Dennis Tuuri

Last week we began a series of messages that’ll be going through our church confession statement and covenant. In the next few weeks we’ll talk, probably spend maybe four weeks on the doctrinal side of that confessional statement. There’s two sides to the covenant of Reformation Covenant Church. First there’s a statement of beliefs. Then after that there’s a covenant statement where the person signing the covenant agrees or pledges himself to do certain things.

We’re going to spend most of our time over the next few months on that second portion, but it would probably be good to spend a few weeks on the confessional side of it. Basically, centering on the distinctives of Reformation Covenant Church. And so, next week we’ll be talking about the sovereignty of God in salvation. The following week, the sovereignty of God in ethics, the following week, the sovereignty of God in history.

And then finally, we’ll spend a week talking about paedocommunion. And after that, we’ll go into the actual oath part of the covenant.

Last week, we began our discussion of the church covenant by looking at covenants in general and trying to see the covenants that God has made and what how those covenants relate to the covenants that we make. And we talked about how God’s covenants are binding. God’s covenants are representational. God’s covenants have objective evaluators. And God’s covenant with man is all-encompassing.

And so, we said that our covenant statement should have those aspects to it as well. And we’ll go on now to talk then specifically today about why do we have a church covenant. Church covenants are not necessarily all that common today for churches to engage in. So I thought it’d be good just to spend a few minutes this morning talking about why do we have a church covenant at all.

Basically we’ll be talking about three reasons why we have a church covenant. The first reason is really the reason from last week, the last point of last week, and that is that since God’s covenant is all-encompassing, then certainly when we bind together into an institutional church, we should have a covenant arrangement to that as well. So the first reason why we have a church covenant is because of the all-encompassing nature of God’s covenant as a model for us in our relationships.

The second reason is so that it might be a help for orthodoxy or correct beliefs. And the third reason to have a church covenant is so that it would be a help for orthopraxy or correct action.

First of all, then we noted last week that God’s covenant is all-encompassing. We quoted from the Westminster Confession of Faith. It says basically that affirming the creator-creature distinction, that God is so far removed from us that God pleases to show himself to man or reveal himself to man by way of covenant relationship.

And a good image to keep in your mind about that—many of you are familiar with that—the large circle here, small circle down here and two lines going down. The large circle representing God the creator. The two smaller circles representing man and the rest of creation, and the two lines indicating the covenant between man and his creation. God reveals himself to man through the scriptures.

And the scriptures are after all the old covenant and the new covenant. They’re a covenant book. And so God reveals himself to man through, by means of a covenant. And so man can only be understood in relationship to God in the covenant. And that’s certainly true of God’s covenant.

Now I was thinking as I was preparing this talk about a judge’s car. Judge B. got special license plates that says “Law1” and the law was extremely important to Judge B., and he taught us all that learned from him a healthy respect for the law. And we understand that law is the law of the covenant. The law is an all-encompassing feature in our lives as well.

Now we’re not talking just here about civil law but the various law structures that we’re under—the laws of the household. Economics comes from two words meaning household and law, and economics speaks of the law of the household. Households are to have laws. Nations are to have laws. Churches are to have laws. And those laws reflect the terms of the covenant that’s being gone into at that particular point in time.

The law is all pervasive and needs a healthy appreciation by us because it reflects the covenant relationships that God has put us into.

Now, we talked a couple weeks ago about adoption and how the fact that the suszeranty form is not the only form of covenantal relationship man has with man or God has with man. We talked about how James B. Jordan noted in his thesis on slavery that while the Old Testament stresses the suzerainty relationship between God and his people, he suggests that possibly the New Testament stresses instead the idea of adoption where God isn’t seen necessarily as just a suzerain, but he actually adopts the parties that he covenants with into his household.

Well, that isn’t to be seen as a shift from covenant to no covenant. After all, adoption, as we talked about a few weeks ago, is a legal arrangement. It’s a covenantal arrangement between the person who does the adopting and the person that he brings into his family. So it has a legal basis to it, has a covenantal basis.

So we see from these things that God’s covenant is all-encompassing. Now we know that there is a shift of course from the old covenant to the new covenant. The old covenant after all dealt with promise. The promise through messiah to come. The new covenant is an affirmation that messiah has actually arrived in time. The fulfillment of the promise. The old covenant speaks through shadows of the things to come. So there were many shadows, and we talked about the various signs and seals of the Old Testament, the administration of the covenant under the old dispensation, and that God spoke through shadows.

Then those shadows spoke to Jesus Christ and the new covenant recognizes that God now in reality has visited his people in the form of his son. The old covenant was concerned primarily with prophecy of things to come. The new covenant rather looks at the realization of what’s already been accomplished in Jesus Christ. So there is a shift of covenants but it’s obvious in all that it is a shift in covenant administration.

It’s not a shift from no covenant or from covenant to no covenant. It’s all covenantal, even though there is a different thrust to the two covenants.

Now, we know that, and we talked about this briefly last week—we’ll review it today—that God, when God created Adam, entered into a covenant relationship with Adam, which is the covenant of works. And we talked about the distinctions between the covenant of works last week and the covenant of grace.

Covenant of works is not the old testament. Okay, I hope we stressed that last week. When you hear the covenant of works, that talks specifically about the covenant that God made with Adam prefall. Okay, the covenant of grace is the rest of history. And that includes both the old covenant, the old testament of scriptures and the new covenant. Those are two different administrations of the covenant of grace.

Okay. But when God created Adam, he entered into covenant relationship with him, the covenant of works. And we know that when God gave Adam a wife, that as well was a covenantal relationship and talks to the importance of the covenant in God’s dealings with man and also in man’s dealings with other men and women. Adam and Eve were in a covenant relationship.

Now, we know that because in Malachi 2:15, there’s a specific charge there that God is bringing against his people. And he’s saying that you dealt treacherously with the wife of your youth, the wife of thy covenant. And he says there that the marriage relationship is to be seen as a covenantal relationship. Okay? And that’s Malachi 2:15, a very important passage, where the wife is called the wife of the covenant.

And by the way, Malachi 2 goes on to state that the purpose for that union between the man and the wife of his covenant is that they might have a godly seed. That God himself might have seed by means of the covenantal relationship with the family that he’s established. And we know that as well is restressed in the New Testament. Children of believing parents are sanctified or holy. They’re a holy seed set apart to God covenantally through this covenantal relationship with the family.

So we know that God’s dealings with men are covenantal. Man’s dealings with his wife is covenantal. And we know from that all of life then we can see is permeated by this covenant relationship.

And we know that God’s relationship with the Old Testament church, the church under the old administration was also covenantal. And the scripture we just read out of Exodus 24 of course speaks to that. But even prior to that, we know that God created a covenant with Abram. And we’ve talked a lot of times about how the animals were cut in two and God passed between them with Abram in a vision.

And it’s by the way in the context of that covenant that God told Abram that his descendants would be slaves for 400 years. And now these people are coming out of slavery as God had promised Abram in his covenant. They’re coming back out of slavery now. And God reestablishes this covenant relationship with them. And so we have this formal process whereby the people of God, the people of the Old Testament church come back into a covenanting relationship with God and acknowledge his ownership of them and acknowledge him as their God.

And he takes them to be his people. So we know that God covenants with the Old Testament church. After all in Exodus 24:7-8 we read he took the book of the covenant and read it in the audience of the people and they said all that the Lord hath said will we do and be obedient and Moses took the blood and sprinkled it on the people and said behold the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words.

So beyond a shadow of a doubt the Old Testament church was in covenant relationship with God.

Now the scriptures tell us use this exact same terminology about the blood of the covenant in Hebrews 10:29. Now that passage in Hebrews 10:29 we have in our older communion form which we’re not using very much these days but is a very excellent passage in terms of remembering the necessity to walk in obedience to the terms of the covenant.

Because what the writer of the book of Hebrews is saying is he talks about the Old Testament covenant a lot in Hebrews and he’s saying that under that covenant if he that despised Moses’ law died without mercy under two or three witnesses of how much sorer punishment suppose ye shall he be thought worthy who hath trod underfoot the son of God and hath counted the blood of the covenant wherewith he was sanctified an unholy thing and hath done despite unto the spirit of grace.

What he’s saying here is that we know there was this old covenant church and there was blood of the covenant there from animals that were slain sprinkled upon the people. And he’s saying that if under that dispensation, if under that administration of the covenant, people who rejected the law of Moses died on the testimony of two or three witnesses, how much worse would it be today if those who’ve been brought into the reality of the new covenant, the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament talked about in Jesus Christ, if those people who see that now despise the blood of the covenant that Jesus has established with his blood.

Now, we know then that what he’s talking about is that the New Testament church is a covenantal has a covenantal relationship to God as well. Jesus Christ came, shed his blood, sprinkled it on the people as it were and through that vehicle ratified the covenant with his church. And so he says if we’re in covenant relationship now, not by means of the typological blood of animals in the Old Testament, but by means of the blood of God’s only son, Jesus Christ, the creator of the universe, the redeemer of mankind.

If we now turn away from that covenant and reject the law of Christ, okay? The law of the new covenant which has a relationship to the old covenant. If we reject that law and we in essence despise the blood of the covenant that Jesus has established in his blood, then we are in much worse trouble than the person who was stoned or cut off from the people on the basis of two or three witnesses of the old covenant.

So, we know that God’s dealings with the New Testament church as well are covenantal. That the blood of Jesus Christ that we partake of symbolically through the wine in our communion service weekly is blood of covenant. Same terminology, blood of the covenant. It shows a continuity between that old covenant we read about Exodus 24 and the new covenant of grace, the administration of that same covenant through the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

God’s covenant is all-encompassing dealing with mankind, his relationship to God, dealing with man’s relationship to other men and also dealing representationally God’s relationship to the Old Testament church and the New Testament church. And so it’s important on the basis of all these things that we reflect that in our church community that we understand that our church community should be a covenantal institution.

Now the fact that the church is an institution inescapably is clearly revealed in the New Testament. Now we know that the church is an organism. It has to have life to it. To simply try to put up an institutional church without having the reality of the Holy Spirit and the indwelling of the people of that congregation is wrong. But we know that if we just stress organism and not the shape or the function of the institution, we know that is as well a denial of biblical truth.

We know this because there’s for lots of reasons, but just we’ll go briefly through a few. In Ephesians 4:11, there are offices given to the church institutionally. Okay, there are offices there. In Acts 14:23, the people are told to select elders. And the word there to set aside these elders is actually to vote by putting forth your hand. We know that the congregation selected elders through some sort of voting mechanism.

Okay, that’s institutional talk. It didn’t just occur. There was an actual institutional practice that was gone into by the part of the congregation to select those elders.

Matthew 18 and the section of scripture dealing with excommunication and how to correct an erring brother—and you know you’re probably familiar with the basic thrust of that passage. If a person is in sin, you go to him individually. You go back to him if he doesn’t repent with two or three. And then if he still doesn’t hear him, you tell it to the church. Well, who are you going to tell it to?

And we know that there is such a thing as the invisible church, the church of all ages. We know that the church is not restricted to a local congregation. But certainly Jesus isn’t here saying you send out a notice throughout the entire world. He’s saying there’s an institutional establishment here, known as the church. And if that person continues in his sin, you have to tell it to the church institutionally.

1 Corinthians 5:13, “The man who is in grievous sin before God is to be put out of the church.” Titus 3:10 talks about heretical people who believe in heresy to reject such a one. You can’t put somebody out of an institution if the institution doesn’t exist.

So, we know that God’s scriptures are clear that the church will become institutionalized as it grows. That’s not a bad thing. It actually you can talk about it in relationship to God’s being one and many, form and substance again. And the fact that certainly a church has to have the substance but it will also develop form to accommodate that substance. And we know that’s true because God tells us that form is to be covenantal.

So the church is institutionalized has to be. Well, how are we going to institutionalize the church? How are we going to decide who to tell it to if a brother is erring? How do we decide who isn’t in the church and who is in the church? If one of the things that results from excommunication is a person being excluded from the church, you have to say who’s in and who’s out.

How are you going to do that? Well, there’s lots of different ways you could do it. There’s lots of ways the churches do it today. You know, we could apply the principles of democracy and just have whoever’s there and present wants to vote. Those people can vote on the selection of elders or can be included into this congregational system, this institutionalized church.

Now, we know that is the way a lot of churches do perform. Actually, they say that you know if a lot of churches say that if a person shows up two or three times, they’re member of that church that they’re to be included into the fellowship then and they would participate in the selection of eldership for instance.

Now the church that believes that anybody can be a member of that church simply by coming and wanting to be a member. What are they saying in that? Well, they’re saying that to put exclusions on that to discriminate between people coming into the church from one another in terms of faith, in terms of practice, is wrong. They’re saying that you shouldn’t do that. Whoever comes in the door, those people should be allowed to vote, participate in the institutional church.

Well, that flies directly in the face of biblical Christianity. God is, after all, a God who discriminates, doesn’t he? Now, he doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor. We know that. He doesn’t discriminate on the basis of somebody’s race, but he does discriminate on the belief systems that people hold and the practice that they involve themselves in. And he commands us to have that kind of discrimination as well.

Why else would we put a person out of the church? We put them out for two reasons. Because he has broken the commands of God or the covenant of God. And by doing that, we’re told by God that we’re to assume at that point that the person has no true belief, faith that works. That’s discrimination.

And so it is that churches today that say there should be no discrimination, there should be no excommunication, there should be no qualifications for membership in the institutional church. Those churches deny a basic teaching of God’s word and that is the fact that God discriminates between sheep and goats.

Strikes me as funny, you know, how people can talk about those sort of systems and say how tolerant they are. Well, that’s not tolerant at all, is it? It’s being completely intolerant toward people who understand that God discriminates. They’re saying that person is wrong. If you have those sort of qualifications, you shouldn’t be involved in this church. Those sort of churches demonstrate by their membership practices that they are in fact practicing humanists.

They’re saying that people are all that count, not God and his holy requirements. Well, that’s one way to go about institutionalizing the church through democracy and through what you call “whosoever will” membership. Whoever wants to join can join. And I, you know, I know of many churches today, of course, who take great pleasure in the fact that they can have people of diverse faiths coming to their services.

You know, I’ve heard church pastors say, “Well, we have Buddhists coming to our church.” As if that was a good thing. Not for the purpose of proselytizing them, not for the purpose of telling them they’re wrong. They just like the fact that they’re there and they enjoy the fellowship of Jesus. Now, we know that is not a biblical way to institutionalize the church.

There other methods as well. Many churches today not explicitly but implicitly are formed around economic bounds, economic ties, people that have like economic faith, consumer churches as it were, and congregate together in terms of their economic standing. And you’ll see that many churches today that have what they have in common is an economic position or a lifestyle. And so there’s discrimination on the basis of economics there. Discrimination but not godly discrimination.

I was talking about this all a few weeks ago. I noticed that when we were at someone’s house having a barbecue that there are various people there and how I noticed that day that there were such different types of people at our church economically and in their musical appreciation for instance, which tells a lot about a person. There diversity here. Why is that? Because our qualifications here in terms of the institutional church isn’t based upon extra biblical criteria. We discriminate covenantally the way God discriminates on the basis of faith, on the basis of correct practice, in accordance with the book of the covenant.

So covenantally is the way that God tells us to institutionalize our churches. We talked about this somewhat also when we went through Psalm 15.

“Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? Who shall dwell in thy holy hill?” And we talked about the fact that the church is now the tabernacle of God. The New Testament is clear in that. Who shall abide in that? “He that walketh uprightly and worketh righteousness and speaketh the truth in his heart”—believe in his heart, acts correctly. Orthodoxy, orthopraxy here. That’s the person who shall abide in the tabernacle of God.

And then go on to give some specific criteria of basic membership or citizenship in Zion. “He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbor, nor taketh up a reproach against his neighbor. In whose eyes a vile person is condemned, but he honoreth them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his own hurt changeth not.” Covenant keeper, that’s who abides in the holy hill of God, on the basis of his faith and his practice, we’re to discriminate.

That’s the way that God tells us to institutionalize our churches covenantally. We do so because God’s relationship to us is covenantal.

Now, church covenants are also a good thing. And one of the reasons why we have a church covenant here in this church is for orthodoxy, correct beliefs. We read in Psalm 15 there that the one who believes in his heart, understands correctly in his heart, speaketh the truth in his heart. That’s the person who abides in the holy hill of God. It implies a belief system, an understanding of the revealed word of God and obedience to it.

Correct doctrine is important in the scriptures and the scriptures spend a lot of time talking about that. Now, I know that in this day and age, correct doctrine, theology is derided. Church after church, churches that call themselves New Testament churches. And yet, the New Testament spends a lot of time talking about correct doctrine. When Jesus came, the thing that the people were astonished by was his doctrine, his teaching, his system of belief, what he taught.

Told in 1 Timothy 4, “Take heed unto thyself and unto the doctrine, continue in them, for in doing this, thou shalt both save thyself and them that hear thee.” 2 John 1:9, “Whosoever transgresseth and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ hath not God. He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ he hath both the father and the son.”

Doctrine is important in scripture and many more verses we could go through that talk about the New Testament specifically, although we don’t have to restrict ourselves to that. The New Testament is a great emphasis placed upon the doctrine of Christ teaching. It’s important to have correct doctrine. Without correct doctrine, the verses we just read said that we don’t have God, don’t have the father.

Now doctrines and intrigues—these sort of things as I said are derided today. Here’s a quote out of a recent book that attacks creedalism. “To arrive at truth we must dismiss religious prejudices from heart and mind. We must let God speak for himself. To let God be true means to let God have the say as to what is the truth that sets men free. It means to accept his word, the Bible, as the truth. Our appeal is to the Bible for truth.”

In the same book, creeds are referred to as “man-made traditions, the precepts of men and opinions.” I’m quoting, by the way, out of “The Usefulness of Creeds” by Kenneth Gentry, which is a real good little booklet. This represents a common attitude toward creeds today in our world, in the life of the church today.

A frequent way that this is expressed is that we have no creed but Jesus Christ or we have no creed but the Bible. Well, this is ridiculous in a word. First of all, it’s ridiculous because creeds are inescapable. To affirm that one has no creed but the Bible is to have a creed. A creed is simply a succinct statement of belief. Creed comes from the Latin word “credo”—I believe. And to believe that there are no creeds other than the Bible is a belief in itself, isn’t it? It’s internally contradictory to say that we have no creed but the Bible.

Creeds are inescapable. And so because creeds are inescapable, it’s important then that our creeds be precise and that our creeds be made public. Churches that say we have no creed but the Bible are in reality being deceitful about what they believe. The same is true of no creed but Christ. What Christ are we talking about there?

“No creed but Christ.” What Christ are we talking about? The passage we read out of Exodus 24 says that God took blood and sprinkled the people. And interpreting that in the book of Hebrews, we’re told that Moses also sprinkled the book of the covenant with that same blood. God brought people into covenant relationship with him under the old covenant. He does so in the new covenant.

That doesn’t mean that the only thing important now is the personal relationship we have with God or with Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ isn’t strictly speaking our big brother who we have a personal relationship with. We have relationship with Jesus Christ through the covenant. So the book of the covenant, the instructions that God gave in that covenant statement, correct beliefs, correct practice—those things were sprinkled by Moses with the blood of the covenant as well to show the importance of it.

Jesus Christ is Jesus Christ of the covenant and of the book of the covenant. And he tells us that if we love him, we’ll obey his commandments.

So to say that our only creed we have is Jesus Christ is really silly. Before I became a Christian 15 years ago or so, I was involved in various counterculture activities and hey, Jesus Christ was okay there too. You know, the cosmic Jesus Christ, the Aquarian gospel of Jesus Christ, for instance, was big with some people I knew. This was not the Christ of the scriptures. The Christ of the Scriptures has to be defined in terms of the belief system that he sets forth in terms of the book of the covenant.

Now, churches will have creeds. The quote I read from Gentry’s book about how the only creed we want is the Bible and everything else is man-made—that comes from a Jehovah’s Witness book. Okay? And Jehovah’s Witnesses and fundamentalists both would say the same thing: we have no creed but the Bible. And then they’d have to figure out how come if that’s the only creed they have, why they don’t like each other and why they wouldn’t let each other participate in their churches.

We do have creeds. If you can think back to your own experience in other churches, if a church you were involved with didn’t have a stated creed, in all likelihood that creed could be discerned through whatever songs they sang, the Sunday school materials, the way they conducted their worship service. These things were all creedal in that they express a belief system on the part of the people who are in charge of that institutional church.

If you can’t, in thinking back over the churches you visited, if you can’t think of what the creed might be through the songs they sing or the Sunday school materials, one sure way to find out about what the church believed was to go against it, go against that creedal position even if it wasn’t stated.

One of the churches that I attended in the past, this very thing happened. You know, this church said that we don’t believe that either Calvinism or Arminianism are correct or that Calvinists and Armenianists should be—I was told by this church and some people who espouse that probably talk about more of this next week, but some people who espouse that use the illustration of a railroad track and how there’s these two sides of the railroad track. If you look down far enough, the railroad track comes together. And you know that’s an optical illusion. Those rails never come together.

Any church that affirms a belief in Calvinism and Arminianism and says they hold them both jointly is probably being deceitful with you. And this particular church that I attended—Arminianism was repeatedly taught in the content of various Sunday school classes. But when somebody taught a Sunday school class that was overtly Calvinistic and made his position in terms of Calvinism clear, that person immediately came under instruction from the elders of the church.

They didn’t have that in their creedal statement. They didn’t say we’re Armenians in this church. In fact, they claimed just the opposite. If you talk to them about it, and yet as soon as you walk over that line—that is really a revelation of their creed. As soon as you walk over that line, you’ll find out what their creedal statement is in terms of God’s sovereignty. That’s just what happened.

The churches are going to have creeds. Belief systems are inescapable because after all, man, created by God and God gives man covenantal relationships with him by means of belief systems. Well, what’s wrong with that? Why not have just creeds just sort of in the ethos of the church as it were and if you walk across the line, you get in trouble?

Well, the problem with that is it’s deceitful. It’s what it really does is it opens up the church to tremendous manipulation by the people in control. They can determine on the basis of how they feel that day or what they think that day if a person has violated that church creed. It’s not so in a church that has a confessional statement or creedal formulation spelling out the doctrine of the church.

That church is bound to objective criteria. Remember we talked about how covenants, God’s covenants have objective evaluators. Churches should have objective evaluators out there, not subject to the whim of the leadership at that particular day or year or whatever it is. We should have those things precise. We should have our doctrinal statements as precise as possible. That simple. And they should be public.

So the people coming to our church want to know what this church believes. We can tell them here’s what we believe. Here are some things that if you don’t agree with, you probably won’t be happy in this church. So they don’t spend a lot of time and effort coming into a church or coming to the church regularly and then find out all along the church actually was an Arminian church and they’d been told for two years that it wasn’t.

That’s deceitful. One of the requirements of God’s law of the old dispensation, continuing today, is that God’s law be made public to the people. That the law of God be read openly to the people. They know they’d know what the objective evaluators of that covenant relationship were. And so it is with churches. We should have creedal statements that objectively tell people and identify to people where the church is at.