So tonight we are going to resume our study, or start afresh rather, our study of the Westminster Confession of Faith. We will not actually get into the text of the confession itself tonight. Rather, we're going to do a little bit of an introductory lesson about what it is that we'll be studying, stuttering, that's what I'll be doing. You guys will be studying the rest of this semester. So the Westminster Standards and why we have them and why we study them, they are to my mind and the mind of many, the most faithful and accurate summary on the core teachings of Scripture. They are remarkable both for being so concise in their explanation and style and yet also so comprehensive in their scope. I often joke I am not a 5-point Calvinist, I am a 33-point Calvinist, right? Because the Westminster Standards cover the full breadth of Reformed Theology. I personally am on the record when we go before Calvary Presbytery both for licensure and ordination. So when I went for licensure, I'm on the record as taking no exceptions to the Westminster Standards. And I plan to do that again in a couple weeks when I go for ordination exams. Please be praying for me for those exams. I would greatly appreciate that. All of the officers of this church are required to subscribe to the Westminster Standards. You, however, as members of the church, are not required to subscribe to the Westminster Standards. So it's okay for you to have things in here that you may not agree with, that you may have issue with. Nonetheless, it's important that you know what your church believes the Bible to teach about these core essential doctrines. In the Westminster Standards, I'll use that term often, by which I mean the confession of faith, which is what we will be studying, along with the larger and shorter catechisms which I will make a frequent reference to. And so what we're going to do tonight is we're gonna talk about two things. First, we're gonna talk about why would a church that believes the Bible alone is the infallible rule of faith and practice, why would we also make such common and frequent use of things like creeds and confessions? That's the first thing we're gonna do tonight. Why do we use creeds and confessions? And then secondly, we'll talk about Where are the Westminster Standards come from? These documents did not just fall out of the sky one day. They were not divinely inspired by God, like the scriptures. Where did they come from? So again, why do we use creeds and confessions, and then specifically for the Westminster Standards, where did they come from? So why use creeds and confessions? Why not just the Bible? This is a charge that is often leveled against the Reformed churches, by many of our non-Reformed Baptist friends. Reformed Baptists are a completely different category. They have their own confession of faith, the 1689 London Baptist Confession, which, by the way, if you ever had the opportunity to read that side-by-side with the Westminster Standards, it's a direct copy, y'all. Word for word, the first chapter is almost identical. but we love them. Non-reformed Baptists will often object to the use of any kind of creed or confession. My great-grandfather on my mother's side was a Baptist minister, and his church was the Church of the Brethren, and one of their famous slogans was, no creed but Christ, and no book but the Bible. And that sounds like something that we should be about. Christ and the Bible. That's our standard and we would agree with that statement insofar as that goes. What had happened is that they had grown suspicious of any type of creedal Christianity because in the 1920s and 30s a lot of the mainline churches and the mainline Presbyterian denominations to be honest, had drifted into theological liberalism because of studying higher criticism. And so our Baptist friends became suspicious of any kind of intellectual academic pursuits connected to the faith. Question? What does liberalism mean in a church setting? What does liberalism mean in a church setting? Great question. Essentially, liberalism within a church setting is the idea that I am no longer tied to what the Bible says. I am more going to preach whatever I think is right and then try and find a Bible passage that sort of sounds like that. So it's cherry-picking verses to match my own theology instead of deriving my theology straight from the Word of God. Good question. And there were lots of problems in the mainline Presbyterian churches in the first part of the 1900s. They denied the miracles of Christ. They denied the virgin birth. They denied substitutionary atonement. They thought that his sacrifice on the cross was just to be a good example. All kinds of really bad, wonky stuff had crept in. Good question. However, while we thank men like my great-grandfather and others held the line and held the biblical authority to go wholesale with no creeds at all. is, in some sense, to throw the baby out with the bathwater. It's not the creed's fault. Embracing creeds and confessions is in no way subverting or undermining the authority of scripture. It's in no way undermining the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. Rather, creeds and confessions serve as what we'll call subordinate authorities to the word of God. What do I mean by subordinate authorities? That is, they support the authority of the Word of God. They summarize the teaching of Scripture in a way that's easy for us to understand and keep in balance with the whole of what the Bible says. And I've got several examples that I'll give us for this. Because you can get in all kinds of trouble interpreting isolated passages of the Bible if you don't have a full working systematic in your head. I'll give you a couple examples. Let's try this. Would somebody please read for us John 17 3. John 17 and verse three. Pastor Johnson, go for it. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Okay, so what might somebody infer about the deity of Christ if they only have that verse to go on? That if you know who Christ is, then you get eternal life. That's true. But what might they think about Christ in relationship to God? That he's like a disciple. Right. That he's not God himself. This is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. Setting Jesus in contrast to God, or in opposition to God. that he's somehow less than God. What about this one? John 14, 28. Would somebody please read that for us? John 14, 28. Ms. Farringer. Ye have heard how I said unto you, I go away and come again unto you. If ye loved me, ye would rejoice, because I said, I go unto the Father, for my Father is greater than I. All right. So what might be an error that somebody might fall into from that verse as they think about the relationship between Jesus and the Father? Anybody want to take a guess? James. That the Father is better than him. Yeah. Not just like in a role of him. Right. Correct. And that's well put, too, by the way. I can tell you were raised here. They might think that God the Father is what we would call ontologically, in his essence, superior to the Son, instead of economically, in that he has a role that's over the Son. That would be a mistake that would be very easy to fall into if you don't have a more robust understanding of the whole of what the Bible teaches about the relationship between these two persons. Okay? John 1.1, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. If you don't know the rest of the Bible, and you just know this one verse, how many gods do you think there are? The Word was with God. and the word was God. Some of you are holding up one because you're so ingrained in the right answer, there is only one God. What I'm trying to say is if you don't have a balanced understanding of what the scripture teaches, this verse suggests that there is the word with God, and the word is also God. That would be a wrong conclusion to draw. However, you all have been raised in good, reformed settings, so I can ask you, are there more gods than one? Children's Catechism, what's it say? There is only one God. In how many persons does this God exist? Three persons. Can you name them, or what are they? Right. So if you guys having this catechesis background, being trained in things that summarize the whole of what the Bible teaches about these things, are protected from interpreting these verses incorrectly. Because you have a knowledge, you have an understanding of a summation of the whole of what the Bible teaches. The easiest doctrine to demonstrate this with is probably the doctrine of the Trinity. which is something that we've hit on a little bit. So what's the doctrine of the Trinity? As you all have already said, there is one God, Deuteronomy 6-4. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one God. And yet, God exists in a multitude of persons. Genesis 1-26, God said, let us make, us, plural, make, also a plural verb in the original language, Let us make man in our singular image. So there's some sense of a plurality of God even on page one. And we know this because we've been well taught. And this God is revealed in three persons. The Father, nobody disputes that, but if you want a proof text for the Father being referred to as God, 2 Corinthians 1.3. The Son is referred to as God in Titus 2.13, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. And then the Holy Spirit is referred to explicitly as God in Acts 5.3-4. When Peter says, you have not lied to men, but unto God, you have lied unto the Holy Spirit. And so the point is, what these creeds and confessions and catechisms help you to do, is when you come to passages talking about God, you interpret them through a Trinitarian lens, because you've got that drilled into you, and you don't have to walk through all these verses every time to build the doctrine of the Trinity, every time you come to a verse about God in your Bible. Does that make sense? That's the helpful aspect of these. It's a lot easier, it's a lot more realistic for you to carry in your head a summary of what the Bible teaches to then help you keep within the bounds of orthodoxy when you interpret specific individual passages. And again, this can be done with other doctrines, not that the doctrine of the Trinity is irrelevant, to your practical daily life. We'll actually see that it's very relevant when we get to Chapter 2 of the Confession. But this is also important for doctrines like sanctification. Is sanctification positional, a one-time event in history? Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6.11, you have been, past tense, sanctified. Or is sanctification progressive and ongoing, like he says in 2 Corinthians 3.18, being conformed from one degree of glory to the next more and more into the image of Jesus Christ? The answer is both. Sanctification is the work of God's free grace, whereby you are renewed in the whole man after the image of God. That's positional. and enabled more and more to die into sin and to live under righteousness. That's progressive and lifelong. Sanctification is both of these things, and that's why the Shorter Catechism, 35, describes it that way, because they're taking into account all of what the Bible says about this and putting it in one sentence for you that's easy to remember. So then, that's why we use creeds and confessions. They help us to keep in our mind the whole of what scripture says about any given topic. And I actually love this analogy that a Reformed Baptist minister by the name of Jeff Durbin uses. I would not endorse everything that this man says, but this is very helpful. He says that to refuse the use of creeds and confessions is to deny that the Holy Spirit has been at work in the church for the last 2,000 years. What he's saying, and he's exactly right about this, is that if we ignore everything that church history has said, all the formulations of doctrine that the church has made from the beginning up until now, we're saying, it doesn't matter what the Holy Spirit taught those people, he's gonna teach me everything. No, the Holy Spirit actually is going to use those people to help you understand more. We don't want to deny that the Spirit has been at work for the last 2,000 years. He's actually leading us into all truth just as he promised. And so there's a very practical and theological reason to use these documents, but let's go one more. They're practical, they're helpful in our interpretation of scripture. They're a theological statement that God has been working through his church to help reveal truth for all this time. But lastly, they are explicitly biblical. The Bible is actually full of short, miniature creeds. For example, Deuteronomy 6.4 is called the Shema. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And that is the statement of faith that a Hebrew child would have said morning and evening every single day. That's a summary of the most important part of their faith. Our Lord is one God. We are not polytheists. We don't go after the gods of the nations. Our Lord is one God. The Apostle Paul uses a creedal formula in 1 Corinthians 15, 3-4. I deliver to you first of all that which I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried and He was raised again the third day in accordance with the Scriptures. That's a summary of Paul's whole theology. He's going to build on that in the rest of his letters, but that's the core of it. He gave us a creed. 2 Corinthians 5, 21. For our sake, he made him who knew no sin to be sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. That is a summation of what Jesus did on the cross for us. And then one last one that you can look up later is 1 Timothy 3.16. Great is the mystery of godliness that he was manifest in the flesh. And it goes on from there. The Bible gives us summaries of its own teaching. That's why it's okay and appropriate for us to use them. Now, with the time we have left, we'll consider the Westminster Standards specifically and some of the historical background about where they came from. As we've already said, these documents didn't just fall from the sky, right? And these are not divinely inspired either. Just as a side note, you'll hear me refer several times to the Westminster Divines. That is not because we believe that they're divinely inspired. That is a reference to their title, to their expertise. My degree that I got from RTS Charlotte, and the degree that Dr. Phillips got from Westminster Theological Seminary, and the degree that Brendan Brownigan got from Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary is called a Masters of Divinity, meaning that is the subject matter that we have a high degree in. We have studied the nature of the divine. So when we say the Westminster Divines, we're not saying these men are divine. They're in an office that teaches and unfolds the things of the divine. That's a common misunderstanding. Just want to be clear about that. So where did this document, where did these documents come from? I'm pulling most of this information from a book called A Short History of the Westminster Assembly by William Beveridge, and it was revised and edited by this guy, J. Ligon Duncan III, who's relatively reliable. It's difficult to begin the story of the Westminster Assembly any later than 1604. Year 1604 is when King James of England, also King of Scotland, met with the religious leaders of his time to try and quell the complaints of those pesky, annoying, obnoxious, obtuse Presbyterians within his country. England had gone back and forth for the last hundred years between being affiliated with the Roman Catholic Church and being affiliated with the Protestant Reformation, and James was trying to settle things. And when he took the throne, many of the Reformed in England were actually very excited, because James had been raised and taught in Scotland, which, for those of you who don't know, Scotland is like the epicenter of Presbyterian Church, theology, government, all of it. That's the mother home. And so James being raised there in that environment when he comes to take the throne, the reformed guys are all really excited. We've got our guy. And James did have good theology, but he was also greedy and selfish and cared much more about power. His motto was, no bishop, no church. No bishop, no king. And the idea is this, James knows that he stands a better chance at controlling the environment, the temperature of his country, if he can also control the church. And so he leads it the way it is. The only thing he gives the Puritan reform guys is he lets them do a new translation of the Bible, which you may have heard of. 20 years later, his son, Charles, takes the throne in 1625, and that's when things get worse. And this is quoting directly from the book. He says, there was liberty neither in church nor in state. The king, who was constitutionally a tyrant, was supported in the state by John Stratford, whose policy was thorough, and in the church by William Laud, who was constitutionally a pope. The result was a political and ecclesiastical absolutism. And I'm just gonna sum that up. King Charles had control over the state without contest and over the church without contest. He governed everything. And he crammed in all the authority and power that he possibly could. He was so abusive and tyrannical in his power that as the king, he said, Parliament, who are the elected officials and leaders of the country that represent the people, Y'all are off. From 1629 to 1640, there was no representative government in England at all. The king just did his bidding through his proxies. And we're not really gonna get into the depths of what that did to the country, because that's not our main concern, but you can imagine that didn't provoke a warm, loving feeling from the people that their representatives didn't matter. And then he also started to impose liturgical practices on the church. He was, through William Law, telling them, this is how your worship service is gonna go. These are the prayers you're gonna pray. These are the scriptures you're gonna read. Here's everything you're gonna do. This didn't go over very well in Scotland. Because again, they were devout Presbyterians who did not take any top-down flack. This resulted in a war in Scotland called the War of the Bishops. Huh? Yes, that's right, that's right. So this resulted in the War of the Bishops. So what happens, and this is going somewhere, stay with me, what happens is as a result of that War of the Bishops, Charles needs some financial support. He needs Parliament to meet again. So he reconvenes Parliament in, April of 1640, it starts to not go his way, so he dissolves it. Three weeks they met, and it wasn't going his way, so he shut it down. For the next six months, he still can't get anything done. He reconvenes Parliament at the end of that year in what's called the Long Parliament. They only agreed to come back together on one condition. The only way we can be dissolved is by our own ruling. This Parliament stayed in session for 20 years. Now, this would result in an English Civil War. This would result in the death of King Charles and lots of other really violent, nasty things. Here's the important part for the sake of our study. In this English Civil War that starts in the early 1640s, that's really all about how is the nation of England going to be governed? Is it going to be the king over the parliament? Or is it going to be the parliament over the king? One of the things that Parliament does is they convene all of the greatest theologians in the two kingdoms, in England and Scotland, the Westminster Assembly. And what's really remarkable is that in this time of war about authority and who's in charge, God uses, by his own providence, to gather probably the greatest assembly of theologians since the church fathers' age. Like, this is unparalleled, the names on the list. To lay out, while you guys are trying to figure out all this, this is how my church is to be governed. And there are proof texts and passages citing and supporting every single point. And the first chapter of the Westminster Confession of Faith ends this way, and I think this is where it will end, and we'll get here to study it explicitly in a couple weeks. the supreme judge by which all controversies of religion are to be determined, and all decrees of councils, opinions of ancient writers, doctrines of men, and private spheres, the supreme judge by which all of those are to be examined, and in whose sentence we are to rest, can be no other but the Holy Spirit speaking in Scripture. How is God's church to be governed? How is the life of the Christian to be governed? according to the authority of the Holy Spirit, speaking through the Word of God. And that's what the Westminster Assembly was trying to lay down for us. Now I'll make a couple other observations. One is that this was not a revolutionary document in its time. It was not brand new ideas. It was crystallized and pristine presentations of ideas that had been around for a long time. It was taking documents such as the 39 Articles of the Church of England. It was taking documents such as the Scotch Confession of 1560, the Second Helvetic Confession in France, the Belgic Confession, all the other Reformed confessions, and it was saying, how can we streamline all of this and make it as clear as possible? what the Lord would have us to believe concerning Him. And that's why the Westminster Standards are the most respected and revered doctrinal standards that there are in all of the Reformed Church. Because they stand on the shoulders of giants and they made things more clear according to the authority of God's Word. Well, let me pray for us and then I'll have time for questions if anybody has any. God in heaven, we do give thanks to you for our church's doctrinal standards. We thank you that they come to us from men, Lord, who while they were not moved along by you, immediately inspired, breathed out by God, they were nonetheless drawing their inspiration from your word. We thank you for the fact that they handled it well and that we get to profit and benefit therefrom. We pray, Lord, that you would bless our study of this great confession over the coming years. We ask in Jesus' name, amen.