I would argue that the majority of men who preach want the same thing. They want people to understand the Bible, to feel the weight of what it says, and to have the desire to live according to it.

Intellectual Preaching

The first ditch that preaching can fall into is intellectualism. In this ditch, the preaching is diligent and serious about the text, as it clearly outlines the passage, explains the doctrine, and will often give the hearer something that they may not have known or heard before.

This type of preaching is attractive to the preacher, as it makes him serious about the text and serious about the Word of God. It is attractive to the hearer because they can leave a sermon with some connection in the text that they may have missed before, or be able to articulate what they believe more clearly.

The danger of this type of preaching is that while real connection may be made, it leaves the hearer to figure out what the text has to do with them. To put it bluntly, the hearer may understand justification better when they leave, but may still leave with the same guilt over sin that they came in with, because the sermon never actually directed him to rest in the righteousness of Christ.

To be clear, exegesis and theological depth in the pulpit are important, but they must serve the preaching, without becoming the preaching.

Emotional Preaching

The other ditch in preaching is emotionalism. In this style, the preacher is rightly attempting to move the congregation; however, he is doing it in a way that sidesteps the work of the Spirit and will, oftentimes, become manipulative, even if that is never the intent.

This type of sermon can cause the hearer to be brought to tears and be visibly and emotionally moved; the question is what was the hearer given to believe. Because there was nothing to believe, when the emotions pass, there is nothing left to sustain them.

To be clear, preaching ought to move us. There is something wrong when we can speak about the goodness and the holiness of God with no apparent sense of their weight. But there is also something wrong when the weight comes mainly from the preacher’s delivery and has little connection to the passage.

The problem for many is that they can fall into either ditch while trying to climb out of the other. Someone tired of shallow emotional appeals may tend to go to the extreme and preach sermons that explain everything, while someone tired of cold theology may begin chasing a response.

Experiential Preaching

This is where I think experiential preaching helps us to stay out of both ditches.

Experiential preaching explains and applies Scripture to the hearer. Joel Beeke describes it as preaching that applies the truth of God to the hearts of people.1

For me, that means application must bring the Christ proclaimed in the text to the person hearing it. We explain who Christ is and what he has accomplished, and then address the hearer with that Christ. His finished work stands outside us, accomplished in history, but the gospel presents him to us to be personally received and rested upon by faith.

Let me be extremely clear: Application cannot be reduced to “Here is what to do”; rather, it must be “Here is Christ for you.”

Commands and duties belong in preaching, but we need to show how obedience proceeds from receiving and living upon Christ, which is why applying Christ involves more than finding a connection to him and mentioning it before the sermon ends.

The preacher's duty is to press the Person and the work of Christ upon the hearer’s conscience. When the text exposes guilt, we bring the sinner to Christ for righteousness and forgiveness. When it exposes helplessness, we direct him to Christ for strength. When it calls for endurance, we help him rest upon Christ and his promises as he waits for the inheritance to come.

And in doing this, we call both the unbeliever and the believer to faith. The unbeliever is called to receive the Christ freely offered in the gospel, resting upon him for salvation. The believer is called to do the very same, and to continue receiving the Christ to whom he already belongs.

The conditions of the hearers differ, and our address should recognize those differences, but both need Christ, and both hearers are addressed with a call to do the same thing: trust Him.

J. C. Ryle explains this well, the purpose and the necessity of this application when he writes:

“Personal application has been called the ‘soul’ of preaching. A sermon without application is like a letter posted without a direction: it may be well written, rightly dated and duly signed; but it is useless, because it never reaches its destination.”2

In short, Ryle’s point is that a preacher can become so absorbed in what he has discovered in the text that he forgets the people before him.

As ministers, a sermon must reach the person sitting before us. We must not lower ourselves to the position of teachers only, but understand that we have been given the solemn privilege to proclaim Christ to both the converted and unconverted sinner. Our aim should be to preach the text faithfully and bring the Christ revealed in it to the people before us.

As hearers, we also need to consider how we come to preaching. We should desire to learn, and we should desire to be moved, but we should come as people who need Christ. Every sermon should find us ready to believe what God has said, and rest upon the Christ freely offered in the gospel.

I need the same Christ I proclaim to others

Ant. But, sir, was this in every way the same covenant that was made with Abraham?

Evan. Surely I believe that reverend Bullinger spoke very truly when he said that God gave these people no other religion in nature, substance, and matter itself, differing from the laws of their fathers; though in some respects, he added to it many ceremonies and certain ordinances.

He did this to keep their minds in expectation of the coming of Christ whom he had promised to them; and to confirm them in looking for him, lest they grow faint. And just as the Lord by these ceremonies, as it were, led them by the hand to Christ, so he made them a promise of the land of Canaan, and outward prosperity in it, as a type of heaven and eternal happiness. So that the Lord dealt with them as with children in their infancy and under-age, leading them to heavenly and spiritual things by the help of earthly things, because they were but young and tender,1 and did not have that measure and abundance of the Spirit which he has bestowed on his people now under the gospel.

Ant. And, sir, do you think that these Israelites at this time saw Christ and salvation by him in these types and shadows?

Evan. Yes; there is no doubt that Moses and the rest of the believers among the Jews saw Christ in them, “For,” says Tyndale, “though all the sacrifices and ceremonies had a star-light of Christ, some of them had the light of broad day, a little before the sun-rising;” and they expressed him, along with the circumstances and virtue of his death, as plainly as if his passion had been acted on a scaffold — “so much so,” he says, “that I am fully persuaded, and cannot help but believe, that God had shown Moses the secrets of Christ, and the very manner of his death, beforehand.” And therefore, I do not doubt that they offered their sacrifices by faith in the Messiah, as the apostle testifies of Abel in Heb. 11.4. I say, there is no question that every spiritual believing Jew, when he brought his sacrifice to be offered, and according to the Lord’s command, laid his hands on it while it was still alive (Lev. 1.4), and acknowledged from his heart that he himself had deserved to die — but by the mercy of God he was saved,2 and his desert3 was laid upon the beast.4 And just as that beast was to die and be offered in sacrifice for him, so he believed that the Messiah would come and die for him, on whom he put his hands — that is, on whom he laid all his iniquities by the hand of faith.5

So that as Beza says on Job 1, “The sacrifices were holy mysteries to them, in which, as if in a mirror, they saw themselves to their own condemnation before God,6 and also beheld the mercy of God in the promised Messiah, who was to be exhibited in time.” “And therefore,” says Calvin in his Institutes, p. 239, “the sacrifices and satisfactory offerings were called Ashemoth, which properly signifies sin itself, to show that Jesus Christ was to come and perform a perfect expiation by giving his own soul to be an asham, that is, a satisfactory oblation.’’7

Therefore, you may assure yourself that just as Christ was always set before the fathers in the Old Testament, to whom they might direct their faith; and just as God never put them in hope of any grace or mercy, nor ever showed himself good to them without Christ;8 even so, the godly in the Old Testament knew Christ by whom they enjoyed these promises of God, and they were joined to him.9 Indeed, the promise of salvation never stood firm till it came to Christ.10 And there was their comfort in all their troubles and distresses, as it is said of Moses in Heb. 11.26, 27, “He endured as seeing him who is invisible,11 esteeming the reproach of Christ greater riches than the treasures of Egypt; for he looked to the recompense of reward.”

And so, as Ignatius says, the prophets were Christ’s servants who, foreseeing him in spirit, both waited for him as their master, and looked for him as their Lord and Saviour, saying, “He shall come and save us.”

And so says Calvin, Institut. p. 207, “As often as the prophets speak of the blessedness of the faithful, the perfect image that they painted of it was such that it might force men’s minds out of the earth, and of necessity raise them up to consider the felicity of the life to come.” So we may assuredly conclude with Luther, that all the fathers, prophets, and holy kings were righteous, and saved by faith in Christ to come. So indeed, as Calvin says in his Institutes, p. 198, they “were all partakers of one salvation with us.”

The question has generated countless debates, yet I wonder whether the question itself assumes a framework that Scripture never gives us.

The more fundamental question is whether God has always intended to save sinners through one promised Christ.

Immediately after Adam’s fall, God promised the seed who would crush the serpent’s head (Gen. 3:15). That promise was renewed with Abraham, to whom God declared that all the families of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 12:3). Israel subsequently became the nation through which that promised seed would come. And then Paul identifies the seed as Christ (Gal. 3:16).

To be clear, Israel occupied an indispensable place in redemptive history because God was bringing Christ into the world through Israel, as well as bringing the Old Testament scriptures through them.

Edward Fisher understood this relationship and, explaining that the addition of the law at Sinai, he wrote that it was given “by way of subserviency and attendance, to better advance and make effectual the Covenant of Grace” (Part I, chap. 2, sec. 2.3, p. 63).

Basically, he was saying that the law was given to serve the promise.

Sinai exposed Israel’s inability to establish righteousness through obedience, while the sacrifices and ceremonies continually directed believing Israelites toward the promised Redeemer. Fisher consequently described the tabernacle, ark, and mercy seat as types of Christ (p. 67).

As Baptists, we distinguish between the covenant of grace promised throughout the Old Testament and its establishment in Christ’s blood. Nevertheless, the saving object of faith remained the same. Abraham was justified by faith, and every believing Israelite likewise received salvation through the promised Christ.

This also explains Paul’s distinction between physical descent and participation in the promise. “They are not all Israel, which are of Israel” (Rom. 9:6). External membership among God’s covenant people never guaranteed saving union with Christ.

We are equally capable of confusing religious privilege with a saving possession. Church attendance, baptism, Scripture reading, and the Lord’s Supper can become occasions for self-righteousness when we begin treating them as grounds of acceptance before God, when their proper use directs our faith toward Christ.

Ultimately, calling this replacement theology is rather like accusing an oak tree of replacing the acorn. The promise has reached its appointed fulfillment.

God did not lose Israel and gain the church. He brought the promised Messiah through Israel, and in Christ the blessing promised to Abraham now extends to the nations.

The church does not replace Israel; rather, as Christ is the true and better Adam, He is also the true and better Israel. He is the suffering Servant that Isaiah prophesied about and succeeds where both Adam and Israel failed as covenant representatives, and brings all those who come to Him back to the Father.

Does the church replace Israel?

Maybe that is the wrong question.

In Episode 11 of Marrowcast, Jeffrey Perry and John Meeks trace Christ's promise from Adam to Abraham, through Israel and Sinai, and ultimately to its fulfillment in Jesus Christ.

Did the law save Israel? Did Moses replace Abraham? Are Israel and the church two separate saving peoples? And what does any of this have to do with law, gospel, assurance, and the Christian life?

The answer takes us to one of the points of The Marrow of Modern Divinity:

The law isn’t replacing the promise. The law is serving the promise, and the entire story is moving toward Christ.

Subscribe and find more at Marrowcast.com.

Marrow Theology, Practically Applied.

On Jordan’s stormy banks I stand
And cast a wishful eye
To Canaan’s fair and happy land
Where my possessions lie.

Within evangelicalism, there is an understanding that the purpose of the Christian’s life is to “cross the Jordan” and to enter into the “victorious Christian life”.

While this sounds great, and even Christian, it not only does damage to the hymn, but also to the New Testament’s use of the imagery of the Old Testament, by completely misreading the biblical storyline and leaving damaging false conclusions in its wake.

Let’s set the scene.

In its familiar revivalist form, the imagery follows, rightly, that Egypt represents bondage to sin, and the Red Sea represents conversion. However, the break happens when you get to the wilderness, as it is said to represent the defeated or carnal Christian life, and that crossing the Jordan is representative of the believer entering into a higher, more committed, “victorious” Christian life.

This scheme emerged from the nineteenth-century Higher Life movement and was later popularized through Keswick teaching, revivalism, and fundamentalism, which was promoted by men like D.L. Moody1, F.B. Meyer2, Andrew Murray3, C. I. Scofield4, and Lewis Sperry Chafer5, among others.

The problem is that it depends on an eschatological mistake that places the Christian, and the church, on the wrong side of the river. But don’t take my word for it; take the word of the apostle Paul, because his use of Israel in 1 Corinthians 10 should be enough to overturn the whole scheme.

In 1 Corinthians 10, the wilderness generation is not given to illustrate the so-called ‘carnal’ Christian; rather, Paul argues that the church is to be seen and understood through the eyes of Israel in the wilderness. Paul addresses the Corinthian church through the history of wilderness Israel because Israel’s experience functions typologically for the church living between redemption and consummation, stating that the believers have been delivered, having passed through judgment, and that they are recieving the provision of the Word as they travel towards their inheritance.

He then makes the case that the greatest danger facing them is the danger that Israel encountered, and that danger is unbelief. However, Paul’s warning not to fall in the wilderness only really works if the wilderness is the Christian’s life between redemption and consummation.

Within the Marrow tradition, this is the same way Ebenezer Erskine describes the church in this present world as “a wilderness, or a weary land, through which they are travelling toward their own home.”6

Prior to the last century or so, and certainly not in the New Testament, the church was not divided into wilderness Christians and Canaan Christians. Instead, the church as a whole is called a pilgrim people traveling through the wilderness toward what Erskine calls “the Canaan that is above.”7

Further, her present posture is not one of victory or carnality, but of weakness and dependence, as she is “leaning upon her beloved”8

Paul, again in Hebrews (Yes, I take Paul to be the author, but that is an argument for another day.), places the church alongside the wilderness generation and instructs it to persevere until entering into God’s rest. The logic of Hebrews is not that some Christians have entered this rest experientially while others remain behind in a carnal wilderness condition. Erskine, quoting this text, says that the believer comes through the wilderness expecting “a quiet rest on the other side, or beyond the wilderness,” and grounds that expectation in Hebrews 4:9 that “There remaineth a rest to the people of God.”9 He even describes God as having made “a promise of life and rest, on the other side of death, through Christ.”10 Erskine clearly believed that wilderness belongs to the present pilgrimage; rest belongs beyond it.

That is why the idea of crossing over Jordan into a supposed victorious life is in reality simply an over-realized eschatology. It takes the biblical categories of inheritance, rest, possession, and arrival and turns them into a stage of the Christian experience that is somehow attainable before glorification.

Again, Erskine’s language is almost a direct contradiction of this idea. The believer, he says, is one “whose life in this world is a life of faith and dependence on Christ”; while traveling through the wilderness, “she leans on her beloved.”11 He then explains the condition of the present age with Paul’s own language: “Here we walk by faith, not by sight.” Thus it cannot be understood that deficient Christians remain in the wilderness, but that wilderness is the sphere in which the Christian life is lived by faith upon Christ.

Not only does it have an over-realized eschatology, but it also creates a two-tier Christianity where there are supposedly ordinary believers who have been saved from Egypt but continue to wander, and then there are victorious believers who have entered Canaan. The issue is that this kind of distinction is not between immature and mature Christians, nor between faithful and unfaithful conduct, but between two supposed modes of Christian existence. This is why within this type of system, “total surrender” sermons and appeals to finally get serious with God abound.

It also shifts the center of sanctification away from Christ and toward the believer. Once the wilderness is defined as the place of the carnal or nominal Christian, the ordinary struggle with sin that is normative to the Christian life (Rom. 7), becomes evidence that the believer is obviously not serious enough. Instead of depending on Christ, the question becomes whether he has finally yielded everything, finally let go, finally gotten right, etc. The decisive factor in the Christian life is relocated from Christ’s sufficiency to the believer’s act of surrender.

The great irony is that the wilderness is meant to expose human weakness and establishes dependence upon God. It was in the wilderness that God gave manna and water from the rock to a people that could not provide for themselves, and He led them because they could not find their own way.

Israel was not sustained in the wilderness by what the wilderness could produce. Rather, as Erskine put it, the believer’s provision does not come “out of the earth”; but like Israel’s manna, “it comes from above.”12

He then asks how the Christian is fed in the wilderness and answers that Christ, the bread of life, comes to his people and “they gather it by faith, and feed on it.”13 Wilderness existence, according to Erskine and according to Paul, is not sub-Christian existence; rather, it is Christ-dependent existence.

To make the wilderness illustrate a subnormal Christianity is to miss the entire theological and eschatological point of the wilderness itself. The very things that higher-life preaching treats as evidence that the Christian needs to leave the wilderness - things like weakness, conflict, dependence, hunger, thirst, and the necessity of continually looking to Christ - are precisely the things the wilderness typology is intended to teach us about life in the present age.

The Christian life is not Egypt, conversion, wilderness defeat, Jordan surrender, and Canaan victory. Instead, the pattern of the New Testament is redemption, wilderness pilgrimage by faith, and final inheritance. We have been brought out, but we have not yet arrived.

The believer, as Erskine articulates, is “bending his course heavenwards,” growing in grace, fighting sin, receiving strength from Christ, and moving toward glory, but he does all of this as a pilgrim.14

This brings us back to the hymn. The Christian in “On Jordan’s Stormy Banks” is standing on this side of the river and looking across toward Canaan as the inheritance still ahead. Likewise, we have not crossed Jordan yet, and any theology that tells us otherwise has confused the present age with the age to come.

In episode 10 of Marrowcast, Jeff and John wrestle with one of the most important questions in covenant theology: what is the relationship between the promise of grace and the giving of the law?

Paul insists in Galatians 3 that the law, given 430 years after the promise to Abraham, did not cancel or replace that promise. Sinai was not God abandoning grace and returning sinners to a covenant of works as the way of salvation. The law was added because of transgressions, exposing sin, shutting every mouth, and showing sinners their need for Christ.

Jeff and John also discuss why Christians still need the law. Freedom from the condemnation of the law does not mean freedom from God’s moral will.

In Christ, the believer no longer hears the law as the covenant of works saying, “Do this and live.” The order has been reversed by grace: live, and do this.

Marrow Theology, Practically Applied.

Listen, share the episode, and subscribe to Marrowcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

The order of God’s dealings with Abraham and Israel helps us understand how this happens.

God promised Abraham blessing through his seed long before the law was delivered at Sinai, and Paul insists that the law, which came centuries later, could not annul this promise or change the way the inheritance would be received (Gal. 3:17–19).

But the fact that God gives a promise before the law brings up a question. Why did God give the law after he had given the promise?

Edward Fisher speaks of the covenant of works being renewed at Sinai, language that, if we aren’t careful, can sound as though God had placed Israel back on a path to life through obedience. However, Fisher says that God intended “that man, being thereby convinced of his weakness, might flee to Christ”.1

The commandments were given to expose what God requires, including the love of Him and neighbor that reaches beyond outward conduct into the heart. Paul argues that the law was added because of transgressions and that Scripture has shut up all under sin, so that the promise might be given through faith in Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:19, 22). Its searching work serves the promise by making clear why we need the righteousness of another.

At the opening of the Ten Commandments, God identifies himself as the Lord who brought Israel out of Egypt before he tells the people what to do (Exod. 20:2). Thomas Boston points to that preface as a witness to the promise God made to Abraham, and he understands the commandments that follow as a rule of life for those who receive God’s promise by faith.2 Deliverance from Egypt placed the nation among a people who heard God’s word and received his ordinances, although belonging to that nation did not mean that every Israelite trusted the promised seed. The law could therefore confront a self-righteous hearer with the demands he could never meet, while directing a believer who knew the Lord’s mercy.

For those who belong to Christ, the commandments continue to speak with their full claim upon the heart and life. Jesus has borne the curse of the law for his people, and Paul can therefore say that there is no condemnation for those who are in him (Gal. 3:13; Rom. 8:1). Selfishness remains sin and obedience remains a duty, while the command now reaches the believer through the Mediator who has already brought him near to God. Fisher explains the order of this life in the words: “Live, and do this”.3

There is room in that order for a conscience to be searched and for sin to be confessed without making repentance a new price of admission. When the law shows a Christian that he has spoken cruelly to his family, neglected a neighbor, or protected a cherished sin, he should take its judgment seriously. He can confess the wrong, seek forgiveness from those he has harmed, and turn toward the obedience Christ commands, while resting his acceptance before God upon Christ’s finished work. The law has exposed something real, and the gospel tells him where to go with it.

So, the next time the commandments expose your sin, hear their demand in its full strength and resist the urge to bargain for God’s favor with a promise to do better.

Instead, bring the sin they uncover to Christ, whose righteousness answers the demand you could never meet and whose mercy receives sinners who come to him.

Then take up the obedience set before you, knowing that the Lord who commands you has already given you life in his Son.

Marrowcast Episode 9

If Abraham was justified by faith and God had already established his promise, why did the law come afterward?

Paul raises that exact question in Galatians 3: “Why then the law?”

In this episode, Jeff and John continue tracing the relationship between promise, law, faith, and Christ. The law given through Moses did not overturn the promise made to Abraham, nor did it introduce a second way of obtaining life. Instead, Paul places the law within the unfolding history of redemption and points us toward its purpose in relation to sin and the coming of Christ.

We discuss what it means that the law was “added because of transgressions,” why the law cannot give life, and how confusing the law with the promise inevitably obscures the freeness of the gospel.

Along the way, we consider the continuing importance of distinguishing law and gospel without treating the law as unnecessary or opposed to God’s gracious purposes.

Marrow Theology, Practically Applied.

Listen and learn more at marrowcast.com

Some may think of the more super strict groups like the Duggars, while others may think of more mainstream independent Baptist churches that would distance themselves from much of that world entirely.

So to be clear from the outset, my experiences are not identical to every expression of fundamentalism, so I do not want to flatten a broad movement into its most extreme examples.

I also want to be very careful because I am not telling this story as someone who has some kind of disdain for the people who I was raised around, or the churches that were a part of this world. Nor would I ever want to give the impression that nothing good came out of growing up in that type of culture. Even looking back, I can still recognize how much of my Christian faith was first cultivated there.

I am not telling this story from the outside of the faith. Much to the contrary. By the grace of God, I am a pastor in a Baptist church, and I can say without hesitation that I am more convinced of the authority of Scripture, more serious about holiness, and more confident in Christ than I have ever been.

Having prefaced these things, let me tell you my story.

Growing Up IFB

My profession of faith came very early in my life. Even though it was 32ish years ago at this point, I can still visualize it in my mind. Honestly, if you were alive in the 80s, you can probably come pretty close to visualizing it too.

It happened on a couch (the one with windmills on it) in the wood-paneled living room of a single-wide trailer.

At the age of 5, I obviously could not have explained the whole process with the categories I would now use as a pastor/theologian, but what I had come to understand even at that young age was that I was a sinner, and Jesus had died to save sinners.

So after a talk with my mom, we prayed, and I asked Jesus to save me. In all honesty, that is really all I remember. I don’t remember a lot of what led up to it, nor do I remember the conversation, or even the words that I said. What I do remember is that was the point that I first believed.

I am going to fast-forward some at this point, and probably become at least somewhat scattered, because as I said, I don’t remember a lot, spiritually speaking, after that. However, what I do remember is that over the next 10 years or so, I lived in fear. And although fear took different forms (like going to hell, getting dragged away by demons, or getting left behind in the rapture), it all basically came down to a question of whether or not I had believed correctly.

Unfortunately, for a kid, questions about the nature of faith do not stay neatly tucked away in the theological part of your brain. Especially when you are growing up in a world where the rapture threatened to happen at any moment.

I can remember many times waking up in the middle of the night in a panic, and running to make sure everyone was still there. Typically, I would check my parents’ room, or the crib of one of my brothers, because if they were there, I could at least know that I had not been left behind to figure out the whole Tribulation thing by myself. (And yes, my undiagnosed ADHD brain was always making contingency plans for what I would do if that happened).

I remember trying all kinds of things to get some peace. I tried praying again and again, although in retrospect it makes sense why that didn’t work. I meant, how could you be sincere enough to ask God to save you if you weren’t really sure that you were really unsaved?

From there, I would try to remember what I had said the first time, or try to figure out the way I felt so that I could convince myself that there was somehow enough conviction. It is exhausting to think about it now, so you can imagine how hard it is to explain all the things running through the mind of an elementary-age kid.

In the same search for peace, I even remember laying out the proverbial fleece many times. One in particular was contingent on whether I could get a basketball through the hoop, which seems harmless enough, except for the fact that I didn’t have an athletic bone in my body.

This continued in one form or another until I was around fifteen, when I had what I would have called at the time a moment of “full surrender”.

To be fair, for years afterward I was never entirely sure whether I had surrendered my life then or actually gotten saved for the first time. (Which would later make me question the validity of my baptism at 9 years old. Go figure.) This may sound weird to some, but if you have spent any time in the kind of churches I grew up in, it was not uncommon to hear a testimony where someone had a childhood profession and later really got saved.

Even into my 20s, I was convinced that to really settle things I would have to answer that question. But for what it’s worth, I would eventually become much less interested in determining whether the couch around 5 or kneeling at a chair at 15 was right, because I would come to understand that the important question was about the existence of faith and less about the exact moment that it started. But I digress. I did not have those categories, and what I did have was a great deal of zeal, so I threw myself into every form of Christian service I could find.

From that point forward, church and ministry became an enormous part of my life. I became involved in different ministries at church, camps, and just about anything else that needed a young guy who was willing to do the work.

I still look back on that season with a great deal of gratitude. Many people poured into me, trusted me, taught me how to serve, and showed me genuine love. I learned how to serve without needing to be noticed, and how much joy there can be in giving yourself to others. This is also the period of time that I met my wife while we were both working at a youth camp during the summer of 2007.

Even if these years were bad, which they were not, it would be difficult for me to spin it that way. Unless, of course, I am prepared to explain to my wife why she belongs in the “unfortunate consequences” category, which seems like a poor way to keep the story moving.

Some of the Lord’s kindest gifts to me came through that very season, and I have no desire to erase any of that simply because my theology would eventually change. Those years also matter because, at that stage of my life, I could still toe the line. I knew what serious Christianity was supposed to look like in that world, and for the most part I could do it. Christian service can be a wonderful thing, but it can also become a very effective place to hide from questions about your own soul, because there is always another visible reason to reassure yourself that you must be doing okay spiritually because, after all, look at everything you are doing.

When It Stopped Making Sense

I got married at the age of 20, which was wonderful for many reasons, including the fact that I married well and I married out of my league, but marriage also has the inconvenient habit of making you responsible for things other than yourself. It is much easier to maintain zeal when the main question is whether you can satisfy the expectations than when you are trying to make that same system work inside a marriage, responsibilities, bills, and the general reality of living with and for another person.

At 22, my wife and I moved to North Carolina and eventually became part of an IFB church for which I remain sincerely grateful. I know I may sound like a broken record in that regard, but I want to keep saying that because I know how easily stories like this get turned into stories about villains and victims when real life is more complicated than that. We were loved there, and there were many people there who helped us bear the burdens of early married life.

It was at this point in my life, however, that things stopped making sense.

One of the main problems, in my case, was that I have always been an almost annoyingly analytical person, and apparently that trait is hereditary because my children now regularly subject me to the same kind of logical cross-examination that I have spent my life inflicting on myself and everyone else.

I’ve always needed things to fit together logically, and when two ideas seem to contradict each other, I have a difficult time simply setting the questions aside and moving on.

Around this point in my life, I was also trying to recover some of the zeal I had once had, while at the same time an acquaintance had begun asking me doctrinal questions about things like the Trinity that I had always affirmed but had never really been forced to articulate with so much precision. In trying to answer those questions, I was unknowingly beginning to learn something of systematic theology. I was not content to know that I believed certain doctrines; I needed to know what they meant, and how they related to one another.

That changed the way I thought more than I realized at the time, because once you begin learning to connect doctrines, it becomes much harder to keep the different parts of your theology separate. I was beginning to see that what I believed about the gospel had implications for what I believed about the Christian life.

Everything came crashing together around 2012, and the issue that finally brought it all to a head was tithing, which sounds almost anticlimactic when I say it now. Many people that I’ve talked to had this same thing happen because of some dramatic scandal or church conflict, while my crisis was basically caused by thinking too hard about Malachi 3.

The problem was not that I suddenly became opposed to giving, because I believed then and believe now that Christians should support their churches, and should be willing to sacrifice for the work of the gospel.

What I couldn’t make sense of was being told that a Christian who failed to tithe consistently would be placed under a curse while, at the same time, I was reading Paul say that Christ had redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.

If Christ had borne the curse for me, then what exactly did it mean to tell me that God would place me back under a curse for failing to give 10% and how was I supposed to hold those two things together without changing the meaning of one of them?

Once I started pulling on that thread, several others came with it. Come to find out, the tithing question was really part of a much larger question about how God related to His people, and eventually that question moved out of the realm of theology and into one of the most painful memories I have from that time of my life.

The 1st Hospital Room

Like many semi-newly married couples with young kids, we were struggling financially during this period of our life. There were months when tithing and paying the bills was simply impossible. At the same time, I was being told that if I did not tithe, I was under the curse of God. In addition to being under a curse because I was robbing God, I was in sin and could not expect him to hear my prayers.

This finally broke something in me the night that one of my children was sick, and we were in the emergency room with him.

I was sitting on the floor of one of the bathroom stalls crying because I wanted desperately to pray, to anything, to get God to do something to help my child, and yet I had become convinced that I did not have the right to ask Him, and even if I could somehow reach Him, my cries would fall on deaf ears. My son was sick, and it was probably my fault, because I had brought this curse on us.

To this day, I still get physically sick to my stomach when I remember the feelings that I had that night.

Looking back, I think that emergency-room bathroom was the moment when the whole system that I had grown up around finally broke. Whatever theological vocabulary I would later acquire, I already knew enough of the gospel to know that something was badly wrong with a brand of Christianity in which a father united to Christ believed he could not ask his heavenly Father for mercy because there was not enough money left after the bills to pay a required percentage.

Eventually I remember telling my wife, probably with more drama than the situation required but with complete sincerity at the time, “If this is Christianity, I’m out.”

I did not mean that I had suddenly stopped believing in Christ, but that I could no longer reconcile the Christ I was beginning to see in the gospel with the God I was hearing about at church.

I was exhausted, confused, and honestly a little angry, although underneath the anger was probably fear, because for all the theological growth that had happened since childhood, I was still living with a version of the same question I had while checking the house to make sure my family had not been raptured.

Detangling

Some people have called this part of their life deconstructing, and perhaps that word works for some people, although I have always felt like “detangling” is a better description. I was not trying to destroy Christianity and build something else in its place; I was just trying to figure out which pieces actually belonged to Christianity, which pieces belonged to the IFB.

The next 6 months or so after that are probably less organized than I would like to remember, but somewhere during that period the Lord graciously began bringing me back toward Himself.

I started reading, encountering voices outside the theological world I had known, and discovering that Christians had been asking many of my questions for centuries.

In some ways, that season felt less like constructing an entirely new house than standing in the middle of one that had partially collapsed and trying to determine what could still be used. Some pieces I picked up and realized were solid enough to put right back where they belonged, while I tossed others to the side. I was not interested in throwing everything away, and I certainly was not starting from scratch; I was trying to rebuild so that what I had could actually bear weight.

I am admittedly leaving a lot out here, because that rebuilding process involved more reading and more conversations than I could fit into one story, but as the pieces started coming back together, I found myself drawn toward the Lordship circles, largely because they seemed to be the ones that took Christianity seriously.

After questioning so much of the system in which I had been raised, the last thing I wanted was a Christianity with no demands. I had seen enough easy-believism to know that simply swinging to the opposite extreme was not going to satisfy me. The Lordship emphasis made sense to me because it spoke seriously about repentance, obedience, discipleship, fruit, and the claims of Christ, and at that particular point in my journey, seriousness felt safe.

For a little while those categories were helpful, but eventually an old problem began appearing again just under a different terminology.

I could start wondering whether my faith had produced enough fruit, whether I had really surrendered everything, whether my repentance was genuine enough, and whether the evidence in my life was strong enough to justify the confidence that I belonged to Christ.

Then, ironically, another hospital room broke me.

The 2nd Hospital Room

In 2018, I had a seizure during a high fever and ended up in the hospital.

Before I turn this into a deathbed scene, I should probably say that I was being way more dramatic than the situation actually warranted and was still a little loopy from dehydration. Which, spoiler alert, is generally not when people typically do their best theological thinking.

Nevertheless, I remember lying there, staring at the fluorescent lights and wondering what would happen if I died, and the old question came back harder than it had in years.

Had my faith been enough?

I knew immediately that the answer was no if “enough” meant strong enough, sincere enough, fruitful enough, surrendered enough, or consistent enough. I knew myself well enough by then to know that there was always another failure, another inconsistency, another mixed motive, another sin, and another reason why anything in myself would never make the cut.

But thanks be to God, somewhere in that fog, the words of Paul came to mind:

“Even when we are faithless, he remains faithful.”

I had read those words before, of course, but in that moment those words did something that years of questions had failed to do. They moved my attention away from the strength of my faith and toward the faithfulness of Christ.

Finding Clarity

That experience did not immediately change my theology, and I certainly did not leave the hospital with a copy of the Marrow of Modern Divinity tucked in under my discharge paperwork, but something had shifted. I began recognizing that the question I had been asking for most of my life had been doing the same thing. It had been consistently turning me on myself.

As a child, I wondered whether I had prayed correctly; at fifteen I wondered whether I had really been saved before; during years of Christian service I found confidence in how much I was doing, and later I asked whether the fruit was enough to prove the reality of my faith.

Somewhere after that, through my best friend (to whom I must give credit, IYKYK), several conversations, and a niche theological controversy that I am not going to explain here, I encountered Sinclair Ferguson’s The Whole Christ.

That book gave words to things I had already begun to feel without knowing how to explain them, especially the idea that the Christian life can become distorted when it gets turned in on itself. From there I eventually found The Marrow of Modern Divinity, and for reasons that probably make me stranger than the average person, an old theological controversy from several centuries ago felt like someone had finally handed me my life back.

For someone who had spent years asking whether he had been convicted enough, repented enough, believed enough, surrendered enough, or produced enough evidence, it was relief. I slowly began to understand that faith does not save because faith itself is impressive, and the value of faith is not measured by how intensely I can feel myself believing at any particular moment. Faith receives Christ, and the weakest hand of faith still receives a whole Christ.

The rest of the theological trajectory does not really matter to this story.

What matters most is that I found the answer to my question.

I am a sinner, Jesus saves sinners, and I can take him at his word. Not because I am enough, and not because my faith is enough, but because He is enough and He is faithful.

That is usually the first question people ask when they come to Genesis 14. Was he simply a historical priest-king? A pre-incarnate appearance of Christ? Something else entirely?

But maybe that is not the most important question.

Melchizedek appears at a crucial moment in Abraham’s life. God had already given Abraham the promise, yet Abraham was living in circumstances that did not always look like the promise was coming true.

Then Melchizedek arrives.

He blesses Abraham and brings bread and wine. He does not give Abraham a new promise. He confirms the one God had already spoken.

And that may be the point we are most tempted to miss: faith is not always strengthened by receiving something new. Often, it is strengthened by being brought back to what God has already said.

Melchizedek ultimately points beyond himself to Christ, the true Priest-King, in whom the promises of God are certain.

Evan. They were delivered to them as the Covenant of Works.1

Nom. But, by your favour, sir, you know that these people were the posterity of Abraham, and therefore were under that Covenant of Grace which God made with their father. Therefore I do not think they were delivered to them as the Covenant of Works; for you know the Lord never delivers the Covenant of Works to any who are under the Covenant of Grace.

Evan. Indeed it is true, the Lord did manifest so much love to the body of this nation, that all the natural seed of Abraham were externally, and by profession, under the Covenant of Grace made with their father Abraham — though it is to be feared that many of them were still under the Covenant of Works made with their father Adam.2

Nom. But sir, you know that in the preface to the Ten Commandments, the Lord calls himself by the name of their God in general; therefore it would seem they were all the people of God.3

Evan. That is not to the purpose;4 for many wicked and ungodly men, being in the visible church and under the external covenant,

Nom. But, sir, was the same Covenant of Works made with them that was made with Adam?

Evan. For the general substance of the duty, the law delivered on Mount Sinai, and formerly engraven on man’s heart, was the same law; so that at Mount Sinai, the Lord delivered nothing new — only it came more gently to Adam before his fall; but after his fall it came with thunder.

Nom. Yes sir, but as you said yourself, the Ten Commandments, as they were written in Adam’s heart, were but the matter of the Covenant of Works, and not the covenant itself, till the form was annexed to them — that is to say, till God and man were agreed on it. Now, we do not find that God and these people agreed upon any such terms at Mount Sinai.

Evan. Indeed;5 do you say so? Do you not remember that the Lord consented and agreed, when he said in Lev. 18.5, “You shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, which if a man does, he shall live in them;” and in Deut. 27.26, when he said, “Cursed is he that does not confirm all the words of this law, to do them?” And do you not remember that the people consented and agreed when they said, Exo. 19.8, “All that the Lord has spoken, we will do?” And does not the apostle Paul give evidence that these words were the form of the Covenant of Works, when he says in Rom. 10.5, “Moses describes that righteousness which is of the law, that the man who does these things shall live in them;” and when he says in Gal. 3.10, “For it is written, Cursed is everyone that does not continue to do all things written in the book of the law?”6 And in Deu. 4.13, Moses expressly calls it a covenant, saying, “And he declared his Commandments, in Exo. 20.2 and Deu. 5.6, stands in the original both as part of a sentence joined to the first commandments, and also as an entire sentence, separated from them, and enclosed by itself.

On the whole, one may compare this with the first promulgation of the Covenant of Grace by the messenger of the covenant in paradise, Gen. 3.15; and with the flaming sword placed there by the same hand, “turning every way to keep the way of the tree of life.” covenant to you, which he commanded you to perform, even the Ten Commandments; and he wrote them on tablets of stone.” Now, this was not the Covenant of Grace; for speaking of this covenant afterwards in Deu. 5.3, Moses says, “God did not make this covenant with your fathers, but with you;” and by “fathers” may be meant (says Mr. Ainsworth) all the patriarchs back to Adam who had the promise of the covenant of Christ.7 Therefore, if it had been the Covenant of Grace, he would have said, God did make this covenant with them, rather than he did not.8

Nom. And do any of our godly and modern writers agree with you on this point?

Evan. Yes, indeed. Polonius says, “The Covenant of Works is that in which God promises everlasting life to a man who in all respects performs perfect obedience to the Law of Works, adding to it threatenings of eternal death if he does not perform perfect obedience to it. God made this covenant in the beginning with the first man Adam, while he was in the first estate of integrity. God repeated and made the same covenant again by Moses with the people of Israel.” And Dr. Preston,9 on the New Covenant (p. 317) says, “The Covenant of Works runs in these terms, ‘Do this and you shall live, and I will be your God.’ This was the covenant which was made with Adam, and the covenant that is expressed by Moses in the Moral Law.” And Mr. Pemble (Vind. Fid. p. 152) says,

“By the Covenant of Works, we understand what we call in one word ‘the law,’ namely, that means of bringing man to salvation, which is by perfect obedience to the will of God. There are also two respective administrations of it: the First is with Adam before his fall, when immortality and happiness were promised to man, and confirmed by an external symbol of the tree of life, on condition that he continued obedient to God in that particular commandment of not eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, as well as in all other things. The Second administration of this covenant was renewing it with the Israelites at Mount Sinai. There, after the light of nature began to grow darker, and corruption had in time worn out the characters of religion and virtue that were first graven in man’s heart,10 God revived the law by a compendious and full declaration of all the duties required of man towards God and his neighbour, as expressed in the Decalogue. According to the tenor of this law, God entered into covenant with the Israelites, promising to be their God in bestowing on them all the blessings of life and happiness, on condition that they would be his people, obeying all things that he had commanded. They accepted this condition, promising absolute obedience, Exo. 19.8, ‘All things which the Lord has said, we will do;’ and also submitting themselves to punishment in case they disobeyed, saying, ‘Amen’ to the curse of the law, ‘Cursed is everyone that does not confirm all the words of the law: and all the people shall say, Amen.’” Deu 27.26

And Mr. Walker, on the Covenant (p. 128), says that “the first part of the covenant which God made with Israel at Horeb, was nothing but a renewing of the old Covenant of Works11 which God made with Adam in paradise.” And it is generally laid down by our divines that we are delivered from the Law by Christ, as it is a covenant.12

Date: 09/06/2026

What do you hold onto when you cannot see what God is doing?

Peter writes to believers facing false teaching, uncertainty, and the darkness of life in a fallen world. His answer is not to look inward for greater confidence, stronger feelings, or extraordinary experiences. He points the church to the sure Word God has given.

Peter had seen Christ's majesty on the Mount of Transfiguration. He had heard the Father declare, “This is my beloved Son.” The Transfiguration was a preview of the glory still to come—a glimpse of the morning before the night had ended.

But the church does not need Peter’s experience to have Peter’s confidence.

We have been given the Word.

When the Christian asks:

Is Christ really for me?
Have I sinned too much?
What if my faith is too small?
What if I do not feel saved?
Is Christ really coming again?

Faith returns to the same solid ground:

“Thus He hath spoken.”

We have not yet seen the morning break. But we have been given a lamp for the night.

And until Christ comes, we hold fast to the Word and to the Christ given to us there.

For most of us, I imagine it would look like some variation of getting our proverbial house in order, making sure that the things that need to be done are done, and especially making sure that the people who depend upon us will be able to continue when we are gone.

There is something stressful even about considering the question, because immediately our minds begin moving toward all the things that might be left unfinished.

That is, in a very real sense, where Peter is when we come to 2 Peter 1:16–21.

Peter has already told the church that he knows he is getting ready to die, that the putting off of his earthly tabernacle is approaching, and that his exodus from this world will soon take place.

So what is Peter concerned about as he prepares to leave? He is concerned that the church will continue to remember what it has been taught, because he knows that false teachers are coming; he knows that they will challenge what the apostles have proclaimed, and he knows that one of the things they will especially attack is the reliability of the promise that Jesus Christ is coming again.

So where does Peter point the church when he knows that Peter will no longer be there to remind them?

He points them to the Word.

Peter begins with the Word the apostles saw, because the testimony that he gives concerning Christ did not come to him secondhand. He says that he and the other apostles did not follow “cunningly devised fables,” because they were themselves “eyewitnesses of his majesty.”

The contrast running through this whole section is between what originates with man and what originates with God: verse 16 says that Peter’s message is not some cleverly devised myth, while verse 21 says that prophecy did not come by the will of man. In other words, Peter is bookending the entire argument by saying that the testimony he is giving did not originate in human imagination because its ultimate source is God.

This helps us understand why being an eyewitness of Christ mattered so much for the apostles. We often say that one of the qualifications of an apostle was that he had seen Christ, which is true enough, but the more important question is why that qualification mattered.

Herman Ridderbos explains that the apostolic witness served as a Spirit-forged link between the promises of God in the Old Testament, the accomplishment of redemption in Christ, and the church that would receive that testimony.¹ Peter had seen Christ because Christ had commissioned him to testify concerning what he had seen, and the Word that comes to the church through Peter therefore comes through someone who was shown the glory of Christ and then sent to bear witness to it.

What Peter had seen was specifically connected to “the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ,” which is interesting because, if we were building an argument for the Second Coming, most of us would probably begin with the resurrection. Peter, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, goes somewhere else. He goes to the Transfiguration, because the Transfiguration was a preview of the coming glory of Christ.

The Transfiguration was not the Second Coming, but Peter had already seen the glory that will be revealed at the Second Coming. He had seen the first rays of the coming Day before the Day itself arrived, and therefore, when false teachers ask, “Where is the promise of his coming?” Peter can answer that he has already seen a preview of the glory that is coming.² He knows that the promise is sure because the glory of the coming King has already broken into history.

Peter was also given more than something to see, because he heard the Father explain what he saw: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.”

That declaration identifies Jesus with the royal Son of Psalm 2, the promised Messiah and King whose enemies will finally be placed beneath his feet. Daniel Ragusa makes the point that if Jesus is in fact the Son of Psalm 2, then his identity guarantees and requires his return.³ Peter’s confidence concerning the coming of Christ is therefore rooted in who Christ is, because if the Father has declared Jesus to be the Son, then history cannot finally end until the kingdom of the Son is openly manifested in its fullness.

That brings Peter to verse 19, where he moves from what the apostles saw to what the church has been given: “We have also a more sure word of prophecy.”

The language can sound as though Peter is saying that Scripture has now become better or more reliable than it was before, but that is not the point he is making. John Calvin explains that the authority of the Word of God remained what it had always been, while the advent of Christ gave further confirmation to what God had already spoken.⁴ The prophets had spoken of the coming glory, Christ had come as the fulfillment and goal of those promises, and Peter had now seen that glory beginning to break into history. What God had said, God had begun to do.

Peter then says that this Word is “a light that shineth in a dark place,” and this is where the passage becomes especially important for the church living in the present age.

We have not yet reached the culmination of God’s redemptive work, because we are still living in a world where sickness, suffering, anxiety, death, and all kinds of circumstances seem at times to rule. We are living in that world while at the same time being told that Christ reigns over all things and that Christ is coming again, and Peter says that in this present darkness God has given us a light.

So what do we do with the light?

Peter says that we take heed to it, that we pay attention to it, and that we attend to what God has given because we are still walking through a dark place.

Lucas and Green point out that the prophetic Word serves the church in two ways: it gives light in the present darkness, and it guides the church until the coming Day.⁵ We may not be able to see far ahead, and we may not be able to understand everything that is happening around us, but we have been given enough light to see where our feet are and enough light to know where the road is going.

Lamps belong to the nighttime, which is why Peter tells the church to take heed to the Word “until the day dawn.”

When the power goes out at night, you turn on the flashlight or light the candle because you need light while the darkness remains, and when morning comes, you no longer need the flashlight because the sun has risen. Peter says that Scripture functions for us in this present age in much the same way, because the darkness remains for a time, the false teachers continue for a time, and suffering continues for a time, but the morning is coming.

This is what gives the whole passage its eschatological movement: Peter has gone from the Transfiguration, where he saw the first rays of Christ’s coming glory, to the present light of Scripture, which the church holds while she waits, and then forward to the Day when Christ himself appears.

We have not seen the Transfiguration, but we have been given the Word, and we do not throw away the lamp because we know that morning is coming. Our faith grabs hold of the light we have been given, and through that light it grabs hold of the Christ who has been promised until the Day breaks forth.

The final question Peter answers is why the church can trust this Word so completely, and his answer is that its reliability rests upon its origin.

Prophecy did not come by the will of man, because holy men of God spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Ghost. Warfield explains this by emphasizing that while men truly spoke, the Spirit carried them so that what they spoke truly came from God.⁶ The reliability of the Word therefore does not rest upon the reliability of its readers, nor upon the strength of our feelings, nor upon the spiritual experience we bring with us when we hear it, because the Word of God is not contingent upon us since it did not originate with us.

That is why John Anderson’s language is so helpful when he says that “the assurance of faith arises from the single view of what is contained in the Word of God,” and summarizes the ground of faith with the words, “Thus he hath spoken.”⁷

When you begin to ask whether Christ is really for you, whether you have sinned too much to return to him, whether your faith is too small, whether you should feel more assurance than you presently feel, or whether Christ really is coming again, faith has somewhere outside of itself to rest.

Thus he hath spoken.

That is what we have been given in this present age, and when faith sees nothing, feels nothing, and finds nothing within itself upon which it can safely rest, it returns to the sure Word that shines in the darkness.

God has promised Christ to us, Christ has come for us, Christ has been raised for us, Christ has ascended for us, Christ sits at the right hand of God interceding for us, and Christ will return for us because the God who has spoken cannot lie.

You do not have to see what Peter saw because you have been given the Word of God, and through the Word preached, the promise repeated, and the Supper received, faith continues to grab hold of Christ again and again while the darkness remains.

One day faith will become sight, the lamp will have served its purpose, and the Christ whom we now apprehend through the promise will stand before us in glory when the Day finally dawns.

1. Herman Ridderbos, Redemptive History and the New Testament Scriptures, 58.

2. Dick Lucas and Christopher Green, The Message of 2 Peter and Jude, 77–79.

3. Daniel Ragusa, Exploring 2 Peter: The Promise and the Path, 12.

4. John Calvin, Hebrews; 1 and 2 Peter, Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, 340.

5. Lucas and Green, The Message of 2 Peter and Jude, 82–83.

6. B. B. Warfield, The Inspiration and Authority of the Bible, 136.

7. John Anderson, The Scripture Doctrine of Appropriation, 48.

Was Abraham saved differently than Christians are today?

In this episode of Marrowcast, Jeffrey and John continue through The Marrow of Modern Divinity, moving into Chapter 2, Section II.2: “The Promise renewed to Abraham.”

Long before Moses received the Ten Commandments at Sinai, Scripture says the gospel was preached to Abraham. The promise first given after the fall becomes clearer: the promised seed is Christ, and through him the blessing extends to the nations.

Abraham was not justified by keeping the law. He received God’s promise by faith before the law was ever given. His obedience followed that promise; it was not the ground of it.

Along the way, Jeffrey and John look at Melchizedek, the promised seed, the land of Canaan, and why these Old Testament types point beyond themselves to Christ and the inheritance found in him.

The promise comes before the performance. Faith receives what God promises. And Abraham’s story reminds us that grace was never God’s Plan B.

If you’ve ever wondered whether your standing with God rises and falls with your performance, this episode is for you. Listen, share it with someone who needs the reminder, and subscribe at Marrowcast.com for new episodes, articles, resources, and listener Q&A.

#Marrowcast #JustificationByFaith #Abraham #FaithNotWorks #Gospel #ReformedTheology #CovenantTheology #TheMarrowOfModernDivinity #LawAndGospel #JesusChrist #GraceAlone #FaithAlone #ChristianPodcast #BibleTheology #Genesis

While this sounds like an extremely Christian thing to say, it isn’t. It is still a complete misunderstanding of the kind of salvation fallen sinners need.

Adam did not need another chance, because another chance would have just placed him in the same place and with the same problem that had already condemned him. Salvation required someone who could accomplish what Adam could no longer accomplish for himself.

The Covenant

Adam was created righteous and placed in covenant fellowship with God. God graciously created Adam, furnished him with every good thing, and entered into covenant with him. Within that covenant, however, life and death were placed before Adam according to the terms God established.

Fisher summarizes the covenant in The Marrow as “Do this, and you shall live,” together with the corresponding threat, “If you do not do it, you shall die.” The covenant therefore contained a command, a promise of life connected with obedience, and the threat of death for disobedience.2

Spoiler Alert: Adam disobeyed.

With this in mind, the significance of the fall extends far beyond just one isolated sin. Adam violated the covenant and incurred its curse; he corrupted himself and brought his posterity with him into guilt and death. The apostle Paul describes humanity’s condition in light of this when he says that through one man sin entered the world, through sin came death, and through the trespass of the one came condemnation (Rom. 5:12).

This is important to understand, because a second opportunity does not fix an existing guilt. Telling a condemned man to perform better tomorrow does nothing about the verdict already standing over him today, and even perfect obedience from this point forward, were such a thing possible for fallen Adam, would not have erased yesterday’s rebellion.

Humanity stands guilty in Adam and requires a righteousness it does not possess.

The sinner needs a Savior.

The Promise

Within the scene of judgment, God announces something Adam could never have produced and had no right to demand. He promises that a Seed would come.

God declares to the serpent that he will put enmity between the serpent and the woman, and between their respective offspring. The woman’s Seed will crush the serpent’s head, although his own heel will be bruised.

Having described Adam as a child of wrath, subject to the curse and possessing nothing due to him except divine judgment, Fisher writes that “the Lord promised Christ to him.” And after quoting Genesis 3:15, Fisher states that “This promise of Christ, the woman’s seed (ver. 15), was the gospel.”3

The gospel enters the biblical story as a promise concerning Christ given to a man who has already broken covenant with God. Everything Adam possesses at this moment demanded judgment. God nevertheless speaks of a coming Deliverer.

The initiative belongs entirely to God because the remedy belongs entirely to God.

No Second Chances

Our instinct toward second-chance Christianity only happens because the covenant of works remains attractive to fallen humans.

Truth be known, we prefer another opportunity because another opportunity leaves some room for us to boast. But Scripture closes that road.

Redemptive history following Adam demonstrates this point repeatedly.

Noah receives a cleansed world, and sin continued. Israel receives God’s law, and sin continued. But thanks be to God, the New Testament makes explicit what Genesis announces in promise.

Christ comes as the representative man whose obedience answers Adam’s disobedience. Where Adam’s trespass brought condemnation, Christ’s righteous work brings justification and life to those united to him. He obeys under the law, bears its curse upon the cross, enters death, and rises victorious.

Reducing Christianity to a second chance is really an affront to the gospel. A troubled conscience does not need the demands of God lowered until they become achievable; it needs to know that the righteousness God requires has been fulfilled by another and that this Christ is freely given in the gospel.

At the moment when human obedience collapses, God begins to direct history toward the obedience of the coming Seed. From that promise onward, Scripture carries the sinner’s hope toward the One who would enter Adam’s ruined world, bear Adam’s curse, defeat Adam’s enemy, and bring his people into a life Adam could never recover for them.

God did not give Adam a second chance.

He promised him Christ.

That is why assurance cannot finally rest on the question, “Is my faith sufficient?” Because our faith will always appear weak when we turn it into the object of our confidence.

The better question is: Is Christ sufficient?

And the answer is yes.

Faith receives. Christ saves.

Marrow Theology, Practically Applied.

🎙️ Listen to Marrowcast at marrowcast.com

Sect. 2 — The Promise renewed to Abraham.

Ant. What followed then?

Evan. Why, then the promise was turned into a covenant with Abraham and his seed, and often repeated, so that in his seed all nations would be blessed,1 Gen. 12.3; 18.18; and 22.18. This promise and covenant was the very voice itself of the gospel, being a true testimony of Jesus Christ.

The apostle Paul bears witness to this, saying “the Scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles through faith, preached the Gospel to Abraham beforehand,” Gal. 3.8, saying, “In you, all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.” And to better confirm Abraham’s faith in this promise of Christ, it is said in Gen. 14.19 that Melchisedec came forth and met him, and blessed him. Now, the apostle says in Heb. 7.1-3, and 6.20, “This Melchisedec was a priest of the most high God, and king of righteousness, and king of peace, without father and without mother; and so he was like the Son of God, who is a priest forever, in the order of Melchisedec;” and both king of righteousness and king of peace, Jer. 23.6; Isa. 9.6; indeed, he is without father as touching his manhood, and without mother as touching his godhead.

By this we are given to understand that it was the purpose of God that Melchisedec should, in these particulars, resemble the person and office of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; and by God’s own appointment, he was a type of Christ to Abraham, to ratify and confirm the promise made to him and to his seed in respect to the eternal covenant;2 namely, that he and his believing seed would be blessed in Christ, as Melchisedec had blessed him.3 Now, let me tell you more: some have thought it most probable, and indeed have said that if we search out this truth without partiality, we will find that this Melchisedec, who appeared to Abraham, was none other than the Son of God, manifested by a special dispensation and privilege to Abraham in the flesh, who is therefore said to have “seen his day and rejoiced.4 John 8.56. Moreover, in Gen. 15.17 we read that the Lord again confirmed this covenant with Abraham; for when Abraham had divided the beasts, God came between the parts like a smoking furnace and a burning lamp, which,5 as some have thought, primarily typified the torment and rending of Christ; and the furnace and fiery lamp typified the wrath of God which ran between, yet did not consume the rent and torn nature.

And the blood of circumcision typified the blood of Christ;6 and the resolved sacrificing of Isaac on Mount Moriah, by God’s appointment, prefigured and foreshowed that, by offering up Christ — the promised seed — in the very same place, all nations would be saved. Now this covenant, thus made and confirmed with Abraham, was renewed with Isaac, Gen. 26.4, and made known to Jacob by Jesus Christ himself. For that man who wrestled with Jacob was none other than the man Christ Jesus; for he himself said that Jacob would be called Israel, a wrestler and prevailer with God; and Jacob called the name of the place Peniel, because he had “seen God face to face,” Gen. 32.28, 30.

And Jacob left it by his last will to his children in these words, “The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor a lawgiver from between his feet, till Shiloh comes,” Gen. 49.10; that is to say, kings will come from Judah one after another, and many in number, till at last the Lord Jesus comes, who is King of kings and Lord of lords; or as the Targum of Jerusalem and Onkelos translate it, until Christ the Anointed comes.

Nom. But, sir, are you sure that this promised seed was meant of Christ?

Evan. The apostle puts that out of doubt, Gal. 3.16, saying, “Now the promises were made to Abraham and to his seed.7 He does not say — and to seeds, as of many, but as of one, and to your seed, which is Christ.”8 And no doubt these godly patriarchs so understood it.

Ant. But, sir, the great promise that was made to them, as I conceive it, and which they seemed to have the most regard for, was the land of Canaan.

Evan. There is no doubt that these godly patriarchs saw their heavenly inheritance (by Christ) through the promise of the land of Canaan, as the apostle testifies about Abraham, Heb. 11.9, 10, saying, “He sojourned in a strange country, and looked for a city having foundations, whose builder and maker is God.” “By this it is evident,” says Calvin (Instit. p. 204), “that the height and eminence of Abraham’s faith was looking for an everlasting life in heaven.” He gives a similar testimony of Sarah, Isaac, and Jacob, saying, “All these died in the faith,”9 Heb. 11.13 — implying that they did not expect to receive the fruit of the promise till after death. And therefore, in all their travails, they had before their eyes the blessedness of the life to come. This caused old Jacob to say at his death, “Lord, I have waited for your salvation,” Gen. 49.18. The Chaldee paraphrase expounds this phrase thus, “Our father Jacob did not say, I expect the salvation of Gideon, son of Joash, which is a temporal salvation, nor the salvation of Samson, son of Manoah, which is a transitory salvation, but the salvation of Christ, the Son of David, who shall come, and bring unto himself the sons of Israel, whose salvation my soul desires.” And so you see that this covenant, made with Abraham in Christ, was the comfort and support of these and the rest of the godly fathers, until their departure out of Egypt.

Ant. And what followed then?

Evan. Why, then Christ Jesus was most clearly manifested to them in the Passover lamb; for as that lamb was to be without spot or blemish, Exo. 12.5, even so was Christ, 1Pet. 1.19. And as that lamb was taken up the tenth day of the first new moon in March, even so, on the very same day of the same month, Christ came to Jerusalem to suffer his passion. And as that lamb was killed on the fourteenth day at evening, just then, on the same day and at the same hour, Christ gave up the ghost; and as the blood of that lamb was to be sprinkled on the Israelites’ doors, Exo. 12.7, even so the blood of Christ is sprinkled on believers’ hearts by faith, 1Pet. 1.2. And their deliverance out of Egypt was a figure of their redemption by Christ;10 their passing through the Red Sea was a type of baptism,11 when Christ was to come in the flesh; and their manna in the wilderness, and water out of the rock, resembled the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; and hence it is that the apostle says,1Cor.10.2-4, “They all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink; for they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.” And when they had come to Mount Sinai, the Lord delivered the Ten Commandments to them.

Then Fisher gives the weight of the passage: the promised seed of the woman is Christ, and “this promise of Christ, the woman’s seed…was the gospel,” serving as “the only comfort” of Adam and the godly fathers until Abraham. Fisher’s point is simple: God’s first revealed comfort to fallen humanity was Christ promised in the gospel.

The words come in a scene of judgment, and the serpent is addressed as the enemy who will be crushed, yet Adam and Eve hear, in the place where condemnation is deserved, that God will provide a seed from the woman who will suffer and conquer for them. God promises a Redeemer who will enter the nature that fell, suffer under the bruising of the serpent, and crush the serpent’s head through that suffering.

Boston’s note keeps the burden of salvation where Scripture places it, because he says man’s restoration to God’s favor and salvation were to be effected by another, since our first parents were given a new covenant in which a Savior was promised as their hope.1

This is where our legal frame fights the gospel, because the legal frame can tolerate Christ as necessary while still resisting Christ as everything. We say we believe in grace alone while functioning as though God gives Christ to the ashamed enough, awakened enough, transformed enough, or exhausted enough.

Adam had no such qualification to bring, because he stood before God exposed, guilty, afraid, hiding, and empty-handed.

God’s first word of hope to fallen humanity was promise.

The gospel saves sinners by giving Christ, who fulfills the law, bears the curse, conquers the enemy, and covers the shame of those who cannot cover themselves.

However, Adam and Eve’s attempted covering still speaks, because the fig leaves show humanity’s effort to manage shame without receiving covering from God. Some fig leaves are distraction, denial, blame-shifting, anger, busyness, and entertainment, while other fig leaves are moral reform, public seriousness, visible sorrow, accountability language, and reputation management.

The issue is who provides the covering, because every covering stitched from resolve, sorrow, seriousness, doctrinal accuracy, emotional intensity, or improvement will be too thin for the presence of God. Fisher connects the skins God provided with sacrifice and says Adam and Eve’s “sin and shame were covered with Christ’s righteousness,” though that typology should be stated with care because Genesis itself does not unfold the point with the same fullness.2

This makes Genesis 3:15 a word for the Christian who has sinned again and now feels that Christ must be approached after a period of quarantine.

The first gospel promise confronts the instinct that says God’s first word after your worst failure must be a demand for improvement, because God’s first word of hope after Adam’s fall was promise. The Son of God comes near, takes flesh, assumes our nature, enters the field where we were conquered, submits himself to suffering, and redeems sinners through triumph in the place of bruising.

Boston says the promise revealed that the Savior would become man as the seed of the woman, that he needed to suffer with his heel, namely his humanity, bruised to death, and that by his death he would make a full conquest over the devil and destroy his works.3

The bruised heel and the crushed head belong together, because the cross is the place where the serpent’s strike becomes his ruin. That matters for Christians who suffer, because many believers expect the victory of Christ to remove every bruise in this life, while Genesis 3:15 teaches us to see victory through suffering.

Some of you are limping under guilt that has stayed longer than expected, affliction that has refused to become a clean testimony, temptation that still humiliates you, grief that still enters the room, or weakness that makes you feel like a poor witness to the Christian life. The promise does not shame bruised Christians for failing to look triumphant, because the Redeemer conquers with a bruised heel. This promise is received by faith, though faith must be understood according to the nature of the promise instead of treated as a new work in the place of Adam’s lost obedience.

Boston says the promise revealed saving interest in Christ and his salvation by faith alone, namely by believing the promise with particular application to oneself and receiving Christ, since these things are revealed “by way of a simple promise”.4

Faith is the receiving of the Christ who is given in the promise.

When the anxious Christian asks whether his faith is strong enough, he is asking an understandable question in a dangerous direction, because the strength of faith saves no one as though faith were the Redeemer.

The better question concerns Christ’s sufficiency, the truth of the promise, the victory of the seed of the woman, the freeness of Christ in the gospel, and the right of the empty hand to receive what God gives. This places repentance where it belongs, because repentance is grace’s fruit rather than grace’s price.

The same Christ who justifies also sanctifies, the same Christ who covers shame also cures our love of hiding, and the same Christ who is received by faith gives the Spirit who turns sinners from sin.

When your conscience tells you to sew something more impressive before you come to God, Genesis 3 tells you that your leaves will fail in his presence. When your guilt tells you God waits for improvement before he speaks mercy, Genesis 3 tells you that God’s first word of hope to fallen humanity was promise. When your shame tells you to hide until you become less exposed, Genesis 3 tells you that Christ was promised for exposed sinners who could not clothe themselves.

God’s first word to fallen humanity was promise, and that promise means Christ would come, Christ would suffer, Christ would conquer, and Christ would be enough for sinners who have run out of leaves.