Covenant and Dispensational Theology Part 2

Automated transcript of the sermon audio, generated with OpenAI Whisper (small.en). It has not been checked against the recording and may contain errors, especially in names and Scripture references.

Boy, how do you follow that? That’s what it’s all about. Obviously, I enjoy studying theology. I enjoy trying to understand how all these things are put together. There’s no comparison between finally getting your head around what dispensationalism means, versus watching what God has done in transforming a person’s life and bringing them from the kingdom of darkness and the kingdom of light. as he dispenses his grace into bringing them under the blessings of the new covenant. If you want to put it that way. So that was neat. Thanks for sharing that. It really encouraged me. And hopefully we can continue to glorify God and worship Him as we turn our minds again to the topic of covenant and dispensational theology.

How many of you here were not with us two weeks ago when we started this discussion? Okay, just a couple of you. Just to briefly try to catch up a little bit, this topic, Covenant Misfensational Theology, is a massive topic. We talked about last week, Jonathan Edwards says he felt it was the most intricate part of all of Christian theology and the area in which biblical scholars, biblical theologians, or as he called them, the divines, did disagree the most. So this is not an easy topic to wrap our heads around. And so if you’re feeling like you’re kind of in the fog. After last week that’s probably okay. I spent several months in that fog trying to work my way towards clarity and the light. And I feel like I have clarity whether that means I’m in the light or not. I’m not sure. But hopefully by the time we get to the end of depending on how far we get today or next week the pieces should start coming together.

I do briefly just want to hit our definitions again so we can remember where we’re coming covenant theology, if you recall, you define this way. It’s a system of theology which holds that God conducts himself towards man at all times according to the terms of two primary covenants, grace and works. These covenants form an interpretive framework for understanding any point of Scripture or theology. Now we’re going to talk about what that actually looks like, or what that means, as we get into defining covenant theology a little bit more this morning, and then we get into the hermeneutics of both covenant and dispensational theology.

But for now, what I want you to just fasten your minds around is the fact that we are talking about theological systems, different ways of understanding the Bible, and in covenant theology in particular, we’re talking about a system which understands scripture from the big picture as being the unfolding story of two covenants that God has made, grace and works. And we’re going to talk about what those two covenants are. And some covenant theologians will further divide the covenant of grace into grace and the covenant of redemption. So we’re going to talk about that difference as well. It emphasizes continuity that God is doing essentially the same thing now as He’s always done, and that what we’re seeing today is just the blossoming of this flower that was planted back in Genesis.

It’s all one growth, one development that God is doing, continuity. And it’s going to focus on God’s work of salvation. It’s going to emphasize God’s saving work as being the dominant theme of Scripture. And if you notice a lot of terms like focus and dominant, it’s because I’m not saying And this is exclusively what these things are talking about, but what the emphasis is. And then when we looked at dispensational theology, we defined that as the system of theology which, by its attempt to maintain a consistent, literal, grammatical, historical hermeneutic, recognizes significant distinctions between God’s administration of different historical periods.

Again, we talked about this doesn’t mean that covenant theologians don’t like good grammatical, literal, historical hermeneutics. They do practice these, but we’re going to talk about how that’s different and how they then apply it with their covenants to interpreting scripture. Dispensational people tend to try to maintain a consistent order of hermeneutic and use that alone. And we’ll talk about the strengths and weaknesses that are involved there. Because of this, they’re going to have more discontinuity. They’re going to say, well, it looks like God’s doing something a little bit different here with Israel than he is with the church.

Looks like God made a promise here. It doesn’t necessarily apply to us here. It looks like there’s more disconnections in scripture than our covenant brothers and sisters would see. So we’re gonna try to chop our Bible up into more pieces than they would. And so we’re not necessarily gonna see everything as being shadowed as substance, seed, the flower. We’re gonna see things as being different dispensations or different administrations of God’s working out in history. And we’re gonna see the major theme of scripture as being primarily the glorification of God through diverse means. Again, not saying the covenant theologians disparage the glory of God at all.

They are all about the glory of God. It’s in their creatives, in their confessions. But we’re gonna see God’s glorification being the major theme, not just as that works out through salvation. We’re gonna see God glorifying himself through lots of different ways and not seeing just salvation as being the primary means that God glorifies himself. So again, we’re seeing more variety, more distinctions, more separations. That’s kind of what defines us as dispensationals, typically. So now with that as our background, we’ll kind of jump into where we left off last week. Remember we introduced our topic, talked about all kinds of disclaimers.

Hopefully I can just footnote those. You can tack them all again onto this week. We’re a family, we love each other. We’re just talking about a friendly in-house debate that’s going on in the church. We define our terms, And then we actually started to look at what covenantalism and what dispensationalism is. So we’ll jump right back in where we left off there. And if you recall, a covenant, which was defined by Douglas Wilson Forrest last week, is simply a solemn bond or a promise, sovereignly administered with attendant blessings and curses. So they’re going to say, when you see a covenant in Scripture, you have a solemn promise or bond that is being sovereignly, and that’s almost always by God, sovereignly administered with attendant blessings and curses.

And we mentioned that they’re going to see three primary covenants, the covenant of works and the covenant of grace. And then you’ll notice I have covenant of redemption in italics. That’s because it is sometimes grouped in with the covenant of grace. Sometimes they don’t make that distinction. But again, I mentioned last week, I want to give you guys a full meal deal. So you’ll see all the terms that you might run into. If you run into somebody that says only two covenants, it’s because this one has been bunched into that one. That’s the only thing going on there. All right, so then we began last week talking about the covenant of redemption, which was an agreement, they’re gonna say was made in eternity past, between the father and the son.

So this was a covenant within the Trinity. The father, we are told, devised a plan of redemption in which the son would die as a substitute for those given to him by the father. Presumably the spirit agreed to implement the plan of redemption designed by the father and secured by the son So this is a bilateral covenant meaning one person promises to do something if the other person promises to do something back And so they’re gonna say the father promise. I will give you son a Looking game to say a peculiar people. I will give you a chosen people for you and And their son says, I will receive those people on condition of me dying to redeem them.

So the father promises to give, the son promises to die for that gift, and the spirit then ostensibly promises to make that all happen. He’s going to help to implement that plan. So the trinity is making this agreement among themselves. And we talked about last week, a trinitarian bilateral covenant is a good thing. a bilateral covenant with us as humans we’re going to see is a bad thing. Because we have a real long standing history of not keeping up our end of the deal. But this would be just fine. So the stipulations we just talked about. And then we mentioned how there’s no direct statement of this covenant in Scripture.

There’s no direct statement of this covenant in Scripture, but it is implied from the fact that we read that this Lamb was slain before the foundations of the world, that we were chosen before the foundations of the world, these verses that talk about salvation having been planned and determined and set up and everything put into place before time began. So they’re gonna say that that language implies some kind of promise was made, some kind of covenant was made.

That’s where the covenant redemption is. Second, chronologically, they’re gonna talk about the covenant of works, which was made in time between God and Adam, whom he had made the representative of the human race. So it was between God and Adam as an individual, but Adam being the representative of the human race, it was essentially a covenant between God and mankind, represented by Adam. Adam would act for all his descendants. Covenantists insist that God promised eternal life to Adam and all his descendants on condition of his perfect obedience of God’s command not to eat of the fruit of the one forbidden tree.

but scripture does not affirm this. Death, however, was purely promised for disobedience. So here we have a bilateral covenant that they’re gonna see between God and man or Adam. So God and man are the two covenant participants. The stipulations they’re gonna say is, God promises I will give you eternal life. If man, you will promise to obey me. If you fail to keep your part of the covenant, then I promise to curse you with death. and they’re gonna give as an evidence of that covenant being made, Genesis 2 16 to 17, where God gives that instruction to Adam. Now where the dispensationists are gonna kind of raise their hand and say, this doesn’t sound like a covenant is because God never said to Adam, I will give you eternal life if you obey me.

What did he actually say to Adam? If you eat of the fruit of this tree, you will die. So we’re gonna say that was a command, but that doesn’t sound like covenant language to us. Okay, now we’re starting to split some hairs, but again, this whole topic is hair splitting. So that’s where we’re gonna start to have some disagreement, but they’re gonna see that as being the foundation of this covenant of works, which is then gonna be seen throughout scripture that we all stand condemned before God, because through Adam, we fail to keep our side of this bilateral covenant. It is upon our failure to keep this covenant that God judges us and condemns us to hell.

Does that make sense? So covenant of redemption, before time began, God promised he would redeem his people. But in time, he made a covenant with Adam. The Adam then failed to keep, and that’s why we stand judge today. That’s the covenant. That’s the covenant. What’s that? I just saw the whole covenant. Yes. Does there mean to be blood to shed? Some people have defined blood as a necessary part of covenant, but they’ve largely backed away from that because there isn’t blood present in every covenant. So depending on who you read, yes and no. In fact, a lot of times even on the… The covenant of redemption. Right, the covenant of redemption, Christ offered to die.

And so you could say there was blood there. The covenant of works, man dies if he fails. You could say that there’s blood there. So there’s typically death involved in these covenants. I know that the dispensation also sometimes said there always has to be blood if there’s a covenant to try to say that these two covenants don’t apply. But I don’t know that that’s the strongest argument. That definition more comes from trying to say, when we see a covenant in Scripture, what are the common denominators? We seem to usually see blood involved when we see a covenant, as opposed to saying the definition of a covenant itself is that there has to be blood.

Does that make sense? Okay, but yeah, typically covenants do involve blood. And you see God making covenants with man, usually something is killed as a part of that covenant making. Now let’s take a look at the covenant of grace. Because our first parents broke the covenant of works, we just talked about that with Adam, when they ate the forbidden fruit, God established the covenant of grace. This covenant was a gracious agreement between the offended God and the offending but elect sinner. That’s key. The covenant of grace was not a covenant God made with all of man in general, but a covenant that he made with the offending, but he left sinner.

That would be those that fell underneath the covenant of redemption, in which God promises salvation through faith in Christ, and the sinner accepts this, believingly, promising a life of faith and obedience. Now, the end of that quote might leave you thinking, wait a second, second. So they’re saying that our salvation is determined upon our faith and our believing. Is this a bilateral covenant? No. They’re gonna say this is a unilateral covenant between God and man where God provides not only a way for reconciliation but he applies that means to those he’s chosen. So God in his covenant of grace says, I will save those who have faith in me and I will give faith to those I have chosen.” So it’s all a work of God. They’re going to see this as a unilateral covenant. Now when we get to the historical study of this movement, we’re going to notice that it’s fascinating. The covenant of grace started off exactly the opposite.

The statement of the covenant of grace at its origin was actually used to refute Calvinism and say that, no, God can’t say this unilaterally because I have to complete my side of the covenant in order to be saved. But that got switched around really quickly during the Reformation. But just interesting little historical footnote. But today, pretty much all covenant theologians will agree it’s a unilateral covenant whereby God makes a way for salvation and then applies that way fully to those He has chosen. So your covenant theologian is going to be a good card carrying member of a Calvinist club. And we would all say a hearty amen to what they’re going to teach about grace. I’d love to sit down and hear most covenant theologians tell me about grace because they usually mail this stuff. The stipulations, like we said, God provides a way and He applies the means and they’re going to look to Genesis 3.15 where God promised the seed to Eve that would crush the head of the serpent. In theological circles we call that the proto-evangelion, meaning the first gospel. That initial

promise that you have just sinned and now you stand cursed but I’m already going to promise a way to save you. Right there at the beginning in Genesis so that’s where they’re going to see the covenant of grace first stated and that’s going to be spelled out as we go along. So this chart hopefully will help to put everything in perspective. We talked about the covenant of works and the covenant of grace are the two primary covenants under which they’re going to see all the other covenants of scripture falling. So underneath the covenant of works, they’re going to see the Adamic covenant, the covenant got made with Adam, and the Mosaic covenant, the covenant got made with Moses, as being examples of the covenant of works. The Adamic covenant was not a new covenant, it was a statement of this covenant of works. The Mosaic covenant was not a unique or distinct covenant, it was a restatement of this covenant of works, a further description, part of this blossoming from shadow into substance.

The Mosaic covenant does double duty. It’s the covenant of works, but it also, you can see under there, let’s see if anybody zoom in a little bit to help you. It’s also the administration of the covenant of grace. So God helped administer his covenant of grace through the Mosaic covenant as well. Meaning that through the Mosaic covenant, God set a standard of law that nobody could fulfill. Right? Paul teaches us that clearly in the New Testament. However, through the Mosaic covenant, he also set up a sacrificial system by which those sins could be forgiven. So it administered his grace while also being the standard of works. So the Mosaic covenant does double duty. Under the covenant of grace, you have the covenant’s God made with Noah, with Abraham, with David, and the New Covenant, all being restatements or further descriptions of this covenant of grace.

So you can see how they’re grouping things together. When they see similarities, they’re going to group them together and they’re going to see them as being developments of these two primary covenants. Now, do we see a threat of grace given to Noah, to Abraham, to David, and in the new covenant? Yes. Yeah. God didn’t just wake up one day and say, New Testament time, I should be gracious. That’s been his character all along. So God has been gracious throughout history. Has God always had a standard of perfection? Yes, he always has, and anybody who has failed to meet that standard has always been the recipient of curses.

So those are patterns we see in scripture. The covenant theologians are gonna formalize those to the point where they’re gonna say those are in fact actual covenants that control flow of scripture and we read our Bible we need to understand everything is being part of these two covenants and we’re gonna see later why we dispensationals like chop them up into those little covenants down at the bottom. You tracking so far? Alright and again if I’m blowing past something you throw a flag I’m more than happy to slow down. So here’s just a quick example because of their understanding of continuity when they look at the sacraments for example the The covenant theologian is typically going to see Passover as having been the shadow fulfilled now in the Lord’s Supper.

Circumcision, they’re going to see as having been the sign of the covenant in the Old Testament, right? God told Abraham, as a sign of this covenant I’ve made with you, you will circumcise all your males. In the New Covenant era, that becomes baptism. And so baptism is now the sign of the covenant. And that’s why many, if not most covenant theologians, observe the practice of baptizing their infants. Not because they think it saves their infants, but as a demonstration that I am introducing this child to the covenant community that I live in, which is the same covenant community of God’s people that has been in existence since all the way back into the Old Testament.

So Passover and circumcision were shadows, Lord’s Supper, baptism, those are substance. the rest of the sacraments, feasts, sacrifices, the Old Testament law, all those things. They don’t just forget about those. They don’t just, you know, we don’t talk about those.

They’re going to say those have been replaced and fulfilled by the simpler displays of the Lord’s Supper and baptism. So again, they’re going to see all these many faceted shadows in the Old Testament have been summarized and fulfilled and more simply displayed by the New Covenant practice of Lord’s Supper and baptism. Does that make sense? You see progression shadow the substance seed the flower. So scripture. Scripture references for that well if you if you want to tear fascinating debate listen to R.C. Sproul debating John MacArthur on infant baptism and you will see how they argue this because Sproul makes a statement in the middle of debate if I could show John MacArthur a verse that said baptism is the same as circumcision I know he’d agree with me. But, and then he goes to the chalkboard. Now, I listened to part of this debate and Skrull goes everywhere in the Bible. He marshals a massive number of scriptures to try to show a logical case for this progression. This will be another example where there isn’t

an explicit statement of scripture saying that baptism is the same as circumcision. But what we’re going to get, when we get into hermeneutics, we’ll see because of their hermeneut, the way they study scripture, they’re going to see that connection. Does that make sense? But yeah, great question, great question. Incidentally, R.C. Sproul said that if we could show him one instance in the New Testament where a second generation believer was not baptized as an infant, then he would change his mind. So they go back and forth on that. Here’s a quote that just hopefully will help to separate this idea between… when you’re second generation.

Oh, got you. In other words, they’re going to say, of course most of the baptisms we see in the New Testament are believer baptisms. Because these are people that came from a pagan nation and they were baptized when they got saved. That then formed a covenant community. And of course, this covenant community would then have baptized their children, their children born into that covenant community. And so what Sproul says is to convince me, I would have to see where you had people that got saved, and then had a child into that saved home, and then they intentionally chose not to baptize their child until they were a believer for me to be convinced.

Does that make sense? Sorry, yeah. And Sproul will admit that. He will just say though that We have two thousand years of tradition of the sign of the covenant being applied to the covenant community. And he says, and I will be, so I will take the liberty of calling that the Old Testament Church. We have two thousand years of tradition there. It’s going to take an explicit statement of Scripture in the New Testament to convince me that that practice no longer takes place. So that’s where he would say the silence for him is fairly convincing. What’s that? because the Lord instituted baptism. So they’re going to say that the baptism has replaced.

Yeah. And that as a sign of the more inclusive nature of the gospel today, we baptize male and female, whereas the sign of the covenant was just in the males in the Old Testament. And you’ve got to listen to that series. It took them hours. I don’t have hours.

Two very intelligent men who both know their Bible really well. And I really encourage I encourage you to listen to it. I want to make this quick quote here though first. There is a difference between being elect and being a covenant member. So we talk about people within the covenants for the covenant theologian. We’re not necessarily talking about all believers. The elect cannot be removed from God’s sovereign decree. They don’t believe you can lose your salvation.

Professing Christians can be removed from God’s people, people and they often, or excuse me, they frequently are. When they are removed, their unregenerate status is revealed. But they were really in the covenant, a fact that now applies to them, to their sorrow. So if you’re born into a Christian family, if you’re born into the covenant community, you receive the sign of the covenant, you now have access, if you choose to obey, to the blessings of the covenant, but you now have extended or increased curses if you reject that covenant. And so a child can grow up in that covenant home and abandon that covenant, and as Michael T. Reinehain says, that now applies to them to their sorrow. So not every covenant member is saved. The elect will remain in the covenant, the un-elect will leave the covenant and receive upon them the curses of leaving the covenant.

So I just want to make that important footnote. So that is covenantalism in a really tiny nutshell. So this is hyper simplified covenantalism as far as just their understanding of the three major covenants. Just one more question. Yes. Would they? No, most would not. I mean, again, you get on the fringes, possibly. But most would not say that even a covenant church would be leaving covenantalism. That’s why if you go together for the gospel or something like that, you’ll see a lot of covenant guys there. John MacArthur, big time non-Covenant guy, and there’s no way they would let him speak there if they thought he could draw their people away from the Covenant. Yeah, I thought I saw another hand.

Question? The features of the member of Abu Dhabi. Right, and we’re going to see a lot of those being future, but yeah, there are differences in how these Covenants manifest over time, but it’s the exact same covenant going from shadow to substance. So they’re not going to say that the shadow types that we see in the Old Testament are identical to what we’re in now. They’re going to say we’re living in New Covenant reality versus the Old Testament people were living in Old Covenant shadow. Same covenant but we’re in the reality now. So there are going to be visible differences but that the essence is the same. It’s the same covenant that’s just been gradually becoming clearer and clearer And so we, post Christ, get to live into the full reality of that covenant.

Well, you just said that again, that we are currently in the weak covenant reality. And so, how is it possible? Gotcha. Because, remember, when they’re understanding of a covenant, covenant does not equal elect. Covenant equals solemn bond with attendant blessings and curses. So if God has provided this way of salvation, this covenant, you can be in the covenant, And if God gives you obedience, i.e., if you’re elect, then you will inherit the blessings of that covenant. If God doesn’t give you the obedience required to receive the blessings, then you’ll receive the curses associated with that covenant. Does that make sense?

There seems to be such a clear promise in Scripture that those who he places in the covenant. Right. As dispensated folk folk, we’re going to kind of harp on that a little bit. But yeah, they’re gonna see it a little differently. Yes. Good question though. So are they basically kind of saying that being in the covenant is basically being in part of the church? Like what we would see the difference between being a professing believer and being a collective believer? Right, very similar. Just the same way that not all Israel, not all who are of Israel are true Israel. You know, within the community of the Israelites, there was blessings associated with being a true Israelite, somebody that would obey God’s law.

And if you didn’t, there’s a whole bunch of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy that told you all the bad things are going to happen to you if you violate the covenant of being an Israelite. And so they’re going to say, similar in the church, which is the replacement of Israel, Yet, if you are obedient to the covenant, if you are given that obedience by God, and they’ll say it’s from God, if you’re given that obedience, you receive all the blessings that come with being in that covenant community. If you disobey, you’ll receive all the attended curses that come with rejecting that covenant. But you are still within that covenant community, which makes you accountable to a higher level, and gives you certain advantages.

They’re going to say that a child born within a covenant community is going to have certain predispositions or certain advantages because they’ve been born within that Christian community. And to a certain degree, do we see that children that grow up within a loving Christian community do seem to not make as many bad decisions in their lives? That there are blessings to being around the people of God. Amen. Amen. Amen. So that’s why we want to be a church of families. This is where you want to raise your kids. But we’re not going to see that as being the blessings of a covenant. Yeah. Well, just like an example in the Old Testament, all the people that died in the wilderness, I mean, they were under the covenant, but they paid the cost of disobedience.

Right, they were under the covenant and then they were under. So, exactly. So I was told that we might have a couple extra minutes today, so I’m going to listen for the thunder. We’ll see how far we can get, but any other questions before we jump into the dizzying world of dispensationalism? Do you have more copies of notes? For this week, I don’t. I’ll be talking with Dave, we’ll try to get a PDF up for everybody. I don’t have blanks on my notes, so you’ll pretty much get the full meal deal. But I’ll try… We’ll have a way of dispersing. So talk to Dave if you want to get those, and then we’ll see what he gets into your part.

I know nothing! All right, good, any last questions? All right, there we go. So that’s very quick summary of the three primary covenants that covenantal theology will see as the overarching themes of scripture. Now let’s talk a little bit about dispensationalism. Dispensationalism has been defined by Ryrie as that system of theology which views the world as a household run by God. In this household world, See, dispensation is just so cute and picturesque. In this household world, God is dispensing or administering its affairs according to his own will and in various stages of revelation in the process of time. These various stages mark off the distinguishably different economies in the outworking of his total purpose, and these economies are dispensations.

Now, if the definition like that, you can see why there’s a lot of variety. because it’s somewhat helpful, somewhat vague. But essentially what he’s saying is that we’re gonna instead of seeing one continuous flow shout out of the substance, we’re gonna see the Bible more like a house with different rooms in it and God’s got maybe different purposes and different things he’s doing in different rooms. Same house, same God, all his world, but he’s not gonna use the bedroom for the same thing as the kitchen for the same thing as the dining room. He’s gonna have different purposes and different functions that he’s going to be doing as time unfolds.

So we’re going to see those distinctions. See this is a little bit more helpful. A dispensation itself simply means an administration or an arrangement. Now the dispensationalist uses the word theologically as a title for the distinctive administration of God throughout the entire Bible. So when we look at our Bible, we’re going to say, hmm, it seems like God was doing one thing here and it looks different here, and it looks different here, and it looks different here. So we’re going to call this one dispensation. This is another dispensation. This is another dispensation. That’s another dispensation. It just looks like God is managing his affairs with man differently at these different times.

We’re going to call those dispensations. Now because the term dispensation is a little broad, people will chop the Bible up into tons of little tiny pieces or a few big pieces. that those change quite frequently, but the essential idea that we see God doing things differently at different periods of time is what defines the dispensational movement. Now let’s see if we can survive these without the definition of stuff. Here we go. These are the six essential beliefs of dispensationalism. So all of you who want to remain members of this church, you have to take these on. These are from blocks.

very helpful tiny little book that just been satanism and this is what his evaluation of the current state of dispensationalism led him to write as the six essential beliefs that kind of mark out a dispensationalist. A dispensationalist will believe other things but he’s going to say if you don’t believe these things then you’re probably not technically a dispensationalist. Maybe you’re like Piper who on his website says I don’t want to call myself either one. So but number one he says progressive revelation from the New Testament does not, and this is the key words here, interpret or reinterpret Old Testament passages in a way that changes or cancels the original meaning of the Old Testament writers as determined by historical grammatical hermeneutics.

And in my opinion that’s probably the most important essential belief of dispensationalism, is that you cannot go to the New Testament and say, in the New Testament I see this New Covenant reality, which lets me go back to an Old Testament passage, that if I had just studied the Old Testament passage by itself, I would have thought it means this. But if I bring my New Covenant reality to it, I realize it was actually talking about this.

We’re gonna say you have to let each passage stand on its own. What did the author mean to write when he wrote that passage? What did he mean to communicate? And while we may see additional information in the New Testament, additional information, you will not see information that causes us to reinterpret the old.

That’s kind of a diehard principle for us. Now there are some on the hyper-dispensational, oh, excuse me, some on the fringes of progressive dispensationalism that are starting to wiggle on that hermeneutical principle. And if you wanna get to Master’s Seminary Journal, Dr. Thomas has an excellent article in there where he just goes after those guys for that because this is so important to dispensationalism. Number two, types exist. But national Israel is not a type that is superseded by the church. So yes, we do see things in the Old Testament that have a significance in the New Testament. Christ is a priest according to the order of Melchizedek.

We do see things in the Old Testament that point to New Testament realities. But if it’s not expressly stated to be such, we can’t assume that it is. So we can’t say Israel was actually a type of the church. Because the Bible doesn’t say it was a type of the church. But we’re going to see that as being a distinction. They’re going to see Israel is the shadow, the church is the substance. And there is the thunder. All right, so we got through two of those. Next week we’re going to finish off dispensationalism and if you like the series don’t miss next week because we’re going to talk about hermeneutics and that’s the most important part of the whole lecture.

You can skip all the rest. Those are very important. So go out, buy lunch for your favorite covenant theologian and help them and help you to love God more. Alright? Let’s pray. Laura, we just want to thank you for the time that we’ve had together this morning. Just still encouraged and excited by what you did in the life of the Martins and Laura I just thank you for your ability to seize upon people and to convert them from destruction to give to them your grace. Thank you for doing that in their life, in my life. And Lord, you know how my wife and I pray you will do that for our little daughter. And Lord, may we be a community, a church that does love one another, reaches out with discipleship, does not leave people to rely on radio programs alone, but gets involved each other’s lives so that we might help one another to look more like your son.

Just pray for the rest of today that you would be honored as we worship and rejoice in the fact that we know you and have been known by you. Pray these things in Christ’s name. Amen.