All that said and done, let us pray and open the evening. Father, thank you for an opportunity to study your word, to look at it and to examine it and see how it impacts our lives. Lord, as we cover the broad strokes of theology, let us remember and be mindful that all theology must become biography. Help us do that, Lord. In your name. Amen. Two stories for you, just to open up with, both of them were me reading to my children. By the way, my wife has memorized word-for-word, good night, moon, after multiple children of sitting there reading it, page by page, but we had this wonderful book by Winnie the Pooh, we all familiar with Winnie the Pooh, and it was Winnie the Pooh's ABCs, and you know, it was A is for Apple, Ardvark and, you know, anchovies, A, A, A, you know, B is for Broncos, Bears, and, you know, whatever, B, B, B. Well, it is actually very anti-semitic, because when it got to age, it said, H is for Harry, hippopotamus, and something, hip-hip hooray. And so I would always educate my one-year-old by letting them know that hip-hip hooray is, of course, Hick Israel, Pradeshia, Hick Israel, Pradeshia, thus Israel is destroyed, and that we shouldn't say that, it's a bad word, and Winnie the Pooh was wrong. My wife took that one away from me, and she gave me instead this other book that was just, I was like, I think she was thinking, how simple can I get? So she gave me this book that just had pictures of animals on it, and it says, what does a cow say? Moo says the cow, you know, what does a dog say? Wolf says the dog, and Scotty and I got to where I would say, what does a dog say? And he go, wolf, what does a cow say? Moo, and then he go, what does a kitten say, and he go, meow, splat. That was the first fight my son got in, because he was in a Sunday school one day, and the teacher asked him what a cat said, and he said, meow, splat. And the other pastor's kid said, no, it says, meow, and they got an argument. Children books. I want you to just take that in your mind, whatever your favorite children book is, cat in the hat, good night, moon, whatever it is, just keep that in mind, as we go through this lesson, I want to end back there, and if I forget someone to remind me to end there, because tonight we want to talk about covenant theology. I gave you on the handout a little worksheet, a little homework to do beforehand, I don't know if some of you all did that or not, I'm not going to go over that, I want to just leave that there for your own interest, except to say that in Genesis, when God makes a covenant with Abraham, it followed the form and the rules of the day, in other words it met legal, it was a legitimate will, it was a legitimate deed, it was a legitimate legal document, and it met the requirements that were needed, it would have passed the test for the day, and we'll talk about that a little bit later, but just to get your mind kind of thinking through that Genesis 15 passage, but I want to start by saying there's really three key questions of theology, who is Jesus, who is Jesus, what is your doctrine of sin? And I made a big point at this last time saying that, in a lot of ways, your doctrine of sin is the most important thing you hold, because your Savior is only as great as your need, and if you feel like Jesus saved you from drowning, but you were kind of drowning in one of those little kiddie pools with half an inch of water in it, I mean you can drown there, or did Jesus save you from drowning in the middle of the ocean with no hope inside, you see, your doctrine of sin, and then the other question is, what do you do with the Old Testament? Some of you say, well we just kind of ignore it, we have this nice big thumbprint where the Psalms are and the New Testament, we don't really read the Old Testament, well it's in there, and what do you do with the Old Testament? And I would humbly say to you, most of church history, it's not all of church history, is really an ongoing debate about how to read the Old Testament, okay, let that sink in for a minute. Most of church history is an ongoing debate about how to read the Old Testament, it becomes the central piece of it, in fact it is the central issue even in Jesus' day, if you read the gospels and you read Jesus' arguments with other people, on by the way, those of you who are new or have been here the nights at Tim or Joel are teaching, I have a really bad habit of not following my notes, so if you're looking for it in the notes, it may be on the next page or somewhere, so I'm sorry, I really try to do better, but it may not happen, but when Jesus interacts with the religious rulers of their day, what is he arguing about? See, maybe you've never asked yourself that question, but what is the context of the argument? It's always, you know, you don't understand the law, you did a miracle on the Sabbath, or it's you can't do this in the temple, or you are, you know, you can't, I can't even think of any kind of, that's horrible, I'm a pastor, I should know better, you know, he's having these debates about what he can do on the Sabbath, whether he can heal on the Sabbath, whether his men can work, he goes in and teaches them and he says things like, you know, your father is not Abraham, your father is the devil, what is he saying? He's saying, you've misunderstood your Old Testament, you think that because you've got the law of Moses, you've got it all, okay, or to put it in another analogy, Scotty came home one day, and he read a story, and if you know my little youngest son, he's very dramatic, he's like, Dad, best story ever, and he goes, I think I'm just done reading, and in a lot of ways the religious rulers were like that, we've got the best law ever done, all we've got to do is finish it, see, all we've got to do is fulfill it, all we have to do is live the mosaic law perfectly, and God will save us, and Jesus flipped that on its head, and he said, how about this, how about if it has nothing to do with what you accomplish, what if it's all about what God did for you, what if the entire Old Testament points to me, not Jerry, but points to Jesus, and Jesus pushed on this, if you look at his dialogue with the religious rulers, it was 95% of the time about what does the Old Testament really say? And Jesus says that you're saved not by what you do, but by what I do, and he goes on to say, and the Old Testament makes us pretty clear, that you're saved not by what you do, but by what God will do in your behalf, we're going to look at that, but I want to just lift out to you two typical interpretations of the Old Testament. The first one is, well, we just have to reinterpret the Old Testament in our own day. One of my favorite stories of this is a professor of mine was Sline, an Israeli airline in the Israel, and he was a British man, he asked for some cream for his coffee, and the stewardess says, well, you can't have cream, and he said, why not? And she said, it's Passover, and he said, well, that's great, but I'm not Jewish, and she says, but I am, and he goes, but I've read the Bible, I don't know where this is, and she says, well, it says in the Bible that you shouldn't eat a goat in its mother's milk, and he said, but I just want cream for my coffee, and he says, I don't understand, and the lady says, well, I don't either, but that's what the rabbi says, that means, okay? And you laugh, but I don't know if you're aware of this 10 years ago, we had the year of Jubilee. The Old Testament, there's a year of Jubilee, right? We're all desert forgiven, I think? If you're a Roman Catholic, every 50 years, you are asked if it all possible to make a pilgrimage to Rome. It, because Levitical Law says to have a year of Jubilee, and they have figured out somewhere in the Vatican that the year of Jubilee now means a pilgrimage to Rome every 50 years. I don't know the connect, but that's what they've said, okay? And you see this constantly, where you just try to take the Old Testament and make it work, make it fit in a little bit better, okay? And by the way, we live in a world where the Old Testament, we just, we tend to take the second approach was just kind of ignore it, but that wasn't always true in America. If you ever drive through Alabama, you'll come across little cities named Dothin and Boaz. I mean, think about how much you have to identify with the Old Testament to name your city Dothin, okay? Or Ebenezer Chapel, right? Or Bethel Chapel. I mean, and if I were to say to you, and again, in the early days of this country, we identified more with the Old Testament than we do now. For instance, if I said to you, I have a friend, his name is Abraham, you would probably think he's Jewish, but whatever you want to think about Abraham Lincoln, he wasn't Jewish, right? You see, but apparently his family had this connect. Now we still have names like David and things like that that we still use that are Old Testament names, but we don't go to the depths, those kind of, you know, minor names in the Old Testament anymore in naming our children. We don't identify with it as much. Also, if I could, our heresies aren't very good heresies for those of you who got shocked eyes, it's okay. As opposed to the early America, when we so identified with the Old Testament, what kind of heretical groups did we create? Jehovah's Witnesses? You see? What's the one true name in the Old Testament? It's Jehovah. By the way, Jehovah's never in the Old Testament. If you want to know that, ask me sometime, I can show you, it's kind of a nerd thing. Seventh-day Adventist? Well, what did they say? They said, instead of taking the Old Testament and pouring it through the new, we're going to take the New Testament and pour it through the Old. You see, we're going to see what holds. And you'll meet people in heaven who are seventh-day Adventists. I don't mean to say they not believers, but I mean to say they, that for the administration and the leadership of that denomination is very much focused on that Old Testament. And in a lot of ways, the believers in there are in spite of the teaching of that church, but you can go even further and you can go somewhere like Mormonism, right? Or again, Jehovah's Witnesses, which are pretty far out there, but they're very old Testament. In some of your hymns that we love and love to sing, you've probably never noticed, but the ones written in the early days of America, and in that period in Britain, tend to not mention Jesus, or if they do, they do it in code. Rock of Ages, cleft for me. Let me hide myself in thee. Well, you have to know about the Old Testament reference to know that's about Jesus, right? Great is life faithfulness. Oh, guide me, great Jehovah. So again, not saying those songs are wrong, not saying we shouldn't sing them, I'm just saying if you look that way, you bend that way, that the Old Testament has to somehow be applicable today and every way. The other way you can go is to say, well, we just want to even ignore it. We've been freed from it. The Old Testament's been abolished. It's not important, okay? I have a gentleman that I've been talking to and working with. He got into a Bible study this year at UTC Campus, where he has been told by his leader that if he is living the religious life, and he's too bound to church, and he's too bound to religiosity, and that he needs to free himself. In fact, oh, probably helps if I don't take that off, doesn't it? This is the email that was sent, very interesting, just hearing this perspective, because I think it's probably different than most of us grew up in. He says, you are going to let God tweak your mind, or you will be exactly where you are when you're 50. God is not a God of doing, but of being, step out of your religion. Think about that. And sometimes you'll meet people who talk about being filled with the Spirit, and that can be a good thing. Again, I mean, just like great as I faithfulness is one of my favorite hymns. You need to listen to the Spirit, can be one of those most meaningful moments in your life, but it can also be an excuse not to obey the rules, right? It can be a statement of my will, and God's will are so synonymous that whatever I want is what God wants. And you meet people who believe that. I'm just trying to paint a picture for you to say, this question, what do you do with the Old Testament? Is essential. It is so important. How do you read it? How do you understand it? The fancy word is, what is your hermeneutic? And the word hermeneutic just means your interpretive grid. How do you interpret it and understand the Old Testament? Questions on that? If I get too far along, if you do, I'm also up here afterwards if you want to talk. So you can't, there's two ways you can go wrong, interpret Christ out. You make everything in the Old Testament go back to him. I don't share one more example of that. One of the favorite medieval pastors of the Reformation, Luther loved this guy. It was a God named Bernard of Clairville. Bernard gave eight sermons on the second verse of Song of Solomon, second verse. That simply says, you know, his kiss goes upon my kiss and my mouth. And he thought for weeks about how Jesus kisses us with the spirit and this and that. But it was an attempt to find Jesus in every passage of the Old Testament regardless, right? And we still have some songs that are like that. You know, his banner under me is truth that kid song is a way of reading the song of Solomon in this vein, okay? Or we can go the other way and say, we got to throw the Old Testament out, we can really throw out most of the New Testament. What is God doing in your life right now? What, what are you feeling? What are you experiencing? You know, raise your hand, speak in tongues and you'll know and we get that too. And I'll say you get more and more of that in this generation and the ones who were 30 and younger and the churches they're going to, it tends to have that feel to it. Kind of scary. All right. Enough about that. So where do we find the balance? Let's look at where we've been. Genesis 1 and 2, the creation, God made creation good. Genesis 3, sin enters the world, the fall. We talked about that last week. Genesis 4 through 11, we learn how bad the sin is. We learn that we are incapable of saving ourselves. But we also learn another important point that God will not give up on humanity. When he floods the earth, he saves a family. Noah. And you know immediately that it's not because Noah was good, right? By the way, my brother had a racing dog named Noah, but they had to rename him George because every time he'd go out in the yard and yell at him, the dog buddy was in trouble. Totally all subject. But Noah got drunk, right? Noah obviously wasn't saved because he was righteous. He was saved because God hadn't given up on humanity. And you've probably never thought of this, but it's one of the coolest illustrations in Scripture because what does God do at the end of the flood? What does he put in the sky? A rainbow. And you and I think of that as a, you know, technicolor little thing in the sky. Well, think about it metaphorically. Rain is arrows. God put his bow of rain in the sky so that when we see the rain, we can look up and to use the modern version, we can see his AK-47 hanging up there and know that he's not going to kill us, you see? That this rain is for our, as for our good, not for our bad. God hangs his weapon in the sky as a visible presentation to us. He is going to save humanity in spite of ourselves. So then you turn to Genesis chapter 12, verse 1 through 3. A great, great passage. One of my favorites. And if you hang around with me long enough, you'll hear me preach this passage about 20 times. I think Ben Hayden used to always preach the prodigal son. I'm sort of that way with Genesis 12. Now the Lord said to Abram, go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. I will make you a great nation. I will bless you. I will make your name great so you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you and him who dishonors you. I will curse. And in you, all the families of the earth, shall be blessed. God makes three promises to Abraham. He makes a promise of a people, right? You'll be the father of many nations. I will bring a people to you. He makes the promise of a kingdom of a land, right? I have a land prepared for you. And he makes a promise of blessing. I will bless you. I will bless you. See, the story of Noah's, I'm not capable of achieving that myself, but God will bless me. Well, you can see those fulfilled in Jesus, right? Jesus calls a people unto himself, reading the New Testament, you who were not a people or now the people of Christ, right? Jesus builds a kingdom. He comes to announce the kingdom. We had a whole sermon series a few years back on kingdom parables. Remember those, right? I go to prepare a place for you. And blessing, Jesus comes that we might have eternal life. You see? But you can even use those three things to read the entire Old Testament. I'll hold that out to you because the rest of Genesis is about what? Abraham's been promised all these descendants and he has no son. The whole thrust of Genesis is about getting descendants. Look at how Exodus starts. The descendants of Abraham were many, but they were enslaved in Egypt. Descendants, check, kingdom, still an open box. We're going to take care of that one. Book of numbers. Do you ever, you know, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers? Have you ever tried to read through your Bible? You probably got caught up in one of those two Leviticus and Numbers. Those are all about God's blessing. Numbers is cool because it says, here you are in the desert. You haven't even attacked the Promised Land yet and there's people over there who are going to try to kill you. But you can be so confident in who God is, you can go ahead and divvy up the property. See, that's the key. You can go ahead and say, Jerry gets from this tree over to that creek and back over to the hill because God's already promised it to you. And you can go through the whole Old Testament with those set of lenses and you get a grid. But there's another set of lens also and that is God's covenant relationship to Abraham and to his descendants. And this is found, of course, in Genesis 15 and then the sign of it in Genesis 17 when Abraham is circumcised. And I want to spend just a little bit of time talking about this because I think a lot of times we pass over this too quickly. This is a legal binding contract. In fact, if you read old theologians sometimes, you'll see it called instead a covenant theology, federal theology. That just comes from a Latin word meaning treaty, treat us. We get the word federal building from it too. It also can mean head, headship, those kind of things. But covenant theology is where God steps in and he says, I'm going to initiate the process of salvation for you. And in the ancient Near East, there was something called the Sussan Vassal Treaty. The Sussan was the king. He was the feudal Lord, we would say. He was the local governance. And you would be a vassal. You would go to him and you would ask for protection. And then a typical Sussan Vassal treaty, you would say, I got this form and there's, you know, brigands about. And he would say, I'll give you protection and you'll give me carrots. Or wheat or whatever it is. You'll provide me. I'll protect you. And you would draw a treaty. You'd draw a legal arrangement. That said, you know, if I do X service, then you give me X product. But here's the hook for the covenant agreement between God and Abraham. Because what you would always do with these things is you would kill an animal, you would split him down the middle, and you would put him on the side. Either way, that is a pretty bloody process. I mean, if you really, if you've never grown up hunting, or you've never grown up around the death of animals, and you want to really understand Leviticus, another sounds horrible, you need to go somewhere and watch him slaughter an animal. And think about that, right? I mean, you know, we come in as a church and we've sinned and we say, you know, Lord, please forgive me. And the Old Testament, you had to haul this, you know, 800 pound bull through town. You know, like, holy, what did Jerry do? He's got three of them, you know, and then they would kill it. And there'd be a lot of blood. You would cut this animal in half and you would separate it. And the two of you would walk, the Sussan and the Vassal, the King and the peasant would walk through. And the message was, if we don't keep the terms of this agreement, we will become like this animal, right? In other words, we're willing to be killed if we don't keep the terms of our agreements. Wow, that's a cell phone contract you can't get out of, right? But in Genesis 15, notice, when it comes time to walk through, Abraham doesn't get to. God does for both of them. Pretty powerful. See, God walks through for both of them. And he says, you can't keep it. I've not only got to do my part, but I got to do your part as well. And of course, we can look back and we can say, well, of course, that's who Jesus is. See, Jesus is fully God and fully man. And because he's fully man, he can be the person that I can't be. He can be the sacrifice that I can't be. And in the Old Testament, we can look at the offices and we studied these this summer, the prophet, right? The prophet brings the Word of God, the message of God. But Jesus was more than just a prophet. He was also the Word made flesh, right? John 1. The priest, the one who makes sacrifices for the people, but Jesus was more than just the priest. He was also the sacrifice. His death on the cross was a sacrifice, sacrificial atonement is the term. And we'll cover that in this room or downstairs, in the next couple weeks. He's also the king. He is Lord. He is God. But, and this one's a little more tricky, but his subjects are his body. His kingdom, his subjects are the body of Christ, you see? So prophet, priest, and king is another way to look at the Old Testament, to find unity in it in Christ without going off the deep end and taking everything in the Old Testament out of context, out of Christ, and developing something that's just crazy, like the yellow deli down the street. You're all familiar with that. Have a very compelling website, the 12 tribes of Israel, and they're very much an Old Testament thing that never got Jesus. But you got to get Jesus. That's the key, okay? So going through this. And let me say this just briefly, that there is one covenant. You'll see somewhere in all those handouts, a picture of a cute little acorn and a big old oak tree. And again, this is one of those diagrams. I'll throw at you from time to time as I teach. I think it's helpful, because if you've got the acorn and you've never seen anything else, you don't really know what that becomes, right? You know you've got something, but you don't know it's an oak tree. But if you see an oak tree, especially if you look up in the fall, because you'll get hit by them, you know it has acorns. That makes sense. In other words, there's a place where you gain more knowledge. And you could read the Old Testament as the development of that acorn into the oak tree. So that you see, Eve being told your heel will stomp the serpent. And you say, ah, Jesus is born of Mary, and he's the one who defeats the devil. David defeats his Goliath, and you can say, well, I can't defeat mine apart from Jesus Christ, right? Moses is called the great prophet. And Moses says, no, no, no, there's going to be a prophet greater than me. And who followed Moses? Joshua. What's Jesus' name in Hebrew? Joshua. You see the connect? See the connect? That the oak tree is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. To finally, you get to Jesus and you're looking, oh, we got an oak tree. I get it. And then you can go back to the Old Testament, looking to Jesus and say, okay, I can understand this passage now. I can make sense of it. Because God made a covenant with us, if you hear nothing else, I say not, hear this. God made a covenant with us, one covenant, and he revealed it over time. Now back to my book reading to my children, right? I made two statements, two stories, and I made a mistake in both. The first one, I started giving my child, who was one year old, lectures on anti-Semitism. Wasn't the time. Wasn't the time. On the other one, I started adding to the message, new revelation. Cats say now, but when you throw them against the wall, they say now, splat. We don't really like cats in my family. I'm sorry for the cat lovers. I realized saying that probably just lost half the audience. My wife likes cats. Yes, he's telling me, yes, she likes cats. I think my children like cats, but they scratch my truck. That's a whole other issue. That's a sin and we've already covered that. It's over. But to say so often in our life, we read that children's book, and we're done. We're done. And you'll meet people today who talk about Israel as if it was still the third century BC. You see, they're talking about it like, well, if we can just get back to that. But Jesus came to fulfill that piece. You see, that's done. It's done. It's new now. Everyone finds their identity in the oak tree, in Christ. You find your salvation in the one man, Jesus Christ. Having said that, if you don't believe me, look at the three people who are highlighted at the birth of Jesus. You may have never done this. Who are the three people that are held up as kind of models at the birth of Jesus? John the Baptist, who was John the Baptist? He was Elijah. He was the great prophet. And what was he declaring? Everything is coming into Jesus. He's the one, not even worthy to tie a sand. You see, and John the Baptist has lifted up in the birth narrative of Christ as the Old Testament model theologian. If you read your Old Testament, this is what you should be doing, right? Eating locust for claiming Jesus with less locust, maybe. Who else? When he goes to the temple, his first entrance into the temple is a baby. We meet two people. We meet Simeon and Anna. Both of whom, both of whom, right? Simeon is there and he's saying, well, God gave me this revelation that I wouldn't die until I saw the Christ. And you're yet, what's he saying? I know my Old Testament backwards and forwards. And I know it's all about you, Jesus. You say, I know you're the sinner of it. Anna, well, if you read, she's been widowed and just been kind of hanging out in church for whole life. And she immediate all these people walking by Mary and Joseph. Don't get it. And she says, you're Jesus Christ. You're the one I've been waiting for. How good to be able to put a name to the hope of the gospel. Powerful, isn't it? Those three people are lifted up so that we can see that's the point of the Old Testament, okay? Now, I know all that makes you ask yourself a question. It makes me ask one. And that is, if it was 700 AD, 800 AD, and I got a calling to be a pastor, how would I get ordained? I know probably most of you ask yourself this question often. Believe it or not, there would be no written tests. My children woe the Chinese for bringing those in the 18th and 19th century. We really didn't use them before then. You would have stood in front of a board of bishops and they would have had an oral examination. They would have asked you questions. And by the way, as a PCA pastor, that's still how we do it. You come stand in front of a group of pastors and we can ask you anything because you all might ask me anything, right? I can send you to Tim, but apart from that, I got to know it. And they would sit and they had three categories that you had to know. You had to know cold as a medieval candidate for ministry. You had to know the Tin Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and the Apostle's Cree. What is the Tin Commandments? What are you testing there? This is why I asked the question. What are you testing that potential pastor for? More law. Do you know the law? Do you know your Old Testament? The Lord's Prayer. What are you asking there? Yeah, your doctrine of Jesus. Do you know Jesus? You really know Jesus? I mean, and of course you would expand from that. Lord and the Tin Commandments says, do not murder. Well, what about in, you know, Leviticus 12? What do you think about that passage? You would expand your question, but these were the core. And the third was the Apostle's Cree, which we say most weekends here. And what are you testing there? This is a little trickier. The church. Someone said it, the church, the church. Those three things are being tested. You understand the Old Testament leads to Jesus? Do you understand the church flows out of Jesus? Do you understand that Jesus is the central component to all of those? And without him there is nothing. There is nothing. A couple of pieces here for you as we close. Calvin, John Calvin, of course, who was central to the Reformation. By the way, most of Calvin's stuff was just stolen. And I say that to you because if you ever read Calvin and some of you might be possessed to do that, I will say this to you. I'll pass this information to Robert Rowe. When I landed at Hicks and Prezz, I needed the Sunday school teacher, and I didn't know anybody. I mean, I really didn't. It was like day one, I had to have a Sunday school teacher. So I went to the church library, and there was only two people who had ever checked out Calvin's institutes. One of them was deceased, and the other one became the best Sunday school teacher ever had. I went to him and he said, why are you asking me? I said because you checked out Calvin's institutes. You know, you either insane or know your stuff. And his comment was, well, I knew enough not to buy it. But if you ever read Calvin's institutes, then you read, and you're reading along, and it's like he stops all of a sudden, and starts talking about the first commandment. And you go, well, this is odd. And you are tempted being a modern theologian to kind of skip through that section. Let's move on. Let's get to the other stuff. But for him, that was how he was trained. You see, the 10 commandments was central to understanding the Old Testament. It was the core principles. Why do I say that? Because to understand the covenant of God, you have to stop looking at the specific rule, and start looking at the principles behind the rule. The principles behind the rule. Because I don't eat goats in their mother's milk, I also probably wouldn't drink creamer in my coffee on an Israeli airline. But it's got to be more than that. So here are the principles I'll give you. And I got them from Calvin, so I thought that was pretty safe. Rule one, our lives are shaped by the law. And Calvin would tell you not just your actions, but your heart. You can't move one without the other. See, if God made a covenant with us, and he is both the Lord of it, but also the one who dies in our place as Jesus, then we have to come to understand he is in the business of transforming lives. It's not you do better in your actions. It's you give me everything. Jeremiah 31, I will create new covenant. I'll pick out their heart of stone. Give them a heart of flesh. So both your heart and your mind have to be shaped by the law. The law always demands more than what it says. Stop thinking of the Old Testament as a to-do list, and start thinking of it as a principles of what God would have us do. And Jesus does this all the time. He says, you say adultery's bad. I tell you, if you look at a woman wrong, it's bad. In other words, that's just a starting point. We're going to raise the bar. We're going to raise the bar on this. You read in the Old Testament where it says, do not murder in the 10 Commandments, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5, but then you read later and it says, you know what, if you find a man who's dead on the state line and he's got one arm here and one arm here, you got a measure and figure out which state he's in the most and those people got to find the murder. Because life is precious. See, if you take, do not murder and you raise it, then you have to say we have to be in the business of saving lives, right? We have to be in the business of saving lives. Not just keeping people from dying, but doing more than that. And you can go through the Commandments that way, right? Go through the Commandments that way. And then finally, recall your duty to God and your neighbor, right? When Jesus has asked the law, he doesn't quote one of the 10 Commandments. He says, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind. The second is like it. Love the neighbor. Love your neighbor as yourself, right? Interestingly enough, the sermon on the Mount mostly about how to love your neighbor well with the implication that that has a direct reflection on how you deal with God, right? Not entirely, but it's there. That how I deal with you all tells you a lot about how I deal with God. And if God breaks me in something and calls me to repentance, odds are our relationships going to see that pop up pretty quick, okay? That horizontal. So recall your duty to God and your neighbor. Uses of the law, there are three that tend to be put out there. There's a lot of different ways to look at this. I'll just bring up these three as one model. Again, this is a broad stroke topic. Show your inability to follow God purely. This has nothing to ascend. This is me. I can't follow the law perfectly. The number two, because of my captivity to sin, sometimes I don't even try to follow the law. Sometimes I run away from it, right? So because of sin, I can't follow it perfectly. Because of sin, sometimes I don't want to follow it perfectly. My need for Jesus is so great that I need to come to Him. But even as a Christian, I need to be aware that God is not only responsible for my salvation. He's responsible for my sanctification. He's not only responsible for saving me. He's responsible for preserving me, right? Which is why some of Calvin's followers down the line came up. Calvin never believed the five points of Calvinism, by the way. He never saw them. He technically believed them, I guess, but he never actually saw them in writing. But if you look at the five points of Calvinism, what do they say? Total depravity. You are a sinner, unable to save yourself. Unconditional election. God the Father chose you not because of anything you did. He chose you because he loved you. And because he's fully God, it worked. Limited atonement. That's when we get hung up on all the time. Well, Jesus died for you. And you know what? If Jesus was fully God, it worked. Irresistible grace. God, the Holy Spirit came and called you to repentance and called you to faith in Jesus Christ. You know what? If the Holy Spirit's fully God, it worked. And if all three of those things happened, then you will persevere. You see, perseverance of the saint. You will be saved. God's not only responsible for my salvation, he's responsible for my sanctification, for getting me to heaven. He saved me and he's going to get me home to put it in layman's terms. And then finally, a guide to Christian living that is we look at the principles of the law. And I want to go back to it one more time and closing and just say to you, again, if Scotty, my son looked at me and he said, Dad, I've got good night moon down path. Got it good. I'm done reading for the rest of my life. I would have to look at him and say, son, you don't understand why I gave you cat in the hat and good nightman. I gave it to you because there's so many greater things out there for you to read. There's so many greater treasures for you to hold in your hands and see. I gave you this so you'll be ready. You're a little acorn. Right? But I did this to get you ready. And that's what the covenant of God is. God in history revealed to us, Jesus Christ, so that, so that we might know as his people, in his kingdom, his eternal blessing. For an Old Testament person, that meant looking forward to the very existence of Jesus. For you and I, it means remembering not to get stuck here, but always having our eye on heaven. I don't know when Jesus is coming back, but I know you and I will see him face to face everyone in this room in under a hundred years. And that's something to look forward to. Questions? No? Let me close this in prayer. Again, make sure you say, hey, to our partners in the ministry down in Monterey. And we're so thankful for them being here. And if you want to come and ask me something, I'll hang up here for a while. And if I don't know it, we've got three other pastors in the room, and they'll be happy to answer. Father, thanks for this. And Lord, we joke about that. But Lord, I mean, all honesty, the Bible is readable. We can read it with the lens of, I don't have it, and God, you give it out of your grace and mercy, and every page can come alive. Lord, do that for us. Make us men and women who seek the Word, who seek the Scriptures, and who yearn to be face to face with our Lord and Savior. Amen. Thank you all.