How to Study the 1689 LBCF

So I want you to turn to chapter 8 of the Confession. The Baptist Confession of Faith is 1689. And I am going to read chapter 8, paragraph 5. Chapter 8 is on page 17. Oh, you're in the other book? So it's V-I-I is Roman numerals.

So it's V-I-I-I, right? Who are you doing it as? So, chapter 8, V-I-I-I. That's right, 5 plus 3. Yeah, 5 is V and the I's are 1, so 5 plus 3 is V-I-I-I. That's okay.

That's why in Rome, if somebody ever said they were livid, what they were really saying is they were like 448 years old or something weird. So that's my only Roman numeral joke. All right, let's listen. So what we're going to talk about tonight, and we will teach a little bit of the confession itself, but what we're actually going to discuss tonight is how to study the confession.

So my concern is that the confession, first of all, is long. I mean, this is a long book. the one I have in front of me if I don't look at the catechism part you know it's over 40 pages that's a lot to read that would take somebody several minutes maybe more than an hour and if you're going to take your time to understand it'll take even more and so if somebody wanted to join our church we would ask them to read this and then we'd ask them to understand it and if they talk about it and if they're willing to agree to it and submit to it and so it's important that people know how to understand it for the people who happen to be in this room right now, we expect that you've already read it or are in the process of reading it. And if you had questions about it that you would ask somebody else, that wives would ask their husbands, husbands would work together on things, and that children would go to their parents and say, hey, what does this mean here?

And so I want you to also be able to feed yourself a little bit. And so I want to give you some tips for how to study the confession on your own. And then if somebody else comes to the church and they say, well, what's this confession thing that they read every Sunday? You can tell them what it is and you can also give them some pointers how to understand it.

So in 8.5, I want to read from the original right now. So if you remember, the original was written about 330 years ago in 1689. And so, did I do the math right yet? And so, it's a little bit of a different version of English than we use because languages change over time. The words that we're using today, some of them people won't use in 50 years, or they'll use some of the same ones with different meanings.

And so let's see what it says. The Lord Jesus, by his perfect obedience and sacrifice of himself, which he through the eternal spirit once offered up to God, have fully satisfied the justice of God, procured reconciliation, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven for all those whom the Father hath given unto him. So if you weren't in the same version as me, it probably looked different, right, Mary?

It's probably almost impossible to follow along, right? Because it wasn't the same. What's that? Yeah, a lot of things are very different. So that's why if you had two, it would have been good tonight, but that's okay. One of the points I wanted to make, though, was I just read one sentence.

And I don't know how long it took me. That was probably 15 seconds or more. I kind of read it a little bit fast on purpose because I wanted you guys to see how hard it would be to understand this long sentence if you just always treated it as one long sentence. In my book, it's four lines and a little more of a fifth line. So that's a very long sentence.

And I think everybody here should be able to agree with me that in general, longer sentences are harder to understand than shorter ones. Would everybody agree? And so if your goal is to read the confession so that you may understand it, this is a bit of an obstacle for you. You have to study it and break it down. So you would have to see that the Lord Jesus is the subject of a sentence, by his perfect obedience is a prepositional phrase.

The sacrifice of himself is a prepositional phrase with the by the sacrifice of himself Which another prepositional phrase And then hath fully satisfied So there the verb but what is the word hath We don use that word Do you want to tell me? Yeah, it means the same thing as when we say have. It's like the helping verb, right? But we don't use that word much, so when you're reading these things and you see words that we're not as familiar with, it's harder to understand than if it was just language you used, right?

Imagine if I just started speaking Spanish right now. Most of you, I don't know if anybody here knows Spanish, most of you would just have no idea what I was saying. Some of you might be able to pick up a word here or there. So this isn't the same as if I was speaking an entirely different language, but it's different enough that it's not quite easy to understand.

So the first thing I was going to recommend if you're going to study the Confession is that you read the Confession in its original, so you see the words that they used because the men who wrote it, these are the words they picked. And those words had meanings in 1689. They really wrote like 1687 and 1888. Those words had meanings that these men intended to convey when they picked those words.

But some very good people have gone ahead and they have rewritten the confession in what they call modern English. And they've done a couple things when they did that. One of them is they made a bunch of places where there's shorter sentences. So some of the places in the original where it's a long sentence with a lot of prepositional phrases built in between a subject and a verb, they have resolved that by giving us some shorter sentences to understand.

And then secondly, they've modernized the language use. So the words that we don't use as commonly today, they have changed them to show us new words that we would understand better that are going to be in a 21st century dictionary so that we might understand what the writers of the original confession meant to convey. So now let's look at 8.5 in the modern English.

The Lord Jesus, so it started out the same, right? It's the subject, the Lord Jesus, has fully satisfied the justice of God. well they skipped all of those extra phrases that were in the original that were describing how Jesus did this and they put the subject and the verb together which for me makes it easier to understand not that this one's better but it helps me actually understand what this one was trying to say maybe if I have trouble finding what it meant the Lord Jesus has fully satisfied the justice of God obtained reconciliation, so another action verb that Jesus did, and purchased an everlasting inheritance in the kingdom of heaven. So that's another verb, he purchased, right?

And then the object, what did he purchase? An everlasting inheritance, and where is it? In the kingdom of heaven. It tells us right there, for all those given to him by the Father. So this took the beginning of the original and the end of the original, and it kind of popped them together in one clear sentence to tell us the action that Jesus took. Then it says, He accomplished these things by his perfect obedience and sacrifice of himself, which he once for all offered up to God through the eternal spirit.

And then it took all the things that were in the prepositional phrases at the beginning of the first long sentence, and it made a new sentence describing how he did what he did. And so it's meant to help us understand, not to improve it, not to make it better. That's not why people wrote this book that I'm holding here, the modern English version. They did it to help people understand what the other people said in the first place.

So it's kind of like when we write a tract for somebody and we give somebody a tract, and the tract has maybe three little paragraphs that tells them what Jesus did for them. And if you look at this tract, you'll find that the tract is not Scripture. This is words that I actually wrote and Brother Jason helped edit and there were other people that looked it over too.

In fact, this text here has gone through like seven or eight revisions now and I love it now. But this isn't me saying I know better than scripture. This is my way of rewording scripture in a way that I think people can understand and condensing it in a way where I can give people a lot of truth that's in a lot of different scriptures in a little easy to read cart.

And so that is why they wrote this book. So the first tip I wanted to give you when you study the Confession is look at the original one because the original one is important Don skip it for this one But use the new one the modern English to help you understand what it says Because what I going to tell you is that it's supposed to say the same thing, but with different words. Or a different word order.

And so it should help you understand. It should give light to this one. The second thing I want you to see, if you look at your confession, and I think it's in this book too, but I actually like using the original one for this one is that there's verses at the end of every paragraph and those verses are what are called the proof texts. And so these are verses that the authors believed supported the extra biblical statement that they made in the paragraph.

So they made a statement that wasn't scripture. It's outside the Bible. It's extra biblical. And then what they are showing us is the verses in Scripture that they think support the words that they said. And more than the words, I'll say, they support the thoughts that they conveyed by the words they chose. And so the idea is that we think the confession, although it's not Scripture, accurately tells us what Scripture says.

And we hope to prove that by looking at the verses. And so the second way to study the confession is to look at the verses that are offered underneath. So if you have your Bible, the first verse listed here is Hebrews 9.14, and it has a little F next to it. And in my confession, there's a little F right next to the words, Hath fully satisfied the justice of God.

I'm looking at the original. The other one, sometimes the letters, the modern one, I don't always think it's in the same spot because it's in a different order. And so the scriptures are usually in the order that the confession wrote the ideas. But so I can turn to Hebrews 9.15 now. And it says, therefore he is the mediator. Well, if I'm just reading Hebrews 9.15, I don't know who he is.

But what I'm believing is the people who wrote the confession think that Hebrews 9.15 supports their statement? Well, the statement was about Christ in the confession. And so I can see, if I look up a little bit in Hebrews 9, that it is about Jesus Christ. If I look at Hebrews 9.11 real quick. But so real quick, I just want to read the one verse. Therefore he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called...

I'm in 9.15, I should be in 9.14. sorry 915 is in the same paragraph though how much more will the blood of Christ who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God purify our conscience from dead works to serve the living God so it tells us that God through the eternal spirit which was in the confession wording in the 8.5 of the modern revised version and in the original one it says, through the eternal spirit, offered himself up to God. And so that statement is just meant to tell us something that the confession was trying to tell us. Now, for me to understand Hebrews 9.14, I might have to go read a little bit beforehand and a little bit after.

Sometimes the verse will just be so obvious, you know what it meant. Sometimes you have to read a little bit more before and after to understand. The writers of the confession did not intend to say that Hebrews 9.14 is the only verse that supports the statement they made. The intention here is that that is a verse that does support it and can be used to support that idea.

There's certainly a lot more scripture to support these ideas. So then I can just look at the next verse, Hebrews 10.14. Something you might notice in your confession is that it just says 10.14. It doesn't say Hebrews beforehand. At least in mine it doesn't. And that's because it says Hebrews 9.14 and then there's a comma and then it says 10.14 and so we're supposed to know that that's still Hebrews.

So in Hebrews 10.14 it says, for by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. Well, that supports the idea that it says once offered up unto God, which is in the confession. so it's by this single offering and what you'll find is as you go through the different paragraphs in the confession the little letters that are next to the verses are also up in the paragraph and it trying to tell you this section of the paragraph is supported by this scripture So then we could look at Romans 3 25 and 26 which is about God sending Jesus as a propitiation for our sins to be received through faith. And it says here he has fully satisfied the justice of God.

And that's what a propitiation is. A propitiation is a wrath satisfying sacrifice. It fully satisfies the justice of God. And then in John 17.2, we could look up that verse. We will real quick. My intention wasn't necessarily to teach this paragraph per se.

It was to show you how you could learn it yourself. In John 17.2, Jesus, I know the context in my head, but I could read the context myself by reading John 17.1. When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven and said, Father, the hour has come. Glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you. So he's praying to the Father right now. Interestingly enough, his eyes are open.

A lot of people think you can't have your eyes open when you pray. Jesus, of course, would never get distracted like we do. But he says, since you have given him, himself, authority over all flesh to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. So there's a scripture that supports the fact that Jesus gives eternal life to those who the Father gave to him.

And then the last verse was Hebrews 9.15. We could go see what Hebrews 9.15 is meant to support by reading that one. I don't want to go there now, but what I want you to understand is that all of these tools are right there at your disposal so that you can learn and understand the confession on your own if you're willing. If you want to put in the effort to understand what this document says that is the founding document of our church, this is what we confess here.

This is why we left Oikos. This is why we left Oikos and started our own church and didn't just go to some different church. The reasoning here was because we want to hold steady and hold fast to this confession, and we want to make sure that we're doing that in the best way we can. And so it's important that we all understand it so that if one of us is doing something wrong, we can correct each other so that we can help one another, so we can try to worship well.

So the first tip was read the confession and reread it, just like you might read the Bible, maybe not with the same effort, maybe not with the same frequency, but read the confession over and over. Read the verses that come with it. Read the modern English to help you understand the old one. Read the verses that come with it and look at which parts of the confession those verses are saying they support.

And then also look at the verses in their context. So don't just read Hebrews 9.14. After you read Hebrews 9.14, go and read more of Hebrews 9 until you can really understand what that paragraph says. The way you know you understand something is if you can teach it. So you are all supposed to become teachers. So I'm speaking to Christians and future Christians right now.

Every one of you, at some point in time, I expect you are to stop being who you are now, and you're supposed to start feeding on the milk of the Word of God when you become a new Christian. Those of you who already are Christians and those who will become Christians, you're going to start feeding on the milk of the Word of God, and then at some point you're supposed to advance to me. You're supposed to get deeper.

You're supposed to eventually get to the point where you understand it and can teach others. That doesn't mean everyone's going to stand up here and teach on a Thursday or a Sunday, but you will have opportunities in your life, if the Lord wills, to teach other people even what little you may know. And so trying to learn it as best you can and then practicing teaching it to others is a great way to do that.

So I just want to encourage you that this is understandable stuff. Another way you could study the confession, too, is that there are people who've just written books on it. There's people who've written exegetical commentaries on the Confession just like they might on the Bible. And we have a study group that we've been doing where we study the Confession with other men and people take turns teaching it.

And so sometimes somebody else teaches me something and I don't put in all the work that week. Somebody else kind of feeds me in a way. And so there's ways we can do these things together as well. So does anybody have any questions about it? Legitimate questions? Well, that was good.