Join us tomorrow morning as we look at Hebrews 11:1–7 and the faith of Abel, Enoch, and Noah. Their lives remind us that faith rests on God’s promises, even when what he has promised is not yet seen. We’d love to worship with you! santaclaritaurc.org/about-us…

The Reward of the Inheritance The Heidelberg Catechism asks whether our good works merit nothing, even though it is God's will to reward them in this life and in that which is to come. Its answer: "The reward comes not of merit, but of grace." The answer guards merit and surrenders the architecture. It makes the reward something different from the eschatological inheritance — a payment keyed to the believer's works, rendered at a gracious rate, running on a second account beside the estate. Scripture keeps one account. "From the Lord you will receive the reward of the inheritance" (Col 3:24) — the reward of the inheritance: the reward consists in the inheritance. The consummation is the earned glory of the federal Head, the Sabbath entrance His obedience merited under covenant, and it reaches the saints as heirs — distributed by covenant location in Him, never tallied against their works at any rate, gracious or strict. The saints' works merit nothing. That sentence is safe. The frame around it is not. Heaven holds no second ledger beside the inheritance, where the heirs' works are summed and paid in grace. Their glorification is the whole estate, settled on the Son's obedience and received entire in Him. What is of grace is their standing in the Head at all. What they receive in Him is His reward — and His reward was of debt, paid to Him in resurrection and session, collected by the heirs on His receipt. #Colossians3 #Glorification #CovenantTheology #Kline #SecondAdam

Psalm 1 opens with a portrait, and the sitter is Christ. "Blessed is the man" — one man. No son of Adam has kept his walk clear of the counsel of the wicked, his standing out of the way of sinners, his seat out of the seat of scoffers, and his delight in the law of the LORD unbroken through a single week. The psalm describes the Second Adam in His probation, and only Him. His delight was in the Torah: "I delight to do Your will, O my God; Your law is within my heart" (Ps 40:8). In His law He meditated day and night — hagah, the low growl of the lion over prey it will not surrender (Isa 31:4). The Torah stayed on His lips. In the wilderness He answered the tempter out of Deuteronomy three times running; on the cross He died quoting the Psalter. The law of God was His food and His weapon in the same mouth. Psalms 1 and 2 stand at the Psalter's door as one portrait in two panels. The Man who meditates day and night is the Son installed on Zion, against whom the nations rage and over whom heaven laughs. Torah's blessed man and the enthroned King are the same person, seen from the valley and from the mount. The blessedness reaches sinners by one route: the Man fulfilled the psalm as their federal Head, and they are blessed in Him. Nobody climbs into Psalm 1 by meditating harder. The chaff is what we were. The tree planted by the waters, bearing fruit in its season, its leaf unwithered — the tree is what He is. #Psalms #Christology #CovenantTheology #Kline #SecondAdam

Some believers on X genuinely mean well, while others are genuinely well mean.

Those opposed to 'Marrow theology' are either ill informed (e.g., they've read about The Marrow that it was antinomian), ignorant (they've not read it), they've misread it, or they've read it and they're just Baxterite neonomians. — R Scott Clark

#6- For God was pleased to have all His fullness dwell in Him, and through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on the cross. (Colossians 1:19-20)

RT @ReclaimingRest:

RT @ReclaimingRest: "Come and listen, all who fear God, and I will tell what He has done for me." - Psalm 66:16 "Motioning to them with h…

The Reformed will continue to have a pervasive neonomian problem so long as guys like John MacArthur, John Piper, Paul Washer, etc. and their students, are considered Reformed.

There are those whose only frame of reference for antinomianism is the 17th century, but the controversy with the antinomians goes back to the early 16th century. Luther and Melanchthon battled antinomianism in the early 16th century. Luther coined the term antinomian. Unlike some opponents of antinomianism, however, in their battle against antinomianism, they did not sacrifice the gospel. Luther taught the third use of the law in substance and Melanchthon gave us the vocabulary (tertius usus legis) for it. The same is true of the second-generation Protestants. Calvin, Bullinger, and the Lutheran orthodox agreed on the distinction between law and gospel, and the third use of the law. The Book of Concord explicitly teaches the third use. The nomists don't want you to know that. Part of their agenda is to drive a wedge between the Lutherans and the Reformed on justification and salvation and the law/gospel distinction. The orthodox & scholastic successors of Luther, Calvin et al. maintained opposition to antinomianism without giving into the temptation of nomism. E.g., Ursinus under the discussion of the distinction between law & gospel, under HC 92: "The objections of the Antinomians, Libertines, and others of a similar cast, who contend that the moral law has no respect to Christians, and that it ought not to be taught in the church of Christ, will be noticed when we come to the exposition of the 115th Question of the Catechism where we shall speak of the use of the law." Zacharias Ursinus , The Commentary of Dr. Zacharias Ursinus on the Heidelberg Catechism trans. G. W. Williard (Elm Street Printing Company, 1888), 497. Yesterday, someone questioned me as to the definition of antinomianism yesterday, implying that the definition I offered, i.e., the denial of the abiding validity of the moral law as the norm of the Christian life, was insufficient. The expansion of antinomianism is a mark of nomism. The definition we find in Ursinus (before the young Turks complain about citing the corpus doctrinae I am aware of the editorial and textual history) was standard magisterial Reformation teaching. When the Marrow of Modern Divinity was 1st published it was, contrary to some claims, received as an orthodox and faithful work. It was largely a series of quotations from the magisterial Protestants. It was done by a layman, so there were some issues that had to be corrected in subsequent editions, but those blemishes did not substantially weaken the major thrust of the work, which was to remind the English Reformed of the Reformation basics. By the early 18th, however, many had quit reading the magisterial Reformers in favor of Richard Baxter. When Thomas Boston and the other Marrow Men rediscovered The Marrow, it became hotly controversial in the Church of Scotland. Our contemporary nomists want you to think that Baxter and the nomists in the C of S were the heroes in the story and that the Marrow Men were latent antinomians. That is revisionist history. There is an active movement to rehabilitate Richard Baxter. The nomists want you to think that either his rejection of the Reformation on justification never happened (that is gaslighting) or that he changed his mind. I'm still waiting for documentary evidence for this claim. As far as I know, his biographers know nothing about any such change of heart or mind. According to the nomists (i.e., those who teach justification, sanctification, or salvation through law-keeping, hence nomist or law-ist), anyone who is not a nomist, is an antinomian. That makes the entire Protestant Reformation and the confessions and catechisms of the churches antinomian. That is just silly. The justified seek to keep the law because they are justified. The saved seek to keep the law because they are saved. heidelblog.net/2018/08/heide…

Your boss is pressuring, and his boss is pressuring him — the pressure runs downhill and lands on you. The kids are pressuring. Retirement savings are pressuring. Health problems. Relatives. Your church. Your spouse. Every relation of your life pressing at once, and underneath them all a single question: will I have what I need? That question sets the pace of the Adamic world. The nations run after bread and clothing, and the running never ends, because in their register the future is unkept and everything must be seized today. "Your heavenly Father knows that you need them all" (Mt 6:32). The pilgrim walks a different pace. Not a matter of speed, a matter of register. He lives in the lower register, and he is registered in the upper — a citizen of Zion now, his life kept in the heaven where his federal Head is enthroned, his provision administered from a throne by a Father who knew his need before the pressure started. Paul found his peace in a shipwreck on the strength of a word spoken in the night: "There stood before me an angel of the God to whom I belong and whom I worship" (Acts 27:23). The ship was lost — cargo, tackle, hull. The word held. God granted Paul every soul sailing with him, and the apostle broke bread and gave thanks while the vessel came apart. The pressure is real, and the ship may still break. The pilgrim's peace was never stored in the ship. #Matthew6 #Acts27 #CovenantTheology #Kline #SecondAdam

RT @ReclaimingRest: God is just. That is terrifying knowledge. Brothers and sisters, what Jesus did two millennia ago makes it so that is…

RT @ReclaimingRest: Hell is separation from the favor of God, not God Himself. (Revelation 14:9-11) Brothers and sisters, take heart and b…

#5- You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified. (Galatians 3:1) Therefore let all Israel be assured of this: God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Messiah. (Acts 2:36)

Mike is right about Paul Washer. When people in crisis over lack of assurance contact me one of the diagnostic questions I ask is whether this person has been listening to Washer. I also ask if this person has been listening to John MacArthur. Typically the person in crisis has been listening to one or both.

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The Calvinist is the man who has seen God, and is filled on the one hand with a sense of his own unworthiness…and much more as a sinner, and on the other with adoring wonder that nevertheless this God is a God who receives sinners. —B.B. Warfield reformeddogmatika.com/the-th…

Does the gospel conquer in this age, or does the church hold on until Jesus comes? Kline's amillennialism answers by distinguishing the registers. Conflating them is the error — in both its optimistic and its pessimistic forms. The structure is the two ages. This age and the age to come overlap from the resurrection forward, and this age runs its Adamic course to the end. The common-grace order persists: nations rise and fall under the patience of God, the sword remains in the hand of the state as His common-grace mechanism, and the cultures of the earth are never progressively converted into the kingdom. History does not mature into the consummation. Within that order, the gospel's advance is real and it is total in its own register. Revelation 20's binding of Satan has a specified purpose: he is bound in respect of deceiving the nations, so that the gospel runs where it never ran before and the elect are gathered out of every tribe and tongue. The enthroned Christ administers that gathering through His Spirit, and it cannot fail. The conquest is an ingathering — heart by heart, nation by nation, across the whole map of the Adamic world. The church's posture inside the advance is witness under suffering. Revelation's conquerors conquer by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, and they love not their lives unto death. The new covenant community carries no sword, administers no culture, and holds no territory. It holds — to the confession, under tribulation, through the apostasy that marks the age's end. Against the postmillennial reading: the typological kingdom administered the law over one nation's land tenure, and that administration is finished in Christ. Projecting it forward onto the nations of this age mistakes a type for the antitype's program. The kingdom that advances now advances in the Spirit's register, among the nations, while the nations as nations remain in Adam until the end. Against the pessimistic reading: a bound Satan and an enthroned Head gathering His own from every nation is not a retreat. The church holds its ground because its ground was taken by another. Its King is not waiting to begin reigning. The end comes as the day of the Lord always comes in Scripture — by irruption. The parousia-Presence arrives in judicial light, the mystery of God is finished, and the age that was held under patience is judged in a day. The gospel conquers its elect out of the whole world. The church holds its confession to the end of the age. Both are true because Christ, not the church's progress, is the hinge of the ages. #Eschatology #Amillennialism #CovenantTheology #Kline #SecondAdam

#4- Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. (1 Corinthians 1:22-24)

RT @ReclaimingRest: The message... "He will speak a message to you by which you and all your household will be saved." - Acts 11:14 (see…