The Whole Christ (part 8)

Bethlehem Bible Church

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free grace, easy believism, non -lordship salvation, the idea that we don't have to submit to the law at all if we have

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Christ, because all is forgiven in him. And then we looked a little bit at the time of the

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Mara controversy and how the theology kind of evolved to express this thing that we now call antinomianism, right?

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We talked about legalism, the general position of the Presbyterian Church, and how that led to the expectation that people had to show fruit in their lives before it was basically worth it to preach the gospel to them.

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By the way, if I'm heads down looking at this and you have a question, just yell at me. I'm used to getting yelled at, so it's

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OK. And so their perception or their perspective was that you could not receive news about the character of God unless you showed submission to the law of God, right?

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That suggested this idea that there was this perceived separation of the two in the church.

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And then we talked about how that separation is actually the same, that idea of the separation of the law and the character of God is both the root of legalism and also the root of antinomianism.

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And then we looked at why that was. And if you are not sure, I would commend to you the last few lessons, because we don't have time.

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So we looked at exactly why that was the case. We looked at Adam and Eve in the garden.

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And then we looked at the parable of the prodigal son. And then as we sort of came forward and looked at some of these expressions and how we are to look at the law and the character of God rightly and the gospel, we looked at a quote from Samuel Rutherford.

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Does anybody happen to remember what that quote was by chance? We talked about it for two weeks. That's totally

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OK. Exactly, right? Reprobates, those who are not the elect of God, have as fair a warrant to believe in Christ as the elect.

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What does that mean? It's OK. It means that there is nothing in the person to qualify us to believe in God, to have faith in God, to even to receive the gospel.

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Now, ultimately, that was the problem with this Presbyterian church's perspective of how you were supposed to preach. There was this idea that there must be something in the people before you preach the gospel to them.

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No, not at all. There is nothing in us that qualifies us to receive the gospel of Jesus Christ.

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We looked at the parable of the wedding feast to sort of reinforce this in our minds, Matthew 22 .10. And those servants went out into the roads and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good.

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So the wedding hall was filled with guests. The gospel offers is to be given to all the elect and to the reprobate.

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Because from our perspective, do we know the difference, really? No. How can we know?

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I mean, there are people that we will see today that we think are elect, and they're not. Do I know who those people are?

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No. Would I say that I know? No. I have no idea who those people might be, but there will be a day in glory when we look around and we say, wait a minute.

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Scripture is clear that the gospel call is to be made to all people.

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And so based on the

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Presbyterian church's idea of the people need to show fruit in their lives before they receive the gospel, when they looked at the

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Marrow men, they said, well, they're antinomian. They don't believe what we believe.

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They think that people don't have to follow the law. Ferguson said, as a matter of historical record, the

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Marrow brethren held tenaciously to the teaching of the confession of faith, which is important. And we'll be talking a lot about the confession of faith today.

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They believe that God's law remains as a rule of life for the Christian believer. So antinomianism became the label that the

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Presbyterian church applied to the Marrow men, even though it wasn't actually true. And ultimately, that causes us to look back at all of the fun analogies that we've made.

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We talked about driving on the highway, and anyone slower than you is a grandma, and everyone faster than you is a knucklehead.

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Or my favorite is the bowling alley where you have the left lane, which is, what did you call it, Steve, freedomism, and the right lane, which is legalism, this idea that somewhere in the middle is where we actually should be.

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But it's perspective. And then we talked about Jesus, and we talked about the perception of Jesus Christ during the life of Christ.

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Remember, we were talking about Jesus in the grain field with his disciples as they were plucking wheat. And the

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Pharisees came, and they said what? They said, what are you doing?

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It's the Sabbath. You can't work on the Sabbath. Did the

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Pharisees think that Jesus was a legalist and antinomian or perfectly correct in his theology?

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Antinomian, absolutely. But we know, of course, that Jesus' theology was perfectly correct. So the important reminder here is that as we look at antinomianism and what it actually is, let's not get tripped up by the fact that legalists see anything less than their legalism, their level of legalism, as antinomianism.

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The application of the label is not a statement of fact. There's a lot of false accusation.

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OK, we are moving. This is good. So then we looked at the key verse for the antinomian, which is

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Romans 6 .14. It says, for sin will have no dominion over you since you are not under law but under grace.

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Simply put, antinomianism denies the role of the law in the Christian life. And then we started talking about these strands.

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Last week, we looked at the dogmatic strand of antinomianism, right? There's the dogmatic, the exegetical, and the experiential.

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The dogmatic strand of antinomianism. What's dogma, by the way? What does the word dogma mean?

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My karma ran over your dogma. What does dogma mean? Have you never heard that?

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Brian? OK, good.

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Good, I have a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.

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That, by the way, is a fun word, incontrovertibly. So for the dogmatic strand, the principle that was set forth was that the law of God is abrogated in its entirety for the believer.

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In its entirety is important. So what does that mean?

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Some notable luminaries, John Saltmarsh, John Eaton, Tobias Crisp.

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And then we talked about another kind of doctrine that is frequently associated with this perspective of antinomianism.

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Does anybody remember what that was? That was last week. Hyper -Calvinism, it's in your notes.

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Right? Yeah, so frequently, this idea is associated with hyper -Calvinism.

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The idea in this theological perspective was that if the spirit indwelled the person, they did it to the point where they were doing things a spirit would have them do.

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The indwelling, not the written law, guides and rules the Christian life.

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It's this idea that we're overwhelmed with the direction of the spirit so that we have no agency of our own.

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That would be hyper -Calvinism. And then in contrast to that, we looked at Hebrews 10, 14 to 16.

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You don't have to turn there. I'll read it to you. Where the writer says, for by a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.

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And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us. For after saying, this is the covenant that I will make with them, after those days, declares the

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Lord, I will put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds. This is

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Prophet Jeremiah writing about the new covenant. But what are the laws here?

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When it says, I will put my laws on their hearts, what does that mean? Old Testament prophet writing the words of God.

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Anyone? The Torah? Good chance.

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Maybe. Sure. When the Prophet Jeremiah in Jeremiah 31 writes, this is the covenant that I will make with them, talking about the new covenant, after those days, declares the

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Lord, I will put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds. The Ten Commandments? Sure.

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So remember last week when I talked about this kind of thought experiment of, does God only do right things because by definition everything that God does is right?

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Or does God only do right things because God doesn't do anything that's wrong? Remember that?

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Remember when I posed that thought question last week? That's kind of what you're talking about, right? Is it God subscribes to the law that he has created because the law is good, and God does good, right?

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And so that's what he does. Or whenever God does something, it is by definition right because he is the creator of the universe and he can do whatever he wants.

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Which one is, well, I mean, that's a little more complicated of a set.

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I mean, God has the agency to do whatever he wants, right? So the concept of fairness, right?

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We are, I mean, here we go, into the gospel, right? We are desperately wicked, right? Deserving of death.

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And so deserving of death by who? Only one who can separate himself from the law and make that determination on his own.

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So that's a little bit different, but I don't know if that answers your question. Right? That's right.

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God does what is right because it's God doing it, right? But it's an interesting

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God question for us because we think of things in this kind of, these are the right things and these are the wrong things. And because we operate under the corpus of the commandments of God, our relationship with them is a little bit different.

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So we'll talk about, when we get to the exegetical strand, that's where we're going to dig really deeply into a lot of those kinds of things.

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But that idea is coming today, I hope. So Roman 7 reminds us of the law and of the right

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New Testament perspective of the law when it says, the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

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And then we talked about, I'll get there,

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I promise. Well, so you mean the question of, like, what are the laws?

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Right, what are the laws that he's referring to, right? The short answer is the moral law.

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The long answer is, we'll get to that in a little bit. Just in case we don't get there,

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I want to at least give an answer for the tape, for the tape, MP3, whatever. So the law is holy, the commandment is holy and righteous and good.

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Did Jesus come to abolish the law? No, he came to fulfill the law, Matthew 5, 17 and 18.

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So if the law remained, albeit fulfilled in some way through Christ, it must apply in some way as well.

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It could not be completely abrogated or removed. Ferguson, this is one of the one of the closing quotes that we had last week.

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Ferguson says, hyper -Calvinistic antinomianism placed such an emphasis on the provenient, eternal, electing, distinguishing grace of God that any emphasis on the place of the law seemed prejudicial to it.

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In one sense, they were operating with an over -realized personal eschatology as though the strong and subtle influence of sin had been destroyed.

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So this perspective would suggest what of believers under this dogmatic approach?

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Are you eyeglassing or hand -raising? Okay, Mark? Yeah, they believe they're already made perfect, right?

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They can resist the temptations of sin in this world, right? That's what it means. Think about the consequences of that kind of thinking, right?

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If you think that sin is abolished in your life, if you think that you're already sanctified, how difficult would it be to not look down your nose at other people, right?

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How would you interpret temptation? How would you make a determination as to what you're doing is either right or wrong?

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You would assume that everything you're doing is right, right? Because you have no influence of sin in your life, right?

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How arrogant would that make us if that were true? It's the fact that we're wrapped up in this mortal coil that keeps us humble.

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So that was the dogmatic strand. Look at that. We're done with review already. Okay. Now we're going to look at the exegetical strand.

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This is similar in a lot of ways to dogmatic. I think they all are pretty similar. Just a little bit more particular.

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And to understand this specifically, it's best to kind of look at the theological architecture of the law that classic

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Reformed orthodoxy would apply. That's why they're on your sheet, okay?

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And I ended up including most of the Westminster Confession, Chapter 19, on the law of God.

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You can Google it. The whole thing's online for free, et cetera. So there's this idea of three epics.

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There's the Epic of Creation, the Epic of Moses, and the Epic of Christ.

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Although the idea far preceded the Reformation, the Westminster Assembly codified this in Chapter 19 of the

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Confession of Faith. That's why I put it on your sheets. So let's talk this through.

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The orthodox view of the law is this. Number one, the

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Epic of Creation. Genesis 1, 26 to 28. Then God said,

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Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

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So God created man in his own image. In the image of God, he created him. Male and female, he created them.

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And God blessed them. And God said to them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens.

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And over every living thing that moves on earth. Now, question.

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What does it mean when it says, Then God said, let us make man in our image after our likeness.

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Does that just mean we look like God? What does that mean? Classic impartial answer from Brian Bartlett, Jonathan.

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Of course, we are not God. We are finite beings. We are fundamentally different from him.

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But it does mean that we have some similarities to him, right? And this is not about physical appearance.

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When we read this, at least when I read this, maybe you guys are, I don't know, more holy than me. But when I read this, and I see this thing that says,

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Let us make man in our image after our likeness. The first thing that I think about is,

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Oh, we look like God. Okay. I mean, there's six billion people in the world, and most of us don't look like other people.

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And yet somehow, in my mind, I've reconciled that into, Oh, we look like God. I don't know how that is.

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But when we actually engage our brain cells, it doesn't make any sense at all that,

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Oh, we look like God. Maybe we have two arms and two legs. But God is spirit, just like Brian said. And so this idea of,

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Oh, well, this whole thing is here just to tell us, Hey, guess what? We look like God. That doesn't make sense. No.

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It means that we do have some similarities to God. We do have some general idea of these kinds of things.

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It means that, just like Romans 1 says, He wrote a natural understanding on our hearts.

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He wrote a natural understanding on the hearts of Adam and Eve. So, Ferguson calls this the pattern of the

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Lord. That's the phrase that he used. Charlie? I mean, he becomes corporeal with regards to the angel of the

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Lord. That would be the classic orthodox view. That's a good question.

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You can ask Steve. Let's rewind about 45 seconds.

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Okay, so Ferguson calls this the pattern of the Lord. This is what he impresses on the hearts of humans.

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He says that Adam and Eve were called to imitate him by exercising microcosmic lordship.

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I just quote him because I can't really say these things any better. Microcosmic lordship.

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When we think about the macrocosmic perspective of all that is under the purview of God, those things that he has called us to have dominion over, microcosmic.

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By the way, this is important. Thus, God's seventh day rest was also the paradigm for their hearts.

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File that away because that's important. John Owen wrote that the law was con -natural to man.

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It was part of him. It was like his friend. This law, in sort of the vernacular that I think we discuss this with, those of us who discuss these weird things, is the moral law.

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This is the moral law. This natural idea that we have to submit to these ideas of right and wrong, this is the moral law, the native intrinsic understanding that God gives to Adam and Eve.

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And then by extension to us. So that's the creation epic. That is where this all begins.

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This is the first one of this kind of threefold division or threefold dimension of the law.

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The moral law. And you'll see on your sheets, I think, it was two in the morning, that there's the epics and then with each epic is associated the different parts of the law.

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Just for us to help us understand and we'll walk through that as well. So, Moses.

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Moses comes, we get the law through Moses. What's that? First. Ten Commandments, right?

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Decalogue. That was supposed to be a softball question. That's okay. But what the

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Ten Commandments is, is God codifying the moral law in Ten Commandments.

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Really, eleven if you include I am your God. So, the reason why

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I put those things on there with moral, ceremonial, judicial, all that stuff, is because the moral law still applies during the

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Mosaic epic. It's just that it's been codified in the decalogue. So, Ferguson writes about a lot of important characteristics.

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I think he has like eleven of them. We're going to talk about two. Because I have fifteen minutes. So, I'll read this, the end of point one.

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God gave to Adam a law as a covenant of works, by which he bound him and all his posterity to personal, entire, exact, and perpetual obedience, promised life upon the fulfilling, and threatened death upon the breach of it, and endued him with the power and ability to keep it.

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It was a full -on covenant of works. So, when we talk about a lot of these things, about the struggle of obedience and these kinds of things, that is specifically due to the presence of sin in our lives.

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And that makes it difficult to obey. And we know that until that point where Adam took of the fruit and ate, what does it say?

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By him, sin entered into the world. If there was no sin in the world, what would the desire of Adam have been?

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It wouldn't have been to sin. It wasn't there. It didn't exist. It would have been to obey

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God in the sense of being, as you said, consonant with him. So, are you good?

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I use the word good as an all -set kind of...

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That's probably the wrong word to use. Okay. So, Ferguson, like I said, wrote,

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I think, 11 things about... Just read chapter 7 of the book. I promise. It's good. We're going to talk about two of these.

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Number one, the commandments are set within a specific... Ten commandments are set within a specific historical sociological context.

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This is important because of number two, which says that within that context, the commandments have extended codicils attached to them because they are to be applied, number one, to a specific group of people, number two, in a specific time frame, number three, with provisions in the application of the laws to the whole of society and to govern them as a specific state, and number four, with provisions made for ceremonial regulations and actions.

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Follow me? Okay. So, what does that mean? The commandments are set within a specific historical sociological context.

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These are the commandments that are lifted up against Israel. And from the

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Ten Commandments, every command that we see in the Torah, in the book of the law, that we see the priest,

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Ezra, read in the book of Nehemiah, all of these things, all of that law, all of that judicial law, all of that ceremonial law, these are extensions of the

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Ten Commandments. But they are specifically for a specific state, the state of Israel, and with provisions specifically for ceremonial regulations and actions.

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What does that mean? This is very confusing stuff. There's a lot of big words being thrown around. If you have questions, come at me.

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I will do my best. And then I will defer to Sinclair Ferguson. Because the law is given to a defined people to rule them in both a civic and sacred context, right?

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The natural extension of the moral law has been codified in the Decalogue, and then therefore into a ceremonial context and a judicial context.

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And this is important because as Christ came and replaced the Mosaic Covenant, the sacramental system of historical

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Israel was no longer necessary. The sacramental system of historical

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Israel was no longer necessary. It didn't prevent Jesus from perfectly obeying that system when necessary, right?

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He would heal someone and say, go do what is right in the temple. These are the ways in which

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Jesus obeyed that system because he was perfect. And because the nation of Israel crumbled and fell, the judicial laws applied to the nation no longer had a people group to apply to.

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So, Ferguson wraps it up in this statement. He says, this

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God taught in emblematic form that the Decalogue was foundational, its applications secondary, contextualized, and temporary.

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This was further emphasized in the recognition that the sacrificial system was pictorial and sacramental and pointed to a future sacrifice that would be fully efficacious to deal with sin.

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So, when we preach the gospel and somebody retorts with, well, blended fibers and, you know, you eat meat with milk or I don't know, whatever the nonsense is, right?

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This is the understanding that helps us get our head around this, right? Those are ceremonial laws.

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They no longer apply. That does not mean that the law is completely abrogated.

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And finally, so that's the Epic of Moses and that brings us to the Epic of Christ.

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Once again, we see the division of the law reduced only to the moral. You can see that on your sheets, right?

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The law of God, thus written on tablets of stone and sealed within the Ark of the Covenant, is now rewritten by the

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Spirit and sealed in the hearts of believers. External regulation once again becomes inner disposition, right?

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So, just like at the beginning, in the Epic of Creation, the understanding of the moral law of God was an inner disposition, right?

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It wasn't explicitly codified on stone tablets from Mount Sinai yet, right?

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But was there sin in the world? Yes. Was there the idea of obeying God and avoiding sin?

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Yes. Those things existed, right? So, this idea of the moral law was there, but it wasn't external.

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It wasn't explicit. It wasn't brought forth through Moses. And so that's why

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Ferguson says, external regulation, that Mosaic Epic, once again becomes inner disposition.

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Throughout Jesus' teaching, whether it was his condemnation of the Pharisees, his teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, he always and continually drove his listeners back to internal obedience, right?

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You have heard it said, but I say to you, over and over again, Jesus would drive them to an internal obedience of the law.

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The law was written upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. Is there a hand there?

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You've got good stuff to say, so I don't want to miss it. Well, there were some people, right? So, Noah was righteous in the eyes of God, right?

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So, there were some, it's just the number was exceptionally small, right? And we read of some, there probably were some we didn't read of.

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But it certainly wasn't a nation of Israel, right? So, we talk about whether, so this is a thing that has come up before.

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Under the Mosaic Covenant, were the works, right, to submit to the ceremonial law, were they salvific, yes or no, right?

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If a Jew is submitting to the law because they're told to, and it shows them that they have this relationship with God, and this is the way by which this is accomplished, and they've internalized that into a desire for righteousness, and that desire for righteousness is made manifest by submitting to the ceremonial law, then, yes, but it's not the submission to the ceremonial law specifically that is salvific, right?

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It's always salvation by faith, right? And so, this is kind of, you know, we look at people like the

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Pharisees, or we look at the priests in the book of Malachi, who are like, well, we're told to do this thing, so we're going to do this thing, and then that's it, and they move on.

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Well, there's no internal obedience there. There's no internal desire for obedience. There's no internal contrition.

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So, that's not salvific because it's about the inside, right? So, no, the

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Mosaic covenant laws were not salvific. The point was to drive the Jews to an internal recognition of the external law.

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Ferguson, again, Thus only in Christ did the law's aspects and divisions or dimensions become clear. What is brought to light by his coming is not created by his coming.

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Rather, Christ's coming makes clear what was always there. So, our 21st century theology, we look back at this stuff, and we've got many wise teachers that have come before us, like Sinclair, and we can see this stuff, and we can see it as the truths of Scripture, as we have so many people who have worked on this stuff, and we use logos, and logos, and Bible works, and all this stuff, where, you know, we can cross -reference, and word search, and,

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I don't know, whatever else we can do. All these things, we have the ability to look across the corpus of text, and, you know, hindsight is 20 -20 kind of thing.

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And so we can look at this, and we can draw an exegetical conclusion from all of this analysis. We can look at the text and see how all of the text, in its beauty, speaks to this thing.

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However, the historical antinomian wouldn't have a lot of those tools. And so, this idea, this sort of three -fold, moral, ceremonial, judicial idea, would look like, this is a word that I learned yesterday, well, not yesterday, when

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I first read this, ep -exegetical imposition. E -P, exegetical.

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Ep -exegetical imposition. What does that mean? I'll put it in terms we can understand, because I think it's something we've talked about before.

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I'm not going to get into an eschatology discussion, at all. However, I'm just not going to go there.

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Amillennialism requires a framework that is put on Revelation. Okay? The perspective of Amillennialism requires a framework where you look at Revelation as the, it's not historical, the events, partially historical,

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I guess, occur in three cycles, right? So, as you read over Revelation, there would be a defined start and finish, three times, and you would kind of pick them up and lay them on top of each other to have a full view of the entire eschatology of God.

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So, there's this imposition that you have to apply over the top of Revelation for the

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Amillennial belief system to sort of make sense, right? And Mike, being premillennial in his last public statement, that's the safest thing

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I can say, right? I haven't talked to him about his eschatology in a while, would kind of rail against that and say, well, look at Revelation with, what does he call it?

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The plumber's hermeneutic, right? Just read it. Just read it. What does it say? That's what it means.

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Right? And so, it's similar, right? So, this idea. So, the historical antinomian would look at this and would hear this thing, because,

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I mean, this whole threefold division thing was like Thomas Aquinas times. I mean, it's been around for a while.

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They would hear that and be like, no, you're putting a thing, you're putting a framework over the Bible so that you can make your theology work.

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But we look at this, and because of all this analysis and all this stuff that we have, and because as people were, not necessarily with the antinomians, but as you move from the creation epic to the mosaic epic, you can now look back on the creation epic and say, now

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I can understand what God was doing. Move to the epic of Christ. Now I can understand what

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God was doing in the mosaic epic and then in the creation epic. And now, 2 ,000 whatever years later, we can look back and we can say, look at what

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God was doing way back when through Christ. And we have that ability, that hindsight, and we can learn from that and look at that and properly understand this.

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And so, ultimately, this is what the antinomians of the exegetical strand would rail against.

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The notion that there was partial abrogation of the law. The notion that the judicial and the ceremonial was done away with, but not the moral.

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Right? And so as we look at the moral, the thread of the moral law as it flows throughout time, we see that it was given as this, what did he say?

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This microcosmic lordship to Adam, flows into and becomes codified in the mosaic epic.

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And then ultimately those things are done away with, but rewritten on our hearts through the Holy Spirit in the epic of Christ.

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Dave? No, they would say that you can't apply this ceremonial judicial moral thing on, you can't step back and apply this framework and then say, these two are done away and this one stays.

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It's either, it's all or nothing. That's what they would say. Right? And they would say, by the way, nothing. So, okay.

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Well, here we are. It is 9 .48 and I've talked about the dogmatic and the exegetical strand and not the experimental strand or the experiential strand.

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I'm going to do this in two minutes. I'd love to get into it in more depth, but I can't.

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When Ferguson talks about experimental or experiential antinomianism, he's talking about interpretation of the law and a failure to properly understand our commitment to the law, listen, because of a failure to understand our position in the law because of what

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Jesus Christ has done and in the gospel. That was a big, long statement.

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What does it mean? I'm skipping around, so if I make a disconnect, just come talk to me afterwards.

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The idea of experimental antinomianism comes from our treatment of the law and the times when we approach it with a lackadaisical affect.

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It's when we break God's law, if there is no concern or contrition or immediate repentance, that is functional, everyday antinomianism.

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Okay, so when we think about antinomianism as this construct, it's a label.

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You're an antinomian. You're a Calvinist. You're an amillennialist or whatever you are, right?

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When you apply these labels, now you're like, well, I'm not that label, right? And yet we sin.

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We don't get upset about it. So guess what we are? That label. Push the envelope a little bit.

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Are we supposed to submit to the laws of the land provided they do not cause us or command us to sin? Yes or no? Yes. Who did not speed on the way to church this morning?

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There's a couple hands, right? Who did not speed at all in the last week? Who feels deeply contrite about the fact that they sped this week?

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Functional antinomianism. I'm with you, right? I'm going to read

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Ferguson's words so you can't come after me. Responding to an antinomian claim, but you are under the law, would in any case not really deal with the problem.

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It would miss its real heart, for the deepest response to antinomianism is not you are under the law, but rather you are despising the gospel and failing to understand how the grace of God in the gospel works.

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There is no condemnation for you under the law because of your faith union with Christ.

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But that same faith union leads to the requirements of the law being fulfilled in you through the

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Spirit. Your real problem is not that you don't understand the law, it is that you don't understand the gospel.

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Like that physically hurt me when I read it. Oh, sure, absolutely. I mean, we would just be undone, right?

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I mean, that's essentially what happens to Paul, right? When he has the vision of being in the throne room. What's the first thing he saw?

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The floor, right? Because when we're properly understanding our position and our sinfulness and all of these things, we're undone.

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Ferguson, again, this is very concrete expressions in what you're euphemistically describing as lifestyle choices.

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This is how I am. God is gracious. And unlike you, if you disagree with me, he accepts me as I am, therefore

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I will remain as I am. We hear that all over the place. Functional antinomianism.

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Our sanctification requires that we change, not that God changes or that we remain different from one another because we are conformed to his image.

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That is what sanctification is. The experimental antinomianism or antinomian...

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This experimental antinomian confuses the love of God for an idol of worldly love. Right? It is misleading to say that God accepts us the way we are.

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Rather, he accepts us despite the way we are. He receives us only in Christ and for Christ's sake, not in Andrew for Andrew's sake, not in Steve, he's not here, for Steve's sake, but in Christ for Christ's sake.

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He finishes the passage and says, without that transformation and new conformity of life, we do not have any evidence that we were ever his in the first place.

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And that goes all the way back to what Rutherford said. Without the active work of the spirit in our lives, without that transformation and new conformity, we're no better, we're no different than the reprobate.

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Our practical living out of antinomianism, which we do, is at its root a failure to grasp, appreciate, and treasure what we have in the gospel.

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I went super fast through that, but that's chapter 7. If you have any questions, come talk to me.

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I'm happy to talk about this stuff. I've been studying it a lot. So let's pray together. Heavenly Father, thank you for this opportunity that we can come together.

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Look at the law of God. Struggle to properly understand how you have worked in the lives of humankind over the course of the last thousands of years.

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I pray, Lord, that this morning, as we go into our worship service, that you would be with us as we worship you in listening, in preaching, in hearing your word, in singing, in spiritual things.

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I pray that you would continually remind us that it is to be our desire to submit to you, to obey you, and to treasure your moral law.