Then so I want to move on to what was supposed to be the first presentation this morning. And that is and I've changed the title. It says here the silence of the lambs. I actually retitled it. It's a wonderful life. The joy of being confessional. But before I do that, there was one question that came up during the break. And I wanted to address that publicly just so no one left here with a wrong impression. The question came up, since I'm given the language I've used about hearing from the Spirit and getting messages from the Spirit, am I saying that there is no Holy Spirit? And let me be categorical and clear about this. In the words of Richard Nixon, let me make this perfectly clear. I believe in the Holy Spirit. I confess the Apostles' Creed. I confess the Westminster Confession. In catechisms, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgian Confession, the Canons of Dort, I am a Catholic with a lowercase c. I believe the Holy Spirit, the Holy Catholic Church, a community of saints. All I'm simply saying is there's no question that God the Spirit hovered over the face of the deep. God the Spirit regenerates us. But he does so through the preaching of the Holy Gospel. Heidelberg Catechism says since we are justified through faith alone, from where does this faith come? From where does this faith come? And this answer is the Holy Spirit creates or works faith in our hearts through the preaching of the Holy Gospel. So all I'm arguing for is that we should always associate the work of the Spirit with the Word, particularly the Gospel. The law, yes, God, the Holy Spirit, uses the law to bring conviction in the first use of the law. That's absolutely true. But what I'm arguing against is that God, the Holy Spirit, operates ordinarily outside the preaching of the gospel and the use of the sacraments. So I didn't want anyone to walk away from you thinking that Clark doesn't believe in the Holy Spirit. If that were true, I would not be a Christian, and I should be called to repentance and faith. I should be called to repentance and faith anyway. All of us should, but you know what I mean. All right. So it's a wonderful life, the joy of being confessional. So as we already discussed, confession of Yahweh as our only savior and creator, as the only God, is fundamental to being a Christian. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, Yahweh our God. Yahweh is one. It's a fundamental act of being a Christian is to confess the faith. And as it was for Israel under Moses, so it is for Christians today. Against the prevailing culture, God's people confess that he, God, is utterly unlike the gods of the nations. He's not part of any pantheon. He's not a god who changes. He's not a god who is jealous, as the Greek gods frequently were. In fact, the Greek gods are frequently objects of disgust and derision in some classical Greek literature. Our god is, according to Exodus 3, the I am that I am. Our god simply is. As heirs of the Catholic faith, we confess, as I was saying, the ecumenical creeds. but very many years passed between the formation of the creeds and the Reformation. In response to the rediscovery of the biblical doctrine of justification on the ground of the righteousness of Christ imputed to believers and received through faith alone, and that faith defined as accepting, resting, and receiving, to use the language of the Westminster standards, I have been arguing that we augmented the creeds with the Reformed confessions. And the most widely used of those are the so-called three forms of unity, the Heidelberg Catechism, the Belgic Confession, and the Canons of Dort. And then the Westminster Standards, which I sometimes call all of them together the six forms of unity, because I see them as being fundamentally united in their confession. Now, there are two ways of relating to these confessions. And here, I wish I had, I didn't think to ask, and so it's nobody's fault but my own. I wish I had a blackboard or something to write on. There are two Latin words that we need to know. One is quia, q-u-i-a, quia. That's the first way of relating to a confession. Quia means because. We subscribe a confession, and by the way, we don't subscribe to it, we subscribe it. The metaphor implied in subscribing is writing your name under a document. And it's not a metaphor, it's a fact. When I became a minister, I literally came up to a table and someone handed me a pen and I wrote my name on a document underneath, as it were, on a line underneath the confessions. And I said, this is my faith. And I signed that document, we call that subscription, because I believe it's biblical. That's one way of relating to a confession. It's we confess what we confess because it's biblical. That was the old Protestant way of confessing. That's the Lutheran way of confessing. And it's the Dutch and German way of confessing the three forms of unity. And it was the old Presbyterian way of confessing in the 17th century. In the 18th century, in various places in Europe, in the Reformed Church, in what we think of as the RCA, and in Scotland and Wales and other places, and in England, Another way of subscribing was introduced that was described with a Latin word, quatenus, Q-U-A-T-E-N-U-S, Q-U-A-T-E-N-U-S, quatenus, which simply means insofar as. And so modern Presbyterian practice since the 18th century has been to subscribe the confession insofar as it is biblical. And the assumption is that some of it is biblical, and some of it isn't biblical. Most of it is, and most of it, and a little of it isn't. Now, who gets to say how much and which? And see, the minute you open that can, you begin to have all kinds of hairy, convoluted discussions about how we subscribe our confession. And so then, out of that distinction, quatenus, insofar as it's biblical, have arisen all kinds of discussions about Well, how do we subscribe our confession? And you have essentially conservative quatainus subscription. Well, we subscribe almost all of it, except this little bit. And then you have another, and sometimes that's called the strict subscription view. And then you have a slightly less strict subscription view that's called the system subscription. We subscribe the system of doctrine in the confession. The confession isn't itself a system, they say, but there's a system in the confession. So there's a sort of confession within the confession. And that's the most widely held. That was the view of Hodge and Warfield, at least the late old Princeton men, and the old Westminster men, Murray, Stonehouse, and those fellows. And then there's a third view that actually has been around for a long time in some ways, but has been recently adopted by the Presbyterian Church in America, although I would certainly say that not everyone in the PCA holds this view. And that's called the good faith subscription. And good faith is that every presbytery gets to decide whether the person subscribing is subscribing in good faith, which is a slightly broader way of subscribing, broader than system and broader than than strict subscription. But all of those are subsets of quaternions. And they all exist because of quatenus, because you've introduced some distance between what is biblical and what is confessional. And my response to this is to say quatenus is the problem. We need to have a confession that we can subscribe quia. If we can't subscribe the Westminster Standards quia, then we ought to have a confession that we can subscribe quia. That's a whole other discussion. But the only, it seems to me, sound way of subscribing a confession is to subscribe it because it's biblical. Now, that doesn't mean that you can't take exceptions, but then you have to stipulate what your exceptions are. Now, in our tradition, in my confessional or ecclesiastical tradition, we typically don't allow exceptions. And if your views change, you are obligated by the form of subscription to go to your elders, we call a consistory, and to tell them what your your problem is and possibly even to your classes and even to your Senate to see if it's serious enough to warrant exclusion from the Reformed churches. So there are different ways of relating to confessions. So I recognize that. But let's back up. The joy of being confessional is that we are confessional. The joy of being confessional is that we have confessions. And our confessions begin with Scripture. We'll come back to that. But after Scripture, our confessions begin with the Catholic creeds. And when I say Catholic, I don't mean Roman, because as we understand things, Rome isn't Catholic. She is sectarian, because she has condemned the gospel. In the Council of Trent, 1547, Session 7, I think, she said, anyone who says that you're justified by grace alone, through faith alone, and Christ alone is condemned. So publicly, Rome is against the gospel. That makes her, according to the Belgian Confession, Article 29, a false church, because she opposes the gospel. So she's not Catholic, whatever she may say. Our argument in the 16th century is we are the true Catholics, because we hold the Catholic faith, that is, that which was held in all places and in all times by all Christians, And so catholicity means that we read the scriptures in conversation with the entire church. But the classic or confessional reformed theologians express their understanding of scripture and churches, the confessional reformed churches, confess their understanding of scripture in confessional documents because they know or knew that Christianity is not a private religion. It's a public religion. It's something to be told to the entire world. The Reformed churches have found great stability in the confessions. They serve as a kind of ecclesiastical covenants, codes, and restrictions. When you buy, in some neighborhoods, a house, you have to sign a document called CC&R, Covenants, Codes, and Restrictions. That means you won't paint your garage some unholy color and do all sorts of obscene things to your house that make no one want to live in your neighborhood and run down the property values. If you want to do that kind of stuff, buy a house in the country. No one cares. But don't do it in my neighborhood. Don't put a car in your driveway up on blocks and drain the oil out into the street and do all kinds of crazy things that make people not want to live in your neighborhood because then when I want to sell my house, I won't be able to sell it or I'll have to take a big loss because you're an idiot. Those are covenants, codes and restrictions. Confessions are covenants, codes and restrictions in the church. It's the way we've agreed to live together. These are the elementary terms on which we are to relate to one another. They summarize our understanding of scripture. They give us a basis on which to relate to one another. When we take them seriously, they serve as a guide for the church and even as an objective standard of discipline. So they give us freedom. Having agreed on what the limits are, we are free within those limits. Therefore, you may believe X, that's a private personal view, fine. But because we have this covenant code and restriction, you can't impose your private view on me as a mark of orthodoxy. You can't make me do things in stated services that we don't confess and therefore, It's a matter of liberty. You might think Shine, Jesus Shine is a great hymn, but you can't make me sing it because we don't confess that. Now, there are a lot of virtues to being confessional. The word virtue is a Latin word that comes from the word for strength. So, there are strengths in being confessional. The virtues I'm referring to here are theological, and I want to name one, two, three, four, five virtues. Five virtues to being confessional. First of all, it's biblical. That's the first virtue in being confessional. All Christians everywhere have held that the scriptures are the font of all saving knowledge. All Christians everywhere have held that the scriptures are the font of all saving knowledge. In the judgment of the Reformed churches, however, the medieval churches, from basically 500 to 1500, were not faithful to that principle. Because if you ask any medieval theologian or minister, they would have called them priests. We don't recognize them as priests. We have only one priest. His name is Jesus. They would have said, of course our faith comes from the Bible, and the Bible is the inerrant inspired Word of God. There was no question about that. And so we agree with the Catholic Church, that is the church at all times and all places, that the Word of God is the fount of theology. It's inspired and it's inerrant. And it's the norm that norms all norms. But the medieval church and the Roman church today was not and is not consistent with that. And in confessing the Bible this way, we are following the scriptures. Our Lord himself says in John 8.53, that God's Word cannot be broken. The Apostle Paul says God's Word is profitable for correction, rebuke, and training in righteousness. God's Word says of itself that the Spirit used the gifts of the writers of Scripture to give us the Word of God, 2 Peter 1.20 and 21 and 2 Peter 3.16. And this is the view, as I say, of the historic Christian Church of Scripture. But scripture itself contains confessions. We'll come back to that. So to have a high view of scripture, I'm arguing, means that you must be confessional, because scripture itself contains confessions, perhaps the most basic of which is the one I keep quoting for you. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. That's a confession. We'll come back to that. Second, though, we take the word of God seriously as the reliable, infallible, inerrant word of God, because scripture itself takes itself seriously and has itself a high view. We also believe that the word of God can be understood. I already quoted Westminster 1-7. Those things which are necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation are so clearly propounded and opened in some place of Scripture or other, that not only the learned, but the unlearned, in a due use of the ordinary means, may attain a sufficient understanding of them. Necessary to be known, believed, and observed for salvation. Those things are, as we say, perspicuous. They are clear. And they can be known by the learned and the unlearned. So the unlearned and even the learned can manage to know those things by due use of ordinary means. So we're not skeptics. We don't think that the Bible means whatever I say it means or whatever you say it means. The Bible means what it means. It doesn't mean that there are no difficulties. The Westminster Confession recognizes that there are difficult texts saved through childbearing. What does that mean? I really don't know. That's a difficult text. The binding of Agabus in Acts. What does that mean? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure Wayne Grudem is wrong. It doesn't mean that it's a ground for non-extracanonical, spirit-inspired, fallible prophecy. If you don't know what that means, don't worry about it. Wayne Grudem argues that there are such things as extracanonical, fallible, spirit-inspired prophecies, and he appeals to Agabus as an example. If you're going to make a doctrine, Agabus is not where you want to go. So there are lots of difficulties. I think I know what it means for Zipporah to throw the foreskin at Moses' feet and say, you're a man of blood. I mean, I have a view. I preached that text. But I would never impose that on anybody else, because that's a difficult text. So there are difficult texts in the Word of God. The apostle Peter says that Paul says some difficult things. Now, we don't know if he's referring to scripture or not, but there are difficulties. The same Holy Spirit who inspired, who created the world and inspired the Word of God, helps his people interpret Scripture. And he reveals a unity to the divine plan of salvation, which we call the covenant of grace, so that God's Word and His plan of salvation is unified with the Patristic Church, with the Reformation Church, the post-Reformation Church. We affirm that God has one covenant of grace and that God the Son incarnate, Jesus Christ, is the focus of God's saving acts and revelation in history. All of the Hebrew and Aramaic scriptures look forward to the coming of God the Son in the flesh. And the Gospel reveals His advent and the Acts and the Epistles explain His advent. The Reformed interpretation of the Bible is covenantal and Christocentric. It's covenantal and Christocentric. We understand that from all eternity, the persons of the Godhead made a covenant within themselves, between themselves, and we call that the covenant of redemption. That from all eternity, God the Father agreed to give a people to his Son, and God the Son agreed to redeem those people, to go and obey in their place, and to secure the redemption of those people. And that as a consequence, God, the Holy Spirit would be poured out at Pentecost upon his people. So that when Jesus said on the cross, it is finished, he was saying, I have completed the work that you, Father, gave me to do and that I agreed to do from all eternity. And you see reflections of this covenant of redemption. in Psalm 110, which is the most frequently quoted Psalm and alluded to Psalm in the New Testament Scriptures, as many as 22 allusions or direct references to Psalm 110, particularly verse 4, which is the crucial part of Psalm 110. And that is a reflection of this covenant of redemption that existed from all eternity. So we confess this covenant of redemption. God the Son would earn the salvation of his people. And that God the Father would give these people and recognize his obedience and give the people to him, as scripture says, as a reward because he earned our redemption. We also confess that there is a covenant flowing out of the covenant of redemption so that the larger catechism is able to look at them as, in effect, one covenant is that there is a covenant of grace. Looked at from the point of view of the redeemed, you can speak one way, which is the way the larger catechism speaks. Looked at from the point of view of the redeemer, you can speak another way, which is the way the confession speaks. It's the same thing. It's just different ways of looking at the same thing. So we have a covenant of redemption and a covenant of grace flowing out of that. But we also, in Chapter 7, confess a covenant of works flowing out of that covenant of redemption. The covenant of redemption is gracious with respect to the redeemed, but it's legal with respect to the Redeemer. And that's why we have three covenants, covenant of redemption, covenant of works, which is a legal covenant in which God says, in effect, do this and live. and a covenant of grace in which God says, the Son shall do, looking forward, or the Son has done, looking backward. And the condition of which is faith, an improperly said condition. The instrument of which, really, is the best way to put it, according to Herman Witsius, the instrument of the covenant of grace is faith. So, when I say Christocentric and covenantal, in some ways, I'm saying the same thing. Christ is at the center of the story of Scripture. Everything leads up to Christ. Everything centers on Christ. But it's organized by covenants. Covenant of redemption before history. Covenant of works in history. The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die. That's a covenant of works. Do this and live. as it occurs in Deuteronomy 26 and Galatians 3. Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything which is written in the book of the law. That's a covenant of works. Do this and live. That's a covenant of works. The day you eat thereof, you shall surely die. That's a covenant of works. That's a legal covenant. God condescended, according to the Westminster Confession, to make a covenant of works. But it's not a gracious covenant. I don't know why we can't get that straight. It's not complicated. We can say God graciously made the covenant of works. Fine. Lots of our theologians have said that. He freely made it. He didn't have to make it. That's why our confession says by voluntary condescension. It doesn't say grace. It says will. Voluntary is a reference to the divine will. Condescension is a reference to his sort of bending over and making a covenant. As it were, just the way we stoop to talk to our children. We bend down, don't we? And we talk to them and we say, now this is the way it is. That's condescension. And we speak in ways that they can understand. So God did for us and he made a covenant of works. It's a legal covenant. Had Adam obeyed that covenant, he would have entered into a state of blessed existence, consummate existence with his father and he would have earned it. How do I know that? Because there was a second Adam. who was also under a covenant of works, and the word of God in Romans 5 tells us that just as by the one act of disobedience we were all plunged into sin and death and corruption, so by the one act of obedience that was both active and passive at the same time. All of Jesus' actions were active and passive in obedience. Passive in the sense of suffering, and active in the sense of actively obeying all of God's law, all of his life. earning our redemption. God didn't give graciously anything to Jesus with respect to our salvation. He earned it by the sweat on his brow and by the blood on his hands and the holes in his feet. That was a covenant of works that he fulfilled for us. And therefore, for us sinners, there is a covenant of grace in which God says, For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. That's a covenant of grace. Come to me, all you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. That's a covenant of grace. How do you enter into the covenant of grace? How do you receive the benefits of the covenant of grace? Namely, justification and sanctification. The two great benefits of the covenant of grace. You receive it by grace alone. through faith alone in Christ alone. That's it. That's our whole theology in a nutshell. Three covenants. Covenant of Redemption, which is legal for the Son and gracious for us. Covenant of Works, which is legal. Covenant of Grace, which is gracious. Covenant of Works is law. The Covenant of Grace is gospel. That's it. And yet we've had a huge discussion repeatedly in the history of Reformed theology at different times in the middle of the 17th century, right when the Westminster Confession was being written. There was a huge argument about the nature of covenant in the Bible and covenant theology as a consequence. And people were saying, namely Richard Baxter, whom many regard as Reformed, but who wasn't Reformed at all. I hope I didn't hurt anyone's feelings. But Baxter's not Reformed. He wasn't regarded as Reformed in the 17th century. He was pious. But he wasn't reformed. He didn't believe our doctrine of justification. And he mucked up our covenant theology. And now people in our churches are trying to bring back Baxter's theology and say, well, that's the true reformed theology. Not according to John Owen, who wrote an entire book on the doctrine of justification in response to Richard Baxter. So when I say covenantal and Christocentric, that's what I mean. I mean to say that we've always distinguished that there are two ways of speaking in the Word of God relative to salvation. One way of speaking is law. Anytime Scripture says, do this, that's law. Anytime Scripture says, it shall be done for you, or it has been done for you, that's gospel. There's one Word of God, but two different Moods. In grammar, we speak of moods of speech. And one is indicative. Something is. And one is imperative. Something must be done. Law is imperative. Gospel is indicative. The Apostle Paul always structures his epistles on the basis of law and gospel. We are to do what God commands because of what Christ has done. And that's why you will hear your minister always talking to you, even if he's not using these words, about the law and or the gospel. That's basic reform stuff. William Perkins, one of the great fathers of the Puritan movement, said that you cannot preach a text of Scripture until you've distinguished and understood whether the passage that you were about to preach is law or gospel. Theodore Beza says there are two words. Beza was Calvin's successor, one of the great late 16th and early 17th century fathers of Reformed Orthodoxy. He said, there are two kinds of words in scripture, law and gospel. I've had people tell me, well, you're a Lutheran. And my response is, well, then so was Beza, and so was Calvin. And so was Ursinus, and so was Olivianus, and so was Wallabius, and Plotinus, and Buchanus, and Turretin, and Coxeus, and anybody else you want to name that was Orthodox in the 16th and 17th centuries. That was and is our faith. We share that conviction with the Lutherans, but it's not distinctively Lutheran. So when I say biblical, I mean to say covenantal. I mean to say Christocentric. I mean to say also that we have worked very carefully to relate our theology to scripture. It is often said now, and people talk as if somehow what we've inherited from the churches before us in the confessions are somehow less than biblical. And I think those people who say those kinds of things don't really know what they are talking about. We have been working in the scriptures in a detailed way as reformed people for hundreds of years. And one of the reasons why people aren't aware of this is because most of those commentaries have never been translated. I'm in the process of working on a commentary right now. It's a 700 page Latin commentary on the Book of Romans by Caspar Olivianus. And I'm one of the few people who's ever actually looked at it. If we translated it into English, which I hope to do, which we're doing very slowly, it's going to come out to be in English something like 1,100 pages. It's huge. We'd like to think that we are the first people to really read the Bible. And that's simply because all of those commentaries, of which there are hundreds and hundreds, have been lost to us. And they give us the impression that nobody really looked at the Bible until we were born, until we looked at it last week. But if we translated all of those books into English, or if we could get them all in one place and put them in a room just full of Bible commentaries, you'd begin to get the sense, oh my, oh, I guess we have read the Bible before. I guess God, the Holy Spirit, has worked in his church to help us understand the word of God before I came along. But to read some of our theologians today, writers, I won't call them theologians, but writers, and anybody with an internet connection and a computer is now a writer. You'd think that they were the first people ever to read the Bible. And people say that, which, as a historian, I find just appalling. All right, the second thing, and time is getting away from us, the second virtue of being Reformed is that, as I already suggested, we are Catholic. And as I say, I don't mean Roman, because Rome isn't Catholic. The English word Catholic comes to us via Latin, and it's a Greek word, katholikos, which means universal. As the father of the English Puritans, William Perkins, noted in 1597 in his work, Reformed Catholic, the Roman Church is not, according to our understanding, Catholic at all. Certainly not since her condemnation of the gospel at session seven of Trent, 1547. We are Catholic in that we hold the holy Catholic faith that's revealed in the word of God and summarized and held by all people, all Christians in all times, and in all places. And we confess the Apostles' Creed. We understand that the Apostles didn't write it, but that it summarizes the basics of the apostolic faith. We confess the Nicene Creed, which was confessed at the Council of Nicaea in 325 and augmented in 381. So it's the Nicene, Constantinopolitan Creed. We confess that in 381 that God the Holy Spirit proceeds from the father, Philioqua, and the son. Well, we confess the Nicene Creed. We confess the definition of Chalcedon in 451. All Reformed, the Reformed doctrine of Christ is basically in the definition of Chalcedon. If you read John Calvin on the doctrine of Christ and you read the definition of Chalcedon, you won't see virtually any difference. I taught at a Lutheran university a course on John Calvin. And when I taught his Christology, I did it in the light of the definition of Chalcedon, which they also affirm. They were shocked to find out how Chalcedonian Calvin's Christology really is, because Lutherans regard us as being somewhat heretical on the doctrine of Christ. And we're suspicious of their doctrine of Christ. We think they're a little closer to heresy than we'd like to see. They're more willing to say it than we are, because they don't care what we think. We're a little more touchy-feely. I'm not, but most of us are. And we also confess, most of us, the Athanasian Creed. If you want to know the doctrine of the Trinity, and again, the doctrine of Christ, download the Athanasian Creed. Now, Athanasius didn't write it, but it's a summary of what Athanasius taught. It's quite a lot later than Athanasius, but it's an excellent summary. I like to tell my students that everything I know about the Trinity, I learned from the Athanasian Creed. And we confess those things. We believe those things. Those are summaries of our faith. So we are connected, not so to say that we are reformed, just to say also that we are connected to the broader tradition of the church. We don't assume that we are the only church or that we've spoken the last word on everything or anything. We've always read the early fathers. Calvin read the early fathers. The beginning of the modern academic study of the early fathers occurred in Reformed Orthodoxy in the 17th century. We invented patristics. Now, for a variety of reasons, we seem to have abandoned patristics. One of our goals in our historical theology program at Westminster Seminary, California, is to train, send off to graduate school, another generation of patristic scholars. And we're doing that right now. We have one of our graduates earning his PhD at the University of Virginia in patristics. And he's one of our HT graduates. We've always been willing to dialogue with the great minds of the church. The difference between us and Rome and some sort of romantic evangelicals is that we don't imagine that the patristic church was a mature church. It was an immature church. And we've always read the fathers that way. There's a great rush now to recover the early fathers because Evangelicals are discovering there was a church before 1857. Wow, who knew? Crumbs, as my English friends sometimes say. Well, fine, read Tertullian, but please, and enjoy Tertullian. He's probably the most fun writer of all the fathers. Read Irenaeus, but please don't stop there. It's a great place to start. It's just a bad place to stop. We are Trinitarians. We hold the Catholic doctrine of Christ. So when I say Catholic, that's what I mean. The third virtue of being Reformed is that Reformed Christianity is vital. It's not just life-giving, although it is in certain respects in as much as the gospel is contained in Reformed theology. But it's a living thing. It's not just something that we used to hold or they held. Or that in order to hold it, you have to be dead Orthodox. I make jokes about being dead Orthodox, but it's just a joke. Because what some people regard as dead Orthodoxy looks like me. And if that's what they think, well fine, then I'm willing to be dead Orthodox. But not really. I think Reformed Christianity is as subtle and exciting a truth as anybody would ever want to meet. Our faith is full of of mystery and wonder and the smell of life and not the smell of death. Reformed orthodoxy and the Reformed confession should not be condemned because sometimes it's been taught badly. Do you refuse to take your car to a mechanic simply because you went to one bad mechanic? Are all mechanics bad? Do you refuse to go to the doctor because one doctor misdiagnosed something? If you do, you're a fool. Well, why do we do that with the Reformed Confession and Reformed Orthodoxy? I think there are a lot of reasons in our theology to make one want to be Reformed, and this is one of them. Orthodoxy isn't dead, not if it's Orthodox. Orthodoxy simply means right worship, which I think is ironic since so many of us are engaged in wrong worship. The orthodoxy goes all the way to orthopraxy, that is correct practice. And to gather with God's people and to call on his name according to the way that he's revealed himself is a glorious thing. I love hearing you people, when I say you people, I mean Covenanters, RPC and AFO, sing psalms and without the clatter and clang of man-made instruments, using the instruments that God gave us, singing the words that God gave us. If that doesn't move your soul to sing about the redemption that Christ accomplished for us, using the Word of God that reveals the redemption that Christ accomplished for us, if that doesn't move you, then the problem is not with orthodoxy, it's with you. You need to repent and believe in the Lord Jesus. If the doctrine of the incarnation of God the Son, who is in the womb of the Virgin and who had an umbilical cord, That doesn't move you. Then you need to repent and believe. If the doctrine that God is one God in three persons, that God the Son is God, God the Spirit is God, God the Father is God, but the Father isn't the Son and the Son isn't the Father, and the Son is eternally begotten and the Spirit proceeds eternally from the Father and the Son. If that doesn't grab your heart and fill you with awe and wonder, Then I say, repent and believe. The kingdom of God is at hand. I frankly don't really know. I know sociologically what people mean when they say dead orthodoxy. But theologically, dead orthodoxy is an oxymoron. It's a contradiction in terms. If you're orthodox, you're not dead. And if you're dead, you're not orthodox. Dead orthodoxy happens because we decide that we know better than God. We are responsible for marginalizing orthodoxy. It's when we say, oh, well, people can't really understand this. Then we need to tell them something else, like how to have a happy marriage in ten easy lessons, when that becomes the staple of our preaching. How to tie your shoes. We're having a seminar. How to tie your shoes. How to be prosperous. We're responsible for marginalizing orthodoxy. We have just said to people, listen, the story of God the Son coming into human history and taking on human flesh, that doesn't interest us anymore. We're going to talk about something else. And those are the people who have the nerve to accuse me and you of being dead orthodox? Here we are serving filet mignon. Right? In the Reformed confession. And some people are serving up chicken tenders and saying, oh, they don't have very good food over there. Give me a break. The fourth virtue of being Reformed is that, properly defined, we are evangelical. We are not, I'd say, evangelical in the modern sense of the word. There are two ways of using the word evangelical. sociologically and theologically. Sociologically, it describes 60 million people in America today, of which we are not a part, I don't think. Sociologically, evangelical describes, in George Marston's words, people who like Billy Graham. If you think Billy Graham is a great guy, you're an evangelical. Now, that's a really low common denominator. Theologically, in using it in this way, I would define evangelical anyone who's had an immediate encounter with a risen Christ. And I use that word immediately, very carefully. You can be Roman. You can be Greek. You can be Baptist. You can be Pentecostal. You can be dispensational. You can be open theist, closed theist. You can be any number of things. You can believe the inerrancy of Scripture. You can deny the inerrancy of Scripture. And in the sociological sense, you can be an evangelical. And if that defines evangelical, I'm not one of them, and I hope you aren't either, because that is way too common a denominator. There is another way of using the word, and that's the old-fashioned way of using the word, the way we used to use the word in the 16th century. And that's to refer evangelical to the gospel. And in fact, in the 16th century, in the old English translation, sometimes we were called gospelers. Because we're always talking about the gospel, the gospel this, the gospel that. Some of my students mock me on campus. You probably can't imagine that. Mainly when they think I'm not listening. And they say, long gospel, long gospel. He's always talking about a long gospel. That's because I'm always talking about long gospel and archetypal, archetypal. I'm always on those things because they need to get those things. If they don't get them right, then they're not going to be ministers. And they ought not to be in pulpits. We're almost out of time. But let me finish this. these two points. To be evangelical is to say that we are defined by the gospel. It doesn't mean to say that we are part of the great modern sociological movement called evangelicalism. At bottom, Reformed theology is a theology of the gospel, of the Father's love for us. of the Son's saving acts for us, which God the Spirit applies to us through the preaching of the Holy Gospel, which is the message of those things and confirms to us those things in the holy sacraments. And just quickly in view of time to move on to the fifth virtue, Reformed theology is churchly. which is one of the reasons why I say sociologically defined, we're not evangelicals, because we are churchly. We believe that God has established in Jesus Christ a visible institution. Christians often talk about the invisible church, and there certainly is such a thing. It's simply the Holy Catholic Church. It's all Christians in all times and in all places. But the Holy Catholic Church comes to visible expression. And so you can't talk about the invisible church without talking about the visible church. If you tell me, well, I'm a member of the invisible church. Therefore, I don't need to be a member of the visible church. I say to you, repent and believe in the Lord Jesus. Don't tell me you're a member of the invisible church if you are not a member under discipline or in good standing of, I mean to say, of a true church, a visible expression of the Church of Jesus Christ. because the two are mutually exclusive. If you're not a member of the visible church, you're not a member of the invisible church. At least you have no right to expect me to believe that you're a member of the invisible church. So God the Son instituted and God himself instituted a, and I don't mean any distinction there theologically, a visible institution. And one way to get at this is to say that We believe, and we confess, that grace renews nature. There are three ways of relating grace and nature. The Anabaptists in the 16th century, and this is a view that's widely held today, said that grace, in effect, they said grace obliterates nature. It destroys it. So that anyone who has been touched by grace is so utterly transformed that they are nothing like what they were before and therefore have no interests, for example, that they might have had before. If you like baseball before you're a Christian, once you're converted, you can't like baseball anymore because that was the old life. We don't say that. That's never been our confession. We don't say grace obliterates nature because nature doesn't need to be obliterated. There's nothing wrong with nature. God created nature good. Rome says grace perfects nature. Nature is broken by virtue of being nature. Why? Because Rome believes in the ladder. And God's at the top of the ladder. We're at the bottom of the ladder. And what we need to do is get to the top of the ladder. And by virtue of being created and human and physical, we are inherently broken. And we need grace to climb the ladder. And all the Protestants said, nonsense. Again, that presupposes that nature is broken, that nature per se, by virtue of being nature, creation, is bad, is evil, is broken, is sinful. And we've always said, no, nature was created good. Nature didn't need grace. Sinners need grace. And that's why Jesus instituted a church. And he instituted that church, God the Son did, before the incarnation. There was a church of Adam, and a church of Noah, and church under Abraham, and then under the most defined visible expression is the covenant assembly under Moses for all that time, 1500 years before the incarnation. So we are churchly. We believe that God instituted a visible institution. in which word and sacrament are administered, in which he's instituted means. And in our tradition, we speak of marks of the church. And in the Belgian Confession, there are three marks of a true church, the pure preaching of the gospel, the right administration of the sacraments, and the administration of discipline. To be reformed is to believe not just a church, but in the church. People sometimes say, well, I can't confess that we believe in a holy Catholic church. I can because Jesus instituted a visible church. In Matthew 18, he says, and we have to stop here, but in Matthew 18, he says, someone sins against you or someone sins and they don't repent. You go to them and they say, stick it in your ear, which frequently happens in church discipline cases. And then some more people go to him and they say, get out of here. I don't want to talk to you. Eventually, what do you do? What does Jesus say in Matthew 18? He says, tell it to the church. And people say, well, I just believe in the invisible church. Well, how are you going to tell it to the invisible church in the first century without an Internet? You couldn't possibly. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures, the word for the covenant assembly is church. It's the same word for which we get church. Jesus said, tell it to the covenant assembly. Jesus instituted the visible church that everybody loves to criticize and everybody says, oh, if only we didn't have an institutional church. You know who said that? That was the German liberals in the end of the 19th century said we need to get rid of the institutional church. The early church was charismatic and charismatic. It was preaching this message, this exciting message, and it wasn't confined by walls and boundaries. and institutions and offices. That all came later. Nonsense, rubbish, and poppycock. The Apostle Paul instituted officers. Jesus gave officers. And he gave a visible institutional church. To be reformed is to be churchly. And it's to believe in the sacraments and the word that are given to the church to be administered. Because those are the things through which God operates. Those are the things through which God has attached promises by which he promises to work. And so when we gather for worship next day, tomorrow, on the Sabbath, we have a glorious privilege of hearing the living God speak through the proclamation of the gospel by an officer in a church instituted by Jesus. That's a glorious thing. And that's as much about what it is to be reformed as anything. That's easily as important as the doctrine of predestination. Think about that. All right. Well, let's take a break. It's 1120 and we're going to take a short break and come back at 1125. Take a short break. We'll come back. 10 minutes. OK. 1130. We'll come back at 1130.