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Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe, it's Iron Sharpens Iron.
This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs, chapter 27, verse 17, tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.
Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.
And now, here's your host, Chris Armisen.
Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Armisen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this very first day of March 2024.
I'm thrilled to have back a returning guest who is actually a regularly featured guest on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and his name is Pastor David Reese, and he is the pastor of Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona, and he's also the CEO of Armored Republic.
Today we are going to be entering into part two of a three-part discussion that we are planning to have. On the theme, an overview of the five solos of the Reformation and the tulip as the distinctives of the Reformed faith, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Pastor David Reese.
Brother, it's an honor to be here. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to be able to move into the bulk of the solos today, to be able to talk about grace, faith, Christ, and the glory of God as causes in terms of salvation and their different roles, so thank you for having me.
Tell us about, especially for the sake of those who haven't heard you on the show yet, tell us about Puritan Reform Church of Phoenix, Arizona.
Puritan is a church that's focused on the idea that Scripture is truly sufficient for the man of God to make him complete, thoroughly furnished to every good work. And so what we think about is when we teach, the purpose of the church is to teach the doctrine that Christ has given to us, to see the worship that he has instituted be performed, and to see that government is put into order according to his command, and our goal is to seek to understand those things from the Scripture and to not add to them or subtract.
And so we're concerned about those things, and we desire to see families put into good order, and especially to see fathers leading their families and seeing family worship put into place with fathers washing their wives in the Word and their children, raising them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord.
So if you would seek to see your own soul and your own family put into better order, I'd encourage you to come and visit us at Puritan on the Lord's Day at 10 a .m. or in the afternoon service at 4 p .m.
And the website is puritanphx .com. That's puritanphx, an abbreviation for phoenixarizona .com. Now tell us about Armored Republic.
Armored Republic is a company that manufactures body armor and some of the various items that people need that are associated with body armor. That includes things like, for example, backpacks that have body armor built into them or concealable armor that could be worn under a shirt and not even noticed.
But on a basic level, you think about armor for body armor and you're thinking about two major threats. One is the idea of pistols and the other would be rifles. And people who buy body armor to stop pistols, 95 percent of gun crimes are committed with a pistol.
And so if you're thinking about resisting criminals to defend your God-given rights, then having a backpack with pistol armor in it or wearing concealment armor are great for things where you're going into a dangerous situation or whatever, and having a backpack with you, you're going to carry a backpack anyway, so why not add like a half pound and have it be able to stop bullets.
And as far as rifle-rated body armor goes, basically you're thinking about the same reason a person would own an AR -15. They're going to have body armor that can stop rifle rounds because they're concerned about resisting tyrants.
And so that idea of the rising concern for tyranny, we seek to supply men with tools of liberty to defend their God-given rights in the honor of Jesus Christ. And I'm honored to be able to be an armorsmith for people and to see those rights preserved.
Amen.
And for more details on Armored Republic, go to ArmoredRepublic .com, ArmoredRepublic .com. And we thank you once again, Pastor Reese, and the fine folks at Armored Republic for being such important financial supporters of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.
Without folks like you, we would not be able to continue this broadcast, and I can never adequately express in the English language how grateful I am to you and to God for you. So thanks a lot, brother.
Praise the Lord. Thank you for your hard and diligent work over many years to see the truth proclaimed across the radio waves.
Thank you. Well, as I already mentioned, this is part two of what we intend to be a three-part discussion on the theme and overview of the five solas of the Reformation and the tulip as the distinctives of the Reformed faith.
Where would you like to pick up in regard to the five solas of the Reformation?
Well, just as a quick reminder, let's do a flyover of the five solas. Five solas are, first of all, things that are distinctive about the evangelical or Protestant faith to differentiate it from Rome.
But they're also really helpful markers in general in terms of defending the gospel. So historically, these five markers differentiated, again, Protestantism from Roman Catholicism. And when we talk about Protestantism or evangelicalism or the Reformed faith, you know, there's a sharing of these elements in historic Protestantism.
And so these five elements are scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, Christ alone, and glory to God alone. So scripture, grace, faith, Christ, and who gets the glory. And so we're answering different questions here because you think about there's five things that are alone.
You're like, well, five things that are alone, that's not alone, that's five things. Well, it's five different questions that are being answered. And so when we think about this, the first question that's being asked is, you know, how do we know or what is the authority to tell us how man is saved or how man's purpose is in life?
So the answer is that scripture is the alone authority to tell us and it's sufficient for every good work and sufficient for salvation. And so the idea that scripture is the formal cause of our salvation means that it's the form that salvation comes to us in, it's the plan that God has given, it's the blueprint of salvation, it reveals to us God's plan of salvation.
And so scripture is the alone source of knowledge to man in terms of the strict sense of things we can have certainty about. We talk about grace alone, what we're talking about is the effectual cause of salvation.
So what's the strict cause, right? What I mean by that is, you know, if this cause happens, the effect necessarily follows. And so grace is the alone effectual cause of our salvation, it necessarily results in salvation for the object of grace.
And grace is a powerful thing, it's the powerful cause of salvation, God's grace. The next idea of faith alone, faith is the instrumental cause of our salvation. So what that means is, it's the connector, it's the tool.
Sometimes you'll see in like philosophical or confessional documentation, the idea of a second cause, that's another way of talking about an instrumental cause. It is the, you know, if we think of scripture as being the thing that is the contract, and we think of grace as the thing that effectually brings about our salvation, the instrument, faith, is sort of the method of acceptance of the contract.
When we get into the next alone, we get to Christ alone. And so Christ is the alone legal basis, he's the alone meritorious cause of our salvation. So that means, you know, why is it just for God to take people who are evil, and then to say they are not evil?
How can he take the unjust and call them just? Well, it's because of the legal basis, the grounds, the reason for this judgment is Christ's work as a substitute. We'll talk about that in more detail. But so this, the meritorious cause, so if we use the contract analogy again, if scripture is the contract, and if grace is the thing that powerfully brings about the benefits of the contract, and faith is like the signing of the contract, Christ is the one who meets the terms, meets the conditions, he's the one who does the stuff to fulfill the contract.
And so he earns reward. And then we talk about the glory going to God alone. And the idea is that everything in salvation is designed to give the glory to God, because he created for the purpose of showing his glory, showing his greatness, showing his attributes, and salvation is designed to cause it so that in creation, the fulfillment of history displays his attribute of mercy, which is the crowning attribute of his glory, because it's the final thing to be fulfilled.
Because justice doesn't require him to have people that he forgives, justice is an attribute that's the kind of second to last or the penultimate attribute to be displayed. He can just have angels, and he can have righteous angels he rewards and wicked angels that he punishes and then he can show his attribute of justice in that way.
Man as a race is fallen in Adam. And so there's this category of man in the fallen group. And so we all deserve God's punishment. And so anybody who receives a reward in that group is being represented by Christ and is therefore an object of mercy is receiving mercy is displaying God's mercy.
And so the ultimate cause, the goal, the last thing to be accomplished in salvation is the display of God's glory. And it's God's glory alone. And it's not glory he's giving to any creature. And so he is preserving the display of his own glory in salvation.
And so that's sort of the flyover. You know, we're going in the Concord and the Concord's been retired now. But, you know, if we had Concord's that were still being used, we'd be flying, you know, at Mach one, at least over the solos in this list.
Now, the first three of the solos that you mentioned, Solus Scriptura is known as the formal principle of the Reformation and justification by grace alone through faith alone are known as the material principle of the Reformation.
And those issues, especially when you even narrow the focus to Solus Scriptura and Sola Fide, are the things that really raise the ire that have created fury in the minds of Roman Catholics for centuries, especially when they became a prominent issue in the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century.
Although you and I would say that Rome rejects all of the solos, you would have differences of opinion amongst Roman Catholics on what kind of spin they would put on that. They might even say, oh, yes, it's all of grace.
It's all of Christ. But they don't really mean that in the way that we do and the way that the scriptures do. But why are these initial solos of the Reformation that you mentioned known as the formal and material principles?
So that idea that the scriptures are the formal principle of the Reformation comes down again to that idea that the scriptures give us the blueprint or the plan, they give us the form in which the doctrine comes.
And so if we said that the authority is church tradition or the authority is church teaching, like the teaching office, and in particular, the claim of the papacy or of ecumenical councils to infallible teaching authority, then that's the form in which the message from God might come would be in decrees of councils or papal encyclicals.
But that's not the form. That's not the plan. The blueprint is the scriptures. And so they're sort of counterfeit plans. And they're trying to put like their architect stamp on it and say, oh, yeah, this has been approved.
And we go, that's actually not God's architectural stamp. I know it is. It's over here, actually. And his architectural stamp is on the scriptures. And so the scriptures are the formal cause of the Reformation in that sense.
And when we talk about the matter, the subject matter that was being debated, it was specifically what is now the gospel as a content of thought, a doctrine set. So there's this idea of the source of authority, which blueprint are we looking at?
And then there's, you know, the material itself that is being taught in the scriptures, which is the gospel of justification by grace alone, through faith alone, apart from the works of the law. And so that idea of the matter that's being subject, the subject matter that's being taught on is why it is the material cause.
It's the actual information that becomes the subject of debate. So there's disagreement about how man is saved, and it's because there's disagreement about the authority from which we get the information.
And yes, and we have to be very careful when we read documents, church constitutions, and descriptions of what a particular group claims to be their belief system and mission statement and so on, because people have become very clever, I'm sure you would agree, during the growing ecumenical movement between heirs of the Reformation, Protestants, and Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, and you will have sometimes high accolades of the scripture and high accolades of grace and faith.
But Rome never rejected the essential nature of those things. They never rejected the inerrancy of scripture. They never rejected that grace was not necessary and that faith is not necessary. The whole issue boils down to is that Rome has always rejected the sufficiency of these things.
Am I correct on that?
Yeah, that's it. First of all, brother, that's a great point. I hope the listeners really pay attention to the fact that, yes, the people have become very clever at trying to make ecumenical statements, and so the word alone is a really important word to look for.
If somebody says salvation is by faith, okay, the question is, was it by faith alone? If it's by grace, is it by grace alone? If scripture is an authority, is scripture the alone authority, right? And so the word sola, which is Latin for alone, is an emphasis we want to have.
That's why we call them the solas, which is kind of ironic, right, because you're talking about the alones, plural. So this idea that alone is really key, and I think we've seen, obviously, increasing perversion even over time since the Reformation.
For example, Trent, for example, doubled down on the doctrine of scripture in a way that became problematic in two ways. One, there's sort of this idea that you need an authoritative interpreter to know what text is actually scriptural, but also the assertion that the Apocrypha is a part of scripture became sort of an infallible assertion, according to Rome there.
And so then they deny the essence of scripture ultimately there by adding to it and making it necessary to have an external authority both to interpret it and also to be able to know which scripture is actually scripture.
And then when you get to how they deal with salvation by grace, you're right, they never denied the need for grace, but they had what was called sort of a semi-Pelagian type of position where they're mixing in human merit with the idea of grace and with faith, also not denying the need for faith.
But one of the things that's interesting is that the doctrine of faith in Rome is something where they say you don't need to actually believe the particular subject matter, you just need to believe that whatever the church teaches on the subject matter would be true.
And so it's sort of the faith becomes explicit in the church, but implicit in terms of the doctrine. And furthermore, they also have since Vatican II, Rome has asserted that you can be saved by sort of the light of nature and the light that you have.
And so if a person is sort of more holy than other people, there's a possibility of sort of a salvation because it's ultimately in Christ. I mean, there's all this kind of there's a number of ways in which over time they have added perversions to it and in some ways sort of obviously denied that.
But I think you're right. Historically, there's still this sort of honoring of scripture in name and honoring of grace and honoring of faith, but not scripture alone, grace alone or faith alone.
And of course, the the slanderous claim of Rome is that the reformers, perhaps even more specifically Martin Luther, removed the apocryphal books, which they call the Deuterocanonical books from the canon.
But some of Rome's greatest minds, including Jerome, who was commissioned to create the Latin Vulgate, he did not want to include those books because Jerome knew that the Jews never revered them as scripture.
And even Cardinal Cayetan rejected the apocryphal as being part of the canon. So this is not some novel idea of Protestants, is it?
No, absolutely not. And I think it's it is it is obvious that when you look at the Old Testament, one of the neat points that the Westminster Confession makes is that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew.
And you can talk about whether or not Aramaic is a type of Hebrew. And I think I would categorize Aramaic as a subcategory since it's got the same letters. But Aramaic and Hebrew being the language of the covenant people of God in the Old Testament.
And, you know, this this this language being the language that the Old Covenant was written in when it was a national body, when the church was national, right, it was focused on on Israel. And then the language that was most common to the nations at the time of the New Testament being Greek.
And so you have you have the Hebrew for the Old Covenant and you have you have Greek for the New Covenant so that it could go out to the nations. And so that's a part of the design feature for going out to the nations in the New Covenant.
But another thing is you don't have any claims of prophets during the time of of most of the apocrypha. And there's there's an acknowledgment generally that, for example, the extra chapters that are trying to be tacked on to Daniel are not from Daniel, not from his lifetime.
And so you end up with sort of alterations of the scripture and you end up with this idea of of scripture coming not through prophets. And so the Protestant doctrine that scripture is self-attesting and self-canonizing is in part because of this idea that there are there are revelatory officers that are called by God and he gives them the authority and the empowerment and by the Holy Spirit causes them to speak his words and to to write them out so that it's in scripture.
Scripture is is is breathed out by God. And so when we when we think about this idea of scripture being breathed out by God, you know, it's God's word when it's given, not it doesn't become God's word by some sort of process from an external counsel or whatever.
And and so, you know, the Protestant doctrine and the view that these books are written by by revelatory officers is is very different from this idea that these books are sort of written and they become the word of God because of the authority of the church after the fact.
And so so that that also plays into it, the view of these documents and whether they came from revelatory officers. So the Apocrypha does not claim to be from revelatory officers in most cases and is not from revelatory officers.
And so that's, I think, an important part of that as well.
And folks, you could actually look up a really excellent debate that I arranged a number of years ago between my friend, Dr. James R. White of Alpha to Make it Ministries and Roman Catholic apologist Gary Machuta.
His name is spelt M-I-C-H-U-T-A. If you look that up on YouTube, James White versus Gary Machuta, this would have been the great debate for I'm sorry. No, actually, it was the great debate. Nine.
I'm sorry. I'm mixing up my Roman numerals here. The great the great debate. Nine is the Apocrypha scripture. And that was a really excellent debate, not only because of the content of the debate, but it was one of those excellent debates where the demeanor of both men was focused purely and completely on the issue that they were debating.
There was no ad hominem or anything like that. Some of the not all, but some of the Roman Catholic apologists out there have used a lot of ad hominem and mean spiritedness. And this one was just purely an academic exercise.
And it was great to great great to witness. But we're going to go to our first commercial break. If you have a question for Pastor David Reese on the souls of the Reformation and the tulip of Calvinism, our email address is Chris Arnzen at Gmail dot com.
Chris Arnzen at Gmail dot com. As always, give us your first name, at least your city and state of residence and your country of residence. If you live outside the USA, we'll be right back. Please do not go away.
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That's RoyalDiadem .com, mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Pastor David Reese of Puritan Reform Church in Phoenix, Arizona, and also the CEO of ArmoredRepublic .com. And we are entering, we have already entered into part two of a three part discussion on the Solas of the Reformation and the five points of Calvinism.
And if you could pick up wherever you'd like to in regard to this topic.
Thank you, brother. So just to be clear, as we move into grace alone, this second Sola, grace alone, what we're talking about, again, is the effectual cause of salvation. So God's grace is something we need to know what that is.
When we talk about God's grace, sometimes when we read the scriptures, there's kind of two ways that we find grace used. One is we find grace used to mean the attitude of God, his desire for the well-being of an object that is unworthy.
Sometimes it can be used also just to be kind of a general statement for the idea of the attitude of favor. But the other can be gifts that are given out of favor or even sometimes that would ordinarily be associated with his favor.
So signs of favor. So when we look at the scriptures, we're looking to understand in the context how it's being used. Is it being used in reference to the signs of favor, things like what we normally call blessings, or is it talking about the actual attitude of God?
And so when we think about grace, I want to give the definition. First, I want to break that down. Grace is demerited favor. Grace is demerited favor. So what is favor? Favor is an attitude in the mind.
It's the desire for the well-being of the object. So if I have favor toward you, I desire your well-being. If God has favor toward you, he's desiring what your well-being. You could kind of say favor is synonymous with love.
So love is, again, the desire for the well-being of the object. Now, love could either be earned because of the excellence of the object, right? We could love something because of its excellence. Or love could be not on the basis of the excellence of the object.
Now, if we think about Adam before the fall, Adam before the fall was righteous. And Christ, when we think about Christ, Christ has never sinned. And so he is perfectly righteous. And when you think about the righteous angels who have not fallen, they're perfectly righteous.
And so with the righteous angels, God's love is not a love that's brooding grace. It's a love that is a merited love. It's a love of the angels because of their obedience, their righteousness. Love of Christ is because of his excellence and his righteousness, not as an object of demerit.
And Adam, had he not fallen, would have been an object meriting God's favor. But he fell. And so he was created in righteousness and then fell. And that, of course, was God's plan. But the idea of the covenant of works was a covenant that's established with the idea of do this and live.
And if you if you break the covenant, then death is the penalty. So God's wrath or hatred towards the fallen angels, they have no mediator. They have no way of salvation. And for those who Christ did not die, they are objects of God's wrath in terms of human beings as well.
And so the objects of God's love in terms of God having an attitude of favor toward them, they do not merit God's favor. It is it is unmerited because we don't we're not righteous. We don't deserve his favor.
And in fact, not only is it unmerited, but it's even demerited. We deserve God's hatred. We we don't deserve his love. We deserve his hatred. And so the grace of God is God's demerited favor. Now, the demerited favor of God is something that when you think about God's favor, the other thing is the scriptures teach us that everything God wants, he does.
He does all that he pleases in the heavens and in the earth and the seas. He does everything he wants. There are no desires in God as the most wise that go frustrated or unfulfilled. And so that being the case, if he favors a person, he's seeking their well-being, he's seeking their good.
And the good of a person is to know God and to enjoy him forever, to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. And so he's going to cause us to get what's good for us if he desires our good. It is necessary by the nature of his of his own omnipotence that if he desires the salvation of a person, if he desires the well-being of a person, they will get it.
And so his love for the righteous angels causes them to be maintained in their righteousness and his love for elect men causes them to become believers in him, to become believers in the gospel and to he causes them to understand and believe the gospel.
And so grace being the effectual cause, God's desire for the well-being of the object results in a golden chain, a series of things that bring about the ultimate good of the object. So God's grace necessitates the salvation of the objects of grace.
Now, God's grace also.
I'm sorry. I'm sorry you pause there. So I thought you might have been finished with the sentence.
Keep going. I was hiding a cough.
I do that all the time.
So so so God's grace necessarily results in the giving of the instrument of salvation, which is faith and necessarily results in the preservation. And so we get to Tulip. Tulip is a defense. Tulip is a defense of the solos.
And so you had a question.
Run into it. Well, I wanted to make sure that something that you said didn't fly over the heads of our listeners because it's very important. You were making a contrast between unmerited favor and demerited favor.
And while unmerited favor is true, it's really not an adequate description of the mercy and grace of Christ in saving evil men. And to give an example that I've tried to remember to give to folks about this is that an example of unmerited favor would be if you're walking down the street and there's a homeless man sitting on the ground.
Perhaps he's got his hat stretched out in his hand because he wants you to throw money in it. And you do you throw money in there and say, God bless you. And you may even buy him a sandwich or something.
That's unmerited favor. That man did not deserve that. He didn't earn it from you. And you through kindness, you gave it to him. But what actually happens in salvation and the way you phrased it, demerited favor is that man, that that homeless man, he murders everybody in your family and burns your house down and beats you near death.
And then you include him in your will. Wouldn't that be more of a description of what's going on here?
Yeah, I think that's a very memorable and powerful differentiation. And I think that idea of exactly that, right, there's giving somebody something when they haven't earned it. That's unmerited favor.
And there's giving somebody something when they, in fact, have have earned the opposite. They've reserved. They've deserved punishment. Right. And so giving them a blessing, giving them that desiring their well-being and acting to secure their well-being.
That is the demerited favor. Exactly right. Amen. So I think that that's excellent illustrations. And I hope that helps to make that clear for everybody. So that idea of of demerited favor, that we deserve God's hatred and he gives us his love.
And and you use the word mercy, and that's a really key word here because people, I think, understand mercy a little bit more easily in terms of this idea of mercy is given in response to guilt. If you're going to, mercy results in the forgiveness of a debt.
Right. And so grace, we often think of the positive giving there. But I think it's important that we tie those words together, that the grace of God is his gift of favor to us is also merciful in that it's overlooking and forgiving sin.
And so there's always it's always a there's a forgiveness with the grace of God. The grace of God is is forgiving demerits as well as giving things that are unearned. And so when we think about the grace of God and the fact that God is all powerful, his grace, his desire to save a person necessitates that he will bring about that salvation.
And so we talk about how faith, which is the next Sola, is a is a gift of grace. Right. The God gives faith. As a gift of grace. And so Ephesians, when you read Ephesians chapters one and two in particular, you really get that laid out very plainly and clearly.
And you know that when the scriptures equate an absence of faith with a spiritual deadness, and that's because they also equate faith itself with everlasting life. John 17 3 says this is everlasting life to know you, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.
And so that idea of the knowledge of God or faith being spiritual life, grace causes spiritual life. And, you know, you don't get the consent of a dead man to be resurrected. The the work of God in this grace and the grace is irresistible.
Why is it irresistible? Is it because he causes people, you know, kicking and screaming to, you know, to to believe? No, the believing makes them so that they don't kick and scream. The believing makes it so that they are now in agreement.
The whole idea is he causes the agreement. So the salvation is by grace alone, that attitude of demerited favor, and it includes the gift of faith. And that is the work of grace. It's a gift of grace is to give faith.
And so, Brother Dylan, you want to say before we jump into faith?
No, no. Keep going.
All right, so when we talk about faith as the alone instrument of justification or the alone instrumental cause of salvation, again, the idea here is. You know, scripture is the contract, grace is the powerful cause of bringing everything about, and and faith is sort of the signature of the contract, but an instrument of an agreement.
You know, if you and I wrote out a contract, brother, and we say, OK, we're going to sign this contract and that puts it into effect. Well, the contract might have terms like maybe I say, you know, I'm going to give you $100 and you're going to give me, you know, a nice leather wallet.
OK, so then then we have the contract. It has the terms laid out. And then we both sign the contract. Those signatures are the instrument now that the signing of the contract is the instrument of that contract being enforced in terms of the legal establishment of the contract.
And then the meritorious cause in the contract would be if I give you the hundred dollars now, you owe me the wallet or if you give me the wallet, I owe you the hundred dollars. And so the meritorious cause of each of the giving of the various parts is the other person giving.
So when we think about salvation and we think about the idea that scripture is the contract, grace is the powerful cause bringing about these things. And faith is the kind of the signature on the contract.
It's not a meritorious action. It's not something that makes it so that we earn salvation. It's not like God said, you know, I used to require perfect and perpetual obedience. But frankly, it's pretty hard to find.
And so, you know, I'm going to lower the bar here to faith, faith. That's enough. Just if you could just if you could just believe that's sufficient. Now, it's not that it's not the meritorious grounds.
It's not that God has lowered the standard. It's that Christ perfectly kept the standard and faith connects us as the instrument to that. So Christ fulfills the meritorious element. So we'll get to that in more detail later.
But I wanted to kind of help to show where faith fits here. So faith is the connector to the merits of Christ. Faith is the tool. It's the second cause of our salvation. It's the contract acceptance method.
So faith is belief in the scriptures. You have the same word pistis being used for faith or belief. They're the same. The word faith and belief are different in English because we talk about, you know, faith itself is belief.
And if I have faith, I believe. And if I have continuously faith, I'm believing. Notice the way I had to explain that grammar, right? We don't say, you know, I'm faithing right now. We say I'm believing.
And so there's a peculiarity in English where the words, you know, can be dealt with as a verb in the same way. So we have faith and then we have belief. Now, faith could be like the faith, the content, or it could be faith as in believing the content.
But we don't have this sort of verb form of the word faith. That's why we have a difference between faith and belief. Sometimes people will try to make them distinct. They're not distinct. To have faith is to believe.
To believe is to have faith. And to believe a thing is to understand it. You can't believe something if you don't understand it. So to believe is to understand. And then it is to think it is true. It is to give mental assent.
It is. But it's not just it's not the same thing as a verbal assent, right? You can say I can say, oh, yeah, I believe the gospel. And I could inwardly not believe it. No, you have to actually inwardly think it's true.
Now, when we think about the gospel, the gospel is content, it's thought content, it's information. So what do we have to believe? What is what is a saving faith? Well, a saving faith is is believing Christ.
It's believing the scriptures, is believing the news of the scriptures, the gospel. And so in the scriptures, we have a distinction between law and gospel. The word law is used in three different ways and the word gospel is used in three different ways.
But what we're talking about right now in terms of law, gospel distinction is, you know, the law is the commandments do this. It's imperatives. The gospel is news, it's promises, it's indicatives, it's it's Jesus died for your sins.
Right. It's it's statements of of fact, as opposed to commandments. And so the idea that you are telling what is in the gospel as news, as opposed to commanding as law. That's the way in which we would contrast law and gospel now and again, there's a different usage of those terms, but this is what's been talked about.
And Lutherans really like to emphasize law, gospel distinction. I think it's a really valuable part of what Luther did. And then, you know, in the in reformed circles, you also talk about the difference from the covenant of grace and the covenant of works.
So the covenant of works associates with law, the covenant of grace, with gospel. I think those are helpful ways of thinking about that. So when we're thinking about what solving saving faith is, saving faith believes the news, the gospel.
And that's the same thing as believing Christ. That's the same thing as believing what the scriptures reveal. If you believe what the scriptures teach and you believe the gospel and you believe Christ, I've just repeated myself three times.
And so, you know, we have to believe that the law teaches us what is good and evil. And it shows us that we are breakers of God's law. And it shows us that God, who is just and gave us that law, is a condemner of wickedness.
And so we deserve we deserve to die. We deserve spiritual death. We deserve hell forever. We deserve the wrath of God. We deserve the curse of God. And so that's the part that shows us that's our need.
It's the first use of the law is to show us our need of a savior. Then the gospel teaches us who Christ is. He's the God man. He's the second Adam who comes to pay for the sins of his people. He is the lamb of God.
And it also shows us what Christ did as the lamb. He paid for our sins. He died. He provides atonement. He provides propitiation. He turns away the wrath of God and gives us his favor. He expiates our guilt.
He dies to pay for our sins, to remove guilt. And he does that as a substitute. He represents me, right? He, Christ is the God man who actually atoned for my sins, me individually. He's my substitute.
And furthermore, I can rest there. There's nothing else I need to do. There's nothing else. So those are the things to assent to. Those are the things to believe is, is I deserve the punishment of God for my sins.
I believe that Christ is the God man who came to take away the sins of God's people, the sins of the world, the sins of the people of God from every nation. That he did that and he represents me personally.
And there's nothing else I have to do. And we have to go to that's that's the.
I was just going to say, we have to go to our midway break. But if you'd like to finish that sentence.
And so that's what you have to believe. That's that's the gospel. And we'll continue on that and we continue with faith next time.
And we will be right back after these messages from our sponsors.
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That's also the email address where you can send in a question to David Reese as we continue part two of an envisioned three-part discussion on the solas of the Reformation and the five points of Calvinism.
Chrisarnsen at gmail .com. Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. I just wanted to read one listener question because it does connect with something that you just said before the break, and I'm looking for it now.
Oh here it is. We have Claudia in Hammer, South Dakota. Claudia asks, you said earlier that the gospel is not a command to be obeyed. I'm wondering then how you interpret 2 Thessalonians chapter 1 verse 8, in flaming fire dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Could you please explain that? Give me the citation one more time. This is 2 Thessalonians 1 verse 8, and it says, in flaming fire dealing out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
Yeah, so the Gordian gospel has three.
Uses in the scriptures, and sometimes the word gospel is used to refer to the whole council of God, which would include commands. Sometimes it's used to refer to the New Testament, which would include commands.
Sometimes it's used to refer to the more narrow message of the salvation, the news, right? So 1 Corinthians chapter 15, where Paul lists out, you know, I declare unto you the gospel, and he gives some propositions there.
That is that third use. Here in 2 Thessalonians, either this is, you know, one of the first two uses, or obey not the gospel is being used as a term phrase for not believing it. And so I'd have to, I've studied this before, and I can't remember which of those conclusions I've come to in the past, but those are the possible readings that avoid a denial of justification by faith alone.
And so, but it's, I think, this idea of, you know, the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ is, again, we deal with the whole message of scripture, which includes law, is one of the definitions, or the New Testament, and that would be what I'm inclined towards there.
So I think it's important to realize that the saving message of the gospel is, you know, when we have justification by faith alone, we're thinking about, very specifically, the fact that we are breakers of the law, and our disobedience is the problem, and we are in need of an obedient one to take our place.
And so I would simply want to emphasize the fact that justification is by faith alone, and that faith is in the God-man, Jesus Christ, what he has done as our substitute, as our atoning, you know, the lamb in our place, and that there's nothing else for us to do beside what Christ has already done, and that faith is the instrument there.
And so that is, that's the elements I want to make sure to emphasize in that understanding.
Okay, great. You want to move on, or do you want me to take another listener question?
I, you can go, yeah, go ahead, I have another question. Let's do that before we….
Okay, we have Cindy in Findley, Ohio. I am familiar with the three uses of the law, but you spoke of grace being referred to in three different ways in scripture, or three uses of grace. I don't recall exactly how you phrased it.
Could you please elaborate?
Yeah, so grace, again, is the, in its proper sense, grace is an attitude of God. In its proper sense, grace is an attitude of God. And so the desire for the well-being of the object is favor or love, and grace is demerited favor.
And so this idea that that's this first sense or use of the term, and so I don't mean like uses and like the uses of law, the three uses of the law is like three ways in which humans can use the law. But I mean like three different ways in which the term is defined.
And so grace is an attitude in God's mind of demerited favor. Sometimes you will see the word grace used in scripture to refer to favor in general. So the word charis is a common word translated as grace in the Greek, charis.
And so you'll have it sometimes as kind of grace itself, like a demerited favor, or you'll see just favor generally. And then you'll also have it referring to, thirdly, the gifts that God gives. So sometimes you'll have like sanctification or something like that, or some sort of a blessing that God gives will be referred to in that way.
And so that's, for example, there's a common reformed term, you know, the outward and ordinary means of grace. Well, the point there is not that the word of God's sacrament or prayer cause God's attitude toward us to change from unfavorable to favorable.
The point is that the gifts of grace, sanctification in particular, are normally given through the outward and ordinary means of grace. And so we kind of see how even in reformed terminology, that's sort of a way sometimes the word grace is used.
So grace is properly an attitude of God. It's typically the demerited favor of God. Sometimes it's used broadly to refer to his favor. And lastly, sometimes it's used to refer to the particular gifts that he gives.
Great. Well, I'll throw out one more listener question, and then you could move on to some of your main points. Let's see here. We have Braxton in Bat Cave, North Carolina. I love that name. In fact, I first heard about Bat Cave, North Carolina from my friend Joe Scarlotta, who is originally from Long Island and was a member of the same church with me on Long Island.
He owns Joey's New York Bagels in Henderson, North Carolina, Hendersonville, I'm sorry, North Carolina. And that's pretty close to you. That's why it came up in conversation. I believe he knew a pastor or a member of a Baptist church in Bat Cave, North Carolina.
But Braxton says, where on earth do the hyper-Arminians get the idea that Calvinists are loose when it comes to morals and repentance? Because that's definitely nothing resembling, obviously, Pastor Reese, what any of our great heroes of the faith who are Calvinist ever conveyed in their writings.
And I've never heard a sermon from a Reformed pastor that gave the impression that we are teaching that the Bible gives us the liberty to be licentious and so on. So if you.
Could, do you have any idea where that comes from? I think it comes from a false implication of salvation being by grace alone. You run into this with Romanists a lot, right, where they'll kind of say, well, if salvation is by grace alone, then why not just sin all the time?
The apostle Paul brings it up as an expected objection. I think it's sort of the fleshly mind responds to hearing the gospel and says, well, if the gospel is true, then I'll just do whatever I want. And it's a failure to recognize that, look, the gospel is saving us from our sin and misery, and those two are conjoined.
When we sin, we're slaves to sin, and we are building up our misery. We're bringing temporal curses on ourselves, and if we're reprobate, we're bringing a permanent curse. And so this idea then comes from a not necessary inference, but an application that would be made by people who want to be sinning and would say, well, this is what I would do if I didn't have to do what's necessary myself to be saved.
And so I think it also kind of, there's this idea that there's a small group of people called hyper-Calvinists who teach that the law of God requires people to only do things that they're able to do.
And so therefore, the law of God wouldn't apply to unbelievers.
Yes, Spurgeon did battle with those folks in the 19th century.
Right. And some of the objections that you have to come into where they go, we don't have to preach the gospel, we don't have to evangelize promiscuously, we don't have to evangelize to everybody because we should only evangelize to the elect because telling people to repent and believe and telling people the gospel is sort of a waste of time casting pearls before swine if they're not elect.
And so Spurgeon's classic response was, well, I'll tell you what, if there were golden E's on the forehead of all the elect, I would limit my preaching to them, but until I can know with certainty who the elect are, I'm going to preach to everybody.
Right. So and that was a good glib way to respond. But they also just the Lord Jesus Christ commands us to preach the gospel to the whole world, going to all the nations. We don't know which individuals of those nations are going to be saved.
And so we go and preach the gospel everywhere. So that being the case, I think there's a misunderstanding there. The other thing is, it's funny because Calvinists are typically the only ones that actually try to teach the law.
I mean, the Ten Commandments are not something you hear preached in broader Armenian churches. The Ten Commandments are largely ignored, and in particular, the Fourth Commandment. And so this idea that the law of God, you know, the law of God has three uses in the Reformed faith, and that was mentioned by an earlier listener, but the law of God has three uses.
The first is a mirror to show us our sinfulness and to show us the holiness of God and therefore our need of a Savior. The second is that the preaching of the law creates social norms and institutional authority that helps to restrain evil.
It's a chain. So it's a mirror and it's a chain, a chain to restrain evil, the outbreak of wickedness. And thirdly, it is a lamp unto the feet of those who have been regenerated, those who know the gospel, and therefore they know what to do and how to walk.
And, you know, the Heidelberg Catechism famously is organized in the guilt, grace, gratitude pattern, which is the guilt shows us our need, or guilt in the law shows us our need of salvation. The gospel preached shows us the grace of God and how we are saved.
And then as a result, now we need to seek to live in such a way as to show our gratitude, and gratitude is the response to grace. And so we were slaves to sin and we've been freed from that slavery to be out of sin and to be slaves to righteousness, to be free from our misery, to be able to joyfully and gratefully do what the law of God commands, not as a way of earning our salvation, but because we've already been saved from the law and from our condemnation under it.
And so that's the good life. We're saved from sin to be free from sin. And so I think only Calvinists have a way of dealing with that. And only Calvinists, you know, with this free preaching of the grace of God, make it so that we have a way to look at the law properly and to think about it properly and to not, you know, get away from it.
If you think that the law is necessary, if you think you have to keep the law in order to be saved, in order to be righteous before God, you're going to downplay the law. You're going to dumb it down.
You're going to make it keepable because you're looking for a way to get there. But when you have an honest reading of the Bible, you get the Calvinist reading of the law that it deals with all of our spiritual, you know, crevices and all the hidden things of life.
And it's perfect. It's perfect. And it addresses everything. And so you see the law and how it condemns our horrific sinfulness. And so we can look at the law honestly as Calvinists, knowing that salvation is by grace alone.
And then out of gratitude, knowing how great of a salvation we have from the hugeness of our sin. And so that allows us to be able to deal with the law honestly,.
Looking at it with a Calvinist view. You know, Braxton used a phrase, and I'm not 100 certain where he was going with that phrase, but he did use the phrase hyper-Arminians. And I'm wondering if he's actually talking about historically authentic Arminians or old school Arminians who believe that you could lose your salvation.
And since Reformed people believe in the perseverance and preservation of the saints, some of those old school Arminians view that as a pathway to easy believism. I think that a lot of it is often a misunderstanding or an incorrect mingling of different groups of Christians.
For instance, as you're fully aware, Pastor Reese, there are heretics out there who believe in easy believism, who believe that you can live like a Satan your entire life without repenting, and you'll still go to heaven.
In fact, I remember Charles Stanley wrote that in his book on eternal security, and it's not a rare idea. And so therefore, you have these Arminian folks who are confusing those folks who usually prefer the term eternal security, or once saved, always saved, and they are mingling that together with perseverance and the preservation of the saints, which is a more fully biblically adequate explanation.
Am I making sense here? Yeah, absolutely. So I think that, you know, my response to people who say, you know, they're concerned about easy believism, is they say, well, I believe in impossible believism.
It's not possible for a human being to believe the gospel apart from the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. Amen. And so that idea that it's impossible for us to believe the gospel apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, and when a person is just, you know, saying they believe, and then they're doing a bunch of sin, you know, the book of James tells us their profession of faith is bogus, right?
We shouldn't believe them. Somebody says, I'm a Calvinist, or I believe the gospel, I believe the Bible, and then they're just going around without any concern for breaking the law of God and won't repent from it.
Well, then guess what? You don't believe their profession. You believe that they're a hypocrite. And so, you know, the whole thing, James chapter 2, is about talking about people who profess the faith, but do not give evidence that their profession is valid.
And so, James chapter 2 emphasizes the idea that there are two witnesses that you have to look at for evidence as to whether a person is saved, and those two witnesses are what they say they believe and what they do.
And so, we need the two witnesses of the profession and their external fruit, their works, to believe that a person has credible profession of faith. Now, your assurance of salvation is not based upon your works.
Your assurance of salvation, you know, you're going to sin as a Christian, and you need to repent for particular sins. When you sin, it's going to cause you misery. It's going to cause you doubt. You're like, why, if I'm a Christian, why am I doing this?
Why am I sinning here in this way? And, you know, your sins come from error and ignorance and not believing the truth as you ought to believe it and not taking every thought captive to the Lord Jesus Christ.
And that's the good life. We need to seek to glorify God. That's the life of joy. That's the life that we should pursue, and we're saved from sin so that we can do righteousness, right? Salvation, our salvation is not by our doing righteousness.
It's by Christ doing righteousness, and it's for us to live righteously. And so, what we need to realize is that, but at the same time, you know, our gratitude empowers our obedience. And so, our assurance comes from the Word of God and not from our own works, and the Spirit works by and with the Word of God to create assurance in the believer.
And this assurance makes it so that, you know, we can be assured that we are saved to the same degree that we are sure that we believe the gospel as it is objectively in the scripture. If you believe the gospel as it is objectively given to us in the scripture, then you are saved, and you are going to be bothered by sin, and you are going to rejoice in truth and righteousness and holiness.
And those are necessary fruits. Now, they're not a part of faith, but they're necessary fruits of faith, right? That idea, you know, that we, faith is not an emotion. It's not a relationship. It's not love.
It's not obedience. It's not faithfulness, but it produces better emotion. It produces an enjoyable relationship with God. It produces love and all the fruits of love. It produces obedience. It produces faithfulness, and those are going to happen.
If you believe the gospel, those other things are going to happen. Now, we got cases like, you know, the guy on the cross next to Jesus, the thief, who, you know, hears the gospel, first mocks, and then makes profession, and then dies, right?
Well, the only good work he managed to pull off was basically asking Jesus to reward him when they get to heaven.
And rebuking the other thief. And rebuking the other thief.
Yeah, that's true. That's true. He rebuked the other thief. So, that was his list of good works right there. But at the same time, we can't even do any good works apart from faith, right? It's impossible to please God without faith, right?
The only people doing any good works at all are believers. Because if we're not doing something out of a faith in the Word of God, and for the goal of the glory of God, then it's not a good work. And so, the only good works that are ever occurring are the good works of believers.
Amen. And isn't that in Romans 8 .8? Those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Yes, Romans 8 .8. So, therefore, we need to be in spirit in order to please God, which means we need to be regenerate.
And that's how we can offer God a faith that pleases him, is because we are no longer in the flesh. And one thing I wanted to say before we move off this topic, wouldn't you agree that there's something wrong with a preacher, teacher, professor, author, etc., or just average Christian, something wrong with their understanding of grace, if nobody ever misunderstands them like the Apostle Paul knew, people would understand him.
And he gives this caveat to what he is preaching about grace in Romans 6 .15, and he says, what then, shall we sin because we are not under law but under grace? May it never be. And, of course, there are other translations that word that a little differently.
But the point is, Paul knew that people would misunderstand what he was talking about. Am I making sense?
Absolutely. No, I think that's exactly right. I expect, as a preacher of the Word of God, my expectation is that people are going to tell me that I'm antinomian, and they're also going to call me a legalist.
And I get both regularly, right? So, people frequently say that I'm teaching that we don't need to obey the law because of how I'm teaching that the gospel is justification by grace alone, through faith alone, apart from the works of the law.
They're going, that's lawlessness. And I go, no, I'm not saying you should break the law. I'm saying we're saved from our law breaking. And then, on the other side, I teach people that we need to care about the details of God's law, as summarized, you know, in the two great commandments or the 10 commandments, and explained in the Westminster Shorter Catechism and Larger Catechism.
And so, you know, I'll deal with people, and I'll talk to them about they need to obey God here, they need to do this and not that, and the scriptures say to do this and that other thing, and they'll go, that's legalism.
I go, no, no, no. Legalism has three definitions. It's either, you know, you think that you're justified by doing good works, which is not what I'm teaching, or it's that you think that I'm inventing man-made law, which, you know, if that's the case, let's argue about the meaning of the text.
Or you're saying legalism is saying we know the difference between good and evil by God's law and what it teaches. If it's the third one, sure, call me a legalist. But the first two, no, that's not what I'm teaching.
And so, that idea, the law of God teaches us the difference between good and evil, and we ought to do good. We ought to always do good. And also, justification is by grace alone, through faith alone,.
Apart from the works of the law. And by the way, Braxton was correct that there are people who make that accusation against Calvinism. I even brought up recently on the show about how I remember so clearly when I worked for a Salem media affiliate radio station in New York City, Raoul Reese, who is affiliated with the Calvary Chapel movement.
He actually had the audacity to say once on his show, there are people out there who believe you can live like the devil your whole life and go to heaven when you die and never repent. Man, that's not in the Bible.
John Calvin made that up, man. And he revealed that he could not have possibly ever read a single sentence by John Calvin, and was therefore—.
Not a sentence.
And he was publicly slandering not only Calvin, but everybody who agrees with him. And that's just a reminder to everybody, including myself and anybody I ever have on the show, we've got to do our homework before we start publicly being critical of those of different beliefs.
And because bearing false witness doesn't—it's not only a sin when we bear false witness against a godly person. Bearing false witness against anybody is a sin. You know, if somebody's arrested for burglary and we falsely claim they also murdered somebody, that's still false witness.
So anyway. But you could pick up on some of the important matters you want to address, because I know the time is going to fly by quickly.
Absolutely. So when we get into the last two solos, we were talking about Scripture alone, we talked about grace alone, we talked about faith alone. And so now I want to talk about Christ alone. So Christ alone is the assertion, again, this is about the meritorious cause of our salvation.
And so when we talk about Christ alone as the meritorious cause, we're talking about the legal basis of God's judgment that we're righteous. We're talking about the grounds, the reason why his judgment is just.
So Christ is the alone meritorious cause of our salvation. So we're guilty in Adam. Adam sinned, he was a representative in our place, in our stead, he sinned. We were born, we were conceived even, in our mother's wombs with a corrupt nature so that we have, from the beginning, not believed what we ought to believe, not glorified God as we ought, not made the choices that we should, and we committed all sorts of particular sins out of that corrupt nature.
And so Christ dies as a substitute for us, as a second Adam, and he fully satisfies all of the debt for all of our sins. He pays for the guilt of Adam imputed to us, he pays for our corrupt nature, and he pays for all the particular bad stuff we've done.
All of our demerits are paid for, the whole debt is satisfied, it's paid for, so we're counted as innocent in Christ. Also, Christ perfectly kept the whole law, he did everything the law of God requires, he did the wholeness of what the law says, which is a perfect rule of obedience, and so his perfect righteousness is the perfect fulfillment of the law.
And so his perfect obedience provides our merits, it gives us the credit to be viewed as righteous, to be counted as righteous. And so in the court of God, in a court of law, under the judgment of God, he views Christ's payment as removing our debt, and he views his obedience as our righteousness.
And so that's called imputation, right? We have to deal with, we deserve death for our own sins, we deserve death for the sins of Adam, we deserve death for our own corruption, and so we have to deal with the imputation of guilt, but that imputation of guilt is paid for by Christ's death, that it's removed, it's expiated, the guilt is taken care of, it's erased.
And so we have the imputation of our sin to Christ, he pays for it, and then we have him perfectly keeping the law, and all the credit for that, all the merit for that being imputed to us. And so that triple imputation is the legal structure of the covenant of grace, so that we're counted righteous before God based upon that substitutionary work of Christ.
And so do I have time to move into the last one here, or should we, do we need to pause and go to break? I think we should just go into the break,.
Because I don't want to interrupt you mid-sentence, and this is the final break, so. Sounds good. If anybody wants to join us, now is your time to send in your question, chrisarnzen at gmail .com, c-h-r-i-s-a-r-n-z-e-n at gmail .com, give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence, don't go away.
I'm Dr. Joe Moorcraft, pastor of Heritage Presbyterian Church in Cumming, Georgia,.
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Welcome back, and Pastor David Reese, if you could now please pick up on your thread here, on these important things of church history that we all should be aware of, the solos of the Reformation and the Five Points of Calvinism.
Absolutely. So again, you know, as we're rounding out here, you know, we talk about which is this idea that, you know, Scripture, not the church, not tradition, is the authority. Salvation is by grace alone.
Salvation is not by our own resources or merits. Salvation is by faith alone and not by works or anything to be added. And salvation is by the mediation of Christ alone and not our own merits, not the merits of the saints or mediation of the saints, not by Mary and her mediation or anything, and not the mediation of any mere creature, it's only by the mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ.
And lastly, now we get to the final here, we're looking at the idea that salvation serves the purpose of giving glory or displaying the glory of God alone and not any other. And so the triune God is glorified in the system of salvation that is laid out in the Scriptures.
And so, you know, who gets the glory, or in other words, who is displayed as being great in this system of salvation? God has designed it so as to accomplish his purpose, and the purpose he has is to show his glory, to show his attributes, to show in particular his attribute of mercy.
And we need to remember, evil exists in order to show God's justice, right? God can reward goodness without there being any evil, but he can't punish evil without there being evildoers and evil they've done.
And so also with mercy, you know, God can give people just rewards for doing righteousness, but he cannot give people rewards that are merciful. He can't give gracious gifts to people who are not evildoers.
So, you know, God didn't need evil to exist, but if he was going, you know, logically, if he was going to have objects that would receive punishment for wickedness, there was going to have to be wicked people, wicked things.
And if there were going to be recipients of mercy or grace, there had to be people who had demerited, who needed to be forgiven and needed to receive gift there. So this serves the purpose in history of displaying God's glory, his attribute of mercy.
And so we need to remember that God is the one who gets all the glory and salvation. He's the one who reveals in scripture. He's the one whose grace is the effectual cause of salvation. He's the one who gives the gift of faith.
He is the object of faith, and he is the mediator. And so he gets all the glory. And so the universe is the theater in which God's glory is displayed. History is the play that goes on in the theater. The author of the play is God, and the theme of the story is the display of God's glory.
And the Bible is the commentary that helps us to understand the play. It tells us what's going on. And Judgment Day is going to be a detailed analysis of everything that's happened and the giving out of rewards, whether it's punishment or whether it's reward in terms of the positive sense that occurs.
And so that's what all this does. It all displays the glory of God. And so Judgment Day is at the end of the story, and that's because God's going to show his justice and mercy in great clarity and in a powerful climactic time.
And so the last thing to be executed is the first thing in his intention. Just like an architect does not get to actually bring about the conclusion of his goal in the blueprints until he finishes the last piece of the building, so too God's display of his glory in creation and in providence does not occur in its full form until the Day of Judgment, where everything is brought to light and even the hidden things are proclaimed from the housetops.
The system of salvation in the Scriptures gives all.
The glory to God alone. Hallelujah. And the system of Reformed theology is really the only Christian system or thought process or belief system or doctrine anywhere found within Christianity where that is the ultimate conclusion, logically.
You will have those who are not Reformed and maybe even anti-Reformed who will claim, oh, I give God all the glory. And every bit of credit goes to the Lord Jesus Christ for my salvation. They may say that, but if you break down their belief system, they can't possibly come to that conclusion, can they?
No, they can't. And you're absolutely right. So the systems of the Scripture, the Scripture cannot be broken. The Scripture is a systematic whole. The denial of any piece of it breaks down the system.
And this system is the gospel revealed in Scripture, and it is designed to give all the glory to God. And when you take out pieces, if you say it's not Scripture alone is the authority, you're taking away God's glory and knowledge.
It is not grace alone, and it's human nature that's capable of doing something or adding something when you're giving part of the glory to the creature. The same with making it so that it's of works rather than faith.
It's of faith that it may be of grace and it's of grace so that we can't boast. It's a systematic.
Whole. All right, we have time for one last question, I believe. We have June in Uniondale, Long Island, New York. And June asks, do you have a book or books, plural, that you would recommend that go through systematically the solos of the Reformation?
So that's hard. I know a lot of good.
Books on them, but it's ones that go through them as a whole. One thing I would say, Gary Crampton has a really great book on solo scriptura. It's called By Scripture Alone, in which he contrasts it with Rome.
And Pastor Philip Kaiser has a really great book on canon called The Canon of Scripture. Those two together are the ones I hand out to people for Scripture Alone. The other thing I would also like to say is, as far as justification goes and the linking of grace, faith and Christ's work there, I think Clark's book called The Atonement is magnificent on laying out Christ's mediation.
And we find that the Everlasting Righteousness by Horatius Bonner is great on the work of Christ as well and on saving faith. And so is Justification by Faith Alone by Charles Hodge. So those are the books that I would throw out to people on that.
And when we go through Tulip next time, Brian Schwartley's book on Tulip is amazing. So we'll talk about that a little bit more next time. Those are some of my good recommendations relating to.
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Well, I'd like you to summarize right now what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners today before we go off the air, Pastor Reese.
What I want everybody to walk away with is the realization that Scripture alone is the authority over our doctrine, what we are to believe, and what we are to do with our lives. And it is not church tradition.
It's not the ancients. It's not private spirits. It's not the church authority teaching. You're to judge all of it by Scripture alone. Grace is the only source of our effectual cause of salvation. We don't have power in our own human nature to save ourselves.
There's no other power apart from the grace of God. Grace is the alone cause of our salvation. It's the effectual cause that faith, not works, is the alone instrument to connect us to the righteousness of Christ, and that Christ is the only mediator between God and man, not the saints, not Mary, no other creature.
And all of this gives all the glory to God, and that is what it's designed to do, and it should cause us to be a grateful people that seek to do good works to the glory of God.
Out of gratitude. Amen. Well, I want to make sure that our listeners have your websites, puritanphx .com. That's puritanphx, the abbreviation for phoenixarizona .com, puritanphx .com. And don't forget about armoredrepublic .com, armoredrepublic .com, the business where my guest, Pastor David Reese, is the CEO.
I'd also like to remind you folks that coming up right around the corner on Friday, March 15th, I will be the emcee once again for the fundraising gala for Grace Christian Academy, which is a classical Christian school on Long Island, New York.
It is affiliated with the church where I was formerly a member before moving to Pennsylvania. And that gala, that fundraising gala that I will be emceeing, will be held at the Coral House Catering Hall in Baldwin, Long Island, New York, which is where I launched the decade-long series known as the Great Debates between Dr. James R. White and Roman Catholic apologists.
That's where they all began, at the Coral House in Baldwin. And if you'd like to find out more about this event and attend, go to gcali .com, gcali .com. That's the website for Grace Christian Academy of Long Island.
And last but not least, please folks, if you're a man in ministry leadership and you want to register for my next free pastor's luncheon, send me an email to chrisarnson at gmail .com and put pastor's luncheon in the subject line.
The luncheon will be held Thursday, June 6th at Church of the Living Christ in Loisville, Pennsylvania, featuring Dr. Joel Beeky of Puritan Reformed Theological Seminary in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Everything is free, including a heavy sack of free brand new books that every attendee will receive, personally selected by me and donated by publishers all over the United States and United Kingdom.
I want to thank everybody who listened, and I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater Savior than you are a sinner.