Episode 42: Baptist Covenant Theology (Part 1)

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Welcome to the Ruled Church Podcast. This is my beloved son, with whom

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I am well pleased. He is honored and I get the glory. And by the way, it's even better because you see that building in Perryville, Arkansas?

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You see that one in Pechote, Mexico? Do you see that one in Tuxla, Guterres down there in Chiapas? That building has my son's name on it.

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The church is not a democracy, it's a monarchy. Christ is king. You can't be

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Christian without a local church. You can't do anything better than to bend your knee and bow your heart, turn from your sin and repentance, believe on the

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Lord Jesus Christ, and join up with a good Bible -believing church, and spend your life serving

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Jesus in a local, visible congregation. Everybody needs to be kind today.

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Eddie has 18 tabs open. I don't even know if my computer can run 18 tabs.

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Yeah, man, I'm flying high. 18 tabs. Ready for today's episode, huh?

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That's right. That's right. You can always count on Eddie. I may double your pay for...

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That'd be great. ...for Rural Church Podcast. Welcome to the Rural Church Pod...

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What is it? Welcome to the Rural Church Podcast, episode 42. I'm your co -host,

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Allen Nelson, pastor of Perryville Second Baptist Church in Perryville, Arkansas, with me is my good friend, brother in Christ, co -labor in the ministry,

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Eddie Ragsdale from Marshall. Say hello, Eddie. Hello, everybody.

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How was your weekend? Man, it was good. We're trying to get... We're planning on doing something this fall, hopefully a program, just trying to really build into young men, disciple young men.

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We have a facility we call Thousand Heels, and we're trying to get that ready for that. And so we had a work day there, and a bunch of guys came out, good godly men, and they worked hard, and we got a lot done.

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So we had a really great weekend. I will say this, though, and I may sound kind of strange because my head's been all clogged up all weekend.

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I guess it's this time of year, but I've been dealing with some of that stuff. But we've had a great weekend. How are you guys doing?

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Yeah, great, great weekend. Of course, we're in... What's today? May 10th is the date that we're recording this, and so we're in the midst of baseball season and such.

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And so my youngest son had a birthday yesterday, and church is going well.

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He's preaching through Ephesians, so I'm preaching on the family right now. I gave an overview of Ephesians 5, 22 through 6, 9, and then we'll actually be talking about wives being subject to their husbands this

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Sunday and then next Sunday talk about husbands loving their wives. Hey, that's going to work out great.

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You're going to talk about wives being subject to their husbands on Mother's Day. Right, like, follow me for more church growth tips.

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Like, what a great... Yeah, no, but honestly, it's the Word of God, and I'm excited. It's good.

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It's a good thing, and it's sad that our evangelical culture pushes so hard against that.

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Well, we're going to look at a subject today that is important, and we're just going to jump off tackling

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Baptist covenant theology. Eddie has recently taken a class.

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I've taken the class as well, but Eddie's recently taken a class with Grace Bible Theological Seminary with Dr.

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Jeffrey Johnson on Baptist covenant theology. It's an excellent class, but Baptist covenant theology, if I can just give an overview, it's more than just a defense of believer's baptism.

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Eddie and I are both Credo Baptists. That is, we believe that baptism is by immersion for those who have professed belief, but the case for biblical, for Baptist, which is funny, kind of a slip up there, but this is synonymous,

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Baptist and biblical, obviously, we would say, but Baptist covenant theology is more than just defending the case for Credo baptism.

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It's really a way that we understand the entire scriptures. It's a way that we understand the

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Old and the New Testaments fitting together, and by the way, the word Testament is from the

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Latin testamentum, and so it's the Old Testamentum and the New Testamentum, and that word just means covenant, and so when we read the

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Bible in our understanding of covenants, and so, Eddie, I'm going to let you weigh in real quick, but I'll just kind of say there's our three main positions, maybe, three most popular positions, maybe.

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One, Presbyterian covenant theology, which would say that all the covenants of the

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Old Testament essentially are, besides the one in the garden, are administrations of the one covenant of grace.

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Then you have dispensationalism, which is just an overview, but just a general summary is that they believe essentially

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God is dealing with two groups of people, Israel and the church, and by the way,

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Eddie and I have both benefited and still benefit and are still friends with Presbyterians and dispensationalists, and we're grateful for those brothers and look forward to spending eternity with them, but if we may, in this podcast episode, we'll give our position, and so,

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Eddie, you want to start out with anything I've just said, thoughts, comments, anything like that?

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Well, the first thing, you know, before I had taken this class in covenant theology and had really done much reading around the subject,

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I assumed, oh yeah, covenant theology, it's just the theology of understanding the relationship between the old covenant and the new covenant, and I thought,

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I think I probably, I probably understand that. Taking the class,

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I will say this, I don't think that I believe anything now that I didn't believe at the start of the semester or when

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I started doing, I actually started doing the reading a while before the class, and I believe that I already held all the beliefs that I hold now,

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I just really gained the language for how to talk about those things because I was basing my belief on what

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I was reading in the scripture. What I gained from taking the class and thinking more about how the brothers before me have formulated these thoughts is really the categories and a way to think about these things.

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But if you read the Bible, and this just seems, I don't ever want to sound dismissive like that a brother who's a dispensationalist that would see more of a distinction between Israel and the church or a

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Presbyterian brother who would see more of a, more continuity between the Old Covenant and the

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New Covenant, I don't want to be dismissive to them. But it seems to me, if you read the Bible, the whole

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Bible, and you see God is dealing with all those who are made in His image, right, all of humanity, and you see the way that God is dealing covenantally with one people that He's calling out from amongst all those made in His image, then the most consistent view to me would be this view that God had a covenant whereby people were under an obligation that man did not meet in Adam and that that continues to be given and that people continue to not be able to meet it until someone comes and meets the stipulations of the covenant, bringing a new covenant hope.

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And that being promised all throughout the Bible, and that it really is

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God has one covenant people from beginning to end. And all of that,

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I would say, really, when I was studying this, it was just like, well, yeah, that's what I already believed.

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I didn't know to use the words of continuity or discontinuity, you know, our

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Presbyterian brothers would want to use the words administration. I didn't know that language, but the concepts, brothers and sisters, this is not something that you won't get just from going to the scripture.

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It's a biblical doctrine, like you said. Another prefatory remark, Charles Haddon Spurgeon preached it this way.

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He said the doctrine of the divine covenant lies at the root of all true theology. It has been said that he who well understands the distinction between the covenant of works and the covenant of grace is a master of divinity.

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I am persuaded that most of the mistakes which men make concerning the doctrines of scripture are based upon fundamental errors with regard to the covenants of law and of grace.

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And so you see there, Spurgeon talking about the two covenants, the two primary, so when you're talking about covenant theology, really you're talking about three overarching covenants.

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There is the covenant of redemption, and in each one of these, you know, people have different positions, all that, but just an overview.

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The covenant of redemption, which would be the agreement between the triune Godhead to save a people.

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There is the covenant of grace, which is the new covenant, which is the

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Baptist, we would argue, the new covenant. It's the covenant by which God saves his people.

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And then there is the covenant of works. So really focus more today, probably, on the covenant of works and the covenant of grace and the differences, really, between Presbyterian theology and Baptist theology when it comes to understanding the covenants.

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First, there is some agreement, and that is when we talk about the covenant of works, the covenant of works was given to Adam in the garden.

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And so the idea here is, in Genesis 2, when

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God says that to Adam, the Lord God, this is 15 through 17, the

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Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, you may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

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Now, that is covenantal language. In fact, maybe we should start this way.

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What is a covenant, Eddie? Yeah, so a covenant is an agreement, more or less.

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And it has stipulations for the two parties entering into this relationship.

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It's an agreement of relationship between the two parties.

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And so each has responsibilities and each has what they're going to receive from entering into that relationship.

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And so God gives the covenant to Adam, which is really defining the relationship between God and Adam.

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I suppose that there are probably people, I know that there are people, who would argue that the word covenant isn't used in Genesis 1 and 2 and 3.

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But I would say the language of Genesis 1 and 2 and 3 is covenantal language defining the stipulations and defining the promises.

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Well, I'll give you, yeah, I'll give you an example that I've used before. But the word marriage is not used in Genesis 2.

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But we all know that that's what God performed. That's right.

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In Genesis 2, it is a marriage. So it's just the idea that you don't have to have the word specifically mentioned in the text itself for it to be describing that word.

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Okay, so we do that all the time with the word trinity, right? So we, you know, the text does not have to say the word trinity for us to use the word trinity.

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And similarly, the text doesn't have to say the word marriage for us to say, okay, this is in Genesis 2, this is a marriage.

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And then finally, as long as the idea of the covenant is there.

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So James Boyce says a covenant is an agreement, like you said, Eddie, between two or more parties by which any one or more things are to be done under the sanction of rewards and penalties.

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All right. Jeff Johnson kind of goes beyond that. And he talks about noting four components to a covenant, law, love, life.

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And he just couldn't complete the alliteration. But the fourth one is death. So law, love, life, death.

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So the idea then with Adam is, the argument is that this is implied.

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So all that's there, you can't, okay, so first of all, there's liberty, right? You can eat anything in the garden that you want, except there's one thing you can't eat.

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And that is the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And this was a positive command. It essentially is a summary of the entire moral law.

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In other words, Eddie, God could have told Adam, he could have maybe not given that stipulation, instead just said, love the

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Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. But instead he puts a stipulation there as an expression of that.

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You want to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? This is what it looks like. Do not eat of any tree, but do not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

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And there's penalty. This is the law. There's penalty there. If you eat of it, the day that you eat of it, you will surely die.

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So the inference there that we understand as we come to the text, well, what would have happened hypothetically, right, if Adam didn't eat?

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Well, what would have happened? Well, since he would have died if he did eat, the implication is that if he didn't eat, there is a reward of life.

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And even in this, there's some disagreement, some nuance and stuff there. You're not saying that, you know, even in the covenant of works, there's graciousness in the sense that if Adam wouldn't have done this, it's kind of like when you say to your kid, if you go pee -pee in the potty, you'll get ice cream.

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And it's like, look, what they did was so lame compared to the reward.

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It's easy, right? But in the sense, similarly, if Adam would have, quote -unquote, completed the covenant of works, like God went above and beyond to promise life in that.

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But it's still hypothetical. But the covenant of works is going to come into play later. But that just kind of establishes there, in the garden, what we have between God and Adam is a covenant of works.

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Now, some people have said, well, maybe, well, could you, if it wasn't a covenant of works, would

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Adam still be obligated to obey? And my argument is this. It doesn't make sense.

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I don't even understand that language. I understand what you're trying to communicate, but I don't understand that language because I understand

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God's covenantal nature. Because of the creator -creature distinction, the way that God relates to creatures is through covenant.

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Well, and I would say, God as the creator and as the sovereign ruler over all the universe, everything, every being is obligated to obey

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God regardless. It doesn't, nothing,

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I mean, every being is automatically obligated to obey God by virtue of their existing.

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I would want to say, to someone listening to this that says, there's no, it doesn't say covenant of works in my

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Bible anywhere. I would say, well, okay, if you don't like the language of the covenant of works, the main thing you need to grasp is are there covenants that involve conditions in the

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Bible where God gives conditions to people? And the answer is yes.

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That's the thing you need to get ahold of when it comes to covenant of works. When we say covenant of works, if we want to boil it down to the simplest thing is covenants where God puts conditions on humans that they must meet.

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And here's the reality. Every time we see God put conditions on humans that they must meet, they don't, every time.

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Well, with one exception. With one exception, yeah. Right, right. But we'll get to that.

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But the next thing I would say to move the conversation down the road just a bit, the next thing

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I would say about the covenant of works is that it's broken. That's right.

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And how is it broken, Eddie? It was broken by Adam and Eve disobeying

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God's command, and then it continues to be broken every time that we sin against God's command.

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Yeah, so, for example, you look at places in the Old Testament like Isaiah 24, 5.

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It says the earth lies defiled under its inhabitants, for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant.

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The inhabitants of the earth, not just Israel, right? The inhabitants of the earth have broken the everlasting covenant.

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And so the idea is, and this is very important. In fact, let me just pull this up in Romans 5.

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But the idea here is that Adam, very key to Baptist covenant theology, 1689 federalism,

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Adam did not just break the covenant of works for Adam. Rather, in Adam, Adam is the federal head of humanity.

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And so when he, God says, don't eat, and he eats, he doesn't just break the covenant for himself, but for all his posterity.

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And this is directly from Romans 5. So in Romans 5, 12, it says, therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin.

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And so death spread to all men because all sinned. Well, how did that happen?

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All sinned in Adam. Let me give you an analogy that I think if you're new to this, maybe it'll help you.

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Why do infants die? Because the wages of sin,

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Romans 6, 23 says, the wages of sin is death. So how come there are miscarriages?

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How come infants die? Well, the reality is, even they are affected, not only by the curse, but even covenantally, they are connected to Adam, who has broken.

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And the day that you eat of it, you will die. So even children, all mankind, we are connected to Adam, we are in Adam as our federal head, and we stand under now a broken covenant of works.

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And, you know, it goes on in verse 14 and says, yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam.

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Meaning they didn't have, they didn't have the stipulations in the same form as Adam had them or as people would have them in the time of Moses.

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But he says, who was a type of the one who was to come, meaning pointing forward to Christ.

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But the reality that we need to see in this is that everyone in the world sins against God, even if they would claim an ignorance.

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So you point out the issue with infants, a person might say, well, what about the tribe, you know, in Africa somewhere that's never heard any of this?

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Well, we would say, well, they do know, they know that there's a creator, they know that there's a

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God, you know, Romans one makes that clear that they're without excuse and that they ought to rightly worship him.

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That is built into us as people made in the image of God. And so they're still under, they're still connected to Adam.

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He's still their federal head, even if they don't have access to maybe the same revelation that we have access to, that doesn't, that ignorance is not an excuse and it doesn't get them out of it, you know?

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And so I think that's something that we need to make clear. One other thing I want to make clear as we talk about Adam's transgression of the covenant in the garden is it says that he would die that day and he did.

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He did die that day. We want to point that out too. He actually died spiritually that day and then he really will die physically later and those are both important.

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He really does die that day. There's a separation between Adam and God that happens that day and he really does die later, which would not have happened had the covenant not been transgressed.

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So I think it's really important that we point out both of those things. Dan Phillips says in his book

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The World Tilting Gospel, he says Adam did die. It just took his body a few centuries to catch up, you know?

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Yeah, that's right. But there's also the spiritual death, as you say, and you see that immediately in Genesis 3.

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When God goes looking for Adam and Eve, as though God has to look, like he knows where they're at, but what do they do?

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They hide. You can see there that relationship is broken and yet God pursues, which we'll talk about that in just a moment.

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Let me just give you some more quotes here. John Bunyan, he said, since all people come from Adam, they are in a sad condition because he left them a broken covenant, or take it thus, because they, while they were in him, did with him break that covenant.

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That's what Romans 5 .12 is teaching us. Or Sam Renahan says, or a modern

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Baptist says, Adam was placed in a defined kingdom, appointed as a federal head, given a law of obedience, promised a reward upon fulfillment, and threatened with a curse.

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He was in a covenant of works which governed entrance into a consummated cosmos.

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So the covenant of works was Adam's key to paradise. That was the way for Adam to enter in, as it were.

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And yet, of course, we understand that wasn't even God's ultimate design. It was going to point us to something else.

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But all mankind now stands under a broken covenant where all mankind is born, or conceived even, in Adam.

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Like David says in Psalm 51, in sin did my mother conceive me. He's talking about even from the moment of conception, we are in sin because we are in Adam.

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So this is then the covenant of works. Any more thoughts that we need?

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I mean, I know we could talk all day just about that, but anything? I think there's one last thing that we need to point out in the issue with Adam before we move forward historically.

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I'm assuming that's how we're going to work through this episode.

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So the last thing we need to point out is we don't need to forget Genesis 3 .15

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because there is a promise made, and that'll be important as we move forward. So I'm not saying we want to get into it right now.

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I just want to note it for the listener. Genesis 3 .15. So that's actually a good transition because I want to bring us to chapter 7 of the 1689.

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Okay, so chapter 7 of the 1689. I'm going to read some of that, and it's going to get us to, it's going to get us exactly to what

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Eddie's saying. So it says, Chapter 7, 1689, 2nd Lundababas Confession.

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Though rational creatures are responsible to obey God as their creator, the distance between God and these creatures is so great that they could never have attained the reward of life except by God's voluntary condescension.

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He has been pleased to express this through a covenant framework. Since humanity brought itself under the curse of the law by its fall, it pleased the

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Lord to make a covenant of grace. In this covenant, he freely offers to sinners life and salvation through Jesus Christ.

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On their part, he requires faith in him that they may be saved and promises to give his

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Holy Spirit to all who are ordained to eternal life to make them willing and able to believe.

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This covenant is revealed in the gospel. It was revealed, first of all, to Adam in the promise of salvation through the seed of the woman.

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After that, it was revealed step by step until the full revelation of it was completed in the

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New Testament. This covenant is based on the eternal covenant transaction between the

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Father and the Son concerning the redemption of the elect. Only through the grace of this covenant have those saved from among the descendants of fallen

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Adam obtained life and blessed immortality. Humanity is now utterly incapable of being accepted by God on the same terms on which

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Adam was accepted in his state of innocence. Okay, so now we get to what

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Eddie says. We have a broken covenant in Genesis 3. Now what we have in Genesis 3 -15 is

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God saying to the serpent, I will put enmity between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring or your seed and her seed.

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He shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel. So just a quick, you know, mini exegesis here.

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I'll put enmity between you, Satan and the woman, and your offspring, that is, those who are of their father, the devil, and her offspring, you know, which

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I think, you know, typifies the church, but also there's something else going on here because then it says, so it's parallel here.

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It's you and the woman, it's her offspring, it's your offspring and her offspring. So you see the parallel.

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So you have A and A, you have B and B. Well, but then you have A and B here because it says, he, that is, this offspring of the woman, shall bruise, you would think he would be talking about the offspring of Satan, but he doesn't.

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He goes back to the serpent. So now, he, the offspring, the seed of the woman, shall bruise your head and you shall bruise his heel.

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In other words, now what happens is you have a promise of God that the enemy,

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Satan, the serpent, is going to be overthrown by the offspring of the woman.

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Right. I think that we could make a case that both

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Adam and Eve believed this promise. So for example, in Genesis 3, 20, it says the man called his wife's name

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Eve because she was the mother of all living. And so the idea here is that life is going to come from Eve.

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And so he believes God's promise. And then, you know, you have God clothing Adam and Eve in animal skins.

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Blood had to be spilt, you know, as it were, and he clothes them in animal skins pointing forward to the cross.

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And then in Genesis 4, 1, it says, Eve says,

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I've gotten a man with the help of the Lord. In Hebrew, it almost comes across as something along the lines of, and I don't have all this in front of me, but something along the lines of I've gotten a man, even

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Yahweh. Like even, like there's, it's possible here that Eve is really far beyond what we might think she knows and understands about this coming

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Messiah. But I think what happens is several times in Genesis, you have this thought, well, is this the

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Messiah? Is this the Messiah? And it turns out, no, these are just pointing forward to the Messiah.

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But something I want to bring up and then I'll turn it over to you, Eddie. Something I want to bring up here is what we're saying in Baptist covenant theology is not that the covenant of grace is established with Adam and Eve, but it's promised and it's pointed forward to.

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And the way that Adam and Eve are saved, and every person is saved in the, every person who is saved, the way that they are saved is by virtue of this covenant of grace, whereby they are only come, they only enter into salvation by grace alone, through faith alone, in the promised seed alone, which is in Christ alone.

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Thoughts, comments on that? No, yeah, that's really good because, you know, for me, like I said earlier, this is what

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I've always believed from the scripture because it had to be, when you read the

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Bible, it just has to be that the only way of salvation has to be Christ. And if you posit that there was a way that old covenant people were saved apart from trusting in the promise of the

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Messiah coming, then there's just no, there's no way that you, I think that you can keep a consistency that Jesus is the only way that anyone was ever saved.

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You have to posit that God saves different peoples by different means.

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But if that were the case, then he didn't have to use Christ to save anybody. He could have used the other means to save everyone he was going to save.

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So it's just not possible, I don't think. But one of the things I want to point out as we think about moving forward from the covenant of grace or the covenant of works and thinking about the covenant of grace, and you even mentioned it, that they were looking for God's promise to be fulfilled.

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And if you read the Old Testament, and I would encourage anybody, and everybody, if you listen to this podcast, you've heard me mention my affection for reading the

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Bible chronologically. But sometime, take a year and read your

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Bible chronologically and try to put yourself in the mindset that you don't know, that you don't know what's coming.

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And imagine that you were reading it for the first time and all you knew was that there was a

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Savior coming. You would just keep thinking this has got to be

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Him. You get to Noah and you think this has got to be Him. You get to Abraham, you think this has got to be

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Him. You get to Isaac, it's got to be Him. Jacob's got to be Him. Joseph's got to be

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Him. Moses has got to be Him. David's got to be Him. You just keep thinking this guy's got to be

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Him. And I think if we could go to our Old Testament and we could read it that way, one, it would build our anticipation for Christ, but it would also help us to see, man, there just is no way that a

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Savior apart from the one that God sends is going to be able to rescue His people from their sin.

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Amen. I think that's a good place. We're going to stop there. We're going to turn this into at least two episodes.

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So, big thing to understand today, God established a covenant of works in Genesis 2 with Adam.

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Adam broke it, and in Adam all die. The promise of the covenant of grace is Christ.

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And we'll talk about this more, but everyone who is saved is only saved by virtue of the merit and work of Christ. Old Testaments were saved by looking forward and trusting in the promised

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Messiah to come, and New Testament saints are saved by looking back to what Christ has completed for us.

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Every person saved is saved in one way, by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone. Now, next episode, we'll talk more about our differences and why it matters with baptism.

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But that's good for today, Eddie. I hope it's helpful for people. If you have questions or comments, feel free to reach out to us.

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But with that, Eddie, why don't you say goodbye? We'll see you guys next week.

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If you really believe the church is the building, the church is the house, the church is what

34:57

God's doing, this is His work. If we really believe what Ephesians says, we are the hoemos, the masterpiece of God.