EPC Australia

The Lord willing, we begin, in this issue, to look at Christ – but we look at Him in an unusual way! I want for us to look at Christ not specifically from Scriptures. Of course, the best way to look at Christ is in the Scriptures. This is the clearest way to see Him. It is only from the Scriptures, by the working of the Holy Spirit, in faith, that we can know Christ, savingly.

So after he had washed their feet, and had taken his garments, and was set down again, he said unto them, Know ye what I have done to you? Ye call me Master and Lord: and ye say well; for so I am. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord; neither he that is sent greater than he that sent him. If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them. John 13:12-17

Adore with astonishment the secret counsel of God, through which, those which seemed good to Him are elected, and the other rejected!^[1]

That was our believer / theologian’s approach to predestination. He prostrated his mind and heart before the God of the Word; and because he heard God speaking so clearly of His eternal predestination, Calvin believed it, taught it, and preached it! Calvin practiced Sola Scriptura!

That reforming principle demanded predestination; and it delivered us from bondage to Rome’s semi-Pelagianism! Predestination, you see, is both the fountain of grace and the death knell to human merit; predestination is what gives us the other great solas of the Reformation: grace alone, in Christ alone, through faith alone, to God’s glory alone. GRACE ALONE! That is the triumphant cry of the Reformation. Calvin took us to its source – the eternal predestination of God. He drove his peg into that mighty truth and anchored us in the free grace of God.

Calvin’s doctrine of predestination stands at the very heart of the Confessions of the Reformed and Presbyterian churches.^[2] The doctrines of grace, or five points of Calvinism,^[3] have rightly become the common-places for biblical Christianity.

Christians are dead to the law as a covenant of works. Being united alone to Christ who is the end of the law for righteousness, we are justified by faith alone. We are dead to the law, that is, we utterly reject it as a way of being either justified or condemned.

I would like to address the necessary distinction between the law as it is a covenant of works, and the law as it is the rule for the obedience of believers. It is my belief that confusion over this distinction leads into the antinomianism that plagues the churches today.