The law, religious piety and practice have fallen on hard times these days in the church. The modern day status quo stance of many professing evangelicals seems to be something of, “I’m free in Jesus to do what makes me happy while not hurting anyone else and to follow the way of Jesus as he outlined in the Sermon on the Mount,” etc. etc. This may be the kind of stance red-letter-only Christians tend to possess. However there’s a big problem with this.
In working through infant baptism and children in the covenant (not, mind you, whether adult converts should be baptized; yes they should), trying to find proof texts (“go ye forth and baptize thy children, or… not”) is the wrong way to go about sifting through the data. MacArthur’s arguments against Sproul, for instance, are unhelpful to me in defending against it. He says, “I don’t see it, it’s just not there,” or “show me a specific text” and then proof texts’ the New Testament, wrongly conflating the Abrahamic Covenant (Genesis 17) with “Old Covenant” (Mosaic Covenant). So much of that has to do with presuppositions underlying “not seeing it” though. In other words, it’s reductionist to just say “it’s just not there” which ignores volumes of theology related to the larger story of scripture, starting way back in Genesis going forward, and the necessary outworking of that story, carrying over into the NT. (MacArthur may be a bad example though given that he’s a staunch classic dispensationalist which sees division in the unfolding of redemption that I don’t hold to, but I hope you see the point.)
As I worked through my understanding of infant baptism and the practical outworking of covenant theology (namely the practice aspect of Reformed theology) with the help of Ligon Duncan’s Covenant Theology course at RTS, snippets from O. Palmer Robertson’s The Christ of the Covenants and some lectures I found of his, Sinclair Ferguson’s defense in Three Views of Baptism, Calvin’s defense in the Institutes, and a host of articles on Monergism.com, I was mostly convinced, but the pieces weren’t fitting together. I have been convinced for quite some time of the Reformed view of the Lord’s Table, but the view of baptism was hard for me to swallow, mainly until I started really digging into covenant theology (this is not to say Reformed Baptists haven’t done this, I just had not dug in enough, personally on this aspect).
“Therefore I ought first to show that the faith by which we are Christians is the gift of God, if I can do that more thoroughly than I have already done in so many and so large volumes. But I see that I must now reply to those who say that the divine testimonies which I have adduced concerning this matter are of avail for this purpose, to assure us that we have faith itself of ourselves, but that its increase is of God; as if faith were not given to us by Him, but were only increased in us by Him, on the ground of the merit of its having begun from us. Thus there is here no departure from that opinion which Pelagius himself was constrained to condemn in the judgment of the bishops of Palestine, as is testified in the same Proceedings, ‘That the grace of God is given according to our merits,’ if it is not of God’s grace that we begin to believe, but rather that on account of this beginning an addition is made to us of a more full and perfect belief; and so we first give the beginning of our faith to God, that His supplement may also be given to us again, and whatever else we faithfully ask.
“Some people think that true spirituality is so mystical that we really do not need the church with its creeds and confessions, and its forms of worship, so long as we follow what God says to our hearts. A personal relationship with the Lord trumps everything else, even the plain teaching of the Bible. Other people put so much stock in the sacraments that they think receiving baptism, attending church, and taking the Lord’s Supper virtually guarantees their salvation unless they do something really bad. Reformed Christianity, in contrast to these extremes, does not separate the life of the visible church and the invisible work of the Spirit, but emphasizes both as crucial to knowing and pleasing God.”
Joel Beeke, http://www.reformation21.org/confession/2013/07/chapter-253.php
“Taste and see that the Lord is good.” Psalm 34:8
“There is a difference between having an opinion, that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet, and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former, that knows not how honey tastes; but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind. So there is a difference between believing that a person is beautiful, and having a sense of his beauty. The former may be obtained by hearsay, but the latter only by seeing the countenance. There is a wide difference between mere speculative rational judging any thing to be excellent, and having a sense of its sweetness and beauty. The former rests only in the head, speculation only is concerned in it; but the heart is concerned in the latter. When the heart is sensible of the beauty and amiableness of a thing, it necessarily feels pleasure in the apprehension. It is implied in a person’s being heartily sensible of the loveliness of a thing, that the idea of it is sweet and pleasant to his soul; which is a far different thing from having a rational opinion that it is excellent.”
Jonathan Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light, https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/articles/onsite/edwards_light.html
This is the great question, from Romans 9:14, that has caused much debate over the centuries as it pertains to election, going back to Pelagius and Augustine, and even as Paul shows, during his own day. If God chooses to have mercy on one and not another, is He at fault, is it unjust? Paul’s answer? By no means! But why? He gives two pieces of evidence from the old testament to back up his claim that God is indeed not unjust in His sovereign election:
I’d be lying if I said I haven’t ever taken a selfie. Still do with the kids occasionally. However, something about this just feels wrong. So much of the endgame of what the enlightenment has wrought (though much good was brought about to be sure) can be summed up in this one picture; that we would memorialize as important something so vain and trivial. As the center-point of what defines objective reality shifted from the external to the inner-self, the subjective, how could this not be the end? A society centered on making itself great and known to a watching world. As we’ve soaked in celebrity culture, and now possess mediums to broadcast ourselves, how could we not become our own celebrities with our own fans? And how much, in such a short time, has social media enabled all of us to put this narcissistic tendency in full throttle? And now we memorialize such overt self-centeredness? What an age we live in.
Churches planted by riding the waves of the latest sociological fad movement can’t last, because their ecclesiology is like a house built on the shifting sand of the sociology of the prevailing culture. In other words, when a church’s ecclesiological philosophy is rooted more in the whims of the outside, secular world and what they esteem as satisfying and energizing, the foundation has been laid for its inherent compromise and collapse, sooner or later.