The "Five Points" of Reformed Theology

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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.

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We talk about Reformed theology. We talk about being Reformed. So people will rightly ask us, brothers, what do you mean by that?

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What does the word Reformed mean? So in today's episode, John and I will be answering that question.

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We hope that it's helpful to you. Stay tuned. Hey guys, as a quick reminder, if you'd like to join

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Theocast and helping other people find rest in Christ, a simple way of doing that is simply by leaving us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app.

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You can also leave reviews on all of our books. They're available at amazon .com.

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And if you haven't started following us on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook yet, that's a great way to take our content and then share it with your friends and family.

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To learn more about how to support Theocast, simply visit theocast .org. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

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Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed perspective. Our hosts today are

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John Moffitt, pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and myself, Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina.

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We've got a good episode in store for you today. So I'm going to throw it over to my brother, John Moffitt.

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He's going to give us a brief observation on food and cuisine, because that matters to us too.

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

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I like fruit that's kind of packaged in a way that you can grab some real quick, throw it in. Last night,

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I was a little hungry after I went to bed. I didn't want to eat anything, you know, heavy. So I walked into the closet and there was a bag of pitted prunes, right?

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And no dates, pitted, not prunes, pitted dates. Complete pump fake, because you said dates to me before we were here.

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I know. And I pulled one out and I'm looking at it and I'm like, this is the same size and color as a cockroach.

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Let's just be real. And I put it into my mouth. And after I thought that, I couldn't. I ate one. I was like, that's it.

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I can't eat anymore because now I feel like I'm eating a cockroach. There you go. For those of you like dates,

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I may have just ruined it for you. Hopefully, everybody is edified and built up by what John has shared with us.

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We're grateful, brother. Yeah, yeah. Well, on a slightly better note, here we go.

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Just some updates from Theocast. Be looking for a new series on covenant theology, an introduction to covenant theology.

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From my understanding, it should be out by now. So you can go and download that and listen to it.

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We tried our best to get that in as small content as possible.

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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.

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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,

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I guess three years ago. We helped plant

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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.

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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.

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Yeah, just south of us. So this morning, right after this, I get to go and meet with him about starting to create that schedule and plan.

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And so it's a big deal. We're excited to see another Reformed church be planted where the gospel will be proclaimed.

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So it's encouraging to see what God's doing there. I'll tell you this right now, I met Patrick through Theocast.

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So those of you who support this and spread this ministry, we are planning another church because of your ministry.

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So there you go. Yeah, absolutely. So you said just now that another

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Reformed church will be planted, Lord willing, in the years to come. That's right. So I know you and I are unashamed about this, and I know

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Jimmy agrees with us. We do Theocast because we think it is valuable and good and needed.

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And at the same time, we are unapologetic about the fact that we are pastors of our own local churches first.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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?

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What do you mean when you say Reformed? Some people have ideas about it. You have Covenant in your name, which is another...

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Yeah, that's right. 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.

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What do you mean when you say that word? Thereby, we're going to have a conversation today about what we mean when we say

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Reformed. Because we like to be clever, and people love us for our cleverness, we have entitled this episode today,

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The Five Points of Reformed Theology.

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By that, we don't mean definitively that Theocast is now laying down the gauntlet for the litmus test of Reformed Theology.

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Theocast is now putting that forward, but no, these are just five tenets, five major pieces of Reformed Theology from our perspective.

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Yeah, when I get this question, and we do a lot of new people who come to our church, or when our church members are sharing, hey,

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I go to Grace Reformed, what's the first question they ask? Well, in our area, Reformed Theology is not popular.

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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.

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So again, to Justin's point, these could be altered a little bit. You could add some or maybe adjust a little bit.

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But we would say, historically speaking, if you were to look at the history of the word and the concept of Reformed and a

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Reformed church, these five would be, I think, at least what would be in all contexts of a

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Reformed church. So we'll start with the first one, and we'll go through there. So the first one that Justin and I would agree on is that the word

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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.

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

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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.

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John, I think you may even make those available to anybody for a donation of any amount.

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So we would refer you to those if you want more detailed unpacking of each of the five points and even what those are.

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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.

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So 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

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God himself. In other words, salvation belongs to the Lord. God saves sinners is what

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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.

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So there is one worker. God does this. We contribute nothing to our salvation.

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All we bring is our sin, and God does everything necessary to save sinners.

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He actually grabs us and pulls us from the realm of death into life. He gives us his

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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.

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John, please feel free to riff on that. I would say because of that, we have that perspective of Scripture.

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We believe that the Bible clearly teaches that man is dead in their sin, that there's nothing they can do to bring themselves to life.

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

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Reformed perspective. It affects the way that we preach, that we teach, and that we do church.

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Because we don't believe we can change the minds of men, that salvation is not a will issue, that all

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I need to do is convince somebody of the gospel, convince someone to believe

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Jesus and follow him, then I would say this changes the way in which we preach.

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When we preach, we trust in the power of the gospel, not convincing them to change their minds.

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We believe that God has to do that through the Spirit. Reformed theology, when it comes to Calvinism, it's not just that we think there are these five points.

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It actually shapes and molds the way we preach, the way we teach, and the way that we administer the gospel and evangelism.

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The last thing I'll say on this is, as I said earlier, that God saves sinners.

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We do not believe that we save ourselves with God's help, and that has a lot of implications.

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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,

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I don't feel like I need to get up and defend that. When I preach the gospel,

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Calvinism, as it is so -called, is really just part and parcel of the good news, basically of what

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Christ has accomplished and that he has done it, and that there is nothing left for sinners to do.

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

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Jon Moffitt Yes. There's a famous quote by Spurgeon, and I think what he was trying to do was pull the title out of Calvinism.

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He literally says Calvinism is the gospel. Often people say,

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I don't believe in a man, I just want to believe in the Bible. All we're saying is that historically speaking, this is what the

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Bible says. If you understand the context of where it comes from, it's just the explanation. We were arguing over is it man or is it

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God, and Calvin got in the middle of that argument. Justin Perdue It's pure, unadjusted gospel.

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Spurgeon's quote is, I don't believe that we are preaching the gospel unless we are preaching what is nowadays called

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Calvinism. There's the first piece of how we understand

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Reformed theology. It is Calvinistic theology. Let's move on to a second major piece of Reformed theology, and that is covenantal theology.

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We recently did a five -part series that you alluded to, an intro to covenant theology, in which

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I think I made the statement that Reformed theology is covenant theology.

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These two things are inextricably linked. 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.

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Just a brief word on the history of this before we consider the theology itself. As the

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Reformation happened in the 16th century, in the aftermath of that, the people who came out of the

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Reformation in the Reformed tradition all understood themselves to be covenantal. That was true whether you were a

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Presbyterian in terms of your polity and the like and how you administered baptism.

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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, and certainly for us,

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John, as we adhere to the 1689 London Baptist Confession. When we say covenant theology,

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I'll just kick us off here, brother. Broadly speaking, we don't just mean that there are covenants in the

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Bible. We don't just mean that God works through covenants because Christians everywhere agree with that statement.

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We are talking about a framework through which we understand and interpret

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

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Historically speaking, there have been developed systems, or I would say lenses or structures that we read the

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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.

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To Justin's point, we believe that the all of Scripture is the unfolding revelation.

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It's the story that's getting progressively more revealed as each page goes through, and what is it revealing?

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It's revealing the redemption of sinners. It is fixing what Adam and Eve destroyed.

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So, we would say that covenantalism is a redemptive historic understanding of Scripture, where all of Scripture is the unfolding story of redemption.

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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

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Jimmy used the illustration in our Covenant Theology series, where there's this quick introduction before the movie begins.

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Before you read Genesis chapter one, you need to know that there's this conversation that happened between the

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Father, the Son, and the Spirit, where there was a promise made. These promises were made between the

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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

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Son would come. The Son committed to the Father to obey the will, which is to be the replacement, the sacrifice, and righteousness needed.

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Historically speaking, this is what the Reformers would say is what we call the covenant of redemption.

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It's a promise that was made to redeem sinners. So, from that, you have to ask, well, how is it going to happen?

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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 what's called bicovenantalism, or two covenants.

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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.

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You have the covenant of redemption. It's now going to be accomplished through the covenant of works and the covenant of grace.

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So, Justin, that's kind of the overarching. Why don't you give us a more fuller explanation of bicovenantalism? Justin Perdue I agree with you, and I just want to restate something that you just said.

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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.

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So, all of history is an unfolding of the covenant of redemption in that respect. The covenant of works is the covenant that God makes with Adam in the

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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.

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There is a prohibition made so that he is not to eat the fruit of a particular tree, and there are sanctions placed upon him if he violates that covenant.

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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.

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

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But to use the language of the prophet Hosea, he transgressed the covenant. To use the language of Paul, Adam fell.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We receive what Christ has done and are counted righteous in him.

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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.

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That's that bicovenantal framework of works and grace. This is absolutely essential to Reformed theology.

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Let me interject here. The word grace is important to understand because grace means to receive unmerited favor.

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That means you are receiving gifts that you do not deserve or earn.

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So when we say covenant of grace, God made a promise to give to his chosen people salvation and righteousness.

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He would cleanse them, and then he would make them holy through glorification through this resurrected body.

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He promised that to Eve and clarified it to Abraham.

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It's further seen through types and shadows, meaning that a type is something that is pointing you to something that is farther.

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Of course, we know what a shadow is. The shadow is not the actual substance, but it is a reflection of the substance.

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The Mosaic law becomes this constant shadow. We use this illustration in the covenant theology series.

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When you are brought a menu, this happened to me last night, and on there are pictures of burritos and taquitos and enchiladas.

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Those are not the actual substance. Those are a type of the substance, and then they take that menu away because I don't need it anymore.

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Why? Because they're bringing out the actual antitype. They're bringing out the actual substance. So the

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Old Testament is this unfolding story of God giving us more and more and more types so we can anticipate.

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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.

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That's the actual substance that was promised to Eve and Abraham and Moses and David and the prophets.

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When we read Scripture, we read it with that lens of the unfolding promise of the covenant grace that's coming to us.

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How did we get the covenant of grace? We got it through the covenant of works, or we would say, as the

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New Testament says, the Old Covenant. Justin Perdue A couple of things. I want to give one other illustration of what you're pointing to, the types and shadows and stuff, because this is helpful for people to understand what we're saying.

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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.

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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.

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In that sense, it purified their flesh, to use the language of the writer of the Hebrews. But, like the writer of the

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Hebrews says, the blood of bulls and goats that were sacrificed could never take away sins. That's Hebrews 10 .4.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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That's what would happen through Christ, and that's what all of Scripture is pointing us to.

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We understand everything in the Bible in light of its main point, which is

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God's plan of redemption accomplished through Jesus and then applied to us certainly by the work of the Holy Spirit.

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The last comment on covenant theology, at least I think it is. I say that, and I might not be saying the truth.

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But the covenant of works and covenant of grace piece, this statement is true.

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We are saved by works, just not our own. What we do is fulfill a covenant of works in the covenant of grace in order to accomplish the covenant of redemption.

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We are justified, we are declared righteous, and we have standing before God on the basis of Christ's works.

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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, and 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.

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other often to a lack of assurance. You can get this at theocast .org slash primer.

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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.

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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.

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You can do that by going to our website, theocast .org. We hope that you enjoy the rest of the conversation.

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We would say here at Theocast, 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.

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This is where you hear Paul referencing that we are part of this new covenant where we are regenerate.

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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

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Paedo -Baptist slash Presbyterian brothers would agree with us. There's a covenant of redemption. There's bi -covenantalism because of work, covenant of grace.

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When it comes down to the final application of some of those, there have historically been some differences.

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We'll leave that for another time in another podcast, but I would say that structure of understanding the

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Bible, which is the most important thing to understand, 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.

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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

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Scripture, Scripture leads you to this. It's just pulled straight out of the text. We believe in a historic understanding of Scripture.

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You look at the grammar, and from that, we see that there is this flow of covenant. We're not putting it upon the text.

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We are arguing it's coming from the text. It flows out of it. If number one was

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Calvinistic theology in terms of our five points of Reformed theology, one is

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Calvinism. The second is covenant theology. The third we would contend is a confessional perspective, confessional theology.

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John, why don't you kick us off with some thoughts on what it means to be confessional? Sometimes when people hear this, they think, well, there's an authority that's greater than the

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Bible. You're not sola scriptura. You aren't believing in the

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Bible alone. You have to have another document that governs you. We want to clarify that.

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I know I held that position when I was very young in Bible college. I was no creed but Christ. I think

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I even used that phrase. All confessions are just smaller Catholic documents.

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They're not needed anymore. We toss them all aside.

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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.

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Often people step off into the deep end and end up drowning in heresy. Confessions have all come out of heresy.

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They're fighting back against the wrong unbiblical doctrines that have come up throughout the ages.

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The confessions are designed to help give what we would say a unified answer to the historic understanding of Christian doctrine.

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I would say it's primary, most important. You cannot deny. If you do deny, you're not a

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Christian. You're not evangelical. Then there are secondary and we would say third level or tertiary is a different confessions disagree a little bit here.

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This is where I would pull in our Lutheran brothers that they are confessional. They fit into this very historically.

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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.

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We stand arm in arm with them. That would be the quick definition as far as historically.

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Then there are different, we would say, prominent confessions today. Justin, I'll let you jump in there and talk about what those are and how they apply to our context today.

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Justin Perdue 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.

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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 a historic confession of faith.

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Certainly it does mean that, but it is more than just simply using a confession in our churches.

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It is a perspective and a posture where we understand that at the heart of the

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Christian life is truth and a set of doctrines and truth claims that are to be trusted and rested in.

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All of those doctrines and truth claims that need to be trusted and rested in center on Jesus Christ.

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They center on his person and his work, what he has accomplished in our place, the nature of redemption, the nature of salvation.

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It is a very objective perspective where we are objective, meaning it stands unaffected outside of us.

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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.

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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.

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In that sense, we'll use the word declarative a lot of times. It's something to be declared. It's over.

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Salvation is done. It's so done that Jesus is sitting down in heaven and he's going to come back for us.

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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.

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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.

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I think we would say the norm in evangelicalism, certainly in the church in the

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West, is a more pietistic perspective. Pietism is something we talk about a lot here, where the focus is on you and you're looking inside and you're concerned primarily with your life, your disciplines, your performance.

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Christ, of course, is there, and he's assumed, but he is not oftentimes the foreground emphasis focus.

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That's something that confessionalism does as well. When a Christian first comes to life, if they didn't grow up in the church, they don't have any biblical knowledge.

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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.

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You can start reading it, and before you know it, they're going to Siri to say, Hey Siri, why does

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God hate everybody in the Old Testament? What's with shaving the corner of their beards? What's with all of the dead animals?

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That's what ends up happening. What the confessions do for the new believer is that it hands them a historic document that has been verified from Scripture.

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These aren't documents that are above Scripture. They are the explanation of Scripture, and they have been,

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I would say, clarified and affirmed for hundreds of years now, that this is what we collectively say and agree that the

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Word of God teaches. The way I use it, it had been in my own church, is I tell people, take this home, because if you have questions about who is

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God, how does he save, what is sanctification, what is the church, what is baptism, what is the

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Lord's table, what is church discipline, how do we understand church membership?

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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

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God is and then how we should live with one another and how we should govern our lives in that way.

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Otherwise, you're left up to all kinds of interpretation of God's Word. So the confessions are what

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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.

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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.

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You're exactly right. The confessions provide for us. They kind of chalk the field theologically.

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They're guardrails, like you said, to keep us from heading into the ditches.

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I think they are also a great lesson for us in understanding that theology is best done corporately, not individually.

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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.

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I'm a follower of this person, or I like this guy's theology, or this guy wrote that book.

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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.

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When we say confessional, underneath that that maybe is even more foundational historically would be creedal.

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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

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Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed. That's where we have overlap with any orthodox

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Christian throughout history would have affirmed those creeds. Then we have specific confessions that might distinguish us from our

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Presbyterian brothers or our Lutheran brothers or our Anglican brothers and sisters, etc. It's useful stuff that keeps us safe and guards us from error.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We get this from our confessions, specifically the Reformed Confessions, which

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Belgium, Westminster, 1689 would be the ones that we would see those in. Savoy Declaration would fit there too.

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Exactly. Savoy Declaration as well. Law, gospel, distinction is, I think, one of the most important parts of understanding the

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Bible because there is more confusion that happens when it comes down to the law and the gospel.

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A lot of pietism and a lot of people who are in bondage to legalism happens when we don't fully understand how the

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Bible has been structured as a message of law and a message of gospel.

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Justin, give us a quick definition of both of those, so then we can explain possibly those are mixed in Scripture, and then we'll talk about the three uses of the law after that.

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Sounds good, man. When we say law, we are talking about anything in Scripture that we are told to do, any command that is given.

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In particular, when we are told to do something for a reward, do this and you will live, that's law.

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In a simple way, do is law, but then when we are told in Scripture, to make the distinction, about things that have been done for us by Jesus, that's gospel.

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When it comes to law, we do things for a reward. When it comes to gospel, we receive what has been done for us by faith.

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That distinction is critical, as you've already alluded to, for a number of reasons. The law says do this and live.

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The gospel says Jesus has done it, now live in him. I would add to that, when it's law, it's not best effort.

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It's not above the rest. The law demands absolute perfection from the beginning to the end without failure ever.

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Eventually, you get there. It has to be from day one. We see this in a couple of ways pointedly in the

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Bible. First of all, that covenant of works that God made with Adam, we saw that one transgression wrecked it.

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It was over. Then think about Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount when he says to his audience that their righteousness needs to exceed that of the

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Pharisees and the scribes who were phenomenal at keeping the law, at least outwardly.

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He applies the law to the hearts of the people, especially illustrating that with adultery and murder and what the command says.

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But I tell you that in your heart, if you're not keeping this, then you've broken the law. Then he says toward the end of Matthew 5 that you must be perfect as your heavenly

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Father is perfect. You're exactly right. The law does not grade on a curve. It is all or nothing.

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You will keep it perfectly or you will face judgment. That's critical for our understanding of what the law requires and what the law is in Scripture over and against what the gospel provides.

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I would say to the gospel, we have to clarify the gospel. The gospel is good news, and the good news is that this goes back to our understanding of how

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God saves. The gospel is the good news that God saves sinners by His sovereign will and decree and by His power.

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He comes in and He changes their heart. He brings them from death to life. What's the promise of the new covenant?

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The promise of the new covenant is that God will come in and rip out their heart of stone, and God will put in a heart of flesh, and then

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God will put the law on their hearts, and He will cause them to walk in it. The good news is that God saves sinners, and then

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He calls them to come to Him. The good news is that you can be saved by God, and the only requirement that is put upon the sinner is to believe.

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Some would even say, no, John, repentance is a requirement. Justin Perdue hears the language these days of the demands of the gospel and what the gospel requires of us, and we do.

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We want to scream from the rooftops that there's one thing. Believe. Trust. Receive.

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You were going to say repentance. Jon Moffitt Right. When we hear gospel, we need to hear

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God is saving sinners. You can't save yourself. What Paul says is that the law becomes a mirror for us.

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It's for us to look into and see our sin and see where we have failed God and see where we need a

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Savior. The law has never saved anyone, nor was it ever designed to save anyone, because you were born in Adam, a sinner.

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The law cannot redeem you. The law was designed to show you how much you need

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Jesus, so the gospel is proclaimed to you. When you hear the gospel, the Bible says the

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Spirit does His work. He transforms your heart. You then believe. You repent.

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You then become the follower of Jesus Christ. You are

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His slave, and He is your master, which is great news. Sin can own you no more.

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Nothing can own you no more because you are owned by the gracious, kind, loving Savior who is now your master.

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That's the good news of the gospel. When we talk about a law -gospel distinction,

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Justin, maybe we need to give an illustration of where those get mixed and how we have to keep them apart. Justin Perdue Sure.

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Maybe a brief thought on repentance really quickly, John. You mentioned it earlier.

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I just want to clarify that the biblical word metanoia literally means a change of mind. To be very clear, repentance is something that God does for us.

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He does it to us. He repents us. We don't repent ourselves. The change of mind, well, what's it about?

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It's about God and about ourselves and what God requires and where we stand before Him and what we need.

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The law is a big piece of how God repents us because, as we're going to talk about in a minute,

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God crushes us with the law and what it requires. We are ruined by that, and then we are driven to Christ in repentance and faith.

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I would contend that biblically speaking, repentance and faith go together. You can't separate the two because it is all a piece of what

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God is doing in us. He repents us and grants us faith. All right, law -gospel distinction.

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Maybe give an example of how these things are collapsed or confused. I'm happy to give a scriptural example, like a text that is often abused.

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The best one that I can think of, John, and we've mentioned this before, but many people may not have heard us talk about it before, is the rich young ruler, the rich young man.

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This man comes to Jesus. He's a Jew. In Matthew's account, he literally says, what work must

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I do to inherit eternal life? In Luke's account, he just says, what must I do to inherit eternal life?

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Jesus looks at him and he says, keep the commandments, and then he lists several of them.

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The young man says, I've done that since I was a youth. Then Jesus responds by saying, one thing you still lack, sell everything you have, give it to the poor, come and follow me.

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The young man goes away dejected and sorrowful. What's going on there? What is going on is that this man thinks he has kept the law.

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What Jesus does in saying to him, sell everything you own, give it to the poor, come follow me.

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He is asking this man to prove his love for God and his love for neighbor. The law of God is summed up in what?

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Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. When Jesus asks this young man to prove that, he can't.

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It crushes him. Jesus has turned up the temperature. He has dumped the full weight of the law on this young man's conscience, and this young man is undone.

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The disciples hear this and see what's going on. Remember, in their minds, think covenant with Israel.

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God blesses people with riches and possessions and the like for their obedience to the law, because that's what

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God had done in his national covenant with Israel. They're thinking, my goodness, this man has wealth.

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This means he's obedient. This means that he's lived a good life. Jesus, if he can't be saved, who can be saved?

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Christ says, with man it's impossible, but with God it's possible. The way that this text is often preached,

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John, is you need to surrender all.

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You need to be willing to surrender everything and then follow Christ if you're going to be saved.

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There's this qualifier put on saving faith. You've got to be willing to do what that young man was not willing to do, and that's not the point.

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The point is you can't do this. The young man thought he'd kept the law. Jesus was like, you haven't, and I'm going to show you you haven't.

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The fact that you need what's standing in front of you, you need me, that's the point of that passage.

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That's a great illustration of the law -gospel distinction that we're pointing to. Justin Perdue would say this happens a lot in Scripture, where you see commands and you see instructions.

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I would even say there are many times when Jesus is asked, what must I do to be saved, or sinners come to him, and he doesn't give them gospel.

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Gospel is the good news that Jesus Christ saves sinners by his work alone. When Jesus says you must do this work, that's not good news.

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That's bad news. To leave father and mother and forsake all and follow me is not good news.

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That's bad news because no one can do that, not on their own, not fully, not completely.

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It always requires God's power to accomplish it. We have to be careful.

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I would say also where you would see a collapsing of the law and the gospel is when we see obedience passages, when we are called to obey, which this is going to lead into our next section on the three uses of the law.

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When we are called to obey, do these things as church, or even we would say the moral law that's brought over.

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If you understand to do those unto salvation, you are now collapsing the law of requirement and the gospel.

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Those who have been saved, Paul tells us there's no condemnation for those who in Christ Jesus. By faith we have all the benefits of Christ.

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Our union with Christ, being adopted as children, we are safe. There is nothing that can separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus.

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Now, being a part of the family of God, there are ways in which we are to conduct ourselves.

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We are told that these things are important. If we don't conduct ourselves in these ways, the church has a structure called church discipline.

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We were to go in and lovingly care for each other and bring each other back under this kindness that God has.

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But you can never look at obedience being either the result of or the requirement of your salvation.

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You have just collapsed good news and law. The law and the good news of the gospel always have to be separate.

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Otherwise, salvation is by works in some form, whether it's keeping salvation or earning salvation.

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Jon, I want to use a term really quickly that I hope will be clarifying for people. There are people who mean well.

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Their intentions are good. We would never impugn their motivations. We would call them biblicists, who want to take the

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Bible seriously on its own terms. But often what they end up doing is introducing a mystery and attention into Scripture where it does not exist.

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A biblicist would take things that are clearly taught in the Bible and somewhat pit them against each other.

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For example, on the one hand, we are saved by grace through faith in Christ alone. But on the other hand, we will go to hell if we do these certain things.

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For the biblicist, it's like, well, the mystery is how both of these things could be true. We would say, well, actually, there's not a mystery there.

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What has happened is you have collapsed categories and you have confused categories of law and gospel.

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That law -gospel distinction that we've been talking about can help us understand how we're saved by grace through faith in Christ alone, and yet the writers in the

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New Testament will say the sexually immoral will not inherit the kingdom of God. This has everything to do with that distinction between the law and the gospel, but also with respect to the three uses of the law and how they have been historically defined.

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All of that can bring a lot of clarity and a lot of relief for people and a greater understanding of what's being talked about in Scripture.

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We plan over in the Members podcast to define the three uses of the law as they have been historically understood, and we plan to talk about our fifth point of Reformed theology, which is an ordinary means of grace understanding of the

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Christian life and even of the way of growth and sanctification in the Christian life. If you are unfamiliar with Theocast and with the

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Members podcast, you don't even know what I'm talking about. You can find out more information about our membership and the podcast that is a piece of that at our website, theocast .org,

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and just by way of an announcement, we plan to offer the Members podcast today for free so that you can continue to track with us as we have defined these five points of Reformed theology.