Well, I've entitled the lecture, The Legacy of the Halfway Covenant, for two reasons. One, I couldn't think of a title for anything I was going to say, so that's one thing. But the other one was just to focus on one of the things that has given us, and I think it could arguably be the chief thing that has led us astray. It may not be quite fair to blame all the errors and misunderstandings of the covenant that we've been plagued by over the last three centuries on the New England Puritans. There were certainly movements and theological emphases that were made prior to the 17th century, which led to the misunderstanding of the Hathaway Covenant. You can trace this back for hundreds of years, literally. But I figured since New England's blamed the South for all these years, for all the problems of the country, it's about time to return the favor. other reasons to place the blame there the halfway covenant certainly brings plainly to the surface the ambiguities that have been present in the process of church and I and I suppose in the church in some sense historically over the nature and implications of the covenant as it relates to the nature of the church itself and the salvation. It is a fair whipping boy for us to choose, especially if you think about this particular nation. It is the halfway covenant and that emphasis that has set Protestantism adrift in this country. We still follow it, by the way. The vast majority of Reformed churches have not departed from the halfway covenant. Most Reformed churches, along with others with few exceptions in Protestantism, follow this in principle, still, even though they think they've rejected it. And what I want to do briefly is simply survey what happened in the seventeenth century in New England and draw out one major deficiency and and then try to draw some conclusions that I hope will be helpful for us who have to live now with this legacy. That's where we are and God knew what he was doing when he put us in this particular place in history and we have to learn to respond faithfully in this situation. Well first in a brief survey of what what we're talking about when we talk about the halfway covenant. The theological errors are usually rooted in good motives. The Pharisees actually intended initially to encourage holiness and preserve faithfulness by the rules that they invented and set up. The Armenians really wanted to preserve the legitimate liberty of will that men have, and the legitimate accountability that man has for his decisions, and his obligation to respond faithfully to the demands of the gospel. Theological errors come from good motives, and I think the same can be said here. The Puritans desired a pure and faithful congregation. They wanted a faithful, pure church. That's why they were called Puritans after all. They wanted the members of the church to be faithful, not hypocritical, not nominal in their commitment to Christ and to the faith that's been once for all delivered to the saints. the nominalism and the hypocrisy that they perceived to be pervasive in the Anglican Church. Now, I'm saying that was their perception. I'm not willing to say that that was maybe as bad as they perceived, but what if it was? If it was, they were right. But they perceived severe nominalism and great hypocrisy in the Anglican Church, and they thought it was abhorrent. And if that was the case, it certainly is abhorrent. Hypocrisy and nominalism is always abhorrent. There was a lack of discipline that they thought was nearly universal and it disgusted them. The bishops of the church were indifferent to wickedness and seemed opposed to holiness and this was offensive. The church was to be the pure bride of Christ and that was their position. The problem now is if that's right and of course we would all in a sense agree with that but how do you maintain a pure church when you have only sinners who can join it. Using the distinction that had grown up over the history of the church and been defined further and refined in the Reformation, the distinction of the visible church, that is, that mixed multitude as we've heard it described of elect and reprobate, and the invisible church, the elect, they believed it was their duty to make the visible church conform as closely as possible to the invisible church. The Puritans came to believe that a mere profession of faith in the truth of the gospel and faithfulness of life were not sufficient to secure the purity of the church. And you see again, their logic was that's what the Anglican Church has. They require a profession of faith and purity and faithfulness of life. And look what's happened to them. That doesn't produce a pure church. So they felt something more was needed than that. And thus they added the requirement to a profession of faith and to a non-scandalous life, the requirement of the necessity to demonstrate that there, in fact, was the presence of true saving faith in the applicants for admission to membership. And not only in the applicants, of course, but to the children of their own children who were born in covenant and baptized and joined to the church. They weren't joined, as I'll say in a minute, to full membership. They were like our children in most in most churches, they were baptized and seen as halfway members. They distinguish, you see, then, between a profession of faith in the doctrines of the gospel and a belief in Christ. They call that merely a general or historical faith. They distinguish that from saving faith, which was the result of a climactic conversion experience after a season of conviction and going through various stages of conviction, alienation, doubt, struggle, all sorts of things and then coming to a semi assurance. Now, interestingly, the separatist who had many problems of their own. Of course, they had denounced the Anglican churches as unreformable, and the only way to have a pure church was to leave it, and they required members in their churches to renounce the Anglican church. But the separatists, they had lots of problems, but they didn't have the problem that the Puritans had. They rejected this view of saving faith. they acknowledge you need to have saving faith, but they didn't believe it was possible to determine the presence of saving faith in the hearts of those who came before you and so they thought the puritans were wrong in seeking to try to examine men for the presence of saving faith by inquiring into their experience of a work of grace in their souls and to make that a requirement for church membership. Understand what I'm saying. They agreed that people had to have saving faith. They didn't disagree with that category. but they were where they disagree with the puritans was they didn't think that you should examine people try to find out yourself if it's present that's not your business so the separatists were the ones who really oppose the puritans at this point now this particular view led the puritans then to embrace a different view of the covenant what they call the covenant of grace the covenant of grace to them existed between God and the elect only those who have saving faith. The church must be a reflection then of the covenant of grace. It should only consist of the elect and the elect can be identified as the possessors of saving faith and the church should only therefore consist of those who are regenerate and born again. The practice then of examining for saving faith did not begin until the Puritans were in this country, however, and they were able to follow their convictions with more consistency. Edmund Morgan has written probably the best analysis of this whole phenomenon in his book, Visible Saints. He says the practice began sometime in the 1630s in this country. It began here, developed here, and then went back across the Atlantic. It was not imported here. And by the 1630s, by that time, there had been two generations of Puritan theologians who had devoted themselves to describing and analyzing and looking into the processes by which or how God's grace operates on the souls of men and bringing them to salvation. These studies established a pattern of conversion which was deemed to be the way, generally speaking, men come to faith. This is the way it happens. Anybody whose experience didn't follow the pattern in general, you didn't necessarily have to have all the steps in there, but at least you had to follow pretty much that row. After all, there's one way to heaven. You better stay on the road. And if you take a little shortcut here or there, that's all right. But if you leave the road, you're not going to get there. And so you had to follow this pattern of experience in order to be assured that you had actually saving faith and not some form of spurious faith. Now William Perkins, one of the most influential of the Puritans Divines, had identified already by the 1630s, this is now a settled teaching and something they had received, no less than ten stages by which a man should go through in order to arrive at saving faith. Now here are the ten stages. The first stage is attendance upon the ministry of the Word. Usually, Perkins says, that's also accompanied with an outward misfortune which will subdue and the stubbornness of the heart. So when you start attending upon the word, your house is going to burn down or something. Just to give you make sure that you are sufficiently humble to receive the word. Some kind of outward misfortune likely will happen. Secondly, there must be a knowledge of the law where you begin to understand what is good and what is evil. And then the third stage is an awareness of your own particular sins you begin to understand what you have done and how you have sinned. The fourth stage is a legal fear where you begin to feel helpless and hopeless and without with despair. Now that you've sinned you're doomed. There's no hope for you and you realize that the wages of sin is death. The fifth stage was serious consideration of the gospel. You begin to think seriously about what the gospel the promises of salvation. And the sixth stage was a will and a desire to believe. You wanted to believe. You had a will to believe, but you didn't yet. And then the seventh stage was a struggle against doubt and despair. You want to believe, but your consciousness of sin was so great that you didn't know if you could or you certainly didn't deserve the grace to believe. Would God be gracious? And you struggled with that. You had to go through this time where you fell into despair and then you came out a little bit and then you'd fall back in and you struggle over whether God will be gracious to you so simple as you are in the eighth stage was a persuasion of mercy that you were you were convinced that God would be merciful to you and then you had in the ninth stage evangelical sorrow that's different from regular sorrow. This is a sorrow that is a grief over sin because it's sin. In other words you're You see the sinfulness of sin as a defense against God, and not because it's caused you sorrow or it's brought sorrow to your family or brought terrible consequences upon you. It's because it was sin. And then the last stage was the grace to endeavor to obey by new obedience. Commonly, it did not end in full assurance. So that there was assurance was a rather elusive thing, as you can imagine. It came and went as it please sometimes for no apparent reason. It would come and you hear you read some of the Puritan diaries and they talk about this being a sunny day. They say because the sun of God's grace is shining upon them and they have assurance but the next day would not be that and their assurance would be gone. It was an elusive sort of thing and it became then the acceptable position to express hopeful desires for eternal life. Though you always had to acknowledge the possibility of your own self-deception. You hoped that you would end in glory, but you realized that you were such a liar. You would even lie to yourself. The heart is deceitful above all things. And you could deceive yourself to such a degree that you might not, in fact, your own hopes could not be trusted. Your own desires could not be trusted. If a man had doubts of his assurance, that was considered sound assurance. If you had no doubts about your assurance, that was clearly false in presumption. Now, therefore, if you didn't go through some of these hard struggles before coming to assurance, you were highly suspect. So saving faith, strangely, came to be marked by nothing so much as doubt. That was if you had Serious struggles with doubt, you clearly had saving faith. A man who saw sufficient weakness in himself could be admitted to membership without question. But if you were such a man as, for example, Captain John Underhill, you were on much more shaky ground. Captain John Underhill was interviewed by the elders of one church, and they asked him, have you come to full assurance? He said, oh, yes. And they said, really, how? He said, well, I came to that while I was smoking a good pipe of tobacco. Oh no, that can't be so. Now you have to see, you have to see, you see it's hard for us, and I'm talking about myself now, who is highly sympathetic to the Puritans. I love them, I grew up on them, and you know I have this affection for them. It is hard for me to see how wrong this is. But force yourself. It is obvious. What does this imply about God? And as Steve was saying last night in his willingness to say, and the freeness of his grace and the fullness of it and the breadth of it and the depth of it, it clearly implies a God who is very, very careful in dispensing mercy and not very free in it at all. And besides that, it doesn't even follow the biblical pattern of conversion. The biblical pattern of conversion, of course, has 14 steps, and if you didn't know them, I need to point them out. Here they are, and I think perhaps get your pen and pencil out on paper and make a note. The first thing is you must have a blinding light appear around you, preferably on a road, and even more preferably a road that is headed toward Damascus. You must go through the stage of falling to the ground. That's a very important stage, and you must not ignore it. Then you must hear the voice of Jesus, but then in the fourth stage, you must question his identity. The fifth stage is you must have his identity confirmed. The sixth is that you must be convicted about your efforts to kick against your goats. The sixth, the seventh stage is trembling with astonishment. The eighth is questioning your calling. The ninth is having friends who are speechless. The tenth is three days of blindness. The eleventh is having your hands laid on you by a disciple. The twelfth is scales falling from your eyes. The thirteenth is being baptized and the fourteenth is going into the desert for three years and good riddance to you. Now, you know, the reason that you and I and I joke about it, not not trying to make light of the one conversion we have in the Bible of any detail, but that's Paul, of course, and you know that it would be absurd for me to lay out here and those are all from the text. I can I think I can ground all of those soundly in the text of Acts. But you see, you would you immediately think, come on, this is a joke and that's why I want to laugh because that's obviously ridiculous to use the text like that. and turn that into a pattern of how man comes to Christ. But, brothers, this is the only account of conversion we have. Now, if we're not going to follow the Bible, what will you follow? The other steps laid out by William Perkins may have been his own experience. I don't know. But where did he get that? That's not what Paul went through. It's quite different, as I hope you've seen. You see, this is indefensible. No matter how sympathetic I am to William Perkins, and I'm quite sympathetic, in fact, to William Perkins. I like a lot of the things he did, but this is wrong and there's no way to defend it biblically. Now, this theology of the covenant of grace became problematic. Obviously, it is problematic in and of itself, but it became really problematic when they sought to apply it to their children, the Puritans were pedo-baptist. Of course, they viewed their children as subjects of baptism and believed that baptism admitted them into membership in the church, but it didn't admit them into full membership. They were PCA Presbyterians in that sense. They were not allowed to vote. They were not allowed to partake of the Lord's Supper. That awaited their conversion. Now you see, this is exactly the pattern that Presbyterians have adopted. That's exactly their position. That is the position of a halfway covenant, brothers. If you're going to accuse somebody of it, accuse yourself. This is the pattern. This is what they believe. You had to have a conversion. And when you did have a conversion, you met with the elders. You made a testimony. The elders admitted you to the Lord's Supper as a result of that. And that's how you got it. You became a full member rather than a half member. Now, here's the problem. It is assumed it was ignored. It was assumed, first of all, that the elect go through this common experience of conversion. That's the first thing. The second thing is, It was assumed that that is the common experience of covenant children. Now, even if this this 10 step process or something that follows that pattern or parallels that pattern, even if I were to say that is the common experience of adult converts. That still doesn't follow that it would be the common experience of covenant children of adult Christians. Why would it be? Children are growing up in covenant. They grow up believing what you have told them and if you teach them. The Bible and the gospel and tell them about the Lord Jesus they're going to believe it and they're going to love it. That's the way God made them and thanks be to God that he made them that way. And there's nothing incredible or doubtful about them doing that. That's exactly what they should do. It's in fact right that they do that. But they won't go through these steps if they're that way. The assumption was they must go through these things because they are sinners and sinners to be converted must follow the same road. And I'm saying that's not right. But that's what they believe. That's what they assume. Now here's the problem. Here you have a whole group of children. And I'm sure it's like any other congregation. Some of them went out and decided that they wanted to be you know the hell's angels of that day and they decided that they and so that they were really in big trouble with the church and got all kinds of discipline and all the rest. But you see the majority of them were not that way. The majority of the children grew up like you would expect them to grow up. They grew up. They didn't renounce the faith. They didn't forsake the church. They were faithful in worship. They lived obedient lives externally. They were not scandalous. But they never had the experience that their parents said must be true for a Christian for a sinner to become a Christian. They believe what they were told. They believe the Bible. They profess faith in Christ and in his atonement and in his forgiveness. They embrace the Orthodox faith as they understood it. They lived obedient lives. They didn't renounce the gospel. They attended worship faithfully. There was no reason to bring rebuke to them in the least. But they didn't have this experience, and so they were never allowed to the table. Then, even though they weren't allowed to the table, they were allowed to get married, so they got married. And God, like He very often does, it's not an unusual experience, but very often He gives children to people who are married. And the children then come into the world, and here are these children of the first generation standing with their children saying, we would like for our children to receive the baptism that Christ promised. Now here's your dilemma. You haven't acknowledged that these children, the parents of the grandchildren, are truly converted. How can you now baptize their children? These are not full members of the church. What are you going to do about their children? You say, well, can't baptize them. Well, that would be saying, though, that these people, they're still members of the church. They're not, there's no reason and there's no basis for shutting them out. You can't bring discipline against them. They're attending church. You can't bring discipline against them for heresy. They acknowledge everything. They even profess to believe that Christ is their Savior. And so it was a great problem. And the Puritans were sensitive enough to realize we've got a dilemma here with our system. We're demanding an experience that they haven't had. You can either give up that demand for experience or make an adjustment. in some other area. They made an adjustment. In 1662, the ministers met and decided on this issue. Their decision was, they gave their decision in seven propositions, and the fifth of those propositions provided that those who were baptized could continue their membership in the church as it was, as a halfway membership. As long as they lived lives free of scandal, they could also have their children baptized. And this was the halfway covenant. Now that leads you to another question. How are now you going to distinguish the real members from these other members and. Oh, this gets all kind of thing. So Cotton Mather suggested there be a difference between disciples who are followers of Christ and brethren who have experienced a work of grace in their souls. So they begin to talk about disciples. They're just baptized people who follow Christ like those children. They haven't been, they're not brothers, they're not brethren who've had experience of grace in the souls. They're, they're the Christians and then they're the own fire Holy Ghost baptized in the spirit and water of Christians. You see that we, you start having to add all kinds of adjectives to describe and make distinctions because you have to make the distinction. Solomon Stoddard said, this is wrong. Solomon Stoddard said, we have no basis for this stuff. You're wrong. The practice is wrong. Children should be admitted to the table by virtue of their baptism. And as they admitted to the table, then the Lord's Supper will bring them to a more full experience of faith. And he said he called it a converting ordinance. Now, you may quarrel with Solomon Stoddard's solution a bit, but he opposed what was wrong and he was right to oppose what was wrong. Jonathan Edwards, his grandson, repudiated Solomon Soder, his grandfather, and then established us firmly in the way of the halfway covenant. So you haven't departed from it. We haven't, as I'm talking about it corporately, we haven't departed from it since. We still follow this practice, all the while denouncing the halfway covenant. It's a very odd thing, and I hope you see something of the oddness of it. What is the result? What has been the result of this practice? It's been the consistent practice of the majority of Protestantism in this country since the 17th century. I hope you're happy with what we've done. Has this worked? I mean, I think that we've got a huge problem and it came from this particular misunderstanding. The Puritans wanted to have a pure church and by their theology of conversion, their misunderstanding of the nature of the church and salvation, they ended up undermining the very thing they sought. They ended up out-Phariseeing the Pharisees. And they're not the last ones to do it. They produced Phariseeism and hypocrisy, a group of people who mistrusted genuine spiritual experience, who did not eventually believe in the miraculous claims of the gospel, in the hope of making up a church of truly converted people, they produced New England Unitarianism. Because it wasn't very long before these men, these children, grew up and said, you know, this is all a psychological stupid thing. Mom and dad and granddaddy, you don't know what you're talking about. We didn't go through the experience. All right, if we're not Christians, fine. Have it. It's ridiculous. And they rejected it all. And in a way, what else could they have done in a sense, you see? You can't endorse their rejecting the gospel, but what would you have done in such a situation? This opened the door to transcendentalism, to existentialism, which provoked revivalism, and then you had things not getting better but worse. The Calvinists, in the first Great Awakening, give us then this standard and establish it as the basis upon which we can distinguish true converts from false. They make things, in a sense, worse. Again, am I sympathetic? Do I kind of like Jonathan Edwards? Are there some good things about Gilbert Tennant? Sure. Were they right about this? No. There was a mistake. It was a big mistake. It was a big problem, and they have produced many many ugly babies. And they continue to hang out in the church as these freeloading bombs and we can't get rid of them and now they're actually in charge of everything. And it's a mess. Now what were the problems here. Well I hope you can see that there were so many problems. Honestly I'm not a good shot but I could be blindfolded with a rifle stuck between my legs and shoot and hit something. This is, there are many, many problems here, but I only want to focus upon one, which I think perhaps is the central one. They completely ignored the significance of baptism and consequently misunderstood the nature of salvation. Baptism was drained of all of its scriptural significance and the biblical teaching of salvation coming to us by our union with Christ was lost in its true sense. Infant baptism to the New England Puritans and to most of their heirs in modern Protestantism and Presbyterianism is nothing more and was nothing more than a wet dedication service. That's all it was. It did nothing for the child. It did nothing more than bring the child into what they called an ecclesiastical covenant, which was merely symbolic and actually accomplished nothing. This was also the view, as you know, and the dominant view in the Southern Presbyterian Church in the 19th century, which was argued for by our heroes. And I mean that. I love those men, Thornwall and Dabney, but they were arguing for this position and basically made baptism nothing more than a dedication and then didn't want it to be much of a dedication at that. This is contrary to the scriptures and furthermore, Furthermore, it is contrary to the Reformed tradition, as if that is even above the Scriptures. Of course, it is contrary to the Scriptures, which is the most important thing, but it is not even the Reformed tradition. The Bible teaches us that baptism unites us to Christ and to his body, by the power of the Spirit. By one Spirit, we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free. We have all been made to drink one spirit, Paul says, at baptism, you're clothed with Christ Jesus. For as many of you as are baptized into Christ have put on Christ. Union with Christ is a real, vital, blessed union. The clothes make the man. With our union with Christ, we have all spiritual blessings. Union with Christ is union with the church, his body. We are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones, Paul says, and then he says and don't you know that from marriage because the two the Bible says become one in marriage and that's exactly that's the that's the picture marriage is a picture of the greater covenant that the church has with its divine bridegroom the church cannot be divorced from Christ and the blessings of the covenant and it's for this reason that our confession states that the outs that outside the church there is ordinarily no possibility of salvation. And that's not a Roman Catholic confession, I quoted, that's the Westminster confession. And they are right. You see, what are they thinking? They're not thinking like Roman Catholics, they're thinking like Christians who believe the Bible, that the church is the body of Christ. If you're not in the body of Christ, if you're not united to him, you're lost. There is no salvation outside of Christ. Since the church is his body, apart from the church, apart from covenant union with Christ, Apart from real union with Him, there is no salvation, because salvation is rooted and grounded in Him. All that we have, we must find in Him. He is the elect of God. We are elect in Him. He is the chosen servant who was to accomplish for His people what they could not accomplish for themselves. He is the well-beloved of the Father, and therefore we are beloved in Him. He is the faithful one, and therefore we are faithful in him. He was baptized. He lived his life faithfully according to that baptism. He did not deny his baptism. He kept the covenant as the second Adam, doing all that the first Adam failed to do, walking by faith, walking in obedience, obeying God day by day, faithfully, we read, by the power of the And he did what Adam, of course, could not have done, taking our curse upon himself, dying in our place, paying the penalty for our sins, becoming thereby the justified one, the one who by his resurrection was vindicated and publicly, judicially justified. He was proclaimed to all the world as the righteous one. And by his resurrection, he is then the first one to be born again. In this sense, he was born from above by the power of the Spirit, reborn, dying to sin, being raised into newness of life. He not only purchased salvation, but secured it for his people. He was the first, in a sense, to receive the blessings of salvation in himself. He is the one, the first fruits, in a sense, from the grave. He receives in the middle of history all that we shall receive at the end of history. and thus he becomes the surety that we will in fact receive all those things at the end of history he was resurrected we will be resurrected he received the his the resurrection body glorified body we will as well and thus salvation he said of the Bible says that it is in him that there is life and there is no salvation apart from union with him. Paul says salvation and he refers to salvation as that which is in Christ Jesus. Second Timothy 2.10 Therefore I endure all things for the sake of the elect that they also may obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory. This is why the scriptures then speak as they do. In him, we have every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, Paul says. In him, we have redemption and the forgiveness of sins. In him, there is no condemnation. In him, we are reconciled to God and brought near. Ephesians, Paul says in Ephesians 2, but now in Christ Jesus, you who were once far off have been brought near. We are reconciled by being united to him. We are accepted in the beloved. And because Christ is the beloved one, we are now beloved of God because we are in him. The love of God is found in Christ Jesus. Paul says in Romans 8, I'm persuaded that neither death, no life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus. That's where you find it. In him, we have sanctification. In him, we have wisdom. The veil is taken away, Paul says, so that we're able to understand. In him, we have boldness and confidence before God, so that John, the apostle, says, now, this is the confidence we have in him. If we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know he hears us in whatever we ask, we know that we have the petitions we've asked of him. That's the kind of boldness you can have if you're in him. In him, the Gentiles received the blessing of Abraham, Paul says in Galatians 3. In him, we're made fellow heirs and partakers of that promise, Ephesians 3. And indeed, all the promises, Paul says, are secured to us because we are in Christ. As God is faithful, our word to you, he says, is not yes and no, for the Son of God, Jesus Christ, who was preached among you by us, by me, Savannas and Timothy, was not yes and no but in him is yes for all the promises of God in him or yes and in him amen to the glory of God through us in Christ we are all made alive at the last day it is in our union with him that secures our resurrection he is the first fruits and he therefore will bring all the others at his coming in him we have righteousness and are justified We are saved by his faithfulness. Paul over and over talks about the faithfulness of Christ. Now it's it's I think unfortunately translated in our Bibles faith in Christ. But in fact it ought to be translated the faithfulness of Christ or the faith of Christ is the way the King James translates it which is a more literal translation Paul. says in Philippians 390, I don't desire my own righteousness, but I desire that which is through the faithfulness of Christ, the righteousness which is from God by faith. Paul does not desire his own righteousness, but desires that which is founded upon the faithfulness of the Savior. The righteousness we need is not obtained by us. He is perfectly righteous. He obeyed the law. He alone fulfilled all righteousness. He's the one who knew no sin. he was he made him and you know sin to be sin that we might be right the rights of God in him that he's the second Adam as I mentioned the righteousness is found only through the one who was only through faith in the one who was faithful at every point and that's why Paul over and over again points to that faithfulness of Christ which is the foundation of his own life so for example listen again to Galatians 2 in this light I know that I'm knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law, but by the faithfulness of Christ. Even we who have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by the faithfulness of Christ, not by the works of the law or by the works of the laws. No flesh shall be justified. I've been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me and the life which I now live in the flesh. I live by the faithfulness of the son of God who loved me and gave himself for me. Righteousness then comes not through our own obedience, but through the faithfulness of our Savior, the one who believes in Him and abides in Him then receives all the blessings and benefits of His work. So we get even the righteousness of God, Paul says, through the faithfulness of Christ Jesus. The promise of God is received through His faithfulness and thus the righteousness that is pleasing to God is obtained by faith in His Son. We are made recipients then of all that is his. This is how we receive the grace of God. It's because Christ received the grace of God that we are granted the grace of God. You see immediately you go I know why you talk like that. But you see we think of grace only as unmerited favor to sinners. Remember that the word refers to favor or pleasure or goodwill and Christ in that sense. is the object of God's grace, not that he was one who had any sin which had to be forgiven, but he was the peculiar object of God's favor and God's good pleasure. This is what we're told in the Bible. In Luke chapter two, verse 40, the child grew and became strong and in the spirit filled with wisdom and the grace of God was upon him. God was favorable to him. This is what God declared at his baptism. This is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased. He was the one, John says, who was full of grace, John 1, 14, and the word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld his glory, glorious of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. And thus it is only through him that we can have God's favor. So that John goes on to say the law was given through Moses, grace and truth come through Jesus Christ. He is the one who is well-pleasing to God, and thus all of God's favor and grace is found in Him, and we are recipients by union with Him. We are accepted in the Beloved. The grace of God comes to us in Christ, Paul says. I thank my God always concerning you for the grace of God which was given to you in Christ Jesus. We are called into that grace of Christ. Paul says, I marvel that you are turning so soon from him who called you into the grace of Christ by a different gospel. You're to a different gospel. You're turning away from the grace of Christ that you found in him, and you're turning to a different gospel. This confidence is to strengthen us. Paul says, you therefore, my son, writing Timothy, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. It is the favor that God gave to Christ and the favor that he continues to hold his son that enables us to be confident who can condemn us when we are united to the one who is the object of God's grace supreme favor. The grace that belongs to Christ will never be removed from him and therefore will never be removed from those who are in him. And those who are in him, therefore, have no reason to fear or to doubt. We stand before God in the grace of Christ and thus cannot but receive that grace as well. And thus we can be confident that God will uphold and strengthen us to live as our Savior lived by his grace. And listen again now to Paul's words in Titus 2 in this light. He says that the grace of God has appeared to all men. How has the grace of God appeared to all men? How did that happen? Well, Paul says it appeared to all men in Christ. By his example, we see what it means to persevere in the grace of God. For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men, teaching us that denying all ungodliness and worldly lusts, we should live soberly and righteously and godly in this present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from every lawless deed and purify for himself his own special people, zealous of good works. We have the grace of Christ, if we have it, We will be unable to live as he lived, denying ungodliness and worldly lust, living soberly and righteously and godly in this present world, confident that nothing can separate us from his love. Nothing can overcome you. Nothing can harm you. His grace is salvation. If we abide in his grace, we shall stand. Joy unspeakable will be ours, and there is nothing that is more certain. Now, you see, reading the Bible this way and in this sense, we can speak of baptismal regeneration in this sense, not in the sense that there's some mystical power in the water of baptism that automatically transforms men if the water has been sufficiently sanctified. Nor is it saying that God is bound to the water of baptism, that God somehow His blessing is always bound to that and can't come apart from that. What I mean by this is we can speak of it in the sense that by the blessing of the Spirit, baptism unites us to Christ and his church and thus in him gives us new life. This is what Paul says in fact in Romans 6 verse 11, likewise you also reckon yourselves to be dead indeed to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus. Since he is the one in whom there is life, we are granted life by our union with him. Indeed, we're made new creatures by virtue of this union. In 2 Corinthians 5, 17, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. He's been regenerated. He's been born again. Old things have passed away. Behold, all things have become new. By our baptism, we have been reborn in this sense. Having died with Christ, we've been raised with him, Paul says. Do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death and therefore we were if we were baptized with him through when we were buried with him through baptism on the death that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the father even so we also should walk in newness of life you've been given new life by virtue of your union with him. Christ baptism mean meant that the old things were the sin and the curse of the Lord passed away and all things have become new. The same is true for all who are baptized. You die to the old covenant relationship to the world. You are resurrected to a new covenant relationship with the Savior and henceforth are required to walk in newness of life. So Paul says you must live like you are. Be what you are. You've been buried with him in baptism. You've been raised now with him. You've been united to Christ. Therefore, you're dead to sin. Don't live in it anymore. It's wrong. You have been brought alive in Christ. Be obedient. And so you read Romans 6 and that's exactly his argument. Our old man's been crucified. So now the body of sin has to be done away with. We can't live in it anymore. We can't be slaves to sin. Therefore, don't let sin reign and don't present your bodies as instruments of unrighteousness. Be what you are. Thus, Jesus connects the new birth with baptism. You see, for this reason, you're born of water and of the spirit, he says to Nicodemus. unless you're born of water and the spirit you cannot see the kingdom of heaven and what would Nicodemus think when he says water and spirit is thinking of what water always what baptism always signified in the Old Testament. You cannot see the kingdom unless water and the Spirit comes so that the water of baptism and the work of the Spirit are combined by our Savior. Paul does the same thing. The work of the Spirit is connected with baptism in Titus 3.5, not by works of righteousness, which we have done, but according to his mercy, he saved us through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit. And there you have both of them brought together again. And Peter then goes on and makes this blunt statement. So baptism now saves you, he says. Comes right out. Says it the Peter first Peter three. There's there's now in any type which saves us baptism and he says I'll come on not real not just mere baptism but not not water by itself but by the resurrection of Christ. It saves us. Not the removal of the filth of the flesh, but the answer of a good conscience toward God through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, angels and authorities and powers having been made subject to him. And you now are in him by virtue of baptism. Therefore, I'll just go ahead and say it, Peter says, baptism saves you. Now you see, if our system can accommodate biblical language, we don't throw out the Bible. We change our system. We have to modify the system. We don't have to embrace Romanism. In fact, I hope you never will. It's a heresy. Wrong. They're mistaken. But you have to embrace the Bible. You have to ask the question, all right, what does Peter mean? And you see, given this perspective, there is no presumption necessary when it comes to baptize people. Traditionally, the Reformed have said, we have to view our children as presumptively elect or presumptively regenerate and therefore Christian if we're willing to take the scriptures at face value there is no presumption necessary just take the Bible and this is true of course because by the baptism by baptism the spirit joins us to Christ since he is the elect one and the church is the elect people we are joined to his body we therefore are elect Since he is the justified one, we are justified in him. Since he is the beloved one, we are beloved in him. Since he was saved from sin and death, in the sense that Hebrews 5 says, who in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with vehement cries and tears to him, who was able to save him from death and was heard because of his godly fear, he was saved from sin and death. This view, you see, solves many, a great many of the problems that we have faced in the history of the church. The halfway covenant is completely unnecessary and absolutely wrongheaded. Children are joined to Christ by their baptisms and must be viewed and treated in the light of this reality. They are to be nurtured in the faith. Now does that mean, oh good, then we don't have to worry about our children. Thanks be to God, I was afraid they were going to go to hell or something. They're so crazy. No, the Bible says, since this is true, what must you do? The covenant has requirements. They have to believe. They have to repent of their sins day by day. They have to learn about him and love him more and be more faithful. They have to learn how to do that. They're to be nurtured in the faith, brought up in the grace and knowledge of Christ. They have to be taught the glories of God's grace in Christ, all that he has given them. They must know and understand and love and appreciate and learn how to worship and respond to him like they should. They must repent of their sins and believe the word as the faithful covenant people do. They must persevere in obedience and love and never depart from Christ, who is their salvation. And God forbid, if they do depart from him, they are to be made the subjects of discipline so that the means that God is ordained to reclaim the wayward may be used again may be applied to them if they refuse to respond to those then we will with great grief cut them off from Christ and excommunication means that they are cut off from salvation. Paul says you I will I will deliver you into the hands into the realm of Satan. There's no salvation there. If you're excommunicated then You're cut off and you have to then, you're in grievous danger. You must then, hopefully the excommunication will make you see that you must repent and come back to Christ. There is no salvation apart from communion with Christ. Now, you may be thinking, well, I know why you're saying all this. You're just trying to use it as a subversive way to teach paedo-communion. I don't think the position, in fact, requires paedo-communion. It's an obvious implication, it seems to me, but it doesn't require it. the people, the church, even if you say, no, I think that there should be some instruction of our children before we admit them to the Lord's table. They shouldn't just come in with rock ignorance and be like a rock. Well, I don't think they do, but that's another discussion. But even if you hold that, fine. You see, that's a position that can be held. But you see, are you going to say that God hates the ignorant? No. Otherwise, there wouldn't be anybody to love. If God hates the ignorant, well, guess what? You ignorant. If you're going to say, well, God, I mean, they really need to understand and comprehend the riches of His mercy. Well, that shuts me out. I don't understand it. No, if you want instruction, of course there can be instruction. And by the way, people who embrace a better community are not opposed to instructing their children. That's what we want to do, too. But that's what the point is that I would say that's not the basis of admission, but fine. Let's say you say no, they have to have some level of understanding. All right, well, then we can teach them, but they get that very early. There is still no reason that their admission to the table should be delayed unnecessarily extended unless you're looking for something the Bible doesn't warrant you to look for. You're looking for some dramatic conversion experience. Well, I hope you never see it in your children. I hope their conversion is simply that they grew up believing just like you do, just like you do. And they want to be like you. But children who are joined to Christ, buried and raised and seated in the heavenly places, they need to be taught how to be faithful so they don't turn away from him, but they don't need any more experiences. What else? What else is there? There it is. They don't need extensive preparation before eating with him, just like they don't need. They do need some teaching to sit at your table, don't they? I mean, they have to know this is food and a spoon. It is not a weapon to shoot things with your brothers and sisters. You have to teach them about how to eat. But once they learn how to eat that, you know, they pick up on that pretty quickly. It's amazing. Well, they can do that, but they do have to have some understanding about what the purpose of our gathering is. Now, you see, under that view, that's still fine, I think. I'm willing to say, yeah, that sounds reasonable to me. Fine, but why would that take 12 years? If your 12-year-old doesn't know what to do when he sits at a table, somebody's not doing something here. I don't know, but somebody hadn't done their job in teaching and training. No, there's no reason for this. The halfway covenant idea is causing problems. And this is not all. I'm not mentioning by any means all of them. This is something that has to be stopped. And the second thing I would say is the purity of the church is not undermined or compromised by rejecting the halfway covenant. Indeed, I will say it is undermined by maintaining the halfway covenant idea. That's our problem. by acknowledging the momentous significance of baptism, the discipline of the Church is greatly strengthened. The view doesn't encourage complacency or presumption unless you do, unless you encourage it by not teaching what the covenant really is. There's no place for presumption in the covenant, unless you think there is, and then you've misunderstood the covenant. The covenant, if it's taught faithfully, then the reality of apostasy will be set before the children. They must understand plainly that salvation is in Christ. It's not a thing that you can put in your pocket. And you see, this is what we've got in our heads that somehow salvation is a little gift that God gives you. And once you get it, it's separated from God and his church. And so you can run off to Timbuktu and get up in the harem with all the dancing girls and the fan ladies. And it's still you still got it in your pocket. Are you saved? Yep, there it is right there. You see that? Don't tell I'm not saved. I got saved. I got the package. But you see salvation in that. It's a relationship with Christ. It's covenant. It's union with Christ. You depart from Him. You don't have it. It's not an experience that's just given as a little drug, you know. Give you a little LSD where you've been LSD'd all your life. I remember that experience. It was amazing. If you turn from Christ and cease to trust in Him, loving Him and obeying Him, you're turning your backs on the grace of God. That's what Paul tells the Galatians. I'm amazed, he says, that you turn your backs on the grace of God in Christ. Why would you do it? Another gospel. It's a real relationship we have, and it demands perseverance to survive, just like any relationship. You're married. That's a real relationship. But if you don't ever speak to your wife after the ceremony, you've got a problem. And your relationship is no good and it will not survive if you're not faithful to love and honor and obey God. Your relationship will die. Does that mean there was no real relationship? No, you were real. You were unfaithful and you lost what you had. The kingdom will be taken from you if you're unfaithful. That's the language that Jesus uses to the unfaithful covenant breaking apostatizing Jews and it's true still to covenant people who apostatize since the kingdom belongs to Christ and no one who is estranged from him can be in it. Therefore. You see if you teach this presumption is destroyed. There's no danger of presumption if you teach this. I mean you can't ensure no presumption but I'm saying you see this doesn't encourage presumption at least does the book of Hebrews encourage presumption. He's dealing with covenant people but he deals with them on the basis of covenant realities and tells them you are going to trample upon the blood that sanctified you. But listen to what he said. You're trampling upon the blood that sanctified you. Thirdly, assurance is not destroyed but set upon a sound foundation. Finally, assurance should never be based upon our own experience or our own perception of our experience, but upon Christ and His work, upon His word and His promises. He is faithful. Believe Him. He has said it. All those who abide in Him will be saved. That's true. Abide in him and you don't have to worry. And some people say, but if you hold this view, I don't understand. What if God hadn't ordained that I abide in him? And what if I'm predestined to fall away? And then one day I wake up and I fall away. Well, you see, that's lightning bolt, a lightning bolt view of God's work. God doesn't work like that. Apostasy doesn't come upon you like a virus that you did nothing. You know, you did nothing. I haven't been doing it. I've been eating my apple every day, and I got deadly sick because it came in the air. Apostasy is a process which comes about because you willfully and persistently refuse to obey the Savior, and you reject every overture, and you will not submit to the truth of God, and you harden your heart against it like Pharaoh over a season of time, and you persist in that. The apostate knows what he's done. It doesn't happen accidentally and unintentionally. He does it willfully. It's the result of his willful, careless, stubborn turning his back on the Savior and refusing to return. That's the only way you can be lost. Apostasy, therefore, is not possible if you continue to cling to him. Don't ever cease to cling to him. So your son will say, you mean Jesus has loved me this much to embrace me, bring me into union with Him. And I don't have to do anything but just kind of love Him back and stay where I am and seek by His mercy to be faithful to Him all my days. And He's promised to give me that strength and mercy. That's it. You say, that's it. That's grace. I don't have to ride a bicycle and get really hurt and be near death and then come back and have an after death experience and then be converted. No. No, you just have to love him because he's loved you. No, it's grace we're talking about here. Grace, not works. Now you see, halfway covenant, and this is my last point, undermines the grace of God. It focuses on you and your experience. over and over and over again. And that's where we are. The vast majority of Protestants focus on their experience, not on Christ. And when you ask them, are you saved? What do they tell you? Yeah. You say, why? Because I was there at this wonderful meeting on this mountain. You can't believe how pretty it was up there. And in the evening we were told to throw our little pine cones on a fire. I threw one. It was a big one. I still remember how it burned. I took a picture of it and I've got the picture right here. I know I'm saved. Okay, that's pine cone salvation. We've got all kinds. But it's not salvation by grace. You, we have encouraged salvation by works. In the name of trying to present the grace of God and trying to preserve the purity of the church and all the things we're trying to do, we have ignored Christ. By means of the halfway covenant thinking and acting, we have inadvertently undermined the grace of God and in many cases have fallen from it altogether. And certainly our children have fallen from it. Our focus has been unintentionally, I truly believe it, unintentionally, but the focus nevertheless very really was not Christ but works. You can't have salvation or assurance that way. You can't have grace. You're turned away from the grace of God. We have to turn to the grace of God. And that's covenant. It's a beautiful thing. God in mercy embraces sinners and calls them to be faithful and gives them everything they need to be faithful and assures them that he will never, he will never turn away from them. I will never leave you or forsake you, he says. You can't beat that. There are a lot of women like to have a husband like that. And that's what we have in the living God. Let us pray. Heavenly Father, help us to learn the lessons of faithfulness so that we might not dishonor your grace in Christ Jesus in your covenant. Help us to be faithful so that we can be your people in this world and show forth your praises for Jesus' sake. Amen.