Thank you all for your warm invitation. Thank you to the consistory for your kindness and what a joy it is to be with you as a congregation. Your love to me has been keenly felt as always. Very grateful for your hospitality and kindness to me. It's been neat to see the developments since my first visit. I think this is the third. So my first visit, all the ways that the Lord's gone with you and before you and provided consolidating the congregation, so many good things. And we give glory and honor and praise to the Lord for these answers to prayer and mercies and look to him for future blessing in the days ahead. So the consistory has asked me to speak to you about the covenant of grace. This is a large topic, but specifically about the continuity of the covenant within the Bible. And what I'm going to ask you to do this evening is to put your seatbelts on. So we have like 10 hours of material to cover in about 45 minutes. I'm going to go pretty quickly. I've sought to strategically cut out as much as I can. But we'll cover, over the next 45 minutes or so, a big swath of material in terms of biblical and Reformed doctrine. And then there'll be a Q&A. Some of you will remember, I love Q&As, it's my favorite part, because I don't know what's in your head, but when you ask a question, it enables me to better serve you. So please do be thinking of questions as we're making our way through this, and we'll have time at the conclusion, God willing, to field some of those questions. So, the covenant of grace and the concept of continuity. So, when we think of the Bible, we should think of it as one book and as the whole book. The whole book is Christian Scripture. And so, from the beginning to the end, we have, in terms of continuity, we have one, right, we have one God, we have one way of salvation, and we have one people of God. So, it's divided in terms of the Old and New Testament, but the predominant emphasis is on continuity. The whole of Scripture is about Jesus Christ and about the gospel. So, if you look in Ephesians 3 and verse 6, it says that the Gentiles should be fellow heirs, that is with the Jews, and of the same body, so of the same people. and partakers of His promise, the one gospel promise, in Christ by the gospel. So if you want one verse, that's, I think, helpful for us in terms of establishing this idea of one God, one salvation, one people, or one church throughout the history of the world. Now when I say history, you think of creation here. We have what's called the covenant of works, which we're not covering this evening. Then we have the fall, and from the time of the fall forward we have this covenant of grace, beginning in Genesis 3.15, which theologians call the Proto-Evangelium, the first gospel promise. that little seed of Christ in the gospel. And then what happens over the course of redemptive history is, think in terms of a flower kind of unfolding, and there's layers of petals that continue to unfold, greater beauty, color, luster, fragrance, and so on. As you work your way through the history of the Old Testament into the New Testament, you'll have several successive covenants. So you have a covenant with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and then we come to the New Covenant. Each of these are components in the disclosure, if you will, the unfolding of the covenant of grace. In Genesis 3.15, it's a little seed. But then we come to Noah and in the covenant with Noah, which is part of the covenant of grace, more is shown to us about Christ in the gospel. You come to Abraham. and even more is shown, so that it's expanding. I've kind of shrunk the space here, but with the timeline comes greater light, greater understanding. Moses the same, David the same, and then it culminates, as you well know, in the New Covenant. So in the New Covenant we have the fullest, clearest, most expansive manifestation of the glory of the covenant in the coming of Jesus Christ and the accomplishment of redemption and all that comes with that. And so think in terms of, you know, through this whole period, it is Christ and the gospel that are at the center, right? It's the center all the way through. There aren't different types of salvation that are found at different stages. Now, I want to show you this from Scripture, of course. And I'm going to limit myself a little bit for time's sake. You can think of the core of the covenant, like the kernel, if you will, in terms of the language that's used, for example, with Abraham and the Abrahamic covenant in Genesis 17. where the Lord says, I will be your God and you will be my people. I'll be the God of you and your seed after you. That's the, if you want the covenant of grace in its most succinct form in terms of biblical language, that's the language. I will be your God, you will be my people. And your homework is this, I want you to go back and take your Bible and find everywhere that language is used. Slight adjustments at times in terms of how it's said, but that same basic words, I'll be your God, you'll be my people. And what you're going to discover is that it's used over and over and over and over and over. You're going to fill a page. You're going to fill a second page. You're going to fill a third page. You're writing down all the references. Because you'll see it all the way through the Pentateuch. You'll see it through the historical books. You'll see it in the Psalms and poetic books. You'll see it throughout the prophets. That language is used over and over into the New Testament, clear to the end of the New Testament. And so we come to the new heavens and new earth, last two chapters of the Bible, and lo and behold, there it is still, Revelation 21 verse three, and I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them and be their God. So from the beginning to the end, you have this continuity. Now, with regards to Abraham, for example, We come into the New Testament, we're not Jews, we're Gentile people, you know, what's our relationship to Abraham? Are we really in the same covenant that Abraham was in? And if you want just two, again for the sake of brevity, two passages, you look at Galatians 3. And Romans 4. So Galatians 3 ends with verse 29. He's writing to a Gentile church. And he says, if ye be Christ's, then are ye Gentiles, are ye Abraham's seed? and heirs according to the promise. You are the heirs of the promise that was given to Abraham. You are the seed of Abraham. And that's actually found throughout the chapter. So in verse 7, know ye therefore that they which are of faith, the same are the children of Abraham. In verse 9, so they which are of faith are blessed with faithful Abraham. Verse 14, the blessing of Abraham might come on the Gentiles through Jesus Christ that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. So that whole chapter is filled with language that's saying we are Abraham's seed as Gentile believing people. You'll find the same thing if you read through the length of Romans chapter 4. So there in verse 3, It says, So Paul's establishing Abraham was saved by faith. Abraham was saved with the same gospel that we have. He looked forward to Christ. We look back to Christ. But it was the same. Christ is the object. And then he goes on in verse 11, speaking about circumcision, he received the sign of circumcision, a seal of the righteousness of the faith which he had yet being uncircumcised, that he might be the father of all them that believe, though they be not circumcised. and that righteousness might be imputed to them also. Verse 12 is the same, and then in verse 16, go back and look at this yourself, you know, therefore it is of faith that it might be by grace to the end, the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only which is of the law, but that which also is of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all. And so what are we seeing? We're seeing biblical basis for the fact that Abraham was in the covenant of grace, same Christ gospel that we are in, and that we still have the same way of salvation and belong to the same people of God, Old Testament church, New Testament church. Likewise with Moses. So in Moses, you know, we read on the Sabbath day, maybe you caught this when we were reading it, in chapter 4, Hebrews 4 verse 2, for unto us was the gospel preached as well as unto them, referring to the Israelites under Moses in the wilderness, but the word preached did not profit them, not being mixed with faith in them that heard it. So they were hearing the gospel. The people of Israel under Moses were receiving the gospel. No surprise, we know Hebrews 11, by faith Abel, by faith Isaac, by faith Moses, they were walking by faith. So there is a continuity there. The ceremonial system, people will say, well, there's Moses and the law, and now we're in the New Testament, that was law, this is grace, that was old, this is new. And interesting, because you go to the book of Leviticus, and I like to call it, you know, we speak of the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. I like to call the book of Leviticus the gospel according to Leviticus, because the Mosaic institutions were slam full of content about Christ in the gospel. Don't tell me that the Mosaic Covenant was something separate from the Covenant of Grace. All those sacrifices and the priesthood and the blood and all of the tabernacle and temple, all of that stuff is loaded with gospel content. That's gospel truth that's being taught unto them. And so even the Ten Commandments begin with a note of grace. You know, it's, I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the land of Egypt. It starts with redemption, and then we have the Ten Commandments that follow, right? The Ten Commandments are put in the context of redemption, and we could go on. So it's no surprise when Jesus says in Matthew 5, verses 17 to 19, don't think that I've come to destroy the law and the prophets, no. You know, I've come to fulfill them that not one jot or tittle shall pass away from the law until all is fulfilled. That moral law which he's expounding in Matthew 5 is a permanent standard of righteousness for all people in all ages. Same thing when it comes to, so we've said something about Moses, David as well, David everything in David's life, including the Davidic covenant, but you get it in the Psalms and elsewhere, it's all pointing forward to David's greater son. David's son, who is his Lord, as Psalm 110 says, and Jesus brings this out in the Gospels. And so he's a picture, a type of Christ, and the covenant engagement there is opening and showing the people then, the church then, and us now, the glory of Christ in the Gospel. So, you come to the New Covenant and we reach the culmination. We reach the fulfillment of which everything else was pointing forward to. This is the last installment, if you will, that gives us the fullest picture of who God is and of what the gospel entails. The New Covenant, of course, does bring a line of demarcation. So, we are emphasizing here continuity. One God, one salvation, one people, one Bible. That's not to say there aren't points of discontinuity. So when we come to the new covenant, because the old is shadows, it's a picture book, it's types, it's symbols, it's all pointing forward ultimately to the revelation of the Son of God and the gospel. Those shadows are set aside because we have the person. You know, the types are set aside with the anatype, the symbols. Now we have the thing that was signified or symbolized in the coming of Christ. So there is discontinuity. Ceremonial law, gone. Tabernacle temple worship, gone. All that is gone because we have the fullness of Christ himself. There are other points of discontinuity. Old Testament was primarily a come-and-see religion. Gentiles were converted under the gospel in the Old Testament, but they were few in number. Right? You have the Ruths and you have the Rahabs and you have the Uriahs and others. But it was a come-and-see religion. You had to come to Jerusalem. Whereas in the New Testament it's a go-and-tell religion, right? We have the Great Commission, go unto all the nations, teach them the gospel and baptize them in the name of the Trinity and so on. And so in the New Testament Old Testament, primarily Jews, minority of Gentiles. In the New Testament, it's primarily Gentiles, and for the time being, a minority of Jews. And so this comes out in the book of Romans, for example. Romans 11 shows us that there's one people of God. Jews are cut out, Gentiles are put in, Jews will eventually be grafted back in. So, there are points of discontinuity, but the overwhelming and dominant emphasis is on the continuity within the covenant of grace. So, we come to the New Testament, our second point really has to do with how this affects things like circumcision and baptism. So, in the Old Testament, the Lord comes to Abraham, who's saved by the gospel, justified by faith, and he says, I'm making a covenant with you and with your seed. The promise is to you, Abraham, and the promise is to your seed. Therefore, the sign of the promise is both to you and to your seed. And so he's commanded to give the sign and seal of the covenant, which was circumcision, to himself and his seed. Paul uses this language in Romans 4. He speaks of circumcision as the sign and seal of the righteousness of faith. Now circumcision was never an end in itself. In Deuteronomy 10, Deuteronomy 32, Jeremiah 4, and elsewhere, the Lord tells Israel, you need your heart circumcised. So the physical circumcision was to reinforce gospel content about the need for a spiritual change, that they needed their hearts circumcised. This comes out, as I'll mention in a minute, in Colossians 2 as well. So we come to the New Testament, the New Covenant, and with this transition, this is a ceremonial institution, right, circumcision, in terms of its form. And so just as the Passover is replaced with the Lord's Supper, circumcision is replaced with baptism. Another point of homework that would be helpful for you is to go to your Bible and study all of the meaning of circumcision. What was the theological content? What did it signify? And so you can just make a list of things here, of all the things the Bible tells us. Circumcision symbolized justification by faith, as we just said, Romans 4. Circumcised, it symbolized regeneration, the heart being cleansed, mortification from sin, union with Christ, a whole bunch of things. Then you go and take your Bible and study what's the content or the import of baptism. And lo and behold, you find that they're identical. The lists are parallel. We could do a whole talk just on this, just lay it all out, you know, text by text. They're the same content. So we come to Colossians 2, verses 11 and 12, and there Paul's talking about circumcision, and in the same context, baptism. And he tells us they both point to the same thing. They both point to the need for a circumcised heart, right? So that's an important text. So, there's this relationship between circumcision and baptism. Why do we baptize our children? We don't baptize them because we believe that the water of baptism washes away original sin. That's a damnable heresy of the Roman Catholic Church. We don't baptize our children because we believe that they're already regenerated and therefore should receive baptism. We don't baptize our children because we presume that they will most certainly be regenerated or converted. Why do we baptize our children? Because God commanded us to. That's why. He commanded that our children, the believers, are to give the sign and seal of the covenant to their children. That was a gospel command to Abraham, and it's never abrogated. You don't come to the New Testament and the Lord says, we don't do that anymore. We don't give the sign and seal of the covenant to our children anymore. No, that command continues, though the ordinance changes, to reflect the change from old to new, from circumcision to baptism. And we'll come back to this a little bit later. It helps us also understand something about the nature of baptism, how we should think about it. So when Paul comes to the Pentecost, Acts 2, he's speaking to a whole bunch of Jews. And when he says, verse 39, the promise is to you and to your children. Bells and whistles would have went off. I mean, he's speaking to a crowd of Jews. That is language that is absolutely embedded deep into their heart and mind. He's using covenant language. He's using the language of our Father Abraham. And he's telling us in the New Testament with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and the call to baptism that the promise is to you and your seed, still in the New Testament. And so the sign of the promise has to still be to us and our seed as well. I'm going to stop there because I'm managing my time here. And I'm going to come to what I think is helpful in terms of confusion. So on the covenant of grace, I would say that in the 21st century, there is no doctrine And I can say this emphatically, there is no doctrine where there is greater confusion in Reformed churches than in the doctrine of the covenant of grace. Tons of confusion. And so we can start, and you think of like the fruit, right? The confusion is found in the fruit. So here's my little attempt at a tree. And you see the fruit, and the fruit would be things like, how do we think about the church? What's the composition of the church? How do we think about the church, the visible church, and so on? There's confusion. You know, what about preaching? You know, how does the covenant influence preaching? And where is the emphasis? And, you know, what kind of things are said and not said? And what approaches are taken in preaching? There's confusion. You know, how should we think about children in the church? You know, what's their position? What's the expectation? What's the, you know, all the stuff that's related to it? How do we think about baptism? There's confusion in all this stuff. And for me anyway, and I hope this will help you, because this is the way I would approach it. We can sit up here all day long and debate the fruit and like each point and try to make sense of it, but I think we get far greater clarity if we actually go to the root problems, right? So here's the roots underneath. And so in my opinion, there are four areas of confusion that are root problems that end up causing all of the problems up here in the things that we see and talk about among the fruit. And so I'm gonna give you those rapid fire as well. The first is the relationship of covenant and election. So this is a biggie, and actually as we go, each of these build on each other. There is this tendency in 20th century and now 21st century Reformed circles to conflate covenant and election. So by that I mean, we think in terms of, people think in terms of covenant and election referring to the same thing. So if you have two circles, you put down a circle for the covenant, Where's election? You would basically lay another circle right over top of that circle, right? They end up being referring to the same thing. That is not what the Bible teaches. And I feel strongly about this. So there's, I could give you lots of examples. An easy one would be this. You find it in Malachi 1 quoted by Paul in Romans 9. We know that God says to Abraham, the promise is to you and your seed, the covenant is with you and your seed, the sign is with you and your seed. So Isaac gets circumcised, so does Ishmael. Ishmael is not. He's reprobate, right? Whereas Isaac is elect. You come to the next generation, and this is the passage from Romans 9 and Malachi 1. He says, Jacob have I loved, Esau have I hated. Paul says, this is a biblical text to help us show the doctrine of election. Well, what are we talking about here? Esau has been circumcised. Esau has the promise. Esau's in the covenant, but Esau's not elect. And what that teaches us, that's one, that's an easy passage, we could stack them up here this evening. It teaches us that actually the covenant is broader than election. The covenant of grace is broader than election. So the covenant of grace would be the outer circle, if you can see from where you're sitting. The inner circle would be election. And one thing that I hope we'll have time to get to, because I haven't kept as much in with regards to this, The covenant is actually a means. So we should think of the covenant as a means to an end. It's the appointed means that God uses to bring the elect into salvation. But not all that are in the covenant are elect. So this is interesting, especially in Dutch circles. You have, for example, Kuiper. So here's Kuyper, right, and you know well some of the problems with Kuyper. So he has presumptive regeneration and so on. On the whole opposite, you have what we would think of as the Reformed Baptists and, if you'll allow me to say, some within the NRC, okay? And these are like two opposites. But what's interesting to me is, though they're polar opposites, they share the same exact root problem. And that is that they both conflate covenant and election. And so what happens with Kuyper is he starts with the covenant. And he says, okay, everybody's in the covenant, so we're going to presume that they're all elect then. He moves from the covenant to election and says we should treat the congregation as if they're all, you know, in a state of grace and so on and so forth. Disciple them, work on our worldview and whatever else. The Reformed Baptists, and some others among the Dodgeett times, start with election and move to the covenant. And they say, only the elect are in the covenant. And so nobody's in the covenant unless you're elect. So, you have opposite views, same root problem, which is that they're conflating covenant and election, not recognizing that covenant is a broader concept. So, we'll come back to this more in a minute. The second area, which I've pretty much decided to skip because it's too big. is two-covenant versus three-covenant. I know this is a powder keg in this circle. I'm well aware of my audience. But two-covenant versus three-covenant. I'm just going to leave you with this much. People that tend to conflate covenant election tend to be two-covenant. So, it's interesting because Kuiper is two-covenant, and the Reformed Baptists are two-covenant, and some others among the Dutch are two-covenant as well, and they have the same thing. So, these things are building on each other. You know, I can say this much, that for the older Reformed theologians who distinguish, when I say three-covenant, let me just remind you all here, we have the covenant of works, right? Then you've got the covenant of grace. If you're two-covenant, those would be the two, and then you have the covenant of redemption. And so for the older writers, the covenant of redemption can be thought of as the foundation upon which the covenant of grace is built. And what else can I say without going on too long? I would add to that that there are different parties in these covenants. So if you're two covenant, you'll say the covenant of grace is between the Father and the Son. and that the elect are in the Son. Right, whereas that's the kind of language that I would use personally for the covenant of redemption. Whereas the covenant of grace is between God's people, between God and his people. And so one of the reasons that this was so helpful, writers like Samuel Rutherford and Dixon and people like John Owen and a whole bunch of other Reformed writers, the reason, you know, there's a biblical basis for this, an exegetical basis for this, But in terms of practical payout, you know, you have Arminians on one end of the spectrum. You can think of that as legalism, right? There's a legal element in Arminianism. On the other end of the spectrum, you have antinomianism and hyper-Calvinism. Right? And what happens is both of these are wrong, both of these have the same root problems, interestingly, and Reformed theologians used this construct of the distinction between covenant of redemption and covenant of grace in order to refute both the Arminians and the Hyper-Calvinists or Antinomians. So my area of study, if you will, is on this kind of topic, which is why I don't want to venture into it. I'm liable to go far too long. But just, you know, tuck that away in your head. You can come back to it and think about it more at some other point. A third area of confusion is between what I'm going to call, actually, this is the language of Olivianus, the outward administration and the inward substance. So, the outward administration and the inward substance of the covenant of grace. It's Olivianus' language. You know Olivianus. So, if you conflate these, if you think, okay, everybody in the outward administration of the covenant, they have, we should view them as having the inward substance. That's a problem. Or if you say that only those with the n-word substance are in the covenant, then there is no outward administration. What's the Bible say? So, for example, in Romans chapter 2, Paul makes this clear when he says at the end of the chapter, in verses 28 and 29, Neither is that circumcision which is outward in the flesh, but he is a Jew which is one inwardly, the circumcision that is of the heart and the spirit and not in the letter, whose praise is not of men but of God." He brings up the same concept when he gets to chapter 9 and he says in verse 6, For they are not all Israel, which are of Israel." And so the biblical concept is that, yeah, there's this outward administration where the visible church, so you know the distinction, I'm running out of boardroom here. But the distinction between the visible church and the invisible church, it's a pretty bread and butter, you know, concept. We have visible and invisible. Visible is what you see, so everybody that's within the house of God, you know, baptized and covenant members, whatever. And then the invisible are what you can't see, and that is those who are elected in a state of grace and so on. That concept is reflected here between the outward and inward substance. So in the outward administration, what you have is the whole of Israel was viewed as the covenant people of God. They're all within the covenant, and they're referred to in terms of covenant language. I mean, this point is made in Romans, again, in chapter 3, when he says, what advantage hath the Jew? You know, much in every way. Unto them is committed the articles of God. Or back in chapter 9, again, he says, who are Israelites? To whom pertaineth the adoption and the glory and the covenants? and the giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises, whose are the fathers, and so on. There's all these privileges that are being given to them. But there's, you know, the vast majority of them died in the wilderness because of unbelief. They weren't converted in that stage, you know, at that point in history. And so there's this, you know, necessity as we were saying earlier, the call to faith and repentance, the call, the gospel that Abraham had. the call that points them to their need for a circumcised heart. So, this continues into the New Testament. The Lord writes the New Testament books, and they're written to the church as saints, visible saints. But then Paul, in the midst of his letter to the Corinthians, is saying, examine yourselves to see whether you're in the faith or not. So he's referring to them as the people of God and yet recognizing that they're a mixed audience, not all of them are converted. A fourth area of confusion would be related to all of this is relationship of promise and demand. So the relationship of the promises of the covenant and the demands of the covenant. So, you know, we often think of the emphasis falling on the promise, and that's true. God's coming. He's saying, this is the God I'll be for you. This is all that I'll do for you as God. He pledges these promises to His people. Now, for many, Kuyper and others, they'll stop there. Well, you've got the promise. Then they conflate that with having the thing promised itself. There's the promise and then the thing that's being promised. No, that's wrong. We have the promise, but then there's a requirement, and that is that we receive the promise with faith. So that Hebrews passage, right, in Hebrews 3, they had the promise. The gospel was preached to them. You know, what's the problem? And Paul is saying to the Hebrews, the problem was their unbelief. They didn't enter into rest because of their unbelief. And they didn't receive the promise with faith, take God at His word, and so on. And so there's both a promise and there's a demand. Now that helps us because then we realize in preaching the covenant, it includes not only preaching the promises, but it includes the call to faith to close with Christ in the gospel. That these overtures and offers of the gospel are to be received with faith and repentance. There has to be an appropriation of the covenant. Now, we know that that faith is a gift of God, that the elect are the only ones who are going to believe, that the Spirit has to work in their souls. But nonetheless, in terms of our ministry, we're to be calling them to that, calling them to faith. and pressing upon them the need to appropriate the gospel. So one time, I can say this to you all, I was at a synodical meeting and there were two ministers from the Freidemacht, the Canadian Reformed over here, and they were talking to me about the covenant. I thought, this is going to be great, this will be so much fun. And so they're on the presumptive end, right? They're with Kuiper. You presume that everybody's already converted, et cetera. And so they were saying to me, well, the problem with you people is that you take the joy of the covenant away from the people because we We preach on the necessity of faith and repentance. We preach discriminatingly, distinguishing between true faith, false faith, true sorrow for sin, worldly sorrow, godly sorrow, etc. You steal the joy of the covenant. And they said, you know, you shouldn't be telling covenant people that they have to be born again. So that's interesting, isn't it? Because if there was ever a son of the covenant, it was Nicodemus. I mean, he's in the covenant, he's a teacher in the covenant, and Jesus says to him, ye must be born again, right? He's calling them to that. The fact is, they don't have any, you know, people in their circles, there's no call to appropriate the blessings of the covenant in the Lord Jesus Christ. So what joy is there without the appropriation? One thing that this does is, in Old and New Testament, a really big point biblically is the difference between covenant keeping and covenant breaking, right? And so, what do we do with this? It's in the Old Testament, it's all through the New Testament as well, language. If you don't have the balance of promise and demand, this is gone. If only the elect are in the covenant, then there's no such thing as covenant keeping and breaking. You're in, and you're in, and you can't break it. You can't lose your salvation, of course. Whereas if you're viewing the fact that these are not the same, that there is a difference between the outward and inward, that there is both a promise and a call to receive the promise with faith and follow the Lord, then covenant keeping, covenant breaking makes sense. So you have people that are in the covenant and who refuse with unbelief to receive the promise with faith and who walk in disobedience and rebellion, they're breaking covenant with the Lord. Whereas those who receive the promise with faith and walk in new obedience and filled with the Spirit and so on are enabled to keep the covenant. And so that ends up being lost, if you will. It also affects things like in preaching. We need to preach both Christ's work for you, emphasis is on, you know, or for us. And then on the other hand, Christ's work in us. Right? So this is objective Christ's work for us. That's something outside of any person. We're preaching Christ crucified, we're setting forth the atonement, all that he's accomplished, all that he's done. You know, the things we were talking about yesterday morning with propitiation for sins and so on, that's objective. But we also need what is, you know, subjective Christ's work in us. And so when these things get scrambled and when we're like covered in confusion, this is lost. You'll have some people and it's all subjective and they're only preaching Christ's work in us. What good is that if we're not hearing about Christ's work for us? You know, what he's objectively accomplished. But then, and that may be some of the background that y'all have faced, but then on the other hand, you can get people like the ones I was just talking about in Canadian Reformed or elsewhere, and all day long they preach about Christ's work for you. And they never, you know, preach on Christ's work in you. That biblical balance, which you find in Paul's writings and in Christ's own preaching and in the Old Testament prophets and so on, ends up being lost. That balance ends up being lost when these things are diluted or distinctions are not recognized. This is a nutshell. Obviously I've compressed too much into too little space. This point, let me just come back to this real quick, this point on the means, the covenant, the outward covenant being a means to an end. So take baptism for example. In baptism we have pictured for us the sprinkling of the blood of Christ which cleanses us from sin. We have pictured the pouring out of the Holy Spirit upon us. We have, you know, justification, regeneration, Peter says, union with Christ. We're baptized into the name, singular, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. So it's union with Christ. So all of that, you know, the child is brought, presented for baptism, and God engraves His triune name on them. They're baptized into the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the Lord, what Baptism is a sign and seal of the covenants. We get the idea of sign, signifying things, I've just mentioned them. Seal is the confirmation of the authenticity. What exactly is being sealed in baptism? The promise is what's being sealed. So it's not the thing itself, salvation, is being sealed to them. The promise is being sealed. The Lord, you know, the Lord in the preaching of the gospel, it goes to every creature and it goes out generally. In baptism, there's a specific particular application to a certain person. When the Lord is saying, I'm sealing my covenant promise to you, gospel promise to you. Now, God is saying in that, this is the kind of God I am, and this is what I do. The children are then to be raised. That's a means, just like preaching from the pulpit, so the visible word, as the Reformers called it, the sacraments, also serve as a means. And so children can be told, you're filthy, you're polluted, you have all this sin, you need to be washed with the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, you need to be brought into union with Jesus Christ, and so on. And the Lord has promised to do that. Just as you hear it from the pulpit, it's pictured in your baptism. That's all promised. Then we tell the children, you must repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. You have to come to him. You have to receive him. You have to lay hold of him. You have to turn from your sins unto the Lord, and so on, and pray that the Lord gives you a new heart, and et cetera, right? It's a means. The covenant of grace is a means to that end. This is important because you'll get theologians like Hoeksema in the Protestant Reformed background, and he says, no, the covenant is the end. It's the telos, he says, the end. And he's getting this wrong. This neo-Calvinistic approach is not old Calvinism or old biblical religion. He says it's the end because he views only the elect as being in the covenant. It's a means to the end of bringing people to saving knowledge, bringing the elect into saving knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. So this is important. I've got five minutes. This is important because if we get the root problems fixed in terms of biblical, orthodox, reformed religion, it fixes this fruit. So, it helps sort out how do we view the congregation. What does that look like? What does that mean? What kind of mental concepts should we have? It helps fix preaching. You know, what should preaching be? You know, how should the gospel be preached? How do we preach covenantally? How do we preach to a covenant people? What are the emphases? You know, I mentioned one of them. I could mention a dozen of them if we had a whole topic on it. This is one balance in terms of for us and in us. But there's all sorts of other things. The free offer of the gospel and discriminating preaching, both being part of the diet of the content of preaching. We could say more. So that it affects preaching. It affects, of course, our view of baptism. So for people on this side over here, right, some within the inner circle, for example, have written, so I mean it's not just conjecture, that a person's baptism isn't a real baptism if they're not elect. Why are we baptizing them? What does this mean? What's the point of this? Well, if they're not elect, it wasn't a real baptism. This is absolutely incredible to me. I mean, this is terrible. It is a real baptism. This is a divinely appointed ordinance. This is the Lord coming and working and appointing these things. It's a true, real baptism. The problem is, You don't understand baptism because you've gotten some of these things wrong. The same thing's true with children. How do we view the children so they're in the covenant, but they need to be, you know, maybe another way, and this is kind of Calvin-esque. This is Calvin's kind of concept. You can think of, I'm getting run out of board here, sorry. We go from being in the church, right, to being in the covenant. The reason we baptize children, by the way, is because they're in the covenant. Why do they get the covenant sign and seal if they're not in the covenant? They don't come into the covenant through baptism. They're in the covenant and therefore receive baptism, but that's another story. So, from in the church, to in the covenant, to in Christ, right? This is the end that we all long for and desire, and so on. So, children, they're in the church, they're in the covenant, they're not like the pagan world. They're not like the Muslims and the Hindus or the, you know, whatever, secular atheists and other people. They're inside the visible church. They're inside the covenant of grace. But they need to be in the Lord Jesus Christ. And so they have all these privileges and all these promises and all these blessings, all of which can serve as a means that the Lord employs, but the aim is that they would be in the Lord Jesus Christ, that they would be brought to saving faith in Him. And so this affects, you know, our view of how we preach to children, how we do child rearing, you know. There's the encouragements of God's sealed promises to you. You know, that's wooing. And then there's the other side of warning them. You know, if you refuse to repent and believe you're breaking covenant with the Lord, you're going to reap the curses of the covenant rather than the blessings of the covenant, right? So you have the wooing and the warning. All of these things fit together, and they work their way out into the practical knit and grit of the fruit of how we practice our religion and so on. All right, my time is spent. And I told you, this was a fire hydrant. So you know what it's like to drink out of a fire hydrant? I don't recommend it, but you've just experienced what it's like to drink out of a fire hydrant. Hopefully this, something here will stick. You know, if one thing sticks and you can start just working on that, you'll have a head start. And hopefully something will, Add clarity, right? That's my goal here, is to add some clarity. So questions and answers. I don't know what you're thinking, but you do, so tell us what you're thinking and we'll try to steer.