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Pray With Us “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.” — Philippians 4:6 (ESV) Paniba PANIBA is a Christian ministry committed to feeding the hungry, sharing the love of Jesus, and strengthening vulnerable communities in the Dominican Republic. Their heart is especially for children and families living in economically disadvantaged areas, where access to nutritious food is limited and basic needs often go unmet. Through weekly feeding programs, PANIBA provides nutritious meals to children to help them grow, learn, and thrive physically, mentally, and spiritually. These gatherings aren’t just about food — they include worship, Bible teaching, games, and intentional time to share the hope of Christ with young lives. In addition to nourishing children, PANIBA extends care to elderly and disadvantaged adults, offering monthly grocery support for those who otherwise have no safety net. The ministry partners with local churches and volunteers to meet both practical needs and spiritual hunger, demonstrating God’s love with compassion, dignity, and respect. Tracie Pratt Surgery Update August 7, 2026 Update Please continue praying for Tracie Pratt following an unsuccessful surgery to remove the cancer from her liver. She is recovering well and in good spirits, and we ask for prayer for her recovery, wisdom for her doctors as they pursue new medications, and for God’s peace and sustaining grace for Tracie and her family in the days ahead. Marilyn Tacoma Surgery August 6, 2026 Surgery Please be in prayer for Marilyn Tacoma as she will be having surgery next week Wednesday, Aug 12. Pray for guidance for the surgeon and strength for Marilyn in the recovery. Tracie's Surgery July 28, 2026 Surgery Please be in prayer for Tracie Pratt as she will be heading to Ann Arbor for surgery on Wednesday, August 6th, to hopefully remove all of the cancer that remains after her chemo treatments. Pray for guidance for the surgeon and strength for Tracie, Lyle, and their family. Claire Sullivan U.S. Army Training July 27, 2026 Support, Military Please be in prayer for Claire Sullivan who is back on base and is in the midst of 10 weeks Advanced Training for the Military Police of the U.S. Army. She asks for your prayers for strength and perseverance and she would love a note of encouragement: PFC Sullivan, Claire A Co. 795th MP BN Bldg. 901 Plt. 2 7676 Loyalty Loop Ft. Leonard Wood, MO 65473 Keith DeRuiter Update July 6, 2026 Update Please be in prayer for Keith & Phylla DeRuiter and the DeRuiter family as Keith will begin immuno-therapy treatments next week. They would appreciate prayers for comfort as they navigate treatments long term. Gary Brinks New Treatment June 29, 2026 Therapy Please be in prayer for Gary Brinks, and for Dale & Bonnie as well, while Gary is in a treatment program in Mount Pleasant. Keith DeRuiter Melanoma Cancer June 22, 2026 Cancer Please be in prayer for Keith & Phylla DeRuiter and the DeRuiter family as Keith has been diagnosed with a stage 4 melanoma cancer. They would appreciate prayers for comfort as they navigate treatments in the next few weeks.

Rebaptism and the Promise That Does Not Repeat 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; Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach February 9, 2026 Position Paper, Theology An issue has arisen regarding the request to be rebaptized in the Northern Michigan Classis of the Christian Reformed Church of North America. If a communicant member of a church requests to be rebaptized, can CRC churches accommodate this request? The answer is no. We should not rebaptize communicant or baptized members of Christian Reformed Churches. What follows is an explanation of why. Biblical Guidance Ephesians 4:1–6 says: I therefore, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit — just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call — one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all. The key phrase that directly addresses rebaptism is Paul's words: "just as you were called to…one baptism." To become a communicant or baptized member of a Christian Reformed Church, a person must have been baptized — either as an infant by their parents, or as a believer upon their profession of faith. Every member of a CRC has been baptized. Paul's statement is clear: there is one baptism. This is rooted in the reality that there is one church, one faith, and one God and Father. The intent of this passage is the maintenance of the unity of the Spirit. Rebaptism undermines that unity. Historical Background 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; it emerges from specific movements that departed from the church's understanding of the sacrament. 1. The Early Church: One Baptism as the Apostolic Teaching From the earliest centuries, Christians understood baptism as an unrepeatable sacrament because it signified God's once-for-all act of cleansing, regeneration, and incorporation into the church. No orthodox church father taught that baptism should be repeated.¹ In the 4th century, the Donatist controversy made rebaptism a major issue.² The Donatists argued that baptisms performed by morally compromised clergy were invalid and needed to be done again. The wider church rejected this, insisting that the validity of baptism rests not on the holiness of the minister but on Christ himself.³ Augustine articulated the principle that became standard Christian doctrine: "The efficacy of the sacrament depends on Christ, not on the one administering it." ⁴ If a baptism was done with water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it was valid and never to be repeated. This conviction is embedded in the Nicene Creed (AD 381): "We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins." ⁵ This line didn't arise in a vacuum — it was written specifically to reject the idea of rebaptism. 2. The Medieval Church: Continuity of the One-Baptism Practice Even through the doctrinal confusion of the medieval period, the church maintained the ancient consensus: baptism is administered once,⁶ and a valid Trinitarian baptism is never repeated.⁷ The medieval church may have erred in many areas, but it never abandoned the catholic teaching of one baptism. 3. The Magisterial Reformation: Calvin, Luther, and the Reformed Confessions The Protestant Reformers did not introduce a new doctrine of baptism; they recovered the biblical and ancient one. Both Luther and Calvin rejected rebaptism because it undermines the nature of baptism as God's act and God's promise.⁸ Calvin argued that baptism is a sign and seal of God's covenant; that God's covenant promises are not repealed, redone, or repeated; and therefore that baptism cannot be repeated without accusing God of insufficiency. The Reformed confessions codify this clearly. The Belgic Confession, Article 34, rejects rebaptism and insists on the once-for-all nature of the sacrament.⁹ The Heidelberg Catechism, Q&A 69–74, frames baptism as God's covenant promise to us and our children — a promise that does not expire or require renewal through a second baptism.¹⁰ The CRC stands squarely within this magisterial, catholic tradition. 4. The Radical Reformation: The Origin of Modern Rebaptism The first significant Christian movement to embrace rebaptism was the Anabaptist movement in the 16th century.¹¹ The Anabaptists rejected infant baptism entirely, declared all infant baptisms invalid, and insisted that every person must be baptized again as a believer. The Reformed churches rejected this movement because it denied God's initiative in salvation and covenant, treated baptism as the believer's testimony rather than God's promise, severed continuity with the church's historic teaching, and fractured the unity of the visible church by rejecting valid Christian baptisms.¹² Modern evangelical rebaptism is a direct descendant of this radical movement, not of Scripture or historic Christianity. 5. The Baptist Tradition and Contemporary Evangelicalism Later Baptist traditions kept the Anabaptist logic while softening its rhetoric. They argue that infant baptism is "ineffective," not sinful, and therefore insist on baptizing again upon profession of faith. This practice — now common in much of American evangelicalism — arises from a theological system that defines baptism primarily as the believer's personal declaration, not God's covenantal act.¹³ But this view remains outside the historic consensus of the early church, the global church, and the Reformed tradition. 6. The CRCNA's Place in This History As a confessional Reformed denomination, the Christian Reformed Church stands firmly in the line of the early church fathers, the Nicene Creed, Augustine, the magisterial Reformers, and the Three Forms of Unity.¹⁴ The CRC recognizes any baptism performed with water in the Triune name as valid. Because baptism is God's act, not ours, it is not repeated. To rebaptize someone who was already Trinitarianly baptized would imply that God's first promise was insufficient, ineffective, or void — a conclusion at odds with Scripture, with history, and with our confessions.¹⁵ A Place for Christian Charity We gladly affirm that many of our Baptist brothers and sisters are faithful Christians who love the Lord, honor Scripture, and seek to obey Christ in all things. They have a different understanding of when baptism should take place and what it primarily signifies, and we should be charitable and patient in those disagreements. We do not question their sincerity, their faith, or the fruit of the Holy Spirit in their congregations. Our disagreement on baptism is real, but it is not a question of orthodoxy or fidelity to Christ. It is a matter where faithful believers, reading the same Scriptures, draw different conclusions. Yet this is not the core issue confronting our churches today. The real pastoral and theological problem arises when individuals who themselves accept the legitimacy of their first baptism — whether administered in infancy or upon profession of faith — seek to be baptized again, or when churches actively encourage such repetition. At that point, we are no longer dealing with a denominational difference of interpretation. We are dealing with a practice that implicitly denies what Scripture, the early church, and the Reformed tradition all affirm: that baptism is a once-for-all act, grounded in God's promise, not in the quality or intensity of our spiritual experience. When a person says, "Yes, my first baptism was real and biblical," and then requests a second baptism because they feel they were not sincere enough, committed enough, or emotionally ready the first time, the underlying assumption is that baptism is chiefly a testimony of personal authenticity. This is precisely where the Reformed tradition must speak with clarity. Baptism is not a barometer of spiritual fervor; it is not a ceremonial reset button; it is not a symbolic recommitment of our faith. Baptism is God's act, God's promise, God's name placed upon His child. To repeat that sign is to imply that God's first promise was either defective or dependent on the maturity, clarity, or sincerity of the one receiving it. And such an implication contradicts the very nature of the covenantal God we proclaim at Prosper CRC — one who speaks, promises, seals, and sustains His people not on the basis of their performance, but on the basis of His steadfast faithfulness. Furthermore, when churches promote or allow rebaptism for those already baptized in the Triune name, they unintentionally cultivate a pastoral environment where spiritual assurance becomes tied to repeated external acts. In that system, baptism becomes a diagnostic tool for evaluating one's internal state rather than a sacrament God uses to anchor His people in His unchanging grace. The sacraments exist to assure weak believers, not to be repeated every time those believers feel weak. So yes — we must extend grace and honor to our Baptist neighbors. But charity cannot mean silence when God's promises are unintentionally diminished. Unity cannot mean permitting a practice that undermines both the catholic and Reformed understanding of one baptism. And humility does not require us to treat rebaptism as a harmless expression of personal piety when Scripture calls the church to guard its sacraments with clarity and conviction. If Christ, through His church, has placed His name on a person once, we dare not suggest — either through our words or our practices — that He needs to do it again. Paedobaptism and the God Who Always Initiates At the heart of the Reformed understanding of baptism is a simple but profound conviction: God always makes the first move. He calls before we respond, He loves before we love, and He lays hold of His people long before they can lay hold of Him. Infant baptism, therefore, is not a sentimental tradition or a convenience of church life; it is a visible proclamation of the gospel's central truth that salvation begins with God, not us. It is a sign that God's promises are anchored in His character, not in our maturity, understanding, or ability to choose Him. When we place the sign of the covenant on the child of believing parents, we are confessing that God's grace is prior, and foundational. The child contributes nothing; the child understands nothing; the child cannot yet express love, obedience, or faith. And this is precisely the point: baptism is not first a declaration of human commitment — it is first a declaration of divine initiative. Paedobaptism dramatizes the truth that God binds Himself to His people before they can respond, and that our response — when it comes — is itself the fruit of His prior work. To baptize our children, then, is to say explicitly what Scripture teaches implicitly from cover to cover: "We love because He first loved us." Moreover, infant baptism guards the church from reducing baptism to a testimony of personal authenticity or a symbolic expression of spiritual readiness. If baptism is fundamentally about my decision, then it is fragile — because my decisions change, my zeal ebbs and flows, and my spiritual experiences rise and fall. But if baptism is fundamentally about God's decision, then it is stable, enduring, and trustworthy. This is why the Reformed tradition has always opposed rebaptism: to repeat the sign is to suggest that God's initial action was incomplete or contingent upon later spiritual performance. At Prosper CRC, where we affirm the confessions and hold tightly to the biblical truth of God's sovereign initiative, paedobaptism is not simply permitted — it is the natural and necessary expression of our theology of grace. Finally, the practice of infant baptism strengthens the unity of the covenant community. It proclaims that the children of believers are not spiritual outsiders waiting to prove themselves, but members of the visible church from the beginning, nurtured in the promises of God and called to later personally embrace those same promises. The entire congregation participates in that call, promising to instruct, guide, and pray for the baptized child so that they might one day publicly profess the very faith symbolized at the font. In this way, paedobaptism forms a community shaped by grace rather than performance, defined by God's initiative rather than human accomplishment. It teaches our people — young and old — that the Christian life is always a response to a God who has already moved toward us in covenant love. Notes ¹ Hippolytus of Rome, Apostolic Tradition , in Paul F. Bradshaw, Maxwell E. Johnson, and L. Edward Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition: A Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2002), 1–15; Everett Ferguson, Baptism in the Early Church: History, Theology, and Liturgy in the First Five Centuries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009), 857–860. ² Henry Bettenson and Chris Maunder, eds., Documents of the Christian Church , 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 64–66 (Council of Arles, Canon 8). ³ J. Stevenson and W.H.C. Frend, eds., Creeds, Councils and Controversies , 3rd ed. (London: SPCK, 2011), 72–73 (Council of Nicaea, Canon 19). ⁴ Augustine, On Baptism, Against the Donatists , in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers , Series 1, Vol. 4, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 420–425; W.H.C. Frend, The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 231–250. ⁵ Philip Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom , Vol. 2 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1983), 57–59 (Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, 381). ⁶ Gratian, Decretum , Distinction 4, Canon 95, in Augustine Thompson and James Gordley, trans., The Decretum of Gratian (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, forthcoming). ⁷ Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica , III, Q. 66, Art. 9, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947); Gary Macy, The Theologies of the Early Medieval Eucharist and Sacraments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 88–90. ⁸ Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), in Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970), 148–150; John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion , ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 4.15.16–18. ⁹ Belgic Confession , Article 34, in The Three Forms of Unity (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 48–51. ¹⁰ Heidelberg Catechism , Q&A 69–74, in The Three Forms of Unity (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2011), 112–114. ¹¹ Conrad Grebel, "Letter to Thomas Müntzer," in Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers , ed. George H. Williams and Angel M. Mergal (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957), 62–64; Schleitheim Confession (1527), in George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 907–915. ¹² William R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story: An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 32–48; John Smyth, The Character of the Beast (1609), in The Works of John Smyth , ed. W.T. Whitley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1915), 228–232. ¹³ The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), Chapter 29, in James M. Renihan, Edification and Beauty: The Practical Ecclesiology of the English Particular Baptists, 1675–1705 (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2008), 224–227. ¹⁴ Lyle D. Bierma, The Theology of the Heidelberg Catechism: A Reformation Synthesis (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), 96–115. ¹⁵ Howard J. Vanderwell, ed., The Church Order Commentary (Grand Rapids: CRC Publications, 2011), 187–190; Christian Reformed Church in North America, Church Order and Its Supplements (Grand Rapids: CRC Publications, 2023), Articles 56–57. 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

Grace Makes You a Charity Case We want to work for what we receive. We want to pay our own way and earn our place. This is true in nearly every part of life, and it often becomes true of the way we relate to God. We begin to think that if we work hard enough, obey consistently enough, or become useful enough, God will be pleased with us. This is the question that will wear out your soul: Am I working hard enough for God? Paul addresses this directly in Galatians 3: Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach July 27, 2026 Theology, Bible Most of us don’t want to be charity cases. We want to work for what we receive. We want to pay our own way and earn our place. This is true in nearly every part of life, and it often becomes true of the way we relate to God. We begin to think that if we work hard enough, obey consistently enough, or become useful enough, God will be pleased with us. This is the question that will wear out your soul: Am I working hard enough for God? Paul addresses this directly in Galatians 3: “O foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? It was before your eyes that Jesus Christ was publicly portrayed as crucified. Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish? Having begun by the Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh?”—Galatians 3:1–3 The Galatians had received the gospel. Jesus Christ had been publicly portrayed before them as crucified. They understood that they were saved through faith in Christ. Yet now they were living as though Christ had begun their salvation, but they would need to finish it through their own effort. Paul’s question is simple: Did God come to you as a boss paying wages, or as a Father giving gifts? Grace Is Offensive to Hard Workers Grace is difficult for hardworking people because grace makes you a charity case before it makes you useful. Legalism affirms that we can save ourselves. It says 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 in order to treat us like Jesus. For us to insist on getting what we are owed is to insist on our destruction. Paul writes: “For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written, ‘Cursed be everyone who does not abide by all things written in the Book of the Law, and do them.’”—Galatians 3:10 The problem is not God’s law. God’s law is good. The problem is our attempt to use the law to make ourselves righteous. If we want to stand before God based on our obedience, we must obey everything. We do not get to present our best moments and ignore the rest. We cannot offer God sincere effort and demand that he call it righteousness. The law requires perfect obedience. We have not given it. God Loves Obedience 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. First Samuel 15:22 says: “Does the Lord delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the Lord? To obey is better than sacrifice.” This isn’t only confined to the Old Testament. In John 14:15, Jesus says: “If you love me, keep my commands.” God loves when we obey what he has told us to do because his law 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 right and true. Every time we don’t follow him, we break away from our Creator. God loves our obedience when it is done with the right intention. But when we try to leverage our obedience toward God as an act to earn God’s favor, it is disgusting to him. My Kids Are Bad Artists 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 it is given as an act of love in response to the love we’ve given them, it is priceless. This is similar to the way God feels about us trying to earn his favor or love through our good works. Our works aren’t impressive enough to place God in our debt. Yet when they come from a heart of love in response to the love he has given us, they are precious to him. The difference is not the quality of the artwork. It is the heart behind it. Our Obedience Can Become Rebellion 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.” This passage uses clearly strong language against our righteous deeds. The original Hebrew is even stronger than many English translations communicate. The polluted garment Isaiah describes was a ceremonially unclean rag. Why does Isaiah describe our righteous deeds this way? Because we have perverted what God designed for our good and turned it into evil. We take obedience, which should be a loving response to God, and turn it into a way to twist God’s arm into loving us more or blessing us more. Just like a child who tries to trick his parent out of cleaning the playroom, God is greatly displeased when we use his law as a weapon against him. Our obedience becomes an act of rebellion when we use it to replace grace. Religion says, “I obey; therefore, God accepts me.” The gospel says, “God has accepted me in Christ; therefore, I obey.” The order matters. Abraham Believed God Paul continues his argument by pointing back to Abraham: “Just as Abraham ‘believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness.’ Know then that it is those of faith who are the sons of Abraham.”—Galatians 3:6–7 Abraham was not made righteous because he had done enough. He believed God, and it was counted to him as righteousness. Abraham brought no credentials. He came with faith in the promise of God. Paul’s argument is that this has always been the way God saves his people. God does not save people because they have earned his blessing. He gives the blessing through faith. The gospel was announced beforehand to Abraham when God said, “In you shall all the nations be blessed.” This blessing would not remain within one family or one nation. It would come to all those who share Abraham’s faith. We are not brought into God’s family through our ancestry, our religious background, or our performance. We are brought in through faith in Christ. Christ Became a Curse for Us The law does not save us. It exposes our guilt. Paul writes: “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us.”—Galatians 3:13 The cross is where your earnings go to die. Christ did not come to help us pay the rest of our debt. He came because we could not pay it. We stood under the curse of the law. Jesus took that curse upon himself. He traded places with us on the cross. He received what we should have received, and in return, we are treated as he deserves to be treated. Paul says this happened: “So that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith.”—Galatians 3:14 Christ took the curse so that we could receive the blessing. We do not receive the Holy Spirit as a wage. We receive the Spirit as a gift. We do not become God’s children because we have proven ourselves useful. We become useful because God has first made us his children. 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 his own deeds and perceived moral standing. He believes he deserves certain rights because of his actions and life choices. He explains that he has gone straight all his life. He admits that he was not religious and had faults, but insists that he did his best. He paid for what he took. If he received wages, it was because he did the work. He wants nothing more than his rights. The other man tells him that getting his rights would not be good news. He says, “I haven’t got my rights, or I should not be here. You will not get yours either. You’ll get something far better.” Still, the Ghost insists that he does not want anyone’s “bleeding charity.” The response is: “Then do. At once. Ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking and nothing can be bought.” Christianity isn’t a marketplace. It’s a mercy seat. 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 poor in spirit know they cannot pay. They know they do not have enough righteousness to bargain with God. They do not ask for their rights. They ask for mercy. Everything Is Here for the Asking The question is not whether you have worked hard enough. You haven’t. The question is not whether you have obeyed enough, prayed enough, served enough, or made yourself useful enough. You haven’t. The question is whether Christ has done enough. He has. The Christian life begins when we stop bargaining with God. We come before him without leverage, without credentials, and without any claim that he owes us something. We ask for the Bleeding Charity. Everything is here for the asking, and nothing can be bought. Whether or not prayer is effective (and it is effective), we are called to be followers of Christ. The question shouldn’t be “Does prayer change things?” But rather “Is Jesus God?” Because if he is in fact God, then what he says goes. Questioning God on whether his commandments make sense to us is a grievously offensive practice. In doing so we (as finite creatures) are inferring that we — somehow — have a better perspective... If God Is Sovereign, Why Pray? 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

NeoMoral Imperialism Morality in Western culture has become based on an insular view of what the majority thinks. By that I mean, the average man walking down the street often doesn’t believe that their morality comes from a concrete source of authority, but rather it comes from how they perceive “the majority” sees what is right and wrong.And with social media algorithms becoming better and better, how we perceive the majority becomes smaller and smaller. Heading 5 Why the Lord's Supper Does What Believer's Baptism Doesn't Mitchell Leach December 10, 2025 Bible, Theology There once was a day when Christians winced at the — once-progressive — notion of “coexist.” You remember the bumper stickers. I remember going on a youth retreat with my church, and my youth pastor saw that bumper sticker and laughed at it. This was the time when Christianity and Christian morals were the dominant view in American culture. I have heard Christians say — recently — that they wish the notion of coexistence could be extended to them. No longer is it acceptable to say, “I believe this, you believe something different. But we can look past that and live in peace.” Morality Based on Majority Morality in Western culture has become based on an insular view of what the majority thinks. By that I mean, the average man walking down the street often doesn’t believe that their morality comes from a concrete source of authority, but rather it comes from how they perceive “the majority” sees what is right and wrong. And with social media algorithms becoming better and better, how we perceive the majority becomes smaller and smaller. It becomes easy to see your world through the insular lens of your social media.[1] As wesaw in the 2016 and 2020 elections, and as we have seen every day since. This affects our view of morality drastically if our view is based on the how we perceive the majority. If we are seeing — on our feeds — the a rhetoric that proclaims that not only the acceptance of homosexuality, but the requirement to affirm homosexuality, we will begin to believe — wrongly — that this is the dominant belief in America. This leads us to a huge question... Is defending a religious position homophobic? This is a question that is progressively becoming more and more relevant in Western culture. Carl Truman, a professor at Grove City College, and author of TheRise and Triumph of the Modern Self argues, Mere tolerance of homosexuality is bound to become unacceptable. The issue is not one of simply decriminalizing behavior; that would certainly mean that homosexual acts were tolerated by society.[2] Truman hits on an important shift in the morality of what he calls a “culture of expressive individualism.” Simply being tolerant of a view of sexuality that goes against the religion you believe in is no longer acceptable. Now if you don’t celebrate these forms of sexuality, you are now a bigot and homophobic. It is ok for someone to be tolerant of an action, and to yet not affirm it because of areligious based moral belief. To say it isn't is to say my morality is the only true morality. Which is itself intolerance toward most of the world's religions. In a sense, this becomes a form of — what author Alan Ryan calls liberal imperialism[3], or what I call neo-moral imperialism. Where white men from Europe came to a new world and because they believed it was their duty to colonize the savage beliefs of the uneducated natives, so it is today. People who would find themselves in the top 90% of the global income, are condemning nearly two-thirds of the world's populations [4] beliefs as archaic. If it was wrong for Europeans to colonize the native tribes of America, then this new form of imperialism must also be wrong too. If you're saying that I can't believe what I believe about sexuality, because you think I'm wrong, you should then afford me that same right. Freedom of speech and religion Do we believe that freedom of speech is a universal right? Better yet, do we believe that for someone to talk about their own religious morality is protected by freedom of speech? If not then is it protected by freedom of religion? Either all theism is for idiots, or it is acceptable for people to believe that there is a God who has a moral code. If you want to believe the narrative that all theism is for idiots, you are easily in the global minority. It is insulting to legitimately oppressed groups. In fact, it is Islamophobic and antisemitic. How can you see the danger in wanting governments to require religions that don’t conform to a modern view of sexuality — that affirms homosexuality — to change their beliefs, as a huge danger to any belief system? [5] It takes a special kind of arrogance to call an entire religion; wrong, intolerant, hateful, bigoted, homophobic, and archaic, based on their experience alone. It may sound harsh, but it is genuinely arrogant to believe, “I’m right and everyone else is wrong,” when you have no authoritative source to draw that morality. Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, they all have religious texts telling them what they believe their God tells them is right and wrong. As a Christian, I believe that my God has told humanity who He is by giving his people rules about what is right and wrong. To say it another way, I believe the most powerful and righteous being in all of the universe has told me — among many laws — that homosexuality is a sin. When someone — who isn’t committed to any form of theism, can stand on their own authority (void of any religious text or appeal), and condemn genuine religious beliefs, you’ve become the very intolerance you have fought so long and hard to defeat. Can we actually coexist? Or is it necessary to imperialize your form of morality up to everyone who disagrees with you? [1] Alexander George Theodoridis, “The Hyper-Polarization of America,” ScientificAmericanBlog Network (Scientific American, November 7, 2016), https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-hyper-polarization-of-america/ . [2] Carl R. Trueman and Rod Dreher, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution(Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2020). [3] Alan Ryan, “Liberal Imperialism,” The Making of Modern Liberalism, May 2012, https://doi.org/10.23943/princeton/9780691148403.003.0006 . [4] Conrad Hackett and David McClendon, “Christians Remain World's LargestReligiousGroup, but They Are Declining in Europe,” Pew Research Center (Research Center, May 31, 2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/05/christians-remain-worlds-largest-religious-group-but-they-are-declining-in-europe/ . [5] Saskia Glas and Niels Spierings, “Rejecting Homosexuality but ToleratingHomosexuals: The Complex Relations between Religiosity and Opposition toHomosexuality in 9 ArabCountries,” Social Science Research 95 (2021): p.102533, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2021.102533 . 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

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