Drawing the Line of Legalism You’ve probably heard the term legalism, or legalist used — not just in the church — but in culture abroad. Legalism carries a clearly negative connotation (and for good reason). Yet legalism isn’t a word found in the English Bible, but that doesn’t mean the Bible doesn’t say anything about it. Paul uses the phrase “works of the law” eight times in his writings (Romans 2:15, 3:20, 3:28, Galatians 2:16, 3:2, 3:5, 3:10).  Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach February 11, 2025 Theology, Bible Exploring the Delicate Balance Between Law and Love My kids are bad artists. It is a hard thing to say, but as I step back from my emotional connection to my kids and their art, and critically look at what they’ve made, it’s not something an art gallery would hang. Don’t get me wrong there is nothing better, or more precious than when my children make art out of their pure childish imagination, and give it to me out of pure love. I still have a — misspelled — card that my son made me in my office from two years ago, simply because when he gave it to me it was him saying “I made this for you because I love you and this is the best that I can do.” But later, this same son of mine (in an attempt to get out of cleaning the playroom) made me a crayon drawing and said “Here is a picture, now I don’t have to clean the playroom.” At that moment that artwork wasn’t something I wanted to cherish or even keep. It was a worthless piece of paper, because of the heart behind it. Our children’s art doesn’t have any monetary value, nor would it win any awards. When it’s given out of a heart that is trying to earn something from us, it actually disgusts us (or at least it did for me). But when given as an act of love in response to the love we’ve given to them, it is priceless. This is a similar way that God feels about us trying to earn his favor or love through our good works. This is called legalism. It’s not in our Bible You’ve probably heard the term legalism, or legalist used — not just in the church — but in culture abroad. Legalism carries a clearly negative connotation (and for good reason). Yet legalism isn’t a word found in the English Bible, but that doesn’t mean the Bible doesn’t say anything about it. Paul uses the phrase “works of the law” eight times in his writings (Romans 2:15, 3:20, 3:28, Galatians 2:16, 3:2, 3:5, 3:10). The point that Paul makes as he talks about “works of the law,” or legalism, is that no one can be justified by works of the law. Legalism is one of two heresies that deal with how we respond to God’s laws. Paul brings this topic up most often in his letter to the churches in Galatia because of the faction in the Galatian churches that insisted that to be saved, you must adhere to all Jewish customs in the Old Testament. Adding To Scripture Legalism is the attitude that identifies morality with the strict observance of laws or that views adherence to moral codes as defining the boundaries of a community. [1] Word Partners is an organization that equips pastors to put the Word of God in the driver’s seat of the church and put His glory on display. One of their teaching principles is the easiest way to visualize this concept. This is an easier way to think about legalism, that it adds to scripture. Legalism — at its core — is not trusting God and his word. It is saying subconsciously, “Not only is God’s grace not good enough for me, but also his word isn’t sufficient for my holiness. I must add more rules to his law so then I can make sure I’m extra holy.” Learn From the Pharisees This is exactly what the Pharisees are guilty of in John 9 when Jesus heals the man born blind. In this story, Jesus miraculously heals a man who had been blind since birth. This is so amazing that some people are questioning whether it is actually the same man, or if it is a look-a-like. This creates such a stir that the Pharisees check into this. As they question this man, they aren’t moved to worship as clearly a miracle has happened. Their sticking point was that this was done on the Sabbath. In their defense, God commands us to rest on the Sabbath. But sadly that’s where my defense of the Pharisees ends, because they had missed the point. They had added to that commandment to rest. They made up rules — initially to help people guard their Sabbath for rest — that made stricter regulations on what was and wasn’t rest. And by doing this they took a good thing God had given them, and in a twisted way made it oppressive. Replacing Jesus Legalism is a way that we think we can save ourselves. We think that we can please God by avoiding sin and doing what he commands. Before you write an angry email or comment, hear this. God is delighted when we are transformed by Jesus trading places with us on the cross by taking our sin, then by coming to new life with him through his resurrection and then responding by obeying his laws and commandments. This is precious to God. 1 Samuel 15:22 says, "But Samuel replied: 'Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the LORD? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.’" But this isn’t only confined to the Old Testament, the apostle John in John 14:15 quotes Jesus when he writes, "If you love me, keep my commands.” God loves when we obey what he has told us to do because his law actually reveals part of who he is. When God commands us not to worship other gods, it’s because he is saying, “There’s only one God and I’m him.” When he tells us not to worship carved images — not just of false gods but also of the one true God, he is saying “I’m infinite and eternal. I cannot be contained in something material. Not even your mind.” God wants us to obey because he knows what is ultimately right and true and every time we don’t follow, we break away from our creator. God loves our obedience, when it is done with the right intention. Our Obedience as Rebellion But when we try to leverage our obedience towards God as an act to earn God’s favor it is disgusting to him. Isaiah 64:6 says, “We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf, and our iniquities, like the wind, take us away.” [2] While this passage has some clearly strong language against good works, our English translations have softened what was communicated in the original Hebrew. Where we read polluted garments, the original Hebrew would have said something like a rag used by a woman while on her period. What Isaiah is saying is that our good works are as disgusting as a used tampon. This is because we’ve perverted what God designed for our good and turned it into evil. As if we could by our own self-made righteousness, twist God’s arm into loving us more, or blessing us more. Just like a child who tries to trick their parent out of cleaning their playroom, God is greatly displeased when we use his law as a weapon against him. Legalism is the opposite of the Gospel Legalism affirms that we can save ourselves. That if you somehow work hard enough God will say, “Well done good and faithful servant. This is what you deserve. You’ve been good, so I’m happy with you.” But the reality is that Christians can hear “Well done good and faithful servant” only because the Father treated Jesus like us to treat us like Jesus. For us to insist on getting what we are owed is to insist on our destruction. Bleeding Charity One of my favorite dialogues from all the books I've read is a passage from The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. In this dialogue, the Ghost (representing a soul from hell) clings to a sense of self-righteousness and entitlement based on its own deeds and perceived moral standing. It believes it deserves certain rights because of its actions and life choices. Look at me, now," said the Ghost, slapping its chest (but the slap made no noise). "I gone straight all my life. I don't say I was a religious man and I don't sav I had no faults, far from it. But I done my best all my life, see? I done my best by everyone, that's the sort of chap I was. I never asked for anything that wasn't mine by rights. If I wanted a drink I paid for it and if I took my wages I done my job, see? That's the sort I was and I don't care who knows it." "It would be much better not to go on about that now." "Who's going on? I'm not arguing. I'm just telling you the sort of chap I was, see? I'm asking for nothing but my rights. You may think you can put me down because you’re dressed up like that (which you weren't when you worked under me) and I'm only a poor man. But I got to have my rights same as you, see?" "Oh no. It's not so bad as that. I haven't got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You'll get something far better. Never fear." "That's just what I say. I haven't got my rights. I always done my best and I never done nothing wrong. And what I don't see is why I should be put below a bloody murderer like you." "Who knows whether you will be? Only be happy and come with me." "What do you keep on arguing for? I'm only telling you the sort of chap I am. I only want my rights. I'm not asking for anybody's bleeding charity." "Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought." As Christians, our hope eternally is based on the reality that we are charity cases. We need the bleeding charity of Christ. This is the understanding that we are poor in spirit. Insisting on earning our favor or our righteousness is — as Tim Keller said — “being middle class in spirit.” The danger of believing scripture was primarily written by man, is that it can then be wrong since to be man is to err. We would relegate ourselves to a few of scripture that shows us that we may question parts of scripture. Right around Christmas time, you will start to hear all of the amazing prophecies about Jesus concerning his birth life, and death. But did those prophets really know what they were saying? The short answer is no. How Did Jesus Understand Scripture? Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

How is Man Made Right With God? If you look at any human relationship – any meaningful one at that – you will find injustice from either party. It is inescapable, humanity defaults toward relational injustice, not towards relational justice. We inflict harm to those we love, and those who love us. Humanity has a strange propensity to cause brokenness in relationships. We do this not just in our horizontal relationships, but in our vertical relationship with God.  How is man made right with God? Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach October 15, 2024 Bible, Theology If you look at any human relationship – any meaningful one at that – you will find injustice from either party. It is inescapable, humanity defaults toward relational injustice, not towards relational justice. We inflict harm to those we love, and those who love us. Humanity has a strange propensity to cause brokenness in relationships. We do this not just in our horizontal relationships, but in our vertical relationship with God. How is man made right with God? This is the question, the most important question anyone can ask. Therefore, the answer we come to must be correct. The question that all of humanity has asked, since time began. Life eternal hangs on our answer to this question. One may argue that this is the question scripture answers; in the Old Testament and New Testament, from Genesis to Revelation, we find the redemption plan for humanity. Paul lays this out succinctly in Romans 3:21-26. In this text we will find; the need for saving, the means by which we are saved, the responsibility of humans for salvation, and what happened in order for us to be counted as righteous. Over the years this passage has garnered some attention from notable scholars. John Piper calls this section of scripture the most important paragraph in the bible. Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones also says these are the most important verses in the bible. The doctrine that this passage uncovers – that of justification – Martin Luther says, is “appointed for the rise and fall of the church.” That means where the church gets off to call itself ordained by God is whether or not it believes and holds true to the central idea in this famous paragraph. Martin also says this is, “the chief point of, and the very central place of the Epistle, and of the whole Bible.” What Paul writes to the church in Rome – here in the next five verses – shapes what Christianity is. These verses have changed the history of the world. They have caused, wars, how cultures act, and changed morality. But most importantly, they have saved thousands of souls who would have been lost. What Paul writes in the next five verses may very well be some of the most important words you will ever read, ever teach your children, your congregation, and/or your family. It is crucial that we understand them well. 21 But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it— Paul uses the language of “But now.” This is a clear contrast to what he was describing in previous verses. Paul just finished explaining how all humanity – under the law – will find guilt with God. Paul is moving from one era – under the law – to a new era; by grace, through faith, in Christ. As we make this shift from the old era to the new, we make a shift from the wrath of God to the righteousness of God. Paul’s point is to try to show the church in Rome - and to a further extent all who would ever read this letter – that anyone who is made right with God is made right apart from keeping the law. The law has done a bad job at justifying the Jews in the Old Testament. Here again, we see the beauty of the Gospel. We cannot make ourselves right by earning salvation through works, but wholly by God’s grace alone. This does not mean that God’s law is void or insufficient. We (who are in Christ) still must acknowledge the law and desire to keep its commandments, both in the Old Testament and the New Testament. Even though it was not through the Law and Prophets, the whole Old Testament foreshadows the coming Savior and the way to become right with God. 22 the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. Paul repeats the words the righteousness of God, to add clarity to the statement in verse 21. This is great for us who are a considerable distance from the New Testament writer. This gives us no room to question the subject of this verse. Christianity is left richer because Paul mentioned this clarifying phrase here. Paul mentions the response of man to the justifying action that God does for us by mentioning faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. I believe that Paul does this to highlight the importance and availability of the universal nature of salvation. For there is no distinction: 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Paul gives us a beautiful piece of theology here in 22b-23. We see here that just as all who are equally separated from God because of sin – those who are in Christ – are equally declared righteous in His sight. Sin and grace are the great equalizers in this world. 24 and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, When we blend the point of verse 23 and the new ideas about justification in verse 24 we see that the gracious nature of our justification shows the unworthiness of the recipient. The word justified – in the Greek – makes its first sighting in this verse. What we see in this verse is that even though all are guilty, all charges are dropped. This is the legal reality of our salvation. The doctrine of justification is central to this passage. Unfortunately, this work cannot give any worthwhile explanation of this doctrine. Although, I cannot do this topic “justice,” I will try to give a brief summery here. Justification encompasses together forensically – legal affirmation of the righteousness of the believer – together with the imputation of the righteousness of Christ as the center of their acceptance. The present tense of the word are, shows us that the legal verdict for the believer is not an eschatological one, but rather one that is made in the moment of belief. The idea that this is by His grace, means that this is not something we could earn or even accept. God did this before we could ever recognize Him, thus emphasizing the reformed doctrine of unconditional election. God acted first to give us this gift. This is a gift, and the very nature of a gift is that it is not earned. To earn a gift transforms it into a payment owed for work done. The beauty in this is that we could do nothing to earn our salvation, but God who loved us, died while we were still in rebellion to Him. This only glorifies Him more and should make our hearts respond with worship for the One who died to take our place. The Roman idea of redemption is an economical transaction. It means a liberation of a slave through a payment of a price. Typically, how this would work is, an affluent person would pay the price that a slave owed in debt, or was worth. Upon payment, the slave would be declared a free man, or woman. We understand that we once were a slave to sin and that we needed to be redeemed – set free – from that very sin. We then see that Jesus Christ is the only one who could provide such a payment for our freedom. On the one hand, the price that was paid (God Himself dying), far exceeded the worth of the object purchased (all who believe). While on the other hand, the price for sin and death required such a high price. In Western culture, we have a tendency to downplay sin, but in doing so, we downplay the price that had to be paid for sin and death to be defeated. Never more rang true the words of the songwriter, Matt Boswel, “Our sins, they are many, His mercy is more.” 25 whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins God put forth Himself as a propitiation to propitiate Himself. The word propitiation carries the ancient idea of appeasement to a god. What we can understand is that Jesus propitiates the wrath of God the Father, the propitiated. God’s wrath has been tragically, downplayed, or played too highly. With that in mind, I would like to give – in my opinion – a neutral and more orthodox view of God’s wrath. The wrath of God is a reaction to the very opposite of God’s character. God, because of the holiness that is an essential part of His character, then must be put to fury or wrath in the sight of anything unholy. This comes from the Hebrew word in the Old Testament, ʾaph, occurring about 210 times. It is the word for “nose” or “face.” As weird as that is, the concept goes back to an idea of snorting, or wheezing as a sign of anger or disgust. We should note that because one character within the Trinity, is appeasing the other, does not mean that they are acting against each other, or undermining each other’s will. They did this in unity, as planned before the foundation of the world. The word blood harkens back to the Jewish festival of the Day of Atonement. Blood was seen as the life of an animal or a human. Therefore, this means, the very death – antithesis to life – of Jesus appeased the just wrath of God the Father. Paul uses further Old Testament language when he refers to how God he had passed over former sins. This would have been understood by the original audience in Rome. The church in Rome was comprised of both Jewish and Gentile Christians. The Jewish portion was probably there because of the persecution of Christians in Jerusalem, after Pentecost. These Jews would have clearly picked up the salvific overtones from the Passover, in reference to Israel’s physical salvation from slavery. 26 It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus In this verse, Paul continues off of the idea in vs 25 of him passing over former sins. In this verse we see the why, or the intended action. God passed over former sins so that he could give - to those who believe – His righteousness. Paul then says so that, to show the reason why God did this action. God must be legally just, yet He desired to bring us back to Himself. In being the justifier of us, He maintained his legal righteousness. Succinctly, Paul is explaining to the church in Rome how they are all separated from God – by nature and by choice. But man is made right with God, when Jesus propitiated God’s righteous wrath as a gift of grace to those who have faith in Him. Barrett, Matthew. The Doctrine on Which the Church Stands or Falls: Justification in Biblical, Theological, Historical, and Pastoral Perspective. 1st ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2019) 223. Boswel, Matt. His Mercy is More, Church Songs. (Nashville, Getty Music, 2016) Chorus Easton, M. G. Easton’s Bible Dictionary. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1893) In Logos Bible Software. Hodge, Charles. Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1953. MacArthur, John. Romans 1-8. (Chicago: Moody Press, 1991) 204, 207. Martin Luther, Luther Bible, Margin at Rom. 3:22ff., quoted in Moo, Epistle to the Romans, 1st ed., 2218n1 Millikin, J. A. Wrath, Wrath of God. In C. Brand, C. Draper, A. England, S. Bond, E. R. Clendenen, & T. C. Butler (Eds.), Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary. (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003) p. 1688 In Logos Bible Software Moo, Douglas J. The Epistle to the Romans. Edited by Ned B. Stonehouse, F.F. Bruce, and Gordon D. Fee. 1st ed. Vol. 1. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015) 221, 224, 227. Piper, John. “PDI Celebration East Conference.” PDI Celebration East Conference. May 31, 1999. Sproul, R. C. The Gospel of God: Expositions of Pauls Letter to the Romans. (Fearn: Christian Focus, 1999) 75. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016) Romans 3:21-26, John 8:34–36, John 15:10, White, J. Justification. In C. Brand, C. Draper, A. England, S. Bond, E. R. Clendenen, & T. C. Butler (Eds.), Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary (Nashville, TN: Holman Bible Publishers, 2003) p. 970 God cannot simply blink at sin and allow it to disappear magically. There is always a cost involved. The Bible is clear about the reality that we are sinful people (Genesis 3:6–7; Isaiah 59:1–2; Psalm 51:4). And the Bible states that there must be a penalty paid to make what was wrong, right again. God is just (Gen 18:25; Deut 32:4). Isaiah 5:16 says, “But the LORD of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.” Is God Able To Forgive Sin Without The Cross? Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

Offensive Spiritual Warfare Spiritual warfare is a topic that Christians either think too much or not enough about. We’ve all met Christians who attribute every bad thing in their lives to spiritual warfare, so much so that there is no more room for sin or our fallen nature. On the other side, there are Christians who nearly disregard the reality that there is an enemy out there who seeks to kill steal, and destroy (John 10:10). Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach December 18, 2024 Bible Spiritual warfare is a topic that Christians either think too much or not enough about. We’ve all met Christians who attribute every bad thing in their lives to spiritual warfare, so much so that there is no more room for sin or our fallen nature. On the other side, there are Christians who nearly disregard the reality that there is an enemy out there who seeks to kill steal, and destroy (John 10:10). Not Just For Defense One of the greatest mistakes in understanding spiritual warfare is putting ourselves on the defense against Satan. I believe this is what he wants us to believe. It only gives him the advantage if we believe that he has the edge in our world and he is launching assaults against Christians and the church. While it’s true that Satan will launch attacks on us, we must realize that this is not how the Bible paints the picture of what is happening in the spiritual reality. As Jesus was teaching his disciples, he asked them “Who do people say that the Son of Man is.” After Peter answered, Matthew records Jesus saying this to Peter, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it” Jesus is saying something about spiritual warfare that we have often overlooked. If you're not familiar with battle tactics, it can be easy to miss the fact that gates are used for defense, not offense. Far too many pastors preach that we must protect ourselves from the evil one and his schemes. While it’s appropriate to be on guard, the picture of spiritual warfare the Bible gives us is one that should bring hope and encouragement to us. We’re the ones who get to advance against evil and wage war on hell itself. Too often the scene that is set for us is one where we cower in the corner as Satan and his forces attack and we just hope that we can make it long enough until Jesus comes back. In his book The Invisible Hand, author, pastor, and theologian, R.C. Sproul says, “The basic premise of Scripture is that the power of Christ is greater than the power of the devil and his domain. Therefore, Christians need not live their lives in fear of Satan's power but ought rather to rejoice in Christ's victory over him.” Christians can have confidence in God, all too often we can believe that somehow God and Satan are opposing forces who are equal in power. But scripture reveals that God is all-powerful even over the actions of Satan and his forces. We then have every reason to be encouraged knowing that even Satan’s plans have been accounted for by God and will be used for ultimate good, and will lead to Satan’s ultimate demise. Church is a base not a haven With this view, it is easy to believe that culture is so far gone and under Satan’s control. We are easily deceived that we need to huddle together to weather the storm of life. While we need to band together it isn’t because otherwise we’ll be torn apart by Satan’s attack. It is so that we can mount a strong attack on evil and the gates of Hell. The American church has — unfortunately — believed that it is a safe haven for weary Christians. While it needs to be a safe place for us, this must be because we are a base, an outpost of the kingdom. It is a launch point for us to make our attack against the evil we see in the world. It is the place where we come to get our battle plans on how we will take back the creation that was lost to sin, death, and evil. It’s the place we come back to remember how powerful our God is. And to remember that we carry with us that same power by the Holy Spirit. John Owen a prominent English theologian in the 1600’s wrote this in his book The Mortification of Sin, ”What a comfort this is to believers, that all the power of Satan is under the control of our Captain, who is the Lord of hosts, the Lord mighty in battle! The enemy is mighty, but he is mightier; he is strong, but he is stronger; he is active, but he is more active.” God is sovereign and we know he has already won. Therefore we cannot be timid people afraid of culture, we must be courageous Christians who are ready to take back the culture by the power of the Holy Spirit. I think this is a desire that is lying dormant in the church as a whole. Men — in particular — are attracted to a message that says “Go and take what is ours.” Yet instead of fear-mongering people into political action, scripture is exhorting Christians to go into their local communities and wage war by proclaiming the gospel and loving our neighbors. Satan’s strategy One of the dangers of believing we’re on defense while we’re supposed to be on offense is that it puts Christians in great danger. Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus’ battle against Hannibal during the Second Punic War (218-201 BCE) is probably the most famous example of how seemingly random and unpredictable attacks could take down a larger army. Hannibal's army was far superior on the open battlefield, employing innovative tactics and formidable cavalry that the Roman legions struggled to counter. Rather than engaging in direct, large-scale battles, Fabius adopted a strategy of harassment and attrition. The Fabian Strategy involved avoiding large-scale engagements and instead focusing on small, inconsistent attacks such as skirmishes, raids on supply lines, and ambushes. These attacks targeted Hannibal's army indirectly by cutting off its supplies and wearing down the troops through constant harassment. This approach was frustrating for Hannibal, as it denied him the decisive victories he sought to force Rome into a peace agreement favorable to Carthage. Over time, the attrition and inability to force a decisive battle took its toll on the Carthaginians, contributing to their eventual withdrawal from Italy. This — in large part — is the same strategy that Satan uses to attack Christians. Spiritual warfare feels inconsistent. At least it does in my life. It’s not every day that I feel the attacks of Satan and his forces. It is so inconsistent that I get lulled into a false sense of security where I feel nothing will happen today. Armor Of God On Attack The challenge of putting our armor on when you’re not expecting an attack every day is that you’re not reminded you need it every day. This is why getting the perspective correct on our spiritual battles is so important. Imagine yourself in a physical war. Imagine you are given plans for an attack on the enemy. As you get ready what do you do? You’d make sure to put on your armor, to grab your weapon. When we accept the reality that we are the ones on the attack, we are the ones who have the advantage, how we live our lives will change with it. So here’s my plea Christian. Go and prepare yourself for battle knowing you are taking the unlimited power of God as you are carried by the Holy Spirit. Know that you have the advantage, know you are on the attack, and know that Satan is the one who fears you. Arm yourself every day because you will need your weapon as you wage war against the evil in this world. But most of all know this, as you go “the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Mt 16:18. R.C. Sproul, The Invisible Hand: Do All Things Really Work for Good (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 1996) You’ve probably heard the term legalism, or legalist used — not just in the church — but in culture abroad. Legalism carries a clearly negative connotation (and for good reason). Yet legalism isn’t a word found in the English Bible, but that doesn’t mean the Bible doesn’t say anything about it. Paul uses the phrase “works of the law” eight times in his writings (Romans 2:15, 3:20, 3:28, Galatians 2:16, 3:2, 3:5, 3:10). Drawing the Line of Legalism Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

Money vs. Ministry There are two types of churches. Churches who are good at supporting missions (giving money to missionaries or mission organizations), or doing missions (sending people to do mission work). Both of these are scriptural commands. It is very clear that as Jesus ascends, He is calling the church to evangelize the world (Matthew 28:16-20). And we also see that it is the call of the local church to support missionaries (2 Corinthians 8). Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach December 12, 2025 Missions There are two types of churches. Churches who are good at supporting missions (giving money to missionaries or mission organizations), or doing missions (sending people to do mission work). Both of these are scriptural commands. It is very clear that as Jesus ascends, He is calling the church to evangelize the world (Matthew 28:16-20). And we also see that it is the call of the local church to support missionaries (2 Corinthians 8). But there are dangers on both sides of this mission paradigm. I am going to focus - in this article - on the dangers of simply supporting missions. How could supporting missions be dangerous? How could sending money to trained missionaries hurt the church? Export What hurts the global church is when the primary missional agent of the church is only monetarily. Churches that swing too far to one side will become reliant on others to do mission work, to the point where the church will no longer see the need or desire to physically do the work - locally or globally - that God calls the church to. Churches that do this often reflect it in their budgets. Churches can give far beyond 10% (which is typically the standard for churches to shoot for). Churches will support missionaries fiscally, without equipping the local church to do any kind of missional work in their surrounding area. These churches will say, "When someone wants to do local missional work, we will put money towards it!" The problem with this philosophy of missions becomes that nothing is planned, and because they have become dependent on others to do missions, no one thinks that they need to do missions themselves. Numbness Another challenging and dangerous side effect of this ministry philosophy is tracking all of the missionaries that the local church supports. When missionaries come to report what they have done the church can become numb to hearing how God is at work. That or they will become proud because we are a church that loves missions. Not realizing that although they give serious money to the mission speaker, that missionary of organization isn't meeting the objectives that the church is giving them money to meet. That reality, pared with congregations' serious lack of understanding of what healthy missions looks like, results in congregations who - most often oversee mission committees - continuing to do what has always been done. That is supporting missionaries who are primarily in regions or countries where the church is already heavily established. Apathy Lastly, the danger that faces the church with a mindset like this is accountability. When a church is supporting lots of missionaries it is hard to keep track of what they are doing. They lose track of what fruit their ministry is producing. What this can result in is churches throwing money away to ministries and missionaries that aren't producing results for God's Kingdom. It breeds this apathetic culture within the local church that believes that mission is important as long as I don’t need to be bothered to do it. Unfortunately, this isn’t the only area in the local church that has this attitude. The result of this is that we end up exporting the very same kind of nominal churches to the rest of the world, which are killing the American church. Why can the church feel this way? Because men cannot create new — correct theology — men can only discover it. Men can invent new heresy, but not orthodoxy. Men and women today and in antiquity can only recognize it. And this is what the modern church should find confidence in. As noted above, the implications of this inform nearly every subsequent theological position the church has taken since. The council of Nicaea was moved by the Holy Spirit to... Can we trust the Council of Nicaea? Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

A Plain Guide to What We Believe About Dispensationalism Is God a God who tests humanity, watches it fail, and starts over with a new arrangement? Or is he a God whose purpose never wavers — whose covenant never changes, whose plan was never derailed, never improvised, never interrupted by human failure? That is the question this paper is about. And it is not abstract at all. The answer determines how you read every page of your Bible, how you understand the church you belong to, and what you believe about the God you worship. Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach April 14, 2026 Position Paper, Church History, Theology A note to the reader This is the shorter, plain-language version of our full position paper on dispensationalism. If you want to dig deeper into the biblical, theological, and historical arguments — including footnotes and a full bibliography - Click Here . What Kind of God Are We Dealing With? Every theological dispute is ultimately a dispute about God. Arguments about prophecy, Israel, the church, and the end times can seem abstract — the kind of thing seminary students debate while everyone else politely changes the subject. But underneath every one of those arguments is a more fundamental question: Is God a God who tests humanity, watches it fail, and starts over with a new arrangement? Or is he a God whose purpose never wavers — whose covenant never changes, whose plan was never derailed, never improvised, never interrupted by human failure? That is the question this paper is about. And it is not abstract at all. The answer determines how you read every page of your Bible, how you understand the church you belong to, and what you believe about the God you worship. At Prosper CRC, we hold the second answer. This paper explains why — and why a popular system called dispensationalism holds the first. What Is Dispensationalism? Dispensationalism is a way of reading the Bible. It is probably the most widely recognized interpretive framework in American Christianity today — present in most non-denominational churches, embedded in the most popular study Bibles, and carried into popular culture through books like The Late Great Planet Earth and the Left Behind series. The basic idea is this: God works differently in different eras of history. History is divided into seven periods — called dispensations — in each of which God gives humanity a specific test. Humanity fails the test. God judges the failure and sets up a new arrangement. The pattern repeats seven times. The seven dispensations are Innocence, Conscience, Human Government, Promise, Law, Grace (the current church age), and the Millennial Kingdom. In each one, God relates to people differently, tests them differently, and judges them differently. There is also a crucial claim at the heart of dispensationalism that everything else depends on: Israel and the church are two completely separate peoples of God with two completely separate destinies. Israel has unfulfilled earthly promises — land, kingdom, temple — that the church does not inherit. The church age is essentially a parenthesis inserted into God's plan for national Israel after Israel rejected her Messiah. When that parenthesis closes at the Rapture, God's clock for Israel starts ticking again. Where Did It Come From? This is important: dispensationalism is not an ancient way of reading Scripture. It was developed in the 1830s by an Anglo-Irish minister named John Nelson Darby, who had become disillusioned with the institutional church after a horse-riding accident led him into an intense period of Bible study. From there, the system was popularized in North America through prophecy conferences and, most powerfully, through the Scofield Reference Bible published in 1909. The Scofield Reference Bible was the first study Bible in the English-speaking world to print theological commentary notes on the same page as the biblical text. This made it extraordinarily difficult for ordinary readers to distinguish where the Bible ended and Scofield's interpretation began. For much of the twentieth century, millions of Christians simply assumed they were reading the Bible when they were, in fact, reading the Bible plus Scofield's dispensational notes. C.H. Spurgeon — the great Victorian Baptist preacher and a contemporary of Darby — was not impressed. He described Plymouth Brethren hermeneutics as "warped" and said: "Plymouth Brethren delight to fish up some hitherto undiscovered tadpole of interpretation, and cry it round the town as a rare dainty." The point is not to be dismissive. Darby was serious and sincere. But dispensationalism has no roots before 1830. Calvin didn't teach it. Augustine didn't teach it. The writers of the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism didn't teach it. When a system claims to be the plain reading of Scripture but was entirely unknown for eighteen centuries of Christian interpretation, that demands an explanation. Three Problems with Dispensationalism 1. It rebuilds a wall Christ died to tear down Paul is devastatingly clear in Ephesians 2. Jesus, through his death on the cross, broke down "the dividing wall of hostility" between Jews and Gentiles. He made the two "one new man." He reconciled both to God "in one body through the cross." "For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility... that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility." — Ephesians 2:14-16 Dispensationalism re-introduces the separation between Jew and Gentile that Paul says Christ destroyed. To say that Israel and the church are permanently distinct peoples with permanently separate destinies is not a minor theological adjustment. It puts the wall back up. It undoes Ephesians 2. This is also why Paul was so fierce with Peter at Antioch. When Peter stopped eating with Gentile believers because Jewish Christians showed up, Paul opposed him to his face and said he stood condemned. Peter hadn't changed his theology. He had just changed his table. But that small relational withdrawal was, in Paul's judgment, a reconstruction of the very wall Christ died to demolish. Any system that re-sorts the people of God by ethnicity or national identity contradicts the gospel. 2. It marginalizes Christ's present reign Dispensationalism teaches that Jesus' real reign — his fulfillment of the Davidic promise — has not yet happened. It is coming in the future, during the millennium, from a literal throne in Jerusalem, over a restored national Israel. The current church age is, at best, a placeholder. But Scripture is not ambiguous about when Christ began to reign: "He raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion... And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church." — Ephesians 1:20-22 Jesus is reigning now. He has been reigning for two thousand years. His kingdom is not postponed — it was inaugurated at his resurrection and will be consummated at his return. To locate the real action of God's redemptive plan in a future earthly kingdom for national Israel is to downgrade what Christ has already accomplished and what he is doing right now. 3. It collapses the law — with real consequences Dispensationalism teaches that the Law dispensation ended at the cross. Since the church now lives in the Age of Grace, the Mosaic law — including the moral law, the Ten Commandments — no longer governs the Christian life. The Scofield Bible called the law "a ministry of condemnation, death, and the divine curse." Scofield even placed the Sermon on the Mount under the Law dispensation, making it a document addressed to Israel, not the church. But Jesus said: "Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law" (Matt. 5:17–18). Paul insists the gospel does not overthrow the law — "on the contrary, we uphold the law" (Rom. 3:31). The law was not abolished at the cross. It was satisfied at the cross, so that its righteous requirements might be fulfilled in us (Rom. 8:4). When the structure of the moral law collapses, the shape of the Christian life goes with it. This is what the Reformation called antinomianism — the severing of grace from the obligation to obey. It is one of the most corrosive errors in church history precisely because it doesn't look like error. It looks like freedom. What We Believe Instead: Covenant Theology Covenant theology is not a new invention set against dispensationalism. It is the historic Reformed reading of Scripture, present in our confessions and pre-dating dispensationalism by centuries. The Belgic Confession, written in 1561, declares: "This church has existed from the beginning of the world and will last until the end, as appears from the fact that Christ is an eternal King who cannot be without subjects" (Article 27). The Heidelberg Catechism, written in 1563, defines the church as the Son of God gathering his people "from the beginning to the end of the world" (Q&A 54). The church is not a Pentecost-era parenthesis. It is not Plan B. It is the one people of God, present in every age, always gathered around the same Mediator, always saved by the same grace. Covenant theology teaches that God works through covenants — binding promises in which he commits himself to his people. After Adam broke the covenant of works in the garden, God immediately established the covenant of grace — the promise of Genesis 3:15 that the seed of the woman would crush the serpent's head. Every covenant after that — Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and finally the New Covenant in Christ — is not a new program but a deepening of that one original promise. As the Westminster Confession puts it: "There are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations." One covenant. One people. One Savior. One gospel. Differently administered across redemptive history, but never divided into separate programs for separate peoples. In Romans 11, Paul pictures the people of God as a single olive tree. Some branches — unbelieving Israel — have been broken off. Gentile believers have been grafted in. But there is one tree. Paul does not plant a second tree for the church alongside the first tree for Israel. Gentiles are grafted into the same tree that was already standing. Dispensationalism, which requires two peoples with two destinies, must contend with the fact that Paul's own illustration allows for only one root, one tree, and one people of God. The Deepest Problem: What Dispensationalism Does to God There is a deeper issue underneath everything else. Dispensationalism's test-failure-reset pattern requires a God who changes — a God who sets up an arrangement, watches it fail, judges it, and starts over. But Scripture is insistent that God does not change. "For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed." — Malachi 3:6 "They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, but you are the same, and your years have no end." — Psalm 102:26-27 The Puritan theologian Stephen Charnock argued that God is unchangeable in three specific ways: in his essence, in his knowledge, and in his will and purpose. Each of these directly refutes the dispensational framework. God is unchangeable in his knowledge. He has always known everything — there was never a moment when the church was unknown to him, never a moment when Israel's rejection of Christ came as a surprise, never a moment when he pivoted to a new plan. The dispensational claim that the church age was "not revealed in the Old Testament" and that the church is a mystery "hidden from the ages" implies a God whose knowledge changes over time. But God does not learn. He does not discover. He does not improvise. God is unchangeable in his will and purpose. Charnock put it plainly: the pattern of test-failure-judgment-reset would require that God changed his mind. But there are only three possible reasons God would change his mind — want of foresight, want of power, or moral instability. None of these is possible in God. His decrees are not experiments. They are mountains of brass — immovable, because they rest on infinite wisdom and uncontrollable power. Most importantly: the cross was not a response to Israel's failure. It was the eternal, immutable, pre-temporal purpose of God — decreed before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4; Rev. 13:8; Acts 2:23). There was never a moment when a restored earthly kingdom for national Israel was God's original plan and the cross was the contingency. The cross was always the plan. It was the immutable, eternal purpose of the triune God arriving at its appointed hour. Where Prosper CRC Stands Prosper Christian Reformed Church rejects dispensationalism. We would not call it heresy — dispensationalists love the Bible, believe the gospel, and worship the same Lord we do. But we do believe it is a serious error that affects how the Bible is read, how God is understood, and how the Christian life is lived. We hold to covenant theology — not because it is our tradition, but because we believe it most faithfully reflects what Scripture actually teaches about the one God who has always had one people, one purpose, and one way of saving sinners. We are a confessional church. Our pastors and elders have subscribed to the Belgic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism, and the Canons of Dort. These documents are not infallible — Scripture alone is — but they represent the hard-won theological wisdom of the Reformed church, developed over centuries of faithful reading. Dispensationalism bypassed all of that. It entered many of our churches not through confessional accountability but through study Bible notes and popular prophecy books. That is precisely why it is worth naming clearly. If you have questions about anything in this paper, please talk to your pastor. These are important questions, and you deserve real answers. The God Who Does Not Reset The dispute over dispensationalism is not ultimately about Israel or the church, the rapture or the millennium. It is about God. The God dispensationalism describes tests and watches and waits. He absorbs failure, judges it, and begins again. He is a God whose purposes can be parenthesized, whose original plan was interrupted, whose later arrangements were not what he first intended. He is, in the end, a God who is surprised by what his creatures do. The God of Scripture is not that God. He is the God of Psalm 102 — the one who endures while the heavens wear out like a garment, who remains the same while all creation changes, whose years have no end. He is the God of Malachi 3:6, who declared that he does not change and therefore his people are not consumed. He is the God of Ephesians 1, who chose his people before the foundation of the world, whose eternal purpose in Christ Jesus was never interrupted, never parenthesized, never improvised. He is the God whose eternal decree to send his Son to die was not a contingency. It was the immutable, pre-temporal, unstoppable purpose of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. He did not test and reset. He redeemed. And from the first whisper of promise in a garden east of Eden to the last page of Revelation, it was always the same promise, the same people, the same Mediator, the same grace. The God of Scripture does not run experiments. He keeps his word. And because he keeps his word, his people are not consumed. Prosper Christian Reformed Church rejects dispensationalism and its theological interpretations. While we wouldn’t call this faulty belief system heretical, we would strongly declare that it is erroneous and an improper way to handle God’s word. The failure in this theology is that it divorces God from his steadfast love, or covenant love. God’s covenantal love for his people becomes dependent on the time in which he speaks. What We Believe About Dispensationalism Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

Is God Able To Forgive Sin Without The Cross? God cannot simply blink at sin and allow it to disappear magically. There is always a cost involved. The Bible is clear about the reality that we are sinful people (Genesis 3:6–7; Isaiah 59:1–2; Psalm  51:4). And the Bible states that there must be a penalty paid to make what was wrong, right again. God is just (Gen 18:25; Deut 32:4). Isaiah 5:16 says, “But the LORD of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.” Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach December 23, 2025 Bible, Theology Could God the Father have forgiven sin without Jesus dying on the cross? Would it have been possible for God to do this? Whenever we ask questions like these, our knee-jerk reaction is to think, “God can do whatever he wants.” But the implications of this question will show us a lot about what we believe about God. If God could On one side if God can forgive sin without Jesus dying on the cross, then what we see happen to Jesus at the end of the gospels is totally unnecessary. To say that God could forgive sin without the cross makes what happens at the end of the gospels a worthless act of torture towards his own son. If God cannot On the other side, it seems like saying God cannot do something is putting a rule or law on God that supersedes his power as if there were a higher authority that he had to submit to. If God can’t why can’t he? So which is it? Imagine you invited me and my family over for dinner, and after dinner, it is revealed that my youngest child has broken a window in your house. Not just any window but your big beautiful bay window that faces the road. In that situation, you have two options. You can demand that I pay to fix it. This would be just. My child broke a window, I should pay to make it right. Or you can forgive me. But in that situation, someone still has to pay, but rather than it being the offending party (me), the cost is shifted to the offended party (you). It’s not like this is something you can leave broken. Similarly, God cannot simply blink at sin and allow it to disappear magically. There is always a cost involved. The Bible is clear about the reality that we are sinful people (Genesis 3:6–7; Isaiah 59:1–2; Psalm 51:4). And the Bible states that there must be a penalty paid to make what was wrong, right again. God’s Justice God is just (Gen 18:25; Deut 32:4). Isaiah 5:16 says, “But the LORD of hosts is exalted in justice, and the Holy God shows himself holy in righteousness.” [1] Wayne Grudem, the Professor of Theology and Biblical Studies at Phoenix Seminary defines what it means that God is just in his profound book Systematic Theology, “God’s righteousness means that God always acts in accordance with what is right and is himself the final moral standard of what is right.” [2] God is Who He is God’s justice or righteousness is a very part of who God is. So rather than thinking that God not being able to forgive sin must be him submitting to a higher authority, think about it as God not being able to go against his very nature. This is also called the doctrine of simplicity. “God’s simplicity entails that his essence and existence are identical, signifying that there is no composition or division within the divine nature.” [3] This means that God is what describes him. The way we describe God doesn’t divide up his essence but is who he is and how he acts together. God tells us this in Exodus 3:14, when, “God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” God therefore cannot “throw off” his justice for a moment to forgive universal sin. To do this would make him cease to be God, as his justice is part of his “Godness.” God’s Wrath Because God is perfectly righteous, he has a perfect hate for sin itself. “It is his indignation at sin, his revulsion to evil and all that opposes him, his displeasure at it and the venting of that displeasure. It is his passionate resistance to every will that is set against him.” [4] This is what we call God’s wrath. J.I. Packer, who is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential theologians of the 20th Century, connects God’s holiness to his disdain of sin when he says, “Every facet of God’s nature and every aspect of his character may properly be spoken of as holy, just because it is his. The core of the concept, however, is God’s purity, which cannot tolerate any form of sin (Hab. 1:13) and thus calls sinners to constant self-abasement in his presence (Isa. 6:5).” [5] God’s wrath is something that we can feel uncomfortable with. The idea that God hates not only sin, but even certain people is unsettling to us in the global west. In recent years liberal theologians have argued that this idea is false and paints God as a vindictive deity. What this essentially boils down to is whether God can be both good and just at the same time. But this objection isn’t an enlightened response to this doctrine. This has been a point of contention since 300 AD. [6] But this — like the idea of God’s justice — is part of God’s character and nature, and it is beautiful. God’s wrath (or deep hatred of evil) has always been a part of his character. God’s holiness has been — throughout history — something that sinful man has had to deal with when encountering the living God. System to Cover Sin This is why understanding the whole Old Testament is so important. As Christians, it is easy to focus our attention on the New Testament because it seems like that’s where the best parts happen. As someone who loves theology, the New Testament is easy because it almost reads like a Western theological work. Yet neglecting to understand the essential ways that God worked throughout the Old Testament will leave us to make major errors in our theology. One main area this happens today is around the idea of atonement. Mankind’s problem — since the fall — has been that we cannot interact with a holy God. So, back in Leviticus, God lays out a system to atone for sin through the sacrifice of a goat on Yom Kippur (or the day of atonement). This goat would — ceremonially — take the place of the people, and would die for their sin. The reason for this is that the blood of an animal symbolizes its life. Something’s blood is needed to take the rightful place of our own. One life needed to be substituted for our own. This system was a foreshadowing of what was to be fully realized in the New Testament by the death of Jesus. Because while this was the system God set up for Israel, the blood of bulls and goats couldn’t satisfy God’s wrath against our sin. We needed someone to come to take on our sin so that we could be made right with God. We needed, not an animal, but a human to die to make right what man had made wrong. The Good News of the Gospel When Jesus went to the cross he took the full wrath from God the Father for sin on himself. Jesus would die for all those whom God had chosen to be his children. Romans 3:22–25 says “For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith.” [7] The important word to focus on is the word propitiation. It’s an uncommon word in our vocabulary. It means to appease the wrath of a God. This passage is saying that Jesus (on the cross) was the thing that satisfied the wrath of God for sinners. In other words, Jesus traded places with me on the cross, because he received what I should have received. He got the full measure of God’s wrath for my sin. And in return, I get to be treated like Jesus should have been treated. This means (among many things) I can have oneness with the Father, freedom from sin, eternal life, and favor in the eyes of God the Father. It’s like our analogy earlier. On a cosmic scale, there are two options for us. We can either receive justice for our sin. This is what Hell is. It is us paying the price for our sin, which requires an eternal death because our debt is against an eternal God. Or we can receive forgiveness because Jesus took Hell on himself. He paid, in full, the penalty for our sin. Theologically this doctrine is called penal substitutionary atonement. This is a fancy way to say, “Jesus traded places with me on the cross (substitute), paid my penalty, and has atoned for my sins.” This is the core message of the Christian faith and the reason we worship God. He paid for my sin and took my place. This is a kind of love that is unbelievable. It is the kind of love that propels us to worship and sing Nothing in my hands I bring, Simply to Thy cross I cling; Naked, come to Thee for dress, Helpless, look to Thee for grace: Foul, I to the fountain fly, Wash me, Savior, or I die. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Is 5:16. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), 203. Brandon Smith, “God’s Simplicity,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed. Mark Ward et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018). Tony Lane, “God’s Wrath,” in Lexham Survey of Theology, ed. Mark Ward et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2018). J. I. Packer, Concise Theology: A Guide to Historic Christian Beliefs (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1993), 43. Origen, “De Principiis,” in Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Frederick Crombie, vol. 4, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Company, 1885), 278. “Now, since this consideration has weight with some, that the leaders of that heresy (of which we have been speaking) think they have established a kind of division, according to which they have declared that justice is one thing and goodness another, and have applied this division even to divine things, maintaining that the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is indeed a good God, but not a just one, whereas the God of the law and the prophets is just, but not good” Origen refutes a heresy that distinguishes between a good God (Father of Jesus Christ) and a just but not good God (God of the Old Testament). He argues that this view misinterprets God's nature, as it fails to recognize that divine justice and goodness are not mutually exclusive but are harmoniously unified in God. He challenges the heretics' understanding of justice and goodness, illustrating through scriptural examples that God's actions, whether seemingly harsh or compassionate, are always just and good. Origen emphasizes that God's justice is not merely punitive but aims at correction and improvement, revealing a deeper, harmonious nature of divine justice and goodness. Origen concludes that the God of the Old Testament and the New Testament is the same, both just and good, rewarding and punishing appropriately. He encourages a deeper understanding of the Scriptures to appreciate the unity of God's nature, rejecting the dualistic view that separates God's justice from His goodness. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Ro 3:22–25. If you look at any human relationship – any meaningful one at that – you will find injustice from either party. It is inescapable, humanity defaults toward relational injustice, not towards relational justice. We inflict harm to those we love, and those who love us. Humanity has a strange propensity to cause brokenness in relationships. We do this not just in our horizontal relationships, but in our vertical relationship with God. How is man made right with God? How is Man Made Right With God? Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Reformed Christians do not wait for baptism to profess faith. Baptism marks God’s covenant promise; public profession and admission to the Lord’s Table become the ordinary way believers confess Christ before the church. Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach August 3, 2026 Theology One question naturally comes up whenever Baptists and Reformed Christians talk about baptism. If Baptists publicly confess Christ through believer’s baptism, how do Reformed Christians publicly confess Christ if they were baptized as infants? The answer is that Reformed Christians ordinarily make a public profession of faith before being admitted to the Lord’s Table. This does not mean that baptism and the Lord’s Supper are interchangeable. They are different sacraments with different purposes. But public profession followed by admission to the Table occupies a somewhat similar place in the Reformed tradition that believer’s baptism occupies in Baptist churches. Both traditions believe faith must be personal. Both believe Christians should publicly confess Christ. We disagree about when baptism should happen and what baptism means. Different Sacraments, Different Timing Baptists believe baptism should follow a person’s profession of faith. The person repents, believes the gospel, and is then baptized. Baptism becomes the public sacramental declaration that this person belongs to Jesus. Reformed churches believe baptism is the sign of God’s covenant promise, given to believers and to their children, just as circumcision was given to believers and their children in the Old Testament. Baptism speaks first about what God promises before it speaks about what we have done. That does not mean personal faith is unnecessary. No one is saved because his parents believed. No one is saved simply because water was placed on his head. Every person must repent of his sins and trust in Christ. But if a child has already received baptism, when does that child publicly confess Christ? The Reformed answer is public profession of faith followed by admission to the Lord’s Supper. God Acts Before We Respond Part of the reason this discussion can be difficult is that we live in a culture that places enormous value on personal choice. The moments that feel most meaningful to us are often the moments when I decide, I speak, and I publicly express who I am. This helps explain some of the emotional appeal of believer’s baptism. It is a beautiful public declaration of faith. A Christian stands before the church and says, in a visible way, “I belong to Jesus.” Baptists do not practice believer’s baptism merely because our culture is individualistic. They believe their position comes from Scripture. But believer’s baptism fits naturally within a culture that places great weight on personal decision and public self-expression. Reformed theology emphasizes something different. Salvation does not begin with our decision for God. It begins with God’s mercy toward us. Jesus told His disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:16). Paul writes that God chose His people in Christ before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4–5). Salvation depends not on human will or effort, but on God who shows mercy (Romans 9:16). Both Reformed Baptists and paedobaptists believe God acts first in salvation. The disagreement is whether the sign of the covenant should also be given before the child is able to respond personally in faith. For the Reformed, infant baptism is not an unfortunate practice we need to explain away. It is a fitting picture of God’s covenant grace. None of us chose our birth. In the same way, a covenant child does not choose his baptism. This reminds us that God acts before we respond. He promises before we profess. He places His name upon His people before they have anything to offer Him. Our profession of faith is not the beginning of God’s work. It is our response to the God who first loved us. Public Profession and the Lord’s Table Historically, Reformed churches have not treated covenant children as though no personal response were necessary. A baptized child is taught the faith, catechized, examined by the elders, and called to repent and believe the gospel. When that child makes a credible profession of faith, he stands before the church and publicly confesses Christ. The church then admits him to the Lord’s Table. That profession is not merely a testimony about a private religious experience. It is a public confession that the promises signified in baptism have been embraced by faith. The Lord’s Supper then becomes the repeated sacramental expression of that faith. Each time a Christian comes to the Table, he is publicly saying: Christ is my only hope. I belong to His people. I receive Him by faith. I intend to walk in repentance and obedience. The Supper is not simply a private moment between an individual and Jesus. It is a covenant meal shared with the church. Paul writes that whenever the church eats the bread and drinks the cup, it proclaims the Lord’s death until He comes (1 Corinthians 11:26). The Supper is both reception and proclamation. We receive Christ’s promises by faith, and we publicly confess that His death is our only hope. Baptism and the Supper Belong Together The Heidelberg Catechism calls baptism and the Lord’s Supper “holy signs and seals.” They belong together, but they do not do the same thing. Baptism is the once-for-all covenant sign that marks our entrance into the visible church. The Lord’s Supper is the repeated covenant meal through which believers are nourished, strengthened, and assured of Christ’s promises. Baptism marks us with the name of the Triune God. The Supper nourishes us as those who belong to Him. Baptism declares that cleansing from sin is found in Christ. The Supper declares that Christ’s crucified body and shed blood are our only food for eternal life. One sacrament marks the beginning of covenant membership. The other repeatedly confirms and nourishes those who embrace Christ by faith. A Helpful Comparison This is why I sometimes say that public profession followed by admission to the Lord’s Table functions in Reformed churches somewhat like believer’s baptism functions in Baptist churches. The sacraments are not the same. They should not be confused. But they occupy a similar place in the believer’s public identification with Christ. For Baptists, the first sacramental act following a profession of faith is baptism. For the Reformed, the first sacramental act following public profession is participation in the Lord’s Supper. Both traditions insist that faith must be personal. Both believe Christians should publicly identify with Christ. Both connect personal faith to membership in the visible church. We simply place that public sacramental expression at different points in the believer’s covenant life. Why This Matters The Lord’s Supper is more than a memorial. It is Christ’s covenant meal. Whenever believers gather at the Table, they proclaim His death until He comes. They confess that they belong to Him, receive His promises by faith, and are united not only to Christ but also to His church. This is why admission to the Lord’s Table has historically been treated seriously in Reformed churches. The church is not merely giving someone permission to eat bread and drink wine. The elders are recognizing a credible profession of faith and welcoming that believer to Christ’s Table. This also helps explain why infant baptism does not remove the need for personal faith. Reformed theology does not teach that baptism saves someone apart from faith. It does not teach that a baptized child has no need to repent, believe, and confess Christ. It teaches that God’s promise comes first, and faith responds. God claims us before we can claim Him. God speaks before we can answer. God marks us before we can understand the mark. Then, by His grace, we come to embrace Christ personally, confess Him publicly, and take our place at His Table. The difference can be summarized like this: Baptists make believer’s baptism the ordinary sacramental expression of personal faith. The Reformed make public profession of faith, followed by admission to and continued participation in the Lord’s Supper, the ordinary sacramental expression of personal faith. Both traditions are trying to honor Christ. We understand the relationship between God’s covenant promise and our response differently. For the Reformed Christian, the story does not begin with, “I chose God.” It begins with, “God, in His mercy, chose me.” The proper response is not passivity. It is not presumption. It is not reliance upon baptism while living without Christ. The proper response is repentance, faith, public profession, and a lifetime of coming to Christ’s Table with empty hands. Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own Word which marks true Christian faith. Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't October 28, 1978 Bible, Position Paper Preface The authority of Scripture is a key issue for the Christian Church in this and every age. Those who profess faith in Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior are called to show the reality of their discipleship by humbly and faithfully obeying God's written Word. To stray from Scripture in faith or conduct is disloyalty to our Master. Recognition of the total truth and trustworthiness of Holy Scripture is essential to a full grasp and adequate confession of its authority. The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own Word which marks true Christian faith. We see it as our timely duty to make this affirmation in the face of current lapses from the truth of inerrancy among our fellow Christians and misunderstanding of this doctrine in the world at large. This Statement consists of three parts: a Summary Statement, Articles of Affirmation and Denial, and an accompanying Exposition. It has been prepared in the course of a three-day consultation in Chicago. Those who have signed the Summary Statement and the Articles wish to affirm their own conviction as to the inerrancy of Scripture and to encourage and challenge one another and all Christians to growing appreciation and understanding of this doctrine. We acknowledge the limitations of a document prepared in a brief, intensive conference and do not propose that this Statement be given creedal weight. Yet we rejoice in the deepening of our own convictions through our discussions together, and we pray that the Statement we have signed may be used to the glory of our God toward a new reformation of the Church in its faith, life, and mission. We offer this Statement in a spirit, not of contention, but of humility and love, which we purpose by God's grace to maintain in any future dialogue arising out of what we have said. We gladly acknowledge that many who deny the inerrancy of Scripture do not display the consequences of this denial in the rest of their belief and behavior, and we are conscious that we who confess this doctrine often deny it in life by failing to bring our thoughts and deeds, our traditions and habits, into true subjection to the divine Word. We invite response to this statement from any who see reason to amend its affirmations about Scripture by the light of Scripture itself, under whose infallible authority we stand as we speak. We claim no personal infallibility for the witness we bear, and for any help which enables us to strengthen this testimony to God's Word we shall be grateful. A Short Statement God, who is Himself Truth and speaks truth only, has inspired Holy Scripture in order thereby to reveal Himself to lost mankind through Jesus Christ as Creator and Lord, Redeemer and Judge. Holy Scripture is God's witness to Himself. Holy Scripture, being God's own Word, written by men prepared and superintended by His Spirit, is of infallible divine authority in all matters upon which it touches: it is to be believed, as God's instruction, in all that it affirms, obeyed, as God's command, in all that it requires; embraced, as God's pledge, in all that it promises. The Holy Spirit, Scripture's divine Author, both authenticates it to us by His inward witness and opens our minds to understand its meaning. Being wholly and verbally God-given, Scripture is without error or fault in all its teaching, no less in what it states about God's acts in creation, about the events of world history, and about its own literary origins under God, than in its witness to God's saving grace in individual lives. The authority of Scripture is inescapably impaired if this total divine inerrancy is in any way limited or disregarded, or made relative to a view of truth contrary to the Bible's own; and such lapses bring serious loss to both the individual and the Church. Articles of Affirmation and Denial Article I We affirm that the Holy Scriptures are to be received as the authoritative Word of God. We deny that the Scriptures receive their authority from the Church, tradition, or any other human source. Article II We affirm that the Scriptures are the supreme written norm by which God binds the conscience, and that the authority of the Church is subordinate to that of Scripture. We deny that Church creeds, councils, or declarations have authority greater than or equal to the authority of the Bible. Article III We affirm that the written Word in its entirety is revelation given by God. We deny that the Bible is merely a witness to revelation, or only becomes revelation in encounter, or depends on the responses of men for its validity. Article IV We affirm that God who made mankind in His image has used language as a means of revelation. We deny that human language is so limited by our creatureliness that it is rendered inadequate as a vehicle for divine revelation. We further deny that the corruption of human culture and language through sin has thwarted God's work of inspiration. Article V We affirm that God's revelation in the Holy Scriptures was progressive. We deny that later revelation, which may fulfill earlier revelation, ever corrects or contradicts it. We further deny that any normative revelation has been given since the completion of the New Testament writings. Article VI We affirm that the whole of Scripture and all its parts, down to the very words of the original, were given by divine inspiration. We deny that the inspiration of Scripture can rightly be affirmed of the whole without the parts, or of some parts but not the whole. Article VII We affirm that inspiration was the work in which God by His Spirit, through human writers, gave us His Word. The origin of Scripture is divine. The mode of divine inspiration remains largely a mystery to us. We deny that inspiration can be reduced to human insight, or to heightened states of consciousness of any kind. Article VIII We affirm that God in His work of inspiration utilized the distinctive personalities and literary styles of the writers whom He had chosen and prepared. We deny that God, in causing these writers to use the very words that He chose, overrode their personalities. Article IX We affirm that inspiration, though not conferring omniscience, guaranteed true and trustworthy utterance on all matters of which the Biblical authors were moved to speak and write. We deny that the finitude or fallenness of these writers, by necessity or otherwise, introduced distortion or falsehood into God's Word. Article X We affirm that inspiration, strictly speaking, applies only to the autographic text of Scripture, which in the providence of God can be ascertained from available manuscripts with great accuracy. We further affirm that copies and translations of Scripture are the Word of God to the extent that they faithfully represent the original. We deny that any essential element of the Christian faith is affected by the absence of the autographs. We further deny that this absence renders the assertion of Biblical inerrancy invalid or irrelevant. Article XI We affirm that Scripture, having been given by divine inspiration, is infallible, so that, far from misleading us, it is true and reliable in all the matters it addresses. We deny that it is possible for the Bible to be at the same time infallible and errant in its assertions. Infallibility and inerrancy may be distinguished, but not separated. Article XII We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit. We deny that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and science. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood. Article XIII We affirm the propriety of using inerrancy as a theological term with reference to the complete truthfulness of Scripture. We deny that it is proper to evaluate Scripture according to standards of truth and error that are alien to its usage or purpose. We further deny that inerrancy is negated by Biblical phenomena such as a lack of modern technical precision, irregularities of grammar or spelling, observational descriptions of nature, the reporting of falsehoods, the use of hyperbole and round numbers, the topical arrangement of material, variant selections of material in parallel accounts, or the use of free citations. Article XIV We affirm the unity and internal consistency of Scripture. We deny that alleged errors and discrepancies that have not yet been resolved vitiate the truth claims of the Bible. Article XV We affirm that the doctrine of inerrancy is grounded in the teaching of the Bible about inspiration. We deny that Jesus' teaching about Scripture may be dismissed by appeals to accommodation or to any natural limitation of His humanity. Article XVI We affirm that the doctrine of inerrancy has been integral to the Church's faith throughout its history. We deny that inerrancy is a doctrine invented by Scholastic Protestantism, or is a reactionary position postulated in response to negative higher criticism. Article XVII We affirm that the Holy Spirit bears witness to the Scriptures, assuring believers of the truthfulness of God's written Word. We deny that this witness of the Holy Spirit operates in isolation from or against Scripture. Article XVIII We affirm that the text of Scripture is to be interpreted by grammatico-historical exegesis, taking account of its literary forms and devices, and that Scripture is to interpret Scripture. We deny the legitimacy of any treatment of the text or quest for sources lying behind it that leads to relativizing, dehistoricizing, or discounting its teaching, or rejecting its claims to authorship. Article XIX We affirm that a confession of the full authority, infallibility, and inerrancy of Scripture is vital to a sound understanding of the whole of the Christian faith. We further affirm that such confession should lead to increasing conformity to the image of Christ. We deny that such confession is necessary for salvation. However, we further deny that inerrancy can be rejected without grave consequences both to the individual and to the Church. The question of rebaptism is not new. The church has wrestled with it for nearly two millennia, and the consistent testimony of the historic, catholic, and Reformed church is that baptism is once-for-all. The modern practice of rebaptism does not arise from Scripture or from historic Christianity; Rebaptism and the Promise That Does Not Repeat Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

Can unbelievers understand and interpret the Bible? "So anyone who thinks he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding buildup this double love of God and neighbor, has not yet succeeded in understanding them”(Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 1.86). St. Augustine — accurately — describes that true comprehension of the Bible comes through a combination of prayer, faith, and an attitude of submission to God's will. It is by loving God and being compelled into action, Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach September 15, 2024 Theology Imagine it is your senior season of high school football, and the school you attend has historically been — let’s just say — less than excellent. So this year your school has hired a computer to be your head coach that is programmed to perfectly analyze each play. But there’s one glaring problem. While it could technically call plays based on trends and relevant data, it doesn’t love the game. There is a huge difference between understanding the game — technically — and actually calling the plays — in reality. You can’t simply expect theory to translate into intuition. What is missing is a love for the game. At this point could you just replace the coach with a computer? If you’ve ever played a sport before you’ll answer emphatically, no! Imagine getting into halftime, anticipating a rousing speech on overcoming adversity from your coach, only to be met with statistics on rushing yards verse their cover three concepts. You could hate football and become an analyst, but you can’t coach without loving the game. The same is true for biblical interpretation. St. Augustine, an influential early church father, wrote, "So anyone who thinks he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding buildup this double love of God and neighbor, has not yet succeeded in understanding them”(Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 1.86). St. Augustine — accurately — describes that true comprehension of the Bible comes through a combination of prayer, faith, and an attitude of submission to God's will. It is by loving God and being compelled into action, by the text that shows that we truly understand the text. All of this is impossible without the work of the Holy Spirit regenerating one's heart to love the God they once hated and hate the sin they once loved. But Can unbelievers understand and interpret the Bible? True biblical interpretation must include the Holy Spirit’s guidance. Sometimes a straw man can be made of this statement, where people will — incorrectly — conclude that this means biblical interpretation (via the Holy Spirit) relies wholly on one’s discernment of the text.Therefore it could have infinite possibilities for interpretation. Much more than this could lead people to falsely interpret scripture because they falsely interpret or misjudge the HolySpirit. To this, I would say that the pendulum has swung too far. Never should biblical interpretation become a sort of fortune-telling-like practice where the text itself is mostly disregarded for feeling. Rather, the text has a concrete main idea and transformational intent from the original author. Where the Holy Spirit comes in is to quicken us to respond in application to this inspired work before us. While biblical interpretation — in the technical sense — can be done well by anyone because there are clear steps in its approach, it fails more seriously to faithfully interpret the text holistically. This is because it will fail to see the very nature of the text itself, let alone what that text insists it to be. The Bible declares itself to be the very word of God. It is a story about God revealing himself to his creation to enter into a relationship with them. It's about a God who loves his people so deeply that he would die in their place. To technically interpret the story of Elijah, but failing to be transformed into worship by God working to bring sinners to justice and salvation to his chosen people is to fundamentally misinterpret the story. Why? Because worship was the author’s (and authors’) transformational intent. Take, for example, the story of Ruth. You could spend a multitude of time and research to bring great analysis to the four chapters in this book. You could; breakdown the narrative arc, identify the historical context in which this is placed, and how that shows an even dire situation for Ruth and Naomi and exemplifies the character of Boaz, you could trace the cross-references to other parts of scripture, or get to the root meaning of theHebrew word for Kinsman redeemer. But to do all of this — and to miss being in awe of the subtle sovereignty of God working to uphold his covenant to his people while sustainingRuth and Naomi, and how that leads to King David and eventually King Jesus — is a gross failure of proper biblical interpretation. Luther's Four Stranded Garland Only a regeneration of the Holy Spirit allows the Christian to interpret the text correctly. Martin Luther coined his hermeneutical tool "the four-stranded garland." In which he told people to think of four things while reading a passage of scripture. First, What instruction is God teaching me? Second, What in this passage causes me to praise God? Third, What causes me to confess in this passage? Fourth, what guidance do I now feel that I need from God? Luther's questions were giving the Christians a way to allow themself to be sensitive to the Holy Spirit during their biblical interpretation. A non-Christian may be able to technically answer the first question, but they cannot answer the last three without faking their answer, or at minimum pretending to act as they believe a Christian should. The work of the Spirit to convict us of our sinful nature and our daily sins is something the non-Christian doesn't have access to. God's work to make me fall on my knees and beg for mercy because He has convinced me that I do not open my heart up to God as the Psalms do, is not on the surface of the text. Therefore it isn't something a non-Christian can authentically do. This is even more true with the last question in Luther's strand. This is the question of application. This is the most spiritually significant, and dependent question. What the Holy Spirit is calling you to do in response to his word is ever-changing. This is one of the reasons Christians have loved scripture over the centuries, and equate a living aspect to it. It's not the meaning of the text that changes, it's the depth to which it calls us to be more connected to the image of the Son. This is the role of the Holy Spirit in interpretation. My question would be why would you want to interpret this story if you don’t desire to see the supremacy of Christ? Why would you care to work on scripture to get to its technical meaning without worshiping a Holy God at the end of it? What use is that literary analysis? Who will you present this to, if not to preach the Word and to exalt the most precious and glorious God of which it is most certainly about? My conclusion is that not only is a true biblical interpretation not possible for those who don’t believe, but it is also a waste to perform literary analysis on scripture without believing the whole story of which it is about. It would be as nonsensical as hiring a computer as a football coach. The danger of believing scripture was primarily written by man, is that it can then be wrong since to be man is to err. We would relegate ourselves to a few of scripture that shows us that we may question parts of scripture. Right around Christmas time, you will start to hear all of the amazing prophecies about Jesus concerning his birth life, and death. But did those prophets really know what they were saying? The short answer is no. How Did Jesus Understand Scripture? Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

What We Believe About Dispensationalism Prosper Christian Reformed Church rejects dispensationalism and its theological interpretations.  While we wouldn’t call this faulty belief system heretical, we would strongly declare that it is erroneous and an improper way to handle God’s word. The failure in this theology is that it divorces God from his steadfast love, or covenant love. God’s covenantal love for his people becomes dependent on the time in which he speaks. Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach April 14, 2026 Position Paper, Theology Introduction Every theological dispute is ultimately a dispute about God. Arguments about prophecy, Israel, the church, and the end times can seem abstract — the kind of thing seminary students debate and ordinary Christians ignore. But underneath every one of those arguments is a more fundamental question: what kind of God are we dealing with? Is he a God who tests humanity, watches it fail, and starts over with a new arrangement? Or is he a God whose purpose never wavers, whose covenant never changes, whose plan was never derailed, never improvised, never interrupted by human failure? That is the question this paper is about. Dispensationalism — the theological framework popularized by the Scofield Reference Bible and carried into millions of homes through books, films, and study notes — answers the first way. Reformed covenant theology answers the second. The difference is not merely academic. It determines how you read every page of your Bible, how you understand the church you belong to, and what you believe about the God you worship. At Prosper CRC, we confess the second. This paper explains why. What is Dispensationalism? At its core, dispensationalism is a way to view how God works throughout history. It’s a philosophy and a framework for interpreting scripture. In this framework, dispensationalists hold that God’s will is distributed distinctly in different eras throughout the biblical narrative. 1 The word dispensation translates the Greek oikonomia — meaning stewardship, administration, or economy. This framework is then applied to the whole breadth of God’s word. Leading to a distortion of the nature of God, the narrowness of salvation, and the importance of the church in the New Testament (to name a few). In his study bible, which was the primary work that popularized dispensationalism, C.I. Scofield wrote that a dispensation is ”a period of time during which man is tested in respect of obedience to some specific revelation of the will of God.” 2 What Scofield — and dispensationalism — implies is that God works differently during seven eras or dispensations. History of Dispensationalism One important clarification about dispensationalism is its relatively novel history. Up until the 1830s, dispensationalism wasn’t a term in any christians minds, nor in the theology books. A man by the name of John Nelson Darby systematized and promoted dispensationalism. Darby grew up in a well-connected family where he had access to the best schools and education. Upon becoming ordained in the Anglican Church, Darby suffered a horse riding accident. This turned out to to be a pivital moment his life. “While convalescing in Edward Pennefather's house in Dublin, Darby underwent a crisis in his religious beliefs. Finally deciding that an established church and its appurtenances were unscriptural, he resigned his curacy later the same year.” 3 It was at this time that he came to see the term “kingdom” in the book of Isaiah to mean something completely different from the church. Based on his study of Isaiah 32, Darby believed that Israel would experience earthly blessings in a future dispensation that were different from what the church would experience. He advocated for a strong distinction between Israel and the church. This is one of the major new discoveries that 4 Darby proposed: that the church and Israel are two distinct groups, two distinct identities, and two distinct futures. Acts 2 is a stop in God's dealings with Israel. During this time, Darby started the Plymouth Brethren church with dispensationalism being one of the core beliefs. The Brethren were deliberately anti-creedal and anti- confessional — a detail of enormous significance for Reformed believers. They don't accept or require any kind of confession of faith to join. 5 Charles Spurgeon — Darby's contemporary — was not silent: Spurgeon regarded their hermeneutics as "warped," saying: "Plymouth Brethren delight to fish up some hitherto undiscovered tadpole of interpretation, and cry it round the town as a rare dainty.” 6 Scofield Reference Bible No one event had more of an impact on the spread of dispensationalism than the Scofield Reference Bible. Edited and annotated by Cyrus I. Scofield, it popularized dispensationalism at the beginning of the 20th century. Essentially, it was the first study bible with a small commentary worth of notes on the same pages as scripture. These notes put forth a single view of the narrative arc of scripture, dominated by dispensationalism. This made it extraordinarily difficult for ordinary readers to distinguish the Bible's text from Scofield's theological notes. Contemporary Impacts The system moved from theological classrooms into mass popular culture with explosive results. The rise of figures like Hal Lindsey with his book The Late Great Planet Earth (1970) brought dispensational premises to a wider, non-theological audience, interpreting current events as fulfillments of biblical prophecy. The Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins (1995–2007) carried the system to tens of millions of readers with no formal theological background. The Critical Historical Argument Dispensationalism has no roots before 1830. The entire Reformed tradition — from Bullinger (1534) to Calvin, Olevianus, the Westminster Assembly (1647), and the Belgic Confession (1561) — is covenantal to its core and knew nothing of a hard Israel-Church distinction. The Reformed understanding of the history of redemption has much more in common with that of the Epistle of Barnabas (c. AD 120), Irenaeus (c. AD 180), Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and the Reformed orthodox than it does with the Dispensational understanding of redemptive history. From the 1520s forward, Reformed theology was covenantal at its core. To speak anachronistically, it was always anti-Dispensational. 7 Ironically, dispensationalism entered American Reformed and Presbyterian churches not directly through theological documents such as creeds or confessions, but through Bible conferences, study Bible notes, and popular evangelism — bypassing the very ecclesial structures of accountability that the Reformed tradition exists to maintain. Errors of Interpretation Seven Dispensations One of the core beliefs of dispensationalism is that there are seven major sections, eras, or dispensations in which God works his will differently. They are: Innocence (Genesis 1:1–3:7) Conscience (Genesis 3:8–8:22) Human Government (Genesis 9:1–11:32) Promise (Genesis 12:1–Exodus 19:25) Law (Exodus 20:1–Acts 2:4) Grace (Acts 2:4–Revelation 20:3) The Millennial Kingdom (Revelation 20:4–6) Each dispensation has several defining characteristics: 1) a distinctive idea of God's revelation; 2) a specific test for obedience in relation to that divine revelation; 3) a failure of man under that economy to the divine revelation; 4) a judgment of God for the failure; 5) the beginning of a new dispensation. 8 Each dispensation is essentially a fresh test that humanity fails, requiring God to reset the terms of engagement. Dispensationalism would argue that history isn't organically unfolding toward a single promised fulfillment in Christ — it is a series of discrete, self- contained experiments. One of the side effects of this system is that it creates commitments to views that directly contradict reformed theology. Three major commitments come to mind. Israel and the Church are permanently distinct peoples with separate destinies. Since the Church Age is a parenthesis — inserted after Israel failed under the Law dispensation — national Israel retains its own set of unfulfilled earthly promises that the Church does not inherit. God has two programs running in parallel. The hermeneutic must be consistently “literal." Because the dispensations are concrete and distinct, OT prophecy addressed to Israel must be fulfilled literally, in the land, through a national people. The Reformed typological/Christological reading of those prophecies is dismissed as spiritualizing. The law does not apply to the Church in the Grace dispensation. Since the cross has ended the dispensation of the law — according to the dispensationalists — the Mosaic law — including the moral law — is no longer the governing standard for the Church. According to the Scofield notes: "The law is a ministry of condemnation, death, and the divine curse.” The Reformed threefold use of the 9 law collapses entirely under this framework. This is not an abstract concern. If the moral law — including the Ten Commandments — does not bind the New Testament church, then the entire structure of Christian ethics is unmoored. The Sermon on the Mount, which Scofield placed under the dispensation of Law, becomes a document addressed to Israel rather than to the church.² The Decalogue, which the Heidelberg Catechism calls the rule of our gratitude and which Paul upholds for the church (Rom. 8:4; 13:9; Eph. 6:1–3), is no longer the shape of the Christian life. The result is what the Reformation called antinomianism — the severing of grace from the obligation to obey. Scripture is unambiguous: Jesus himself declared that he came not to abolish the law but to fulfill it, and that "until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law" (Matt. 5:17–18). Paul insists that the gospel does not overthrow the law — "on the contrary, we uphold the law" (Rom. 3:31). The law was not abolished at the cross; it was satisfied at the cross, so that its righteous requirements might be fulfilled in us (Rom. 8:4). To say the law is simply gone — rendered obsolete by dispensational change — is to misread both what the cross accomplished and what the Christian life requires." Reformed theology has never denied that God's one covenant of grace is administered differently across redemptive history. The question is whether those different administrations constitute fundamentally different economies in which God relates to different peoples by different means. The Reformed response is not "there are no differences between the Testaments" — it is that the differences are administrative, not substantial. One covenant. One people. One Savior. One gospel. Differently administered across redemptive history, but never divided into hermetically sealed compartments where God tests, fails, judges, and resets. Christology: Dispensationalism Marginalizes Christ's Present Reign Because dispensationalist theology makes the church and the nation of Israel two separate peoples of God, Israel still has its own set of earthly promises that haven’t 10 been fulfilled, which the church will not inherit. In this disjointed view, God has two peoples with two plans of salvation running separately and alongside each other. In dispensationalism, the real focus of scripture is the future earthly kingdom for national Israel. When this is the focus, then Jesus’ reign over all things is not only downplayed, 11 but it is denied. Paul is clear in Ephesians 1:20-23: 20 that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, 21far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. 22 And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, 23 which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all. 12 Jesus is the fullness and the head of all things to the church, or the present New Testament people of God. To all who are able to be saved, Jesus the crucified and risen Lord is in authority over all things. For nearly two thousand years, Jesus has been the high point of the biblical narrative. To some dispensationalists, the high point hasn’t come yet. At least not for Israel. This view also contradicts one of the clearest doctrines in all of scripture. The primacy and exclusivity of Jesus as the only way to be saved. Jesus’ own “exclusive” claims John 14:6 — “I am the way… No one comes to the Father except through me.” John 10:7–9 — Jesus as “the door”; “If anyone enters by me, he will be saved.” John 3:16–18 — salvation tied to believing in the Son; “whoever does not believe is condemned already.” John 3:36 — whoever believes has life; whoever rejects the Son does not have life. John 8:24 — “unless you believe that I am he you will die in your sins.” John 5:23–24 — rejecting the Son rejects the Father; whoever hears/believes has eternal life. John 11:25–26 — life/resurrection bound up in Christ (“I am the resurrection and the life…”). John 6:40, 47 — eternal life attached to believing in Christ (“whoever believes has eternal life”). John 6:53 — “unless you eat the flesh… and drink the blood… you have no life” (life is only in union with him). Matthew 11:27 (cf. Luke 10:22) — only the Son truly knows the Father, and only those to whom the Son reveals him. John 17:3 — eternal life defined as knowing the Father and Jesus Christ whom He sent. Apostolic proclamations in Acts Acts 4:12 — “There is salvation in no one else… no other name… by which we must be saved.” Acts 10:43 — “everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness… through his name.” “One mediator / one name / only in Christ” in the Epistles 1 Timothy 2:5–6 — “There is one God, and there is one mediator… Christ Jesus.” 1 John 5:11–12 — “Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son… does not have life.” 1 John 2:23 — “No one who denies the Son has the Father.” 2 John 9 — “Whoever does not abide in the teaching of Christ does not have God.” Romans 10:9–13 — salvation tied to confessing/believing in Jesus; calling on the Lord. Galatians 2:16 (cf. 2:21) — justification is not by law-works but “through faith in Jesus Christ”; if righteousness were through the law, Christ died for no purpose. Ephesians 2:18 — “through him we… have access in one Spirit to the Father.” Hebrews 7:25 — Jesus “is able to save to the uttermost” those who draw near to God through him. Hebrews 10:19–20 — access to God comes through Jesus’ blood and “the new and living way” he opened. “No other foundation” (exclusive basis) 1 Corinthians 3:11 — “No one can lay a foundation other than… Jesus Christ.” If dispensationalism is true, then it changes something about the God we worship. This God would be one of confusion by pronouncing — quite repetitively — that Jesus is the only way to be saved, and yet that is not true. Either God can lie to us, or God’s promises to one group of people can be given with theological earmuffs, as it were. Can God promise this exclusivity to the church and cover the ears of the Jews and say, “This message really wasn’t meant for you?” Reformed theology says no. The Wall Rebuilt: Dispensationalism Reverses Ephesians 2 Paul answers the two-peoples question directly in Romans 11 with one of the most vivid images in all of his letters. He pictures the people of God as a single olive tree — one tree, with one root system, one source of nourishment. Some branches, unbelieving Israel, have been broken off (v. 20). Gentile believers have been grafted in (v. 17). But there is one tree. Paul does not plant a second tree for the church alongside the first tree for Israel. He does not describe the church as a parallel program. He says Gentiles have been grafted into the same tree that was already standing — “the root of the olive tree” (v. 18), which Ephesians 2 is Paul's theological explanation of exactly what happened to that wall between the branches: 14 For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility 15 by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, 16 and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility. 13 In Ephesians 2:14-16, Paul writes that because of the cross, the “dividing wall of hostility” has been “broken down.” This was in reference to a literal wall in the temple that divided Jews from Gentiles. This was a physical barrier for Gentiles who wanted to experience God’s presence, which resided in the center of the temple in the holy of holies. To re-introduce the separation between Jew and Gentile is not a minor theological adjustment — it dismantles the very argument Paul spent an entire letter making. The whole of Galatians is Paul's sustained case that the cross of Christ has created one new people, unified not by ethnic identity, religious pedigree, or ritual compliance, but by faith alone in Christ alone. When the false teachers in Galatia demanded that Gentile believers adopt Jewish identity markers — circumcision, food laws, calendar observances — Paul didn't treat it as a secondary matter. He called it desertion (Gal. 1:6). He called it slavery (Gal. 5:1). He called those who preached it accursed (Gal. 1:8-9). The reason the stakes were so high is that the Jew/Gentile distinction wasn't simply a social boundary — it was a theological one. There was a literal dividing wall in the temple that governed access to God by ethnicity, gender, and status. Paul's climactic declaration in Galatians 3:28 — "neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female" — names each of those checkpoints and declares them demolished. Not reformed. Not softened. Demolished, in the flesh of Jesus Christ (Eph. 2:14). What made Peter's behavior at Antioch so serious — serious enough for Paul to oppose him to his face and declare him condemned — is that Peter hadn't changed his theology. He had simply changed his table. He withdrew from eating with Gentile believers when the circumcision party arrived, and in doing so, he preached a different gospel with his feet. He acted as though Christ were sufficient to forgive the Gentiles, but not quite sufficient to make them clean enough to share a meal with. And that subtle, relational distinction was, in Paul's judgment, a reconstruction of the very wall Christ died to tear down. The Heidelberg Catechism states plainly what is at stake (Q&A 30): “To say that Christ is not enough is a most enormous blasphemy, for it then would follow that Jesus. the old categories — any addition of ethnic, ritual, or cultural prerequisites layered on top of faith in Christ — does not deepen the gospel. It contradicts it. Prosper’s stance on Dispensationalism Prosper Christian Reformed Church rejects dispensationalism and its theological interpretations. While we wouldn’t call this faulty belief system heretical, we would strongly declare that it is erroneous and an improper way to handle God’s word. The failure in this theology is that it divorces God from his steadfast love, or covenant love. God’s covenantal love for his people becomes dependent on the time in which he speaks. God’s promises in the Old Testament become irrelevant to the New Testament church. That hermeneutic then dissolves any true need for the work of Christ. One — of many — things that breaks down is if the Old Testament is obsolete, and the New Testament tells us that Christ is our atoning sacrifice. What does atonement mean? Why would we need that? The list of themes in the Old Testament that — not only shape but also — provide a theological basis for the New Testament is too numerous to cover here. Without the narrative of the Old Testament, the salvation that comes in the New Testament wouldn’t make sense. Covenant Theology As reformed believers, we believe that God works consistently through scripture. This belief is grounded in what the writer of Hebrews says in his letter by saying, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.” 14 God works through covenants, or promises, where the collateral is your own life. As reformed believers, we confess with the Belgic Confession that “this church has existed from the beginning of the world and will last until the end, as appears from the fact that Christ is an eternal King who cannot be without subjects” (Article 27). The church is not a New Testament invention. It is not a parenthesis inserted after Israel's failure. It is the one people of God, present in every age, always gathered around the same Mediator, always saved by the same grace. The Heidelberg Catechism echoes this when it defines the church as the Son of God gathering, defending, and preserving a community “chosen for eternal life” from “the beginning to the end of the world” (Q&A 54). These are not new ideas developed in God makes these covenants throughout scripture, all of which lead to the coming of Jesus the messiah. Every covenant leads to a single redemptive point, where the Father saves his people through his Son. Covenant of Works & Covenant of Grace Covenant Of Works There are two major covenants in this grand story we find in the bible. First is the covenant of works. This covenant was given to Adam (and Eve) in the garden (Genesis 2:15-17). In this covenant, if Adam and Eve could obey God’s law, they could: Stay in the garden Have the protection and comfort it offered Live in unity with God They wouldn’t need a mediator Live in harmony with creation Remain in a state of innocence Live with the ability not to sin This covenant was wholly dependent on Adam and Eve’s ability to obey what God had commanded them. But we know that happened in Genesis 3. Covenant Of Grace Because Adam and Eve sinned and broke the covenant God had instituted in the garden, and sin had corrupted God’s good creation, they couldn’t live in the garden with God as they had before. God then chose to give grace to Adam and Eve — rather than putting them to death right then and there — he allowed them to live. As God did this, he made a promise to them (a new covenant). He promised to redeem them and reverse what they had brought into the world. This is the point where all of redemptive history changes. Previously, humanity could keep the covenant by their obedience, but now they must be saved. From here on out, God must step in and save his people from their sins. All the covenants lead to this action. God saves sinners by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone — and this has always been true, in every age, for every person God has ever saved. The Mosaic covenant does not replace the Abrahamic. The New Covenant does not start over. Each is an administration of the same grace, pointing to and finding its fulfillment in the same Mediator. The Westminster Confession puts the Reformed position plainly: "There are not therefore two covenants of grace, differing in substance, but one and the same, under various dispensations.” Crucially, in covenant theology Christ is the center and goal of all history — not national Israel, not a future millennial kingdom, not a restored temple in Jerusalem. Every covenant pointed to him. One Consistent God: Immutability Scriptural Proof of Immutability Against Dispensations Psalm 102:26–27 26 They will perish, but you will remain; they will all wear out like a garment. You will change them like a robe, and they will pass away, 27 but you are the same, and your years have no end. 28 The children of your servants shall dwell secure; their offspring shall be established before you. 15 The psalm was written by a people under affliction pressing toward the promise of redemption, and the ground of their comfort is precisely God's immutability: "the church should continue in its stability, because it stands not upon the changeableness of creatures but is built upon the immutable rock of the truth of God, which is as little subject to change as his essence.” 16 Exodus 3:14 — "I am that I am" Charnock argues this is the foundational assertion of immutability: "If his essence were mutable, God would not truly be; it could not be truly said by himself, 'I am that I am,' if he were such a thing or being at this time and a different being at another time." This name is not incidental — it is the ground of every covenant promise. Malachi 3:6 — "For I am the Lord, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed." This is the direct covenant-immutability link in Scripture itself. God's unchangeableness is explicitly given as the reason Israel was not destroyed. The covenant people's preservation hangs not on their faithfulness but on God's immutable nature. Charnock cites this passage as God's own assertion that immutability governs his will and counsel. Numbers 23:19 — "God is not a man that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent." Charnock uses this to establish that change in God's will would require either deficiency of wisdom (he didn't foresee the circumstance), deficiency of power (he couldn't execute), or moral instability — all of which are impossible. Therefore his covenant decrees stand. Hebrews 6:13–18 — The oath of God to Abraham This is perhaps the most direct biblical statement connecting immutability to covenant. Hebrews 6:17–18 says God "interposed with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement." Charnock calls this explicitly "the immutability of his counsel." This passage is foundational because it reaches back to Abraham and forward to the new covenant church — the same immutable counsel, one continuous covenantal promise. Hebrews 1:10–12 (citing Psalm 102) The author of Hebrews applies Psalm 102:25–27 directly to Christ, identifying him as the "You are the same" of the Psalm. This is decisive: the immutability of God is not merely an abstract attribute — it is personally located in the Son. Charnock notes the Christological force of this: Christ's eternal unchangeableness is the anchor of the covenant of grace. Immutability of God's Knowledge In his book on the attributes of God, Stephen Charnock establishes that God's knowledge is eternal and unchanging: "God knows all things from eternity and therefore perpetually knows them... by one simple knowledge he considers the infinite spaces of past and future." More pointedly: "God does not know creatures because they are, but they are because he knows them... He knew them when they were to be created in the same manner that he knew them after they were created.” 17 Now apply this to dispensationalism's foundational claim — that the Church Age was not revealed in the Old Testament, that Israel's rejection of the Messiah was not anticipated in God's original plan, and that the Church is a mystery hidden from the ages. Dispensationalists argue this mystery means the Church was a genuinely new thing — not foreknown as part of the original program but inserted in response to Israel's rejection of Christ. But if God's knowledge is immutable and eternal — if "all his works were known to him from the beginning of the world" (Acts 15:18, which Charnock cites directly) — then there is no moment at which the Church was unknown to God. There was no divine discovery. There was no pivoting to a new program. The dispensational "parenthesis" doctrine requires that at some point — whether at the cross, at Pentecost, or at Israel's rejection — God shifted to a plan he had not originally purposed. Immutability says this is impossible. His knowledge does not admit succession or surprise. Immutability and the Pattern of Test-Failure-Reset Charnock gives the razor that cuts dispensationalism's structural logic: "There can be no reason for any change in the will of God. When men change in their minds, it must be for want of foresight, because they could not foresee all the rubs and bars that might suddenly offer themselves — which if they had foreseen, they would not have taken such measures." He identifies only three possible causes for divine change in purpose: Want of foresight — God didn't see the failure coming Natural instability — God is morally unstable Want of power — God couldn't execute the original plan Now run the dispensational pattern against this. Each dispensation ends in failure and a new economy begins. But if God is immutable in knowledge, he foresaw every failure before the dispensation began. If he foresaw it, why structure the dispensation as a test whose outcome was unknown? The answer dispensationalism must give is that God didn't know how humanity would respond — or that he structured the test anyway knowing failure was coming. The first option denies omniscience. The second makes God's entire management of history a theatre of the absurd — testing what he already knew would fail, judging what he had already foreknown, resetting to what he had already purposed. The Reformed framework has a clean answer: there is no series of failed experiments. There is one immutable decree of election and redemption, administered across different covenantal epochs, each pointing forward to the same end. "The wickedness of former ages altered not his purpose." God was not surprised by Adam's fall, Israel's failure, or the Conclusion The dispute over dispensationalism is not ultimately about Israel or the church, the rapture or the millennium, the seven dispensations or the one covenant of grace. It is about God. The God of dispensationalism describes is a God who tests and watches and waits — who offers a program, absorbs its failure, judges it, and begins again. He is a God whose purposes can be interrupted, whose plans can be parenthesized, whose original intentions were not accomplished until the seventh attempt. He is, in the end, a God who is surprised by what his creatures do. The God of Scripture is not that God. He is the God of Psalm 102 — the one who endures while the heavens wear out like a garment, who remains the same while all creation changes, whose years have no end. He is the God of Malachi 3:6, who declared that he does not change, and therefore Israel was not consumed. He is the God of Ephesians 1, who chose his people before the foundation of the world, who works all things according to the counsel of his will, whose eternal purpose in Christ Jesus was never interrupted, never parenthesized, never improvised. He is the God whose eternal decree to send his Son to die was not a contingency response to Israel's failure — it was the immutable, pre-temporal, unstoppable purpose of the triune God, who does not test and reset, but redeems and restores. This is the God we confess at Prosper CRC. This is the God our confessions describe. This is the God whose one covenant of grace has gathered one people from the beginning to the end of the world — not two peoples on parallel tracks, not a primary program and an inserted parenthesis, but one body, one bride, one church, built on one foundation, saved by one Mediator, secured by one immutable promise. The God of Scripture does not run experiments. He keeps his word. And because he keeps his word, his people are not consumed. Bibliography Charnock, Stephen. The Existence and Attributes of God . Edited by Mark Jones. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022. Clark, R. Scott. "Can Dispensationalists Be Reformed? (Part 1)." The Heidelblog . October 9, 2023. https://heidelblog.net/2023/10/can-dispensationalists-be-reformed- part-1/. "Darby, John Nelson." Dictionary of Irish Biography . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press / Royal Irish Academy. https://www.dib.ie/biography/darby-john-nelson-a2398 . Gribben, Crawford. "Darby, Dispensationalism, and the Rise of Evangelical A n t i s e m i t i s m ." T h e G o s p e l C o a l i t i o n . J u l y 1 0 , 2 0 2 4 . h t t p s : // www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/darby-dispensationalism/ . N. Darby and the Roots of Dispensationalism*. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024. Johns, Varner J. "Dispensationalism and the Scofield Bible." Ministry: International Journal for Pastors 18, no. 3 (March 1945). https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/ 1945/03/dispensationalism-and-the-scofield-bible. Mangum, R. Todd, and Mark S. Sweetnam. The Scofield Bible: Its History and Impact on the Evangelical Church . Colorado Springs: Paternoster, 2012. Marino, Matt. "Dispensationalism 101." The Reformed Classicalist . April 29, 2023. https://www.reformedclassicalist.com/home/what-is-dispensationalism . Mathison, Keith A. "What Is Dispensationalism?" Ligonier Ministries. https:// learn.ligonier.org/articles/dispensationalism . Mohler, Albert. "J.N. Darby, the Father of Dispensationalism … or Maybe There Is More to the Story — A Conversation with Historian Crawford Gribben." Thinking in Public . Podcast. AlbertMohler.com . July 10, 2024. https://albertmohler.com/2024/07/10/crawford- gribben-2/. Ryrie, Charles C. Dispensationalism . Revised and expanded edition. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2007. Spurgeon, C. H. Commenting and Commentaries . London: Passmore and Alabaster, Vlach, Michael. "Dispensational Theology." The Gospel Coalition . https:// Footnotes Charles C. Ryrie, Dispensationalism , rev. and exp. ed. (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2007), 33. C. I. Scofield, ed., The Scofield Reference Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909), 5. "Darby, John Nelson," Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press / Royal Irish Academy), https://www.dib.ie/biography/darby-john-nelson-a2398 . Michael Vlach, "Dispensational Theology," The Gospel Coalition , https:// www.thegospelcoalition.org/essay/dispensational-theology/ . Albert Mohler, "J.N. Darby, the Father of Dispensationalism … or Maybe There Is More to the Story — A Conversation with Historian Crawford Gribben," Thinking in Public (podcast), AlbertMohler.com , July 10, 2024, https://albertmohler.com/2024/07/10/crawford-gribben-2/ . C. H. Spurgeon, Commenting and Commentaries (London: Passmore and Alabaster, 1876), 28. R. Scott Clark, "Can Dispensationalists Be Reformed? (Part 1)," The Heidelblog, October 9, 2023, https://heidelblog.net/2023/10/can-dispensationalists-be-reformed-part-1/ . Matt Marino, "Dispensationalism 101," The Reformed Classicalist, April 29, 2023, https:// www.reformedclassicalist.com/home/what-is-dispensationalism . Varner J. Johns, "Dispensationalism and the Scofield Bible," Ministry: International Journal for Pastors 18, no. 3 (March 1945), https://www.ministrymagazine.org/archive/1945/03/ dispensationalism-and-the-scofield-bible. Rather than the reformed veiw the church and Israel are two names for God’s chosen people. Dispensationalists believe that the return of the Jews to Palestine is one of the prophecies that needs to be fulfilled in order for the Second Coming of Jesus to occur. Rather than favoring the conversion of Jews, dispensationalists view support of Jews as part of Christian doctrine. Dispensationalists cite Genesis 12:3, in which God promised Abraham, "I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse." Christian Zionists interpret this covenant with Abraham to apply to his descendants, the Jews, and thus they believe that supporting Israel, considered as the community of Jewish people and, since 1948, the Jewish state, is imperative to their own blessings as Christians. Gary Burge, a theologian in the Christian Reformed Church, states the Reformed position clearly: Christian Zionism takes the land promises of God in Genesis 12, 15, and 17 and applies them to the modern state of Israel. Therefore, despite Israel's own declared intention of being a secular state, modern Israel still benefits from a 4,000-year-old promise. Reformed theologians believe something decisive happened in Christ. His covenant affected not simply the covenant of Moses, making a new and timeless form of salvation, but also every other Jewish covenant, including Abraham's covenant. Reformed theology does not split Israel and the church; it finds rich continuity between them. Paul did not "become" a Christian; he realized the deepest meaning of his Jewishness when he chose to follow Jesus. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Eph 1:20–23. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Eph 2:14–16. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Heb 13:8. The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2025), Ps 102:26–28. Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. Mark Jones (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2022), 6. Stephen Charnock, 24. 17 The following Statement affirms this inerrancy of Scripture afresh, making clear our understanding of it and warning against its denial. We are persuaded that to deny it is to set aside the witness of Jesus Christ and of the Holy Spirit and to refuse that submission to the claims of God's own Word which marks true Christian faith. The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978) Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

How Did Jesus Understand Scripture? The danger of believing scripture was primarily written by man, is that it can then be wrong since to be man is to err. We would relegate ourselves to a few of scripture that shows us that we may question parts of scripture. Right around Christmas time, you will start to hear all of the amazing prophecies about Jesus concerning his birth life, and death. But did those prophets really know what they were saying? The short answer is no. Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach December 8, 2025 Bible, Theology This may be a question you’ve never asked before but it’s extremely important to understanding Jesus, the Old Testament, and God’s covenantal nature. Some people will argue that Jesus didn’t see the Old Testament scripture as fully inspired by God. In fact, they will try to argue that our evangelical belief that Jesus saw scripture as God’s word is imposing too much into the gospel accounts of Jesus. To be fair, Jesus doesn’t come out as clearly as Paul or Peter does in his view of scripture. But a careful study of the gospels will show us that Jesus does believe all of the Old Testament scripture is God’s very word. What are the dangers of seeing scripture as mostly man-made? The danger of believing scripture was primarily written by man, is that it can then be wrong since to be man is to err. We would relegate ourselves to a few of scripture that shows us that we may question parts of scripture Did Jesus believe the Old Testament prophecies were about himself? Right around Christmas time, you will start to hear all of the amazing prophecies about Jesus concerning his birth life, and death. But did those prophets really know what they were saying? The short answer is no. When Isaiah said: 4 Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. 5 But he was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed. 6 All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned—every one—to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. [1] Surely he had no idea of the crucifixion that would come. So, how can we understand scripture differently than the original author? We can’t understand it differently, but we can understand it more fully. This is the idea — some theologians call — sensus plenior. In his book Canon, Covenant, and Christology, Matthew Barrett — the associate professor of Christian Theology at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary — defines sensus plenior like this, “when a [sensus plenior] is first revealed in scripture, it is at this point — its conception — that the human author’s purview is the most limited, not knowing all the intentions the divine author has in mind.” When Isaiah wrote this prophecy he could see dimly what we see clearly. He knew the Messiah would suffer, but how exactly he didn't know? Yet he was still very correct about the nature of his suffering. What this idea shows us about God’s nature and his revelation is that he must be understood in light of all of scripture, rather than a brief moment of the historical author’s understanding. In other words, God prophesied using humans in one time, so that humans in another time could recognize the prophecy in its fullest sense. It comes down to the question of how can we interpret the Bible. Is the only justifiable rating of scripture one that only sees the human author’s intent, or are we able to see Scripture as written by one divine author who knew the full scope of redemptive history? Did Jesus believe all scripture was about him? Jesus saw what the prophets couldn’t, by living into the promises they made centuries before he came to earth. By his recognition and living into these prophecies, Jesus is affirming the Old Testament scripture as the very word of God and not only of mere men. This is what we call the scripture’s plural authorship. This means that all scripture is written by both human and divine authors. Jesus affirms Israel’s view of Old Testament scripture Jesus was Jewish, while it may seem obvious. But he came into a world where — even his enemies within Judaism — saw scripture as God-breathed. This is most clearly seen by looking at the covenants of the Old Testament. Matthew Barrett, says “God spoke a saving word in and through the cutting of covenants with his people, covenants that not only explained Israel’s Genesis but maintained their relationship with Yahweh as his chosen people.” God's relationship with Israel was in the form of written words. Not merely words that he agreed with but works that came from his mouth. The fact that Jesus fulfills the covenant shows us that he sees, recognizes, and affirms the reality that the covenants in the Old Testament are not just a man’s words, but the precious words of the God of the universe. It is maybe clearest that the truthfulness and beauty of the Old Testament scriptures are upheld in the fulfillment of God’s covenant promises. The clearest passages You are probably familiar with the passage in Luke 24:13-27. This is the story of Jesus revealing himself to two disciples after his resurrection. As he makes known to the two disciples who he is Luke goes on to write this memorable verse, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.”[2] Jesus shows the disciples that all of the Old Testament scriptures were pointing toward Himself. 17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.[3] Here in Matthew 5:17-19, Jesus gives one of the clearest pictures of how he views scripture. Jesus loves the scriptures, not as wisdom from men, but as the word of God. In fact, the reality of Christmas — or God becoming flesh — is an inditement against worldly wisdom. Jesus couldn’t have seen scripture as merely from men, the incarnation is a testament against it. Jesus’ actions show that he loves the Old Testament scripture. In his commentary on Matthew, theologian, and professor, D.A. Carson says, “that Jesus fulfills the Law and the Prophets in that they point to him, and he is their fulfillment. The antithesis is not between ‘abolish’ and 'keep’ but between ‘abolish’ and ‘fulfill.’ ‘For Matthew, then, it is not the question of Jesus’ relation to the law that is in doubt but rather its relation to him!’”[4] Jesus’ obedience to the law confirms that he believes the law was God’s word. If Jesus didn’t believe that — and is still God himself — he would have had no need to keep them. If they weren’t authoritative, Jesus would have had no desire to be obedient, but we see the exact opposite. Jesus was obedient, “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”[5] Jesus was the word of God. His closest friends on earth attested to this. Jesus loved the scripture because he embodied it. Have confidence that Jesus not only believed that the Old Testament scriptures were breathed out by God, but he loved, cherished, and was obedient to them. Therefore we — as Christians — ought to love, trust, and obey God’s holy word too. [1] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Is 53:4–6. [2] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Lk 24:27. [3] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Mt 5:17–19. [4] D. A. Carson, “Matthew,” in The Expositor’s Bible Commentary: Matthew, Mark, Luke, ed. Frank E. Gaebelein, vol. 8 (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), 143–144. [5] The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), Php 2:8. [6] John Chrysostom, “Homilies of St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople on the Gospel according to St. Matthew,” in Saint Chrysostom: Homilies on the Gospel of Saint Matthew, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. George Prevost and M. B. Riddle, vol. 10, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1888), 104–105. You’ve probably heard the term legalism, or legalist used — not just in the church — but in culture abroad. Legalism carries a clearly negative connotation (and for good reason). Yet legalism isn’t a word found in the English Bible, but that doesn’t mean the Bible doesn’t say anything about it. Paul uses the phrase “works of the law” eight times in his writings (Romans 2:15, 3:20, 3:28, Galatians 2:16, 3:2, 3:5, 3:10). Drawing the Line of Legalism Read Learn More About What We Believe Prosper Christian Reformed Church holds that the Bible is the inerrant, divinely inspired Word of God and the highest authority for faith and life. We believe in the centrality of the gospel: that all people are sinners in need of salvation, which comes through Jesus Christ’s atoning death and resurrection, by grace alone through faith alone. We practices infant baptism as a sign of covenant inclusion and uphold traditional biblical teachings on marriage, gender roles, and sexuality. We affirm Reformed theology, including the five points of Calvinism, and embrace an amillennial view of Christ’s reign and the end times. What We Believe

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