Good afternoon, everyone. I seldom impromptu for anything, but we'll start. It's 3.30, so we'll go ahead and start up. I'll open us with a word of prayer, and then we'll get into the material. So let's pray. Our great God and Father in heaven, we rejoice this afternoon and give Thee thanks, Lord Thou art the God of all blessing, the God in whom we live and move and have our being. the God who hath lavished upon His people all spiritual blessings in Christ. And Lord, we give Thee thanks this afternoon, particularly for the Lord Jesus, for who He is and for what He has done to redeem His people. We ask, O Lord, that Thou wouldst be with us by Thy Spirit in this time. Guide our thinking, guide our discussing. We ask, O Lord, that in all of it, that the blessed Lord Jesus would increase and that each of us would decrease. For we ask it all in His name. Amen. Well, this afternoon we're going to be looking at the Christology of the Reformation. It's kind of a broad theme, but we're going to look at a couple different aspects of it, trying to get at some of the guiding principles of Reformation Christology. Now, oftentimes the guiding theological emphases of the Reformation as a whole are summarized by using the five solas. You all have heard them. Sola Scriptura, Scripture alone. Sola Fide, Faith alone. Solus Christus, Christ alone. Sola Gratia, Grace alone. Sola Deo Gloria, the glory of God alone. These are used to summarize the theological content in many ways of the Reformation. You see that even at the conference over these couple of days. Now, one of those five solas, as you perhaps noticed, is Solus Christus, Christ alone. As Christians, we have faith in Christ alone. Our hope, our salvation, are in Christ alone. Christ alone is the mediator between God and man. Solus Christus speaks of the exclusivity and the exclusive glory of Jesus Christ in the redemption of God's people. But what we want to do this afternoon is, in a sense, kind of go behind Solus Christus. When the Reformers and those who followed after them, when they spoke of Christ, when they proclaimed His exclusive glory, precisely who was the Christ that they had in mind? The fancy theological word there is Christology. Christology is the study of the person and the work of Jesus, who He was and what He did. Well, if Christology is the study of Christ, then what was the Christology of the Reformation? When the Reformers, those who came after them, when they proclaimed the exclusive glory of Christ, How did they understand this Christ whose glory outshone the sun? That's what we want to explore for a little while this afternoon. And as we start to explore this Christology of the Reformation, we find a Christology of profound depth. And that richness of Reformation Christology largely results from two specific factors. In the first instance, the theologians of the Reformation were articulating their doctrine over against Roman Catholic presentations of traditional creedal orthodoxy. That reality demanded that the Reformers address in specific detail every component of traditional Christian doctrinal language. In his Institutes of the Christian Religion, John Calvin framed the matter this way. Calvin's speaking about calling Jesus the Son of God, calling Jesus the Redeemer of the world. And he writes, "...it would be of little value to know these names without understanding their purpose and use. The Papists use these names too, but coldly and rather ineffectually, since they do not know what each of these titles contains." See, every word that the Reformers were using to explain who Christ was, what He had done, all of those words, Roman Catholic theologians had been using for centuries. And because of that, those words had come to have meanings that were quite different from their biblical meaning. So the Reformers had to assume that even the traditional language of the Christian creeds had to be explained in detail in order to free that language both from Roman Catholic distortions that had become attached to it. Nothing could be assumed. Everything had to be clearly explained. And that created this comprehensiveness and a real rigor to Reformation Christology. There was no area of Christological thought. There was no terminology used to express that thought that they could leave unexamined. The second factor leading to the richness of Reformation Christology is that while the Reformers were articulating their doctrine over against Roman Catholic teaching, At the same time, they also were refuting the errors of other men who were rejecting not simply the Roman Catholic presentation of creedal orthodoxy, but who were rejecting that very orthodoxy itself. And the result was that Christology seldom was addressed in isolation from other areas of doctrine. They weren't writing to refute men who were just a little bit wrong on their Christology. They were writing to refute men who were wrong on their entire systems of doctrine. An example of that is seen in John Owen's work, The Mystery of the Gospel Vindicated. It's kind of into the post-Reformation era when the men were largely consolidating, explaining the theology of the Reformation. The Mystery of the Gospel Vindicated is probably, at least in my mind, Owen's finest work on Christology. And in that work, Owen is systematically refuting the false teachings of the Socinians. The Socinians were a group of well, you have to call it what it is, a group of heretics who had emerged in the early days of the Reformation. Among other things, they denied the doctrine of the Trinity, they denied the deity of Christ. And given the Sassanians' wholesale rejection of Christian truth, Owen is forced to begin at the beginning. He has to begin by defending the Christian understanding of Scripture, then the Christian understanding of the being and perfections of God, then a biblical view of mankind's condition before the Fall and after the Fall. Owen has to address all these things before he can even begin to address the person and the work of Christ. So when his treatment of Christology comes, it's already reared upon the foundation of what Owen already had written about who God is and who mankind is. You know, for example, Owen had written with considerable detail, spending considerable time explaining how, in order for God to be God, He had to be infinite and He had to be omnipresent. There had to be no limitations placed on His being or His power. You know, Owen had shown that infinity and omnipresence were necessary to divinity. And then he comes to treat the person of Jesus Christ. And he writes in reference to the incarnate Son of God, though he humbled himself and was exalted, yet in nature he was one and the same. He changed not. You see, since he has discussed divine omnipresence before he has discussed the incarnation of the divine Son, Owen is unable to avoid this profoundly mysterious issue. How do you understand the incarnation of an omnipresent God? How do you understand the seemingly contradictory facts that the Son of God is both in a specific geographical place as Jesus of Nazareth and, since He's God, He fills heaven and earth. How do you understand those two things together? You know, since Owen is presenting his Christology within this larger theological system and not focusing just narrowly on Christology, he's compelled and really forced to address all of these issues that necessarily arise. So when you kind of combine these two factors, you know, the need to refute entire systems of doctrine, and the need to be very explicit about the terminology, the concepts that are being used in that refutation, these two factors together create this depth and this richness to the Reformation's Christology. You know, today when works of Christology are written, The author really is free to choose whatever areas of Christology he wants to address. Sometimes that's determined by a specific Christological error he wants to refute. Sometimes it's determined just by his own personal likes and interests. But for the Reformers, there wasn't that freedom. Everything had to be addressed. It all had to be set within a larger theological system. And all the words being used to express this comprehensive doctrine had to be explained very clearly. And there's really little wonder that the Holy Spirit used these theologians to bring such clarity to our understanding of who Christ is and what He's done for His people. You know, this understanding of Reformation Christology, it'll seem simple. but yet it plums mysteries whose glories we'll be singing longer than this earth shall endure." Jesus Christ is fully God, fully man, and He's won a full redemption for His people. Now, in the first place, the first section of this Reformation Christology, Jesus Christ is fully God. Now, the biblical support for that is clear, it's plentiful. John chapter 1, verse 1, we're told that the Word, the Son, is God. John chapter 10, verse 30, Jesus says, I and my Father are one. Romans 9.5, Titus 2.13, Paul refers to Jesus as God. That description earlier had been used by the disciple Thomas in John 20.28. Philippians 2.6 talks about Jesus' identity with God throughout the New Testament, Jesus' worship. Y'all know all these biblical facts. But here's the complicating factor. All of these things are said about the man, Jesus of Nazareth. And so, when we consider what all these things mean, we tend to start conceptually with a man, Jesus, and then make him as much like God as we possibly can. But our starting point, the beginning of our reflection, is Jesus, a man. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. Jesus is a man. But the complication is that often we fail to do justice to the full deity of Christ. We fail to do justice to His full godness, simply because we can't conceive of how a man can be or do the things that God is and does. The theologians of the Reformation, they were forced to deal with the full implications of the deity of Christ. You know, an example of a situation which had occurred is the one that I mentioned just a few minutes ago with John Owen. He's writing against the Sosinians. Some Sosinians held this bizarre view that God was limited to some form of a physical body in heaven. And against that error, Owen argued passionately that God is infinite. That part of what makes God God is that He's present everywhere. God can't be limited to just one place. He's everywhere. As God Himself says in Jeremiah 23-24, He fills heaven and earth. So how do we understand that? How do we understand the omnipresence of God alongside that statement that sounds so familiar in our ears? Jesus is fully God. During the earthly ministry of Jesus, was the Son of God present everywhere? Or was He only in specific places within the geography of Israel? These are the sorts of issues that the Reformers and their descendants are having to address. Now, the glorious answer to that mysterious question often is given a rather peculiar name. It's referred to as the extra-Calvinisticum. Now, even if you don't speak Latin, you probably can tell that that name attributes this view to John Calvin, the extra Calvinisticum. And we'll talk in a few minutes about whether that's an entirely appropriate name for the doctrine. But first, we need to be clear about what the doctrine is. In Calvin's own words, quoting from his Institutes, the doctrine is this. For even if the Word, in His immeasurable essence, united with the nature of man into one person, we do not imagine that He was confined therein. Here is something marvelous. The Son of God descended from heaven in such a way that without leaving heaven, He willed to be born in the Virgin's womb, to go about the earth, and to hang upon the cross. Yet He continuously filled the earth, even as He had done from the beginning." So Jesus Christ is the incarnate Son of God, and yet the Son of God is not confined within the physicality of Jesus. Or put it this way, during Jesus' earthly ministry, the eternal Son of God was on His knees, washing dirt from the feet of the disciples, and at the same instant, He was filling and upholding all of creation. Jesus of Nazareth isn't a container that encloses the Lord of glory, but rather He's the person in whom the infinite Son is incarnate. And even in that infinite, that incarnated lowliness, The Son did not surrender His divine functions. That's what Calvin's saying. Simultaneously, the Son of God was incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth and filling heaven and earth with His divine presence and divine power. Now immediately, that sounds bizarre. It might even sound wrong. But it's the glorious mystery to which the Scriptures point us. In John chapter 1 verse 18, the Scriptures tell us that even as the Son was in the flesh, even as He was making God visible to man, even then, the Word was in the bosom of the Father. In John chapter 3 verse 13, Jesus tells Nicodemus that He, Jesus, is both there with Nicodemus and in heaven. In Colossians chapter 1 verse 17, we read that all things consist by the Son. Meaning that all things, all of reality, is held together by the Son. Now if that's true, and most certainly it is true, then even during His earthly ministry, the Incarnate Son was holding together all of reality. If He weren't, If, at the Incarnation, the presence and the potency of the Son was confined to the physical body of Jesus, then all of creation would have dissolved. Even in the Incarnation, the Son of God remained transcendent. He veiled aspects of that transcendence during His earthly ministry, but He never surrendered it. He never became less than God. That's the ineffable reality to which Calvin and the other Reformers were led as they considered the fullness of what it means to say that Jesus is fully God. Now, a few minutes ago I said that the name often ascribed to this particular doctrine is the extra-Calvinisticum, or the Calvinistic extra, which essentially means the Calvinistic beyond. And while that is a commonly used name, it's also a potentially very misleading name because it strongly implies that the doctrine began with John Calvin. But the doctrine is much older than Calvin. It's prominent in the Christology of the early church, particularly in men like Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria. It's prominent in the Christology of the medieval church, in men such as Peter Lombard, Thomas Aquinas. It's prominent in other branches of the broader Reformation, in men like Peter Martyr Vermigli, Zacharias Ursinus. This understanding of the transcendence of the Incarnate Son, it has filled the church's understanding of Christ since the earliest of days is not novel to John Calvin. The name extra-Calvinisticum, it doesn't reflect the pedigree of the doctrine. It reflects the context in which Calvin was articulating it. As you know, there's profound differences between the Reformed and the Lutheran understandings of the Lord's Supper. And one of those differences was that the Lutheran branch of the Reformation believed in what they called the ubiquity of Christ's body. According to that doctrine, since Jesus Christ was fully God, and God is omnipresent, Jesus' body is everywhere, most particularly in the elements of the Lord's Supper. Well Calvin very strongly disagreed with this doctrine of the ubiquity of Christ's body. And he argued that Christ's body, as a fully, truly human body, was limited to a specific place. Just like your body, my body. But at the same time as the Son was incarnate in that physically limited body, He was transcendently present in all of creation. He was, in the fullest sense, God, fully transcendent, and man in a limited physical body. Again, to a quote from Calvin, "...the very same Christ who, according to the flesh, dwelt as Son of Man on earth, was God in heaven. In this manner He said to have descended to that place according to His divinity, not because divinity left heaven to hide itself in the prison house of the body, but because even though it filled all things, still in Christ's very humanity it dwelt bodily, that is, by nature and in a certain ineffable way." In other words, Christ can be, and Christ is, present even when His physical body is not. Christ is ubiquitous, to use the Lutheran terminology, but His body is not. Now, what that meant for the Lord's Supper was that Christ is spiritually present in the Supper, even though His body remains in heaven. Now, obviously, the Lutherans disagreed with that understanding, and in an attempt to ridicule this position, kind of paint it as a novelty fresh out of Geneva, they called it the extra-Calvinisticum. But it's not Calvin's doctrine. It's a Scripture's doctrine. The Son is fully incarnate in Jesus Christ, Yet the incarnation does not exhaust the infinite being of the Son. In a way that we simply cannot conceive, the Son of God is at the same moment both in the flesh and beyond the flesh. Now, if right this moment you're thinking, wow, I sure picked the wrong breakout session to attend. Stay with me just a second. Do you see how wondrous the Jesus whom we worship is? As Jesus lay in His mother's arms in Bethlehem and cried for the nourishment that He needed in order to survive, at that very moment, the stars that filled the sky were there only because He held them there. As you walk the streets of Galilee, the earth would have vanished in His absence. If you're a Christian this afternoon, the one who hung in the darkness of Calvary, desolate under the judgment due to your sin, He was the one who holds reality together and was holding it together that very moment. He's fully God. It's not just words we use. He was fully God. He didn't hang on the cross in weakness. He hung there because in His divine strength He was redeeming His people out of love for them. That's the love of the Son of God for His people. If you're a Christian, that's the glory of the Jesus who loves you. If you're not a Christian this afternoon, know that this is the majesty of the Jesus who says, and who says to you, Come unto Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." Jesus isn't a man of frailty. He's not a man of nostalgic interest. He's not a man of limp sentimentality. The Jesus with whom we deal, the Jesus who offers Himself in the Gospel, is the living God. The one who holds the world in its place. Now this incredibly high view of Christ, this high view of His divinity, it pervaded the Christology of the Reformation. But this insistence upon Christ's divinity was never at the expense of His humanity. In fact, the Christology or the Reformers accentuated the full humanity of Christ in such a way that it was seen as scandalous by many of their contemporaries. It's interesting, or at least it is to me. You might not think so, but I think it's interesting. One of the two places in the Institutes where Calvin addresses this extra Calvinisticum that we just discussed, it comes in precisely such a setting. You know, Calvin just has laid out the full humanity of Christ, all of its implications in Book 2, Chapter 13 of the Institutes, and then he concludes that chapter by articulating the extra. Calvin's attention to the humanity of Christ had been so gritty, so intensely human, that he wanted to assure his readers that this same man was also unceasingly God. In the Christology of the Reformation, Jesus is both fully God and fully man. Now, the Reformers, those who came after them, they traced out this humanity of Christ in a number of ways, but I want to focus us on one distinctive way in which Reformation Christology really underscored the full humanity of Christ. Now, as you read through Christological discussions in the Reformation and the period thereafter, with surprising regularity, or at least I find it to be surprising, you stumble across the words, monothelite and monothelitism. Now, to a few of you, those words might sound vaguely familiar. Maybe you heard them in a Christology course at some point. But in the 7th century, there arose within the church a teaching known as Monothelitism. And that teaching held that Jesus Christ, in the Incarnation, possessed only one will. Mono, of course, means one in Greek. Thelma in Greek means will, so monothelitism is essentially one-willism. The incarnate Son had one will. Specifically, He had a divine will. Now, opposed to that teaching was duothelitism. They were catchy names here. Duothelitism is the doctrine that Christ has two wills. He has a divine will and He has a human will. Now, this might seem to be a rather obscure argument, but it raged in the church in the seventh century, until finally, in the year 681, the third council of Constantinople condemned the monothelite position as heretical. Now, one of the reasons that that is important is that after 681, there really wasn't any simmering dispute within the church between monothelites and duothelites. All the monothelites had been kicked out of the church. The issue largely was decided and had faded well into the background of theological discussions. It just wasn't an issue anymore. But then in the Reformation, post-Reformation theologians, it emerges with surprising prominence. You know, why was this doctrine of the two wills of Christ suddenly so widely used within the Christology of the Reformation? Well, among other things, it was seen by Reformation theologians as being critical to understanding the full humanity of Christ. Now, doethalitism, again, is the doctrine that the incarnate Christ has two wills. He has a human will and He has a divine will. That's the orthodox doctrine. It's not describing a divine schizophrenia. It's describing the orthodox doctrine. Now, conceptually, and we'll look at the scriptural witness here in a minute, but conceptually, doethalitism is rooted in our understanding of who Jesus is. In the words of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, Jesus is two distinct natures in one person. Jesus is two natures. A full, perfect divine nature and a full, perfect human nature. in one person, Jesus Christ. Jesus is one person. He's one distinguishable, differentiated personality. And He has within Him two natures, divine nature and human nature. Now, to refer to a nature can be a little bit vague, but a nature is essentially that which makes a thing what it is. You know, whatever makes a human a human is a human nature. Whatever makes God, God is divine nature. A nature is that which makes a thing what it is. Well, Jesus possesses a divine nature. We've seen that already. Jesus is God. He has a divine nature. Everything that makes God, God, Jesus possesses. And Jesus also possesses a human nature. In Hebrews chapter 4, verse 15, we're told that Jesus is perfectly and completely a man. You know, the only difference between His humanity and ours is that He has no sin. Jesus possesses a human nature. So everything that makes man, man, Jesus possesses. So Jesus has a divine nature and Jesus has a human nature. Well, part of divine nature, part of what makes God, God, is His will. His purposeful, intentional determining. His volition, His purpose, His will. And part of human nature, part of what makes man, man, is His will. His purposeful, intentional determining. You can't have God without having a divine will. You can't have man without having a human will. If you remove will from either nature, you're left with something less than either God or man, depending upon which will you remove. The divine will is part of the divine nature, and a human will is part of human nature. What that means is that Jesus Christ, one person, has two wills, a divine will and a human will. Now, we see Jesus' divine will in places like Matthew 23, verse 37, Luke 13, verse 34, John 5, verse 21. You know, this divine will is precisely the same. It's perfectly and precisely identical with the will of the Father and the Spirit. Jesus' human will is different. It's not sinful. It's not rebellious. It's a perfectly sinless will. It's always authoritatively led by Jesus' divine will. But it is a human will. Yes, Calvin wrote, in Jesus, the divine will and the human will differed from each other without any conflict or opposition. So, in this perfect harmony, Jesus has both a divine will and a human will. Now, if you're expecting me to explain fully how that operated during Jesus' earthly ministry, you're going to be disappointed. There's no way to explain fully how that worked, or even to understand fully how it works now in Jesus' glorified, exalted state. Now, the Scriptures don't tell us that. But they do tell us that Jesus was fully God and He was fully man. He had a divine will and He had a human will. Not just a divine will, as the Monothelites would say, and not just a human will, but both. So you start to see the robust quality that this lends to our understanding of the humanity of Jesus. Not just in the things that you can see, not just in the fleshly, tangible things of the body, but even in here, in the interior volitional impulses, Jesus is a man. He is fully a man. And the Reformers saw this doctrine most clearly in, and they argued it most elegantly out of, Matthew chapter 26 and verse 39. It's a familiar passage. It's the night of His betrayal, and Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane. Jesus prays to the Father to let the cup of God's wrath against sin, essentially to let the cross pass from Him. In verse 38 of Matthew 26, Jesus tells His disciples, "...my soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death." Jesus dreads what He knows lies ahead. And then in verse 39, Jesus prays to the Father and He says, "...O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as Thou wilt." Then, after a brief break, Jesus prays again, down in Matthew chapter 26, verse 42, "...O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me, except I drink it, Thy will be done." And do you see what Jesus is doing here? He is submitting His will. He's submitting His human will to the will of the Father. He begins in dread, wants nothing to do with the cross, Then He pleads for a change of course, but He expresses a willingness to submit to the will of the Father. And then finally, in verse 42, He prays for the Father's will to be done. Jesus' human will has been brought into submission to the will of the Father. He wants what the Father wants. He prays for what the Father wants. You know, not without heaviness, but He prays for what the Father wants. Jesus, the Son of God, is submitting His human will to the will of the Father. In the thick air of Gethsemane, you see the two wills of Christ. The one, the divine will, that's identical with the Father's will, and the second, the human will, that initially shrinks from the ravages of Calvary, but that then, obediently, is led by the divine will into submission. In Gethsemane, we see, and even more poignantly, we hear the two wills of Christ. You know, Jesus wasn't just a human anatomy that the Son of God activated. He was fully, truly, completely, from the inside out, a man, even at the level of His will. That's what the Reformers and their theological descendants wanted so desperately to assert when they rebuked monothelitism and when they argued again and again for the two wills of Christ. There is no level of consciousness. There's no corner of the interior life in which Jesus Christ is not fully a man. Now that might seem like some rather abstract stuff. But brothers and sisters, it gets at and it affects the way that we live our lives. You think about what it means. Jesus knows the struggle of bringing a human will into submission to the will of God. What we hear in the anguished cries of Gethsemane is Jesus bringing His human will into obedient submission to the divine will. You know, Jesus knows what will be involved in the cross. And His human will doesn't want it. It wants to pull back. Jesus' human will doesn't want the desolation of the cross. It doesn't want the disintegrating fury of the wrath of God against sin. It doesn't want to be the colliding point of God's perfect wrath and all the sin of His people. But Jesus brings that will into submission. brings it into a submission to such a degree that he can pray by the end that the Father's will be done. You know, Jesus didn't live His days in some sort of sanitized environment in which doing the will of God always was easy. Jesus knows what it is when doing the will of God is hard. If you're a Christian this afternoon, there are depths of comfort for you in an understanding of the two wills of Christ. You're called to a life of obedience, and that's hard. You struggle with all your might to make it appear to others as if it's easy for you, but it's not. It's hard. And if you're anything like me, the hardness of obedience isn't here. The hardness of obedience is in here. Yeah, I can grip my teeth, and I can do out here things to meet whatever standard you please, but to wrestle with the still sinful will that resides in here, and to make it want the glory of God. Brothers and sisters, that's the hardness of obedience. Now, Jesus, He was without sin. There was no sin even in His will. But He knows what it is when submitting your will to the will of God is hard, when it's terrifying, when it's absolutely unpalatable. Jesus knows the aching hardness of submitting to God's will, and He knows that pain from the weeping side of the tears. You know, Jesus knows what it is to have precious things. He knows what it is to have beloved things. He knows what it is to have a life. and to lay it down, to lay it down at the feet of the will of the living God. You know, when you know what it is that God would have you to do, you know, a difficult situation at work, a relationship, your interactions with a family member, you're dealing with a particular sin or vice in your own life, whatever the case may be, when you know what it is that God would have you to do, and you just don't want to do it, Jesus knows the anguish. Not the sin, but the anguish. He knows the pain of letting go. He knows the struggle of bowing down. So we can pray to Christ that by His Spirit, He would strengthen us to submit to God's will as He submitted to God's will. It's not easy. even for the perfect, sinless human will of Jesus, united to the divine will. Even then, it wasn't easy. Pray that Jesus would give you strength to submit your will to the will of God. He knows what you mean when you ask it. And He's able. Because as the Reformation Christology insisted, He's fully God and He's fully man. But there's There's one final thing that Reformation Christology presses upon us that we want to look at before we're finished. Within Reformation Christology, Jesus Christ is fully God, fully man, and He's won a full redemption for His people. Now here, it's helpful to begin with kind of how the Reformers interacted with the notion of merit. And the Reformers had a very nuanced relationship with the idea of merit. On the one hand, the Roman Catholic Church had developed an understanding of merit, wherein merit was something that you could kind of accumulate, you could receive from dead saints, you even, in the worst cases, could purchase in order to escape the judgment of God. That notion of merit was fundamentally opposed to the gospel. The Reformers wanted nothing to do with it. But on the other hand, there were some who were withdrawing from Rome at the same time, who completely and radically rejected any idea of merit. These groups reacted against Rome so strongly, and they rejected the notion of merit so absolutely, that they argued that there wasn't even anything meritorious in the blood of Jesus. That blood hadn't merited anything, it hadn't won anything, it hadn't really purchased anything at all. In this line of thinking, grace is fundamentally opposite to the notion of merit. And so to assign any place to any merit was to begin this unavoidable slide back into Roman legalism, works righteousness, Now, while the Reformers certainly didn't want to articulate a Roman Catholic view of merit, they likewise wanted to be clear that there was merit in the blood of Jesus. That blood, that sacrifice, had actually earned, it had actually deserved redemption. By that blood, God actually paid the debt due to His own justice to redeem His people. There was merit in the blood of Christ. Now here again, Calvin's very helpful. In Book 2, Chapter 17 of the Institutes, Calvin deals with how Christ truly merited grace and salvation for the people of God. Now Calvin starts with the stipulation that ultimately, grace, salvation, they all flow from the good pleasure and the decree of God. So when we speak of Christ meriting the redemption of His people, It's not as if Christ is procuring something that the Father is reticent to bestow. But rather, out of His mere good pleasure, God had decreed that through the merit of Christ's work, the redemption that He desired for His people would be justly obtained. So the merit of Christ's work isn't causing God's mercy, but rather the merit of Christ's work is the instrument through which God is bestowing His mercy. You know, Christ came, He merited redemption for His people, not so that God could love His people, but because God already did. Now, with that critical stipulation made, Calvin gets to the pointed issue. He deals with the merit, the procuring merit, of Christ's work. And Calvin states it very bluntly. He says, "...by His obedience, Christ truly acquired and merited grace for us with His Father." You know, as counterintuitive as the language may sound, Christ earned grace. And Calvin's very specific about how that worked. You know, quoting from Calvin again, When we say that grace was imparted to us by the merit of Christ, we mean this. By His blood we were cleansed, and His death was an expiation for our sins. Christ's blood earned our cleansing. His death earned our sins removal. The blood that Jesus Christ poured out on Calvary earned forgiveness. You know, put it strongly. Because of the shed blood of Jesus, those who are His deserve to be cleansed. You know, Calvin's telling us the same thing that the Scriptures tell us in 1 John 1 verse 9. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. You notice what John says there. Why does God forgive the sin of His people? Does John say, if we confess our sins, He is merciful to forgive us our sin? Does He say, if we confess our sins, He is gracious to forgive us our sin? No. He says, if we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins. When Jesus died under the curse of God against the sin of His people, He took God's wrath against that sin away. It's gone. Their sins have been judged in Christ. And therefore, they deserve to be forgiven. Justice has been satisfied. God forgives sin. He makes His people clean. Not because He doesn't care about their sin. Not because He overlooks it. Not because He winks at it. God forgives His people, He makes His people clean because He's dealt with their sin in Christ. Jesus has earned, He has merited their forgiveness. And so God forgives their sin out of His justice. He gives that which has been merited. Now, Christ's coming displays God's grace, His mercy, but the forgiveness that Christ bestows He earns. He merits. Now, that's sublime. But Calvin rightly nudges matters even further. You know, still in the same chapter of the Institutes, Calvin notes the words of Galatians chapter 2 verse 21, where Paul writes, "...if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in vain." And for that verse, Calvin asserts that in Christ's death, believers have the righteousness that they would have had by keeping the law, if such obedience were possible. What could have come through obedience to the law, hypothetically, has come through Christ instead. In that connection being made, Calvin then writes this, For if righteousness consists in the observance of the law, who will deny that Christ merited favor for us when, by taking that burden upon Himself, He reconciled us to God as if we had kept the law? In His obedience even unto death, Jesus merited for His people not only forgiveness, but a positive righteousness. He made them as those who had kept the law. Jesus gives His people a law-keeping, God-pleasing righteousness. It's what Paul is describing in 2 Corinthians 5 verse 21 when he writes, "...for He hath made Him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him." Christ takes the sin of His people on Himself. He satisfies divine wrath against that sin. He merits their forgiveness. And the righteousness that Christ had won through a lifetime of perfect, unflinching obedience He then bestows on His people. He merits for them righteousness. Now that's clear in Calvin. It would become even more clear in his theological descendants. There is, in Christ's work, what is called an act of obedience. An obedience by which Jesus perfectly fulfills the law. He merits righteousness by that obedience. And then He gives or He imputes that righteousness to His people. And so His people are counted not as guilty, and not even simply as forgiven. They're counted as righteous. Jesus doesn't just take away their sin, He gives them righteousness. Now if you're a Christian this afternoon, hear the comfort of this Reformation understanding of what Jesus has done. All of your sin, all of your filth, your degradation, your shame, Jesus has taken it upon Himself and He has paid the debt that you owed to divine justice. Your sins are gone. They're gone. And in their place, Jesus has given to you, He's imputed to you, He's credited to your account His own righteousness. In the sight of the living God, you are righteous. Now, among men, the taint of sin, it lingers. You know, men and women, they look at you and they remember. You know, there's that man who did that terrible thing. Or there's that woman who was so hurtful. There's that man who was a real failure as a father. There was that woman who was so shameful. But it's not so with God. He knows your deepest sin, and yet He looks on you and He sees the iridescent righteousness of Jesus. The Jesus in whom the Father declared Himself to be well-pleased. There's no shame. There's no guilt. If you're a Christian, in you, God sees only righteousness. You're clean. You're righteous. And it's not some fabrication because Jesus has merited it. With His life, with His death, Jesus has earned your place in the realms of endless day. Jesus is fully God, fully man. And He's won a full redemption for His people. In a day of often weak, superficial understandings of who Jesus is, what He's done, the Christology of the Reformation has stores of riches for us. It describes for us the only work that can merit four centers, acceptance, life before the Holy God. And it presents to us the only Jesus who can accomplish that work. Jesus is fully God, fully man, and He's won a full redemption for His people. You know, praise God for these truths that He revealed afresh to the Reformers May all these truths invigorate us and stir our love to Christ, even today, as they did then. Now, I think there are... we have just a few minutes left, ten minutes left in our time. I'll take a few questions, if anybody has any. as Christ's will went from the dread to the submission. Relating that to us, we may not have the same... You said that the two wills aren't contradictory as before, but if our will is not perfectly lined up with the dread, doing something that's very difficult, It's how we react to that that could be what we might have sinned. You know, just because our role isn't necessarily typically in alignment, how we react to that, if we submit to it and actually perform our duty or whatever you want to say. You know, just because at the outset something appears difficult to us and we don't want to do it, that's not necessarily sin. Right. Wouldn't that be a true statement? Yeah, I think a lot of it comes down to the precise situation. If someone feels, say, called to the mission field, and are initially very resistant to that out of concern for family, kind of legitimate concerns, and the difficulty of submitting one's will to the will of God. at least in that way, doesn't involve sin. Rather, it's a coming to submit. It can sound strange to say lack of immediate acquiescence is not sin, but then we see in the case of Christ in the garden that that can be the case. The opposite sort of situation would be if you feel convicted to lay aside a particular sin. The spirit has given you eyes to see a certain pridefulness in your heart, say. And you don't want to give it up just because you don't want to give it up. In your pridefulness, you want to hang on to your pride. So at that point, the resistance is sinful. But there are instances in which coming to submit one's will, and it being a process, is not a result of sin, but a result of the difficulty of submitting to the divine will at points. Now, I think you'd have to say, if it becomes too protracted, then it can be a problem. In the case of a hypothetical situation of someone called to the mission field, if they don't go on the mission field for twenty years, at that point, you're resisting the will of God. But I think even as we seek to walk in obedience, even in the midst of obedience, as we're being obedient, there's still difficulty in it. And I think that's the sort of thing that's reflected in the picture we get in Gethsemane. The obedience of submitting our will to God there can be a sinless, or a sin-free difficulty in it. That I think at times can be hard to recognize. Does that kind of get at what you're... Yeah, it was just kind of like the apostles were beaten for the gospel. They could take joy in that, but probably during the beating, they weren't happy. They were in pain and difficulty and were gladly Christ's human will doesn't want the horrors of the cross. No one wants masochistic, wanting suffering. Yes, I appreciate so much your explanation on the extra of Calvinism, Calvinian. I think I'm pronouncing that correct. Of course not. So in light of that, could you help us understand Philippians 2, where the scripture says that he played a side as deity. He's considered as deity not something to be grasped, Let it go as a servant, and became a servant in the form of a man, and died for our sins. So, what's the connection? We know that he was still divine and human at the same time, and yet in his humanity, or in his work, he laid aside, or didn't consider his duty something to be grasped and held on to. For most of the history of the church, there's been tremendous disagreement over that verse. So there's not a... You'll get discussion about it. But the general Reformation understanding, I think the biblical understanding and my understanding, is that when Philippians 2 talks about Christ's emptying himself It's an emptying of a veiling. There's a perspective that takes it as being a kenosis, an emptying in the sense of almost kind of setting his divinity to the side for a time. There's an understanding that it's more of a, in Greek, krypsis. It's a veiling or a covering of his divinity so that mankind could look on him. He was setting aside some of the some of the exercises of some of his divine prerogatives in such a way that he was fully man. So he's not emptying himself in the sense of setting aside deity in any way, but rather he's emptying himself by uniting the divine nature to a human nature to be the person Christ. And in that, the full grandeur of his divinity is not visible. in your illustration, or in the example you cited, with Jesus in the garden, that to take the cup, he laid that aside. To take the cup of God's wrath, to stay human, to not exercise his prerogative as God, would that be a fair application? I think a more helpful illustration would be in Christ's Temptations. It was within His divine power and prerogatives to turn the stones into bread. But that was a prerogative and a power that He set aside in order to live out the fullness of his full humanity, because a man can't do that. And so there's a setting aside of some of the, not of his divine essence or nature in any way, but just of some of the exercises of some of its potentials. I think, whereas in the Garden of Gethsemane, it's much more a just a bringing into conformity of the human nature, more so than any explicit veiling of the divinity. Yeah. I see a question, a hand back there a minute ago. Excuse me? Yes, sir. That was one of the primary problems with the doctrine even at the time, was that if he has a human nature without a human will, then he's not fully human. One of the chief problems even at the time was that it essentially made him unable to be our substitute. The response of the Monophelites to that was that It kind of got to their understanding of anthropology, of what makes up a person. They were arguing that if he has a divine will and a human will, and you're saying his human will always submits to the divine will, then what's the difference from saying there's just a divine will? Their opinion was that the Doethalites were being a little bit disingenuous by inventing a will that never did anything anyway. It's not convincing, I don't think. Yes, sir. Swingly claimed he preached the gospel really almost before Luther and Calvin certainly preached the gospel. But Swingly almost wanted to convert the other Cantons by starving them and by war. And Calvin almost put Geneva under theocracy. So it almost seemed like they didn't see that gospel like Paul did. I'm not ashamed of the gospel, but it is the power. It seems to me it came off more clear with Luther than with the other two in actual application. Well, they certainly were applying their understanding of the gospel and applying the gospel in situations that are very different from what we know. I think particularly with Calvin, you had a desire to see wider reform and was seeking after that with a town council who was, on the one hand, quite friendly to him, on the other hand, kind of antagonistic toward him. I personally don't think that Calvin was pursuing a theocracy. I think what he wanted might look like a theocracy now in some ways. I think those sorts of things certainly raise the issue of how different the context of these men were. These men weren't like our pastor today a couple hundred years ago. They were in a very different world with different relationships with the civil magistrate, different relationships to the culture. We have to be careful how we read them. Well, I realize we're two minutes over time, so let me pray for us quickly and we'll be dismissed. Our great God and Father in Heaven, we do rejoice again this afternoon. Lord, You are mighty and great beyond all measure. Thou art high and lifted up. And Lord, we give Thee thanks that in Thy love for Thy people, Thou hast redeemed them in Thy Son. And Lord, we confess that we are men and women of small minds, that we are unable to grasp the immeasurable glory of the triune God. We ask, O Lord, that by Thy Spirit Thou wouldst move in us in order that we might come more and more to understand Thy beauty and the glory of what Thou hast accomplished. We give Thee thanks for Christ and for the redemption that is in Him. Help us, O Lord, to live day by day as faithful followers of Him. Make us to be those who do good works and who do them so that others might see them and praise our Father who is in heaven. Lord, be with us now as we go and refresh ourselves with supper, then come back. We pray, Lord, that all of it would be done for Thy glory. We ask it all in the wonderful name of Jesus. Amen. Thank you all for your time.