Okay, I think we're gonna get started here. Maybe we can get the elders up here in front. All right, let me open in prayer, and then I think I'll just have everybody kind of introduce themselves. So I think everybody knows everybody, but it'd be good, especially with Dr. Street here. We're delighted to have him here, he and Janie. So let me pray.

Father, we thank you for your great love and your mercy and grace. We thank you for the occasion that brings us together today. We thank you for James and the evidence of your work in his life, your leading and directing his every step. We marvel as we reflect back and think through the years about your guiding and directing a hand and your faithfulness and all that you've done in leading James and his precious family. and ordering their every step. Guide and direct us today according to your sovereign will and purposes. We thank you for each one that's gathered here today. And we pray you'll guide and direct us as men as we seek to examine James. and testify of his faithfulness and soundness in the things that he believes and is convicted of. We love you. Thank you for our precious Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. And it's in his name we pray, amen.

John Street, I'm from Southern California, Santa Clarita, California, and it's a pleasure to be here. We've been serving there since 1999, about 27 years, at the Masters University and Seminary. And then I've been an elder for the same amount of time at Grace Community Church. Pray for us, because we're looking for a new pastor. And so that's a big deal right now. But we're going through a very, very careful process as we do that. So thanks. OK. Will Kestis, pastor of Trinity Bible Church.

I don't see anybody that I don't already know, but that's it. I'm Matthew Pierce, an elder out at Hillcrest Bible Church. I know most of you, if not all of you. I've known James for right at 20 years now, and I look forward to seeing if Kaylene's had enough time to set him straight. I'm Peter Spirip, elder at Hillcrest Bible Church. I'm Gary Custis. I'm a friend of James, good friend of James. I've known him for 100 years. So I'm pastor of Hillcrest Bible Church. Well, I haven't known him for 100 years. I'm Dylan Rowe, an elder at Trinity Bible Church. I think most of you know me, Jonathan Spafford, also a junior elder of Trinity Bible Church. And I'm Kelly Spafford, elder at Trinity Bible Church.

So the way we're gonna structure this is we're gonna give James about an hour to go through his statement in any fashion he would see fit and kind of direct the discussion or the frame of the discussion based on kind of what he believes as evidenced in this document.

The documents are on the back table if you want to get a copy of them. Please avail yourself to those. And then we'll take a break and then we'll probably spend another hour in Q&A after that. So it'd be two plus hours to go through this. Okay, any questions? All right, James.

I feel a little bit like President Pro Tempore of the Senate up here, but I'm daunted by the task before me, thankful for Kelly's prayer. And let me just one more time petition the Lord to help me, and then I'll do my best at presenting my thesis. And we'll get questions when we get to those.

So please pray with me. Heavenly Father, I'm mindful of the soberness of the occasion and I ask that you would be pleased to equip me and equip all of us to delight in your truth and to even use this time as a time of worship as we consider the truth of who you are and of the salvation that you have fully accomplished for us and for all of your elect. I pray that you would be pleased to gift all of us with a measure of your spirit as we would go through this time. We pray this in Christ's precious name, amen.

All right, I really don't know how to present this, so I'm just gonna try to lay down a couple broad principles first. So I was asked to prepare four documents, and I just grouped them all into one packet, and the four documents are in the title here, a doctrinal position, that's one, philosophy of ministry, that's two, a philosophy of counseling. It's not quite a theology of counseling, but it's essentially The theology behind it is the word of God is what's to guide and direct our counseling, because counseling is after the sanctification of the Lord's people.

And then a personal testimony. So those are in there. There's also an appendix on the logical relation between faith and repentance, because I think that comes up from the section on conversion that I have in here. The natural question that arises is, so how do these two go together? If repentance is a good work, then, and it's necessary for my salvation, then our works necessary for salvation, or we would wanna say Christ's works are necessary for our salvation, which we receive in faith.

So that's in there as well. In the acknowledgements, which I won't really present on, but I'll just reference it, I just wanna point out really my theological forebears, where I come from. So I am a product of Hillcrest Bible Church. and of the ministry of Pastor Gary, of Vern Isaac, of Matthew Pierce, and I didn't sit under the ministry of Peter Spira, but he is one of that number. I was at Hillcrest Bible Church for my entire life until I went to seminary, for 25 years. So somebody would ask me how long have you been at your church, and I'd say 25 years, and they'd say, how old are you? I think I showed up there when I was two months old. You'll have to ask my mom and dad. Three months old? Okay, three months old. That is the theological formation that I received. That's from Gary Custis, who went to Dallas Seminary, was taught by S. Lewis Johnson, and obviously grew up under the teaching of his father, Dwight Custis, who pastored this church.

That's my history. As such, I fell in love with reformed theology. I'm gonna use that as a term for Calvinistic theology in general, not covenantal theology, even though there are people who would want to wrestle you to the ground that it means covenantalism and it means a specific kind of covenantalism, though there's a myriad of kinds. It's not monolithic, despite what some would say. But really, I grew up in a, broadly dispensational, Calvinistic, Reformed background. So there's a number of things informing me. So as such, during seminary and after, I came in contact with the Second Lent of Baptist Confession of Faith. which I really like, but as it requires a covenant theology, you'll notice that in the document, I pull from it quite a bit, and then I don't pull from it in certain key areas. The Reformed Orthodox in general, which you could think of as the Puritans and their fellows from the European continent. up into even the 1800s with Hermann Bavink, who I really enjoy his reform dogmatics, and then the more recent guys that we've listened to, like S. Lewis Johnson, Lloyd-Jones, R.C. Sproul, and John MacArthur, then obviously what I've received from the Master's Seminary.

I'm being informed by a couple different disciplines, would be the way to say that. But I trust all co-working together to produce a sound biblical theology. So the way I broke down the doctrinal position is it just goes through each section of systematic theology. So if you were to grab any volume on systematic theology off of a library shelf, whether that would be, like Burkoff is what people usually think of in the Reformed tradition, or Biblical Doctrine, the one that's produced by Master Seminary, edited by MacArthur and Mayhew.

You'll notice that they'll start with, well, they'll start with Prolegomena, the stuff you need to know in order to know you can do theology, then they'll move through the sections as I've laid them out here. So they'll move from bibliology on scripture to theology proper. Then they'll talk about Christology and pneumatology, which is the doctrine of the Son of God, Christology, the doctrine of the Spirit, pneumatology. They'll move into sin and the fall and salvation, et cetera, et cetera, through.

So I just followed those headings and how I move through this. And let me just, I think I'll just present those one at a time. I'll try to be quick. Kelly, what time should I aim at taking a break at the top of the hour? That'd be best. little after? You go at a comfortable pace. I'd say if you want to take a liberal view, I'd say 2.15, 2.20, but if you finish up at the top of the hour, that's fine too. Okay. I'll take a liberal view of time, but a conservative view of theology.

So let's talk about Holy Scripture. So I have this on Holy Scripture, and there'll be, if you know the Reformed Confessions, whether that's the Westminster or the 1689 London Baptist Confession of Faith, there'll probably be things that sound the same. I've cited in here Stan Reeves's modern English version of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith. Most of the times when I block quote it, it's just the original structure and vocabulary, but in modern spelling. from 1689confession.com, I think, which I should have put in the bibliography, but I don't think I did. So let me read this here.

On Holy Scripture, although God has implanted the knowledge of his existence, his moral law, and his final judgment in the heart of every person, so as to leave them without excuse, sinful man's knowledge is so darkened that a saving knowledge of God is not possible through this general revelation.

Therefore, in order to show himself and his will more fully, especially under the salvation of sinners, God chose to reveal himself through special revelation, most especially by communicating his word through writing in the texts of Holy Scripture. There's a number of things that could be classified under special revelation. The Lord Jesus himself would be one of those, the Urim and the Thumim that come out of the high priest's robe. that they were used to divine God's will. Anytime they cast the lots to find God's will, the Lord is revealing His will through that. That could be a special revelation. But focusing on Holy Scripture here. specifically because Holy Scripture, the word of God inscripturated is required for us to know what we need to know to be saved, what we need to know about ourselves, about our sin, about God and his holiness, et cetera, et cetera.

So he chose to reveal himself through special revelation, most especially by communicating his words. This is the most obvious form of special revelation. It's not the only form of special revelation, though it is the only form operative today. And we get that out of Ephesians 2 verse 20.

The books which are Holy Scripture are the books in our Bibles. So the 39 books of the Old Testament, 27 books of the New. We reject the additions of the Roman Catholic Church in the Apocrypha. We would reject the writings of the canonized saints or whatnot. I think there's been a push in the Catholic Church to get different Catholic mystics writings added to scripture at different times throughout church history. We reject all of that and agree with the historical church that the books in the Protestant canon are the books to be received as holy scripture.

I have a footnote on page two which gives the criteria used to decide that. And that's just quoted from biblical doctrine from MacArthur and Mayhew, and they list three things, which is that the writing had to have been authored by a recognized prophet or apostle or somebody associated with one of those, as in the case of Mark, Luke, Hebrews, James, and Jude, as if you believe Hebrews wasn't written by Paul. And second, the writing could not disagree with or contradict any previous scripture, and third, the church had to display a general consensus that a writing was an inspired book. This took time as the writings traveled around the church. As the church was across Asia Minor and North Africa and such, it took time. But these were the books that were received as scripture. And so we should receive them also as the very word of God.

Not just as good life advice or something that's broadly wise. You know, this is not a book written by Jordan Peterson. This is a book written by holy God, right? So that it be confessed as the very word of God, and as such, the authority contained in them is the highest, because they come from God himself. So there's no authority that can trump these.

And on page two, right above the heading interpreting scripture, You'll see this paragraph that I wrote which says, while a local church may have as its authorities its statement of faith, confession, the ancient creeds, its leadership, the ultimate authority for matters of faith and practice of every church and believer is the word of God and no authority is to be followed where it opposes or violates God's word. This is, I think very important because we confess that we follow the Bible, that we're under the authority of the Bible, but it doesn't mean that we don't have bylaws in the church that we also follow. And those are real, tangible authorities in the church, legally binding authorities in the church. But those aren't ultimate, and if those have a rule in them that contradicts the way scripture says the church is to be ordered, then those bylaws need to be changed or tossed out. Because scripture orders the church. God orders the church through his word. And we'll even mention that in the philosophy of ministry as it comes up. I have a statement in here on interpreting scripture, which I think is important.

The challenge I had when writing this document, I mean, it ended up being 40 pages long, but the challenge I had when writing this was to figure out what needs to go in here and what doesn't need to go in here. So there's some things I mentioned kind of in passing that I figure, well, I'll probably have to expound on that verbally, and there's some things that I thought they needed some time for me to actually say it, some space for me to say it.

This is one of them, and this is why I didn't just turn in the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith doctrinal standards, besides the fact that I am more dispensational than covenantal, is that the way we interpret scripture is with the, I'm calling it the literal sense, but the technical term is the grammatical historical hermeneutic. And that means that when you look at any part of the Word of God, you are recognizing that it's coming from both a divine author and a human author, and their intent was exactly the same. So what Paul wanted to write, the problems he was addressing, the reason he needed to write, and how he wanted to address the problems he was addressing, are the exact same things that the Lord wanted to address, and how he wanted to address them. and the way he wanted to verbalize it in the writing of Scripture. And so as such, there's not a tension between what the Lord's intent and the human author's intent.

And you'll hear this both from liberal theologians, but then also some people who are more on the big R reformed side of things, where they'll have a hermeneutic, they might call it a typological hermeneutic or a redemptive historical hermeneutic, that's the term you'll hear a lot today. And a lot of those require what's called supersessionism, which is the, we would call it replacement theology. They don't like that terminology.

And there's different forms of that. One is that Israel gives way to the church. One is that Israel is totally rejected. One is that the church is eschatological Israel. There's different versions of that. But those hermeneutics, they really drive at you taking the New Testament over the Old, and then reading the Old through the New Testament.

When we would wanna say, no, all of it is God's Word driving at a common storyline, if you could say it that way, not to say that any of it's fiction or anything, but a common train of thought that's running through the whole Bible. So this is key, that means that when I read Daniel, Chapter nine, I end up believing in a literal future seven-year tribulation period. I don't say, well, this must be talking about some period of trial that's gonna come upon the church at some point or something like that. I'm not exactly sure how all of them would articulate it who are on the redemptive historical side. But I think it's important.

We look at the Bible, we could say everything I need to understand what God is communicating is right here in the text. Then I can check my interpretation against the rest of scripture that I've interpreted the same way, and with the same rules, I should say, and I can see that it all coheres, and it all teaches the same doctrine, or teaches a variety of doctrines that teach the same doctrine. the sound doctrine, sound Bible Christian doctrine. There's another way of trying to destroy how to read the Bible is from Outside the church, there's things like critical race theory, intersectionality, or standpoint epistemology. I needed to make sure I knew what standpoint epistemology was, so I looked up a definition.

It was worse than I thought. And it's a feminist theory that one's social standpoint produces knowledge, not that there's knowledge that's objective out there that needs to be discovered. So it's just even worse than you thought. And if you say, that doesn't make sense, you're right. It doesn't make sense. And those, schemes, they just do violence to the text. They don't let God speak. They force what man wants on the text.

And again, they put a grid over it through which everything is to be read. So I thought that section on interpreting scripture was important, and I would agree with how to study the Bible that the way that's been articulated by Abner Chow, especially in his book, The Hermeneutics of the Biblical Writers, Learning to Interpret Scripture from the Prophets and Apostles. It's just an excellent book. It probably takes three or four read-throughs, but it's an excellent book.

I wanna stop for questions, but I'm gonna charge ahead. Let's move to talking about On God, and you'll see that I confess classical theism, God as he's been described, which I think is totally in line with scripture, but using the wording that's been developed by the church over church history, this is not, imposing church tradition on the Bible. This is saying that the men in church history came up with a certain kind of terminology that encapsulated what they were drawing out of scripture. the exegesis that they were using, they were coming up with the doctrines, and so then certain terms got applied. Think of it the way we would use the term Calvinism. We're not saying that Calvin, it was inspired, but the five doctrines that that term usually refers to are pulled straight out of the Bible.

So it becomes a catch-all term. That's useful, you could argue it's not useful anymore, because everybody has their own definition of what Calvinism means. This would be a hot button issue. There's a meme that says, what's one thing that everybody agrees with until you say its name? Calvinism.

So here on God, I just cite what the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith has said. And I suppose I should read it. but it's lengthy, but it's good.

The Lord our God is but one only living and true God, whose subsistence is in and of himself. That term subsistence there is referring to his self-existence, his aseity. infinite in being and perfection, whose essence cannot be comprehended by any but himself, a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts, or passions, who only hath immortality dwelling in the light which no man can approach unto, who is immutable, immense, eternal, incomprehensible, almighty, every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute, working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory, most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin, the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and withal most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin, and who will by no means clear the guilty. You can hear just in the way that they've worded it how much they've just drawn that straight from the Bible, especially that last part drawn from God's declaration of his glory to Moses when he hides Moses behind the rock. The second paragraph here is, God having all life, glory, goodness, blessedness in and of himself is alone in and unto himself all sufficient, not standing in need of any creature which he hath made, nor deriving any glory from them.

That might trip you up to hear that terminology. That doesn't mean that he doesn't receive worship or praise or is received or is seen to be glorious. It doesn't mean that we don't bring glory to God when we acknowledge him for who he is, confess the truth, the word of God says about him, sing the word of God, the Psalms, hymns, spiritual songs, et cetera, et cetera. But it means that he doesn't need any creature in order to be glorious. So he doesn't derive glory from creatures, but he does receive praise and adoration and acknowledgement of his glory from creatures. So lest that trip you up in that wording, that's how we should understand that.

But only manifesting his own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. He is the alone fountain of all being, of whom, through whom, and to whom are all things. And he hath most sovereign dominion over all creatures to do by them, for them, or upon them whatsoever he pleases. In his sight all things are open and manifest. His knowledge is infinite, infallible, and independent upon the creatures. So as nothing is to him contingent or uncertain, he is most holy in all his counsels, in all his works, and in all his commands.

To him is due from angels and men whatsoever worship, service, or obedience as creatures they owe unto the creator, and whatever he is further pleased to require of them. So there's even a principle of a natural and positive law that's being put in there by the men who wrote this. He is due worship from angels and men. Sandra Bannon shared with me a quote from Stephen Charnock, which said that, in all of creation, it said like, from the brightest star, to like the deepest ocean.

I forget exactly how he framed it. So there's only two things that fail to give glory to God, fallen angels and fallen men. Just striking because everything was made to bring glory to God. Again, not so he could derive it and thus have something that he needed satisfied. He's all sufficient in himself. But everything was made to bring glory to him, to work the way he created it to work.

Right? And part of the way he's created us to work is to worship him. And we do that on the Lord's Day, primarily. The Trinity. You'll notice in this, I don't have a section devoted to talking about the Holy Spirit, because he just shows up all throughout Christian doctrine. And so I thought I'll let these statements about God be seen to be true of God in His essence. So that's true of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit in their being, which is His essence. And then we'll talk about the Trinity in this next section. which is that he subsists in three persons, these being the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The persons can be called hypostases or subsistences. It depends on which language, Latin or Greek, that you're pulling the term from, but those refer to the same thing. And we just need to make sure that we confess it along these lines.

The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not three gods. They're one God. But the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are not all the same person. They're three persons. And how does that work? Well, again, the Baptist Confession states it. In this divine and infinite being, there are three subsistences, the Father, the Word, or Son, and Holy Spirit, of one substance, power, and eternity, each having the whole divine essence, yet the essence undivided. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. The Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son.

All infinite, without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties and personal relations. which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all our communion with God and comfortable dependence on Him. So we confess an order within the Trinity that the Father is first, the Son is second, the Holy Spirit is third, but it's not an order of valuation or of quality. It's not rank in terms of subordinate authorities. It's order in terms of how they relate to one another. and they relate to one another in that the father and the son have always been in a father-son relationship.

And when we try to make that from our standpoint with like me and my father, you know, I actually came from him. So, and then I grew up under his authority. And so then if we try to apply that back to God, we can get kind of fuzzy with how that works. But it's really should be the other way around.

There's actually, there's something analogous in us that reflects the Trinitarian relationship of the Father and the Son. Um, and, um, they have had that relationship for all eternity. And then the spirit is, um, the term is he proceeds or he's spirated or he's breathed out. Um, and he's always had that relationship with the father and the son. And that's about as, um, That's about as nailed down as you can get it.

If you try to go too much farther, you end up saying wonky things. So I won't, if you ask me questions on it, I'll do the best I can, but I'm not trying to bar any of that kind of thing. But for good reason, we can't comprehend the Lord. We can't comprehend him in his essence. We can understand his works, that he's worked in, especially in salvation as he's revealed it, but we can't understand the inner constitution of God.

We can confess that it's not this way. And it is in some sense this way, and then we sort of just say, and that's as far as we can go. And that's a good and a reverent thing to do. There's the kind of agnostic who's really proud because he thinks his ignorance is commendable when it's not. But then there's this kind of ignorance which says, I can't actually go any further than this because God hasn't revealed any more than this.

So we should be willing to stop, which scripture would call us to stop. So when God is working, you'll notice that in scripture, things are ascribed to the different persons of the Trinity. So we especially think about that in the terms of the Father plans, the Son accomplishes, and the Spirit applies. And that's a right way to talk, but that's not to say that the Son and the Spirit somehow were ignorant of God's plan.

The Lord Jesus says that he didn't know the time or the hour. But he spoke of that while he was incarnate, so there's a limit on his human knowledge. But in terms of, if he's fully God, then he's a full partaker of the divine will and knowledge as well. So it's not as though there are certain persons of the Godhead that didn't know what other persons do or don't do what other persons do, except in the incarnation, because the son alone became.

And we'll talk about that in a minute. God's decrees are very important. God has decreed whatsoever comes to pass, and here, Dainsey's providentially, I'll move quickly here, his decrees are, extend to everything. It's not that he spins up the engine and then steps back and lets the engine work. That'd be a deistic model, which would be of God that's just totally transcendent and beyond us, but not near us imminently.

But God is the sovereign Lord over all who has decreed all things. And so the question then comes, well, has he decreed sin? The answer is yes, but it doesn't mean that he's the author of it or that he's approving of it. And we could talk about that more if there's questions on that. But he has decreed all things. Or you could say he's ordained all things.

So within that is predestination. This is just, this is a Bible doctrine that a lot of people don't like, but you cannot get away from it. You read Ephesians 1, you read Romans 9, you read any part of the Gospel of John almost, and you just, you can't get away from it. It's just there. That the God is the God of salvation. He's not waiting for you to make him the God of salvation. He has saved. And even the extent of the atonement, we can talk about that.

So he's elected, chosen some sinners to be saved. What this means then is that there are certain sinners he has not elected. And that means, we would call those the reprobate. And they are predestined to judgment, but they're not, you don't have humanity as a neutral party, and God's sort of willy-nilly just deciding what he wants with people. You have all of humanity condemned in sin from the sin of Adam, who are destined to hell, and he chooses to rescue some. and then to visit the just penalty that the others deserve on them.

So that is clear Bible doctrine, and the way the Lord accomplishes it is through providence. So he accomplishes his decree through creation. He had to make everything through which he was gonna work, and then through providence, which is his working in everything. Some people have talked about providence as being a continual creation of all things. I don't know if that wording is necessarily good or bad. But I like to think of it, this is how, at Trinity Bible Church, this is how we usually use the term God is sovereign.

We mean that he's accomplishing what he wants right now. And the Baptist Confession of Faith has four paragraphs which are so helpful on this doctrine, which essentially say this, I won't read them, because I'm gonna use up all my time before I get out of theology proper. that he causes everything to accomplish what he desires it to accomplish, and he has a good purpose for everything. So he is working to bring it about, and that means he uses even the motivations and the circumstances that are within your own heart and that are within your own life context.

He uses the natural forces of the universe to bring about his purposes. A hurricane hits an island or hits New Orleans or something like that. It's not that God somehow just lost focus. He was too focused over here and so that one got out of control.

But that actually has a good purpose for why that comes about. and uses the natural laws, as we would call them, as we would rightly observe, that he put those in place and he's using them and upholding them to bring about his good purposes. So how is he then not guilty of sin? Well, it's because he's using sin, he's not causing it. And how does allowing sin to come into creation accomplish glorious purposes?

I think the cross is the best answer to that question. But I think there's also a degree of glory that we won't understand until we're with the Lord and we're able to see how certain pieces connect and that we can say, wow, the Lord accomplished that. And we'll just, what do we do? We'll throw our crowns at his feet in worship and adoration. God assuming human flesh here to wrap up this section.

Because the Son of God is the only one who becomes incarnate, I wanted to explain the right view of the incarnation. And it's that he assumes or takes a human nature. So he doesn't leave deity to then go somewhere else and become human. But the person who's a full partaker of the divine nature assumes a human nature as well.

So the philosophical language is actually that he draws it near to himself. That's even in the Greek terminology. And it's hard to conceive of and explain well. James Dolezal has probably done the best job recently in his article, neither subtraction nor addition, the words, Terminative Assumption of Human Nature.

But he assumes a human nature which is composed of a rational soul and body. And so it's a full, he's a full human. He's not lacking anything. It's not that he creates a shell and then inhabits it. It's true human nature that the Son of God creates, the Holy Spirit creates, in the Virgin Mary. And then the Son of God is, I guess, is joined to that. I want to be careful that I don't stray into weird versions of Apollinarianism. So what this means then is that the human nature and the divine nature, they don't augment each other, okay?

And they don't change in order to be agreeable to each other. They're separate. They're joined in Christ. They're not joined to each other. That's actually important, and that would be the Chalcedonian definition would be, I think, correct in articulating that, and that's how, so the Second London Confession of Faith, chapter eight, paragraph two says, which is the bottom of my page eight here, says that, In Jesus are these two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person without conversion, composition, or confusion, which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man.

This means that his human life was a real human life, which means he's actually able to save humans. Right, that's what Hebrews 2 talks about. Since the children partake in flesh and blood, it was necessary that he also partake of the same. And so that makes him a better intercessor for us in glory right now, but it also makes him a fit savior to save us. So the way Pastor Gary said it, I'm pulling, you didn't expect this, is we have this stuff, so you need this stuff to save us, right? So the Lord Jesus had to come and take on human flesh. You probably don't remember doing that, but I remember you doing that exactly in Sunday school at Hillcrest, at the little chapel building. All right, charging ahead here. I'll try to move a little faster.

On man, this is a one page, which is a little, I don't know if that's good or bad. In some ways, succinct is good, but there's probably a lot of stuff that could have been added that would have been good. I wanna do a couple things in this, which is to confess that God created man male and female, and that that means that neither male nor female is properly of more value than the other, but also to note that there's a proper order that was built in creation with the man being made first, the woman being made for him. Matthew Henry has a great statement, and I think it just was used by, all the guys from that time, and even from the medieval church, where they talk about the woman wasn't taken from the head of man that she might rule over him, or the foot of man that he might trot upon her, but from the side of man that she might, that he might, how do you say it?

Basically, yeah, be a companion and help him and aid him in his task. So there's a really beautiful picture in that. And I think that that's excellent. Because of that, what's called the Edenic ideal, Adam and Eve, right? Then that is proper human marriage, right there.

And the question that comes up when you go through the Old Testament, and I'm reading through 1 Samuel right now, and at this point, David's got three wives. Just one of them happens to have been given to somebody else for a time, Michael, Saul's daughter. But he's gonna go and get her back. So now he's got three wives, and you wonder, what's going on?

And why is this even framed in such a way that it seems like he's doing a good thing, almost? The Bible wouldn't say he's doing a good thing, but you would be forgiven if that was your, your initial thought. And the answer is not because polygamy is permissible. The answer is that these were fallen, fallible men who are men of their time, and the sins that they were given to were a lot of times the consequence of the culture that they inhabited, and that was one that was improper.

The Lord built the children of Israel through Jacob and four women. That is not right. but the Lord used it to bring about good purposes. So when you go through, especially the New Testament, even just Proverbs, even Solomon, with all his wives and concubines, he says, rejoice in the wife of your youth. He's talking about one, right? He should have followed his advice.

Man is created in the image of God, with a rational soul and body, in a righteous state, though corruptible. This is important to note, he wasn't made evil, that God made him good, yet able to fall. And man did fall when Adam ate from the tree. And as such, man now in his nature is morally depraved. And you get that especially from Romans chapter three, but you see it even in right in the beginning of Genesis six, five, where every thought and intention of man's heart was only evil continually. So that leads us into sin in the fall, which is to note this, I spend the first part just articulating essentially the historical circumstances that brought about the fall, and I note then that the fall Results in that every human who comes from Adam is imputed with a human nature.

And the reason that that's so is because Adam represented us in the garden. He's what's called our federal head. Some people might think you have to confess a strict covenant theology in order to get those concepts. I don't think so. I think it just comes right out of Romans five.

That when Adam sinned, all of us sinned. And so everyone Adam represented as a sinner, if you wanna say, no, it's everyone who's a child of Adam as a sinner, well, then you run into a problem because that means the Lord Jesus must be a sinner. You have to confess him as a sinner.

And you say, no, because he's different. And you say, well, if he's different enough to be categorically different from us, then how could he save us? So he has to be truly human, but yet not so exactly like us that he's partaking in our fallen nature. And the answer to that is what Romans 5 gives us, which is that Adam represented everybody in him, and Christ represents everybody in him, and Adam did not represent Christ.

But Christ partakes of everything necessary to human nature, full human nature. Sin is not necessary to human nature. It's a perversion of human nature. Or the sin nature is a perversion of human nature. The guilt of sin is such that it deserves death.

That's declared very clearly from the beginning. Dying, you will really die. That's what the Lord says. That when you eat of it, you're gonna be really dead. It's just, it's like guaranteed. You can't get away from it. And Romans 3 says this, that the wages of sin is death. It's what you've earned in your sin. Lord Jesus makes it very clear that the desire to sin is sin. So it's not just when sin is acted out that it's sin, but it's even the desire, the temptation towards it and the desire towards it is sinful.

And that needs to be repented of as well. In salvation here, I'm sorry, we're just charging ahead so fast. We don't even have a, we'll get to a break, I promise. Salvation is accomplished because of man's great need in his sin and because of man's inability. Therefore, it's holy of God. Scripture makes this point quite clearly that we're saved by the grace of God. It's a gift of God. It's not something that we do. We don't even activate salvation in our faith. The Lord gives us the faith to believe. which I'm going to mention here later on.

But this is important, that if salvation was up to us, nobody would be saved. But salvation is a work planned and accomplished and applied by the Lord for us, which is just amazing that he would, you know, But he would love us to such a degree that despite our sinfulness, Romans 5, verse eight, I think, says, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. There's nothing pleasing in us to cause Christ to say, yeah, I think that guy's worth dying for. We were wholly not worth dying for.

We deserve nothing but the wrath of God, and he accomplished our salvation. This is accomplished. because the Lord planned it, and it was to be accomplished through the mediating work of Christ, who 1 Timothy says is the only mediator between God and man.

He's able to be the perfect sacrifice in our place because of his perfect life. He did not sin in any way. There was no sin found in him. No deceit was found in his mouth, I think is how Isaiah 53 and 1 Peter 2 put it. And so he fully fulfilled what the law and the prophets both said he would do and also the righteousness that they declare as what is needful for salvation. And he went to the cross and died and the apostles declare that to be the predetermined plan of foreknowledge of God, that he would die on the cross. and would atone for his people's sins.

How did that happen? Because God punished him as a substitute in our place. It's not like God just couldn't help himself, he needed to hit somebody, so he decided he'd hit his son. It's that there's a just penalty, which is death. We just said, we looked at sin. And sin requires the death penalty. And therefore, in order for God to be just and the justifier of those who believe, he provided one to die and pay the death penalty.

So his justice is satisfied. and His mercy is accomplished because we didn't die, we don't expect an eternity in the lake of fire, in hell and lake of fire, we expect an eternity in glory, why? Because the punishment we would have been receiving for an eternity was visited upon the Lord Jesus in our place in a matter of hours on the cross. The extent of the atonement is, if you just think about this logically from what I just said, is therefore totally sufficient for everybody whom the Lord intended to die for.

There's nobody left out. It's not like he says, well, my death can only save 100,000 people, and since you're the 101st thousand person to come to me, sorry, I just don't have anything to give you. No, everybody he intends to save, he saves. There's nobody who, he says, the Lord Jesus says, there's nobody that can snatch you out of my father's hand, snatch a sheep out of his father's hand. And Alistair Begg put it well when he said, you are not strong enough to fall away while God is inclined to keep you. So you can't even snatch yourself out of your own father's hand. And so we wanna be careful that we don't present a view of the atonement, which is Christ's death on the cross, that somehow makes it to where it's only really saving when you receive it.

Because it's perfectly sufficient to save in and of itself. He saved you when he died. You might receive the benefits of that when you believe, but when he died, he saved you. and he paid for your sins. Your justification occurs at the moment of faith. Your justification was accomplished at the cross.

And that's important. Your security is built on that. If it's up to you to believe the right way or believe enough to be saved, because the salvation of Christ is not really, able to do its work until you make it able to do its work in receiving it, well then all the assurance of salvation rests on your ability to believe enough. But the fact is a weak faith can lay hold of a strong Christ. and Christ is strong enough to save. So very important and just hugely pastoral that we get that right.

That's limited atonement, what I just confessed. And some people don't like that because it seems like there's a, like God's kind of a bully because he doesn't want to save everybody. But actually, it's really good because those who he wants to save, he saves. and you make sure they're saved, and he doesn't leave their salvation somehow half done, whether truly or hypothetically. Okay, so how it's applied, Romans 8. 2930, 2931, 2930, provides the order of it. And it doesn't have every term that we use when we talk about conversion and we talk about the application of salvation.

So there's a few that I had to supply in here, but I basically followed that to say that it's those whom he foreknew, he also predestined. Those whom he predestined, he also called. Those whom he called, he also justified. And those whom he justified, he also glorified. The question why is glorified in the past tense comes up, but we'll talk about that in a minute. the Lord foreknew, and foreknew can mean that he knew it beforehand, or it can mean that he loved these people beforehand.

And Douglas Moo in his commentary on Romans makes a very clear case that when no before or foreknew is used with God as the subject, that those passages don't refer to intellectual foreknowledge or cognition. He's not just aware of your existence. But he actually determined to enter into a relationship with you in love from before time began. So he chose or determined to know before. which is really huge, that we get that right.

So then that means he predestined, we talked about predestination, he elected his people to glory, and as such, then he fully accomplished their salvation through the work of Christ, and he calls them to salvation, he calls his people, his elect, effectually, which means that he calls them such that they hear and respond in faith and repentance.

The gospel call from the church pulpit goes out to everybody, regardless of whether this person is gonna become saved or not gonna become saved. We don't wait to see if somebody's elect to give them the gospel. We give the gospel to everybody and discover who the elect are because they come. And what you find out when somebody responds is that the Holy Spirit has done a work in their heart, in regenerating and calling them.

So regeneration's the next one, which is not named in Romans 8, but needs to be put here, which is that on being effectually called, the person, the elect person, is equipped to respond in faith and repentance, to respond the right way. And they're equipped by being made alive. John 3 talks about it that way.

You have to be born again. And so, as long as, are you a born again Christian? It just knocks you more on, right? If you're a true Christian, you are born again, just by definition. Because in order to be a believer, in order to be called by Christ's name, you have to have been made alive by the Holy Spirit. And the Lord talks about that most clearly in John 3, but also in John 1, 12, 13, and 1 John 5, 1. In John 1 verse 12 and 13, it's those born not of the will of man, but of the will of God. It's just very clear how that's what it's talking about.

So then at the moment of conversion, and this is probably where a number of questions could arise. At your moment of conversion, you are made spiritually alive, and you respond by doing two things. And both of these occur in your conversion. You believe and you repent. And belief is a, it's not just an intellectual awareness of the facts, nor even an agreement that they're true, but it's a receiving of them.

For you, you could say it's like the Lord died for me, right? I agree that he died, I agree that he's able to save everyone he died for, and I believe he did it for me. And that's saving faith. You're justified upon condition of saving faith, and at that moment of conversion, you also repent. So you turn from, this is clear in 1 Thessalonians, you turn from dead works to serve the living God.

And you do both of those. That is what, if you remember, in the 80s and 90s, the easy-believism, and then you had, I think, I think the shot heard around the world in that debate was the gospel according to Jesus. And that was MacArthur critiquing easy-believism, pointing out, no, when you're saved, you actually do both. believe and repent. I do have a critique of MacArthur's formulation of it in the appendix, which we can talk about. But the easy believism, which was that you can be saved, kind of like the classic example is at summer camp, and then 15 years later, decide you're gonna live for Jesus, but you're saved the whole time.

You're not saved the whole time, right? Because there was no life change. that was displayed. You didn't actually believe and repent. Conversion didn't happen. You may have agreed with the facts of the gospel and even agree that Jesus was able to save, but true faith didn't happen there. Because if there was true faith, we would have seen repentance alongside of it. And that's what happens at conversion.

When you believe you're justified, that's a legal declaration by God that you are now declared to be righteous, meeting the righteous requirement of God's law. When the Lord Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, you must have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. When you're justified, you're declared to have a righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. true righteousness, not a hypocritical works righteousness, not a legalism.

What follows that, and again not mentioned in Romans 8, you'd expect it to be there. but Paul doesn't stress that, is sanctification. And this is the growth in, I call it practical righteousness, you might call it holiness, you could call it piety, that word can trip people up because we think of somebody who's sort of just off contemplating the clouds, you know, somebody who's really pious. And which is not the proper use, piety just refers to holy living. And so practice of piety would be things like prayer and reading your Bible and engaging in holy conversation with other believers. But... we can call it practical righteousness, which is that you begin to live like Christ more and more and more and more and more as you live through your life, which means you begin to see your sin even more clearly for what it is, you begin to hate it even more.

And again, not to appeal too much to Pastor Gary here, but if you've been to his institutes and he's drawn out the graph for you on, it looks, your sanctification is a general trajectory upwards, but you feel like it's a constant dropping as you're climbing. as you're becoming more and more aware of your sin.

But it's the Lord who's sanctifying you, and he's doing that through giving you the ability to please him in your obedience. Philippians 2 makes it clear that sanctification is both the Lord providing the means and the desire, and you working it out. You see both of those things happening. So it's proper to say the Lord is sanctifying you.

It's most proper to say that. But it's also proper to say that you're pursuing sanctification by desiring to be more obedient. Glorification is placed here in the Aorist tense, which is just a tense of completeness to indicate its certainty. And if I remember right, there's There's no augment on that, so it's not past time, because you're not glorified in the past.

You're expecting glorification when you receive a body like the Lord's risen body. First Corinthians 15 makes it clear what that looks like, or at least as clear as scripture will make it, where the principle of the old man is removed from you, and you're made fit to dwell with Christ. and fit to behold the Lord. That's really wonderful.

And that's going to happen in chapter eight. We'll mention how that happens or the order that happens. Union with Christ, I'll just mention in passing. But the reason all of this can occur is because God determined to love you in Christ. And if you read Ephesians, we'll just all through Ephesians, but especially Ephesians one and the first, I think two chapters, I think it's into the second chapter, especially in Colossians. Those are written about the same time. you see this union with Christ doctrine where we're known in Him and it's through Him and in Him that we receive all these blessings. It's really wonderful. So union with Christ is important. Let me charge ahead here and then that way we can get to our break and we can do the question and answer time.

Holy and unholy angels, we just simply recognize that there's two classes. There's all angelic beings. were made to minister to God, but some fell away because they were led into sin by the devil. There's no salvation for angels revealed in scripture. So I'd be content to say there's no salvation for angels, because I think scripture would have told us if there was, though God didn't need to tell us that.

And they fall because the devil leads them into sin. So there's certain angels who the Lord preserved, and certain ones that he did not preserve. And the ones he did not preserve fell into sin. This must have happened before the fall of man, because the devil shows up in Genesis 3 tempting Adam and Eve. And why is he tempting Adam and Eve if he's not in sin himself? So that happened before, when before? I don't know. Was it a matter of hours? Could have been. Was it a matter of days? We don't know.

But the devil is, Satan is the chief of all the demonic hosts. We call fallen angels demons. And his sin was pride. And then his sin was murder, because he tried to destroy humanity. He wanted to destroy humanity. And that's why the Lord Jesus says that you have your father the devil. He was a murderer from the beginning. And he's called Beelzebub, the king of the demonic host.

Demons are active in the world now. to thwart the plans of God, seeking to thwart the plans of God, and actually seeking to steal worship that's owed to God. First Corinthians 10 talks about how the Apostle Paul does not want the believers to engage in pagan worship practices, even eating meat in a temple and that kind of thing, not because the meat is bad, But because when they're eating it in the temple, they're actually engaging in worship to demons, is what he says. He says, I don't want you to partake in demons. That word partake is the same word for I want you to partake in the Lord through the Lord's Supper.

So demons are behind all the false religions. I don't know if that means there's a demon named Ra and a demon named Odin, I don't know. But demons are behind it and And therefore, false religions are, really properly, a stealing of worship that belongs to God alone.

So that's just where you have to end up when you read 1 Corinthians 10 and 1 Timothy 4, 1, which Pastor Will just preached on just a few weeks ago. All demons and Satan are destined for the wrath of God. in the lake of fire, that's where they will end up.

And they're used now to bring about God's purposes, which is just astounding that that's even possible. One of those purposes might be correcting sinning believers. who persists in unrepentant sin. The Apostle Paul talks about certain men that he's handed over to Satan that will learn not to blaspheme. And some of those purposes will be seen in the tribulation period. If you read the Revelation, you see demons coming out of the pit and afflicting the section of humanity that belongs to the beast and has his mark. But that's a visiting of the wrath of God on people. So they're used to accomplish his purposes, even in their attempts to destroy the plans of the Lord. The Lord is, he is truly the Lord. There is no other.

On the church here, we've got two sections left. So let me just blast through. On the church, we can think of the church as universal and local. Let me take a drink here. Universally, the church is every believer saved between the period of Pentecost and Acts 2 and the tribulation period. And those are the bounds of the church. And I have a statement in here on page... 21 about the church in Israel, how I see a distinction between the two. So why am I saying the church only exists between Pentecost and the rapture, right before the tribulation, is because of what I say there on page 21.

So the universal church would be the saints who've died and gone to glory. So Jim Wilson, my grandfather who just died, would be in that number, as well as my grandmother, as well as Pauline Houk, as well as all of our faithful and beloved brothers and sisters who've gone before us. And they're there awaiting the return of Christ when they'll be reunited with their body. and reunited with us. But the universal church also includes those who are believing now and are currently alive.

And those people populate local churches. Trinity Bible Church is one local church. And borrowing the words from Zuber here, the local church is a body of professed believers who assemble in a particular location or setting with recognized leadership, mutual commitments, and with a recognized membership. So there's people that commit to live together and worship together under the leadership of the church.

And we don't know. We can be fairly certain with each other that we're saved. We don't know for sure. And we do know for sure those who have gone with a good testimony are with the Lord, that they are. That's not to sow doubt in your mind at all, but just to say the Lord knows the heart. And who knows the heart but the Lord? I don't know your heart, you don't know my heart.

Church leadership is in two offices, elder and deacon. The elder is the higher office, the deacon is the lower office. And the deacons receive delegated authority from the eldership. This is different than a lot of Baptist churches where you have a congregationalism and a deacon-led church where there's a pastor hired and fired by the deacons and all that sort of thing. The scripture reveals that the leadership is given to the elders who kind of take the position of the apostles. And you see that really quickly in Acts, where the elders are kind of part of the number of the apostles, and the apostles disappear, but the elders remain. And when Timothy and Titus are sent out as apostolic delegates, they're not sent out to make apostles, they're sent out to put elders in places, in the churches.

And then deacons are, I do think that the diaconate is an office, But it's kind of the way, I would say exactly the way Alexander Strauch has articulated it in his book, Paul's Vision for the Deacons, that it's an office that's meant to receive delegated authority from the elders to accomplish administrative tasks which would keep the elders from being able to minister the word and minister in prayer. So, and I'm looking at Act 6 as the defense for that. I could just point you to Will Sermon from just a couple weeks ago as the defense for that. He's on my side, or I'm on his side.

But there's nothing to restrict deacons from being able to teach the Word of God, but they don't have to be able to teach to be qualified, because they're not responsible for protecting doctrine. They're responsible for protecting the ministry of the Word. by not having the elders get distracted with all the administrative tasks. So they do protect the ministry of the word.

That's the phrase that Will used, which really hit me right between the eyes. And I thought, oh, that's a really helpful way to put it. So I put it here. So local church rule is given to the local church. And you'll notice in Acts 15, and I think a little after, I can't remember exactly. You see there'll be controversies and they'll go to Jerusalem to get help in their controversies.

And the Presbyterian model of church government wants to look at that as precedent for saying, so we should have a ruling council over a number of churches. But I think what you see there is you see that the elder, the apostles are really the, the rulers as sort of the representatives of Christ over the whole church. But when the apostles leave, you might see churches associating with one another, but you don't see a ruling council being composed of elders, of like ruling elders in a general assembly kind of sense. I wanna be gracious with them and believe the best about the Presbyterians and how they have their convictions for a reason. but it looks to me like the elders of the local church are the highest authority in that church receiving the authority as they minister the word of God.

I mean, not receiving the authority, but they've been given authority that's bounded by authority. the word of God for local church authority. It's contained in the eldership as the highest authority under the word of God. So that would mean then that Caesar or civil rulers don't have a claim to authority over the church.

And that gets really difficult to case law out. You know, because you say, what about fire codes? What about building occupancy? What about those kind of things? And there's a time to discuss all of that, I don't have it, but they're certainly not allowed to tell you how to worship. They're certainly not allowed to tell you that you can't sing hymns.

And we all experienced that in the years 2020 and 2021. Church membership, I think there should be a recognized and formal church membership. I think it's useful for a number of reasons. One, it's useful for the people as they realize that they're covenanting, as it were, to be an encouragement, an active part of this group of people, that they're concerned with the care and the growth of the believers around them. It also helps the elders to know who they're shepherding, who are primarily responsible for shepherding. Different churches will do membership slightly differently, but I think when you look at the New Testament churches, they knew who belonged to them. And so there's at least some kind of membership implied in that.

And you don't need to have church membership only if you're gonna be a congregational church. There's benefits to it, even if you're not a congregational church. The marks of the church are the preaching of the Word of God, ordinances of Lord's Supper and baptism, and the practice of church discipline. An element of worship is giving.

That's clear in 1 Corinthians 16. But I don't know that, the Apostle Paul says, as often as you come together, he says, your first day of the week, set a little aside, that there be some for when I come. As often as you come together, he's talking about the Lord's Supper. So you can make a case on frequency for the Lord's Supper, being more frequent.

But giving was certainly just an active part of people's worship. That's not included in here. You could make a justifiable case that it ought to be. But it's not an ordinance either. But these ones are. The word of God is commanded to be preached in the church. The Lord's Supper and baptism are commanded to be observed, and church discipline is clearly commanded, especially Matthew 18 and 1 Corinthians 5. I...

Do not think we should baptize infants. We should baptize those who make profession of faith. Mode of baptism, we could argue about whether or not it's permissible to ever pour water over somebody's head and say that's baptism. You could make, the early church made a case that there was a time and a place for that.

If somebody wasn't able to get into water, now we have machines that could lower them into water, so we could kind of make that one null. It would be a moot point. It's not so much the mode as who's the proper recipient. And the proper recipient is a believer. And you see that in the New Testament.

You don't have to have babies in a household in order for it to be considered a household. So when appeal is made that, well, all of Cornelius' household was baptized, don't you think there were babies involved in that? Like, well, I don't actually have to believe that in order to understand household. So I think the point's on you to prove there were babies there.

So it's those who believe, and they're baptized by the Holy Spirit, and then they receive baptism. You see that with, even especially with Philip and the eunuch in Acts 8. The mission of the church is to fulfill the Great Commission, and that's a mission given to the whole church, not just the pastors in the church, or not just the evangelists, or not just the outreach department, if you're gonna have one in your church. but it's the Great Commission. The Great Commission is composed of two things. It's evangelism and discipleship, right? And because you go into all the world and preach the gospel and make disciples. So you make disciples by declaring the gospel to those who are affectionately called to believe, and then you teach them to observe all the Lord has commanded. And so it's a mission of the whole church.

And I even stand here, not as one who was only trained by Pastor Gary, my pastor growing up. but as one who sat or was in many conversations with the men at Hillcrest, with Jeff Hill, with Dave Haas, with John Featherston, with Bob Bowers when he was there. I talked to these men, and these were my dad's friends, and they shaped me. So it was the discipleship, even in my own experience, was the discipleship from the whole church. Obviously the preaching and the Sunday school time were the most formal, and you could argue the most formative, but they were not the only means of that. The church in Israel, I just appeal to Romans 11 as the main text for seeing there's a distinction between them.

And then I'll talk about eschatology here for about five minutes and we'll will be done. Eschatology is where everybody wants to spend the most of their time. I would just say come to Sunday school, and you'll hear all about it, or Pastor Will's Friday night studies. Two ways to think about eschatology. Eschatology is just what's going to happen in the end times.

And the two ways to think about it, or to conceive of it, in terms of categories, are what's going to happen to everything, and then what's going to happen to me. So I start here with personal eschatology, what's gonna happen to the individual, and that's determined by whether or not they're a believer.

If the wages of sin is death, and death, not just physical death, but eternal death in hell, then if somebody is not a believer, then upon their physical death, they're translated spiritually to hell, from which they await the final judgment at the Great White Throne in Revelation 20.

If they're a believer, death no longer has a claim on them. Romans 8 one, there is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So they physically die as a consequence of their flesh still being. in this, I guess you'd call it dispensation, this under-atom time period, but the death is not their final resting place. When we die, we await the resurrection of the dead. We'll be reunited with our bodies and reign with Christ forever. So it says in 1 Corinthians 4 that they will dwell with Christ forever in glory. And I think he even says it in a way where he says, we will always be with him.

I'm trying to remember the exact wording. We could look at it, but I don't want to take the time because we're probably going to be opening this a lot in the question and answer time. In terms of cosmic eschatology, that's what I just put under what everybody wants to know.

When's the rapture gonna be? Who's the Antichrist, right? What's the mark of the beast? How does America fit into all that? All that kind of stuff. And I just say here, here's kind of the rough order that we can draw out of the New Testament especially. And it's first the resurrection of the Christian dead and the pre-tribulational rapture. So I'm arguing for a pre-trib rapture. Some of you here might not agree with that. That's fine. We can still get along. But...

The reasons for that, for why that happens first, is John 14, a little bit, and it's von Zuber's statement, really helpful, that the Lord Jesus goes as a bridegroom to prepare a place to come back and get his bride and take them to be with him. So there's this expectation of coming to then take his people to heaven. And if it was a post-tribulation rapture, he'd be coming to then come all the way to earth. But I think the biggest ones are in Revelation 3. And I don't list that in here, I should have. In Revelation 3, the people are promised that those who overcome will be kept from the hour of testing, which is about to come upon the world.

And from is the Greek term ek, and it means out of. If it was through. which would be any other rapture view, it would be dia, it would not be ek. So I think that's a huge one. And then another reason would be that in First Thessalonians, the wrath of God that's coming upon the world that the church has been saved from is the eschatological wrath, is the day of the Lord wrath. And so there's an expectation that the people will be kept from the day of the Lord, which is the tribulation period.

So we can go more into that if we need to, but that's it, roughly. I said four minutes, I've already hit four minutes, so give me another one. The Bemissi judgment happens after the rapture, and this is not a judgment which will determine a penalty, because there's no penalty reserved for believers. The penalty was paid by Christ. So this is now a determination of rewards.

This is the parable of the talents, where the Lord said, and I say here, I put it in a possibility, but I think that is what the parable of talents is talking about in Matthew 25, that when the Lord talks about these servants who were given, you know, one 10 talents, one five, one one, and then, you know, The first two, they put that talent to work and they get a return.

And the last one goes and buries it and doesn't put it to work. And when the master comes back and the servants say, hey, look, your ten talents has turned into so many, I forget the exact numbers. The master says, well done, good and faithful servant. And you've been faithful and little, you know, receive. And then he says a number of cities for him to receive.

And in that context, you know, Matthew 23 is the woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. And then Matthew 24 is the apostles, the disciples saying, what's going to be the sign of your coming? And he starts explaining the tribulation period. Then Matthew 25 comes right after.

And in context, it seems like he's talking about how should you live in light of my coming, and how you should live is you should, I guess you could say you should get to work. And note that he's entrusted you with your giftings, with your Christian life, and so you should use it faithfully to him, and he's gonna reward you based on that faithfulness. Does he need to reward you? No. but he's glad to, and that's just really encouraging.

Right before the Lord comes back, the way it's put in Revelation 19 is you have the marriage supper of the Lamb. And the question is, is this right before he comes back, or when is it in this tribulation period? Or if you're post-tribulational, I think you would put this as you meet the Lord in the air and then you come back and have it or something. I'm not sure exactly where it would go. I'm admittedly haven't looked at the arguments here, the rapture systems, very well. Okay, so I just, I do confess some ignorance in that. It's what Revelation 19 puts right before the Lord comes back and you have Armageddon and then the binding of the devil and the throwing of the Antichrist and his false prophet into the lake of fire and then the setting up of the Millennial Kingdom.

Right before all of that sequence, you have this marriage supper of the Lamb. So it's sometime before he comes back. During these rewards and sometime during all of this, you have the tribulation happening on earth where the lamb, Jesus, is breaking the seals. Then you have the trumpets, then you have the bowls. We're going through that in Sunday school right now here at Trinity.

It's been a really excellent study. And that's seven years of the wrath of God being poured out upon the world and the Lord saving countless people, but bringing Israel, especially bringing Israel back to him, bringing Israel to belief in their Messiah. And it will end with the Lord coming in glory with his saints and the destruction of the false prophet and antichrist in the lake of fire.

Then you have the millennial kingdom, which we believe to be 1,000 years, because it says he's going to reign for 1,000 years. So we just take that at face value. Because of the grammatical historical hermeneutic we talked about right at the beginning. And why does Christ need to reign in millennial kingdom? Because the Abrahamic, Davidic, and New Covenants say he does. It's really what it is. So you either have to say he's reigning in some spiritual sense, or he's going to reign the way it says he's going to reign. And based on our hermeneutic, we believe he's going to reign the way it says he's going to reign.

There'll be worldwide peace and prosperity. The devil will be bound during this time, so he won't be able to deceive. The martyred believers from the tribulation period will be resurrected and reign with Christ. Old Testament saints will be resurrected and reign with Christ. And after this, Satan will be briefly released.

He'll lead many people into sin and rebellion, and there'll be one last desperate struggle against the Lord, which the Lord will He'll defeat them by destroying them by fire from heaven, it says in Revelation 27 and nine. And after that, the devil will be thrown in the lake of fire and everybody will then, all the unbelievers will then go to the great white throne judgment. Second Peter three mentions that the heavens and earth will pass away with fervent heat, the elements will melt.

So it seems like everything, all of the creative world goes away and creative universe goes away and you're just left with people. and what's written in the book, what's the record of their life, and they're judged on it before the Lord. Now, we've already been judged, so that's not us as believers. That's the unbelievers from all time are judged, and those not found with their names written in the book of life, which will be all of them, are thrown into the lake of fire, and that's the final death.

Then you have the eternal state, which you read those final chapters of Revelation, you just wanna know more. But we will know more, because we'll see it, we'll be there. And that has the new heavens, the new earth, that has Christ dwelling within with the people forever, there's no need for the temple, there's no need for the sun, there's the new Jerusalem, it's just glorious and glorious and glorious. And that is the, I make this statement right at the end, at the last sentence of page 24 that goes on to 25. This is the ultimate goal of all salvation history. redeemed humanity dwelling with God in perfect harmony in creation without the presence of sin or death. That's the goal.

So I didn't talk about philosophy of ministry or counseling. I'm happy to take questions on those as they come up, but I'll look at Kelly now to direct us. Thank you, James. So let's take about a 15-minute break. Let's come back at 3.50, 3.52, OK? Give me a full 15 minutes. OK, thank you. And we'll get going here.

Let me pray as we start this session that the Lord would bless us. Father, we thank you for your love and your kindness to us. We thank you again for this occasion that brings us together. We thank you for James. and his faithfulness in giving testimony to you and your character and your greatness. Father, we all stand before you and worship you and we pray that you'll guide and direct us in our conversation for the rest of this time. May you be honored and glorified and give us wisdom, Father, as we seek to ask James questions that would, again, give testimony to his love for you and his love for your word and for the truth. We love you. It's in Christ's name we pray these things, amen.

Okay, let's go for, just so you all know how to plan, we'll go for until 4.50 and then I'm gonna give Pastor Gary Custis a few minutes to say some closing remarks. I'll pray and then we'll call it a day. So again, we'll go for about an hour. Pastor Custis will say some few words and then I'll pray. Okay, so men, Ask away. And if you want to have a conversation among yourselves, we can do that, too. We can hand the mic around. Well, maybe I'll start off with one. So you obviously, at the beginning, talked about a lot of things. basis for, as you put it, systematic theology.

In our current day, what do you think the biggest threat the church faces? In other words, if you think about the structure of the church, you think about Christ, what is it that you think is the biggest threat that faces the church? I'm tempted to just fall back on R.C. Sproul and say, no knowledge of the holiness of God.

It's probably knowing the Lord because that is the, I think even if you were to look at the philosophies of ministry and counseling that I've put in here, the, The goal of discipleship is to be like Christ, so equipped to worship, and equipped to worship.

You just get that out of John 4, that the Father is seeking such as worshipers. Some of those who worship him worship in spirit and truth. So I think human beings were created to worship the Lord. not as the only task we do, but certainly as a feature. I think that's even built into the fourth commandment. So there's a principle in the fourth commandment about regular weekly worship that we should observe, and we do just by going to church on Sunday.

I think knowing the Lord. When you know the Lord, you're changed to become like him. and you know him through his word. So it's all sort of interrelated, you know, because then you could say a knowledge of God's word, you know, because you know him through that. So that's probably what I would say, which would then say that there is the greatest need of the church is sound preaching and the teaching and declaration of the word of God, so. Maybe I'm answering as a preacher, but that's where I'm inclined to go.

Maybe you could give some context. You stated at the beginning that you're very influenced by the particular Baptists and the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith. So for context, who were the particular Baptists and what was the context in which that confession was written? Yeah, I'll do my best. Jim Rinehan has written a book on, he's a Reformed Baptist, and he's written a book called To the Judicious and Impartial Reader, which is from the first paragraph of the second line of Bab's Confession of Faith, so he took that as the title of his book.

It's a historical commentary on that document, so we include some of that kind of stuff, and then he cites the guys who wrote the document, all throughout, and he's quoting them to show when they wrote this, here's what they meant. Really helpful just for getting the historical theology down. And there's several names that stand out.

Nehemiah Cox is one, C-O-X-E. Benjamin Keech is another. These were guys who, agreed with the guys who were called the Westminster Divines, and those would be the English Puritans and some Scottish Puritans who came together during the Republic under Cromwell. to draft the Westminster Standards. And that's the Westminster Confession of Faith and the larger and shorter catechism. I think there's a directory of worship that they put together as well.

But that's usually, you don't hear about that one as much unless you're in the Presbyterian circles. And the particular Baptists, are differentiated from the general Baptist, because the general Baptists are Arminian and believe that you are equipped with everything needed to believe and be saved just like that. by virtue of, I think they had a version of prevenient grace in there. And the particular Baptist confessed particular redemption, limited atonement. So they're Calvinistic. They confessed a similar reformed theology as the Westminster divines. So they took the Westminster confession of faith and basically made it better. But they're still Covenantalists.

So that's why I didn't just give it as my document, because I have a statement about the church and Israel having a distinction. And even though I believe that there's federal headship under Adam, and federal headship under Christ, I don't think the scheme to see scripture is covenantal, though there are certainly covenants in the Bible. that we need to recognize. Everyone's saved by virtue of the new covenant. So I think those are big deals that we need to be committed to.

So the particular Baptists are really good in a lot of things. And there's a retrieval happening right now. of getting their works published, because Banner of Truth has really been instrumental, and Crossway especially, in getting the historical Presbyterian sources out there, but there hasn't been historical Baptist sources out there. but there is now more of them coming out. They're really good, but we'd use them the same way we'd use the Westminster Uniform guys, where we'd say there's a lot of things really helpful, and then there's some stuff that I don't agree with that scheme. Even though there might be stuff you're saying that's really helpful, the scheme I might not take. I really like them. I like that document, but I'm also I still like guys like Estilis Johnson. Thanks, James, and good job today, that was great.

I'll ask you just a simple one. If someone were to ask you for several Bible verses, the clearest that show that Jesus is God, where would you take them? Yeah, I would want to go to, there's a couple different ways you could argue that, or you could show that. One would, because some people don't like when you go to the epistles, because that's, well, that's Paul saying that, you know, but it's just, if we just agree the Bible's the Bible, then there's no issue. I think John 1 is a really important one. Some people have said John 1's not an important one. I think it is, John 1, 1.

And it shows that, it says, in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God and the word was God. He was in the beginning with God. And the way the Greek plays out there, there's no way to say, and I'd have to hone, I'd have to go hone up on the argument to be able to give it to you really clearly, but the, Basically the way he's written this, he's written this as saying there's a unity between this word and God, but there's not an identity. So the word was, in the beginning was the word, well that sounds like in the beginning God created, right, out of Genesis 1. And the word was with God. You go, okay, so maybe he was, you know, the first creation, but there's a differentiation between this word and God now, and the word was God.

So now there's some unity, some measure of identity, but not a strict identity between them because they're together, but also the same. And so it requires you to, you know, to end up where we should end up, which is that the Lord Jesus is God. That's a really big one.

In John 5, if I can find the verse, he says that I and the Father are one. In verse 18, you can see this, that his opponents knew what he was saying about himself. where he says, for this reason, therefore, the Jews were seeking all the more to kill him, because he not only was breaking the Sabbath, well, according to their law, I mean, he didn't break a single law of God, but also was calling God his own father, making himself equal with God. So they didn't understand it as him being a lesser being. They understood his claim of God being his father as a claim of equality. So that would be one. In verse 26, the same chapter, just as the father has life in himself, even so he gave to the son also to have life in himself. So the son has the divine prerogative of self-existence. So the gospel of John, it would be big. All throughout, you'd see it. There's other ones I'm trying to remember in Timothy. which one it is, but I don't remember exactly the verse. In Colossians, you can see it in chapter one. I was talking to Dave Haas about this.

He's the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. Firstborn prototokos means first in rank, not first in generation, or first in terms of creation, as in the first created being, but he's the one who's first over all creation, because in him all things were created. He's before all things, in him all things hold together.

So you see these statements about him, that really refer to his deity. So, because scripture in a number of places, this would just be one of them, ascribes to the Lord Jesus the prerogatives, the rights that only properly belong to God, you have to conclude he is God.

And he states it clearly in Revelation, where he calls himself the Alpha and the Omega. And that's really big. Where he, He says in verse eight of Revelation chapter one, I am the Alpha and the Omega, says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty. And in the context there, this is, you see the Trinity and then the Lord Jesus is called the Living One later on in verse 18. So there's, I think if you just, when you stitch it all together, you see that The Lord Jesus is God. Hebrews 1 would be another one. Again, there's a lot of language that seems almost like philosophical in the Bible. In Hebrews 1, 1, God, after he spoke long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways in these last days has spoken to us in his son. whom he appointed heir of all things, through whom also he made the world.

He is the radiance of his glory, the exact representation of his nature, and upholds all things by the word of his power. And even in Colossians it says that, in him all the fullness of deity was pleased to dwell. All the fullness of the Godhead was pleased to dwell. So you just look at all of that and you put it all together and you say, I'm not even allowed to say that he's just like the greatest of all creation. But he's, in order for all this to fit, he has to be God with the Father.

And then you see that similarly with the Holy Spirit as well. And the thing of like Basil the Great, his, on the Holy Spirit, he uses the same arguments that were used like a generation before against the Aryans to prove that Jesus is God, to prove the Holy Spirit is God. It's just the exact same thing. He goes through the scripture and says, if all the prerogatives that belong to God properly belong to the Holy Spirit, then we must say that he's God.

So, yeah. It was a scattering, but I hope it answers. I don't know how you take all of theology and put it into one hour, but you did a masterful job at doing that. So I really appreciate it. And bunches of questions do come up. Some I probably, we would get into much trivia. But there's a couple things, and it's gonna be oriented more towards what that means in terms of practical theology.

And one of them is, In the anthropology as well as your view of harm archaeology, in those two areas, how would you describe the noetic effects of the fall? And this is especially applicable because we have modern Christians today that are compromising that, even a lot of good reformed guys are compromising that with Thomistic overtones. So how would you describe the noetic effects of the fall? Yeah, I think Ephesians 4, if I remember, if that's the right chapter, makes this clear. And I'll just clarify in case there's anybody who doesn't understand the term noetic. But noetic means the effects of the fall on the mind and your ability to think, okay? So in Ephesians 4, verse 17, he says this.

So this I say and affirm together with the Lord that you walk no longer just as the Gentiles also walk in the futility of their mind. being darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, because of the hardness of their heart. And I think that's a key phrase, is the hardness of their heart. That we're not seeing, with unbelievers, we don't see an inability to think reasonably. We see a determination to not think reasonably. And I think that's important because you can lay out clear biblical evidence for the Lord Jesus being God, for the gospel being true, and somebody can say, that's great, I understand what you're saying, I don't want it. And so there's a moral opposition that's contained in here. In our culture, people are also just not, just taught, they are not taught to think reasonably either.

So they don't have the skillset developed. But I think what's spiritually at work is not that they've been so marred that they can't understand that two plus two equals four. but they've been so perverted that they reject the conclusion when it harms their, well, their idols, usually what it is, and their lusts. In verse 19 here, it says that they, having become callous, have given themselves over to sensuality for the practice of every kind of impurity with greediness. So they've delighted in their lusts, And so they reject what calls their lusts to account.

So I would say that you have to recognize the moral aspect. And while I don't think that there's as much a rational, a perversion of the rationality, I also think that there's I don't know how to say this well. There is such a rejection of the truth that it's almost like they may as well not be able to think clearly, because they won't let themselves think clearly. The other side of it, too, is in Ephesians 2.

It says that you were dead in your trespasses and sins which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience. And so there's, it's not just that they're morally perverted in their hearts, but there's actually opposition in the spiritual world to keep them from being able to think and respond clearly as well.

So you've got both of those. What's the solution to that? It's the Holy Spirit opening their eyes through the preaching of the gospel. That's the solution to that. But that's how I would articulate that. You might be able to draw more out of me if you ask a clarifying question, but I think that's probably a good frame of reference for it. Well, let's apply it to real life day-to-day stuff.

How do you see the noetic effects of the fall in terms of the influence on Christian thinking? especially in the area of how quickly the Christian church have adopted and embraced self-love, self-esteem. All right, how quickly that has been embraced and accepted, when in reality in the Bible, there is not even a hint of that.

The Bible constantly warns that that's the man's problem. Yeah, I think in that, there's the lust of the heart, that the fallen heart loves sin, And it wants to make excuses, you know, in the philosophy of counseling section it would talk about the heart being devious.

And it's thinking and it's planning and it's devising and it's deceitful. It says on page 29, What a man thinks in his heart is underneath counseling his heart ministry. What a man thinks in his heart, so he is. All human action is a result of the thoughts, desires, affections, the lusts of the heart. And you can see that really clearly in Mark 7 where the Lord says, out of the heart the mouth speaks. The heart is the inner, person, it calculates, meditates, plans, and deceives, a number of references for that.

And so Christians are constantly under pressure of being conformed to the world, and that conformed is an outward pressing into the image, stamping into the image of the world. And in the fallen nature of Christians, there's an inclination towards the world's stuff. and a desire to believe the lies of the world. So self-love would be a part of that, self-esteem, all that kind of, really it's nonsense, but it's stuff that the world has propped up to try to really permit the lusts of their heart. And I think you would need to do what the Apostle Paul says in, I think it's 2 Corinthians 10, where we tear down arguments and every speculation raised up against the Lord Jesus.

So. Good, good. One other thing, at least for now. And that is, in anthropology, you talk about the fact, you view, if I read it correctly, a dualism between, for man, in terms of the body and the soul. That's correct, right? And on the soul level, which I think we would argue that's the conscious level. All right, how do you see the consciousness of man breaking down in terms of that? Do you see it as there's a consciousness, unconsciousness, subconsciousness? Do you see it a consciousness, unconsciousness? How do you see that from a biblical perspective?

Yeah, from a biblical perspective, I don't think there's, I think you would, those schemes I think come from Freud originally. I don't think you can permit, like, you know, in my subconscious or, you know, maybe in like a natural medicine kind of angle, somebody might talk about, you know, you've got to get the body, the body knows what it needs or that kind of thing. They might talk in that way as if the body has its own personality. And I don't think scripture allows for that.

You have the spiritual component of man, which is the heart of man, the mind of man, the soul of man, the spirit of man. I think all those are terms for the same thing. And it desires what is in accordance with its nature. And then you have the body of man, and these affect one another, so somebody can be spiritually depressed because they have certain organs in their body not working right, and hormones not being pumped out the way they should. But you could also have somebody who's aware of their guilt before God, and so the body isn't operating properly, and their stomach is in knots, and that kind of thing. They work on each other.

But I think the spiritual person, or the spiritual side, component of man, wants to do what's in accordance with its nature. I don't think there's a, biblically, you look at Romans 7, Paul talks about these two desires in him, a desire to do the right and then also a desire to the wrong because of the desire to do the right that pop up. You see that kind of inner dialogue. You don't see levels of consciousness in scripture.

Yeah, I realize I only cited one passage, but that's how I would answer that. Yeah. Yeah. And in counseling, in the counseling section, I think we say we should reject... We defined the heart really well there on page 2930. I say underneath counseling is a mystery of God's word. As scripture alone claims authority and sufficiency over believers' lives, all secular models of counseling with their godless worldviews ought to be eschewed in counseling. Because they're built on pseudoscience. They're not built on the revealed word of God, which tells us about our spiritual makeup. psychology has properly studied the soul, but they've rejected the soul outright and then tried to figure out some sort of biological consciousness, some sort of spiritual, not spiritual thing.

And it's just, yeah, I can't imagine finding any truth in there. I'll try to make this an audible question. You spoke in your chapter on salvation about salvation being the work of God alone, and so how can you take this truth and take it and apply it to something like sanctification to not just encourage the believer, but also how would you take that truth and help them apply it to their lives if they're struggling in their pursuit of sanctification and just to apply it holistically to their lives? Yeah, that's a good question. So we're assuming the person in question here is somebody who's desiring to be obedient but struggling to be obedient. and the comfort is that the Lord is saving them, right? Would that be a way to say it?

In Philippians, I just had to sing a song in my head to figure out where Philippians was. In Philippians chapter two, I think that this is helpful. The solution is not to say, as some Christians have said, This might be like the Keswick view, or at least a hyper-grace view, like the Tulian-Javidian style, which would say, you just gotta believe the gospel, and then, you know, lo and behold, you'll just become like Jesus, just over time, kind of thing, as if there's no effort needed to apply to the Christian life.

And the New Testament, I mean, why does it tell you? to seek the things above where Christ is, if you're not supposed to seek the things above where Christ is. Seems kind of nuts and bolts. So Philippians 2 says, verse 12, So then my beloved, just as you have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. So I think the encouragement is not, God's done it all, so you don't need to pursue sanctification, you don't need to worry about it, just trust the Lord.

I think it would be God's done it all, so trust the Lord to cause your pursuit of it to be profitable and to result in sanctification. Because he is the one who is working in you to willing to work for his good pleasure. The Apostle Paul to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 5 can say, faithful is he who calls you, and will bring it to pass. What's it to pass? It's the previous verse, may the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely. So the Lord will sanctify you, but he sanctifies you by empowering and blessing your pursuit of Him.

You know, so I think the, so you'd wanna, with that person, you know, you'd wanna find out like, are they, is there a slavery to sin that's in here that we can help them find and repent of? Or is it just a general awareness of their weakness? You know, if it's an awareness of their weakness, they should be reminded of the perfection of Christ's work. And then that would encourage them to press on and being obedient to Christ. Just to kind of follow up on that a little bit.

So I think we kind of live in a day where the sanctification of the Christian is kind of almost maybe a little bit of an afterthought in the way that maybe the global church kind of lives their lives. And I think even, you know, in circles that we are part of, the idea of sanctification is challenging because a lot of people feel maybe like they have a car with a flat tire to a certain extent or maybe aimless is a better way to put it. But I think as a you know, as a church, I think we struggle with the idea of God's holiness and how to pursue that practically. And just easy ways for us to kind of apply that personally.

And so how would just, how would you comment on like what you would practically say, okay, obviously this is not personal advice, but somebody that says, okay, so point, point me in the right direction so that I can, you know, begin to seek this out for somebody that's just, okay, so where do I go from here?

Yeah. Yeah, I think in that situation I would probably find a... a believer who has, maybe an older believer who's walked with the Lord for a while, and I would try to get them together and say, you know, walk together with the Lord, because then there's a lot of, there'd be a lot of help in seeing the faith practically worked out in this man or this woman's life, you know, and there's biblical precedent for that in Titus 2. The older women are to teach the younger women how to keep house and how to love their husbands, how to, you know, raise their children. So there's a biblical precedent for that kind of discipleship.

So that would be one practical way that I would try to help the person. That doesn't mean that I'm, that doesn't really answer the question, so let me answer the question. Which is, I would, I would want the person to know that they've been saved by the Lord, to walk in a manner that pleases the Lord. And they began that at their conversion when they believed and repented. And so then I would probably want to just make it really basic.

Like, what the Lord wants you to do is be an active member of the church. You know, so he wants you to, you know, we go to the virtue vice lists in the Bible. You know, we could go to Colossians 3. We could work out, you know, you're part of a family. Well, then here's how he wants you to behave in the family. You know, are you an employee? Well, here's how he wants you to behave as a master slave in the Bible. So here's how we'd apply that to boss employee.

You know, we could, you could case law all that out. what that person probably needs at the bare minimum is you've been brought into Christ and so now just be a part of Christ's body here. And the reason I say it is because I think a lot of the answers for how to live in a holy way and how to be sanctified come from just being with the Lord's people. Worshiping the way he's commanded you to worship, you know, going and grabbing lunch with another believer, being a part of the congregational singing, which the Lord says in Colossians 3, is one way that you're teaching that the word of God is richly dwelling in you, which is going to be the means to sanctify you. Behold Christ in scripture would be one example. But you would get that by, coming to church and hearing the word of God expounded, having Christ held forth to you out of his scripture. So practically, I think I would always start with, be a part of the church. And you will grow, and the Lord will minister to you in it.

Because you're trying to get them to do the kinds of things that the Holy Spirit uses to grow them. You're not trying to get them to just follow a bunch of rules. You're trying to get them to do the kind of things the Holy Spirit will use to make them holy.

So putting them in those contexts is how I would approach it, rather than saying, well, here's the 50 things that I do. At a bare minimum, obviously, we have the virtue vice list and stuff, but the barest minimum is be a part of the Lord's body. We're gonna make you exercise. All right, you talked a little bit about demons and Satan and the statement you had there. Let me ask a practical question about that in terms of the pastoral practice.

Because both Roman Catholics, they have a whole class of priests. that are exorcism. Practice exorcism, charismatics, a lot of Arminian churches practice exorcism. There's a whole Middle Ages, they used to burn people to stake as a form of exorcism, because fire cleansed the demon out of the person before they went to heaven. So they saw it as a good thing. Should you, James, as a pastor, practice exorcism?

Or for that matter, burn people to steak. No. I'm trying to remember the verse. I don't have it on top of the correct reference, but the Lord Jesus talks about the strong man and how if you cast out a demon, And there's no stronger man that takes the place of that demon. He'll go find seven worse spirits than himself and come and occupy the same place, because, hey, the house is swept in an order. Let's party. So I don't think the goal is exorcism.

The goal is people changed by the Lord. And the Lord changes somebody who is possessed by a demon by the Lord casting out the demon and occupying that space as the strongman. And so that would have to happen through the ministry of the gospel, because it's the, Romans 10 tells us it's the gospel that is heard so that they can believe. So again, using the means the Lord has provided for those things to happen.

But you don't want to be the sons of Sceva. You know, who could go around and where the demon says, you know, Jesus, I know Paul, I know, but who are you? You wanna be the one who brings the Lord to these people. And so again, then you're thrown back on it.

It's the Lord who fully accomplishes salvation. So then obviously there's gotta be a huge amount of prayer that the Lord would save this person. and would remove the demonic influence and would occupy the space of the heart. It's kind of like apologetics, right? You can exercise all of your apologetics and convince somebody to believe in God.

What have you done? You've given them a more rational worldview, but they haven't come to faith in the Lord Jesus. It'd be a similar thing. You've managed to help somebody clean their house, but you haven't actually given them the Lord. I don't think exorcism should be the goal, nor are we given that power in scripture. We're ministers of the gospel. We're not wielders of the spirit against demons. So James, I want to give you a scenario where we kind of maybe make application. I think you've gotten a trend here. You're saying, great, let's take this theology and end the pastoral role, right? How do you move this forward?

You're really clear about the relationship in your appendix there between repentance and faith. And it's very clear even earlier in your document that you view repentance as in the Ordo Salutis as not preceding faith, right? Nonetheless, your position on repentance is quite strong, and you say that it is, I think you go so far as to say that it is the second requirement of salvation. That's, if I got the wording there, quite the way you put it. So on that concept of lordship effectively, right, and repentance and the surrender of one's life to Christ in the experience of conversion, because that's where you first addressed that topic, is in that portion on conversion.

With that backdrop, you're here, a young man walks in, begins to visit the church, he's been here two or three weeks, you have an opportunity to sit down and talk. You find out he's not a believer, very interested, some people would call him a seeker, right? And along the course of your conversation, you find out that he's currently living with his girlfriend. And then he asks you a question about, I really wanna go to heaven, I feel like I'm carrying this burden of sin. And you have this open door to share the gospel with him. How do you approach that situation in his life?

To what degree does an evangelist effectively address the situation, not just of your positional sin, and the fact that Christ will, forgive that as you trust in him by faith, but also the practice of sin and the surrender of life to Christ, and how do you tie that in with faith and Paul's simple answer to the jailer, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved, right? So to what degree would an evangelist even pull that conversation in and say, oh, by the way, let's talk about your living situation? Or would you say, I want to present Christ, believe in Him, He'll forgive you of your sins. Now that you've professed Christ, we have some things to talk about here in terms of obedience to Him. How do you approach that conversation as you sit down with that young man?

So the Mormon are really helpful, and John Cullohan is really helpful, because they talk about the evangelistic call is repent and believe, and it's in that order. And these are the guys who were saying that faith logically precedes repentance. So you'd think that they would have trouble saying that we call people to repent and believe. And they say it this way, that repentance is the goal. and faith is the means to the goal.

Because the goal is life change, right? For grace you have been saved by faith, and this not of yourselves, the gift of God, not a result of works that no man may boast. For you are his workmanship, creating Christ Jesus for good works. So what's the goal? The goal of Christian life is holiness, right? And so that's even the goal of conversion, and the goal of saving faith, the end result. It's not just a change in, it's not a get out of jail free card, right? It's, or the, you know, the police chief's a card, a courtesy card, so you can get out of the ticket. It's just a change of life.

I think you would have to talk about that man's present sin, or you may even say his presenting sin, if you want to say it that way. You'd have to say, this is a problem. And this is wicked. The law of God condemns this. And because of these things, you stand before the Lord condemned.

And I would use that as, I think you should use that as the means to then present Christ in the gospel. And the solution to the present condition you're in, because of these actual things you're doing, the solution is come to Christ. and receive forgiveness for your sins. And the Lord is calling you to believe and to change your life.

He's calling you to both. So I would wanna be careful not to take my articulation of the logical order and then somehow make that become chronologically how I minister to somebody. Because I'm after their conversion. I'm not only after their faith. Does that make sense?

The other thing, one of the Reform scholastics, Pietrus van Maastricht, who's a Dutch Reform guy in the early 1700s, he's part of the high orthodoxy, it's called, he's kind of the later group. So Reform theology is building, building, building, and it sort of finds its truest expression in the guise of this period of time.

And he says that, really helpfully, when you come to the Lord in faith, you receive him And you receive him in whole, which means all of his offices. You don't just receive him as priest who died for your sins, but you also receive him as king, and you receive him as prophet. And how do you receive him as king? But you receive him as king by submitting to him. So it's interesting that he's even got that, which sounds very Lordship to us, kind of baked in there. I wouldn't include obedience as an element of saving faith, but I think there's a point that when you believe in the Lord, you forsake everything else and come to him.

It occurs at the same time. That's why John Murray, he has no patience for this conversation. In Redemption, Accomplishment, and Applied, his book, he'll say the question is futile. Like, when you believe, you turn from sin. And when you turn from sin, you're turning to the one you're believing will save you. So he's like, they both happen at the same time.

So he has no patience for my appendix, right? But he's right when he's talking about conversion. So I don't wanna say, here's the logical order. And so now I'm not gonna encourage somebody to repent until I see they believe. That would just be the opposite problem of not telling somebody to believe unless I see they repent. But I'm after their repentance.

And as such, I'm presenting Christ as able to save them and able to forgive them for the sins that they've committed. are actively working. So I think I would use the sin that he's even talking about as a means to present the law, bring it heavy upon his conscience so that Christ is seen as truly lovely and worthy.

It's the same thing you do with a child, right? When a child sins and now you have to go and discipline them, you say, what'd you do, right? What does God say you're supposed to do? Did you do that? But you're supposed to do it. You're supposed to be perfect. Can you be perfect?

And if they're little, they'll say yeah. I've had that experience. But as they get older, they say I can't do it. Gospel. So I think you use the law to open up their conscience to the need of the gospel. So you should talk about the sin they're currently. engaging in. Long answer, so if I need to clarify it, let me know. Yeah.

We've talked about this one before, but we confess that God has attributes such as love and anger, And we typically refer to those as passions, right? But in page four of the Second London Confession of Faith, it talks about God being a most pure spirit, invisible without body parts or passions. How do you reconcile that and what is the practical implication of God being passionless?

Yeah, I don't think he's passionate about you. When somebody hears that and they go, whoa, he doesn't care about me? No, he does care about you. He just doesn't care about you in a passable way. So his caring for you doesn't change. He's always cared about you. From eternity past, he's foreknown you. So he's loved you with an everlasting love, not a love that's subject to being changed.

To be passable is to be subject to being really acted upon by an external force, is the concept of being passable. So if God were passable, we're passable. So somebody cuts me off on the freeway, and my inclination is to, what is this guy doing? You know, or that's just one example you could present.

And God isn't gonna be stirred up by that. So, which is not surprising if he's all-knowing, all-powerful, providentially working all things to bring about his eternal decrees. Right, so then something surprises him such that it makes him, that it creates a response from him. It causes him to change in some way.

That's just, I just don't think that's proper. So, no, he doesn't change. And since he doesn't change, that means he doesn't have an emotional life to change. It doesn't mean that he's not loving. No, he is, because he is pure love being perpetually acted out. If he's passable or has passions, then he's going to change.

I think I wrote this in here. You can see this in Acts 14. This is really clear in the King James. It's not as clear in the modern translations, just because we don't have the same some of the same terminology. But Acts 14 verse 15, Paul and Barnabas have come to Lystra and they heal a man. The Lord heals a man through them.

And the people look at them and say the gods have become like men and have come down to us. The Greeks had passable gods who could be changed. You just read the Iliad. We read the Iliad lately. It's pretty clear these gods are just, they just, they change based on the conditions of humanity.

So they call Barnabas Zeus and Paul Hermes because Paul's the chief speaker. And the priest of Zeus, whose temple is just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands to the gate and wanted to offer sacrifice with the crowds. But when the apostles Barnabas and Paul heard of it, they tore their robes, rushed out to the crowd saying, men, why are you doing these things?

We are also men of the same nature, but it's actually passions. It's the term, the word passions. hamoyo patheis, and patheis is where we get passions. So, they're saying, no, we're just like you. We're passionate, we're passable, we're just like you. Our nature is like a created being, able to change. We're not like God, who's unable to, is the implication of what they're saying. So, yeah, it does not mean God doesn't care about you. but it means that, it actually means he does care about you, and his care of you is perfect and unchanging, and you can't do anything to shake it off.

If you're passable, then you could cause him to change toward you. Yeah. That's a good one. You introduced that doctrine to me a couple months back, and I really like it. It's very anchoring, right? Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I too appreciated this document. I enjoyed getting it electronically earlier in the week and I intend to hang on to it as a reference. This question has got some, I think, intentional holes in it that maybe you can fill in.

I'm looking in your role in ministry, how do you lead or shepherd your congregation to Interact in the community, you know work in I think 2nd Corinthians 5 were ambassadors for Christ How do you as the shepherd chief shepherd of it? the local church How do you make that happen? How does that work? And I'm not looking necessarily from a tractional model or something like that, but you know where I'm headed I think I think so I think you need to both preach it and then model it, would probably be the case, because that would be how you would present any element of Christian obedience.

We tend to think of evangelism as something, you know, there's the There's the Billy Grahams of the world who are evangelists, you know, and I'm just hoping that somebody notices that I said hi and thank you at work and that I can use that as a gospel opportunity kind of thing. You know, it's like, that tends to be a lot of times how we think about it. But no, we're witnesses for Christ, we're ambassadors for Christ in the world. And the pastor is another believer with the same commission.

So I think probably, probably needing to model it and to preach it. Practically, how does that work out? I don't know. Some churches have set up, you know, booze at farmers markets. Some have had conferences and try to advertise that to let people know.

We have the, the internet's changing to where there were always a bunch of lies on the internet, but now there's a lot of lies on the internet and you can't tell they're lies. So it used to be you could use the internet well to let people know, to basically get the truth in front of people and let them know you exist.

But I think if we're just kind of thinking in the abstract, it really comes down to preaching it and modeling it. I'm not sure, probably you would need to be praying a lot for the Lord to direct you and present opportunities to you for you to be able to model it. Because you don't wanna just say, well, we're gonna go make this happen. You wanna obey the Lord, so. That is, a very abstract answer. Do you want to ask a follow-up question? Am I getting near what's helpful? I don't think it's an easy question to answer. I'm not sure practically how it works out, so.

Yeah, I do think that it's the word of God that we as Christians use for, to reach the lost. As Romans 10, you just can't get away from it, right? That how will they hear unless someone preaches, right? And how will they believe unless they hear, and how will they hear unless someone preaches? So at some point, the word of God is the truth of the gospel message that's contained in the word of God is presented.

So yeah, I wouldn't want necessarily an attractional model, but I would want some way that practically facilitates that to happen. There's a number of ways you could do that. I'm going to take the opportunity to springboard off of that and just ask the question, in your estimation, What is the role or should be the role of a local church and its leadership in missions? And I know, you know, you talked about the Great Commission being what the church is about fulfilling. You talk about the role of the leadership in preaching the word within the four walls. God's people go forth, they share the gospel as they are able. and they live lives that demonstrate its power. This effectively fulfills the Great Commission, is kind of how you presented that.

And if you'd had time to do 200 pages in four hours instead of what you were limited to here, I imagine you would have gotten into concepts of missiology. And I know that Trinity has a practice, right? But from your perspective, what is that kind of outbound messaging? How is that best practically executed?

Yeah, I think actually it's best practically executed in terms of missions through planting churches. I think this is the model of acts. I think churches plant churches and churches train up pastors, train up men who then go and become the leaders of churches that they're planting. And it's under the authority of the sending church until it becomes kind of self-sufficient. Yeah, that'd be the right way to say that. And I think you see that in Acts 13.

Paul and Barnabas have been ministering at Antioch and it says in verses one to three here. They were at Antioch in the church that was their prophets and teachers. This is church leadership here. Barnabas and Simon, who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manan, who had been brought up with Herod, the Tetrarch, and Saul. While they were ministering to the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, they laid their hands on them and they sent them away. And then you get the first missionary journey.

And what they're doing is they're setting up churches. They're going into the marketplaces, preaching the gospel face-to-face, people get saved and they organize them into churches. And if they're unable to, it sounds like they get a leadership pretty quickly, but then later on you see that Paul sends Timothy and Titus out to really secure leadership in the local churches. So how does a church practice missions?

I think it should be in the context of church planting. I'm pulling a lot of this from the Master's Academy International stuff I've heard from them. They're really helpful because they're trying to basically get seminaries in these countries to then train up men who can pastor local churches in that area. and because of this kind of stuff in Acts, where it's like we're supposed to be sending men to then plant churches. So I don't think a surfboard ministry qualifies, you know, but you could have a beach community church where the people really enjoy surfing and there becomes an outreach opportunity. Wonderful.

But in terms of missions, I think the churches train up men and then go and plant churches. And that should, I think any church can do that. however small. When Trinity wasn't very big, Pastor Gary and Mr. Isaac were sent to Hillcrest to essentially replant it. And now it's, you know, grown to be the church that it is, the church I grew up in. So I think any church could do that. It doesn't need to be Grace Community Church with international funding in order to do missions right. Trinity sent Tim Huggins, did we? Did we send Tim Huggins out as well?

So I'm trying to remember the history. So yeah, I think that's all I had to answer. Real quickly, James, I know that our time is fleeting and almost gone here, but a couple of real practical counseling things that go back to, I get phone calls from former students literally all over the world about these things. Sometimes from me. So I want you to answer them for me.

One is, is there such thing as a biblical divorce in marriage? If so, what does that constitute? And the other thing, in your pastoral counseling, what are you gonna share with parents that have lost a child? Or what about a child, in reading your testimony, you talked about your own, how God worked in your life. What about a child and their ability to be able to genuinely surrender their life to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior? Can you describe it?

It's kind of a two-fold question a little bit, but that's it. Yeah, so the first one was? Divorce. Divorce. Is there such a thing as biblical divorce? What is it? When does that take place? Yeah, I think there is such a thing as biblical divorce, and I think, and there's, There's one in 1 Corinthians 7, where in chapter 7, verse 15, he's talking about a mixed marriage, an unbeliever and a believer.

And the believer does not have a right to seek divorce in that setting. But if the unbeliever leaves, the believer's supposed to not stand in the way. They're told just to basically let it happen. In verse 15, yet if the unbelieving one leaves, let him leave. The brother or the sister is not under bondage in such cases. God has called us to peace. And so you're to, basically if the unbeliever's seeking divorce, then basically go with it. But the believer should not be the one seeking it. That probably is a fulfillment of Paul's language in Romans 12. As far as it depends on you, be at peace with all men. And the other one, the Lord Jesus talks about in Matthew chapter five, I think, is that right? Yeah. Chapter five, verse 31.

It was said, whoever sends his wife away, let him give her a certificate of divorce. I say to you, everyone who divorces his wife, except for the reason of unchastity, makes her commit adultery. And whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery. There's a number of versions of that. I think, I've read a couple books on it. I agree with what Jay Adams says on it. I think Jim Neuheiser has the same articulation in his book, Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage. Both of those wrote books entitled Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage. And I think they're right in both.

But some people have tried to say that this is There's a betrothal view that it's only during the betrothal period that if you find out she hasn't been pure during the betrothal period, you're allowed to seek a divorce because you were technically married before you consummated the marriage.

But the... The kind of sexual sin mentioned is just sexual sin in general, and it doesn't seem to be confined with the wording to, like lexically, in terms of the dictionary definitions of the word, we're not required to see it as a patrol of you. So it seems like there's an option to a believer that he or she is allowed to seek divorce if there is some degree of sexual sin from their spouse.

Now, the Lord Jesus in this section though, he's making divorce harder than the Pharisees had made it. So that cannot be used to say, you know, well, that person, you know, looked at that store when we walked through the mall. And so that was sinning. So I'm out of here. You know, I just, obviously the Lord Jesus wouldn't permit that. There'd be a great deal of wisdom that would need to go into this. And I don't think you would even really want to counsel somebody from the get-go. Well, you know you can get out. Right, that's not the goal, right? Because that's not the Lord Jesus' goal either. The goal is two people living in union and faithfulness to each other and in obedience to the Lord. So that should be the goal. I think it would be right to classify abuse, physical abuse, as abandonment in the 1 Corinthians 7 passage. So you would seek the safety of the spouse being abused.

But again, there's a lot of case law that comes up that you'd have to hunt down. And that's one reason Jay Adams' book is so helpful. That's because he just works through it all and is like, okay, if this, then these possibilities. Okay, well, let's talk about each possibility. And that presents these possibilities and he kind of hunts them all down. It's really helpful.

The other question had to do with a child. Okay, so two other questions. One is the parents who have lost a child, a young child, presumably in infancy. I believe that infants who die are elect. That's what I believe. And I would base that on one, on David's words when he loses the child that he and Bathsheba conceived.

And the Lord did that as a discipline to David for lying and hiding the truth and for murdering Uriah, Bathsheba's husband. But David confesses that he will go to the child. The child won't come back to him. So there seems to be a faith that David has that when he goes to be with the Lord, the child will be there. And so that would be the biblical precedent.

The other theological argument I would use in support is just the character of God. The Lord cares for the innocent. And you say, well, but theologically they're not innocent because they've been imputed with Adam's sin. Right, that's why they can die in the first place. But they aren't able to, if they stayed as an infant, you could say they don't understand why they're being punished in hell.

And these are those where the Lord says he sees the father to the orphan. and he takes care of the widow. So it seems like it's perfectly in character, more in character for the Lord to save the child than it would be for the Lord to condemn the child. I would argue it's, It's a better, some people wanna really say, in defending total depravity and the justice of God, that God has every right to judge that child. You know, I said, well, theologically, I agree. But when I look at God's love and mercy, and he's a father to the fatherless and all that, it seems like he would not be God if he condemned the child. It's a theological argument. So subject to debate, but that's where I would go with that.

My own experience in growing up, when I was baptized, I was baptized upon profession of faith, but not on a conversion story that had some radical repentance. But there's a lot of Christians like that. who they grow up and they believe when they're five, six, seven, eight, and then they wonder, okay, well, I didn't get into any gross sin and repent of it and then be saved. So, you know, am I really saved? Because I don't see radical repentance in my life in terms of, and if they use that phrasing, they'd probably be thinking sensational repentance, you know.

But there is radical repentance in if they turn from sin to God. If you repent of something, again, the Morroman subject, that was excellent, is if you repent of any sin as sin, you're repenting of it because it's sin, you've repented of sin. You don't need to itemize everything you've ever done. You don't repent enough to be qualified to get into the kingdom. You turn from sin.

And in the case of the hypothetical that Matthew mentioned, we could say, well, it needs to include these ones. Right? And he'd change these ones. But for the little kid who he, you know, he's been given to lying and has been given to hitting his sister or his brother or something like that. When he says that those are sin and I know the Lord doesn't want me to do them and I hate them and I don't want to do them and I want to follow the Lord. You could say, well, how is that not also repentance?

So then their spiritual growth and their physical growth kind of line up together, sort of one hiding the other. And so that's where it gets tricky. And so, yeah, I wouldn't give baptism to a five-year-old right away. I'd wanna see, is there a pattern of growth that also looks like spiritual growth? But I also wouldn't wanna tell that child, I don't know if you're saved yet.

You know, I'd wanna take them out their word and say, yeah, you're trusting the Lord. So let's try to honor the Lord and let's keep turning from sin and keep trying to please the Lord, because he loves us and we love him, yeah. Okay, well thank you all. I'm going to have Pastor Gary close us up and then I'll pray. Can I do it from here? Or you want me to stand up? Well, James, I was trying to think of a question for you to be able to be challenged to unscrew the inscrutable. But I couldn't think of a question.

I agreed with your document, and I agree with you. Let me just say one thing. And when Paul was writing to Timothy, he gave him a lot of advice. But I think the most important advice he gave to him was at the end. And he started the same way you started. He started with scripture. And he said, all scripture is given by inspiration of God. It's God-breathed.

It is profitable for doctrine, for a proof, for correction, for instruction and righteousness that the man of God may be complete, thoroughly equipped for every good work. Your challenge and charge that is given to you then is to preach the word of God. You know, when all is said and done, your theology is most important. And the effect of that important theology is to preach it. Preach the word.

Be ready in season, out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort with all long-suffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers. And they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables. But you be watchful. In all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry.

And that's a charge to all of us. But it's certainly to someone in the role of being a pastor. And I'll say two things about preaching the word. The first person you preach the word to is you. You preach the word to your own heart. And that's a valuable part of the ministry. because as your people grow, you need to grow and grow in grace and the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. And then secondly, you preach the word to your people. But the preaching of the word is something that is most important. It is not always done today. And the most important thing to do from going from your ordination is to be a proclaimer of the word of God. And you will know that. And that's what you love. And it's wonderful to see you here today and answering questions and dealing with the truth. And you'll continue to grow in that truth. And it's a wonderful privilege that God has given to you. But you want me to pray for you? Let me pray.

Heavenly Father, we thank you that you're the God of truth, and that you guide us in the truth. We're thankful for the Lord Jesus Christ and we're thankful that he accomplished so great a salvation for us. We're thankful for James and having opportunity to stand firm in the truth and to walk in the truth and to walk in the victory of Jesus Christ.

And we pray that you will guide his life. We pray that you would direct him. We pray that you would continue to sanctify him and make him holy. Set him apart to be more like Jesus Christ and less like this world. And we pray that you would guide him in ministry, guide him in life. And we pray that you would bless him and that you would be with him and his family. We pray that your hand would be upon him. In Jesus' name we pray. Right, I want to thank each one of these men. And thank you, James. It's been a wonderful day. Thank you all for coming. You're dismissed.