Dead Men Walking with Jared Longshore: From Baptist to Presbyterian & God's Covenant with Children

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Exploring Theology, Doctrine, and all of the Fascinating Subjects in Between, Broadcasting from an

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Undisclosed Location, Dead Men Walking, Undisclosed. They know where we're at today,

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Jared. That's right. Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of Dead Men Walking, podcast live at Fight Lap Feast in Knoxville, Tennessee.

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Man, we got a good one here, and we have a special guest, very excited. I was talking to him earlier, and he was gracious enough to jump on.

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Mr. Jared Longshore, how are you, sir? I'm doing great, I'm doing great, happy to be here in Knoxville, and yeah, excited about this podcast.

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Yeah, and you are, I think you're talking later today, aren't you? Hmm, tomorrow. Tomorrow? Yeah. Okay, and can you give us a hint for those that aren't attending and might be listening to this into the future, what do you kind of, without giving away too much, we don't want you to spoil it for us.

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Yeah, yeah, well I think, I was assigned the topic serrated quiver, and somebody just said,

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I have no idea what that is, and I said, yeah, me neither. So you're going to find out tomorrow. You're going to find out tomorrow.

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So I'm going to talk a little bit about, you know, raising children in the nurture and admonition of the

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Lord, deal with some of the covenant promises that God makes to our children, all that. And that includes keeping them out of government schools, amen?

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Yeah, yeah, keeping them out of government schools. And of course, everybody knows, I said, I think the Cross Politics guys want to have some, like, token pedo -convert, you know,

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I think they're using me as a token convert to pedo -baptism. Well, speaking of that, that's kind of what

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I want to talk about. So we were talking offline, and I've kind of had this, obviously, for those listening who aren't familiar, you were associated with the

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SBC, correct? Founders Ministries, very prominent. And then just over the last few months, or it's been less than a year,

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I think, famously left that organization and said, I think

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I'm a Presbyterian now. And, well, you said it more gracefully than that. But I've kind of been on that same journey.

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We were kind of talking about I grew up in a non -denominational church, which is essentially Baptist Light. And now

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I'm attending, within the last year, a Reformed Presbyterian church. And I was just wondering what your journey was and how long that was for you.

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Maybe was that something that started for a while, and then scripturally you were looking at it? Was it something other than that?

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Hopefully it wasn't other than Scripture. But what was that for you to go from, like I said, very prominently in one denomination to another?

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You know, the first thing to underscore is the glorious unity we have. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one

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God and Father of all. And we are one bread. You know, you get that here at this Fight, Laugh, Feast conference.

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It's nice. A lot of Baptists and Presbyterians here. Yeah, they're here. And you just realize, oh, like we really do. There's an

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Apostles' Creed kind of thing going on that doesn't negate the significance of our confessions and the significance of doctrine.

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But you sense the unity. It's palpable, which I think is an immediate application of being eager to maintain the unity of the

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Spirit and the bond of peace. So, man, making a transition kind of within that Church of God, going from like a

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Reformed Baptist position to a Pado -Baptist, Reformed Pado -Baptist position.

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Yeah. It's significant. It has some serious kind of worldview changes that are going on. I grew up in the

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Southern Baptist Church, that kind of setup, and then became kind of a

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Calvinistic Baptist, holding to TULIP, seeing the sovereignty of God in salvation.

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And then eventually more of a Reformed, confessional, regulative principle, if people are familiar with that, that the

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Word of God here is directing how we are to worship the Lord. And then it's really all about covenants.

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So it's kind of working through covenants. What does the Bible mean when it says covenant? What is this Word all about?

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And there's disagreement, debate, going all the way at least back to, say, 17th century, where you have this

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Reformed Baptist way that people are understanding the covenants, and then you have

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Pado -Baptists, and even within, say, Pado -Baptist tradition, there's a lot of different takes in how people are understanding these covenants.

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So in American evangelicalism, born -again Christianity is Christianity, right?

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To be a born -again Christian is to be a Christian. And then we work out from there. We know that there are people that tell us that they're

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Christians, but we're like, yeah, I don't think you're a Christian. I don't know. So that's all right and good.

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The Bible says you must be born again, and indeed, you must be born again. If you are not born again by the Spirit of God, then you are not going to heaven.

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You must be regenerated by the power of God through the Spirit. You must have a living faith.

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You must have a faith that works, genuine faith, which is genuine faith, or you're not going to heaven. And then you step back and say, okay, what is

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God doing in the world, even from the time of our first father, Adam? What's going on in Genesis 3 .15

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that God says the seed of the woman is going to come and crush the head of the serpent? Now it's clear, if you go back even before Genesis 3 .15,

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that humanity is wired up in a covenantal way, by which

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I mean whatever Adam did in the garden resulted in trouble for us.

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At some point, every Christian steps back and goes, you know, I'm going to have a talk with Eve when

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I get to heaven. They start to do, I'm going to have a talk with her. And then you start to work that through.

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Then Adam, of course, you say, why am I in trouble for what he did?

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This is something he did. Why doesn't God just deal with me on me? Yeah, that's atheist or agnostic question 101 too.

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Well, why would God blame you for someone else's? And you say, okay, this is how

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God has determined to deal with mankind. He has dealt with mankind representatively.

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And we see this in Romans 5 where the Lord Jesus Christ is compared with our first father Adam. Jesus Christ is the second

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Adam. And God deals with people covenantally. When Adam fell, we fell in him. Sin was imputed to us, and we are dead in our sin.

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Dead men walking, there you go. We are dead in sin. We have received guilt. We have received corruption from our father

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Adam. So immediately upon his fall, God dealt graciously with Adam.

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We hear this announcement in Genesis 315 that the seed of the woman is going to come and crush the head of the serpent, which is remarkable because imagine you're

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Adam. What had Adam been told? He's going to die. He says, in the day that you eat of it, you shall surely die.

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We're dead. I'm cast out of this garden. I'm cast out of fellowship and communion with my creator.

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And death is now coming upon us. But then he hears this promise. The seed of the woman is going to come and crush the head of the serpent.

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And he responds to that promise. We see his faith when he says,

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Eve is mother of all the living. You will be mother of all the living. He knew. We're not going. I'm going to live.

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We're going to live. And there is hope. There's a future. There's a child coming who is going to destroy the one who tempted us into this particular situation that we find ourselves.

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But then you hear about this enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. There's going to be enmity.

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And then Adam has children. So when he has children, you're going to have to start to say, well, is this the seed of the woman or is this the seed of the serpent?

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What is this? And in one way, if you abstract these categories and you say that the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent or what the apostle

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Paul says in the book of Romans that the children of the flesh and the children of the promise, if you abstract them and make them watertight categories such that no one could ever be in both or you might say devolve into only being a seed of the serpent or devolve only into being a seed of the flesh, then you're going to be in a weird position when it comes to how to think about covenant children.

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What's this baptism thing going on? Couldn't it just be the war of the flesh versus the spirit of God?

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You know what I mean? Could they be both at the same time? Yeah. Well, there's certainly a war that goes on within us.

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Like the apostle Paul speaks of that in Galatians about the spirit wages war against the flesh. Right. And every person experiences this.

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And if you're experiencing that, then praise the Lord. That's a sign that you, you know, it's the people that have the fight. There's a troubled soul that says, well,

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I don't know if I'm a Christian because, you know, I have to do battle against the flesh all the time.

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Right. That's the sign of the Christian. That's the sign, yeah. Praise the Lord. You think you're all good, you're in trouble. That's right. You have that kind of thing going on.

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But the language of seed, it's actually going to be enmity between the seed. Okay. Which is implying like an actual children, people.

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Okay. Yeah, lineage. So, you know, one man is going to look at Genesis 315 and say

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God is just announcing something there. It's kind of this promise that's being made to Adam. Yeah. And any individual that would like to believe that promise can believe that promise.

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I would liken it to kind of ice cream being served up at an ice cream stand in the street.

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Like here it is, Jesus is being offered up. Whoever comes and eats by faith, you know, he receives, he trusts in the promise, whether that be in the

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Old Testament or now, now in the New Covenant, New Testament times. Either way, individuals at the ice cream stand come and eat.

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And if they do, they're saved. And if they don't, they don't. And you're looking at your, you know, your brand -new six -month -old and you're like,

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I don't know whether he's eating or not. It's going to take time to evidence whether he's eating or not. And the logic is once we have evidence, once he has professed faith and once he has evidenced that faith, that's when baptism is supposed to happen.

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That's basically the position that I held for a very long time. Which I was always, can

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I be honest, I was very confused with, even, and I believed it and I grew up with that, but I go, it feels like, so, because you'd always have these conversion stories and I got baptized.

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What about the kids that grew up in church and never had that? And at what age are they allowed to be baptized?

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So what does that mean before that? And these were questions that I wrestled with. So that's what you grew up believing.

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And then when did you start to think, okay, maybe Scripture says something different here?

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Yeah. It's hard to mark, like, when, you know, because there's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of things that go.

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Was it a nagging feeling then? Was it a realization moment? Or was it something that you kind of moved into over time?

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Moved into over time. It would be kind of like the frog in the water, like the boiling pot. Things start to shift.

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Because you find, I've described it categorically, right? I'm going to tell you about another category here, about how people view how

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God's dealing with Adam covenantally. But this first, even within this kind of first camp, which would be a

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Credo Baptist, there's all sorts of differences. There's all sorts of ways that people articulate it.

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All sorts of biblical texts that can be provided to support this kind of idea. Again, I would mention here, you know, a lot of people know that I was

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Credo, and I was Credo in a Reformed kind of way, and I was Credo for a long time, went to seminary and all that kind of stuff.

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So, you know, G .K. Chesterton once wrote in Orthodoxy, he says, if there's a joke to this book, then the joke is on me.

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Anyone who thinks I'm trying, no man can say that I'm trying to make a fool of him. I am the fool of this story, and no one will cast me down from my throne.

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So that is my life. Anytime you hear me talking about going from Credo to Pedo, know that no one can accuse me of trying to make a fool of him.

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I am the fool of this story. The irony is all over me. So, all right.

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I'm sorry, you're in Genesis, we're at the covenant. So it's warmed up. Basically, to show how that one way the shift comes about, is you start to look back and go, what is

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God doing when he makes this promise in Genesis 3 .15? Is there something more than just an individual promise being made to individuals?

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Is there more than just an ice cream stand in the street? And the second man can say, well,

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God's certainly delivering a promise, but he's delivering a promise through covenant, this word covenant, which is all in the

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Old Testament, hundreds of times in the Old Testament, 30 -plus times in the New Testament, this word that's kind of a strange idea.

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Is that merely a promise, or when God covenants, is he doing something more, maybe something bigger than a promise, not something entirely different than a promise, but he's actually establishing a people.

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Is he establishing a people such that Cain, for example, what's the status of Cain? You've just mentioned what's the status of these kids before they're baptized in the church.

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Well, what's the status of Cain before he murders his brother Abel? Is he a part of the people?

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Is he a seed of the woman, or is he a seed of the serpent? How should we think about this?

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Is he what the apostle Paul would say is a child of the promise, or is he merely a child of the flesh? Well, you see that Cain is actually offering sacrifices, which is interesting.

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You say, okay, well, like Abel, he's offering sacrifices. Where'd that come from? That's a part of worship. He's offering some kind of worship to God that God himself had established.

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When God deals with Adam, he actually has animals slain that are used as clothing for Adam and for Eve.

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And I'd say you can reason that, yes, Adam would do this for his child as well.

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There would be this, like God himself has provided this blood, and God has provided this clothing, this protection that's signaling his promises to us.

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This is how he's going to... Now, not to get you off track, and this is not canon, okay, and we don't hold it, but it's an interesting read.

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If you look at the book of Adam and Eve, it talks about that in Jewish literature, about God showing them how to hunt, how to provide.

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They're overwhelmed with despair. We're going to die, right? You gave us this promise. The sun is burning our skin.

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It gets very detailed, and it's interesting, not canon. You know, it's a historical book, but exactly what you were saying, where the

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Lord provides for them, and then he passes that on to Cain, we're assuming. Yeah, I mean, what a time it would have been.

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Imagine being there, Adam, man. So there's Cain, there's Abel, and basically this second position

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I'm saying views that ice cream is being served up just the same, Christ is being served just the same, the promise of Messiah is there, and the

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Old Testament Christ himself is being promised in the New Testament, New Covenant times. Now, you must eat by faith.

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You must taste and see that he is good. You must trust in the Lord, call upon his name, and when you do, you eat the ice cream. But the second view views the covenant somewhat like an ice cream shop.

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So there's ice cream being served up in an ice cream shop, not merely ice cream being served up at an ice cream stand in the street for individuals to eat.

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Individuals still eat, or they do not eat, and they go to hell. But when a man calls upon the name of the

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Lord, his household comes with him into the ice cream shop. His children come with him into the ice cream shop.

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So he's actually tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. And then his children are marked by covenant.

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The promises of God are made to him and to his children in a particular way such that they are theirs.

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They're to be appropriated by faith. They'll be fulfilled by faith. Faith is essential, even for the little ones.

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But this sign is saying that they're actually insiders, not outsiders. And some would say that's true for even

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Cain, even Cain in the Old Testament, that he's in, you can see it by his offering of sacrifice.

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He's in by this covenantal word that God gives him in Genesis 4 where he says, even after he had sinned and murdered his brother

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Abel, God says, if you do well, will you not be accepted? We say, how's

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God dealing with Cain that way? Because the covenant that God made with Adam in the garden, which is different, we call that a covenant of life before his fall, that was based on personal and perfect obedience.

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That's what Adam had to do. And if you eat of this tree, there's no mercy. There's no mercy in that covenant.

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You eat of the tree, you're dead. Well, he's coming to Cain, who sinned like his father

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Adam, and he's promising him mercy. If you do well, will you not be accepted?

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Even after he's murdered his brother, that's a different covenant. You have a different covenant operating there.

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And Cain, again, is in this covenant. And then he is exiled or further exiled.

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Adam is exiled from the garden, then Cain is further exiled, becomes a wanderer of the earth after his sin.

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And this is like a proto -removal from the church or excommunication, which we see in the

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New Testament. It's kind of like an early example of this. Here he is, a part of the worshiping community, and then he is removed upon his rebellion against God and his murder of his brother.

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So this covenantal idea, the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent warring against each other, being not

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Christ as the principal seed. He's the principal seed. He's the ultimate seed who crushes the head of the serpent.

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But we hear in Romans, Paul says that God will soon crush Satan under your feet.

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And he's talking to the people of God. So you have this covenant people, this seed of the woman, these children of the promise, who are actually in this ice cream shop, in this community.

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And again, that covenant is kept by faith, genuine saving faith.

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Eating of the ice cream is essential. To be in the ice cream shop is not enough to get you into heaven.

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You actually have people that will go out from us because they are not of us. And this idea would be this is one who is in the covenant like Cain or like Esau or like Ishmael or like Hagar.

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They're in among God's people and genuinely so among God's people.

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But they are removed by their disobedience.

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They evidence that they actually never had saving faith in the Lord Jesus Christ. So for people listening, let's break down the analogy very quickly.

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So if eating of the ice cream is, let's say, regeneration, standing in the ice cream shop with the parent is, let's say, paedo -baptism, and outside of the shop is outside of the family or the promise, if I have someone come up to me or someone who might not be familiar with these terms and go, okay, the child goes in with the father to the ice cream shop, doesn't eat the ice cream, later on in life leaves the ice cream store altogether, what's the point of the baby even being in the ice cream store then?

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What's the distinction there? What's the practical distinction of standing in an ice cream store with my family? And then if we start talking about eternal security and things like that, what's the practical purpose of the ice cream store?

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Not the eating of, but being in there with father or mother. Right. There are great blessings associated with being a part of God's covenant people.

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We hear in the book of Romans that the apostle Paul asked the same very question, so what good was it for Israel? And the answer is, much in every way.

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These were the people of God. They were his representatives on earth. The oracles belonged to them.

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Or you hear in Hebrews striking language about these people who have participated with the

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Holy Spirit and who had been sanctified by the blood of the covenant, had tasted the power of the things to come, the age of the things to come.

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There are extraordinary blessings that are associated there. And I make no attempt to detail each and every way.

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And some of the question arises from the way, again, that we think it's born again

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Christian, you go to heaven, and going to heaven is the totality of my salvation. It's not the totality of your salvation.

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It is the future, the glorification, the consummation. It's all of those things.

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But God is doing something glorious in the world. We ought to be thinking about that. And being a part of his covenant people through whom he is doing something in the world is great blessings.

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Practically, though, for the children in view, again, we would say, boy, to know, to look at the child and say, you are a child of the promise.

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God has made glorious promises to you. That's going to lead to covenant nurture where you are, they know, oh, okay,

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I'm in, I'm loved by God. I think some of the doubting of our salvation, you know, there are certain traditions, and I'm thinking particularly about a certain

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Pedo tradition that gets twisted on this and says, you know, well,

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I don't have any assurance. I don't have any assurance. And it's almost like you're more godly if you have less assurance.

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It's like there are ways that, you know, I was just reading another book that was talking about we do need to doubt ourselves more and doubt the truth less.

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And the problem with modern man is that he doubts the truth and has no doubts in himself. So there's a small qualification there.

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But the point is this is still not the way that Christians are to live. You're not more godly by having less assurance.

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Right. You want to have this confidence that I am a part of God's people. He is my

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God, and that's nurtured from the beginning of life, from the very beginning. What we all want is them to never know a day that they didn't know the

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Lord. And so God is your God, you are his people, and then you nurture it. You must trust him, trust him always.

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There's a great little line. I think it either comes, you might have heard it from either Pastor Doug here or Rachel Jankovic, that, you know, raise your children in the faith, not in the doubts.

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So there's a way to approach it where you're not sure of the status of your child.

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You're not sure whether he's an outsider or an insider. And the thing is the only category you have for outsider and insider is new birth.

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And you don't want to wrongly assume, well,

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I just know beyond a shadow of a doubt that this child is born again because you have enough doctrine to know that this is a work of the

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Spirit of God. We are totally depraved. We need the regenerating work of the Lord or else we don't go to heaven.

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You know that, which is right and true. But because there's no other category of outside, inside, you then raise, you can raise the child unsure.

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You do a lot of evangelism to the child, but then the child's getting signaled that the key thing is, the key difference is me, whether I have this or don't have this.

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I made that profession or had it. Right. Now, if you've got some Calvinists out there, you've got some good Calvinists that know, well, even the faith comes from the

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Lord. Sure. And so that's kind of baked into the way that you're talking to the child. So I don't mean if you raise them without covenant, then you're just going to raise them as an

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Arminian would or something like that. But you're still left with this thing like this paradigm that says, well,

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I'm outside and only outside. Yeah. And the key factor will be me.

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The key factor will be. And then in addition to that, I've got to, you know, it's going to have to be proven to varying degrees, whether it's real.

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I've got to figure out whether it's real. And then other people have to figure out whether it's real. And so it's just, there's a lot of truth woven into that way of thinking.

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And it's not that I think that everything down that pathway is wrongheaded, but there's something, there's a covenant here.

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There's something, there's another category of outside inside that this covenantal approach reveals.

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John Ball was an old covenant theologian back in, I think, maybe 17th century. And he would speak of these people

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I've mentioned were the seed of the woman until they degenerated into the seed of the serpent. Children of the promise until they degenerate into being merely a child of the flesh.

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Interesting. John Calvin speaks this way too. He says, you know, unless you want to make circumcision nothing in the

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Old Testament, which basically isn't a good idea, there's got to be this appreciation for them being a child of the promise until they degenerated into being the child of the serpent.

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Now I should say, the problem with the language of degenerated is it sounds like losing your regeneration as a theological category, and that's not what they mean.

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That's not the idea. They would not say such a man was regenerated. But you get the idea like, oh, these are organic, historical, genealogical, earthy concepts, you might say.

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Whereas election and reprobate, which a lot of the Calvinistic world right now knows, they know well, elect and reprobate, regenerate or unregenerate, are abstract categories, good categories, nothing wrong with them.

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But you don't ever go from being elect to being reprobate. You don't go from reprobate to being elect, and you don't go from regenerate to being unregenerate.

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That doesn't happen. So these other categories are covenantal categories.

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You're looking at them organically. They mean something. They're significant. It's a significant status to be a child of the promise.

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Certain things are true of you as a child of the promise that are not true of you if you're not. So anyways, that's maybe the deep end of the pool there.

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Man, you went right for it. I absolutely love it. We kept you a little longer than what we wanted to. Jared, we appreciate you being here and coming on the podcast and talking about these things.

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We'll have to do something in the future where we have a little more time. We can get into it. And we thank you for being here.

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Thanks for having me. It was awesome. Guys, thanks so much for listening to another episode of Dead Men Walking Podcast. As always, God bless.

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