Started this morning as we continue this Brief series, I keep using the word brief But but you you you know me well enough to know that that term is has a certain elasticity to it, right? But brief could be a couple of weeks. We've already surpassed that It's likely we're gonna go several weeks here. I because the topic is just too rich to pass through quickly. So we're thinking about and meditating upon Christology. If you'll turn with me in your Bibles, once again, we looked at this passage last week, but in 1 Timothy 3, I wanted to take a second to look at that this morning as we continue to work through what are our, the question, what are our sources as we think about the topic, the subject of Christology? the person and the work of Christ, what are our sources? How do we arrive at our theological conclusions? Let's go to the Lord in prayer and ask for His help, His faithfulness towards us. so that we can understand what He has given to us by way of revelation in His Word. So let's pray together. Father, thank You for Your Word. Thank You for the Christ in whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells bodily. We thank You that we have a sure, certain, and infallible guide to to deliver truth to us by means of your word, enlivened and perfected according to your spirit. We are grateful and we ask with open hands that you would give to us ears to hear, give to us eyes to see what you intend to teach us as your church and as your people. We ask this in Christ's name, amen. What we were doing last week, and sort of in my notes, literally just drew a line, here's where we're stopping today, we'll pick up next time, looking at how do we know what we know about Christ? What are our sources? And you'll recall that the Scriptures have to be our primary source. It is what we call the norming norm. The Scriptures is what makes things clear to us and makes things certain to us because we can know much about God, about the deity of God, from natural revelation. But we could never discern from the heavens, for example, that God is triune. We could never discern from the declaration of the heavens that God took to himself human flesh. We could never discern from the most careful study of this created world that it was the second person of the Godhead, not the first, and not the third, who assumed to himself a reasonable soul and a truly human body. We would never know those things. We could spend a million years, even with perfected minds, and not be able to come to those conclusions. We are dependent wholly upon special revelation. Now, when we study theology proper, the study of God, then there is a measure of helpfulness with natural revelation. Psalm 19, for example, declares to us that even the heavens declare the glory and the majesty of God. Romans 1, of course, tells us that the invisible attributes of God even are plain to men. Even though they suppress that truth in unrighteousness, that God exists and that we can know something about His being, something about His essence, something about His character is plain even from creation. The rain falls on the wicked and on the righteous, the just and the unjust. We can know from that that God is a merciful God. He is a God who is fundamentally good, but we cannot know, as I said, that He is triune. So we must depend upon the Scriptures. Now, in 1 Timothy 3, as we considered this text last week, beginning in verse 14, Paul writing to Timothy, Timothy is there in Ephesus, a place that is no stranger to worship. The citizens of Ephesus were familiar with the concept of worship. There was a mighty temple there. The paganism, true paganism, was the religion of the public square. And into this context, Timothy comes, ministering and pastoring a church there, and Paul's writing to this young man, encouraging him, and he says, I hope to come to you soon, but I'm writing these things to you so that if I delay, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of the truth. Great indeed, we confess, is the mystery of godliness. And here is the confession. He was manifested in the flesh, vindicated by the Spirit, seen by angels, proclaimed among the nations, believed on into the world, taken up in glory. Now one of the brothers asked a really good question last week, what does Paul mean by this term godliness that we see here? Great is the mystery of godliness. And we know it has to mean more than the perspective of our own piety with reference to ourselves. It has to mean more than that. It's more than just the mystery of morality. It has to do with the person of Christ revealing the very nature of our triune God. There's a couple of comments that I want to read to you in this respect. One, the first one is from John Gill. I think this is very helpful. He says, what follows is so. The incarnation of Christ, his birth of a virgin, the union of the two natures, divine and human, in his person. This is a mystery, which, though revealed and so to be believed, is not to be discerned nor accounted for, nor the modus of it to be comprehended by reason." So this is sort of an elucidation or an explanation of this term, mystery, the mystery of godliness. Part of this is, it's been revealed to us, Christ has come, all that the prophets had foretold has come to fruition. And yet, there still remains an incomprehensibility. And Paul means here, the mystery of godliness means there's an incomprehensibility with respect to the nature of the God-man, or the person of the God-man in two natures. human and divine. Gil goes on, he says, So what is Gil getting at here? What he's saying is this mystery of the Incarnation, this mystery of God taking on human form, is the very substance. It's the foundation. It's the stuff of our Christian religion. We find in Christ the full expression of the Godhead. We find in him, as we look to him, as we study his person, as we study his character, as we study his two natures, human and divine, it is there that we find both the power and the practical godliness that ought to drive us, ought to motivate us. Another comment from Matthew Henry. I think it's also helpful coming at this from a slightly different vector. Christianity is a mystery, a mystery that could not have been found out by reason or the light of nature, and which cannot be comprehended by reason, because it is above reason, though not contrary to reason. That's an important statement, isn't it? It's above reason, but it's not contrary to reason. So we don't throw reason out the door, but we recognize this surpasses. our human intellect. It surpasses our human reasoning. We could never get to a doctrine of Christ with reason alone. But of godliness designed to promote godliness, and herein it exceeds all the mysteries of the Gentiles. It is also a revealed mystery, not shut up and sealed, and it does not cease to be a mystery because now in part revealed. Read that last statement again. It is also revealed mystery. It's not shut up and sealed. And yet at the same time, it doesn't cease to be a mystery because it has been in part revealed. But why? Because it exceeds our capacity to comprehend. And so it is in this mystery of Christ taking on human flesh, that mystery of godliness, that's articulated in those six succinct statements that follow. It's in those statements that we have not only the secret to understanding who God is, but also who we ought to be in Him. That's the mystery of godliness. And so these six arguments or six statements that follow, He was manifested in the flesh. This is the second person of the Trinity. only begotten of the Father, God of God, true God, light of light, and yet he took on, he assumed to himself without addition or subtraction from his divine person, a human nature. It was manifested in the flesh. He was vindicated by the Spirit. He was declared by the Spirit of the living God to be the Son of God. I mean, think about it, his baptism. when the Spirit was seen and heard descending like a dove, and the voice of the Father from heaven declaring, this is my Son in whom I am well pleased. Listen to him. He was vindicated by the Spirit of the living God. He was seen by angels. He was proclaimed among the nations. He was proclaimed among the Gentiles, which is exactly what the prophets had foretold. He was believed on in the world. And again, the belief in him was not merely Jewish. Even though he went to the Jews first, those gospel crumbs fell from the master's table, and the Gentiles feasted upon them, and he was taken up in glory. Crucified, dead, and buried, and yet raised from the dead, exalted into heaven, ascended to heaven, and exalted at the Father's right hand. This is the mystery of godliness. And so as we contemplate this, there's two things that we need to kind of keep into our mind. One is that these things have been revealed to us in the Scriptures. We have both the privilege and a responsibility to study them out and be able to, as best we are able by the power of the Spirit, to express and articulate with all the saints what we believe about our mediator, about the God-man. And at the same time, we have to confess that these thoughts are above our minds. We are into statements that are, while we can say them as true, they are incomprehensible. And at the point, and again, Gill makes the comparison to the Trinity in terms of the importance of the doctrine. And the moment we think we really understand the Trinity, I think we've betrayed the fact that we don't, right? Because of the incomprehensible nature of our triune God. And in a similar way, as soon as we can say, oh, this whole hypostatic union, I got that down pat. I understand it all. Well, then perhaps we've lowered the bar and we've eliminated the mystery that still remains. Now, where we left off last week, we're tracing through, and I labored this week, and I convinced myself it's probably not profitable to do it. I labored to try to produce a graphic. I tend to think in visual ways, so think of a graphic that would illustrate how we think about the various sources. So we have the scripture, which is the norming norm. It is the, so I thought about maybe it's the circle in which everything else, maybe it's the top of the pyramid. I grasped at straws and came up with nothing that I was persuaded would be fruitful, so I scrapped it. But we have, first of all, first and foremost, is the word of the living God, which declares to us who Christ is and all that he has done. or all that we need to know about what he has done. John testifies to us that if everything that Jesus said and did were to be written down, the whole world could not contain the books. But we were given a sufficient revelation of the person and the work of our Lord Jesus Christ. But from there, where do we go? We know we could not know Christ by reason, by human intellect alone. We are dependent upon the scriptures, but let's be honest. If we hand a new believer the Bible and just say, here, here it is. Get back to me in a couple weeks and let me know an orthodox doctrine of Christ. Well, I mean, even if you've walked with the Lord a good amount of time, you've sat under sound preaching, you've read the Bible cover to cover numerous times, that still would be a daunting task, wouldn't it? And many throughout history have actually done just that, and were later found to be heretics, because they were off by just a few degrees, and the errors compounded. So, we have the scriptures as our norming norm. Everything has to be referenced against the scriptures. This is our palm line, it's our foundation, our cornerstone by which everything is measured. And yet we also need additional helps, not because the Scripture is insufficient, but because God in His own Word demonstrates to us the helpfulness of creeds. 1 Timothy 3 not only teaches us content about this mystery of godliness, but actually gives us a model to follow, doesn't it? What did the early church do? They wrote down what they believed the Scriptures taught about the person and the work of Christ. What we find here is a short confession of faith. And I submit to you that over the next several centuries, the church was working out and building upon, finding words to express as clearly and succinctly as possible this mystery of godliness. So, kind of a hint of where we should go next. If we're thinking in an order of priority, You're building a tool chest to study Christology. The very first thing you need is the Word of God. That's the indispensable revelation that you need. But what else would be helpful? What else is, in fact, necessary in our study of Christology? It is the creeds, the ancient creeds of the church. And the reason these are so important is because on the anvil of history, the various errors and heresies were hammered out. In fact, this may strike you as a strange statement. Heretics were a great blessing to the church. Does that strike you as odd? We know that God works all things together for good, right? And throughout the Old Testament, throughout the New Testament, God used wicked men to accomplish his purposes. I mean, think of Joseph's declaration there in Genesis 50. After old Pop had died, Jacob was gone, the brothers are now fearful for their lives, and Joseph declared to them, what you intended for evil, God intended for good. And so we have here, in God's providence, heretics that were raised up. Dr. Dolezal's class, and once again, much of the material I'm gonna give to you today is straight out of his notes. I'll be adding a few things here and there, but I want to make sure I give credit where it's due. Our brother, Dr. James Dolezal, has labored much to the profit of myself and hopefully to you as well. He calls Arius, for example, the arch-heretic. because it's from the errors of Arius that we find a number of, not just the denial of the divinity of Christ, but a number of other errors that we'll work through over the ensuing weeks. But it is in the process of, let's say it's Arius, or Nestorius, or other heretics that appeared on the scene. They had to be challenged, they had to be challenged publicly. And then the church did what it is often done, it assembled a council or a synod to study the matter. To have men who were skilled in the word of God, who are mighty in the scriptures, to come together and write down, sometimes using words that were not found in the scriptures themselves, in order to describe the truth that's contained in the scriptures. And so, one of the things that we come back to is in the very first chapter of our confession. The very first chapter is the Holy Scriptures. In paragraph 6, we find this very important statement, "...the whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture, unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit or traditions of men." So what we confess is that these creeds, we call them ecumenical creeds because they were an agreement by the church at large, that these things are not only are they true, but these are things that are of the nature, they must be believed in order to be a true Christian. And so it is, so for example, the doctrine of the Trinity, even the word Trinity is not found in your Bibles. The word Trinity is not expressly set down, but it is necessarily contained. It is necessary. If somebody says, I don't believe that God is triune, then we must say, then you, sir, are not a Christian. Well, the Trinity doesn't appear in my Bible. Yes, it does. The word does not appear, but the concept is clearly, plainly there. In a similar way, the word hypostatic union does not appear anywhere in your scriptures. You can search every concordance on your bookshelf and you will never find hypostatic union in your Bible. And yet the concept is there that God assumed to himself in the person of the Son a true human nature, both a reasonable soul and a truly human body. And so we have to be able to say both of those together. And this is where the creeds become helpful. Creeds, in many ways, are the process of elimination. In fact, much of the work of the ancient church in formulating these creeds was saying, not that, but this instead. We can't say that God, that the Son was created. We must say that he is begotten, he's uncreated, just as one example. So we need the creeds. We need these ecumenical creeds in particular. I'm going to read to you, this is the Chalcedonian Declaration or the Chalcedonian Creed adopted in 451. Now think about that. Nearly 500 years. after the birth, the life, the death and resurrection of Christ, the church is still working through these things. Do you think Paul meant what he said when he says the mystery of godliness? It took time, and the Spirit of God was still at work in the church of Jesus Christ. This is the Chalcedonian Creed. We then, following the Holy Fathers, all with one consent, teach men to confess one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man, of a reasonable," or we could say, rational soul, and body, consubstantial. There's another word that you won't find in your Bible. Consubstantial. But what does it mean? It means of the same essence. We're going to get really technical. Of the same stuff. Of the same is-ness. So the second person of the Trinity The Lord Jesus Christ, He is the same perfect in Godhead. He is consubstantial with the Father according to the Godhead. So in other words, according to His divinity, He is of the same essence as the Father. He is not distinct from the Father in the sense of His essence, His essential being. He is distinguished according to His person. The Son is not the Father. The Son is not the Spirit. The Father is not the Son. The Father is not the Spirit. And yet, truly God. Are you lost yet? This is that theological brain freeze, right? You drink too quick, it hurts. But it's important that we make these distinctions. And every word in these creeds is carefully crafted, carefully chosen, because they're eliminating a heresy. They were saying, some would say, yes, Jesus is divine, but he's not of the same stuff. He's divine, but not in the same way that the Father is divine. And so, no, the Creed of Chalcedon says, no, consubstantial was the word that was agreed upon to describe this mysterious phenomenon. So consubstantial or coessential with the Father according to the Godhead and consubstantial with us according to manhood. In other words, there is nothing about the humanity of Christ that is different from our humanity. You might be thinking, well, but he didn't sin. Sin is not an essential feature of humanity. Adam and Eve were created as truly human and sinless. And one day, In glory, we will remain truly human and yet without sin. So sin is not a necessary feature of humanity. It was a consequence of a fall, for sure. But our Redeemer, the God-man, is co-essential with you in every respect. This is why, according to the writer of Hebrews, he could be the perfect great high priest, because he in every way could sympathize with our weaknesses, with the frailties of the human flesh. The creed goes on, In all things like unto us without sin, begotten before all ages of the Father according to the Godhead, and in these latter days for us and for our salvation, born of the Virgin Mary, the mother of God, according to the manhood, one and the same Christ, Son, Lord, only begotten, to be acknowledged in two natures. What are those two natures? Divine and human. One person, our mediator is one person, our Christ is one person, our Savior, our King, our Messiah is one person, and two natures, human and divine. And these two natures exist inconfusably, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably. The distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the unity. So here again is the mystery, isn't it? Here is a distinction between his two natures. There's a distinction between his human nature and his divine nature, and yet that distinction does no violence to the unity. Is your head hurting yet? If it isn't, then we've lost some of the mystery here. So the distinction of nature is being by no means taken away by the unity, but rather the property of each nature being preserved and concurring in one person and one subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons. See, that was one of the other heresies was that the mediator was actually two different persons. There was one person, the mediator, the two natures, but one and the same Son, and only begotten, God the Word, the Lord Jesus Christ, as the prophets from the beginning have declared concerning Him. And the Lord Jesus Christ Himself has taught us, and the creed of the Holy Fathers has handed down to us." Now, we don't have the time to trace through each one of the ecumenical creeds. But when you do that, you will see that each one builds upon the previous one, as new heresies come to light. And the language has to be tweaked and added to, to hedge and to head off those kinds of errors. So we have the scriptures, that's our norming norm, that has to be our chief and first source. It is the only certain, sufficient, and infallible source. And yet, we need the creeds. I mean, All of us together took the church four and a half centuries to get to this language. So who do we think we are that we could sit down with our open Bibles, with good intentions, with the best of modern scholarship and come up with this in even years' time? We need this work, and this is the evidence of the ongoing work of the Spirit of God at work in His church. When Jesus says in, if you'll turn with me to the Gospel of John, at the end of John 15, Jesus is teaching His disciples that He's going to depart but he's going to send the paraclete, the helper, the Holy Spirit, after his departure. And he says in verse 26 there, the very last paragraph of chapter 15, but when the helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me and you also will bear witness because you have been with me from the beginning. And then in verse 12 of chapter 16, I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, He will guide you into all the truth, for He will not speak on His own authority, but whatever He hears, He will speak, and He will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take what is Mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is Mine, therefore I said that He will take what is Mine and declare it to you." The Spirit continues to be at work, not because we're getting new revelation, but helping his saints, helping his people to glorify Christ, to state plainly who he is. And yet it doesn't take away the mystery that remains. Okay, so we have the scriptures, we have the ancient creeds, where else do we go from there? our confessions. And I'm making a little bit of a distinction between creeds and confessions. The creeds were those which were ecumenical in the true and historic sense of the word, meaning they were universal. They were believed by every true Christian. But when we get to confessions of faith, those touch on larger matters beyond just theology proper or Christology. If you go through our confession, in fact, if you have a copy near you, you can look and just scan the table of contents very quickly. 32 chapters. We speak about the Holy Scriptures, of God and the Holy Trinity, God's decree, creation, providence, the fall of man, of sin, and the punishment thereof, of God's covenant. Some of these things are universally believed, but others are distinct. distinct to particular denominations or theological positions. So, for example, we get to chapter seven of God's covenant. There's going to be bona fide differences among true Christians, how we understand God's covenant dealing with his people. Our Presbyterian brothers and sisters, and they are brothers and sisters, will have a different understanding, for example, of the Abrahamic covenant, of the Mosaic covenant. They will nuance their positions differently than we as Reformed Baptists do. But these are not the essential features of our faith. But who God is, who Christ is, those are essential features. So those are ecumenical creeds. They are universal creeds, meaning they are believed by every true Christian. And the flip side of that is true. If you don't believe these things, you can't be a true Christian. But we get to the confessions. particularly those confessions that came out of the Reformation, all of them will confess, in many ways, many using the exact same words as these ancient creeds, the same truth about God, about God being triune, the same truth about Christ and His hypostatic union. For example, in chapter two in our confession, we looked at this months ago, but with respect to In paragraph three of chapter two, in His divine and infinite being, there are three subsistences. The Westminster Confession says three persons. That's not a different doctrine. The Baptists were trying to sharpen their pencil a little bit sharper here to say subsistences. The Father, the Word, or Son, and the Holy Spirit of one's substance, power, and eternity. See, that's exactly what we just read in the Chalcedonian Creed. that Jesus Christ is consubstantial with the Father. It's another way of saying the very same thing, that He is coessential. He's of the same substance as the Father. And yet the essence undivided. The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. the Holy Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son, all infinite, without beginning, therefore but one God, who is not to be divided in nature and being, but distinguished by several peculiar relative properties and personal relations, which doctrine of the Trinity is the foundation of all of our communion with God and comfortable dependence upon Him." Now, if we turn over to chapter 8 in our Confession of Christ the Mediator, In paragraph 2, I want you to hear some of the same language, some of the same echoes of the Chalcedonian Creed. Paragraph 2 of chapter 8, the Son of God, the second person in the Holy Trinity, being very and eternal God, the brightness of the Father's glory of one's substance, and equal with Him, who made the world, who upholds and governs all things, He has made, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon Him man's nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof." Do you hear the echo? Essential properties of manhood. The essential nature of God Himself. being conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit coming down upon her and the power of the Most High overshadowing her. And so was made of a woman of the tribe of Judah, of the seed of Abraham and David, according to the Scriptures, so that two whole, perfect, and distinct natures were inseparably joined together in one person, without conversion, composition, or confusion. which person is very God and very man, yet one Christ, the only mediator between God and man. So again, I mentioned last week in the old days of overhead projectors, we have the transparencies and you can put one on top of the other. If we could put these paragraphs that I've just read to you out of our confession, put them side by side or on top of the Chalcedonian Declaration, you will find the concepts are identical. The Reformed confessions were intentional about using the same language, the same concepts. They were not, had no, in the forward to our confession of faith, I love the phrase that they use. They said, we have no itch to clog religion with new words. And I like that. We were not eager to invent new things. We were not trying to be novel. We were not trying to be inventive. We were not trying to be innovators. We want to confess the very same things that our fathers confessed. Because they were wise enough to recognize as soon as you start using new words and new concepts, you're almost always going to end up in heresy land. So anytime you hear, Someone say, well, the Trinity is like, and they begin to give an illustration. Run, run fast, because none of the illustrations work. You've probably heard some of them. The Trinity is like water. It exists in a gaseous state, a solid state, and a liquid state. No, that's modalism. You've seen the Lutheran satires. Heresy, Patrick. If you haven't seen those, those are fun, little cartoons. two little Lutheran characters. They're the old monks or clerks, and they're dealing with these various heresies. But I digress. So we have the scripture, which is our norming norm. We have the ecumenical ancient creeds of the church, which are faithful guides to us. They are not infallible, as the scripture is infallible, but they have stood the test of time. They have had centuries for people to poke holes in them and to say, no, this isn't right according to the Scriptures, and they have stood the test of time. So what should that tell you when you're on YouTube, or you're on Sermon Audio, or you're listening to a podcast, and your favorite preacher says something that's contrary to one of the ancient creeds? What should that tell you? Danger, danger, Will Robinson. I mean, red lights should be flashing on your dash at that point. And there are, sadly, more and more and more in even conservative evangelical, even reformed and reformed-ish circles who are contradicting or undermining or saying, well, I believe in Nicaea, but. Now, careful, anytime you say, I believe, but, but I want to put a different spin on this, or I want to nuance the language a little differently. Well, these words have been strained and hammered and vetted and worked on and tweaked for centuries. And so no matter how eminent or schooled or eloquent some modern teacher might be. And that includes the ones who are not that schooled or not that eloquent, like your own pastor, who would say something contrary to the confessions, to the creeds of the ancient church. It's got to be a red flag. It ought to be a red flag. What else? What are our other sources, a kind of a descending priority? Dolezal makes this statement, he says, Scripture is normative in a way that no church council is. Second to the ecumenical creeds are the confessions of ecclesiastical bodies that were not ecumenical, such as the Anglicans' Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, or the Presbyterians' Westminster Confession of Faith, or we could add our own Second London Confession. These, too, reflect the collective wisdom of a wide group of theologians, and for that reason may be accorded more weight than the writings of a single theologian. So do you hear now, we're still ranking, we're still putting things in an order of priority. The scriptures is our only certain, sufficient, and infallible guide. Then from there we go to the ancient creeds. From there we go to the confessions, particularly the reformed confessions of the 16th and 17th centuries. Then we can be helped by some of the ancient theologians. Early in our lesson today, I read to you from John Gill. I read to you from Matthew Henry. Both men who were eminent even in their time and whose works and writings have stood the test of time and continue to be faithful guides. Were they infallible? Not at all. Was John Gill right on everything he ever wrote? Nope. Was Matthew Henry correct on everything that he ever wrote? Nope. Was John Calvin right on everything he ever wrote? Nope and nope. Maybe a double nope there, but they are helpful guides. So again, we're ranking them. Now, so let's just kind of play this game. What would we do with a modern, contemporary theological scholar? Where would we rank them on this scale? It's a lot of rhetorical. Where would we rank them? It would depend to some degree on who else they're relying upon, that's true. But just categorically, their writings have not stood the test of time yet. So maybe one day, I mean, let's even take Dr. James Dolezal, for example, and I think he would heartily agree with this. very much appreciative of his labors and his work. And he is self-consciously and vocally dependent upon the church fathers, of course, the scriptures, the creeds, the confessions, the church fathers. But his writings have not stood the test of time. in 200 years, 400 years, if the Lord tarries. Maybe look at a James Dolezal, who knows? But maybe we look at him and say, our great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great children say, you know, Dolezal's been really helpful to me to understand some of these things. But he's not there yet. So in terms of our ranking and our priority, I did leave, as I skipped over part of my notes here, the scriptures, the ancient creeds, the confessions, and to some degree, we could put the church fathers, those who were writing at the time that the ancient creeds were written, in that order of priority. So even as a practical thing, in your own studies, the internet's a wonderful thing, and you can find all kinds of commentaries free online. How do you weigh those? How do you give them relative weight in your study? Well, I would encourage you to study the scriptures first and foremost. Study the ancient creeds. Even memorize them would be helpful. We recite the Apostles' Creed each and every week. I want to start in the near future mixing in some of the other creeds. I think it would be helpful as part of our worship. Study your own confession of faith. But in terms of you're looking at your family devotions and you're stuck on a particular passage and you're trying to work through this as a family, what does this mean? And you can Google or you can get online and you can find all kinds of commentaries. The commentary that was published 20 years ago versus the one that was published 200 years ago. Which one gets the better weight? Would you rather read John Gill a modern scholar. Rich Barcellos, I was talking to him one time and he said, when you're studying for a sermon, read the commentaries in chronological order. In other words, read the old dead guys first. before you get to. And there's been some significant advancements in modern scholarship in terms of textual criticism and understanding more what some of the Greek or Hebrew terms meant. That can be helpful. But those early commentaries are just indispensable. So then, here's maybe the final question. Where do we place the role of reason? We could use this concept both formally and informally. Formally in the sense of philosophy. Aristotelian logic, for example. Where do we place that on our continuum or on the graphic that I didn't produce? Where do we place that? And then informally, our own reason. How do we prioritize those things? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and that's a more helpful way to think about it. Reason is, it's a tool, it's not a source. And so reason can be a legitimate source for some things, but not Christology. We will never know from reason, again, that the second person of the Trinity assumed to himself human nature. Creation doesn't tell us that. It wasn't designed to tell us that. Creation does tell us that God is good, that he's almighty, that he's powerful, that he providentially rules and governs all things, but it doesn't tell us anything. about the hypostatic union. So reason does not teach us that. It can't be our source, but it can be an instrument. It can be a tool. Listen to Dolezal here. He says, philosophy and reason are tools that can be put into the service of Christological theologizing, but they cannot ultimately arbitrate what is theologically acceptable or unacceptable. we should beware of using the wrong philosophical tool or of allowing philosophy to skew the various sorts of theological questions we need to ask. And he quotes another scholar that says, human reason alone cannot make sense of the Trinity or the Incarnation. God has to reveal these things to us, but reason has a function in trying to tease out the logical interrelationships between doctrines that have been revealed and the inner coherence of each of the doctrines themselves. So reason can be a tool to help us, in a sense, evaluate some of the conclusions we've come to. Are they internally coherent? Do they contradict one another? But reason cannot be our source. for doing this wonderful work of Christology. Well, I'm gonna close here today. Hopefully, this has been helpful to shape our thinking in terms of how do we prioritize our sources with respect to studying theology in general, but particularly with Christology? Scriptures first. and second and third and fourth and so on. Then the ancient creeds, the confessions, to some degree the church fathers, ancient theologians, modern theologians, particularly if they're consistent with the ancient creeds. And then lastly, reason, including our own. Peter testified that no prophecy exists by private interpretation. There's an impulse within all of us to trust our own insights, our own reason, our own conclusions above others. And sometimes that hubris can be to such an extent that we trust our own reason even above the collective conclusions of the church ancient. And that ought to be a guardrail for us sort of built in. There ought to be a reflexive sense of not an unhealthy distrust of myself, but a healthy distrust, a healthy skepticism of my own conclusions, especially when I find that my conclusions vary from those that were uniformly confessed by the ancient church. Fair enough? Let us pray and prepare ourselves for worship. Gracious, holy, wise, and good God, thank you that you have made yourself known to men. What is man that you are mindful of him? And yet, not only were you mindful of us, but you revealed yourself to us. And we confess that we must come to the place at times when we are like