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man's salvation, faith in life, is either expressly set down in scripture, or by good and necessary consequence, may be deduced from scripture.

Simply put, the way we know God's will is he tells us in his word. We are people of the book.

This is where we get that doctrine of sola scriptura. Now, you do want to pay attention to what your parents teach you.

You should have respect for them, what your teachers teach you, what your tradition has taught you. But ultimately, at the end of the day, what we want to know is not what does some man say, but what does

God say? And this applies every bit as much to baptism as to any other aspect of life.

Here's the problem. There are some doctrinal questions that can be answered simply by a direct appeal to scripture.

I think we get used to that. So if someone were to come to you and say, do I really need to be born again?

You could just open up John chapter three, and there's Jesus telling Nicodemus, unless a man is born again, he cannot even see the kingdom of God.

Question asked, question answered. That's the end of the story. But there are a lot of questions, a lot more than you realize,

I would guess, because we just assume this, that are answered not by a direct appeal to one verse, but are answered by pulling scriptures together and seeing the necessary consequences of that.

I'm going to give you an example that might surprise you. Should we have women participate in the

Lord's Supper? I trust you're all saying, yes, of course,

Christian women should participate in the Lord's Supper. But do you know there's not a single verse in scripture that either commands that, or is unambiguous about women actually participating in the

Lord's Supper? There's not one. You make that leap to the fact that, of course, they should, from understanding that Christians, who are women, are equal heirs of Christ, and they have an equal place in the kingdom of God.

And we understand what the Lord's Supper means in terms of celebrating Christ's death until he comes, but also the communion of the whole body of believers.

And you just naturally move there. Now, what I want you to see is, is if some church said, hey, there's no verse in the

Bible that says women should participate in the Lord's Supper, so we're not going to do it, they wouldn't simply be doing something different.

They would be doing something wrong. We are obligated to follow the necessary consequences of scripture.

But that means when we're going to fit these scriptures together, we have to read the Bible not any way that I want, but on the way that God himself has structured scripture so that we read it his way.

That's how we get God's will. And the good news is God has structured his word. He has structured redemptive history.

But he's also structured the way he's revealed redemptive history to us in his Bible in an organic way so it all fits together.

And the way he has done this is based on covenants. Covenants, I'm sure you've heard that term.

But have you thought very much about what a covenant is? Now, in the Bible, every single major covenant that God makes between God and human beings in redemptive history is simply a treaty.

It's just like treaties that nations make with each other, right? And that should help you.

Because what you're going to see is when you get that fact that the Bible is structured on this treaty pattern from beginning to end, it will pull everything together.

Of course, unless you're working in foreign policy or something, you probably don't think a lot about treaties.

So what I'd like to do this morning is begin by walking us through how treaties work between nations in the modern world.

What do they do? How do they function? And then bring it back to the ancient Near East, because that's the context we're looking at for how the

Bible is written. And then see how it applies to God. And if you get these three things, you're going to be a long way down the path to understanding covenant theology.

And I would dare say better than many seminary graduates are on this.

So it's a lot of information, but it will really help you. So here are the three things

I want you to see. First, how do treaties between countries work in the modern world?

Second, how did treaties between countries work in the ancient Near East? And third, how do treaties between God and human beings relate to the treaties of the ancient

Near East? Well, what do treaties in the modern world do? They create a relationship between countries, right?

They bind two countries together, usually for something specific. Historically, most treaties were functioned around mutual self -defense, peace treaties, those sorts of things.

But as you know, treaties can also address issues like trade, human rights, environmental issues, all manner of things.

Now once a treaty is entered into, at least in theory, it is the supreme law of the land.

So if the United States government passes a treaty like, say, NAFTA, whether you like it or not, that's the supreme law of the

United States. Congress can't just pass a law that violates NAFTA, because we have this treaty between Canada, the

United States, and Mexico that binds us together. So here are three aspects of how treaties work.

This is how treaties work all throughout history, really, including the ancient world. We're going to nuance it just a little bit.

First, treaties are enacted by lawful representatives of the respective countries.

Please get that, that's an important thing to get. Treaties are enacted by the lawful representatives of the respective countries.

In the United States, that's the President of the United States, with the consent of the Senate. Your consent is not required, right?

So, for example, if an American soldier was in war, he is obligated to follow the

Geneva Convention. A soldier can't say, I didn't agree to this. In fact, there's a whole series of treaties called the

Geneva Convention. It's not just one. They all took place before you were born. But the lawful representatives agreed to it on behalf of the whole country, and therefore, everyone else is involved, right?

It's not normally done in a purely democratic process, and your individual consent, or anyone else's individual consent, is not required.

Second, and I'm just going to elaborate that point, every single person represented by those lawful authorities gains all of the privileges and all of the obligations of the covenant.

You get this simply by being born in America. You become someone who has all the privileges of the treaties we've made, but also all the obligations.

Every single person in a treaty that's represented by these lawful authorities receives all the privileges and all the obligations of the covenant, of the treaty.

Third, treaties or covenants operate on a principle of continuity. That is, these relationships between countries, for them to be useful, they have to be stable.

And so, when we get a new president of the United States, some things change about foreign policy, but actually the treaties don't.

Now, in merely human treaties, they normally have a means for getting out of the treaty, for getting out of this covenant relationship.

We saw this just fairly recently in 2000, when Britain withdrew from the European Union, it's called

Brexit. If you've paid any attention to that, you know that was a big deal. It involved a lot of work, a lot of debate and everything.

Because the ordinary practice with treaties is there's continuity over time, generations.

In fact, I thought this was interesting. I found this when I was just preparing to talk with you today.

The alliance between England and Portugal, created by King Edward III and King Ferdinand I in 1373, is still in force.

So, the idea is these relationships keep going. They're not like passing a law or getting a new idea. These are long -term relationships.

So, these three points about treaties or covenants are important to keep in mind. They are entered into by representatives.

Every person represented by those lawful authorities gains all the privileges and all of the obligations of the treaty, and there is continuity in treaties or covenants from generation to generation.

Now, that's the way it works with modern treaties. How did it work in the Ancient Near East? Because that's actually the background for the

Bible. Well, basically, it worked exactly the same way, with just two distinctions.

First of all, as you would guess, and these will both be obvious to you as soon as I mention them, in the

Ancient Near East, it wasn't elected representatives. It was kings, right? Kings entered into treaties with each other, and all the people that they represented, every person in their nation, received both the privileges and the obligations of whatever treaty they entered into.

The second thing, this is still somewhat true in the modern world, but it was a bigger deal in the ancient world, is not all relationships between kings were equal.

So, sometimes, a couple of small nations would get together as kind of equals, and they would say, we have mutual interests, let's bind together for that.

But often, one of the kings was a really powerful ruler, like the king of Assyria, the king of Babylon, the ruler of the

Hittites, the superpowers of their day, and then there were these little small countries. And the treaty relationship, therefore, wasn't exactly equal.

What would happen is, is the big king, the great king, would, in fact, offer benefits to the little king.

So, the king of Babylon might tell Syria, well, you know, I'll protect you if someone tries to invade you.

You'll get trade with my empire. You'll get the rule of law and various things. There were some benefits, but there was no doubt about who was in charge.

And not only that, the small king couldn't just withdraw. If the small king tried to, let's say, in Syria, tried to abandon a relationship with Babylon, that wouldn't simply be, oh, we had a different thing, let's do

Brexit. It would have been treason. You're rebelling against my rule.

I am the king of the known world. How does that help us when we read the

Bible? Well, it turns out the Lord, when he structures his own revelation to us, we see this distinctly in the book of Deuteronomy, makes a treaty.

And he actually follows the Hittite formula. The book of Deuteronomy is structured on exactly the same structure as the way the

Hittites, the superpower of that day, created treaties. Big king, little kings.

That's actually why one scholar has called the book of Deuteronomy the treaty of the great king.

Now, if you understand that the book of Deuteronomy, and actually, as we're going to see, the rest of the Bible, is structured as a covenant between God and his people, that's going to help you understand the book of Deuteronomy better.

It's going to help you understand the whole Bible better. And you're going to see how it all fits together. And that's what we're trying to do this morning.

So let me start by giving you an example using the Mosaic Covenant as a treaty.

We should expect, based on everything I've just told you, that the Mosaic Covenant would be entered into by representatives.

And it is. God and Moses. Moses represents all the people, right?

He's a covenant head, a federal head, representing the people of God. By the way, when you go to the other covenants, you're going to see that they also have covenant heads.

Whether you talk about, right in the beginning in Paradise, Adam is a covenant head, and Abraham, we talk about the

Abrahamic Covenant, but Abraham represents all the people that are related to him, and Moses, and David in the

Davidic Covenant, and so on. How, then, is the Mosaic Covenant structured?

OK, I've got to slow down a little bit here so I don't kill you. But the Mosaic Covenant is structured in a particular way, and I know this is a crash course, so I'm going to give you a simple structure.

I actually want to encourage you to stick with this simple structure. Some of you may become so fascinated, I know your pastors will, so fascinated with covenant theology, you're going to read lots of books that make things more complicated.

It doesn't need to be more complicated than this. This three -part structure will help you far more than coming up with 5 .8

-point, so on, structures and getting all the nuances. The reason for that is we're trying to actually apply the

Bible. We're not trying to write research papers. Now, you can keep a three -point structure in your head so that when you read the

Bible, you can see how it works. If it's so complicated you have to look it up, it's not going to help you very much.

So I want to encourage you to stick with this three -point structure, and it goes simply like this. And by the way, it always goes like this.

Provisions, stipulations, consequences. Provisions, stipulations, consequences.

Every single treaty that God makes with people, every covenant is structured in exactly the same way and exactly the same order.

It begins with God's gracious provision. That's actually really good news. God's grace always comes first.

It begins with God's gracious provision. Then God tells us what we should do, how we should live.

Sometimes that's commandments, sometimes that's instruction, but those are stipulations. And then there are consequences to whether or not we obey

God, we trust him and therefore do what he says, or we disobey God because we don't trust him.

Right? Provisions, stipulations, consequences. Let me illustrate that using the

Ten Commandments. By the way, when you read the Bible, you're going to see God actually calls this giving of the Ten Commandments his covenant, right?

So this is not some weird abstraction. If I were to ask you, where would you begin in describing the

Ten Commandments? You might say, number one, right?

Begin with the first commandment. And that's a good guess. Turns out though, it's not quite correct.

You do not want to begin with the first commandment. You want to begin with what God says before that.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

God delivers the people before he gives them the Ten Commandments. I am the Lord your

God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. God's gracious provision always comes first.

Then you have the stipulations. Then you have the consequences for whether or not Israel follows the Ten Commandments.

See how that works? It works that way in every single covenant. Think about Adam. God does give stipulations to Adam, but before he gives him stipulations, he gives him paradise.

He gives him a helpmate, a wife. He gives him his own presence. He gives him his word. Then he gives him stipulations like, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

And of course, do not eat from the tree in the midst of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, right?

The Abrahamic covenant. Abraham was an idolater. Do you know that? Abraham was an idolater when

God came and appeared to him. And God said, I'm calling you to myself. I'm making promises to you before Abraham does anything good.

And I'm gonna give you this land. God's gracious provision comes first. Or you think about David.

David was a shepherd boy out in the field, a nobody. And God sent his prophet and anointed him to be his king.

God's gracious provision always comes first. You can tell I wanna pound the table on this point because that will be immensely practical to you.

Let me just step back a bit from this big picture thing and just give you one example of how practical this is.

Every single time you read a commandment in the Bible, you ought to ask this question.

What provision has God made for me to keep it? Because his provision always came first.

Always comes first. So God says, don't covet. Don't covet your neighbor's house.

Don't covet his wife, his manservant. I trust your neighbor doesn't have any manservants. But whatever it happens to be.

And so you ask yourself, God, I'm kind of struggling here. And you ask, Lord, what provisions have you made for me?

And God says, well, I've made you a joint heir of Jesus Christ for all eternity. And besides that,

I clothe the flowers of the field and I feed the birds of the air. And as your father,

I'm committed to meeting all your needs so that you can glorify me and enjoy me forever. And in light of being a joint heir of Christ, with Christ for all eternity, why would

I care about my neighbor having a better car than I do? God has made provisions for us.

It's very, very practical in your day -to -day life. Now, do you see how that works?

Provision always comes first. Now, naturally, if we were gonna talk more about this, we'd also talk about paying attention to the consequences.

If I disobey God, and there's lots of examples in the Bible, that's bad. It's bad for me, it's bad for my neighbors, it's bad for my wife, bad for my children.

It has negative consequences. But that's gonna have to be for another day. In fact, I should have said earlier, this is such a complex and rich topic.

Maybe sometime in 2022 or 2023 or whatever, I could come back and just do a series of discussions entirely on covenant theology.

Today's just the crash course, but I hope it'll be helpful to you. Well, I'm gonna slip something in on you.

I may have already slipped it in. I may have talked about the Mosaic Covenant as being an administration of the covenant of grace, but I actually haven't told you what the covenant of grace is.

That's gonna be a term that's familiar to some of you, but it's gonna be a surprise to others. And I want you to see how this fits together.

Instead of the Mosaic Covenant being just a discrete block, like God tries one thing, then he tries something else, then he tries something else, what

I want you to see is the Mosaic Covenant and the Abrahamic Covenant and the Davidic Covenant are all built on an underlying covenant that God has made with Jesus Christ.

Right, that's called the covenant of grace. Now, that should make sense to us because there's continuity between treaties, continuity between covenants.

And the reason why there's continuity between the Abrahamic Covenant and the Mosaic Covenant and the Davidic Covenant, I'll show you a little bit of that in a moment, is simply that they're all based on God's commitment to his people in Jesus Christ.

Go all the way back to Genesis chapter three to see where this gets started. Now, I think in this church, everyone's gonna get something for granted.

The blood of bulls and goats can't take away sin. So how is God being gracious to people under the

Mosaic Covenant? And the answer is, is those sacrifices are pointing to Christ, right?

There's nothing intrinsic in the Mosaic Covenant. And that's true with Abraham and the Davidic Covenant as well.

The Lord's relationship with Israel did not begin on Mount Sinai.

So now I wanna show you the continuity between the relationship of God to Abraham and his people 400 plus years earlier with the

Mosaic administration of the covenant of grace. And if you just think about this, you realize the relationship didn't start on Mount Sinai.

In fact, God delivering his people out of Egypt was about God fulfilling his covenant promises that he had made previously to Abraham.

As part of making that covenant, this is the covenant with Abraham, the Lord says, know for certain that your offspring will be sojourners in a land that is not theirs and will be servants there.

And they will be afflicted for 400 years, but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve and afterward, they shall come out with great possessions.

And then hundreds of years later, the Lord appears to Moses at the burning bush. It's actually one of my favorite passages in the whole

Bible. And God spoke these words to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, the

Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the

God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever. You can pause there.

What's his name forever? He's identified with the patriarchs. He's connecting the people, the people coming out of Egypt with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

Same God, same people. This is my name forever. And thus

I am to be remembered throughout all generations. Go and gather the elders of Israel together and say to them, the

Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob has appeared to me saying,

I have observed you and what has been done to you in Egypt. And I promise that I will bring you up out of the affliction of Egypt to the land of the

Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites and the Jebusites, a land flowing with milk and honey.

Here's the pattern. Promise is made to Abraham. Promise is kept, which is really good news.

Our God is a covenant keeping God. You know, there's an organization, I might still be back in business.

It kind of faded for a while. It was very popular maybe 20 years ago called Promise Keepers.

It was about calling men to become promise keepers in their relationship with their wife, their children, and most importantly, based on their relationship with God.

The problem is we're promise breakers. The good news is, is God's a promise keeper.

God makes covenant and he keeps it. By the way, that doesn't mean you shouldn't by God's grace be seeking to be a promise keeper, but you should never think

God is like us. Push comes to shove. Sometimes we break our promises. God never does.

As Paul would later put it, the law which came 430 years afterward does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God so as to make the promise void.

Did you see that the covenant God made with Abraham is still in force? We don't have a new covenant.

We have a new administration of the same covenant of grace. Well, we don't have time this morning to trace out all the ways that you can see the connections.

There are hundreds and hundreds of them that go between the Abrahamic administration, the Mosaic administration, and the

Davidic administration. By the way, that's exactly what we should have anticipated once we realized their treaties.

Treaties presume continuity and that's what we find in the Bible. There is a fundamental continuity between the

Abrahamic administration of the covenant, between God and his people, and the Mosaic administration, and the

Davidic administration. There are changes. Actually, most of the changes are pretty obvious.

Well, why you'd have them? With Moses and bringing people out of Egypt, all of a sudden you have a nation.

It needs laws for a nation. And when you get to David, all of a sudden you have a monarchy. So you have different types of relationships that are pointing forward to the coming of Christ.

It's beautiful. But keeping that in mind, even when you think about David as becoming king, the law for kings is given all the way back in the

Pentateuch, hundreds of years before there was a monarchy. It shows that there's a fundamental continuity.

And by the way, kings were required to personally write out. Oh, I say they were required.

Regretfully, they didn't do it. If you read the Old Testament, you discover that most of the kings are faithless.

But the kings were supposed to write out the personal copy of the book of Deuteronomy, which shows you they didn't move on to a different covenant.

They moved on to a different administration of the very same covenant of grace. This actually starts, as I mentioned, all the way back in Genesis chapter three.

In the beginning, the Lord made a covenant. That is a treaty with Adam. And all of humanity, every person born from Adam by natural generation is born under this treaty that God made.

God gave him gracious provisions, right? Paradise, his own presence, his word. Regrettably, Adam rebelled.

It's really that straightforward. And when he rebelled, he threw all his people that he represented, that's us, into misery and death.

And the good news is, is God didn't stop there. He made a second covenant with his son,

Jesus Christ, who's actually referred to as the second Adam. And so all of the humanity is structured on this bi -covenantal basis.

You either have Adam as your federal head or you have Christ as your federal head. That means, of course, while baptism's a really important topic, it is not the most important question you have to answer this morning.

The most important question you have to answer is, am I in Christ? Am I still under Adam, so my federal head is the one who rebelled, or am

I in Christ enclosed in his righteousness and my guilt having been wiped away through the cross? Right, that's the most important question for you to answer.

But it does show you that there's a structure to the Bible between those who are in Adam still, who, by the way, are called the seed of Satan, and those who are in Christ.

Let me just read a portion of God's word here for you from Genesis 3, verses 14 and 15.

I know this will be familiar to all of you, but it's good to have it in our ears. The Lord God said to the serpent, because you have done this, curse it are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field.

On your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.

I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and her offspring.

He shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise his heel. You see, there's two contrasts here.

There's the people, her offspring and your offspring, which actually can be both collective and individual.

There's a divide between all those who are in Adam still and those who are in the second Adam, Jesus Christ, by faith.

But it also is very explicit. Notice not they, but he shall bruise your head, pointing forward to Jesus Christ, the unique seed that comes from the woman, right?

And so that's the key thing for us to realize. Am I in Jesus Christ?

Do I have him as my covenant head, or do I still have

Adam as my covenant representative in Adam all die, in Christ all are made alive?

Look at Romans chapter five. You'll see that Paul deals with this in some detail. Let me step back and talk about covenants here.

How many redemptive covenants does God have? One, because there's only one

Christ, right? That's the key point. The Bible says there is one

God, and there is one mediator between God and man, the man,

Christ, Jesus. And therefore, the relationship that we have with Christ as our federal head is called the covenant of grace, and there's only one covenant of grace.

Now, the specific details of how the covenant is administered, they're gonna vary. There's diverse aspects to it as you go through history based on changes in redemptive history.

But the substance is always the same. It's the covenant that God made with Jesus Christ and with Christ's people.

Now, as I said earlier, I have to apologize here again for some of you. If this is new to you, this is like drinking out of a fire hose.

It's a lot of information, but it's important. Go back and listen to this again.

Talk to your pastor, send me emails, right? Get this down. This will help you immensely in understanding

God's word. But I wanna bring it together in a simpler package for you to consider just two big things.

First, I want you to realize that what I'm telling you is consistent with the very best scholarship. Absolutely.

This is not three guys in a room inventing an idea about covenant theology.

This is put into the confessions of churches that have made really detailed studies of this so that right now, every single

Bible -believing Reformed church on the face of the earth confesses what I'm telling you about the covenant of grace.

So don't treat this like some exotic idea. This is mainstream biblical Christianity, right?

That should carry some weight for you. But second, I don't want you to trust the church. I do wanna say, but it's really important that you should, as children, honor your parents and kind of defer to their judgment.

You ought to come to this church and start from a presence of deferring to your pastors who've studied, perhaps, much more than you have.

That's a useful thing to do. But ultimately, you need to be Bereans who ground your faith in the word of God.

But here's what I want you to do. Take what you've heard and try reading the Bible that way. Simply go back and read

Exodus and see how it connects to Genesis. Read the later books like 1st and 2nd

Samuel and see how they continue under the Davidic covenant, the

Mosaic and Abrahamic administrations of the covenant of grace. Because if you do that, you're gonna see the evidence for it everywhere and you're gonna ground your faith not in what

I say, not even in what the great tradition of the church says, but in what

God himself says. Now, in the time we have left, I'd like to begin to discuss how this helps us see that the children of one or more believing parents are, in fact, members of the covenant community and ought, therefore, to receive the sign of the covenant.

That's the goal we're going for. By the way, I'm making this, all this background things, in some ways, this gets really simple.

It's kind of funny. You could study this for three or four years and then all of a sudden you go, oh, it's so obvious. But the issue is really this.

If you understand there's only one covenant of grace all the way through history and you understand what baptism means, what

Kendall's gonna talk about in the next lecture, you will baptize your covenant children. How's that for simple?

If you understand that children are members of the covenant and there's one covenant of grace through all history and you understand what baptism means, you will baptize your covenant children.

And yet you have to do all this work to understand how covenants work, but I trust this isn't just gonna help you with baptism.

It'll help you read the Bible in general. Well, you're gonna have to stay tuned for the next two lectures to see how this all fits together.

But this is a good place to get started. And to that end, I want you to consider two things.

First, a question. Who receives the privileges and obligations of the covenant of grace?

Let me throw one more in there. Who receives the privileges, the obligations and the ultimate blessings of the covenant of grace?

That may sound simple, but it's a little trickier than it may sound. And second,

I hope that you're gonna see that children are in fact members of the covenant community in every administration of the covenant of grace, including right now in the new covenant.

So let's start with that apparently simple question. Who receives the privileges, obligations and blessings of the covenant of grace?

The straightforward place to begin is to look at the Mosaic covenant, right? Who gets delivered out of Egypt?

Not just believers, right? Everybody that's connected to the nation, actually a mixed multitude joins in.

They say, we wanna be part of Israel rather than Egypt, but the whole nation gets delivered. The whole nation receives

God's law on Mount Sinai, right? They have blessings. They have the signs, the sacraments.

They have a sacrificial system. You know, what do you do if you're in Egypt and you commit horrible sins and you wanna be reconciled to God?

There's no sacrifices in Egypt that can do that, but God has appointed a sacrificial system that points forward to Christ to be sure, but a very real system.

God has given them priests, both to lead them in worship, but also to instruct the people. There are privileges that all the people have just because they're part of the nation.

There are also obligations. I'm not gonna say that no one ever said this, but no one could rightly say in ancient

Israel, well, you know what? My parents, they're Yahweh worshipers, but I haven't personally made that commitment, so it's okay if I worship other gods, right?

And I can commit adultery and don't need to worry about the Sabbath day and so on. No, the privileges are theirs, but so are the covenant obligations, and then we see the consequences of that playing out.

Well, we actually see this quite clearly, the fact that so many of the people that were privileged didn't respond in faith.

The vast majority of adult men who leave Egypt die in the wilderness, and we have

God's own commentary on why. They didn't believe. They died in the wilderness because they didn't believe

God. By the way, faith is always the central stipulation of every administration of the covenant of grace.

They don't think they died in the wilderness because they didn't keep all the details of the law well enough. All the details of stipulation are simply manifestations of faith.

If you believe, then you do what God says, right? And if you don't do it perfectly, God's already made provision for that.

God didn't simply give them the moral law. He gave them the sacrificial system. Just like today, it's a lot easier for you.

When you sin, you repent and you ask God for forgiveness. Now, you know, if you never repent, you never ask

God for forgiveness. Do you know what kind of Christian we call you? You're a non -Christian, right?

Because if you actually believe in God, real faith does what God says, right?

You access the means of grace that he has provided for us. So the whole covenant community, what we call the visible church, receive the promises and the obligations of the covenant, but only those who trusted the

Lord receive the ultimate blessings of the covenant. And this pattern is true throughout all redemptive history.

So you actually have to divide those three things up. Every member of the covenant community, the visible church gets the privileges.

Every member of the visible church gets the obligations. Only those who believe receive the ultimate blessing.

That's always the case. The apostle Paul gives us an authoritative commentary on this reality in the first verses of Romans chapter three.

I'm sure these are familiar to almost all of you, but see how they fit together with how this works.

Paul writes, then what advantage has the Jew? Or what is the value of circumcision?

Let me stop there. You know, Paul has been going through the fact that merely being circumcised doesn't guarantee your salvation.

Do you know what Paul doesn't say? He doesn't say, what's the value of circumcision? Eh, no big deal.

It doesn't really matter. As long as you believe, right? That is not what Paul says.

He says, what is the value of circumcision? Much in every way. To begin with, the

Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. What if some were unfaithful? Does their faithlessness nullify the faithfulness of God?

Right, so Paul's not saying it's not important. He's saying these are extraordinary privileges. Now we can add privileges here, but the two that he mentions are, they have the word of God, you have the word of God.

It's an extraordinary privilege. I think actually the fact that it's so easy for us to get, and probably many of you like me have more than one

Bible at home, we can forget what an extraordinary thing it is that we have the very words of God in our own language.

But he also mentions circumcision. Those are privileges of the covenant, right?

Every covenant follows this pattern. Provision, stipulations, consequences.

Every member of the Visible Church enjoyed the privileges of being in the covenant community. In particular, they had the word of God, but they had the sacraments of circumcision.

They had instruction by the priests. They had the sacrificial system. They had many blessings. Second, all the members of the

Visible Church were also under the obligation to fulfill the stipulations of the covenant. And third, some of the members of the

Visible Church trust the Lord and therefore demonstrate that they're actually in Christ, right?

And therefore they receive the ultimate blessings. Just keep that idea together. All the members of the

Visible Church receive all the privileges and obligations of the covenant. Only those who believe receive the ultimate blessings of the covenant.

That's true today, right? It's the same thing all the way through the covenant of grace. Okay, we just have one more truth

I want to get out this morning, and then we'll take questions. One more truth that we need to see before we bring this lecture to a close.

The children of believers were members of the Visible Church in all of the

Old Testament administrations of the covenant of grace, and they are members of the Visible Church in the

New Testament as well. Make sure you have this in your head what you're thinking about here. The children of believers, or you can just say children in the

Visible Church, right? They are all members of the covenant community. They all receive the privileges of the covenant, the obligations of the covenant, but they only receive the blessings of the covenant if they come to faith.

It's almost a work of super -irrigation for me to try to point this out in the

Old Testament. All you have to do is read the Old Testament. It's very obvious the children are members of the Visible Church. Let me give you just one passage.

This is from Genesis 17. It's when Abraham is 99 years old.

The Lord appears to him, and the Lord says, I am God Almighty.

Walk before me and be blameless, that I may make my covenant between me and you and may multiply you greatly.

Then Abram fell on his face, and God said to him, behold, my covenant is with you, and you shall be the father of a multitude of nations.

No longer shall your name be called Abram, but your name shall be Abraham, for I have made you the father of a multitude of nations.

I will make you exceedingly fruitful, and I will make you into nations, and kings shall come from you, and I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout third generations for an everlasting covenant to be

God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession, and I will be their

God. Three times when God gives this promise to Abraham, he says, and to your offspring, right?

He always intended this to be a family affair to include Abraham's children and grandchildren and so on.

And then the Lord institutes circumcision as a sign of this promise. Right, this is where circumcision is given in Genesis chapter 17.

He institutes circumcision and he says, you get circumcised and circumcise your children on the eighth day.

They are clearly included in the visible church. And since covenants assume continuity throughout the generations, we're not surprised that when you move from the

Abrahamic administration to the Mosaic administration, it's reiterated. You got to circumcise your children on the eighth day.

And when we move to the Davidic administration, they're still getting circumcised if they're being faithful on the eighth day.

Children are included in the visible church. The question we have to ask is, did this change in the new covenant?

You see, if you want to hold to a believer's only Baptist view, you really have to come to the conclusion that God changed this with the new covenant.

The children were considered part of the visible church, objects of the privileges and obligations of the covenant all the way up until Pentecost.

I mean, after Pentecost, it's only believers and children are no longer objects of the privileges or the obligations of the covenant.

That's the shift that you have to make. Well, you could read whole books on this.

I'm gonna try to give you a short summary of the fact that this is true. First, I want to encourage you to simply put yourself back in the apostolic church.

I've discovered that people often have a very ahistorical view of the New Testament when they read it, like God dropped the

Bible down to us in 1518 or something. You think back, if you're a

Jew, remember, all the early Christians are Jewish, when the gospel goes out at Pentecost, it's to people who have gathered in Jerusalem precisely to celebrate this

Jewish feast. If you're a Jewish person, you ask this question. You have to imagine on a

Baptist view that there are people going around declaring this really horrible news. Our children are no longer special to God.

Think about that. For generations, for over 1 ,000 years, for over 1 ,400 years, the

Jewish people knew that God had given these privileges and obligations to their children, and now with the coming of Christ, that's over.

Your children are no longer special to God. That just doesn't make any sense. And we actually see this from the

Bible, but the opposite is true. The Bible explicitly tells us that the children of believers are set apart to the

Lord in a special way. Consider 1 Corinthians 7 .14. Now, in 1

Corinthians 7 .14, the Lord, through Paul, is talking about this issue of should a believing wife leave her unbelieving husband, right?

So that's the issue that's at stake. But what he says is really important here to remember that our children are special to God.

He says as long as that child is under your roof, under your authority, that child is holy.

Think about that language. Otherwise, they'd be unholy if they only had unbelieving parents. Now, the language of holy does not mean saved.

The language of holy means set apart as belonging to God in a special way. You know, in the ancient world, in Israel, if you took a normal silver pot and dedicated it to the temple, they'd actually say the pot became holy.

They'd have a service, they'd cleanse it, they'd dedicate it. Now, nothing changed about the pot, right? It's still the same metal.

But now it is set apart for God's special uses. It belongs to him in a special way. And Paul was saying that's true of your children.

Your children are holy if they have one or more believing parents. Otherwise, your children will be unclean, but as it is, they are holy.

I should say, by the way, that instinctively Christians get this. Even if they don't connect the dots. Nobody actually tells their children, don't pray to God because your prayers are just a stench in the nostrils of the almighty because you're a pagan, right?

We understand that our children are set apart to God in a special way. We teach them to pray the Lord's prayer. Maybe you do or don't do that in this church, but you do teach them to pray, to sing the hymns of the faith and so on.

Because we instinctively know what Paul makes explicit. God makes a distinction between the children of believers and unbelievers.

He says your children are holy. Third, the language used in the

New Testament for the promises of the covenant mirrors the language of the

Old Testament. So you get in the Old Testament, we have all these passages that have this continuity of, and your children, and your children, and your children.

Then we come to Pentecost. And at Pentecost, Peter says, repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins and you will receive the gift of the

Holy Spirit for the promises for you and for your children.

So you can't just go to this text and go, that answers everything. But what I want you to see is this pattern of talking about family as a covenant whole is identical with the way it's used in the

Old Testament where we know that children are members of the covenant. We also repeatedly see the baptism of whole families in the

New Testament. If you've considered this before, I wanna step back and say this issue gets abused by both

Presbyterians and Baptists. Because people start looking at the pattern of whole families being baptized and the

Presbyterian says, well, it's kind of unreasonable to think we got five families being baptized and there's no young children in it.

And the Baptists say, I have no problems imagining that. And we're talking about something that's not in the text.

But that actually misses the point. The point is, is those families are treated as covenant wholes, not as a group of individuals.

To adopt a view that says we don't baptize covenant children is to say everybody's a marble.

There's no connection here. And actually the pattern we see throughout the New Testament is the families are treated as covenant wholes.

And the children, of course, as we saw from 1 Corinthians are explicitly described as holy.

Fourth, do you remember how children were addressed as members of the covenant in the fifth commandment?

This is helpful, by the way. You look at the Mosaic covenant and go, how do you know children are in the covenant? Well, the 10

Commandments actually includes a command directly to the children. Honor your fathers and mothers with a promise attached to it.

And this was not simply, okay, if you happen to be a believer, now you've got to honor your father and mother.

No, you're a member of the visible church. You belong. But you know, when you come to the New Testament, Paul does exactly the same thing.

In Ephesians chapter six, Ephesians is written to those set apart, to the saints. In Ephesians chapter six,

Paul is continuing this description of the household code. You know, you talk about husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church.

That's in chapter five. When you move to chapter six, he addresses the children directly. Directly.

Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.

Honor your father and mother. This is the first commandment with a promise that it may go well with you and you may live long in the land.

So apparently the most natural thing in the world for Paul was to address children as though they're part of the covenant community.

They are members of the church. They are entitled to the privileges. They are also under the obligations of the covenant.

And I want you to see here, if you go back and look at this for yourself in your own time, that Paul makes two qualifications here.

I think they're both significant. He's not simply giving general moral guidance. Now, let's be honest, it would be great if unbelieving families that were all pagans taught their children to honor their parents.

That'd be a good thing. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not what Paul's doing here. He qualifies his command with in the

Lord and he qualifies it with a promise. And that promise is specifically a covenant promise.

Well, a great deal more could be said, but I think this is a good place for us to stop and for me to take some questions.

Let me just say one more thing and then I'll take questions from you. So far, all that we have done is set the stage, right?

For why the children of believers should be baptized. Kendall's gonna go on to talk about the meaning and mode of baptism in just a moment.

You have to marry these things together. Nevertheless, if you come to see that there's a continuity of the one covenant of grace to the whole

Bible and different administrations, and you see the children of believers are members of that covenant community in every age, you're 90 % there.

Because honestly, you can't hold those things which are clearly taught in the Bible once you see it.

You know how often that is when you're reading the Bible, there's things like you're going, I never saw it, it's so obvious. But then

I remember I didn't see that 10 years ago, right? That that's just part of how God works in our lives. Once you see this, this will be obvious.

One covenant with continuity, children members of the covenant community in every administration of the covenant of grace, including the new covenant.

And you're gonna then see the beauty of the fact that God has done that, including putting the covenant sign of baptism on your children.

With that, let me take questions from you. Other than, wow, that was a lot. Bit of a house, yeah, there we go.

Housekeeping point. David, thank you so much, brother. And the reason

I wanted David to share on this topic so badly is because what affected me the most was understanding covenant theology.

I don't know if you remember back in John six and John seven, we were talking about covenants. I make a joke that I preached myself into this position because as I was studying covenant theology, it dawned on me that I didn't understand the covenant properly and the children were members of the covenant.

It was the most important point for me to understand. And I hope you'll take this today.

Also listen to it again and again, there's so much in it, but I wanna say thank you for laying that foundation. We're also recording.

So if you have questions, I wanna capture them on the microphone. That's the housekeeping issue I wanted to talk about. So raise your hand and I'll run around and get everybody on the mic.

So, Chika, you raised your hand. Yeah, I wanna say thank you again so much for just the wealth of knowledge and just how you put it in simple terms.

It's just, it was phenomenal. Thank you for that. You just talked about Ephesians chapter six about regarding, you know,

Paul's making a command to the children, right? So, and you just said like, right, like whenever God makes a stipulation, you have to ask, okay, what is the provision that God has given to us, right?

Or to me to do this. So what do you think that God's gracious provision is to the children in Ephesus?

When he's saying like, you know, honor your father and your mother in the Lord. This is a fantastic question.

And by the way, the requirement to honor your parents doesn't end just when you're children. We have to do it when we're adults. And that's why this is so helpful to us.

If we think about the provision that he's made, the first provision he's made is he's given them a believing parent. What an extraordinary blessing.

He's given them the church that can nurture them in the faith and teach them to grow in the fear and admonition of the

Lord. But I want you to realize that he has even a more important provision behind that, which he has called that person to himself.

We're gonna talk about baptizing covenant children. God puts his name on them, baptizes them in the name of the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and calls them to embrace that. Why is that so important?

Well, sometimes the parents you're trying to honor may be wrong. Sometimes parents that you're trying to honor may be mean, because we are sinners.

But they have a Father in heaven who is not. And therefore, they don't honor their parents because their parents are right.

They honor their parents because God is right, and God has given this to them, parents, to help guide them.

By the way, you should think about the fact that if you were gonna write 10 commandments as the basic principles for governing everything, how many of you would have included honor your father and mother in there?

But do you see why it's so important? As children learn to honor their father and mother, they actually learn to honor God. So this actually fits not only with the children, it also fits with husbands and wives.

One of the things I say when I'm officiating in a marriage ceremony is that wives do not submit to their husbands because their husbands are worthy.

They submit to their husbands because Christ is worthy. Remember, the language is in the

Lord. That's the language here for children, but that's also the language for wives submitting their husbands. So God himself is the ultimate provision.

You have a follow -up, or? Yeah, and then also, because you just basically alluded to my follow -up, basically the

Fifth Commandment, right, and the Decalogue. So these are, would you agree that the

Decalogue is legally binding on everybody, regardless of if they're in the covenant or not?

Like, everybody, so in that sense, then what would be the, like, for that person who doesn't know

Christ and they're breaking the law of God, what would you say that God's grace is a provision for them in that sense?

Would it just be the fact that they actually know these things to be true, or? I'm just looking at you.

So first of all, yeah, thank you. That's a great question. The question is, is the 10 Commandments binding on everyone?

And in one sense, the answer is yes, because everybody is obligated to follow God. And if you read

Romans 1, what we see is nobody's left with an excuse. God has revealed himself to everybody. So if I wanted to start with the provision, and please tell your unbelieving friends this, the most important thing

I want for you is not that you honor your parents better. It's that you come to believe in Jesus Christ.

So the provision God is making for you is this incredible, gracious way that all your sins can be put away, and now you can follow me.

So the problem is you're an outsider. There is another sense, though, in which the 10 Commandments applies to the covenant community in a distinct way.

There's a promise there, tied right in the Fifth Commandment. There's a commandment with a promise. That promise is not made to unbelievers.

An unbelieving person who, from a purely human standpoint, kind of honors his parents or her parents is, in fact, not a recipient of the blessings, right?

Because actually, all of our behavior, when we talk about it on a relative scale with each other, we talk about civic virtue.

But the truth is, my most righteous acts are filthy rags apart from Jesus Christ, right?

So there's no ultimate blessing. So mostly, I want to say everyone's obligated to keep the 10 Commandments, but there are special promises given to those who are believers and in the covenant community.

So there's a nuance there, okay. And another thing I wanted to add is that, because now that you bring this up, actually, like Genesis 19, when

Lot was, the angels were trying to get Lot out, it was interesting how the angels were, he was trying to get him and his son -in -law, right?

So his household, basically, get them out, right? It wasn't just like, you, Lot, you alone, you're getting out of here.

It's like, no, get your family as well. So it kind of like, that just kind of like brought home the point that you were talking about, like that God deals with households.

It's just, wow, it's amazing. And also with Noah as well, it's like, it just makes so much sense to me.

So I just want to say thank you for that. Thank you. Let me extend that just one point while the microphone is passed to someone else with a question.

Notice why Lot is delivered. Lot is delivered for the sake of Abraham. There's a representative connection.

God has a relationship with Abraham. Abraham prays to God, God delivers Lot and his two daughters, yeah.

So that covenant connection goes all the way through the Bible. Yes. So I want to tell you that the best ha -ha that you've had so far was the idea that there was a

Hebrew evangelist walking around the camps of Israel saying, has everybody accepted

Yahweh as your personal deliverer from slavery in Egypt? I think that that idea is hilarious.

It is, by the way, the concept that you're bringing up today is, it's important because it's really making me even rethink the question, have you accepted

Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? And wow, I'm seeing that as just such a misleading offer.

I see it appealing to Americans. So what I'm asking is, this is the question.

At what point was the personal decision and baptism conflated, married together, and then brought forward?

And at what point in Christian history did this come up? Because I'm seeing this now as, my goodness, how did we get here?

Thank you, it's a fantastic question that I don't want to do too much on it here because we could talk about that for 40 minutes.

But let me give you a short answer and see if this works for you. The first thing is, is it's part of Christian history from the beginning in the

New Testament. It's not a new idea because people are called, unbelievers are called, repent and be baptized.

By the way, the very first baptism I ever did was an adult baptism of someone that had not been part of the covenant community.

I mean, that should be part of your church forever. You're evangelizing people. You're gonna get people that were not baptized as children, didn't grow up in the church.

We ought to be calling them to commit to Jesus Christ, to place their faith in him, and therefore they're baptized.

But here's the key distinction. You ought to baptize people because of what God says about them, not because of what they say about themselves.

Let me say that again because that may sound really simple, but it's very profound. You ought to baptize people based on what

God says about them rather than what they say about themselves. I know you had a seminar here actually recently about critical race theory.

That issue probably came up. Who are you? Are you who you decide you are internally?

That's American culture. Or are you who God says you are? And that applies to this issue as well.

So on the one hand, for adults, we've always called people to do this. The problem is, and I don't want to do too much of the history of this, but in the early church, there were some people that refused to baptize covenant children, and they actually had a misunderstanding of baptism.

That's what drove it. And in some other cases, they were actually heretics. Don't treat your Baptist friends, or some of you are still

Baptist, I'm sure, as though they're heretics. You don't want to lump everyone together with those problems.

But in America right now, the problem is I always think it's about me and Jesus. So let me tell you how

I share the gospel with people. I do not offer people Jesus as though he's a consumer product that's gonna make their lives better.

If they would just choose Jesus, that'll make Jesus so happy, because that's not the gospel.

I should come back and, I have a book I'm writing right now on the gospel in plain English, so maybe I can come back and talk about this with you.

But the gospel is a declaration of the victory of God in Jesus Christ over Satan, sin, and death on behalf of his people.

It's about Jesus. Now the question is, are you gonna submit and follow Jesus? He's not a consumer product, he's gonna make your life a little bit better.

Are you gonna bow the knee and follow Jesus? That's the question. So I proclaim the gospel rather than treating as an offer that'll make you better.

Other questions? I got it. This is more sort of basic, and I think

I know how you'd answer, but I might be wrong, and I just think some more common questions that I imagine specific people asking, we should just get on tape here.

But when you look in the New Testament, when they talk about circumcision, there's sort of a downplaying of it, but at the same time, not sort of any sort of explicit saying that, oh, the baptism replaces this, it's the same sort of thing going on here.

And then you have like verses like 1 Corinthians 7 .19, circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing but the keeping of the commandments of God.

And I know someone who believes in a believer's baptism would say that this shows, oh, they're just, they're getting rid of the whole concept of this covenant symbolism done with people who aren't old enough to choose anything, and it's putting a primacy on, you're not really a

Christian unless you're old enough to know what you're doing. By the way, your last point there would get us all in trouble.

It's sort of the, you shouldn't come to the Lord's Supper until you understand it, which would mean none of us would come because we're all growing in our understanding.

There's riches there that are beyond our grasp. So thankfully, your salvation does not depend on you having a high enough

IQ and a deep enough education. I wanna defer answering this question till after Kendall gives his lecture on the meaning of baptism, that's really where it belongs, but I am gonna pick it up in our third section where we talk about answering common objections.

I do want you to realize though, just very narrowly on the question of circumcision, that of course circumcision is put away with the transition to the new covenant.

That doesn't mean that children aren't involved anymore. As I already said earlier from Romans chapter three,

Paul says about circumcision, what's the benefit? Much in every way, as long as you're looking back.

But with the change of covenants, there's a change of signs. We'll talk about that in the third section. Do you need to get going or do you wanna take some more questions?

As long as we have questions, I'm okay to do it. I'm good with that. I'd rather answer your questions than mine. Oh, sorry,

I was looking. Here you go, Dawn. Okay, mine's gonna be fairly simple for you,

I'm sure, but there was one part that you said, children of believers are set apart and special to God.

Yes. So children of non -believers are not special? Or I mean, what about children that come, you know, doesn't

Jesus say, let the children come to me? Oh, which. Doesn't, you know, and.

So let me answer that question about children. Which children is Jesus talking to when he says, let the children come to me?

Yeah. No, no, no. No, all. They're infants, they're actually infants here. The word means infants. They're covenant children.

So you can't separate this as being children in general. So there is a sense in which every person you ever meet, adult or child, is special.

Because you were created in the image of God. The person who's mean to you at work was created in the image of God, and they are special in that sense.

But they are not set apart to God as being holy. They're not set apart to God in a special way.

Covenant children are. Now when Jesus says, let the little children come onto me and don't forbid them, the word there,

I'm gonna pronounce this wrong, but it's, well, I'm not gonna pronounce it, you don't need to know Greek. It's, it actually means infants.

It's very small children. And he doesn't simply say, be like them. He says, for of such is the kingdom of God.

That is, he's saying, these children in the covenant are part of the kingdom of God.

That's true in the new covenant, as we move on to the, after Pentecost as well. But it's not children in general.

God makes a distinction between unbelieving children and children that are born to one or more believing parents.

And he specifically, you can go back and look it up, First Corinthians 7 .14, calls the children of a believing parent holy.

Yeah. That might take a while. Sometimes children will come, even though they had unbelieving parents.

I mean, come to church? Yeah, and they come to God. They come to Christ. Of course. Without, you know, growing up in the faith.

Growing up with believing families. So the goal, of course, is we want to call every single person to faith, right?

Both those who grow up in families without the privilege of the covenant, to call them into the covenant, and those who grow up in the covenant.

Remember, when you baptize children, you're not saying, I know they're gonna be saved now. What you say is, God has set his promise upon you of salvation that comes by grace alone, through faith alone, because of Christ alone, and we're calling you to embrace that.

But it is actually a beautiful thing to realize, if you have children, that God has not simply pulled you out of your family when he brought you into the kingdom of God.

He's actually, in one sense, set apart your whole family with you, and said, you're special to me.

And it turns out that there is some sense in which God ordinarily works that way. Right, so that children are believers, ordinarily, not all the time, but on a pretty regular basis,

God causes them to become believers, and so on. And it's actually a beautiful thing. Regrettably, sometimes they don't, and thankfully, sometimes, often, children of unbelievers do come to faith.

That's also part of God's plan. Oh, you go ahead, you wanna follow up?

Kind of. Go ahead. Is it all right if I jump in real quick? I feel like the implications for this are so important, because if our children do not belong to God in a special way, there's no reason to bring them to church.

There's no reason to pray with them, and teach them, and disciple them, but yet, we do these things instinctively, because we know that God expects us to raise them as Christians.

So, I just wanted to ask, what other practical application things could you tell us as parents that we ought to be doing with our children if they really are children of the covenant?

And if we know that they are, how should we live differently, knowing what you just said? Well, it's both how you live, but it's also what you do with them.

I mean, one of the things we get from the Old Testament is God says, oh, with your children, when you get up in the morning, when you go to sleep at night, when you go out and work, you tell them about these things.

Well, what are these things? The whole counsel of God. So, it's not something that you isolate and say, well,

I bring them to church on Sunday. Well, of course, you should bring them to church on Sunday, right? That's an important thing in the

Bible studies. But it's actually even beyond sitting down and reading the Bible with them, which you should do.

It's very important. By the way, if you think that somehow your children are gonna absorb Christianity by listening to one sermon a week and you don't touch on that for the rest of the week, that you're kidding yourself.

This is an ongoing thing. But what God is calling us to do is not simply those moments that we set apart and say, let's study the

Bible. It's as life goes on. They have a struggle with a friend at school. You don't just say, this is how you do things, this is how you don't.

You put it in the context of the gospel. That they have Christ, that they have the Holy Spirit available to them, that they can turn to God and pray to God, right?

It's an ordinary part of life. It also means, of course, that your example is really, really powerful. There's this whole thing about the fifth commandment with honor your father and mother.

We should realize that into a, admittedly, a very fallible way, we are modeling God to our children.

Because you are the authority figure when your children are very small in your life. To the degree that they see you repenting when you sin and saying,

I'm sorry, please forgive me, that will totally change the way they think about relationships with other people. I mean, a great deal more can be said, obviously.

Me. So this covenant is relative,

I've been saved a long time, but never taught covenant, covenant, covenant, covenant.

And also, I was raised Catholic, so it took a lot of years to get away from Catholic baptism and now

I feel like I'm coming back. And I'll get there, because I'm seeking, but I don't know if this is so much as a question, but I raised six children in the church.

The youngest is 27. I did devotions, they were all baptized, mission trips, blah, blah, blah.

Three of them, I don't even know if they believe in God anymore. So, I guess, where do they stand?

If they were under my covenant, you know. Yeah, that's a great question. I may give you a somewhat painful answer, but on the top of it.

I know, I almost couldn't even ask the question. Yeah, I'm gonna tell you what I think the Bible says. So the first thing

I wanna say to all of you as parents is, and actually those of you who are not parents as well, please always remember that salvation is by grace alone, to faith alone, because of Christ alone.

That means the Bible does not have a connection that says, if you were a better parent, all your children would be believers.

You see this in the Bible, right? So Eli was a terrible father and his children were rebellious.

Samuel was one of the greatest men of God of all time. We can't imagine Samuel being anything other than a great father, and yet we're told that his children didn't walk in his ways.

So the first thing I wanna say is actually directed toward you. Don't look at your unbelieving children and think, boy,

I should have done better, right? Salvation is by grace, you keep praying for them. Now here's the thing that's gonna be hard to hear, but I honestly believe this is true.

To whom much is given, much is required. The fact that children are privileged to grow up hearing the word of God, being part of the church, doing devotionals with their parents, rather than setting them aside in a good way makes them more guilty of not embracing

Christ, right? So by the way, that's true for all of us too. You have pastors who love

God's word and are teaching it to you. Congratulations, you have greater responsibility before God.

It's a privilege because of responsibility. But I would also say keep praying. It's not as though God has like, you know, when they hit 30 or they hit 40,

God's done with them. I've had the privilege of talking with people who've come to faith in their 70s and 80s, right?

And so we shouldn't assume that somehow because they've been walking that way for a long time that God's done with them. You don't know what

God's gonna do. By the way, those things that you taught early in life, they come back to people. It's in there, so be confident about that.

Go ahead. Oh, thanks. I wanna make one comment about Roman Catholic baptism versus covenant baptism, just because you inadvertently brought that up.

It is Trinitarian baptism, so most Reformed churches accept it, but the Catholic understanding of baptism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding.

It merges together the thing that's signified with the ultimate reality. The way all the sacraments work is there's a sacramental connection between them.

They're used as means of grace, but they are not exactly the same thing. If you totally divorce those two, you end up with sacraments being bare signs that are utterly meaningless.

They're not means of grace. People fall off that end very commonly in American evangelicalism, so who cares if you get baptized, just water.

Catholics fall off on the other side. They merge the two things together so that if you're baptized, it actually purges out the sin.

At the moment you're baptized, you are completely pure before God. You are, in fact, saved by it, baptismal regeneration, unless there's an extraordinary thing that's happened, so that if you died right after you were baptized, you go to heaven, because you're perfectly pure.

By the way, that's one of the mistakes that happened in the early church. Someone asked earlier about when did people start doing other individual things.

Actually, the big problem, when you get into like the third century in the church, where people were delaying baptism instead of baptizing infants, was actually not because it was so personal about I need to make this commitment.

It was because if baptism washes away all your sin, I want to do it as close as I possibly can before I die, right?

So it was based on a theological mistake, so, yeah. Okay, you actually just gave me another question.

Good. With that answer. So the idea within American evangelicalism that baptism is a celebration, an outward celebration and sign and proclamation of your inward change in Christ is essentially you're saying wrong.

It is wrong. I trust that Kendall's gonna talk about this in a moment, about the meaning of baptism. It's actually something that's gotten embraced in 2000, so please don't think this is the way the

Southern Baptist Convention always has, but in 2000, they came out with what's known as the Baptist Faith and Message, and they actually say there that baptism is me testifying to my faith in God.

That is, it makes me the subject in baptism. I'm the actor. And then you read the New Testament when you discover is you don't do baptism.

You are baptized. You are the object rather than the subject. And the meaning of baptism, and I don't want to steal

Kendall's thunder, but the meaning of baptism is about God, his promises. Christ baptizes people with the spirit, the reality.

Christ baptizes people with water, the sign. You get baptized by Christ. Yeah, so it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the meaning of baptism.

Kendall will show you that, and we'll talk about that in the objections answered. Go ahead. Okay, so my original question was, and I want to get where you're going with this because I'm definitely all for throwing

American evangelicalism out, but the verse that just I can't get out of my head is

Romans 2, 28 to 29. Actually, you referenced that earlier, but for no one is a

Jew who is merely one outward nor is circumcision outward and physical, but a

Jew is one inwardly, and circumcision is a matter of the heart. And then it goes on, but the question here is how can you get from that, where circumcision,

Paul is saying, is not outward, not physical, to circumcision equals, in this new administration of the covenant, baptism, which is both outward and physical?

No, so you have to just go back to how the covenant works.

Remember I talked about the fact that the privileges of the covenant belong to everyone in the visible church, the obligations belong to everyone in the visible church, and the blessings ultimately belong only to those who respond with faith, those who are elected by God's grace do that.

That was true in the old covenant administration, the covenant of grace. It's true in the new covenant administration.

Now, you have to remember that when Paul is talking about circumcision, circumcision has already been set aside. We're in the new covenant era, so circumcision points forward to the cutting off of Christ on the cross.

Once that happens, there is no more sacramental circumcision, right, so that's one thing.

But just realize that when Paul says, because now he's saying that circumcision is nothing, what he's trying to say is being a

Jew or being a Gentile does not privilege you more in the kingdom of God.

That was an ongoing struggle. By the way, I didn't even learn this when I was at RTS in 1989 and 1991.

This really did not get a lot of attention back then. It's gotten a lot more attention, I'm sorry, Reformed Theological Seminary, you won't know all the insider lingo.

We weren't talking about that, but when you read through the New Testament documents, the epistles, you're gonna see they're wrestling over and over again with, did

Jewish Christians have privileges above Gentile Christians? Did Gentiles need to get circumcised in order to be saved?

And that's the context that Paul is saying there in Romans two. But please remember, that continues.

My very favorite hermeneutical principle, you do not have to go to seminary to get this, just keep reading.

If you get stuck somewhere in your reading, go, how does this fit together? Keep reading, because normally the Bible will explain it, and that flows right into chapter three, where Paul says, well, circumcision's no big deal, right?

No, he says much in every way, but it's great privileges to the old covenant Jews. So he's not pushing children out of the covenant.

What he's trying to do is bring Jews and Gentiles together in the one covenant. That may take some going through.

Don't take my word for it, read for yourself, be a Berean, and see, is that what Paul's saying?

But it is. All right, let's take one more question, and then we'll do a five -minute break where everyone can go to the restroom, grab coffee, stretch your legs, anything you need to do, because the next one is just as dense.

Okay, I got two questions. Number one, so number one, real quick, so Rahab in the

Old Testament, and Melchizedek and these people who were not a part of Israel, right?

In the flesh, in an ethnic bloodline sense, right? These people were part of the visible covenant community.

Would you agree with that? It's more complicated than that. So the question about Rahab is, she becomes a member of the visible covenant community.

She's not a member of the visible covenant community when she's still in her own city of Jericho while it's surrounded, but there she professes faith.

That's what we want everyone to do, unbelievers to become believers. And she says, I know the God of Israel is the real

God. I mean, we know what happened, he did in Egypt. I've come to faith, and God doesn't leave her in Jericho.

He brings her out of Jericho, and she becomes part of Israel. Now, one of the things that might be in the back of your head is a misunderstanding and broader evangelicalism.

I love my evangelical brothers, but this idea that ancient Israel was just made up of ethnic

Jews. Actually, from the very beginning, there's always branches being grafted in and branches being broken off.

You see a vast mixed multitude of people out of Egypt that were not naturally Jews, and they become part of the covenant people.

That's what happens to Rahab. She comes out of Jericho, she's grafted into Israel, and just becomes part of the covenant community.

In terms of Melchizedek, it's a little trickier. My own view is Melchizedek is a pre -incarnation appearance of Jesus Christ, but boy, that's gonna take us way away from the subject.

So if I am right, I could be wrong about this. But if I am right, not only is he a member of the covenant community, he's the covenant head.

Last thing is, I've heard some things about, I mean, and you know how they probably, this is like a, I'm sorry to kind of drop this bomb here, but I've heard some things about federal vision.

So first of all, number one, in layman's terms, in a nutshell, what is federal vision? And is federal vision an aberration or deviation from traditional reform of covenant theology?

I can go back and give you three lectures on that one. So let me give you a very short answer that will apply to many things outside of quote, the federal vision.

The federal vision is a misnomer. That may surprise you, because you're gonna have books written about it.

But what really happened, and I know people involved, is a group of friends got together, and they were having a theological discussion.

And they drew a circle around the friends and said everyone inside this circle is orthodox, and they were exploring issues in how covenant theology may play out in the church.

It became really controversial, and people started treating it as though there was this one really carefully thought out systematic theology in view, and in fact, these friends were disagreeing with each other.

So just realize that happens sometimes in church history. Don't think there's like this block out there of federal vision people.

People that were associated with that would distance themselves from it just 20 years later. We could talk in private about more details, but I should tell you that actually one of the sad things that can happen in the life of the church, happen over any issue, is people that are not part of this group can try to exalt themselves.

See how orthodox I am? Because I can point out how wrong they are. And that happened in this particular debate, right?

So Kendall will know some about federal vision, but I gave you my email. I'd be happy to talk with you in detail if you're reading particular things.

I do have some expertise in that, and I actually know some of the people that were involved. But don't run down that path too far.

Thank you very much. Five minute break, and then your pastor is going to give you an overwhelming amount of material, yes he is, on the meaning and mode of baptism, and we will do more discussion after that.