The "Five Points" of Reformed Theology

Reformed Theology as Five Distinctives

Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are going to answer a question that we get all the time, not just here with respect to the podcast and the ministry of Theocast, but even in our own local churches.

We talk about Reformed theology. We talk about being Reformed. So people will rightly ask us, brothers, what do you mean by that? What does the word Reformed mean? So in today's episode, John and I will be answering that question.

We hope that it's helpful to you. Stay tuned.

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

We've got a good episode in store for you today. So I'm going to throw it over to my brother, John Moffitt. He's going to give us a brief observation on food and cuisine because that matters to us too.

And then we're going to get to the real stuff of the conversation for today.

I like dried fruit. I like fruit that's kind of packaged a way that you can grab some real quick, throw it in. Last night, I was a little hungry after I went to bed. I didn't want to eat anything heavy.

So I walked into the closet and there was a bag of pitted prunes. I pulled one out and I'm looking at it and I'm like, this is the same size and color as a cockroach. Let's just be real. I put it into my mouth and after I thought that, I ate one.

I was like, that's it. I can't eat anymore because now I feel like I'm eating a cockroach. There you go. For those of you who like dates, I may have just ruined it for you.

Justin Perdue. Hopefully everybody is edified and built up by what John has shared with us. We're grateful, brother. John Moffitt. On a slightly better note, here we go.

Justin Perdue. Just some updates from Theocast. Be looking for a new series on covenant theology, an introduction to covenant theology. My, from my understanding, it should be out by now. So you can go and download that and listen to it.

We tried our best to get that in as small content as possible. We really did want it to be an introduction. I think it's three hours total. It's five sessions. There's including notes and all of that.

So go to the website and look for that. A big deal in my life lately, we started our church about three and a half, I guess three years ago. And we are, we helped plant Jimmy Buehler that's in Minnesota last November.

And this last weekend, two weekends ago, we had another man who is a graduate from Westminster Theological Seminary in San Diego, who's been an associate pastor there. He just moved out here to help work with me for the next year.

And then next year in the summer of 2021, he's going to be planting a church with us. Yeah, just south of us. So we meet this morning right after this, I get to go and meet with him about starting to create that schedule and plan.

And so it's a big deal. We're excited to see another reformed church be planted where the gospel will be proclaimed. So it's encouraging to see what God's doing there. So just, you know, I'll tell you this right now.

I met Patrick through Theocast. So those of you who support this and spread this ministry, we are planning another church because of your ministry. So there you go.

Yeah, absolutely. So you said just now that another reformed church will be planted, Lord willing, in the years to come. I know you and I are unashamed about this, and I know Jimmy agrees with us. We do Theocast because we think it is valuable and good and needed.

And at the same time, we are unapologetic about the fact that we are pastors of our own local churches first. And so as you and I were talking before we recorded this morning, the content that we're about to record today, we hope and trust will be helpful to a lot of people.

And we absolutely think that it will be helpful to people who attend our churches and to people who show up, especially maybe for the first time. And we're having conversations with them about Covenant Baptist Church or about Grace Reformed Church, and they'll ask us.

They'll hear the word reformed. It's in the name of your church, John. They hear that word potentially in the context of our church here in North Carolina, and many people will ask, what do you mean? What do you mean when you say reformed?

Some people have ideas about it, but it's a point or two to a piece of this conversation that we're going to have. So people have a lot of questions. What do you mean when you say that word? And so thereby, we're going to have a conversation today about what we mean when we say reformed.

And so because we like to be clever and people love us for our cleverness, we have entitled this episode today. I'm being completely sarcastic right now. We have entitled this episode The Five Points of Reformed Theology, and by that, we don't mean definitively that Theocast is now laying down the gauntlet for the litmus test of reformed theology.

Theocast is now putting that forward. But no, these are just five tenets, five major pieces of reformed theology from our perspective.

When I get this question, and we do a lot, a lot of new people who come to our church or when our church members are sharing, hey, I go to Grace Reformed. What's the first question they ask? In our area, the reformed theology is not popular.

A lot of people don't know what it is. It's kind of why we decided to put it in the name of the church. I give them these five points. Again, to Justin's point, these could be altered a little bit. You could add some or maybe adjust a little bit.

But we would say, historically speaking, if you were to look at the history of the word and the concept of reformed and a reformed church, these five would be, I think, at least what would be in all context of a reformed church.

We'll start with the first one, and we'll go through there. The first one that Justin and I would agree on is that the word reformed or reformed church is going to be, I know this might be a big word for people, it's a controversial word, but Calvinistic.

They would hold to what we would say the five points of Calvinism. Justin, for someone who has no idea, if they were just curious about reformed theology, give us a helpful definition of Calvinism.

I'm not going to give the five points of Calvinism, just as a brief plug here. We did five episodes, one on each of the five points a while back. John, I think you may even make those available to anybody for a donation of any amount.

We would refer you to those if you want more detailed unpacking of each of the five points and even what those are. The most simple way to define Calvinistic theology, I think, historically and from our perspective here at Theocast, is that God is sovereign and purposeful in all things, and he certainly is in redemption.

When it comes to the salvation of sinners, there is one worker, there is one person, one being who does that, who accomplishes salvation, and that is God himself. In other words, salvation belongs to the Lord.

God saves sinners is what Calvinistic theology would teach. To use a word that is maybe slightly more technical and theological, but it's good for us to know, we believe as Calvinists that salvation is monergistic, mono meaning one, and then the word ergo meaning work.

There is one worker, so God does this. We contribute nothing to our salvation. All we bring is our sin, and God does everything necessary to save sinners. He actually grabs us and pulls us from the realm of death into life.

He gives us his Spirit. He counts us with the righteousness of Christ. He provides us with everything that we need, and we are redeemed through his work, not our work.

Justin Perdue I would say because of that, we have that perspective of Scripture that we believe that the Bible clearly teaches that man is dead in their sin, that there is nothing they can do to bring themselves to life.

This is why the Spirit must come through the preaching of the gospel and bring them to life. That it will affect the way, and it has throughout all of history, those who would understand a Reformed perspective.

It affects the way that we preach, that we teach, and that we do church. Because we don't believe we can change the minds of men, that salvation is not a will issue, that all I need to do is convince somebody of the gospel, I'm sorry, convince someone to believe Jesus and follow him, then I would say this changes the way in which so when we preach, we trust in the power of the gospel, not convincing them to change their minds.

We believe that God has to do that through the Spirit. So, Reformed theology, when it comes to Calvinism, it's not just, well, we just think that there's these five points. It actually shapes and molds the way we preach, and the way we teach, and the way that we administer the gospel and evangelism.

Justin Perdue. Last thing I'll say on this, perhaps, is we believe, as I said earlier, that God saves sinners. We do not believe that we save ourselves with God's help, and that has a lot of implications that you already mentioned some of them.

Part of this, too, for me over the last number of years, John, is that even the five points of Calvinism and some of the things that that entails, I don't feel like I need to get up and defend that. When I preach the gospel, Calvinism, as it is so-called, is really just part and parcel of the good news, basically of what Christ has accomplished and that he has done it, and that there is nothing left for sinners to do.

Frankly, there's nothing that we ever could do, and so that's what we're talking about here when we refer to Calvinistic theology.

There's a famous quote by Spurgeon, and I think what he was trying to do was pull the title out of Calvinism, and he literally says Calvinism is the gospel. Justin Perdue. I was just going to say, because what his point was, often people say, well, I don't believe in a man.

I just want to believe in the Bible, and all we're saying is that, historically speaking, this is what the Bible says, and if you understand the context of where it comes from, it's just the explanation that we were arguing over.

Is it man or is it God? Calvin got in the middle of that argument.

Justin Perdue. It's pure, unadjusted gospel, is what we would say. Spurgeon's quote is, yeah, I don't believe that we are preaching the gospel unless we are preaching what is nowadays called Calvinism.

There's the first piece of how we understand Reformed theology. It is Calvinistic theology, but let's move on to a second major piece of Reformed theology, and that is covenantal theology. We recently did a five-part series that you alluded to, an intro to covenant theology, in which I think I made the statement, and I stand by this, that Reformed theology is covenant theology.

These two things are inextricably linked, and even before we recorded this session, you and I were debating whether we would do covenantal theology or Calvinism first, because that's how primary we understand this covenantal perspective to be.

Just a brief word on the history of this before we maybe consider the theology itself. As the Reformation happened in the 16th century, in the aftermath of that, the people who came out of the Reformation in the Reformed tradition all understood themselves to be covenantal.

That was true whether you were a Presbyterian in terms of your polity and the like and how you administered baptism. It also was true of Independents and true of particular Baptists. Broadly speaking, in the 17th century, all of those groups of people understood themselves to be covenantal, and so that is our heritage as Protestants here in America.

Certainly for us, John, as we adhere to the 1689 London Baptist Confession, that is true for us. When we say covenant theology, I'll just kick us off here, brother. Broadly speaking, we don't just mean that there are covenants in the Bible.

We don't just mean that God works through covenants, because I think Christians everywhere agree with that statement. We are talking about a framework through which we understand and interpret Scripture.

Why don't you give us maybe an overview at a high level, and then maybe we'll unpack some of the pieces underneath that.

Historically speaking, there have been developed systems, or I would say lenses or structures that we read the Bible from. Some of you may have heard of what's called a dispensational understanding of Scripture and then counteracted that with what we would say is covenantal.

So, to Justin's point, we believe that all of Scripture is the unfolding revelation. It's the story that's getting progressively more revealed as each page goes through, and what is it revealing? It's revealing the redemption of sinners.

It is fixing what Adam and Eve destroyed, and so we would say that covenantalism is a redemptive historic understanding of Scripture, where all of Scripture is the unfolding story of redemption. A good example of this is if you were to go to Ephesians chapter one, there is given to us from Paul, as I love how Jimmy used the illustration in our covenant theology series, where there's this quick introduction before the movie begins and any of these adventure stories.

Yeah, it's the montage. Before you read Genesis chapter one, you need to know that there's this conversation that happened between the father, the son, and spirit, where there was a promise made, and these promises were made between the father and the son that the father would redeem.

He would redeem for himself a chosen people that he would save them from their sins, and the son would come, and the son committed to the father to obey the will, which is to be the replacement, the sacrifice, and righteousness needed.

Historically speaking, this is what the reformers would say is what we call the covenant of redemption. It's a promise that was made to redeem sinners, right? So from that, you have to ask, well, how is it going to happen?

How is he going to redeem sinners? Well, now you can go to Genesis chapter three and begin to read, and what you learn is they call what's called bi-covenantalism or two covenants. You learn about the covenant of works and the covenant of grace, and the whole structure of the Bible is the outflow of this one covenant.

So you have the covenant of redemption. It's now going to be accomplished, right? Through the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. So Justin, that's kind of the overarching. Why don't you give us a more fuller explanation of bi-covenantalism?

So I agree with you, and I just want to restate something that you just said. It's important for our understanding that the covenant of redemption that was made amongst the Godhead before the world began is what is accomplished in time and space via the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

And so all of history is an unfolding of the covenant of redemption in that respect. So the covenant of works is the covenant that God makes with Adam in the Garden of Eden. We would read about that in Genesis chapter one, Genesis chapter two, where there are positive things, commands that God gives to Adam as to what he is to do with his life, and there is a prohibition made.

So that is that he is not to eat the fruit of a particular tree, and there are sanctions placed upon him if he violates that covenant. The tree of life is there in the garden, and the tree of life shows up again at the end of the story in the book of Revelation.

So that we understand is representative of the eternal life that Adam would have achieved and would have accomplished for his posterity and along with himself had he kept the covenant. But to use the language of the prophet Hosea, he transgressed the covenant.

To use the language of Paul, Adam fell. He did not accomplish what God laid out for him. He violated the prohibition, and so the sanctions were rolling forth upon him from that point forward. Death came, and sin entered the world, and corruption and the like.

So then the question is, this covenant of works, this conditional covenant that God made with Adam has been broken, and things don't look so good at this point. How then will the covenant of redemption be accomplished?

That is through, as we've already said, the covenant of grace that God promises initially in Genesis 3 .15 when he says to Adam and Eve from the woman, a seed will come who will crush the head of the serpent who is the devil.

Then what happens from that point forward, we see the promise of the covenant of grace revealed further and further and further through Abraham and Moses and David. Then we see the covenant of grace itself established through Jesus in the new covenant.

Unlike the covenant of works, the covenant of grace is an unconditional covenant where we do nothing. We receive what Christ has done and are counted righteous in him. Our sin is atoned for and removed from us, and we are reconciled to God, and we are redeemed.

By grace, through faith in Christ alone. That's that bi-covenantal framework of works and grace, and this is absolutely essential to Reformed theology.

Let me interject here. The word grace is important to understand because grace means to receive unmerited favor. That means you are receiving gifts that you do not deserve or earn. When we say covenant of grace, God made a promise to give to his chosen people salvation and righteousness.

He would cleanse them, and then he would make them holy through glorification, through this resurrected body. He promised that. He promised it to Eve, clarified it to Abraham. It's further seen through types and shadows, meaning that a type is something that is pointing you to something that is farther.

Of course, we know what a shadow is, right? The shadow is not the actual substance, but it is a reflection of the substance. The Mosaic law becomes this constant shadow. We use this illustration in the covenant theology series.

When you are brought a menu, this happened to me last night, and on there are pictures of burritos and taquitos and enchiladas. Those are not the actual substance. Those are a type of the substance. Then they take that menu away because I don't need it anymore.

Why? Because they're bringing out the actual anti-type. They're bringing out the actual substance. The Old Testament is this unfolding story of God giving us more and more and more types so we can anticipate, and with great confidence and clarity, when Messiah shows up, we can point to him and say, yes, that is the type we have been looking for.

That is the actual substance that was promised to Eve and Abraham and Moses and David and the prophets. They all pointed us to this. When we read Scripture, we read it with that lens of the unfolding promise of the covenant grace that is coming to us.

How did we get the covenant of grace? We got it through the covenant of works, or we would say, as the New Testament says, the old covenant.

Justin Perdue. Yeah, and a couple of things. I want to maybe give one other illustration of what you're pointing to, the types and shadows and stuff, because this is, I think, helpful for people to understand what we're saying.

A lot of times people read the Mosaic Law and they'll read about the sacrificial system and the intricacies of these things and clean and unclean and all this stuff. What does this mean ultimately? What's this about?

If we think about the sacrificial system, it was given initially so that people, when they became unclean, could be made ceremonially clean again. In that sense, it purified their flesh, to use the language of the writer of the Hebrews.

But, like the writer of the Hebrews says, the blood of bulls and goats that were sacrificed could never take away sins. That's Hebrews 10 .4. Then what was the sacrificial system ultimately about? It was about the one who would come to be the perfect sacrifice in the place of his people who actually would take away their sins.

This is the language not just of the New Testament, but the Old Testament. When God will say in Isaiah 43 that I am he who will blot out your transgressions for my own sake and I will remember your sins no more, or Psalm 103 that our sins are removed from us as far as the east is from the west, and God will no longer deal with us on the basis of our iniquity.

That's what would happen through Christ. That's what all of Scripture is pointing us to. We understand everything in the Bible in light of its main point, which is God's plan of redemption accomplished through Jesus and then applied to us certainly by the work of the Holy Spirit.

Last comment on covenant theology, at least I think it is. I say that, and I might not be saying the truth because we may say more. The covenant of works and covenant of grace piece. This statement is true.

We are saved by works, just not our own. What we mean by that is that Jesus accomplishes a covenant of works. He fulfills a covenant of works in the covenant of grace in order to accomplish the covenant of redemption.

We are justified. We are declared righteous. We have standing before God on the basis of Christ's works. It's not as though God doesn't require works. It's not as though God doesn't require righteousness.

It's just that Jesus has done that for us. A covenantal framework helps us understand exactly how that's the case, that everything required was fulfilled and then counted to us in the covenant of grace by faith.

We are excited to announce that we have a new free e-book available at our website called Faith vs. Faithfulness, a Primer on Rest. We the hosts put this together to explain the difference between emphasizing one's faith in Christ versus emphasizing one's faithfulness to Christ, and how one leads to rest and how the other often to a lack of assurance.

You can get this at theocast .org slash Primer. If you've been encouraged by what you've been hearing at Theocast, we'd ask you to help partner with us. You can do that by joining our Total Access membership.

That's our monthly membership that gives you access to all of our material that we've produced over the last four years, or simply by donating to our ministry. You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org.

We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation. We would say here at Theocast, and according to 1689, that the promises of the covenant of grace are given to us in Eve and Abraham, and then you see it in Moses and David, and then the prophets.

But the actual establishment of it is in the new covenant. This is where you hear Paul referencing that we are part of this new covenant, where we are regenerate. The Spirit lives within us. We now have union with Christ.

Now, just to throw a hat out there, there are slight differences between covenant theology, but I would say everything up to this point, our Paedo-Baptists slash Presbyterian brothers would agree with us.

There's a covenant of redemption. There's bi-covenantalism because of work, covenant of grace. When it comes down to the final application of some of those, there have historically been some differences.

We'll leave that for another time in another podcast. But I would say that structure of understanding the Bible, which is the most important thing Understanding the Bible from a covenantal perspective, the unfolding story of God saving sinners through the story of redemption, that is what defines it as something that's very different than what's out there historically speaking in the world.

There's a lot of other systems out there, some of them more popular than others, but we would say when we say reformed, we believe when you approach Scripture, Scripture leads you to this. It's just pulled straight out of the text.

We believe in a historic understanding of Scripture. You look at the grammar, and from that, we see that there is this flow of covenant. So, we're not putting it upon the text. We are arguing it's coming from the text.

Justin Perdue It flows out of it.

Jon Moffitt. That's right. Justin Perdue. Absolutely. So, if number one was Calvinistic theology in terms of our five points of reformed theology, one is Calvinism, the second is covenant theology, the third we would contend is a confessional perspective, confessional theology.

So, Jon, why don't you kick us off with some thoughts on what it means to be confessional?

Jon Moffitt. Well, sometimes when people hear this, they think, well, there's an authority that's greater than the Bible. So, you're not sola scriptura, you aren't believing in the Bible of Loan, that you have to have another document that governs you.

We want to clarify that. I know I held that position when I was very young in Bible college. I was no creed but Christ. I think I even used that phrase. All confessions are just smaller Catholic documents that are not needed anymore.

So, we toss them all aside. What we did when you toss all of the historic faith that has gone before aside, you don't realize the pool that you're swimming in. Often people step off into the deep end and end up drowning in heresy.

So, confessions have all come out of heresy, actually, that they're fighting back against the wrong, unbiblical doctrines that have come up throughout the ages. The confessions are designed to help give what we would say a unified answer to the historic understanding of Christian doctrine.

Now, there I would say is primary, most important, you cannot deny. If you do deny, you're not a Christian. You're not evangelical. And then there are secondary, and we would say third level, or tertiary is a word that's used there, where you're going to have the different confessions disagree a little bit here.

This is where I would pull in our Lutheran brothers, that they are confessional. They fit into this very historically. They also fought a lot of the battles that we as the Reformed had fought, defining the nature of the gospel, defining the nature of justification and sanctification.

We stand arm in arm with them. So, that would be the quick definition as far as historically. Then there are different, we would say, prominent confessions today. Justin, I'll let you jump in there and kind of talk about what those are and how they apply to our context today.

Justin Perdue. Yeah, man. You made some good points there, even the fact that heresy is what usually gives rise to confessions because theology and doctrine need to be clarified in terms of what is orthodox versus what is heterodox, what's false doctrine.

A lot of times I think a misconception about confessional theology, people assume that all we mean by that is that we are adhering to an historic confession of faith, and certainly it does mean that. But it is more than just simply using a confession in our churches.

It is a perspective and a posture where we understand that at the heart of the Christian life is truth and a set of doctrines and truth claims that are to be trusted and rested in. All of those doctrines and truth claims that need to be trusted and rested in center on Jesus Christ.

They center on his person and his work, what he has accomplished in our place, the nature of redemption, the nature of salvation. It's a very objective perspective where we are objective, meaning it stands unaffected outside of us.

We are looking always outside of ourselves to save what's wrong in us versus looking inward and hoping to find the ground of our assurance and our peace there. We are looking outside of ourselves. We're not looking inward to transformation and things like that primarily.

It is also a perspective that is grounded in something that is finished. In that sense, we'll use the word declarative a lot of times. It's something to be declared. It's over. Salvation is done. It's so done that Jesus is sitting down in heaven, and he's going to come back for us.

We are not concerned primarily with what we need to be doing in order to be redeemed. We are concerned with what we need to be trusting in and receiving that Christ has done that has accomplished our redemption.

It's a fundamentally different orientation, and it's a different focus and a different posture that would describe confessional theology versus what is more the norm. I think we would say the norm in evangelicalism, certainly in the church in the West, is a more pietistic perspective.

Pietism is something we talk about a lot here, where the focus is on you. You're looking inside, and you're concerned primarily with your life, your disciplines, your performance. Christ, of course, is there, and he's assumed, but he is not oftentimes the foreground emphasis focus, and that's something that confessionalism does as well.

When a Christian first comes to life, and if they didn't grow up in the church, they don't have any biblical knowledge, the Bible is full of wonder, and it's full of glory, and it's full of confusion to those who have no idea how to read it.

And you can start reading it, and before you know it, they're going to Siri to say, hey Siri, why does God hate everybody in the Old Testament, and what's with shaving the corner of their beards, and what's with all of the dead animals?

That's what ends up happening. Within the second chapter, the second book, Deuteronomy is what happened here, or sorry, third book. So, what the confessions do for the new believer is that it hands them a historic document that has been verified from scripture.

These aren't documents that are above scripture. They are the explanation of scripture, and they have been, I would say, clarified and affirmed for hundreds of years now that this is what we collectively say and agree that the word of God teaches.

And the way I use it in my own church is I tell people, take this home, because if you have questions about who is God, how does he save, what is sanctification, what is the church, what is baptism, what is the Lord's table, what is church discipline, how do we understand church membership?

All of these are going to be given in simple paragraph explanations with verses underneath them to help you understand collectively how it is that we should know who God is, and then how we should live with one another, and how we should govern our lives in that way.

Otherwise, you're left up to all kinds of interpretation of God's words. The confessions are what I would say help give us bumpers to keep us moving in the right direction through God's word that we don't end up being heretics, in other words, or trapped in sin.

Confessional theology in that sense, John, is just Jude 3. It's a passing down of the faith once for all delivered to the saints, and you're exactly right. The confessions provide for us, they kind of chalk the field theologically, they're guardrails, like you said, to keep us from heading into the ditches.

I think they are also a great lesson for us in understanding that theology is best done corporately, not individually. This is something that is prevalent in our day where people are not as confessional, but then what they end up doing is they end up following the doctrine or theology of one man or the doctrine or theology of one church.

I'm a follower of this person, or I like this guy's theology, or this guy wrote that book, and it is basically the framework through which I understand things now. That's a lot more precarious and dangerous than it is to look back to documents that were produced by oftentimes large groups of people that have stood the test of time.

Just a last comment before we transition to our next piece. When we say confessional, underneath that that maybe is even more foundational historically would be creedal. We are creedal Christians as well, meaning that we adhere to the ancient creeds of the church.

The three ancient creeds that we would adhere to most notably are the Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. That's where we have overlap with any Orthodox Christian throughout history who would have affirmed those creeds.

Then we have specific confessions that might distinguish us from our Presbyterian brothers or our Lutheran brothers or our Anglican brothers and sisters, etc. But yes, it's useful stuff. It keeps us safe and guards us from error.

We've gone through the first three. The three C's have been covered. Calvinistic theology, covenantal theology, and confessional theology are all a piece of what it means to be reformed. What would we say next, John, if we were trying to explain to somebody who's new to this?

Since we've hit this point on confessionalism, all four other points are seen in our confession. I would say the confession really does help provide for us a Calvinistic, covenantal, or I'm going to say the next two, which are law, gospel, distinction, and ordinary means.

All of these you will see throughout Scripture. The confession points these out for you, that God is sovereign in salvation, that He accomplishes this through covenantalism or through covenants. There is a distinct understanding between the law and the gospel, and then the way in which the church interacts with that is what we call through ordinary means.

We get this from our confessions. Specifically, the Reformed Confessions, which are Belgium, Westminster, section 89, would be the ones that we would see those in.

Savoy Declaration would fit there too. Exactly.

Savoy Declaration as well. Law, gospel, distinction is, I think, one of the most important parts of understanding the Bible because there is more confusion that happens when it comes down to the law and the gospel, and a lot of pietism and a lot of people who are in bondage to legalism happens when we don't fully understand how the Bible has been structured as a message of law and a message of gospel.