Of the Holy Scriptures (1:1-5)

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An exposition of the 1689 Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. Chapter 1:1-5 (Holy Scripture 1)

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So, we're in Lesson 2 of the Confession. Before we get into the lesson, though,
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I want to do a quick review. I gave you that historical development sheet that should have ended up in your duotangs, and I just wanted to run over a couple things that I didn't mention last time, or that will offer us some helpful review this time around.
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And that is the context in which you'll remember, the context in which the Confession came to be, that it was really in the furnace of affliction that the
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Confession has come to us as a human document. It is not inerrant.
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It is very much a human document, and yet refined in many ways by the persecution that the early
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Baptist forefathers of ours experienced in the 17th century. And I found a couple quotes that I thought,
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I'll include these, and then we can appreciate some of them later if we want. But E .B.
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Underhill, he says this about them, "'No heresy was too gross to attribute to them, no practice too wicked.'
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Another one adds, "'Their churches were often targeted as objects of great suspicion, and not a few of their members suffered cruel treatment at the hands of others, relentless slander by their opponents.
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In both pulpit and print, evidence that these early Calvinistic separatists were being confused, on the one hand, with the theological heirs of the general
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Baptists, those were the Arminian Baptists, and on the other hand, the political extremes of the
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Munster Anabaptists. Such misunderstandings were not only untrue, but also carried with immediate dangers of imprisonment and possibly the death sentence.'"
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And we heard how one of the responses of those early Baptists was to draft up a Confession, to indicate what it was that they believed.
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And in the midst of that, after that first Confession was draft, there was the Act of Uniformity that was passed, and then the
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Five -Mile Act, and led to even increased hardship up until 1689, when
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William and Mary took the throne. And it was only after that Act of Toleration was passed that really the 1677
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Confession could be truly published, not anonymously, but publicly. And during that time, and I didn't mention this to you last time, it was a hundred churches in the area, or over a hundred churches, and the delegates from each of those churches that came, the messengers, to affirm the
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Confession. And then I made a little bit of a note here last time we stopped at 1689. From there, it's the last paragraph, "'It became the standard of orthodoxy amongst particular
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Baptist churches throughout the British Isles, eventually being adopted by the Philadelphia Association as the doctrinal standard for Reformed Baptists in early
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America.'" And so it was in that time of affliction that this Confession came to be, and that they came to seek out a document that would bring about unity in the churches, unity between the
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Pedo -Baptist Reformed Churches and the Baptistic Reformed Churches. And now we get into, if you look to,
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I believe it's page 12 now in your documents, lesson 2, the second London Confession of Faith, chapter 1, of the
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Holy Scriptures. And as much as possible, if I can remember to do it each time,
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I want to start each of our lessons by looking at a passage of Scripture that speaks to the actual topic that we're looking at.
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And so you'll see here, 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17. We read this, "'All
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Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.'"
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And so what we find in chapter 1 of the Confession is that which deals explicitly with the doctrine of Holy Scripture, what has been called by many theologians,
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Bibliology, the doctrine of the Bible. And taking a quote from James Renahan, who speaks on this first chapter, he says this, "'Following the traditional method of expressing theological loci, the three
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Puritan confessions begin with what was called the Principium Cognisendi, which is the principle of knowing.
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Chapter 1 articulates the foundational epistemological basis of Christian theology.'"
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Now, does anyone know what that means? Epistemological basis of Christian theology? Epistemology is the theory of knowing.
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It is the theory of knowledge. And so the study of the Word of God, the study of the Bible, brings about the foundation of our knowing, what is the basis of Christian theology.
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And he says this, "'Namely, the Holy Scriptures.' And so it's the Bible that provides the building blocks of all successive doctrinal heads.'"
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He says, "'True theology is erected on the Word of God. It rests on exegesis, collates the results of that task, and carefully articulates the results.'"
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And he says, "'The ten paragraphs present here provide a concise yet full definition of the nature of divine revelation.'"
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So what he's speaking about there is that it is in the Bible that we get our knowledge of true knowledge.
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It is in the Bible that we come to understand everything that there can be understood about God, and about ourselves, and about our relationship to him.
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And in this first chapter of the Confession, we find that there are ten paragraphs. And within these ten paragraphs, it's broken up into seven different sections.
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Today, we'll look at three of those sections, and you'll see them listed there on page 12.
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The three that we'll look at is the necessity of the Scriptures, the identity of the
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Scriptures, and then the authority of the Scriptures. And so, as with the study of all
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Christian theology, our study must begin with the Word of God. And so we'll look, as we look at this necessity, identity, and authority, we'll look first at paragraph number one, and that is the necessity of the
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Scriptures. And rather than me reading all of these paragraphs, I'm wondering if I can pass my microphone around here, just for the recording, if someone would be up for reading paragraph number one for us.
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My educational assistant is going to look at it. Don't make eye contact. I wasn't trying.
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So just what's in the box? Okay, it's paragraph one. The Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge of faith and obedience, sorry, knowledge, faith, and obedience, although the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the goodness, wisdom, and power of God, as to leave men inexcusable, yet they are not sufficient to give the knowledge of God, and His will, which is necessary unto salvation.
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Therefore, it pleased the Lord at sundry times and in diversified manners to reveal
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Himself and to declare His will unto His Church, and afterward, for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, and for the more sure establishment and comfort of the
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Church against the corruption of the flesh and the malice of Satan and of the world, to commit the same wholly unto writing, which makes the
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Holy Scriptures to be most necessary, those former ways of God revealing His will unto His people being now completed.
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So what you'll see as we go through here is we'll look at the paragraph, and then I have the emboldened exposition, and throughout, what we'll find is as we quote from that confession and expound upon it,
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I'll put that in bold with the exposition around and below it. And so here, as we get into chapter one,
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I want to just dip back, our toes back into last week a little bit as we talk about the reason for a confession, or the reason for a doctrinal statement.
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Some people have contended, in fact many people have contended, that to hold to, to adopt a confession, or some kind of doctrinal standard, some kind of doctrinal statement, is antithetical to the
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Christian life. And the reason they say that is because they say it, what it does is it undermines the sufficiency of Scripture.
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That if we have a confessional document, we have some summary of our doctrinal views, that we invariably will turn to this, this confession, rather than to this
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Bible. And one of the things that we see in this confession is, I think, twofold. Firstly, we see that the confession from this first paragraph was not written to supersede or to compete with the
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Scriptures. The role of a sound confession, as our brother prayed just a few minutes ago, is merely to summarize the teaching of Scripture.
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I like what Sam Waldron says about this in one of our lectures. And I'm not going to try to replicate his voice every time
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I quote him, despite my temptation to do that. But he says this, that the confession does no more to undermine the sufficiency of Scripture than the squeezing of orange juice does to undermine the sufficiency of an orange.
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That when we make orange juice out of an orange, we're not undermining that orange, rather we're simply taking some of the contents of that, the concentrate of it, and we're consuming that aspect of the orange, not to the neglect of the whole orange.
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And so, we're not, as we look at the confession, we're not undermining Scripture at all, but rather we're upholding it.
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We see that, secondly, in this, that the Second Lenten Confession contains the strongest statement on the sufficiency and necessity of Scripture of any of the three
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Puritan Confessions. And it's written there. If it wasn't, I would ask you what they are. But we remember the three
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Puritan Confessions were the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Savoy Declaration, and then the
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Second Lenten Confession of Faith. And we'll see how it is that it is stronger than those still in just a moment.
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But it reads there in the confession, the Holy Scripture is the only sufficient, certain, and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience.
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And this is contrary to the papist notion that the Church was and is to be guided by both
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Scripture and Roman Catholic Church tradition. Here the confession articulates a position that can be summarized in that Latin phrase that we know came out of the
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Reformation, that great refrain, sola scriptura, that it is from the Bible that we find our greatest and highest authority.
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It's from the Bible alone that we find that infallible source of authority.
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And it's interesting as we go through the confession, one of the things that we'll find time and again is that a great deal of what we find in the confession is a response, as I mentioned, it is a
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Reformation doctrine. It is a response to the errors of the Roman Catholic Church. And so we'll see
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Roman Catholics and really the errors that surround that responded to again and again and again.
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And this view that the Holy Scripture is the only sufficient certain infallible rule of all saving faith and knowledge really is an echo of the words of Martin Luther if anyone remembers the story of Luther at the
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Diet of Worms. Does anyone recall that story? Does that ring a bell at all?
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Thumbs up? Some people? Okay. Well, it was in 1521 that Martin Luther, so this was just a few years after the commencement of the
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Protestant Reformation, it was in 1521 that Martin Luther was taken to what was called the
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Diet of Worms. Am I saying that right, Sam? It's German, so it's not the
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Diet of Worms, but it's the Diet of Worms. And there he was put before a man named
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Johann von der Ecken, the General Secretary of the Bishop of Trier.
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And he was made to answer for his various statements that were considered heretical. And as he went before the
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Diet of Worms, they gave him an opportunity to recant of his view. And really interestingly, you might think of Martin Luther and his gregarious ways of immediately responding to that and refusing to recant.
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But what he said was that because it had to do with salvation, and because it had to do with some of the most important things in terms of Christian theology, he asked for one day to think about it.
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And given a day to think about it, he was given the remainder of that day, the night to sleep on it, and the following day the question was posed to him,
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Martin Luther, will you recant of these views? If he would not recant of these views, he would be charged with heresy.
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In being charged with heresy, he would be condemned as a heretic, excommunicated from the
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Church, and there was a good likelihood that in that being convicted of or being condemned as a heretic, that he would end up being put to death at some point in the future.
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And there as Martin Luther stood there at the Diet of Worms, he said and you can see it, it's italicized at the end of that paragraph on page 13, he said, unless therefore
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I am convinced by the testimony of Scripture, or by the clearest reasoning, unless I am persuaded by means of the passages
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I have quoted from the Bible, and unless they thus render my conscience bound by the word of God, I cannot and will not retract, for it is unsafe for a
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Christian to speak against his conscience. Here I stand, I can do no other, may
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God help me. Amen. What he's saying is as he stands before this crowd of authorities and onlookers is,
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I can do nothing but that which the word of God says. No quote from the
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Roman Magisterium, no quote from the Pope or any other church authority, but that which the word of God alone says.
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We hear that echoed in this first line of the Confession. And then as we go on, what we see here is that it says that not only is the word of God an infallible source, but that it's our infallible source at the top of page 14 for the knowledge of God and of ourselves, for the object and nature of our saving faith, and for God's requirements for our obedience.
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And this is where I said, you might remember a moment ago, I said that the Second Lenten Confession has the strongest view on the sufficiency and necessity of Scripture.
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Here we see it, that in the Westminster in fact, in the Savoy, we don't see that mention of obedience, but only here in the
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Second Lenten Confession. That it is there, most certainly for our faith, it's most certainly there for our knowledge, but it's also most certainly there for our obedience to God as He has revealed
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Himself to us. And this came in response to a movement of the Quakers. There was one particular prominent church where nearly a quarter of the members had been convinced of Quakerism and the excesses of that movement.
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The Roman Catholic Church in the early 1670s was beginning to re -emerge in some ways, and seeing some of these excesses and some of the other related issues, they added this note on obedience.
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But the Confession qualifies the statement by saying that while Scripture is our only sufficient certain infallible rule, it also says that there's this one statement, although the light of nature and the works of creation and providence do so far manifest the good wisdom and power of God to leave men inexcusable.
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Now, there's been a debate that has been waged in recent years, and we see in fact that it was being waged long before our day, but even here in the 17th century,
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I'm not sure when these terms came to be used, but this battle between what has been called inclusivists or the inclusivist position and the exclusivist position.
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We see that just below the bold font midway down page 14. And here the inclusivist position articulates that there are those who maybe they live in a distant land, maybe in Papua New Guinea or somewhere in the
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Amazon rainforest, that they see that there is a God somehow in the creation that is around them, that perhaps they have misconceptions about that God, maybe they've even fashioned an idol for themselves to worship that God, but because they are judged based solely on the light that they have received,
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God will look at them and that he will save them apart from not only their saving faith, but apart from their knowledge of the gospel.
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Apart from any interaction with redemptive revelation. Now if someone were to come to you,
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I want to involve you as much as I can, if someone were to come to you and say no, we don't have to go to the people in Papua New Guinea, maybe that's not a great place because many have gone there, but we don't need to go to that little island in the
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Indian Ocean where not even the fishermen can get near, where there's no outside influence whatsoever.
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They worship there, and whether they realize it or not, they're worshiping the one true God, they just don't know it.
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They will be saved. God will judge them based on the light that they have received. They articulate an inclusivist position.
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How would you respond to that? Yeah, I always ask long questions,
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I'm sorry. How would you respond if someone said, they don't need to hear the gospel to be saved.
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God will save them based on the light they've received. Psalm 19?
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Yeah, that's a great way of putting it.
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The book of nature will reveal God, but not Christ. Not redemption. And so there's this inclusivist position that God is going to save as has sometimes been termed the noble savage.
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There's this noble savage somewhere out there who has never heard the gospel that God will save him, apart from the gospel.
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Or there's the exclusivist position which says that essentially, I'm going to quote from Romans 10, that faith comes by hearing.
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And hearing through the word of God, or through the word about Christ. And so what the confession does is it takes a position, an exclusivist position.
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And here it argues that every person has enough revelation to be damned, that is in the book of nature, but yet not enough revelation to be saved.
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And though some might find this assertion unpalatable, this is clearly the position of scripture, as we've already looked at.
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Psalm one, oh, excuse me, I have 119. Psalm 19 it should read. In verses one through six.
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It's interesting, in Psalm 19 we find actually a clear picture, and you can turn there in your
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Bibles if you would, to both the book of nature, what theologians call general revelation, in verses one through six.
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And then in verses seven through eleven, the book of scripture, or again, what has often been called special revelation.
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And so I won't read the entire passage, but in Psalm 19 verse one, we read these familiar words.
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The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.
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Day to day pours out speech, and night to night reveals knowledge. There is no speech, nor are there words whose voice is not heard.
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Their voice goes out through all the earth, their words to the end of the world.
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So we see this picture of the book of nature, as it is open, when any man or woman lives in the world.
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And they have eyes to see, ears to hear, a mouth to taste, nose to smell, their senses, even if not all of their senses are functioning, but they have senses nonetheless.
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The ability to touch, the ability to exist, even there and then, they are without excuse, because God has revealed himself to them in his book of nature.
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We read about it in Romans chapter 1. Our brother alluded to that as well in verse 19.
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For what can be known about God is plain to them, it says, because God has shown it to them.
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For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature, are clearly perceived in everything that has been made, so they are without excuse.
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For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they came futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened.
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The unbeliever, though he does not know God in the way that a Christian knows God, the unbeliever who is living in the world, reading nothing but the book of nature, it can be said of them that they know
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God, even though they did not honor him or give thanks to him.
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In Romans 2 we see that addressed further along. So what we have in the book of nature is enough for a man or a woman to be condemned, but not enough for a man or a woman to be saved.
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This should motivate us as the church in Edmonton, at Grace Fellowship Church, and as the church abroad to be zealous for world missions.
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The inclusivist view, as much as we might want to hold that in our hearts, that God is somehow, someway going to save that noble savage in the
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Amazon. That is a delusion. It is separate from scripture, but rather that these men and women and children across the world who have never heard the name of Christ, I'm not sure how many it is,
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I believe I heard a stat once, 10 ,000 villages in India where there is no Christian witness.
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Those villages need the gospel of Christ. They need special revelation as we see midway through page 15.
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Yes, please. There are a couple places we could go to look.
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We won't go to all of them now, but a couple places I would show us is Romans chapter 4, or Hebrews chapter 11.
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Romans chapter 4 speaks about Abraham being justified by faith, because he was believing
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God, he was believing God's promises, that in Hebrews chapter 11, this faith hall of fame that we have.
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In Romans 3, that's where I'll take us first, or maybe the only place today, that we actually see that God was in Christ atoning for sins of the saints who were before Christ.
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And that though they may not have understood everything,
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Scripture speaks about how the prophets longed to look or longed to understand some of the aspects of these prophecies that they were speaking, but they understood they had a messianic hope right from,
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I would suggest, from Adam when that proto -evangelion was given, that the serpent would bite the heel or bruise the heel, and the offspring would crush the serpent's head.
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From our first parents, Adam and Eve, they had the first gospel, the proto -evangelion.
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And so in Romans 3, in verse 21, we read a little bit about that, but now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, though the law and the prophets bear witness to it, the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe, for there is no distinction.
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Familiar words here, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified by His grace as a gift through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom
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God put forward as a propitiation by His blood to be received by faith.
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And here it is. This was to show God's righteousness, because in His divine forbearance,
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He had passed over former sins. He passed over the former sins of Adam and of Noah and of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and of Samson and list the name of David.
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Let me pick up my spot there. Yes. Because in His divine forbearance,
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He had passed over former sins. It was to show His righteousness at the present time, so that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
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That there was, in a sense, He was passing over our former sins, but also their former sins, passing over them, looking to Christ who was to atone for the sins, not only for all who would come after Him, but for all who would come before Him.
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And so, though they may not have understood, for instance, every aspect of, for instance,
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His name would be Jesus, that He would be born in Bethlehem of a virgin, that He would go to Egypt, though many of those details emerge in the
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Old Testament, I'm listing things that emerge there, they had a messianic hope, a messianic hope that was salvific, according to according to God's progressive, the progressive nature of God's revelation.
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And so, for instance, if you came across someone today who said, I don't want the faith of a
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New Testament Christian, I want the faith of Adam and Eve, right? This nameless, faceless
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Savior, this offspring who's going to crush the head of the serpent, I mean, that's an interesting debate, but I would say
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God has given us, and we trust all of this other revelation to paint a complete picture.
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And so, there are Old Testament saints, in the Septuagint, the
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Greek translation of the Old Testament, oftentimes the assembly of Israel uses the term ecclesia, it's really the
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Old Testament church, with its saints, they were justified in the same way that we are justified today, by faith in Christ, though we have a greater degree of revelation, a greater knowledge of Him today, if that makes sense.
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Well, yeah, to the degree that they had revelation, the same today, right? But you still have, like I was thinking about it,
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I'll speak about it on Sunday, you have Uriah the Hittite, he's not an Israelite, he's a noble man, fighting in David's army, he is by lineage, a pagan, and yet, by scriptural example, he seems to be a man who belongs to the people of God, a man of faith, a man of noble character, a man who dies righteously at the hands of a conspiratorial murderous king at that moment, and so you've got foreigners, you've got the mixed multitude that leaves
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Egypt, you have people who in the midst of, or a
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Hagar, you've got these people in the midst of these fallen nations that see the revelation of God as it were in front of them, and respond to it and are saved.
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And I think that what's important to note is that the nation of Israel was to be a blessing to all the nations. And to a certain extent
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I think that their mission, I don't want to go down a rabbit hole here, but one of their missions was for people to see the just laws that God had given them, to see the
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God whom they worshipped, and that those nations would come. That's why there was a court of the Gentiles even in the temple.
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That's why the Lord was flipping tables, that this would be called a house of prayer for all nations, not just for the nation of Israel.
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Yeah, not everyone who says they're of Abraham are truly sons of Abraham. The Lord was looking not just for circumcised foreskins, but circumcised hearts.
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So we see that special revelation is needed. So the second half of Psalm 19, verses 7 -11, the law of the
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Lord is perfect, reviving the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
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The precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandments, the commandment of the
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Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. We see this, there's this enlightening nature of Scripture.
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It makes one wise, it says in Psalm 19. And then we see those words repeated by Paul in 2
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Timothy 3 .14 as he's talking about Timothy and how he came to know the gospel.
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He says, But as for you, continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it, and how from your childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, that is
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Scripture, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ.
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Romans 10. How then will they call on him whom they have not believed? How are they to believe in whom they have never heard?
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And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And he says in verse 17, if you will tolerate me fast forwarding a bit.
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So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ. So, in a remarkable way, in a very thorough way, the confession lays out this difference between natural revelation or general revelation and special revelation.
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And then he says, or they say, excuse me, those who were framing the confession, that in the second half, therefore please the
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Lord at various times and diverse manners to reveal himself and to declare his will unto his church, and then for the better preserving and propagating of the truth, for the sure establishment and comfort of the church against the corruption of the flesh and the malice of Satan, to commit the same wholly into writing.
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What a blessing it is that when we have the Bible, that it is a product of God's revelation and of God's wisdom not only to propagate but to preserve
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Scripture so that we can go back and look at some of the oldest manuscripts of Scripture.
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We can find in caves old jars full of scrolls that have
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Old Testament books and passages throughout that we can see, not just in our minds through oral tradition, but on the printed page, the very word of God.
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And as we go through, I want us to appreciate that this is not just doctrine for doctrine's sake, but this is doctrine for life.
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This is theology for life, that God has revealed himself, not only in nature, but in Scripture.
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And that in an inscripturated word. We're not going to go in there, but I've listed a number of passages that you're welcome to look at there.
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Just in that paragraph on page 16, above the paragraph 2 box, in God's wise providence, he sought a fit to inscripturate.
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And there's a number of passages there where it speaks about Moses writing it down,
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Isaiah writing it down, Jeremiah writing it down, Daniel writing it down in the epistles,
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Paul wrote it, Christ said it, Paul writes it down in 1
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Peter 5 18 as Scripture, what Jesus himself said. And so we won't go through all of that, but I encourage you to look at that and see how it is that God has given us the printed word.
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In paragraph 2, who would like to read paragraphs both 2 and 3?
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Or we can split them up. Paragraph 2, would anyone like to read?
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Paulo, can I get you to read paragraph 3? Now just, brother, if you want, just read it and slide it over to Paulo.
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Sure. Paragraph 2. Under the name of Holy Scripture or the word of God written are now contained all the books of the
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Old and New Testaments, which are these. Of the Old Testament, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1 and 2
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Samuel, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, Esther, Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the
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Song of Solomon, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi.
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Of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, the
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Book of Acts, Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1 and 2
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Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Hebrews, James, 1 and 2
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Peter, 1, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation, all of which are given by the inspiration of God to be the rule of faith and life, 2
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Timothy 3 .16. Paragraph 3.
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The books commonly called Apocrypha, not being of divine inspiration, are no part of the canon or rule of the
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Scripture and therefore are of no authority to the Church of God, nor to be any otherwise approved or made use of than other human writings.
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Luke 24, 27, 44, Romans 3 .2. So as paragraph 1 deals with the necessity of Scripture, paragraphs 2 and 3 deal with the identity of Scripture, or the canonicity of Scripture.
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And some of you might look at this and go, do we really have to list all of the books?
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Is that necessary? Or even to acknowledge that there is an Apocrypha?
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And I want to go into some detail, I think, why that is helpful. And as we go through,
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I will be a completely open book with you. I've come to appreciate this confession so much that I want to persuade you that it is a good confession, a confession that our
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Church should hold to. And I think paragraphs 2 and 3 are a good example of why the thorough nature of the confession is actually a help and not a hindrance to us.
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So here, the confession explains what was exclaimed by B .B. Warfield. This is at the top of page 17.
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He says this, and hopefully we can appreciate this. He says, No less than 66 separate books, one of which consists itself of 150 separate compositions, immediately stare us in the face.
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These treatises come from the hands of at least 30 distinct writers, scattered over a period of some 1 ,500 years, and embrace specimens of nearly every kind of writing known among men.
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Histories, codes of law, ethical maxims, philosophical treaties, discourses, dramas, songs, hymns, epics, biographies, letters, both official and personal, prophecies, every kind of composition known beneath heaven seems gathered here in one volume.
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What a wonderful thing that the Lord hasn't given us a book, but he's given us a library of books within this book.
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As I was preparing for today, I was reading a chapter from a book that I had read a few years back, and I wrote in the margins visiting a library.
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For those of us who are bibliophiles, who love books, who love holding a book in your hands, for some of you,
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I've shown you just this copy of the Confession that I got while I was in the States.
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A nice binding. It smells like something good. You can smell it later if you'd like, but you can hold it in your hands.
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You can go into a whole library, surrounded by books, and appreciate all that they have.
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And yet you can walk into the Library of Congress in Washington D .C. and look at all of the books that surround you, and none are as wonderful, no library as treasured, as should be treasured, as this library that God has given us.
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And why is it, then, that the framers of the Confession saw fit to include this library in their
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Confession? Well, again, if I can quote from F. F. Bruce on this topic, he says this, dealing with some of the history of this inclusion in the
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Confession, he says, "...the authorized version, or the King James of 1611, was formally a revision of the last 1602 edition of the bishop's
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Bible. It included a version of the Apocrypha as a matter of course. Four years later, the
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Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, a firm Calvinist in the theology, forbade the binding or selling of Bibles without the
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Apocrypha on penalty of a year's imprisonment." So, Brother Lowell, your
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King James Bible, that first edition, as it came, came with the Apocrypha included.
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So, that's the 1611 edition of the King James Bible. So, this is the context that the
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Puritans find themselves in. He continues, "...this measure seemed to be necessary because of the increasingly vocal Puritan objection to the inclusion of the
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Apocrypha among the canonical books. In 1589, an attack on their inclusion by John Penry had called forth a spirited reply from an earlier
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Archbishop, John Whitgift. Now, despite the penalty enacted by Archbishop Abbott, copies of the
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Authorized Version and the King James Version without the Apocrypha began to be produced in the years from 1626 onward."
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And then, the tide, as it was running, he says, "...in the Puritan favor in those years, in 1644, the long
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Parliament ordained that the Apocrypha should cease to be read in service of the
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Church of England. Three years later, at the Westminster Assembly, this list was included to formally state that we do not, that they did not, as Puritans, recognize the
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Apocrypha as part of the Canon." And so, we see it in the Westminster Confession, in the London Baptist Confession of Faith, that in the history of it, as this debate was being waged about the
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Apocrypha, about what belonged in Scripture, they said, "...these are the books that are canonical."
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And we'll get into why some of these debates were happening in a few minutes as we address that Apocrypha.
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Now, I want to pose a question to all of you before we look at the Old Testament. And it is this, how do we know that the
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Old Testament, that is in our Bibles today, is all of the books of the
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Old Testament, with not one more or not one less than what
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God intended? Same as the
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Jewish, yeah, same as the Jews. The Jews recognize the 39 books of the Old Testament as being canonical.
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Yeah. Any others? Well, I mean, that certainly demonstrates the value of the
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Old Testament, that these scrolls were preserved in excellent condition.
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How would you do that, brother? Yeah, that's right.
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How often does Christ himself reference the Old Testament as the
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Scriptures? You have heard it said, but I say to you, the whole Sermon on the Mount is an exposition of the law.
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The Apostles, again and again, I referenced 1 Timothy 5 .18, you shall not muzzle an ox who treads the grain.
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The worker deserves his pay. Paul is quoting Christ as Scriptural, who is quoting from the
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Old Testament law, in that place. So what we see is, in fact, that within the
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Old Testament, within the Jewish tradition, as well as within the New Testament, there is a continuous recognition that there are books that do belong, and books that do not belong, to a canon, a rule, a measuring rod, that tells us what is
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Scriptural and what is not. And I acknowledge here, you'll see Gregory Lanier, in a footnote, footnote number 23 at the bottom of 17, and then that, the word ibid, ibid, ibid, ibid, for the next couple of pages, it's because I've leaned a lot on Greg Lanier's material here.
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And he says this, he says, there is very little debate about the 39 books that make up the
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Old Testament. On this point, oh, I said that. This is what Greg Lanier said.
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Modern Jewish, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant traditions fully agree on 39 of the books.
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The Protestant tradition agrees with Judaism, as you said, sister, in stopping there. But Roman Catholic and Orthodox Bibles include other books of Scripture as well.
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And in speaking about how we can see the development of this canon, and then the preservation of this canon, he says this, later
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Jewish historians likewise speak of Scripture which is laid up in the temple, and the books laid up in the temple.
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In Josephus, for instance, the letter of Aristias describes how the high priests of the temple approved the copies of the
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Jewish Scriptures being sent to Egypt. And in 1st Maccabees, which is an apocryphal book, describes how the
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Greek soldiers who defiled the Jerusalem temple in 168 BC burned the books of the law that they found.
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In short, the Israelites and the post -exilic Jews signaled their regard for the divinely given scriptural books by depositing them in the house of God.
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That as these books came to be, that the five books of the Pentateuch, or Torah, the giving of the law,
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Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, as those came to be, they were stored. We remember that, in fact, this was recorded in Scripture that when the
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Decalogue, the Ten Commandments, were given, they were written on stone tablets. And where did those stone tablets go?
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Does anyone remember? They went into the Ark of the Covenant. So we begin to see already the tradition of, in the center of God's worship, storing up those books that were canonical.
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We see this develop through the Old Testament, as is recounted here. And then in the New Testament, if anyone remembers, when
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Christ enters into the synagogue, what does he do? But he unrolls the scroll, another copy of a canonical book, and reads from the
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Scriptures concerning himself, if anyone remembers that. This became a process where it wasn't if I can use this expression, it wasn't nilly -willy.
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Where it's, well, this is kind of canonical, this is sort of canonical. No, it was recognized by the people of God.
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This belongs to the canon of God's sacred word. And we will preserve it, we will protect it, and keep it.
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So when the Jews, sister, as you mentioned, when we come to the New Testament, in the beginning of the New Testament, as Christ is quoting from the
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Old Testament, as the Apostles are, as even the Jews in that day are quoting the
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Old Testament, they knew what belonged and what didn't belong to the canon because they had maintained a thorough record of it.
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And the Apocrypha, we'll get to that in a little bit, was not included in that record.
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Now, speaking to that period between Malachi and Matthew, what about that period of time?
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Why don't we account for any scriptural books in those four years? On page 18, a quarter of the way down, it says there's evidence of a cessation in the
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Old Testament writings at the end of what is our Old Testament canon. Again, quoting from Lanier, the cessation of spirit -inspired prophecy after the 400s
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BC is attested to in several early Jewish writings, from Maccabees, the prayer of Azariah, Josephus, and others, as well as the
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New Testament in Hebrews 1, in Matthew 11, 13. By the early rabbinic period, the consensus is that after the death of the last prophets,
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Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, the Holy Spirit departed from Israel.
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And so by the early, by the 400s BC, there was a clear, he writes, inter -biblical awareness of a collection of writings given by the
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Spirit of God, received as covenant scripture for Israel and deposited in the temple.
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The shape, boundaries of these scriptures may not have reached full recognition, but that does not undermine how
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God had by definition closed the canon through the cessation of divinely -inspired scriptural writings.
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And so there were, you could say, people who were rightly cessationists prior to the coming of Christ because God had, at that time, closed the canon.
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The canon was closed. There was a general recognition of what was included in the
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Old Testament and we see that repeated again and again and again in the
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New Testament. For those brothers who have been taking our institute classes, we know that that Old Testament is broken up into three different sections, called the
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Tanakh. Does anyone know? I'm going to ask you guys. Brandon, what is the
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T in the Tanakh? The Torah. And what's the
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N in the Tanakh? Do you remember? Yeah, the Nevim. And then the
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K is the Ketuvim. Those are the Law, the Prophets, and the
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Writings. And we have those in our full Old Testament canon. And then in the
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New Testament books, if we can go on a little bit further, forgive me, I was running out of time, and so I quoted a lot here from Greg Lanier.
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He says that the common misconception is that Constantine and the bishops imposed the canonical books at the
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Council of Nicaea in 325 A .D. or that Athanasius did in his Festal Letters of 367
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A .D. The former is simply false. There is no record that the scriptural books were debated at that council.
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He says, instead, the early church quickly came to the agreement that God gave the Gospels and the
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Epistles of Paul as the nucleus of New Covenant Scripture. Bishops never picked these writings or granted them canonical status.
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The Gospels and Paul never asked anyhow. They simply were. We will take them in turn and focus on two different kinds of data.
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And he goes on in his book to speak to quotations and allusions. The internal quotations of the
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New Testament within itself, the allusions of such, and then direct statements.
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This is specifically in church history about them. He says of Origen, Origen writes that the texture of the net of Scripture has been completed in the
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Gospels and in the words of Christ through the Apostles. And even earlier, Ignatius and Hippolytus assert that the two -fold source of authority in the church is the
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Gospel and the Apostles. Notice this. These early church fathers are not saying that the church is the authority, dictating that it is the
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Gospels and the Apostles that are canonical, but it is the
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Gospels and the Apostles who are the authority, who are as he says, the two -fold source of authority in the church.
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But the details for each of the other books is case -specific. And I included a table here of some of the early church fathers and their reference to these books in Scripture.
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And this has to do with direct quotations or allusions to these books. And so, for instance,
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Origen, who's second from the top, he quotes and references from every book of the
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Gospel, from the Gospels, from Paul and Hebrews, from the general epistles, and from the book of Revelation.
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The same with Clermont, Searle of Jerusalem, Athanasius, Gregory of Nazianzus, except for Revelation, Jerome, Augustine, and Rufinus, I believe that is, all there.
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And then in some of their lists where this is not seen, for instance in Eusebius, third from the top, he quotes from each of the
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Gospels, from Paul's letters, and from Hebrews, from the book of Revelation, and the only places we don't see it is
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James, 2nd Peter, 2nd, 3rd John, and Jude. So we begin to see that the
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New Testament is making use of the Old Testament, that the New Testament is making allusions to, is making use of the
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New Testament, and then the early Church Fathers. There's this recognition, some of them coming here before these councils, leaning on these books, leaning on passages from each of these books as canonical, as Scripture itself.
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And then the Apocrypha, and this is commentary on paragraph 3. What do we make of the
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Apocrypha? Should we include it? Well, the word Apocrypha, it means spurious, that it is suspect, it does not belong.
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And it wasn't formally recognized as being canonical by the Roman Catholic Church, actually, until the
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Council of Trent in the year 1546. And on this point, I'll quote from Wayne Grudem, he says this.
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The Council of Trent was the response of the Roman Catholic Church to the teachings of Martin Luther, and the rapidly spreading
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Protestant Reformation, and the books of the Apocrypha contain support for the
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Catholic teaching, a prayer for the dead, and justification by faith plus works, not by faith alone.
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I might have that quote a little bit off there, that is quite reading it right. But the Catholic teaching of prayers for the dead, and justification by faith plus works, there they found an argument for that, not prior to the
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Reformation, not in 1000 AD, or in 1200 AD, but the
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Council of Trent, 1546. So, just shy of 30 years after the beginning of the
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Reformation, they say, oh, but the Apocrypha. But the Apocrypha is in fact here, and it teaches what we believe, or what we want to believe, and what we want to teach.
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And so they adopt it there. And so while the books of the Apocrypha may be interesting, and I think that the
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Confession indicates that, that it can be appreciated as a human document, as human writings.
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Though it is interesting, it might even be helpful in some places. It is not to be regarded as Scripture, but it is to be regarded as human writing.
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The Apocrypha itself does not claim for itself to be Scripture, as the
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Scriptures do. As Paul says, when he's writing to the Thessalonians, you didn't accept my words as the words of a man, but as the very words of God.
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There's no reference to that in the Apocrypha. They are not regarded as Scripture by the
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Jews. They were never quoted as Scripture by Jesus or the New Testament. Their teachings often contradict those of the
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Bible. So that is why we do not accept the Apocrypha, and that's why
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I think it's okay for us to say aloud in our confessional documents, we don't accept the
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Apocrypha. And then in paragraphs four and five, you'll notice there's no other lines here.
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It's because not every single paragraph is going to get a full treatment. But I'll read these out loud and make a couple of comments, and then we'll close with questions.
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Paragraph four. The authority of the Holy Scripture for which it ought to be believed depends not upon the testimony of any man or church.
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So despite all that I have just read, it does not depend ultimately on the church's attestation to it, or of an early church father's attestation, but wholly upon God who is truth itself and author thereof.
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Therefore it is to be received because it is the Word of God. Paragraph five.
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We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church of God to a high and reverent esteem of the
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Holy Scriptures, and the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, and the majesty of the style, the consent that is the agreement of all the parts, the scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God, the full discovery it makes of the only way of man's salvation, and many other incomparable excellencies, and entire perfections thereof, are arguments whereby it does abundantly evidence itself to be the
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Word of God. Yet notwithstanding our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the
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Holy Spirit, bearing witness by and with the Word of God, with the
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Word, sorry, in our hearts. That we don't accept Scripture to be
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Scripture because I just quoted a bunch of early church fathers. We don't accept Scripture to be
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Scripture because our church holds to a confession, not this confession at this time, or that another church holds to it, or because John MacArthur says it's important, or R .C.
01:00:04
Sproul, or anyone else under the sun. But we hold it to be Scripture. I think you can all agree with me in this, that when the
01:00:12
Lord first saved you and you opened this book and you began to read it for yourself, you came to understand immediately, as it says here, by the inward work of the
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Holy Spirit, bearing witness that this is, in fact, the Word of God.
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That the words here are wise and true. That they are steadfast. That they are reliable.
01:00:35
That the prophecies within the Scriptures, we see them being fulfilled.
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We live our lives, and the older and older we get, we see the wisdom of the
01:00:47
Proverbs. We see the fullness of the prayers and hymns of the
01:00:52
Psalms. We understand the truthfulness of the Gospel and the promise of Christ's return from Genesis through Revelation.
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So, with that, that is the first five paragraphs of the Confession. I believe, oh,
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I think I have it earlier in my notes, I think now we're officially about three percent through, five percent through the