1689 LBC: God's Covenant

God's Covenant 

1. The distance between God and the creature is so great, that although reasonable creatures do owe obedience to Him as their Creator, yet they could never have attained the reward of life except by some voluntary condescension on God's part, and this He has been pleased to express in the form of a covenant. 

2. Moreover, as man had brought himself under the curse of the law by his fall, it pleased the Lord to make a covenant of grace. In this covenant He freely offers to sinners life and salvation by Jesus Christ, requiring from them faith in Him that they may be saved, and promising to give to all who are appointed to eternal life His Holy Spirit to make them willing and able to believe. 

3. This covenant is revealed through the Gospel; first of all to Adam in the promise of salvation by the seed of the woman, and afterwards by further steps until the full revelation of it became complete in the New Testament. The covenant of salvation rests upon an eternal covenant transaction between the Father and the Son about the redemption of the elect. It is solely by the grace of this covenant that all the descendants of fallen Adam who have ever been saved have obtained life and blessed immortality, because man is now utterly incapable of gaining acceptance with God on the terms by which Adam stood in his state of innocency.

A Look At Salvation...Pt. 3

(Titus 3:5)
"He saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to His own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit."

In our third look at salvation, we will look at the phase of salvation when God imparts life into or regenerates individuals. God chose individuals to be saved in eternity. Christ died for them 2000 years ago to make it legally possible (justification). Now it is the Spirits operation that actually imparts that spiritual life to God's elect children.
Let's look at Ephesians chapter 2.
"And you He made alive, who were dead in trespasses and sins

in which you once walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit who now works in the sons of disobedience,

among whom also we all once conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, just as the others." (Eph.2:1-3)

 

Though God had elected these Ephesians in eternity and Christ had died for them on the Cross to justify them. By nature, that is their attitude toward God, and by their desire to continue to sin they were just like everyone else. By nature they were like the "children of wrath, just as others". Now it is the Spirit of God's responsibility and operation to bring them into spiritual life by giving them a new nature. This is the phase whereby God's elect are given spiritually a new life and a new nature.

 

Let's continue in Ephesians 2 starting with verse 4.

" But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, (He loved us because He chose us in Christ and He gave us Christ to die for us!) ⁵ even when we were dead in our trespasses (that is we were dead in nature towards God, we had no desire toward God), made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— ⁶ and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus." Notice in verse 6, it is God who has raised us up, we were dead in our sins and trespasses and God raised us up. He has given us life and we have a new nature.

 

Moving on now to verse 10 of Ephesians, "For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them." God elected us in the eternal phase, Christ justified us in the legal phase, and now the Spirit of God quickens us or gives us life in the regeneration phase. We are worked on by God who gives a new nature.

In Ephesians 4:24, "and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness." Jesus Christ made us righteous on the Cross when He sacrificed Himself for us. Now sometime during our life time the Spirit of God must give us a new righteous nature, or "new self".

Without this new nature toward God, we would have no inclination toward Him and He could not accept us into His presence.

Notice these first three phases of salvation are entirely the work of God. God doesn't ask sinners to cooperate with Him at all, He does this by Himself. They are all wrapped up in the Godhead. God the Father elects, Christ the Son justifies, and God the Holy Spirit regenerates.

Ezekiel 36:26, "I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh."

 

Our next blog will be on the fourth phase of salvation. The phase that is our response to His salvation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

1689 LBC: Free Will

   Free Will 

1. God has indued the will of man, by nature, with liberty and the power to choose and to act upon his choice. This free will is neither forced, nor destined by any necessity of nature to do good or evil. 

2. Man, in his state of innocency, had freedom and power to will and to do that which was good and well-pleasing to God, but he was unstable, so that he might fall from this condition. 

3. Man, by his fall into a state of sin, has completely lost all ability of will to perform any of the spiritual good which accompanies salvation. As a natural man, he is altogether averse to spiritual good, and dead in sin. He is not able by his own strength to convert himself, or to prepare himself for conversion. 

4. When God converts a sinner, and translates him into a state of grace, He frees him from his natural bondage to sin, and by grace alone He enables him freely to will and to do that which is spiritually good. But because of his remaining corruptions he does not only (or perfectly) will that which is good, but also wills that which is evil. 

5. The will of man will only be made perfectly and immutably free to will good alone in the state of glory.

A Look At Salvatio... Part 2

As we look into the Scripture about salvation, this second blog will be on the second part of salvation that involves the death of Jesus Christ. In the last blog, we looked at the first aspect of salvation which was the eternal phase, God's choice of who He would save from eternity. This next phase which we will call the legal phase involves Christ's work to make our salvation possible.

Since God is a righteous judge (Psalm 7:11) "God is a righteous judge, and a God who feels indignation every day", He cannot save someone from sin without that sin being paid for. Either sinners must suffer eternally in hell and pay for their own sins or a substitute must be found to pay for those sins. God cannot over look wickedness. In (Exodus 34:7) we read, God "will by no means clear the guilty" God is so righteous and so just that all sin and transgression must be punished either by the sinner themselves or in a substitute.
This is the second phase or legal phase of salvation where Jesus provided a legal basis for which people could be saved.

Look at (Romans 3:24-27), "and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus."
The main component of the legal phase is justification. Justification is based on the shed blood of Jesus. (Romans 5:9), "Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God."
Christ must justify us, and the reason Christ must justify us, is because God must punish somebody for sin. It is Christ's life, death, and resurrection by which man must be saved. God could not have saved us without this legal payment to be paid on our behalf.

Look at (2 Corinthians 5:21), "For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." Notice in this verse a legal transaction took place, God charged or imputed Christ with our sins and God charged or imputed us with the righteousness of Christ.

So this second phase of salvation is God's work to satisfy His holy nature and perfect justice for the salvation of His elect. Because every sin must be punished, He sent a Substitute to die for their sins.

A Look At Salvation

When were you saved?' 

What does the Scripture say about when we were saved. Scripture supports five actual aspects or phases of salvation. 

1.) Salvation from eternity
2.) Salvation when Christ came into the world
3.) Salvation when the Spirit regenerates man
4.) Salvation when man responds to regeneration at conversion
5.) Salvation in its finality when we receive our glorified bodies on the Last Day.
In this first blog I will discuss the first aspect of salvation, the eternal phase.

In (2 Timothy 1:9) Paul speaks of salvation before the world began.
"[God] who saved us and called us to a holy calling, not because of our works but because of his own purpose and grace, which he gave us in Christ Jesus before the ages began"
So in this verse we see that God, before He created the earth or Adam and Eve saved us to a holy calling by grace (a gift) which He gave us in Christ Jesus!

(Ephesians 1:11) says,
" In Him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will"
Here in Ephesians 1:11 we see our salvation was predestined and occurred in the will of God.

(Ephesians 1:3-4)  
^"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,  even as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before Him. In love"
Here Paul says God the Father chose us (the elect) in Christ before the foundation of the world. So this aspect of salvation as we see from these verses is eternal.

Now some have said and I personally heard it taught that God looked down the corridors of time and saw who would chose Him and who would not choose Him. As we will see in Psalm 14 this concept flies in the face of Scripture.
(Psalm 14:2-3)
"The Lord looks down from heaven on the children of man,
    to see if there are any who understand,
    who seek after God.

 They have all turned aside; together they have become corrupt;
    there is none who does good,
    not even one."

The LORD didn't look down the corridor of time, God is outside of time (2 Peter 3:8).  He viewed humanity, as a whole, sinful and not seeking after Him. God "in love" (Eph. 1:4) chose a people as a love gift for Himself.

This is the eternal phase, the first aspect of salvation. In the next blog we will be looking at the second phase. of salvation, when Christ entered the world

1689 LBC: Justification

A wonderful document rich in theology that I hold as my doctrine. Here is an excerpt on justification, enjoy!

1. Those whom God effectually calls He also freely justifies, not by infusing righteousness into them, but by pardoning their sins, and by accounting and accepting them as righteous, not for anything wrought in them, or done by them, but for Christ's sake alone. They are not justified because God reckons as their righteousness either their faith, their believing, or any other act of evangelical obedience. They are justified wholly and solely because God imputes to them Christ's righteousness. He imputes to them Christ's active obedience to the whole law and His passive obedience in death. They receive Christ's righteousness by faith, and rest on Him. They do not possess or produce this faith themselves, it is the gift of God. 

2. Faith which receives Christ's righteousness and depends on Him is the sole instrument of justification, yet this faith is not alone in the person justified, but is always accompanied by all the other saving graces. And it is not a dead faith, but works by love. 

3. Christ, by His obedience and death, fully discharged the debt of all those who are justified, and by the sacrifice of himself through the blood of His cross, underwent instead of them the penalty due to them, so making a proper, real, and full satisfaction to God's justice on their behalf. Yet because He was given by the Father for them, and because His obedience and satisfaction was accepted instead of theirs (and both freely, not because of anything in them), therefore they are justified entirely and solely by free grace, so that both the exact justice and the rich grace of God might be glorified in the justification of sinners. 

4. From all eternity God decreed to justify all the elect, and Christ, in the fullness of time, died for their sins, and rose again for their justification. Nevertheless, they are not personally justified until the Holy Spirit, in due time, actually applies Christ to them. 

5. God continues to forgive the sins of those who are justified, and although they can never fall from the state of justification, yet they may because of their sins, fall under God's fatherly displeasure. In that condition they will not usually have the light of God's countenance restored to them until they humble themselves, confess their sins, ask for pardon, and renew their faith and repentance. 

6. The justification of believers during the Old Testament period was in all these respects exactly the same as the justification of New Testament believers.