Covenant and Dispensational Theology Part 3

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.

All right, well good evening. It is very humbling to see how many of you would give up your Friday nights on a holiday weekend to come and hear a theological lecture. From me, no less. Thank you for giving me your time. I will try to respect it and avoid anything that would be unnecessary to fill up your evening. How many of you have not been at the previous two discussions that we’ve had so far? How many of you have been at only one or haven’t been at any of them yet? Okay, a handful of you. For your benefit, I’m going to try to fly through some basic introductory materials. For those of you that have your note packets, you can just refresh as we go through them.

For those of you who are new, I did make 20 extra copies of my notes, and they are available on the table there in the back in the middle where the lights are sitting. Please avail yourself of that. I haven’t left any blanks or anything in the notes so that if we go fast you’ve got pretty much everything that I have on my powerpoints and written forum on there so that you can go back and not take my word for it, but study it for yourself. But I think it would be appropriate as we begin since we are talking about God and his word that we would pray and acknowledge him and ask him to bless our time together. So let’s begin with a word of prayer if you would.

Father, once again, we thank you for the chance to come and to think about a topic which is complicated in some ways. And Lord, I pray that as we wrestle through these issues that we would just enjoy the process of, in some ways, bumping up against our infinite God and bumping up against what we can and what we cannot know, that it would expand our understanding of you, that it would give us hearts of worship, that you would help us in what we can know to be more precise in how we praise you and how we serve you and how we tell others about you and Lord we ask that you would guard us from any kind of puffery any kind of intellectual superiority or the sense that we have gained something that We have not I pray that you would help us to remain humble as we study and as we learn So that we would not by our lives violate the very things that we are studying And so we pray these things in the name of your son. Amen.

Well, as we begin again, I just want to quickly touch on our introduction and how we’re going to run through this. As you recall, I tried to break this big old topic of covenantalism and dispensationalism down into this roadmap. We’re going to try to define our terms, and we’ve done that to some length together. Then we’re going to try to describe what these two systems are, And that will include defining what is covenantalism and all of its understandings, what is dispensationalism and its different flavors and its understandings, what are the covenants, what are the dispensations. And then, most importantly for our discussion tonight, what is the hermeneutics that these two systems use?

What rules do they use when they go to study the Bible? And it is my conviction that it is the convictions of hermeneutics that actually shape these two views. But that’s where we’re going to really see where these two views come from. And that’ll probably also be tonight where if you have any questions, you may have the most in that section. I want to make sure that we have time to answer any questions that you’ll have. So by the end of tonight, I’m hoping to finish off those first two. And you may be thinking, wow, well, you’ve done two weeks already, and then all of tonight we’re only halfway through. The second half is shorter.

So we should be able to fairly easily work our way through the last two at our next meeting, Lord willing, a week from tonight. we’ll look at the historical development of these two movements. Where were they born? Who were the people that thought these things up? How was it developed? When was it developed and why then? How does it reach us? And why do we see something some places and other things other places? I think it will be very fascinating as we see how these spread around. Then lastly we’re going to look at a couple key issues, at least one in particular, hopefully two, that show what scholars from a covenant and a dispensational view do when when they approach some of the big questions in the Bible, like what’s the difference between Israel and the church?

Or what does the Bible mean when it talks about the land of God? So those will be a couple issues that hopefully we’ll have time to look through. And you’ll just see how these two theological views actually affect Bible study. That’s the goal. And like I said, we’ve already run through the description to some degree in the definitions in depth. And so I don’t wanna belabor those, but just for those who are new, quickly wanna make a few reminders. I want to jump here to the quote by Jonathan Edwards. There it is, sorry, in the middle. Jonathan Edwards, who says, There is perhaps no part of divinity attended with so much intricacy, and wherein orthodox divines do so much differ in stating the precise agreement and difference between the two dispensations of Moses and Christ.

That’s Jonathan Edwards commenting on this topic. And that was how they referred to it back then. They didn’t call it covenantalism, dispensationalism. They called it the precise agreement and difference between the two dispensations of Moses and Christ. And he said it was the most difficult thing in Christianity. So it is a difficult topic, and as we’ve said many times, because it is a difficult topic, we want to be very careful about arrogance in our view. We want to be very careful about saying, we’re the intelligent ones, anybody who doesn’t disagree with us, they’re hopelessly lost, poor them. We want to not be dividing fellowship with one another over this discussion.

It’s an in-house discussion, it’s an in-house debate, and I think it is profitable, and I think there is much that we can know and we can learn, but I think it becomes sin for us when we take what we learn and we use it to attack our brothers and sisters. That’s not acceptable within any family, it’s not acceptable within God’s family either. So with that being said then, let me quickly look at the definitions that we suggested, and that’s the royal we, This is the definitions I suggested, so you’re free to disagree with them as you please. But this was the definitions that I put in place to just frame our discussion, so that we have something in common to talk about.

And in defining covenant theology, this was my best stab at it. 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.

Grayson Works. These covenants form an interpretive framework for understanding any point of scripture or theology. So it’s a system that sees two primary covenants, Grayson Works, as being the guidelines by which we can interpret and understand any point of scripture. You can already see how this very much affects the rules by which they say the Bible. That’s why Hermann Uyghur is so important. That’s why we’re going to camp tonight. The key words here are an emphasis on continuity because they’re going to see these two covenants as being the overall guidelines for interpreting all of scripture. They’re going to see everything as being very similar throughout scripture that what God is doing is the same in almost every case. And so when they look at the Old Testament and the New Testament, they’re going to emphasize, well, this is just like the Old Testament that, this is really just the Old Testament that they’re going to keep connecting those dots. So they’re going to emphasize continuity, and they’re going to emphasize salvation. They’re going to emphasize

that God’s big plan with these two covenants has been to save humanity, and that’s the main theme of Scripture. So we’re going to emphasize salvation. And then we talked about how in our dispensational side, we might define our position this way. It’s 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. So it’s another system, but this one is characterized by an attempt to say, I’m going to interpret every verse according to the same set of rules, and I’m going to take each verse as it comes in its context. And I’m not going to reinterpret any verse based off of some overarching theme. I’m going to interpret each verse by itself and try to determine what did the author mean when he wrote this verse. And as we do that, we seem to see there are more differences in how God has worked throughout history.

Some of the things where our covenant brothers and sisters are going to say in the Old Testament it was this and in the New Testament the exact same thing is just called something else, we’re going to say, no, as we look at these verses, we think those are two separate things. We think God is up to two different things here. So there’s going to be discontinuity as an emphasis in what we’re doing. Now, do we believe that God changes, that his character changes, that his purposes change? No, we believe in the same unchanging God. We just believe that he’s been administering himself to humanity in different ways. We’re going to talk about what those different ways are tonight.

We’re going to go through all the dispensations that dispensationalists tend to see in scripture. So discontinuity, and they’re going to emphasize that the big picture in scripture, the overarching theme of scripture, is God’s glory. Not to say again that the covenantal people don’t believe that God gives himself glory in everything, that that’s the overarching theme of God. But we’re going to say that scripture is not primarily just about the salvation of of humanity, but it’s primarily about God glorifying himself in a whole bunch of different ways. And we celebrate the creativity and the power and the awesomeness of God through different themes, through different purposes that he’s working out, including the plan of salvation.

So that’s where we kind of land with our definitions, and we developed these more extensively in the last couple weeks. I would invite you, you can come see me afterwards, the video content and the audio of my previous discussions is up online. You can watch all the slides. You can listen to the audio. You can suffer through me for several more hours and catch up with anything that we don’t cover in these other slides tonight. So that’s where we got caught up. Are there any just really pressing questions on the definitions before I launch into the next section? All right, great. Well, in that case, we’re going to then jump to part two, which was the description.

So if you’ll just give me one moment. Great, here we go. So we’re going to now look at the description. And again, we already started some of this, but just by way of review, we talked about what is a covenant. When we’re talking about covenantalism, it’s important to define what a covenant is, because that’s what they base their view on. And we define covenantalism the same way Douglas Wilson, a prominent covenant theologian, defined it. It’s simply a solemn bond, sovereignly administered with attendant blessings and curses. So a covenant is a promise, some kind of promise that God Himself watches over, it’s sovereignly administered, to have blessings and curses.

So if you keep the promise, there are blessings. If you break the promise, there are curses. That’s what they’re going to see when they look at the Bible. And in Scripture, they’re going to identify three primary covenants. actually say two primary covenants, one of which can be further divided into two by some theologians. The two primary ones we mention are works and grace, and grace is sometimes further divided into grace and redemption. But a lot of covenant theologians will just group those together. So the two primary covenants are works and grace, and then you’ll also hear discussion of redemption sometimes.

And we define these different covenants using some of these quotes that you’ll hopefully remember. I think they’re in your notes, so hopefully you can refer them there. But they’re going to talk about the covenant of redemption, being a covenant made in eternity past, before time began, within the Trinity. So they all promised one another, the Father saying, I will give to my Son a special people, or a peculiar people, as the King James says. And the Son says, to receive that people, I will commit to die for them, to redeem them. So the Father says, I will give if you will redeem. And they agree to do that. The Holy Spirit agrees to take part in implementing this plan.

And actually helping to quicken us, to make us alive, to indwell us, to seal us, to teach us all of the aspects the Holy Spirit plays in our lives. So they’re going to say, before time began, there were these promises made between the Trinity, members of the Trinity. And those then flowed out throughout history as part of this covenant of redemption. Is it specifically mentioned in scripture? No. Is it implied in scripture? They will say yes. It is implied because of how redemption unfolded that these promises must have taken place. So that was the covenant of redemption.

Then there was this covenant of works. And I’ll put up this slide so I can make this a little clearer. The covenant of works was between God and man. And this one took place in time. So redemption was before time. Works is in time between God and Adam as representative of the human race where God promised Adam if you will obey me perfectly I will give to you eternal life if you disobey me the curse of that will be death and the case of Adam as our representative he failed he broke that covenant with God and therefore he was cursed and removed from the garden and all of his descendants flowing out of that covenant have received the same in curse of breaking that covenant.

Again, is this covenant mentioned specifically in scripture? Sort of. The Bible does say that God told Adam and Eve, if you eat from that tree, you will, told Adam, if you eat from that tree, you will surely die. So they’ll say that’s where the covenant of works was made. Our response as dispensationalists would be, that’s not a covenant. Because there was no offering of a promise, That was just a warning for disobedience. If you disobey me, this will be the consequence. But that’s not an official covenant. So they’re going to see that being the beginning of covenant works. We’re going to challenge them and say that’s not technically a covenant.

And then we’re going to see God upholding his holiness throughout history on humanity, but not seeing all of the punishment of sin being a result of breaking an official covenant of works. And if you’re just kind of swimming around, does this matter at all? Hang in there. Hopefully, I know I’m flying through this stuff. We went through it in a lot greater detail. You can listen again to those messages online if you want to get some more of the implications. Hold on tight. We’ll see where this discussion becomes more important when we get to the hermeneutics and look at how we study God’s Word. But just for now, we’re booking through some definitions.

And then lastly there was the covenant of grace, which was another covenant between God, it was a covenant between God and man, but it was not a covenant for which man was responsible to do anything. This is important. The covenant of grace was a promise God made to man contingent upon himself only, whereas works God would bless if man obeyed. in the covenant of grace, God will bless because God promises to bless. And he commits himself to that. So it’s between God and man, and God promises to provide a way of reconciliation. He promises to provide a way to restore man to himself, and that he will promise us to apply this means to those that he has chosen.

So he’ll provide a way, he’ll apply the way. That falls under the covenant of grace. And so after the covenant of works, when man broke that, we fall into the curses of God. God then makes another covenant of grace, wherein he promises to restore some of those fallen men. And he will do that on his own. And they will look at Genesis 3.15, where God promised a seed to Eve that would crush the head of the serpent. That will be where they will see this covenant beginning and being first stated. Again, it’s not phrased as a covenant in Scripture, so we will challenge whether or that’s technically a covenant, but that’s where they’ll see this beginning.

So those are going to be the themes that they’re going to see as overarching all of Scripture. Everything else, every other promise you see God made, every other time you see a covenant in Scripture, it’s a restatement of one of these three main covenants. And God’s working this all out through history. All right, so there we go. You guys got covenantalism in a nutshell. This just illustrates what I just mentioned, whether it’s the Adamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Noeic covenant, the Abrahamic covenant, the Davidic covenant, the New Covenant, all these covenants you read about in the scripture, they really all just fit into these couple overarching covenants in the covenantal view.

And if you can fit more uses of the term covenant in a sentence than I just did, then you should get a gold star. That’s the covenantal view. And because of that, we talked about how they’re going to see this continuity pass over, Same thing as Lord Supper’s circumcision, replaced by baptism. It’s all the exact same, working out of the exact same promises. Just the New Testament has fuller realities of what was already there in the Old Testament. Alright, let me jump back out here real quick. So that was covenantalism. Now let’s take a quick look at dispensationalism. We define that as a system of theology which views the world as a household.

And dispensation, when you find that word in the Bible, in the Greek, it literally means a house rule or house rules. So, when you play in God’s house, you follow the house rules. So if you’re living in this world, you follow his rules, and he has different rules for different periods of time and for different people. That’s all that dispensationalism is saying. So it views the world as a household world where 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. Where I really simplified it somewhat, a dispensation 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 what’s a dispensation? It’s simply God doing something a certain way for a certain period of time to certain people. That’s all it is. And then if he does something else another way to another group of people at another time, that’s another dispensation. And as we look at scripture, we see a number of these different periods of time and groups of people that God is doing different things with. And hence, we have dispensations. That’s all it means. There’s been proposed six essential beliefs of dispensationalism. If you want to take a dispensationalist and hold on to task, he’s supposed to believe these six things. Now dispensationalism being the quickly changing beast that it is, this list may expire at some point in the future. But for now, I think it’s pretty good for identifying dispensationalists. Progressive revelation from the New Testament does not 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. If that sounds similar to our definition of dispensationalism, it’s for a reason. I think this is the most important one. The New Testament cannot reinterpret the Old Testament. Can it add to what we know about the Old Testament? Yes. Can it change what the Old Testament clearly meant? No. That’s what we’re going to say. If we read the Old Testament and we come to the conclusion, Isaiah meant this to these people, we can’t say, well actually that’s not what this passage meant. And that’s what Isaiah meant, but he was wrong.

The New Testament tells us what this really means. We’re going to say that’s off limits. You can’t do that. That’s going to be, I think, the most important belief in dispensationalism. We also talked about how types exist, but national Israel is not a type that is superseded by the church. The Old Testament is for illustration, the New Testament tells us that. The Old Testament has types as well, things which represent New Testament realities. Israel is not identified as such. Israel is not identified as a type of the church. The example of their lives teaches many things, but they do not equal the church. That’s the conclusion that dispensationalists come to by applying that first rule.

And we’ll talk about that hopefully in our next week when we get to that description, excuse me, the demonstration phase. Third, Israel and the church are distinct. Thus, the church cannot be identified as the new or true Israel. Similar to two. People have called the distinction between Israel and church the essential distinguishing feature of dispensationalism. So that’s why you’ll see that show up in a lot of these descriptions. If you want to ask what is the unmistakable or unavoidable conclusion being a dispensationalist, it’s that Israel and church are not the same. Doesn’t matter what flavor dispensationalist you are, you’ll agree on that basic truth.

There is both spiritual unity, number four, in salvation between Jews and Gentiles, and a future role for Israel as a nation. This one, I think he stuck in there purposefully to keep out the heretics on the fringes of the dispensational movement. Because there were some dispensationalists, called hyper dispensationalists, that were We’re flirting with the view that there were two plans of salvation, which as we’ve talked about is a heresy, and must be rejected as such. Most mainline, and I would go to say anybody who wants to call himself a mainline dispensationalist had better agree that God has one plan of salvation, and that’s through the Messiah Jesus Christ.

But dispensationalists will say that just because God has one plan of salvation for Jew and Gentile does not mean that every promise he made to Israel is also true for the church. Or that every promise he makes to the church is necessarily true for Israel. You know, I can promise to give all my kids Snickers bars and promise to give one of them a Snickers bar and a Babe Ruth. That doesn’t mean all my kids get Babe Ruth now. So we’re going to say God can make multiple promises to specific people. And just because we’re included in some of the promises to one group, doesn’t mean that we’re included in all. So that’s going to be the distinction.

Excuse me. Number five, the nation of Israel will both be saved and restored with a unique identity and function in a future millennial kingdom upon the earth. That throws you under a certain shoe box of eschatology. If you’re going to believe that Christ will reign literally on this earth, over the nation of Israel and the world through the nation of Israel, then you have landed not in the Amillennial camp or most of the other camps that you’ll see very popular in the covenantal view. So that’s another place where we differ quite a bit and if you ever see a covenant person teasing their brothers and sisters who have all their charts and their graphs, that’s us. Where are the charts and the graphs people?

Because we have to see discontinuity. I’m going to say all millennialism. Okay. Got you. And again, I have done a discussion on eschatology for the full picture, because there’s no way that we’re going to get it all here. But yeah, in short, the prefix, means not or without millennial. So the all-millennialist view does not believe that there is going to be a literal millennium. but that there is a spiritual sense in which we are currently experiencing the reign of Christ. So it’s not a fixed physical period on earth, but it’s a spiritual reality that will get progressively better and better and better until Christ will come down one day and then that will be the end of this heavens and this earth, and will immediately go into the new heavens and the new earth.

Whereas we will see that the world is going to get worse and worse and worse until God comes back and at that point in time He’s going to pour out His wrath on the earth then he’s going to set up his kingdom on the earth, and then he will establish his new heavens and the earth. So that’s in a very tiny nutshell. But that’s going to make us distinct as well, our view on eschatology. Number six, there are multiple senses of seed of Abraham, thus the church’s identification as seed of Abraham does not cancel God’s promises to the believing Jewish seed of Abraham. And that’s because when we use the phrase, seat of Abraham, the Church is sometimes referred to as being the seat of Abraham.

Does that mean that we’re the same thing as Israel? And we’re going to talk about that very question at the end of next week. What are the people of God, or what is the people of God? What is that referring to? Who is in that group? That’s a very important discussion. So those are the six essential beliefs of dispensationalism. Yes. So, in this view that Israel and the church are two separate entities that God deals with differently. So today, when you hear Christians quote the Old Testament verse about, if my people will humble themselves and I’ll heal the land, would that be flowing into the covenantal view of life that Israel is the type of the church?

If God said Israel applies to the church. Lots of dangerous questions to answer this close to the 4th of July with all of our patriotic juices flowing. Step out. Yes, definitely, very much so. That was a promise God gave to Israel, the people of God. We are the true Israel people of God. That’s a promise that would be true for us and our Christian nation if we could just all get together and start praying. And we would say, nope, that was a promise to Israel. Now, can we draw from the promises that God made to Israel that in God’s character, He tends to bless those who pray? Yes. So, do we just tear out everything before Christ came and established the church and say not for us, not applicable?

No. But do we claim all the promises that God made to Israel? No. And that’s probably a good thing. Because we should have gotten overrun as a country over and over and over by Canada Mexico for how we have been living in this country and God hasn’t done that. So that’s a good thing. But yeah, that is a covenantal view coming through. Any other questions on this? Alright, well then I think we’re quickly starting to approach where we began to leave off last week. Actually let me jump down here.

Alright, this actually wasn’t last week, two weeks ago. Did we get to this slide this is new okay new material well in that case I think I missed one of my quotes that I like and this one is just Lewis Schaeffer provoking people he correctly observed that any person is a dispensationalist who trusts the blood of Christ rather than bringing an animal sacrifice and any person at the dispensationalist who observes the first day of the week rather than seventh so you know could you take that and be really cheeky with somebody you could I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it’s there in your notes and use it with the discretion.

All right. So, was it in the notes or did I do that now? Okay, I think I was being more discerning when I was writing my notes. Yeah. Yeah, you can come get that one for me later. I’ll try to get the PowerPoints themselves up online if I can so you can go on that. All right, so here we go.

ready for the fire hose, this is new material. And just for those of you that are looking at the endless list of slides and starting to jade over, we’re going to try to get through the dispensations and the covenants and then we’ll take a break for a little, for a few minutes, stretch, reload caffeine, whatever you’ve got to do, and then we’ll hit hermeneutics in the second half of tonight. That’s my plan. So we’re getting there, hang on, there’s a break coming. That being said, we’re going to dive into the constantly changing and fascinating world of dispensations. What are these different periods where we see God working in different ways? There’s going to be any different combination of these that you will hear from different dispensationists. Some people see four, some people see seven, you’ll see eight. I’ve thrown all nine that you’ll find in major writings by major dispensationalists up here, just because I don’t want you guys to feel like you got the diet version of this discussion. I

I want you to feel like you got the real deal. So this is not what everybody recognizes as being dispensations, but this includes most of the major dispensations that you’ll run into. So with that, let’s just quickly look at this slide and then we’ll jump through them one at a time. There is the age or dispensation of perfection or innocence, which is chronologically from the point of creation to the time of the fall. It was how God interacted with man before there was sin in the picture. Then there was this age of conscience or moral responsibility from the fall to the flood. How God reacted and how man reacted after sin entered the world and before God wiped out the world at the flood.

And there’s the age of civil government. After the flood and up to the time of Abraham followed by the age of promise or patriarchal rule. As God began to reveal himself to the patriarchs and promised this establishment of a land and blessings for the earth, that began to develop. That all took place during this age of promise, Abraham to Moses. Then you had the age of Mosaic law, where God chose to reveal the law in Sinai and begin to interact specifically with the nation of Israel in a special way. And that was from Moses all the way up until the time of Christ. I apologize again. Then you had the age of the church, where God establishes this new entity, because Again, we’re not going to say it’s different.

This new entity called the church that’s going to be taking place between the coming of Christ and the rapture. And then you’re going to have the time of tribulation, which is going to be from the rapture to the second coming. And then you’ll have this millennial reign, this physical rule of Christ on earth, which will be from the second coming to the great white throne. That’s what bookends Christ’s thousand years here on earth. And then you’ll have lastly, the unending dispensation of the eternal state, from the new heavens and the new earth into eternity. Those are the nine different time periods you’ll run into if you talk to or read through dispensationalist writings.

So, where do we see these things and what do they involve? Well, first let’s take a look at the age of perfection or of innocence. This was from the time of creation to the time of the fall. And it involved the Edenic covenant. And you gotta just learn to say these things Because you can say the promise has gotten made in Eden, but it’s more interesting if you say the Edenic covenant. So you can just walk away sounding very scholarly after we go through all these. And we’re going to see this in Genesis 1.28. Can somebody read Genesis 1.28 for us? And God blessed them, and God said, fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish and living things.

Exactly. And so we see here something that God told man to do. And this was how God was going to interact with man and what man was supposed to be up to during this period of time. And it’s from right there in Genesis 1. It’s a bilateral covenant. And the terms of this covenant include to be fruitful and multiply, and to have dominion over the earth. Those were the guidelines God gave in the Garden of Eden. Now we’re going to be jumping around back and forth here. Hopefully none of you are prone to seizures. I can slow down if it becomes an issue. So that’s the period of innocence. During the period of innocence we force in man’s job, multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Yes?

That’s when you were over-viewing covenantalism and you referred to that covenant of works. You said it’s debatable when there was a covenant in the dark of Eden. Yeah. I know, isn’t that sneaky? No, that’s a good point. I’m going to call it the Edenic Covenant because that is how you’re going to always see it. We make this disclaimer, when we’re looking at these different dispensations, they don’t always hinge on an actual covenant, but they are periods of time which God works differently in his creation. And so in this case, the Edenic Covenant, while it is debatable if it’s an actual covenant, is a statement of how God was going to work with men during that time. So we’re gonna, if you want to just put covenant little c and make it an italics in your mind when we go through this section, that’s okay. We’re not hinging everything on actual covenant, so we’re gonna run into a bunch of them. But we are depending on God making clear statements of how he’s going to deal with us differently in each period.

Yeah, so that’s a very good question. Well, like we read Douglas Wilson said, a covenant is a solemn bond sovereignly administered with attendant blessings and curses. In the case of the covenant they’re referring to, they’re talking about when God told Adam to eat from the tree he’ll die. They’re not talking about this verse. And so we’re gonna look at that verse and say, do we see a solemn bond sovereignly administered with attendant blessings and curses? No, we see a curse for a particular sin is all we’re gonna see there. Right. Right, that’s why I said we’re gonna, well we’ll use the term covenant softly in this Genesis passage. What is clear is that God, if you want to call it the Adanic mandate, I think that might be a better term. But, yes. Exactly. Yeah, so every book you’re gonna read they’re gonna call this the Adanic Covenant, and so if I don’t call that you’re going to be looking in vain to find anybody else who talks about this.

We could, I see Dave Light’s processing, so you can go bug him later and he’ll straighten you out. But yeah, for now we’re primarily talking about where has God told us that he’s working in different ways throughout history. That’s the main issue. Very true. Yeah, we’re all required to be precise with what we say until you get a doctorate, in which case you’re allowed to start making up words in terms that everybody else has been stuck with forever, even if it was a terrible term. So you’re finding some terms I don’t think are good. I would rather call this the Edenic Mandate, and if you want to put that in your notes you can.

That’s a fantastic question though. Fortunately for us, we don’t have to find a specific covenant, because we’re not covenantals. So, it makes it easy. Alright, the second period of time is called the period of conscience or moral responsibility. We talked about it from the fall to the flood. And in this period of time, you have what is referred to as the Adamic covenant. And we’re going to see this primarily in Genesis 3.7.

Can anybody read that passage for me as well as then if you can read seven and then jump down and read 14 to 19 That would be helpful And they knew that they were naked and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings 14 you said 14 to 19 the Lord God said to the serpent because you have done this cursed are you more than all cattle and more than every beast of the field on your belly you will go and dust you will eat all the days of your life and by the sweat of your face you will eat bread to return to the ground because from it you were taken for you are best to dust you shall return thank you and so you see in that verse after Adam and Eve sinned their eyes were opened they they recognize their nakedness, shame and guilt, enter the universe, you have a change in dispensation.

Something has fundamentally changed about the universe, and as a result, God is going to fundamentally change how He administers Himself towards men. Whereas before, His mandate would simply be fruitful and multiply, have dominion over the earth, He walked with them in the cool of the day. Now God shows up and He starts cursing everything. It’s a very sad dispensation. And this is what you call a unilateral, use the term softly, covenant, because there’s no ifs anywhere in these verses, are there? It’s just statements. You’re cursed and you’re cursed and you’re cursed, but, and there’s that little bit of hope, I will make a way someday for your seed to crush the head of the serpent.

So there is that promise for hope in the future, but it’s primarily of cursing. So you have enmity between the seed of the woman and the serpent, and the seed of the woman would crush the head of the serpent one day. how God is going to administer himself during this dispensation. The third one is this age of civil government. Now we’re going to go from the time of the flood all the way to Abraham. And this is going to be administered underneath the Noahic covenant. So we’ve had the Edenic, we’ve had the Adamic, and now we have the Noahic. So if you, just those terms don’t click. Just like we’ve talked about Eden, Adam, and Noah.

That’s where we’re going through. And you’re going to find a lot of support in 815 down through 917. Are we going to read all that? No. We’ll be here all night. But if you do go to that passage, this is after Noah comes out of the ark and he offers sacrifices to God. And God puts his rainbow in the heavens and says, from now on I will never destroy the world by water. That’s important. I was at a camp just about a week ago. And part of my job every morning was to read the Bible story from a kids Bible. And I’m reading the story of Noah to them. And it says, And God loved the people so much that he promised he would never destroy the world again, so he hung up his war bow in the sky.

His war bow. He hung it up in the sky. And I was thinking, this is problematic, because tonight when I preach on this topic, I’m going to talk about how God’s coming back to destroy the earth, where it was again, but with fire. So God’s just promised no more water, but fire is very much on the table. And he’s promised to use that. So God promises not to destroy the world through water, and then he discusses a number of other things that I think we usually gloss over when we go through this in Sunday school. But Noah and his sons are blessed and commanded to repopulate the earth. Plants and animals are made available for food at this time.

God grants them that to eat. is forbidden and capital punishment is established at this time. God promises never again to destroy all of life on earth by flood and the rainbows created as an everlasting sign of this covenant. So the covenant represents not just God not destroying the world again by a flood but it also stands as a reminder the covenant for how civilly people are going to start to relate. Capital punishment, populating the earth, eating animals, etc etc. So those are all involved in the Snowaic Covenant, they all fit into this dispensation of civil government. Then we’ll jump to the dispensation of promise, or patriarchal rule.

This is picking up now from Abraham and going to Moses. And obviously if we’re talking about Abraham, we have a huge covenant that’s so important in the Bible. The Abrahamic Covenant stated in Genesis 12. So if somebody could read us the first three verses of that, that would be very helpful. Lord said to me go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you and I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you and make your name great So that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you I will curse and in use all the families of the earth shall be blessed Great and this covenant is restated at least two more places in chapter 15 and in chapter 17 and I recommend you guys look those up because it adds more details to the covenant.

But in essence, this covenant comprises three different ingredients. There’s a blessing, there’s a seed, and there’s a land that are part of this covenant. The blessing is God promises to bless Abraham by blessing those who blessed him and cursing those who cursed him. That was a promise to Abraham. There is also a seed. God would make Abraham a great nation, from Abraham would come this great nation, and land. God would give Abraham the land of Israel. That’s not fully mentioned in Genesis 12 here, but in Genesis 15 and 17, and then further on to Abraham’s descendants, this covenant gets very specifically defined as to what piece of land is involved in that promise.

So that’s the Abrahamic promise. So God comes down to Abraham and he begins to pick a people for himself, the nation of Israel. So that’s something new he hasn’t done so far. Noah wasn’t an Israelite. He didn’t have a special nation at that point. He was just a righteous man. And you might put the definite article in there. He was the righteous man on earth at the time. So that’s the period of Promiser-Patriarchal Rule, which leads us to the period of Mosaic Now we’re past the patriarchs, now we’re talking about Moses. And this is going to be the longest one. It’s going to go all the way from Moses to the time of Christ.

And we’ve got three different covenants that God made during this period of time. They helped define how he was going to work with his people. There was the Mosaic Covenant, the Palestinian Covenant, and the Davidic Covenant. Some people are going to debate the Palestinian Covenant a little bit. But again, I’m giving you guys a full meal deal. So if you see the Palestinian Covenant, you’ll know what they’re talking about.

about. And we’re going to see in Exodus 19 is where God’s going to start to reveal himself and to relate towards men in this way. But we’ll take these one at a time. So if somebody wants to read Genesis chapters 19 through 24, this would be where God was giving the law. And in short, it was a bilateral covenant with the following terms. God would bless Israel if they obeyed him. God would curse Israel if they disobeyed him. That’s the Mosaic Law to nutshell. Lots of specific stipulations on how they were to live. And at the end, God says, if you will do these things, I will bless you. And the people say all these things, we will do them. And God says, good, because if you don’t, I will curse you. I will bring the foreign nations to conquer you, and things are going to get bad. And they say, that’s okay.

And as we see throughout the rest of the Old Testament, they suffer the consequences for constantly violating the nation of Israel, violating this Mosaic covenant. And that’s one of the great scenes in the Old Testament, if you want to go home and read it, because they actually had the priest split up onto two mountains. And one mountain shouted forth the blessings for obedience, and the other mountain shouted back the cursings for disobedience. I’ve been there. I would have been as quite an impression, you would have had an impression made upon you at that point. And every time they walked past those mountains, they would remember, blessings, hersing, blessings, hersing.

So that’s the Mosaic covenant. And there was the Palestinian covenant. This one was made in the chapter of 30, chapter 30 of the book of Deuteronomy. Excuse me. This was a unilateral covenant. This was a covenant that God made and he just holds himself to it. He promised he would scatter the nation of Israel among the nations of the world. Now there’s no way you can read this, so I’m going to zoom in a little more for you. One second. There we go. He promised he would scatter Israel among the nations of the world. He promised the turning of Israel’s heart and soul back to God. This is cool. Because God could have just said, I promise I’m going to curse you someday.

And that’s it. But he promised that he would turn Israel’s heart back to himself. He promised Israel’s blessing that it would be related to the return of the Lord. So the Lord promised to return to his people one day, and Israel’s blessing would be related to that return. Promised a repossession of the land, after they had been scattered. Promised they would repossess the land. Promised conversion unto God. the punishment of the Gentile nations and promised millennial blessings. This is all wrapped up in the statements of the millennial, or the Palestinian covenant. So it’s really a packed set of promises that God gives.

And because of this, some people today have gotten super excited. Israel’s back in the land. God’s fulfilling the Palestinian covenant. We’ve got to go over there and make sure that the Israeli government is stable and it’s supported and all those kind of things. You have to be careful, because remember all of these covenants are hinging upon the return of the heart of Israel to their God and the return of the Lord. That’s when this will be fulfilled. Is it good that Israel is back in their land? Yes. I think it’s unkind to see any nation scattered across the world and persecuted. I’m glad that they are back in their land.

Is this a fulfillment of God’s promise for Israel? No. Israel is a secular nation. Their government is a secular government. hearts have not turned back to God. When that happens though then you will see these promises filled. Is God possibly starting to put pieces into place to fulfill this covenant? Very possible. But if Israel gets kicked out of their land next week God has not broken his promises yet because Israel’s heart has not yet turned back to him. So that’s the Palestinian Covenant. Then you have the Davidic Covenant. This is the covenant that God made with David and with his descendants and this one I think is short enough that we can read, can And somebody reads Psalm 89 verses 3 and 4.

That’s a pretty sweet covenant, if you happen to be David. If you happen to be going up against him in an election, that’s a bummer. But God promises David will have an unending dynasty, an eternal dynasty, to his descendants. And then in 2 Samuel 8 to 17, that’s further described. I’ll just read you some of the details you’ll see there. That God would give David a great name. And that doesn’t mean that he’s not going to name him something like Archibald. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure you have a good name. His reputation, his standing, would be known and would be wonderful. That’s what it means to have a great name.

It promised a restful and permanent place for Israel. A place of peace. A son to build a house for God was included in God’s promise to David. You’re not going to build my house, but your son will. That was Solomon. Seed that would be established forever, and the establishment of an eternal throne. That last one is what marks the difference between some of the flavors of dispensationalists. Is Jesus technically reigning on David’s throne today in a spiritual sense, or does Does that only begin when he returns in the Millennial Kingdom and sits on the throne of David in a physical sense? So that’s what’s going to be the difference between your classical and your modified or progressive dispensationalist.

So you can see how these things start to work their way out into these systems we’re talking about. Very interesting, this covenant is referred to at least three times in the New Testament. Gabriel quotes from it when he’s telling Mary that her son will be born. Was Jesus really the Davidic descendant? Yes, by angelic decree. Peter proclaims Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the Davidic Covenant at Pentecost. And James refers to the Davidic Covenant in his declaration at the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15. These covenants were in the minds of the people and they understood that these covenants talked about how God was going to deal with his people.

And so they were watching for God to do that. So that was the Davidic Covenant. That takes us up through that whole dispensation. So now we’ve gotten through the dispensation of Mosaic Law from Moses all the way up to the time of Christ. And we are getting there. We’re getting there. So break time’s coming. I really appreciate you guys being attentive and patient. I think I would have been out by now myself personally. So thank you. Now we’re at the dispensation of the Church, Christ to the Rapture. And this involves the best covenant of all the covenants ever made, which is the new covenant. How do I know that it’s the best covenant? Well, Hebrews calls it a better covenant.

So it’s the best covenant. You see that referred to in Acts 2, 1-4 is where this dispensation changed. That’s not what the covenant’s mentioned. But this dispensation begins in Acts 2 with the coming of the Holy Spirit and the beginning of the day of Pentecost. If we’re going to look at the actual covenant, there we go. We’re going to actually have to go all the way back to Jeremiah. Jeremiah chapter 31, 27 through 40, God promises that He is going to come and make a new covenant with His people. Can somebody read Luke 22, 20 for us? And in the same way He took the cup after they had eaten, saying, this cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.

That was huge. We say that in communion, and it’s kind of like, okay, time to drink the cup now, right? When Christ said that to His disciples, He unloaded all Old Testament hope and expectation on them. And it would have blown them away for Him to say, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. That would have been shocking. So all the promises that were most specifically described in Jeremiah 31, 27 through 40, Christ says, I’m inaugurating those through my blood. And then in Hebrews 8, 7 through 9, 24, the author of Hebrews goes to great lengths to show exactly that, how the blood of Christ affected the promises of the new covenant, and that that’s the reality that we’re living in now.

Different than the reality we’re living in. Different dispensation. Some of the promises that come with the New Covenant included the internalization of God’s law into the heart. Not just something that the rabbis were always reading and always proclaiming that you kept hearing but that God’s law would actually finally be internalized into the heart of His people. The rebuilding of God, sitting in a form that will never be overthrown again. There’s the sacrifice of Christ that would be the payment to initiate the New Covenant. The New Covenant would replace the old covenant. This is the high priest and the advocate, that’s part of the new covenant, and members of the new covenant will receive eternal life.

That’s a great covenant. It’s a great covenant. It’s also great because it’s another unilateral covenant. Yes? So, as long as the heart, many old Testament references talk about, I may have hearts of stone, I don’t give them a heart of flesh. Is this a fulfillment of that, or is that when Israel turns their hearts back to God, fulfillment of it or is it kind of a pre-filment of what God’s going to do for his works? Gotcha. So when God promises his nation Israel, I will give you hearts of flesh instead of hearts of stone. It’s the new covenant, the fulfillment of that promise. They’re related. Because it is through the new covenant reality of Christ that their hearts will be turned back to hearts of flesh.

But it is going to be a special act of God for his nation that will cause that to happen at a national level. God has said that yes, under the provisions of the New Covenant, my people’s hearts can be turned back to me. But as Paul writes in Romans, God has allowed their hearts to be hardened to the effects of that New Covenant for a time. And there will be a time then when God will allow them to respond and they will look on him and they have pierced and they will be pierced themselves. Yeah, so that’s coming. And it is through the promises of the New Covenant. But yeah, it is. So it’s yes and no. Yes, through the New Covenant, but it’s also a separate promise. It’s working through Israel.

What we didn’t see in Acts was Israel as a nation. Because hearts were pierced, like Peter’s. Right. And those were Jews. Then hearts were being turned. There was the establishment of this thing called a church. Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female. all of these people being saved and forming this new entity without any kind of human division to separate them. But God has a plan for a national Israel. Yes, and so forth. There will be Jews that will be saved throughout time, but it’s promised that that’s going to be a hard field. It’s promised that their hearts are going to be hardened. And today you don’t see Jewish people being saved in thrones.

And part of it is because of this. So evidence would speak to that being an individual promise on national. Right, yeah. The New Covenant is an individual promise in the sense that God promises he’s going to save his people, he’s going to be coming through the blood of Christ, it’s for the church, and that it will eventually affect the nation of Israel, but not until a later time. Yeah. So we’re going to, there will be a slide at the very end, The last slide we have will show all these lines weaving and connecting together. We see distinctions, but it’s not that God is operating completely unconnected from whatever else he’s doing.

Yeah? The fulfillment of Joel 2 also. Yes. Yeah. Don’t you dare go into Joel 2. I’m not ready for that. You’ve already dealt with that. Okay, good. Yeah. So that was the church age. A couple more here. The tribulation, which is going to be from the rapture to the second coming. So the church age is going on, boom, God takes his people out of the earth. That’s different. That’s something God hasn’t done yet. There is no new covenant made, but this is the preparation. God is getting ready to fulfill his covenants. So his covenants are already in effect. They are already beginning to be experienced. God’s law is coming into our hearts.

We are receiving the promises of eternal life. But God has not completed all of the promises He made in His covenants. This period of tribulation is when God is getting ready to do that. And so you read about in Matthew 24 how God is starting to get ready for the coming of or for the fulfillment of His covenants. you can refer to a very long series on Matthew 24 that goes through this in much greater detail that was delivered upstairs. So with all these dispensations, there was also this series that was preached through all of these. Did they actually call them dispensations? Because I didn’t hear all the messages.

But he essentially went through the dispensations. So if you want to go back through all these passages in more detail, you can take a look there as well on the church website. And then you get to the period of the millennium. This is from the second coming of the Great White Throne. So this is a period of seven years of tribulation, where Christ is beginning to pour out His wrath on the earth. The Church has been taken up. At the end of that, He comes back. That’s when you have Armageddon and all the events there. Christ destroys His enemies. Christ brings back with Him all of the saved, who are met by those who have been saved on earth.

There’s this great time of rejoicing. There’s the establishment of a kingdom. Christ is ruling on earth for a thousand years. That’s the Millennial Kingdom. Satan is bound during this period of time. And again, some of you are thinking, whoa, this doesn’t sound right. You’re probably on Millennial. Maybe we can talk about that later. This is the Dispensational Camp. We understand Christ, Satan’s bound. At the end of that time, Satan’s freed. He comes back to see his nations. They go up. They decide they’re going to have a war. They come up, knock on the front door. God fries them all with fire out of heaven. And then you have this thing called the Great White Throne.

And that’s where God judges the unbelieving dead of all time and casts them in like a fire. That’s the period of the millennium. This is where covenant fulfillments are finally really beginning to be initiated. You’re seeing the effects of the curse beginning to be rolled back, time of blessing. God is on earth. He’s sitting on David’s throne. He’s administrating his people. The hearts of Israel have been turned back to them. It’s a time of great blessing. And so God is really kicking his covenants into high gear. And that’s going to be cool to be a part of that and to watch God vindicate himself in front of the nations of the world.

And you can read about that in Revelation 21-6, which leads then into the Eternal State, the Last Dispensation. Following the Great White Judgment Throne, the emptying of the unbelievers in the Lake of Fire, this heavens and this earth are dissolved by a great heat. They are melted at the elemental level. It says, and the new heavens and new earth are created or recreated, depending on what you want to… we can talk about that too. There’s a new heaven, there’s a new earth, And that’s where we spend eternity. This is the permanent state of covenant fulfillment, Revelation 21. All of God’s promises completely fulfilled in place, forever and ever.

This is the dispensation we’re all waiting for. This is the big one. So that is, in a nutshell, all the dispensations that you’ll run into as you study this topic. So you can see how God has done a lot of different things throughout history. to a lot of different people for different reasons. Same God, same character, same purposes, different things he’s doing. And that’s kind of cool. They might tease us about our charts and our graphs and all these lists, but I think in the complexity of God’s working, with the unity of his character, there is such an amazing amount of glory that he gives to himself. And I think we give God glory as we marvel in His complexity and in the intricacy of His plan as it unfolds, just as much as our covenant brothers and sisters marvel in God’s simplicity.

Well now we’re getting to the issue which I think is at the heart of the whole discussion. In many ways this is the most important section that we’ll talk about in our entire discussion of covenantalism and dispensationalism. is hopefully where the issue will become the most clear as to what the difference is and why. I think it all through the place where we will most strongly see why we stand where we do and why we feel that being dispensational is probably the preferred position and why this church goes that direction. So that is all under the topic and under the heading of hermeneutics. And as we dive into this, it’s helpful to keep in mind what is this topic of hermeneutics.

Well, if you’re going to look at studying the Bible as a game, hermeneutics is the rulebook. I know it’s if you’re playing soccer in the World Cup or something, this isn’t telling the athletes which play to run, but it’s telling the athletes where the boundaries of the field are, and what’s off limits, and what’s off sides. And if you’ve been watching the World Cup, it seems like that would be a good rule for them to refer to a little more often. But, Hermonetics is the rule book for studying Scripture. And that’s critical, because what you’ll get out of Scripture is going to be largely dependent upon how you study it.

If you’re going to be a liberal theologian, and you’re going to assume that there isn’t such thing as supernatural, If you’re going to assume the books weren’t written by who they were written by, if you’re going to assume that it contains mythology, then you’re going to get a lot different message out of the Bible than if you assume that God wrote it and he meant what he said. So that’s very important. What are the rules that the covenant theologians use when they come to scripture? Well, I’ve collected some quotes that I think are very helpful. The first is from O.P. Robertson, who by all accounts is one of the foremost covenant theologians out there.

He’s written a number of very influential books defining covenantal theology. He says this, “…yet many theologians in the present day continued to interpret the promise of the land and the old covenant in terms of its shadowy, typological dimensions rather than recognizing the greater scope of new covenant fulfillment.” He’s saying there, The problem today is all these people keep reading the Old Testament and assuming that’s all it’s talking about. Excuse me, reading the Old Testament and assuming that’s all it’s talking about, instead of reading the New Testament, seeing the greater realities of New Covenant truth, and reinterpreting the Old Testament with those.

And so in this case he’s talking about the land and what God meant when he promised Abraham the land. And we’ll talk about this again next week, When God said to Abraham, you’re going to get a land from here to here, from here to here, that’s not actually what God was referring to. He’s referring to the greater reality that we will inherit the universe. And I’ll show how O.P. Robertson makes that exact claim. We’ll get to that next week. He goes on to say, in the nature of things, these writers, referring to Old Testament writers, could only employ images with which they and their hearers were familiar. But in the context of the realities of the New Covenant, this land must be understood in terms of the newly recreated cosmos about which the Apostle Paul speaks in Romans.

So we have to understand that Old Testament writers, their vocabulary, their concepts were limited. They couldn’t write about what they were really writing about. But in the New Testament, they were now able to write about what they were really writing about. And so we need to go back and understand that the Old Testament people were just unfortunately limited and we’re going to fill in the gaps for them. Paul Martin Hanbury in the journal Dispensational Theology wrote, basic rules of interpretation accepted by covenant theologians include that words must be understood in their plain historical sense, the grammatical historical sense. That’s good. That scripture is of divine origin and contains no contradictions. That’s good.

That scripture should explain scripture, the so-called analogy of scripture. That’s good as far as it goes. And that the Holy Spirit must illuminate the meaning of the text for us. So far, so great. However, covenant theologians modify these basic rules in actual application and use as follows. Literal interpretation of prophecy not yet fulfilled is entirely untenable. If it hasn’t happened yet, we shouldn’t interpret it literally. That’s what he’s saying there. Prophecy must be interpreted in a spiritual or allegorical sense. That is, prophecy not yet fulfilled. So you can’t say all prophecy is to be interpreted allegorically, because there’s a lot of prophecies in the Bible that were fulfilled literally in the Bible.

But prophecies that still haven’t been fulfilled are to be understood more allegorically or spiritually. A theological interpretation must be added to the grammatical historical method, especially to unfulfilled prophecy. For example, the land promise, God promised Abraham land from here to here from here to here. That’s the literal grammatical understanding. The theological understanding of the concept of a land promise, which actually refers to the inheritance of the universe by the saints, must be added to that. The Old Testament must be interpreted by the New Testament, not that the Old Testament is aided by the New Testament, but it must be interpreted by the New Testament, resulting at times in a new meaning of the Old Testament passage.

Now this guy is not a covenant theologian. He’s critiquing them. So you’re thinking, well, that’s not very fair. I put his quote first because we’re going to read the next quote from a covenant theologian who’s going to say this very same thing. Does that answer your question? I think so. Okay. With such modifications, of course, the result is an artificial exegesis. The imposition of a theological system, covenant theology upon the Bible, forces a reinterpretation of prophecy not yet clearly fulfilled. It is difficult to reinterpret a prophecy already literally fulfilled, such as the birthplace of Jesus, the extent of this imposition controls the interpretive outcome.

So he’s saying that covenant theologians are using a system to reinterpret Scripture. How much pressure that system pushes on their exegesis determines what they think the Scripture means. That’s stating the case very strongly, but I don’t think it’s stating the case inaccurately. Richard Pratt Jr. says, all Protestants who have remained faithful to their heritage affirm sola scriptura, the belief that the Bible is our supreme and unquestionable authority. Covenant theology, however, distinguishes the Reformed view of Scripture from other Protestant outlooks by emphasizing that divine covenants unify, I should say, unify the teachings of the entire Bible.

This is a covenant theologian. More and more we find that Reformed theology has been reduced to what we often call the doctrines of grace. Of course we should value these truths of Scripture, but when we fail to stress the larger framework that covenant theology provides, our understanding of the Bible soon begins to suffer. When we don’t stress our framework, our understanding of Scripture suffers. That’s a somewhat dangerous statement to make. He wrote this in a magazine called Table Talk, an article called Reformed Theology is Covenant Theology. trying to argue that you’re not reformed unless you hold to this kind of covenant theology.

Jacob, yes. Do you think he would substitute the word hermeneutics for framework? We’re gonna, no, that would not be quite accurate. The framework is one of the tools that’s out there. Hermeneutics is how are you supposed to use it? Yeah. So if the framework’s shovel hermeneutics is where are you allowed to dig how deep are you allowed to dig what do you do with the dirt when you dig it? Would it be accurate to say that the covenant of the yield ocean puts on a special pair of colossus that are tinted with those overarching covenants so that when they see the scriptures and then go after their normal approach there gets all tinted.

In other words, could that framework be as worldview when it comes to scripture? I think in what you’re driving at, yes. Obviously, yeah, they would not fully agree with the way you said that. But I think in essence, yes. And I’m being really… I’m dancing around it a little bit because they’re very particular about how you say things. Because the covenant guys are the smartest Christians you’ll find. Right, and that’s my concern right there, that’s what you just mentioned. Because being a lay person at any formal, built Bible training, okay, even when you were teaching earlier, as I pondered and kind of worked through this, what I came up with was, it’s like you would need a person like me, somebody newly saved, going to read in the Old Testament, you would just take it at face value.

But under this system, you do need a secret decoder ring, and you need somebody over you to give you that framework by which to interpret it. And in that sense it seems very much Roman Catholic like. That’s a very mouse thing to vote on. I wasn’t going to fully go there, but that has crossed my mind. Remember, the person who wanted to reform the Catholic Church and be a protestant. Yeah, and when we get to the… It makes a lot of sense. Yeah, no, I think you’re very accurate. If you… the next time you’re talking to someone who’s covenantal, you’re like, oh, you’re like the Roman Catholic Christians. They’re really not going to like that.

But there is the danger when you develop such an intricate framework that you use to interpret Scripture, and when you make statements like, if we fail to emphasize our structure, structure, our understanding of the Bible suffers, then you begin to have gatekeepers of truth. And the Bible says that we are the priesthood that access the Father through the Word directly. And so we want to make sure that we don’t put something between man and God. Because they also brought us the priesthood of the believer. They did. So, kind of connected but a little different. When we read the Old Testament and read the news and go back and reinterpret the old, is that kind of saying that the old is really, the original old is erosive? Not erosive, not perfect. It’s not complete, it’s not inherent.

Right, and that is, I think, a legitimate charge to make when you have cases of reinterpretation. Now they’re going to appeal to the imagery of blossoming and of shadow to substance, And they’re going to say, it’s not that they were wrong, it’s that they saw dimly and we see clearly. And they’re going to say, it’s all been the same thing, it’s just now we really see what’s going on. So they’re going to appeal to progressive revelation. But we’re going to say progressive revelation can add information but not reinterpret. This is a very important quote. It’s probably the strongest I found in the covenant view. We have made frequent reference to the covenant, have tried to see it in a variety of perspectives.

We have now reached the stage where we have to consider it in strictly theological terms. Our purpose in this investigation is to recognize the covenant as a fundamental principle or presupposition at the core of all Christian theology. In this effort, we can choose one of two possible methods, the strictly exegetical method whereby each text is evaluated in accordance with the insights, religious concepts, and cultural values of a given age, or the synthetic method whereby we overlook the nuances of meaning attaching to each text and try to see the covenant as an overall concept. Biblical scholars usually tend to adhere to the first method with the result that we have a large variety of conflicting opinions. So he’s saying, the reason why we all disagree in the church today is because we keep trying to understand God’s word The second method, though less precise, has the advantage of reducing the different views to one common denominator.

In this way, the covenantal relationship can be stated in one single sentence, God’s condescension to man. This simple formula is sufficient to cover every biblical situation bearing upon the divine human encounter, but it applies with equal relevance to every theological utterance in which revelation is assumed. So he’s saying this simplification of scripture to the idea of the covenants can be used every single place you have revelation, divine revelation, and if we’ll look at scripture through the simplification of the covenants, that’s how we will eliminate all the division in the church, that’s how we’ll get at some kind of a unified understanding of the Bible.

Most covenant theologians will not state it in these words. But the more I read, the more I have the conviction that covenant theology, in effect, practices this basic understanding. Yes? Would they not state it in those words as he has because they see the problem with it? Yeah. So we want to accept what he says, but we really want to tell anybody we’re accepting what he says. Again, when I made kind of the joke about all the smart Christians are covenantal, that is the reality that you’re going to find most of the people with letters after their last name are going to line up in that camp. And so such a simple statement like this, well just anybody who’s been around academia knows that if you’re in academics, you never want to say anything bluntly, because then people will know what you’re talking about and they might disagree with you directly.

You want to phrase things and hedge them and dance around. So I had quite a bit of difficulty trying to precisely define anything in this discussion. It took me about three months of pretty serious study to try to come up with my definition of covenant theology, because I had to go through hundreds and hundreds of pages of very intricate, broad, but vague argument and discussion before I could finally start seeing the points of commonality. Like I said, I finally found, I think, the best definition on Wikipedia. Helped out there too. After I had written mine, I went back and said, oh, I think that was pretty good. So they don’t want to state it this directly, because they understand the implications of what he’s saying, which are dangerous.

And they don’t want to feel that their view actually sits in that camp. But anytime you’re going to make something an interpretive framework, and they all do use that language, anytime something becomes an interpretive framework, you’re letting something besides the Bible determine what the Bible means. And once you’ve done that, then you are in this situation. And then as Paul said a minute ago, the degree to which you do that determines your interpretation. Yeah, they’ll state it in 400 pages, but it essentially will mean the same thing. Are you going to bring up the scroll argument? Go for it. That would exactly state that you just said that that little quote from this guy.

When scroll said, if it was in the Bible, my friend John would believe it. But since it isn’t in the Bible, what we need to understand is continuity and discontinuity. and off the watch. That says it all. I mean all the master’s seminary guys that went to that debate, sitting in the audience, we were all getting up out of the chair. Debate’s over. Then he goes, no, no, we need to understand the continuity and discontinuity. He writes it on the blackboard and off he goes. Right. Now the covenantal folks, it’s not like they just grab these covenants out of the air and start in line. they believe they see the covenants in Scripture. So they believe the Bible itself reveals a secret to come to ground.

And then they interpret it to put the reign on as a free researcher. Right, as we were sharing in the gap, if you recall the one slide I showed that had all the different covenants in the Bible and they were all grouped up with the two larger covenants. As they’re reading the Bible, they’re saying, hmm, it seems like I see a bunch of times where God’s being gracious with people in these covenants. and I’ve seen a bunch of times where God’s dealing with people pretty severely in his covenants. And they’ll start grouping those similar things together and saying, why do we see all these things that are similar? They must have some underlying reality that they’re coming from, that must be some gracious covenant that is the root of all of these individual covenants that are gracious.

And they start developing all these things by implication. I think the fact that covenant theology was heavily developed during the period of modernism, of modernism when the concept of a metanarrative was strong greatly informs that for some of you that come out of sociological background. We’ll get into some of that when we talk about the historical development of it. So I guess I won’t steal all my thunder from next week, but yeah. But you made a statement that baptism has replaced circumcision and that’s infant baptism And it’s like, okay, what covenant took that come under? I mean, that’s really stretching.

Well, again, if you see continuity, you’ve got this covenant of grace. And God makes a covenant of grace with humanity, starting with Adam and Eve saying that I’m going to redeem you someday. And he’s revealing more and more information about it. You get the time of Abraham, and he says, you guys are going to demonstrate that you are part of this covenant of grace with a sign.

sign. That sign is going to be circumcision. So from now on you’re going to practice a sign to indicate that you are accepting the blessings and curses that come with being part of this covenant of grace. And so then you march down through history and you get to the New Testament and the church is the same thing as Israel, just a fuller reality of that. Well, do we see that this sign that has always been part of this covenant of grace is in the New Testament as well? Well, let’s see. We don’t see circumcision anymore, but this thing called baptism has shown up. That must be the sign that a person is participating in this covenant.

If they’re not doing it on end, I mean it as an outward. And what Sproul would say is, and Sproul will say, if you can show me one instance in the Bible where you had a person who was saved, and then they had a child, and they didn’t baptize them as an infant, then I will change my view. He says the reason why you don’t the infant baptism in the testament is they’re all first generation believers. They’re all people that are getting saved and so they’re becoming part of the covenant community. Their children will be born into the covenant community so they will receive the sign of the covenant as an infant because you as a parent are going to bring them into the covenant community with you.

So that’s an argument from silence. He actually says that. This is an argument from silence but I think it’s a very loud silence in this case. Yeah, we had a discussion with one of the students that went to church here and graduated from grace and stuff. And he believes in the infant baptism thing. And we had quite a discussion with him. We disagreed, disagreed, but it was kind of interesting. Well, I’m just thinking being a women where you’ve got a denture farmed, persimmed farm, here. Yeah, their kids are children in their covenant, but what does that look like practically lived out? A lot of times that’s just violence.

Would you see it as saying things like that as well? What does it seem like to us living there? It kind of becomes that way. A real strong covenant theologian, if they see their children living a sinful life, will actually really be mourning for them because they will believe that God will have stricter judgment on the disobedience of their children because they’ve been part of the covenant community. So yeah, there’s a lot of practical implications of this. Yeah? that facial appearance generally have faithful children who grow up in our state. Yes, and we did mention that. Which is, can be argued, again, as being part of the covenantal relationship that God honors your faithfulness.

We just don’t recognize it by baptism. We wait, and we wait, and we wait, until some magical age that they can be baptized, because of you, you cause the problem with your guys, too young. I was going to say, we, that, you know… I go to Valley Bible Church in Spokane, so I don’t know what you’re talking about. No, but yeah, you make a point that covenant is not a dirty word. We just talked about a whole bunch of covenants in the Bible. And there are very real blessings that come from being in the New Covenant. God does often bless the obedience of parents that are in a relationship with Him in their children. And that’s great, but we’re not going to say that’s because of the Old Testament covenant community of Israel being dragged into the New Testament and just being called to church now instead.

Yeah. I think we had a quote way back at the beginning the first week where they make the distinction. Being in a covenant community is not the same as being elect. part of the covenant community simply places you under blessings and curses corresponding to a certain relationship with God. And so they’re gonna say if you’re in the covenant community as a child you may not be elect, but you will have a leg up. You will have certain blessings that come from being raised in that community. You’ll have certain advantages. You’ll have certain predispositions from being in that community. And if you’re not one of the elect and you reject God, you will come in a greater judgment. You’ll have a higher accountability because you were in the covenant community rejected him.

Just like they would say a Jewish person would not necessarily be a man of faith, but they would have grown up in Israel and if they choose to follow God they have extra blessings that come with being part of the people of God. But if they choose to rebel against God within the nation of Israel there was stricter punishment for disobeying God than there was out in the Gentile nations. So covenant community and elect or savior are not synonymous. But yeah, any other questions on that? I think I have some pictures that will hopefully be helpful. We’ve gotten through some of these quotes. There we go. Time for pictures.

So, what do covenant hermeneutics look like in practice? And that’s probably a little smaller so I can make it a little bigger for you guys. You start with a literal historical grammatical study of scripture that reveals that God is a covenant making God. So as we study scripture we see, hmm, God makes covenants. These promises or covenants can be grouped into either two or three categories of similar kinds of promises and covenants. Grace and works, or redemption as well if you see that third one. These similarities are best explained by seeing two or three overarching covenants making the promises and covenants mentioned explicitly in scripture, restatements or refinements of these primary implicit covenants. Does that make sense?

The best way to explain why we see so many similarities between God’s promises is to conclude that there is an overarching covenant of which all the specifically stated covenants in scriptures are merely a restatement or a refinement. So the explicit statements in scriptures are refinements of the implicit overarching covenant that we understand must be true because it’s the best explanation for why we see similarities between the covenants that God makes. Because I found a bunch of summer dots in the connective, assuming that there’s an interesting and may not be a conviction.

Right, and again, the people connecting the dots are guys like Jonathan Edwards and Spurgeon and people like that, so they’re not like me growing up in church trying to do a little connective dots in the back. Phew, these guys, they’re dots and they’re connecting or doctoral thesis. So, they’re very cool dots and very cool lines, but they are not things that are mentioned explicitly in Scripture. So these covenants then must inform our understanding of God’s activities through Scripture. When we see God working, we must keep in mind the overarching covenants that He has. So a passage’s meaning is the result of filtering our literal grammatical historical exegesis through these covenants and their logical implications. So we started by saying the Bible, which led us to conclude that there’s this overarching framework which we then must go back through. It’s like refried beans. Cook it once, you got to cook it again before you’re ready to eat it.

Okay, that’s the basic idea. If you want to look at it as a pyramid instead, this might be helpful. You have the text of Scripture, grammatical historical literal exegesis, and they do good at this. Some of the best people at digging and seeing what scripture means are covenantal. But then they add the layer of the covenants on top before they get to the meaning of the text. And that’s where dispensational folks will say, no you can’t do that. You have to put the meaning of the text right on top of your exegesis. When we stop at the second level, they say we’re just cowboy Americans. Reading the Bible off on our own.

which I interpret for the plow boy is supposed to be able to understand. Right. Yeah. And when we get to the historical development, we’re going to see how the dispensation of it was popular in the Pentecostal movement and the Charismatic fringe. And so our stereotype for them is going to be some, you know, bookworm who’s unrelated to reality. Their stereotype for us is going to be some crazy Charismatic who is reading three words and coming up with his whole theology out of it. So that’s the two stereotypes that are always fighting at each other. On the flip side, what do dispensationalists claim is the core of their hermeneutics?

Consistently literal or plain interpretation is indicative of a dispensational approach to the interpretation of the scriptures. And that’s Craig Blaising, who’s a very well-known dispensationalist quoting Ryrie, whose work called Dispensationalism was kind of the mantra of Dispensationalism for a long time. Eliot Johnson, what I mean by historical grammatical interpretation and how that differs from spiritual interpretation, seems like somebody along the way should have taught this guy that the title could be shortened up a little bit. He apparently did, yeah. An original expression of a historical truth may have a limited time of application, as with the truths about animal sacrifices, and thus be replaced by a subsequent historical truth resting on the completed work of Christ.

But such a replacement of an original truth does not alter, contradict, nor deny the original expression of truth. merely reflects that God’s dealing with man may change as the fulfillment of God’s purposes progressively unfold. That kind of looks like what we’ve been saying all along. The New Testament can give us new information, additional information, fuller information, but it will not go back to the Old Testament and say it doesn’t mean what it says. So dispensational hermeneutics then follow this kind of a flow-plast. A literal historical grammatical study of scripture enables us to determine the original intent of the author.

What was he trying to say when he wrote it? There’s an old maxim, if the plain sense makes sense, don’t seek any other sense when you’re studying the Bible. Each passage must be taken within its own immediate context and means what the author meant when he penned it. Since God’s word is by definition revelation, we must not presume to approach any part of it other than according to the rules of normal language. One of the most contradictory or ironic theological terms I think in all of Christendom is perspicuity, which is the doctrine that scripture is not hard to understand. The idea being, God was not trying to conceal himself from everybody but the intellectual elite.

He was trying to reveal himself by what he wrote and had written in the pages of scripture. And so when we come to scripture, we expect to find God revealing himself. And so what it says is what it meant. And we’re not looking for any additional sense or some kind of a confusing framework that we have to use the secret decoder key before we understand what God was trying to reveal. Thus, we must use a single set of hermeneutical principles to understand all genres of scripture, including prophecy. We use our same rulebook, what does this verse mean, using grammar, using language, using history, using all the basic tools that you use to understand regular language, same set of rules for all genres of scripture, and interpretive difficulties when you come to something that’s tough, it must be addressed through more strenuous exegesis, not through hermeneutical modification.

So when we come to a passage that’s not fitting into our system well, the solution is to study more, not to change our rule book, or not to reinterpret the passage based off of our framework. It’s very important. A passage’s meaning, finally, is the result of determining the intent of the original author by means of a grammatical historical exegesis alone. And that’s the key word there, because our covenantal brothers and sisters do use grammatical historical exegesis, but not alone. So if you want to call it sola exegesis, you want to add that to your little reformation, your personal reformation, you go for it.

That is the essence, I think, that makes a distinction between covenantalism and dispensationalism, is putting no additional layer between your exegesis and the meaning of the text. Does this mean that dispensationalism has all the answers for every passage? Not yet. I don’t think we’ve arrived. But the reason why I’m glad I’m a dispensationalist is because I think that we’re being more honest with the text. And I think that the answers that we will come to as we continue to study God’s Word will be more accurate. Because I’m not going to change what God’s Word says to fit what I assume it must mean because of my framework.

I’m going to keep changing my framework every time it doesn’t fit with what I determine God’s Word says. I think that’s the best way to go. Yes? Both approaches recognize progressive revelation. Yes. Yes. Right. One is purely additive, meaning one purely gives more information, the other is allowed to reinterpret. And that changes what is already given. Right, exactly. That’s where you had that one quote. It cannot alter or contradict or change already revealed truth. And so we, while we both acknowledge progressive revelation, we’re also going to say that Just because we know that progressive revelation takes place, we’re not going to assume everything we see in the Bible is really just a continuation of something else we see in the Bible.

We’re only going to assume that what we’re seeing here is a progression of this. If the Bible tells us, it’s a progression of that. And if it doesn’t, but it sure sounds like it’s saying this is something new, like a mystery that’s now been revealed that wasn’t revealed before, like the church, we’re going to see it as something new. Yeah. So Chris, so a question that was just between the first and the least was how would a covenantal theologian then interpret 1 Corinthians 15, talking about the rapture and versus the prophets? You know, what do they do with those passages to make them fit? They are all in the maleism and they’re covenantal.

What time is it? Well, it’s not about the rapture. It’s not intent, yeah. Did you cover that in your eschatology presentation? In my eschatology presentation, my primary goal is to explain our position, marching through the book of Revelation. I did not take much time to compare and contrast it. Because for the covenant theologian, that doesn’t happen. The rapture is not taking place. Or it’s an up and down rapture.

Or a crisis is coming down, and then he takes us up, we meet him in the air, the air and then we all come down together. That’s how some of them will expire in the rapture. And now that that error, has that already happened? In their… Some varieties of eschatology will believe that there has been some kind of a spiritual rapture, but most would still say that if they believe it, that the rapture is going to take place, that we at least make fun of them calling it the Elevator rapture, because you just go up and coming back down. But Christ is coming down, we meet Him in the air, then we all come back down together as part of a single event called the Second Coming. Yeah, and there’s… Right, they’re gonna compress everything that we’re gonna see. And the tribulation has happened already.

No, no, no, no. Some will say that, yeah. Again, there’s a lot of rights. Preterists will believe that, yeah, almost everything in the tribulation was already fulfilled historically at 8070. Sproul would be probably one of the best known examples of a Preterist, so yeah. Although I think he’s backing away from some of the Preterist views. And then just one other question. Yeah. And maybe you’ll come and bring me cover this next week, so if you want to wait till then. It’s just part of this, does any of this method of interpretation flow out of the fact that Israel did not take this as a nation?

Any no longer? I don’t think so. I think that it was heavily influenced by some of the anti-Semitism you had in the Reformers. I mean that yeah, that you have guys like Martin Luther, our great hero of the faith, who said that all Jews should be put to work as shovels, their property burned and confiscated. That’s probably not what we want to teach our kids to follow. So even our spiritual heroes had major issues. And so the idea that these detestable Jews in their eyes were over with, the Christ killers were done with, God had finished with them, and now we inherit all those promises, that fell on very eager ears.

Again, the covenant guys are going to come after me for calling them based on anti-Semitism, but we’re going to see historically some would, some wouldn’t. But I do think that was one of several reasons why it caught on early. The hardcore people actually say because they are Christ-takers. That’s where development is. That’s where the whole ground is going. We can’t make a biblical case for that once again though. You’re looking at where… Or you just look at Paul, who was very clear that don’t get cocky thinking that God took out the Jews and you’re better and so he’s picked you now because God can do the same thing to you because you drafted it. You don’t even belong here.

And God’s going to bring his people back. The ultimate heresy out of that is British is railing this, which is, you know, the king when the king became Christ’s agency. Yeah. Every emc, a lot of the pilgrims came over to build God’s kingdom, the city set on a hill in the new world. So all of that’s connected. It’s amazing how this has actually affected world events. But I really need to make sure I respect the time that you guys have committed. So if you’ll give me just a couple minutes to finish a couple slides, a lot of this will hit next week. And again, I think if you’re patients, here’s what we’ve been talking about, the difference on a single slide.

In our dispensational camp, we take the text of scripture and use it to continually modify and change our theological system. It’s one way. We study God’s Word. If it doesn’t fit with our system, we go and start chiseling away at our system. That’s why dispensationalism is always changing. The covenantal system, you text the scripture to develop your theological framework, and the framework helps you then reinterpret scripture. And so at this point they’re pretty confident their framework is sound. And so if a verse isn’t fitting, we’ve been reading, they are comfortable with allowing their framework to reinterpret the verse.

So it’s a two-way interaction, and we’re going to say, no, you can’t do that to scripture. You can never reinterpret scripture by anything other than more study of scripture. What difference does it make? In all areas of bibliography, theology, proper Christology, pneumatology, Mardiology, anthropology, no difference whatsoever. So terriology, we’re going to agree right down the line. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Where we’re going to start disagreeing is Israelology. What is the doctrine of Israel? We’re going to be very different there. Ecclesiology. How does a church function today? Issues like infant baptism come up here.

We’re going to be moderately different. And then eschatology, usually very different on our view of the end times. So take this all with a grain of salt. We’re not talking about people whose complete conception of the Christian faith is so different, we can’t have any kind of point of contact. On most areas of faith and practice, we’re going to agree. Here’s where we’re not. And then you can see then how this affects those different areas. You both agree the Bible is authoritative and inspired and inerrant. But then because of the difference in hermeneutics, when you come to Israel, covenant people are going to see a national identity with physical and spiritual promises.

I mean, dispensational people are going to see that. Covenant people are going to see there’s a national identity, but it’s a type fulfilled by the church. Dispensational people are going to see the church as a distinct entity separate from Israel. covenantal people will see it as the inheritor of the fullness and promises of Israel. Dispensationalists will see in the future a distinct future for Israel, and physical as well as spiritual fulfillment of promises. And covenantal people will typically see no separate future for Israel, spiritual fulfillment of God’s promises of a millennial reign, things like that.

So that’s how that hermeneutical difference begins to trace its way down through their theology. I know that’s small, but I’ll try to get this up. Here’s the last line with the squiggly lines I told you about. Covenant in relationship to salvation and the purpose of God. Here’s covenant theology, and here’s dispensational theology. I don’t think I need to explain anything right now. The idea being that in covenant theology, they’re going to see all of these different covenants. That’s what my little push pins here are. Different covenants in Scripture. And they’re going to see them as just tracing out the unfolding of one continuous covenant throughout scripture.

One continuous plan, one continuous purpose. It’s all just one deal. And God’s just revealing more along the way. In dispensational theology, we’re going to say God does have things and purposes which go from beginning to end, but He also has other things and purposes that may be for a time, or may be connect for a while, and then have other elements which are unique and then reconnect again later. And the covenants that God is making are on all of these different paths. And so some covenants relate to us today. Some covenants were just for a particular time. Some covenants partially relate to us. For example, the spiritual blessings of being of the seat of Abraham.

The Bible says that we share some of those as a church, but that we don’t share some of the physical promises that they have of a land. So we’re going to see all these things weaving in and out. purpose is being very diverse, discontinuity in other words. Now which one of these looks neater? Obviously this one’s a lot faster to draw and a lot easier to explain and that’s why they make fun of us because our charts usually end up looking like this. But as we’ve seen our charts end up looking like this because our hermeneutics are simple and it takes a system, a theological framework that looks like this to produce their understanding of the Bible that looks like this.

And I’d rather have my understanding of how to interpret Scripture be simple and clear and straightforward and based on Scripture alone even if that does prove to develop some complicated charts as I try to get my head around everything God’s doing. That’s why I’m a dispensationalist. That’s largely why people at this church teach a dispensational point of view on scripture. I just want to close with a disclaimer I begin with usually every night. Let’s love each other, let’s serve each other. This is not ammunition, this is informative. It should affect our relationship with God and the way that we love other people.

And that’s when it will be profitable. And again, let me just thank you all for your time putting up with my cold and my endless list of slides. I really do appreciate that. That is very kind to me. and let me close it over to prayer and then you guys can have a wonderful 4th of July weekend. Let’s pray. Our God, Lord, we just do thank You for the fact that no matter how long we study Your Word, no matter how many charts we do come up with, no matter how many slides fill our presentations, there’s always more. There’s always more of You. There’s always new things to marvel at, new perspectives on old things to be refreshed with.

Lord, we thank you that you are an infinite God, and we look forward to an eternity of learning more and more and more about you, that you are inexhaustible, that in you there is no such thing as boredom or monotony. And, Lord, I pray that you would help us even as we study this topic to be struck by that afresh. I pray that we would be encouraged and motivated to study our Bibles more diligently, to not gloss over difficult passages, but to let them challenge our thinking, to let them make us be confronted with even the limits of our own minds. I pray that we would be curious about you and about your word, that we would be sharing that curiosity with others.

This would be a church and a place where you are a favorite topic. And Lord, we pray even for the rest of this night, we ask that you would give everybody here a safe trip back home and a restful sleep as they go into their weekend, keep them safe even as we celebrate this holiday of independence in our country. We do thank you for the fact that we can have a meeting like this here freely without fear of it being rated any moment and we know that that is a sign of your common grace and your work in this world. You pray these things in Christ’s name, amen.