Leaving Dispensationalism | Theocast

Why We Left Dispensationalism

Hi, this is Justin and today on Theocast, we are going to do our best to give the people what they want. By popular demand, we are going to try to answer the question why it is that we have left dispensationalism.

Perhaps you're out there and you have spent some time in a dispensationalist context, or maybe you're just seeing aspects of dispensational teaching in your current environment. We're gonna have a conversation today about the distinctions between our perspective that is Reformed and Confessional over and against the perspective that is dispensational.

John and I are going to talk a little bit personally. We're going to talk theologically. We hope that this is a clarifying conversation for you. And as always, we hope it encourages you in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Stay tuned. If you'd like to help support Theocast, you can do that by leaving us a review on iTunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app. You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.

Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there. Thanks for listening.

Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ. Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and myself, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

We have met today on a rainy Wednesday morning, at least it is here, to do another podcast. I'm not a huge fan of the rain and the clouds. I understand that the earth needs it, John. But my mood doesn't so much love it.

I'll just be honest.

I just need it gone by Friday. I want to actually try and get out and go off, believe it or not.

Yeah, you are. Hey, just some side news. Hey, the greens should be receptive for you. That's right. Amen.

Hey, just total side news. I didn't even tell you I was gonna say this, but a big, big deal in my life this weekend. I am officially going full time at my church. So it's exciting. My church is very excited for that.

And they're already putting me to work. Man, my schedule's busy. Yeah. But well, man, we got a giveaway today. And sometimes we're trying to figure out what we can give away that's related to the podcast.

But this day we decided to give away some merch. Sometimes we just give away swag. That's right. So the coffee cup did well. A lot of people wanted that. We actually sent them a new one, a custom one.

So those of you that signed up, you got a custom coffee cups, a little bit different than the one he's holding, but it's still got the cool logo on it. Man, JP is just really rocked. We need to get you like a gold necklace.

Calvin or something. I don't think I can pull that off. You totally can.

You're the only one who could. It would. And it also,.

It also would not be good for my marriage. My wife would be like, like her eyes would roll out of her head.

So we're going to give away, if you're watching us on YouTube, which we'd recommend to do, if you want. JP has our newest Theocast hat available. So you can go to our website and we're going to give you one of those away.

So today's one's going to Joel Mason. And so Joel is one of our members through the sovereignty of God. That's right. The sovereignty of God and the selection of the will of names. So we put all of those in there.

It took forever this time. The membership is exploding. So, and Justin, I just have to say this in the beginning that unless something just absolutely tanks, we should have our brand new website and our brand new membership,.

Which we'll talk about later. By the time this podcast releases for sure. Yeah.

Unless something just tanks on us, we should be up and rolling on that. So go to Theocast .org. Yeah. Check it out. So Justin, what are we talking about today, my friend? Oh, wait, I forgot. Listen, if you want to win a hat, I totally forgot about this.

If you want to win a hat, we're giving one away for free. So go to our social medias, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, look for the giveaway posters instructions there. And we will give one of these hats away to you for free.

So including shipping, we'll even pay the shipping. Why are we so generous?

I suppose. And not only are we generous, John, let it never be said of us that we do not read emails that come our way and that we do not read the Theocast Facebook group posts because we do. We do. Exhibit A is today's conversation.

A Reformed and Confessional Alternative to Dispensationalism

We're going to talk today because of popular demand. We're going to talk today about leaving dispensationalism and we're just trying to give the people what they want, John, you know, and we had a number of people on the Facebook group post about this and, and then like when the first post went up, there were lots of other people that chimed in and said, yes, please talk about this.

So we're going to talk about it a little bit today. And the episode is entitled, as I already said, leaving dispensationalism. But just to clarify a little bit of what we're going to try to do today and John, you can add anything you want to this.

We're not going to give a bunch of technical deep heady definitions of dispensational theology or anything like that. What we're going to do is hopefully aim to have an approachable conversation where we talk about the high level distinctions between our reformed confessional perspective and a dispensational perspective.

And before we even get into it, I'll just go ahead and give a little bit of my background that is relevant right now. And then John, you can talk a little bit about you as well. My exposure to dispensational theology was more general in that I was a part of a church that was self-consciously liberal theologically, but had a very mixed bag in terms of the membership of the church.

And many of the members of the church were conservative-ish, at least theologically and certainly conservative morally. And so they had been heavily influenced by just kind of the default dispensational evangelical-ish theology that was out there in the 20th century in America.

And so I absorbed some of that and was never taught anything contrary to it. And so basically by default, I would have had notions of, for example, the pre-trib rapture understanding of the end of the world.

I definitely was aware of Tim LaHaye's Left Behind series. And whenever the judgment house thing would happen, there was definitely the rapture that occurred and the piles of clothes everywhere. And you don't want to be left as one of the people, because then you're going to have to go through tribulation and all kinds of things.

And so, yeah, that was kind of my exposure to it all. And then I began to read and encounter different theology in my early to mid -20s. And as I began to read and study and investigate scripture more on my own from a more Reformed covenantal perspective, I started to see the distinctions between what I had kind of absorbed and what I was now learning.

And so, yeah, that's enough about me. John, why don't you let the people know a little bit about your background? Because you, even more than I was, were steeped in dispensationalism and even went to a postgraduate institution that would, you know, champion this kind of understanding of scripture.

And yeah, why don't you do that and then we'll take off.

John Moffitt’s Background in Dispensationalism

Yeah. Yeah, I've been in different kinds of dispensationalism. I grew up in the independent fundamental Baptist world. My dad was a preacher for 20 years before he passed away in that world and progressively coming out of it.

We came, for those of you that know anything about that world, my dad used to work for Jack Hiles and then he slowly started to read men like John MacArthur and became more and more of, I would say, he started leaving it.

And I went to the two colleges that I went to were both dispensational. And then most of the churches I worked in in my early 20s were all dispensational. So I was very familiar with the branding and the style, I would even say the hermeneutic and the theology.

And then I ended up going to probably one of the most prominent dispensational schools that are conservative and I would say Calvinistic in today's world. I went to the Master's Seminary and it was there that I really began to dive deep into the dispensational perspective and understand the nuances and the differences, the different kinds of dispensationalism is.

So it's not just dispensational theology, there's actually different kinds. And this is not an overview of what this is because there's plenty of information out there of what dispensationalism is. And there's, again, like MacArthur, the school I went to, probably more of a progressive dispensationalism, if you don't know what that means, you can kind.

Of get that in versus kind of a classic historical dispensational view.

And there are definitely some differences. I think progressive is by far better hermeneutically than a traditional classical, there's a lot of concerns that come from there. What we're going to really talk about is why I left it or why we kind of don't.

Hold to that perspective, or at least why we're not there today, you know, why we believe something else.

Yeah.

And not, I think we're going to, we're going to talk about the major differences. And I would say these are differences that the majority, now I'm sure you can find a dispensationalist that's going to counteract us.

This is the thing about it is that theology just can get so broad, but I would say mainline dispensational. And I would even say mainline progressive dispensationalism. For the sake of this argument, my seminary, my alma mater, and John MacArthur would disagree with us and say, yes, we would not agree on these points.

And so that's really what this podcast is about is what we embrace to be. Um, what we think is biblical and historically accurate, um, in our perspective now to, to, to be clear, Justin, I think it's safe to say this.

We need to say this. We love our dispensational brothers. I do not think they're heretical unless I'm sure again, I'm sure there's some weirdo out there that holds to some weird doctrine and calls themselves dispensationalist.

I am not going to be the straw man who torches that. That is just not well.

And the only, the only things that we would condemn from a dispensational perspective are things that most dispensationalists have already condemned themselves, like the idea that, you know, there are two different covenants of salvation, one with Israel and one with the church that has been rejected by the vast majority of people that would call themselves dispensationalists.

And we too would look at that and say, yeah, that is not at all faithful to scripture and is a false doctrine.

That's correct.

Yeah.

And you're not, you're not, the Israel was not saved by the law and those under, under the covenant are saved by Christ.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's just not, not correct. Now that was taught by some, uh, but that is not the prominent view today. And so we aren't going to bring that up as one of the oppositions because that's not what they're saying and we do not want to misrepresent them.

So I would say the easiest place to begin, Justin, when we're thinking about the differences and what my journey out of dispensational theology was that when I was actually in seminary, steeped in it, studying all the different books that I was reading, they had a lot that were talking about continuity and discontinuity between the New Testament and the Old Testament, understanding the different dispensations.

And then of course I had classes on covenant theology and the way in which it was being presented. And as I began to read scripture, uh, in really new eyes, when I stopped trying to read into the text, moral application, like I'm going to be like David, be like Daniel.

But I, one of the things that I am very thankful for that my seminary taught me is to understand the authorial intent. What is the author's intentions in writing the book? And one of the, one of the things that I took from that, and sometimes this in our dispensational friends, uh, they only go to the actual author, like, you know, Moses or the Psalms or Paul, whatever.

But the book is authored by one God, which is, you know, our sovereign being. And we have to ask, what did he, what was his authorial intent? What can we look from scripture to determine what was his intentions for writing these books?

Then you can lower down into the individual authors and then you can lower down even, even more into, to the individual applications of that text. Like for instance, in what, what are they trying to communicate in this particular pericope or section, this paragraph.

So what I began to discover is that the Bible had one story. It was really describing one pushing narrative. Now the dispensationalist will say it's the glory of God is the overarching purpose of God's word and why he wrote it.

Which we're not going to disagree with that because everything is for the glory of God, but there it's, there's, it's, you can't just say this book is about God's glory when it has in the very opening scene in Genesis three, uh, like the major theme, which is the fall of man and God's promise to restore man back to his original, yes.

So it's redemption. So I began to see scripture unfold from a redemption or redemptive understanding. And I would say that it's not only just redemptive, but it's redemption through history. So the technical term for it is a redemptive historic understanding.

When I, when this was introduced to me and I was reading through, um, the, the counter arguments to covenant theology, I was, I was taken back by how can this not be right when it seems like all you have is the further progression of God's promises to his people through covenants to bring us the Messiah and prophecies to bring us the Messiah.

Uh, I quickly began to see a redemptive historic understanding of scripture to be an accurate way of understanding how to explain the Bible.

The Bible’s Redemptive-Historical Unity and Christ at the Center

Yeah.

I mean, we do not disagree with the dispensationalists that say that the Bible is about the glory of God, but we want to be more specific because we think the text is more specific and it's more clear in terms of how it is that God gets glory for himself.

And certainly he is glorified in having his righteousness vindicated through judgment. And at the same time, it is quite clear that God is glorified. I'm going to go in and say is most glorified in the work of redemption accomplished by his son, Jesus.

That's right.

And so that is a big point of difference, which just kind of dovetails with another.

Piece.

Not only is our understanding of covenant theology at odds with a dispensational hermeneutic with respect to the Bible and how it hangs together and how redemptive history unfolds and the like, we also are going to be explicitly Christo centric.

We're going to be Jesus centered in how we understand the Bible and its main point, that it is God's plan of redemption accomplished through Christ that brings God glory. And our dispensational friends will disagree with us on that because for them at the center of God's plan to glorify himself.

Of course, they're not going to deny that Jesus is a part of this, but at the center of God's plan to bring himself glory is Israel and how God works through Israel. It's a very Israel centric hermeneutic where ours is unapologetically Jesus centric in terms of how God goes about saving his people, what the point all along was, and we're basically taking our cue from Christ himself and certainly the apostles as they understand the entire Old Testament to be ultimately about Jesus the Christ and what he would come to do in order to accomplish redemption all to the praise of God's glorious grace.

Yeah, and to maybe bring some clarity, what's so hard is the nuance here and we don't want to misrepresent. So to hear our hearts and hear how we're trying to express some technical differences. So I will say every dispensationalist I talk to would say, of course, Jesus is the point of the Bible.

I mean, they wouldn't reject that because to reject that would be weird.

How do you even reject such a statement?

Right.

So we don't want to throw that straw man out there either. Their rejection is that, well, John, you guys find Jesus under every rock. When you say it's crystal centric, you're saying every single verse you need to find Jesus in that verse.

And that what I would say is you're projecting a bond, the text, something just like I would say people do when we think about projecting moral applications. Be like Daniel, be like David. You shouldn't do that either.

That's not what we're saying. But what we're saying is the narrative and the purpose behind what was written is to further explain, clarify and reveal the shadow of Christ as we get closer to the substance.

Of Christ.

So we think everything in the Old Testament is a greater shadow, a revealing of what's going on when it comes to the actual substance of Christ. So, yeah, all of the Bible is crystal centric.

Well, and it's like you're saying, I think the big difference and where this comes out maybe most pointedly is how we read and understand the Old Testament because we read and understand the Old Testament with Christ at the center of it as well.

We do not read anything going on about the nation of Israel or with the nation of Israel and read that without Christ in view as the backdrop through which, or I would even say a better way to phrase it is the lens through which we view Israel is Jesus.

And so that I think is a difference between our perspective and a dispensational view. It is a hermeneutic, and a hermeneutic is a means or a method of interpretation, right? We, again, are not forcing anything down on the text.

We are taking our cue from Christ and the apostles in understanding that the point of the Bible is to reveal God's plan of redemption through history as it has unfolded. And all of his plan to save his people has centered upon Christ.

And so we would understand, like you said at the beginning, John, that yes, we're concerned with authorial intent at the human level—Moses, Paul, David, whoever it may be—and we are primarily concerned with authorial intent at the divine level because there is one author of Scripture, namely the Holy Spirit, who inspired men to write exactly what God would have written down.

And so we want to get underneath any kind of human authorial intent and see exactly what God intends to reveal. And God has not left us in the dark on that because as we look at the entire canon and how it hangs together, we are able to better interpret the Old Testament in light of the.

New.

And as we've said many times on here, the best interpreter of the Old Testament is the Holy Spirit speaking to us in the New Testament. And so that's where we're going to come at odds, I think, with some of our dispensational friends.

If we were to go to an Old Testament text, it's going to become very obvious that the way that we're coming at it is different.

Justin Perdue. That's right, and that's really helpful. And I think it's encouraging to see where we do agree with our dispensational brothers. This is why we can call them our brothers, and there's a lot I've learned from them.

They've been super helpful in their interpretation of Scripture. But I will say that it does impact your use of the Old Testament.

Justin Perdue. Right.

My alma mater did an entire lecture series on why they would reject a Christocentric understanding of the Old Testament. John MacArthur has openly stated that the primary reason he teaches from the New Testament is that we're in the New Testament era, so the Old Testament is not.

Justin Perdue. We're in the era of the gospel of the Messiah, and so the Old Testament is really not all that applicable, other than to moralize it and apply it in those kinds of ways. Is that fair?

Justin Perdue Yeah, and if you go to his book on preaching, it's been around for years, which he still holds to. Basically, you can use the Old Testament for great illustrations, and then there are sections about the prophecy of Christ, but as it relates to preaching Christ from the Old Testament, it's just not something that they promote.

Justin Perdue. Whereas for us, as Reformed guys who are covenantal in our theology, we hold to the three historic covenants, the first one being the covenant of redemption that was made in eternity past between the members of the Godhead, most pointedly between the Father and the Son, where the Father and Son agree together about redemption and how it would be accomplished.

Then the Son is going to be the one to do it. Then we would understand the covenant of works that God made with Adam in the garden, and dispensationalists would disagree with us on that language. They would just say, well, that's just not in the Scripture.

Then we also would understand the covenant of grace that is promised in Genesis 3 .15, when God promises that there would be one who would be the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent's head. We understand that to be the first promise of the covenant of grace that then is going to be revealed through farther steps and ultimately established through Christ in the new covenant.

Dispensationalists would disagree with us completely with respect to that framework. They would say, well, that's not in the Bible. You guys are imposing that down upon the text. We would just say, no, actually we are aiming to responsibly read the entire Bible and see how it hangs together as a whole.

Therefore, what we're saying about these covenants actually comes up out of the text and then helps us understand the whole thing. A little bit of what's going on there, John, I'll go ahead and throw these two words out there and briefly define them.

When a dispensationalist would argue with us about covenant theology and say that those three covenants respectively are not in the Bible, I think two things are going on. One is a little bit of word concept fallacy, where it's like, well, the words that you're using are not in the Bible, and so we shouldn't talk that way.

Of course, the greatest thing to bring up there is, well, the word trinity is not in the Bible, yet it's the best way we know to express the threeness and the oneness of.

God.

So three in one, right? Trinity. And so that's a little bit on that. The other thing that I think goes on with dispensationalists, because of their high view of the Bible and their high view of inerrancy, they do tend toward biblicism, where there's just this kind of, well, we need to see it chapter and verse in a text, and then we could talk this way, and what you're saying is not there chapter and verse in that sense, and so we disagree with your theological framework.

To which, again, our response is, well, this stuff is very clearly revealed over the course of the whole canon from Genesis to Revelation, and it makes sense of the entire thing, and there's this unified thread that runs through.

In covenant theology, in a redemptive historical understanding with Jesus at the center, all of that hangs together.

Thankful to our dispensational brothers, they do fight against the logical conclusion of biblicism, which ends up being open theism. Because if you have to have the actual text say something, or you take every text literal, and you won't allow Scripture to interpret Scripture, and you do not allow the explanation of all of Scripture to apply, you could come to the conclusion that God doesn't know the future, that God isn't in the future, and that God isn't eternal, and that's what open theism has done.

It's the ultimate conclusion of biblicism.

Totally, and we will do a podcast on biblicism, I trust, in the next few months, because it's something that John and I have talked about. Biblicism, basically what you get there, guys, is people take words in the biblical text, and they pit one text against another.

That's right.

They introduce a tension and a mystery that is actually not there, that can be harmonized and explained quite easily with appropriate hermeneutical tools. But biblicism, again, it actually unsettles us because it's like, well, this is saying this, and this is saying that, and apparently there's a contradiction here, and there's a mystery and a tension here, and that actually does not exist.

If we understand the Scripture rightly, we would argue, for example, from a covenantal redemptive historical Christ-centered perspective.

That's right.

So when we're talking about a dispensationalist would openly agree that they are not covenantal. As a matter of fact, it literally is A and B.

It's oil and water.

It is.

There is a distinct difference that both covenantalists and historic dispensationalists are not going to agree on these frameworks of interpretation, and I will say that dispensationalism is a framework of interpretation.

It's how you interpret God's Word, right? And so they would say the way in which they understand the Word of God to unfold and explain itself is through these seven dispensations, which we're not going to get into, but they are going to interpret all of their Bible through those lenses, and so the application of it is going to come from that lens of a seven dispensation lens.

Now, people are going to differ on what those dispensations are, but it is broken up, and there's not continuity between the two.

But those seven dispensations in and of themselves are a theological system and framework, right? Because I think a lot of times what's interesting is that the dispensationalist argument against Reformed covenantal types like us is that we are using and relying too much upon a theological framework or a theological system, you know, and implication they are not.

It's like, well, yeah, those seven dispensations, that's a system and a framework of its own. And the other thing that can sometimes happen is, at least I've heard this before, a dispensationalist will say, you know, we're just using the Bible, whereas you guys are using confessions and creeds and things like this alongside the Scripture.

Humbly, I would say this, it's like, well, you know, what do you think that Schofield Study Bible is? You know, I mean, that thing has some stuff that's not in the biblical text, too, that very much sounds, again, like a confessional thing, or it sounds like a creed of sorts, or it certainly, like I say, contains some kind of a theological system in it.

Well, you're claiming that you're not doing that.

Yeah, any true dispensationalist is not…. I very rarely meet somebody who can fully explain dispensationalism and they came up with that on their own. It's been handed down to them. I, you know, I just have never really met someone who fully explained dispensationalism, and then a dispensationalist goes, you know, that's dispensational theology.

It's just, again, is it out there?

Sure.

Broadly speaking, broadly speaking, that is not the case. So, we would say just, we have to be careful that just because it's not a specific verse or word in the Bible doesn't mean the concept, I mean, Trinity is really, or even the eternality of God or the sovereignty of God.

These big concepts that a lot of times, it takes a lot of scripture to help explain what's going on with this theological understanding, or we could say system, or we could say systematic of understanding it.

So, covenant theology is going to be definitely something that when I began to understand it and understand the hermeneutic of it, I very much embraced the idea of it because it was consistent with the flow of scripture, and it was consistent with the explanation.

Of scripture.

Of course, Justin and I, just to be clear, we are Reformed in our understanding from a covenantal perspective of the London Baptist Confession. If you want to know the technical phrase of that, it would be the 69 Federalists is our understanding of that.

Full explanation of that in the link below or in our comments, go to there. We did a whole five-part series on our perspective of covenant theology, so we'll move on from that. We don't need to spend more time there.

Justin Perdue. Last thing I may say before we move on to another item is I've referenced this earlier, and I think you have too, John, the fact that Israel is such a big deal in terms of a dispensational theological framework where Israel becomes a big point of emphasis and focus from a dispensational perspective to the point that I think a dispensational, at least as I've always heard it taught and explained, and even as you and I've talked, I think this holds water, and you can push back on me if you think this is overstating.

It.

But I think that in a dispensational view, Israel, in terms of God's people and God saving His people, Israel is the point, and the church is kind of the parenthesis. Whereas from our perspective, we would say it's actually maybe the opposite, that Israel is the parenthesis and that the church, God's people, both Jew and Gentile, the elect from all nations, tribes, and peoples, and all that stuff around the throne of God, that's the point, and that Israel was the parenthesis.

So that's a fundamentally different perspective there too in terms of how we understand God's purposes in redemption and what He's always been out to accomplish.

Israel, the Church, and God’s Purposes in Redemption

Jon Moffitt And I will say because of these two theological differences, you are going to have the dispensationalist as a heavy view on end-time theology, the rapture. Now, this may not be true today of all dispensationalists, but of the ones I grew up in, and the Tim LaHaye and that you were talking about, the Left Behind series, the end-time theology was a scare tactic to get you to live straight.

It was a scared straight tactic.

Tim LaHaye. It's all fear and judgment.

Jon Moffitt Yeah.

There was no assurance on Christ and resting in Christ, looking forward to the return of Christ. I was dreading the return of Christ. I did not want Him to come back.

Frightening reality.

I mean, we would scare people by leaving our clothes all over for a youth group. I actually watched the original Left Behind series back in the 70s. I think it was very disturbing. So the number one question we get all the time, because a lot of dispensationalists are listening to us, they ask us, what is your hermeneutic on end-time theology?

And because it's so emphasized, and it's so part of this theological system, that what you believe about the return of Christ is paramount for whatever reason. Let me tell you this, and we're not going to do a podcast on this today, but I'm going to just throw this out there, that dispensationalists, all millennialists, post-millennialists, any of those positions that you want to take, they all agree.

Tim LaHaye. Or historic pre-mill.

Jon Moffitt. Or historic pre-mill. They all agree that Christ is coming back, he's going to rule and reign, and we will live with him forever in our new bodies, in a new heavens, in a new earth, in a physical realm, not a spiritual realm, that was rejected a long time ago, in a physical realm.

All positions hold that. Our brothers, we do not need to be calling each other heretics in our disagreements on these positions. Justin and I have our perspective. But so whatever reason in the dispensational world, the return of Christ and those details, if you don't get it wrong, you are a heretic in some ways, not everybody.

Tim LaHaye. If you don't get it right, and if you don't have a particular view on it, then you are less than at best, if not anathema, in terms of how you would be viewed. And yeah, I agree with you, Jon.

Whenever I talk about eschatology, even teaching our membership class at our church, I mean, our elders are united in our perspective. I don't tell people what that is. I also will say to them, here's what you need to agree on, to your point, that Jesus is coming back, that it's going to be personal, it's going to be visible, it's going to be bodily, it's going to be glorious, and that there will be a judgment according to righteousness, and that all those in Christ will be resurrected unto eternal life, and to live with God forever, and with each other, in a new heavens and a new earth that's just as physical as this.

If we believe those things, we're good to go, and we can be charitable there. Let's move on.

We've got two more we've got to get to. That's right. Law, gospel, distinction. So, Justin, real quick, tell us what it is and why it's different.

I can talk about what the law, gospel, distinction is first.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

Start there.

We hold to, I mean, we've done some podcasts, and I'm sure we'll link to this in the show notes. We've done several podcasts on law, gospel, distinction, and even the podcast that would have released a few weeks ago at this point called Are You a Legalist or an Antinomian is a very good law, gospel podcast in and of itself, where we understand that there is a distinction between the law and the gospel, where they need to be kept distinct.

The law reveals most pointedly and fundamentally in God's moral law what God requires of humanity if we are going to be righteous in His sight. And then the gospel, distinct from the law, reveals what God has done for us through Christ.

So, the law tells us what we need to do. The gospel tells us what God has done through Jesus for us in our place. And so the law, as we understand it, because of the fall and because we are all born corrupt, we're born sinful, we all stand condemned by the law.