How do we read our Bibles? How do we understand the Scriptures? One thing for us to proclaim the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. But possible for us in a sense to deny both by the way in which we miss handle and misuse the Word of God. As a new Christian, having spent my first 18 years of life with no Bible reading or Sunday school, I had no framework or context to help me understand the Scriptures. And sadly, for some Christians today, due to the widespread biblical illiteracy, you can spend 18 years in some churches and face the same challenges that I did. So today, on this Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind, Sinclair Ferguson will share several principles to show the covenantal nature of Scripture to help us understand it better, and to see the relationship between the Old Testament and the New, the Old Testament figures, and our Lord Jesus Christ. And today only, to help you in your lifetime of study, we're offering a copy of the Reformation Study Bible when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. I'll tell you more about the study Bible at the end of Dr. Ferguson's message. This message was from a Ligonier Ministries National Conference back in 2002. The theme of the conference was War on the Word, and that war has only intensified over the past two decades. So here's Dr. Ferguson with a message on rightly dividing the Word. While now we are turning for this session in our Bibles to Paul's second letter to Timothy, and I want to read some verses there, well-known verses from chapter 3 and into the beginning of chapter 4. Second Timothy, chapter 3, into the beginning of chapter 4. Interestingly, Paul at the beginning of chapter 3 is giving a description of the pressures that the people of God will know during the last days. And they have an uncanny resemblance to the disintegration of our own societies at the beginning of the 21st century. By contrast, however, you, however, and the contrast there is strong, you by contrast, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings, what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium, and Lestra, the persecutions I endured, yet the Lord rescued me from all of them. In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted, while evil men and imposters will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived. But as for you continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of, because you know those from whom you learned it, and how from infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge. Preach the word. Be prepared in season and out of season. Correct, rebuke, and encourage, with great patience and careful instruction. For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine instead to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to save what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you keep your head in all situations. And your hardship, do the work of an evangelist. Discharge all the duties of your ministry. The very simple question that we are to address in this session is the question, "How do we read our Bibles? How do we understand the Scriptures?" One thing for us to proclaim the inerrancy and authority of Scripture. But possible for us in a sense to deny both the inerrancy and the authority of Scripture by the way in which we mishandle and misuse the word of God. And so it is important for us to try to think together about how we use the Bible, how we understand the Bible and how we interpret the Bible. A number of weeks ago in our own congregation in Glasgow, we began a series of studies on Paul's letter to the Ephesians. And I entitled the first sermon in that series, taking the Ephesians test, taking the Ephesians test. What I had in mind was a test that I suppose in a way, my own simple way, I had devised as a very young minister. When someone in our congregation had come to me very excited about his quiet times, his daily reading of Paul's letter to the Ephesians. He was a young man scarcely any younger than I was actually. I thought we knew one another well enough, we had bonded sufficiently together for me to try something out on him that might be a little painful for him. And so I said to him, "Have you ever taken the Ephesians test?" Well, I knew he'd never taken the Ephesians test because I'd just invented it on the spur of the moment. And he narrowed his eyes and said, "The Ephesians test?" I said, "Well, you've been telling me what marvelous times you've been having in these last four weeks studying Ephesians." Imagine I had given you a notebook at the beginning of the month when you had opened Ephesians chapter 1, verse 1, and said to you, "Now over the period of the next few weeks, I want you to write down what you are learning as you study Paul's letter to the Ephesians. If you were prepared to hand that notebook back to me at the end of the month, would I find either one, a most fascinating and illuminating description of your own spiritual pilgrimage during the course of these last four weeks? And how, from day to day, you have responded to the Word of God. You have listened to what God is saying to you. Or would I find, number two, at least as a foundation for your reflection on how the Word of God applied to you, would I find, at least in the pages of your notebook, a sufficiently clear and substantial outline of what Paul was actually saying to the Ephesians? That I would know it was his letter to the Ephesians that you were studying. And he looked at me a little sheepishly and said, "There is no doubt what you would find would be a spiritual autobiography and you would find almost nothing about what Paul was actually saying to the Ephesians." And this, to me, was such an illuminating moment that I've used the Ephesians test. You can give it 66 different names, actually. I've used it so often and so frequently discovered an echo of my friend's answer that underlying sport seems to me to be a deep-seated malaise in our evangelical community as we study the Word of God together. There is, Bob Godfrey was already hinting to us, and this has become something of a theme in many of the things that have already been said. At the end of the day, we are really so obsessed with ourselves that we are finding it difficult actually to listen to what the Word of God is saying. We are so interested in short-term gain that we have little interest in long-term investment so that we may have studied Ephesians or Philippians or Romans or Isaiah over years and years and years and years, and yet if somebody were to say to you, well, just give me a quick outline of Romans. What is Paul actually saying or Ephesians or Philippians or Isaiah or Exodus? For all the years, for all the time of our study of the Bible, there is at least a sense in which we haven't gotten to the bedrock on which we can build a permanent knowledge of the Scriptures so that it is not simply the mirror into which we look day by day, which has its value, but has become so part of our being so imbibed by us, the very structure of the thought of the Bible has become so much the structure of our thought that we really have learned in measure to have the mind of Christ and indeed to think God's thoughts after him to such an extent that the teaching of the Bible becomes the very instinct of our souls. And it is because it is such an urgent need for us to learn to do this, but it's important for us to try to think a little self-consciously about some of the great principles that govern our understanding of the Bible, govern our reading of the Scriptures, govern our interpretation of the Scriptures. And so we think together in this context, against this background, about what it means to rightly handle the Word of God one, and to rightly handle the Word of God two. And it is of course precisely at this point that we are so grateful to that movement that we call the Protestant Reformation, forgiving the Word of God back to the people of God in a way that enabled the people of God to read the Word of God in such a way that they could make it their own, and that the truth of God began to seep through the pores of their very existence. Most of us who come to a conference like this are familiar with the fact that by the pre-Reformation days, elements of Bible understanding that had crept into the Christian Church from relatively early on now took center stage. And the really important thing in the way in which the Bible was handled was what its spiritual meaning was. And one of the great tanning points of the Reformation was when Martin Luther trumpeted the simple truth, that this spiritual meaning of the Bible is the literal meaning of the Bible and the literal meaning of the Bible is the spiritual meaning of the Bible. But if you're going to understand the Word of God, you've got to listen to what God says in that word, in terms of its history, in terms of its plain meaning, and not in terms of the wonders that you can spin out of that, in terms of a kind of second level of allegorical meaning. Or a third level of so-called "tropological meaning" or a fourth level of "anagogical meaning". Simply to go back to the Scriptures and listen to the Word of God as that Word is given to us in space, in time, in the reality of human experience, in history. And not to fall foul as so often the early Christians tended to do of the influence. We all do this, of the influence, of the philosophy of our days, the approach of our days, and their day, the philosophy that's usually called neo-platonism, that was always looking for the spiritual meaning by contrast with the athlete, the literal, the historic meaning. I think it wouldn't be too far from the truth to say that ever since then, evangelical Christians have been plagued with a reading of the Bible that has been very little concerned with what the authors are saying and far more concerned with answering the question, "What does this say to me today, here and now?" And the value of what the Reformers were seeking to do was not simply a matter of a scholastic argument, a scholastic disagreement. It was because they had this great vision which they exhibited, particularly in the way in which they themselves expounded the scriptures, literally day in and day out to the congregations of the Lord's people, by simply coming to them and saying to them, "This is what God is actually saying in His Word." The consequence was that the people of God, by placing their lives under the ministry of God's Word, were learning in the very best way possible how to interpret the scriptures, not by being given a series of principles, but by listening to the scriptures being interpreted in the ministry of the Word of God and instinctively imbibing those principles. In order that we ourselves might learn how to interpret the scriptures. Well, I want us for a few minutes to think about some of the great emphasis that emerged in the days of the Reformation and emerged in a very interesting way in this very cardinal passage which we read a few minutes ago in 2 Timothy 3 and into chapter 4. And I read through chapter 3 into chapter 4 to underline the point that the apostle Paul did not write in the margins of his epistles, chapter numbers. And you would notice as we read through that passage that Paul, having said in 3, 16 and 17, this is what scripture is for, then says to Timothy, "If that's what it's for, go and use it that way." And he picks up the very vocabulary that he's used in describing the qualities or characteristics of scripture and says, "Now this should be the qualities and characteristics of the way you use scripture." And so in this marvelous way, in this context, he himself gives us some basic principles as we come to handle the scriptures in a godly way. And I want to underline four of them. The first of them is this, one of the great watchwords of the Reformation, sola scriptura. The principle, first of all, of the sufficiency of scripture. This is the great emphasis, isn't it, in verses 16 and 17. All scripture is God breathed, has these functions, and serves in order, verse 17, that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work. Now, it's likely, I think, in that context, that man of God is a semi-technical description for the servant of God, the minister of the word of God. But if this is true for the minister of the word of God, it is by parity of reasoning, true for all the people of God as they use God's word. That the God breathed scriptures are absolutely sufficient in and of themselves, thoroughly to equip the servants of God, the men of God, the women of God, the people of God, adequate to equip them for every good work. And that, of course, in the days of the Reformation, stood over against the emphasis of the Roman Catholic Church that the scriptures in and of themselves are insufficient. Whenever it hasn't happened for many years, whenever a Mormon came round to my door in Scotland, telling me how I needed to read the Book of Mormon, he said, "Yes, the Bible is fine, but you need the Book of Mormon." I would point him to 2 Timothy 3, verses 16 and 17, and say to him, "If the word of God itself says, I don't really need anything in addition, how can you say as you bring this book to me in your hand that I need this in addition?" And this, as I say, was the great emphasis of the Reformation. Interesting to notice in that connection that Paul understands that the emphasis on the sufficiency of the scriptures does not demean or deny the importance of the Christian Church and the Christian fellowship to me. He says, "In verse 14, you continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of." Well, of course, because it's God breathed this scripture. Well, that's true, but you notice what he says, "Continue in what you have learned and have become convinced of because you know those from whom you land it, from your infancy you have known the holy scriptures." And he understands that the Bible and the Church are both the ordinances of God, that the Bible is the Word of God and that the Church of Jesus Christ is that community in which the Word of God is taking life in the obedience of the fellowship of God's people. So that those of us who are preachers of the gospel know that one of the strongest blessings God can give us is a community of these people, in whom the words that we speak make sense to those who have never heard these words before, because they see the Word of God come to life in the application that's been given in the community of God's people. So this emphasis on the absolute soul sufficiency of Scripture does not deny the significance of the community of God's people as an expression of the truth of Scripture, as a vehicle to encourage us to understand Scripture, as illustrations of the truth of Scripture. But it does surely deny every conceivable dual source of authority theory. That has ever been propounded in the past 2,000 years. It's certainly denied at the time of the Reformation and denies today the dual authority view of Revelation held in the Roman Catholic Church. This is why, to say to a Roman Catholic, the Bible is authoritative. And then on the basis of that alone, to say to them, "So this is wrong, and this is wrong, and this is wrong," can be so much water off a duck's back. Because certainly the consistent Roman Catholic believes that God has given Revelation from two sources, the source of holy Scripture and the source of holy tradition. And until we are able to demonstrate from the first source that the second source by definition is false. We are never able to get far in the course of our polemics with the Roman Catholic Church. There is, however, and we've had a taste of it in some of the things we've talked about already in this conference. There is, however, a denial of the sufficiency of Scripture. Indeed, I think there are several different kinds of the denial of sufficiency of Scripture that are current in our contemporary evangelicalism. They are present at one level in the scholarly world, where the sufficiency of Scripture is minimized by the weight that is attached to natural revelation outside of Scripture or events in history outside of Scripture or to scientific investigation outside of Scripture. And where the scriptures are fitted into a new mold of another source of revelation. That's certainly true in a different way, at a totally different level, in what I think of as charismatic immediately. We of the Word of God, I've had it sentiment. We of the Word of God, the Word of God is expounded to us, but we have this as well. We have these revelations that God gives to us. You are a farmed Christian, you are the Word of God, but you don't have this. We are preaching the Word, we are expounding the scriptures, we are studying the Bible just as much as you are. My dear friends, that may be true in the first few years of the first generation, but it never lasts beyond the first generation. Why? Because as soon as you propose an immediate source of revelation, be it holy church or holy charismatic revelation, as soon as you propose a more immediate source of revelation. It is psychologically inevitable that that second source of revelation will become the tale that wags the dog. Why on earth should I spend my hours studying the scriptures trying to find out from my commentary? What the Greek or the Hebrew might mean coming to conferences like this? If God can speak to me right here and now with the same divine authority. There isn't a human being under the sun who isn't psychologically likely to give to that second source of revelation an immediate set of canonical authority for living the Christian life, that they do not have not and would not give to the pages of sacred scripture. And there's a very simple way to test it. How well do you know your Bible? So we need to understand this great principle of the Reformation is profoundly relevant to us today. The second principle is this. If the scriptures are sufficient, then they are also perspicuous. This is, of course, the doctrine of the perspicuity of scripture, which shouldn't be confused with the perspicacity of scripture, which is also true, but not the truth of this scripture. What is the perspicuity of scripture? It is the clarity of scripture. And Paul hints at this already when he speaks to Timothy. He says listen to Timothy from childhood. The psychiatrists of our modern world and their secular wisdom say whatever you do, don't give the Bible to children. It's dangerous for them. What do the scriptures say? They say Timothy from childhood, it was possible for you to know and to understand the scriptures, to read and to believe the Bible. Those of you who are pastors, those of you who are parents and have the opportunity of seeing youngsters being brought up in the context of Christian godliness, aren't you sometimes astonished by the questions they ask? They not only understand the perspicuity of scripture, they understand the perspicacity of scripture. They are asking questions that bring them into the very foundations of understanding the wisdom and the power and the majesty of God. They want to understand the Trinity. We are so pathetic in our middle years that we have come to thinking that the Trinity is, well, a kind of old-fashioned doctrine of the early Christian church that has no practical relevance and our little children are looking up into our eyes and saying, have I got this right? This is important to me. I need to understand God's revelation. And this, too, is a very important principle of the Reformation, that the scriptures that are sufficient to point us to Jesus Christ, to funishes for every good work, are also perspicuous. They teach us the way of salvation with a singular clarity that even a child can understand. A child, of course, illumined by the work of the Holy Spirit, but nevertheless, a child. And yet there is something that we need to learn, as it were, on the obverse of this. If the Reformers taught the perspicuity of scripture, that is to say that the way of salvation is made plain in scripture. They also recognize that that principle implied that there are some parts of scripture that are clearer than others, that are more perspicuous than others. They got that, of course, straight out of the apostolic mouth. Paul says, you remember in various places things that Peter regarded as difficult to understand. And we need to understand that it is not a biblical mentality to think, that you understand everything that's in the Bible. It is certainly not a reformed mentality to think that you know everything. And it is not to be a matter of shame to us to say, there are some things in the Bible I actually find difficult to understand. My dear brother or sister, since God is ultimately the author of the Bible, it shouldn't surprise you, there are some things that God says, that God does, that are difficult to understand. What has become of us that we complain that there are things that are difficult to understand? How good for our humility that there are. But you know there's something that we need to learn from that. It isn't easy for us to learn, it takes wisdom for us to understand it. But if there are some things in scripture that are clearer than other things, then we ought to attach the weight of our emotional commitment in a way that is appropriate to the clarity of the revelation. Those of you who are teachers, you must have experienced as I've sometimes experienced, too often experienced in grading exams, that there are students who have sat listening to your class or to your lectures, who have assumed that you constantly speak in capital letters. They are incapable of distinguishing between what you are saying in capital letters and what you are saying in small letters. And very often as Christians part because of our profound emotional commitment to the scriptures, the Word of God in their entirety, we lose sight of the importance, the practical importance of the Doctor of the Perspicuity of Scripture, which helps us to give emotional commitment of the highest order to the things that are clearest. And to understand that there are things in scripture that are difficult for us to understand as a Christian community. Then while we give our total commitment to everything that God has said in scripture, we do not give the same emotional commitment to the things that we don't understand as clearly as a community as we do to the things that we do understand clearly as a community. And this is why, for example, in the days of the Reformation, you find this extraordinary Catholic spirit by and large. I know there were failures but by and large an extraordinary Catholic spirit among the Reformers, as they sought to grasp the perspicuity of Scripture. But then there's a third principle and it emerges wonderfully in 2 Timothy 3. And that is, and this is really my main point, the Christocentric nature of Scripture. The fact that all Scripture focuses ultimately on the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. From infancy, he says, verse 15, you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. I marvel at the genius of that statement incidentally. That's not the way most of us would put it. We would say the Scriptures teach you how to be saved. But Paul, out of this wealth of biblical understanding, says what the Scriptures teach you is how to become wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. He is really saying that all of the Scriptures in all of their parts ultimately have this focus upon the person, upon the work of our Lord Jesus Christ. As Luther delighted to say, when you go to the Scriptures, you go to the Scriptures like the wise men going to the manger in order to find Jesus. And Calvin, a little more modestly, argues constantly that Jesus Christ is what he calls the scopus of the Scriptures. He is the scope, he is the great burden. He is the focus of the teaching of the Scriptures. The principle so wonderfully illustrated in Luke chapter 24 and the marvelous journey, not only on the road to Emmaus, but the journey on the road to the very heart of the Scriptures, in which Jesus accompanied these two disciples on the day of his resurrection. And in reflection, they commented on what we comment on when the Holy Spirit guides us into the truth of Scripture and unveils the person and work of Christ in Scripture, did not our hearts burn within us. But what was he doing? He was showing them in all the Scriptures, the things that related to himself. But the question is, how did he do it? And how do we do it? It was here, of course, that the early church fell into its allegorical method of handling the Scriptures. And many evangelical Christians still fall into that allegorical method of handling the Scriptures. If Christ is to be found in all of the Scriptures, for example, where is he to be found in the parable of the good Samaritan? And so the church wove this allegorical meaning into the parable of the good Samaritan, that the man who was broken at the side of the road was the sinner, that the man who came along and helped him was Jesus, the Savior, that the donkey was the Holy Spirit, that the inn was the church, that St. Peter was its keeper, that the two silver coins were baptism and the Lord's supper, and that the promise of the Samaritan that he would return was an expectation of his coming in future glory. But where is Jesus in the parable of the good Samaritan? Well, he's telling the parable of the good Samaritan. That's where he is in the parable of the good Samaritan. And I suppose if one had listened, as perhaps some of you have listened to an exposition of the parable of the good Samaritan like this, you would have gone staggering out of the church saying, "Wow! How did he get that out of this passage? Why did I not see it in this passage?" And the answer presumably is because it's not there in this passage. And so we need to understand that when we see that the scriptures have a Christological center, a Christological focus, we are not perverting or transforming their natural meaning in order either supernaturally or subnaturally or unnaturally to try to find Jesus. But if we'll listen to the scriptures as they come to us in their historical context with their grammatical meaning in the light of all that we are learning in an ongoing way about what the scriptures teach us, then we will see how all of the scriptures point us to and lead us to our Lord Jesus Christ. How do they do this? They do this by what we customarily call a redemptive historical pattern. We understand that the whole of the Bible is a story in history that focuses upon the way in which God redeems his people and ultimately redeems them in the person and work of Jesus Christ. And if we are to understand that, then I think there are five principles that we need to try and grasp that will give us in a kind of overview way an approach to studying the whole Bible that will begin to unveil for us the whole Christ who is revealed in the whole Bible. And I want to try to enunciate these five principles now. Principle number one is this. But the Bible has a fundamentally covenantal structure. The Bible has a fundamental covenantal structure. What do I mean when I say that the Bible has a covenantal structure? I mean this, that the Bible is essentially the story of a promise to which God has absolutely and resolutely committed himself to keeping. It's the story of a promise that God has absolutely and resolutely committed himself to keeping, staked his existence on keeping it. And it's the amazing, adventurous, surprising, unexpected and romantic story of how that promise of God ultimately comes to its fulfillment and consummation in the person, work, and ministry of our Lord Jesus Christ. There is a thin, red line of promise, of covenant promise that runs through the Bible virtually from the beginning, actually, to the very end. It's rooted, of course, in the words of Genesis 3.15, to which the New Testament itself alludes as a promise, a for promise, of the work of Christ and his conflict against the powers of darkness in the person of Satan. Sometimes said about philosophy, that all of philosophy is just a footnote to Plato and Aristotle, while all of the Bible is simply a footnote to Genesis 3.15. To that great cosmic conflict that is set up by divine decree between the powers of God and the powers of Satan between the person of Christ and the sons of the devil. It's interesting by the by to notice that the first promise that we find in Genesis 3.15 is not primarily a promise of forgiveness. It's a promise of victory and deliverance. And the whole of the Bible's story is the story of that fundamental antithesis, that fundamental conflict between the building of the kingdom of Jesus Christ and his exaltation and the building of the kingdom of darkness, sometimes referred to, of course, by the very name of Babylon, Jerusalem, the city of the great king, Babylon, the city of the powers of darkness. And all the way along interwoven, God is working his purposes out as year succeeds to year, deep in unfathomable minds of never failing skill. He's treasuring up his bright designs and he's working his sovereign will as he keeps this promise against all the odds. It seems to be destroyed. He keeps this promise. It rises up again. So the right through to the very end of the book of Revelation, the whole of redemptive history is seen as a conflict between the city of man, the city of God, Babylon and Jerusalem, the serpent and Jesus Christ himself. And you always need to be on the lookout for this. You always need to be asking the question, where are we in relationship to the fulfillment of the promise of Genesis 3.15? What's the significance of both that horrible holocaust under the hand of Herod and that hellish temptation of Jesus in the wilderness in Genesis 3.15? The powers of darkness seeking to destroy the purposes of God and the promise of God rising as it were from the chaos of the holocaust as God brings to pass the fulfillment of his want. So the scriptures have a covenantal structure. Point number two, the scriptures have a covenantal grammar. And this is so important for us to understand. That the covenant of God that has worked out in succeeding generations of his gracious purposes is a covenant that speaks according to the rules of its own grammar. And the rules of that grammar are simply these. That the imperatives that command obedience are rooted in the indicatives that describe grace. And that is true from the beginning of the Bible to the end of the Bible. It's true in Genesis 3.15, it's true in Exodus 20. The imperatives of a godly life, the imperatives of a covenantally orientated life are imperatives that are rooted in the indicative of God's gracious redemption. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt out of the house of bondage. That for, that for, you shall have no other gods before me and so on. There is a shape to the grammar that the Bible speaks. The Bible does not overturn the grammar of covenant grace. It is not that the Old Testament, you understand this. I hope everybody in the room understands that you don't read the Old Testament. When it tells you you can be saved by obeying the imperatives of God's law. Whereas in the new you are saved by receiving the indicatives of God's grace. No, the structure of the whole Bible is unified at this point. It does not speak with farmed tongue. All imperatives of God's covenant dealings with these people are rooted in the indicatives of his grace. But it's very important for us if we are to understand not just the Old Testament but the New Testament to observe how this covenant works. God makes a covenant pledge, a covenant promise, a covenant bond. And out of that self-giving of God, I will be your God. He issues the imperatives of obedience and faithfulness to his people, which, if his people take hold of them and follow them, will issue in what the Old Testament constantly calls God's blessing. But if they turn away in disobedience and unbelief, they will find themselves outside in the dark under the judgment of God's cursing. And by and large in the Old Testament, it runs right through into the New Testament. These two words, blessing and cursing, are not simply words that spin out there somewhere in the stratosphere. They are words that say to you, God's covenant is being worked out here. Do you see that God's covenant promise is being worked out here? That's why what Bob Godfrey said about the sound on the mount is so significant. The sound on the mount that begins with the beatitudes is not saying to you, you'd better be better. It's saying the kingdom of God has come, the covenant promises of God are being fulfilled. And the implication of that for those who, in faith and with empty hands, take hold of that covenant promise of grace in Jesus Christ is that all the blessings of God's covenant are showered upon them, blessed are the poor in spirit, blessed are the meek, blessed are those who mourn, blessed are those who are persecuted. That's not saying be better. That's saying experience and grace. This is what it does when it touches your life. So the scriptures of a covenantal structure, they have a covenantal framework. What is that covenantal framework? Well, I think you can put the whole of the Bible. This is not the whole of the story. Please don't misunderstand me. This is not the whole of the story. But this is a thin red line that runs through the whole of the story and makes sense of it. But not only does the Bible of a covenantal structure and speak a covenantal grammar, but it has a covenantal framework. It has its foundation in the opening chapters of the Bible that provide for us the context in which God makes his covenant with his people and establishes it then with Moses. And then the whole of the history of God's people, what we call the historical books, but interestingly, Old Testament believers and Jews tended more accurately to view as the farmer prophets, the writing prophets. These historical books interpret history through the lenses of God's covenant. That's so obviously so, isn't it, in the catalogue of the kings? What is the principle in which they are being judged? The authors are looking at them through the lenses of God's covenant. God's great promise, have they responded in faithfulness? Or have they responded in faithlessness and disobedience? There is blessing and there is cursing. So there's a covenant foundation in the Pentateuch. There's a covenant out working in the history. There's an expression of covenant worship in the Psalms. You'll never understand the Psalms until you understand that the man who wrote the Psalm is speaking out of the context of God's covenant promise. And his promise of extraordinary blessing to those who are faithful to his covenant. That's why he can dare to say, "God, why are things going wrong when I have been righteous? I've been faithful to your covenant. Where is the fulfillment of your promise?" And then in the wisdom literature, there is the outworking of the covenant lifestyle. The book of Proverbs, that's full of this kind of thing. The book of Ecclesiastes that shines a light upon what it means to begin to stray away from covenant faithfulness and disobedience and to discover that you're in the desert land, the barren land, under the judgment curse of God. And there is the covenant summons of the prophets constantly coming to the people, not merely to foretell the future, but to speak to them the word of God, calling them to covenant faithfulness. And so in a very simple way, the whole of the Bible hangs together along this great outworking of God's covenant purposes until we come to the quintessential moment when our Lord Jesus Christ lays down his life for our sins upon the cross and says, "This is the new covenant in my blood." And so our fourth principle is that there is covenantal progress, covenantal structure, covenantal grammar, covenantal framework, and covenantal progress. He grew one, one following in many diverse, fragmentary ways God made himself known, but now he has fully and finally made himself known in Jesus Christ. What's he saying? He's saying that within this covenant context, God gave flashes of light about how he would bring the salvation of his covenant to pass through the ministry of a mediator. And we have this flash of light and we see the king in Old Testament Israel, and we're not surprised that we can draw lines from his kingship and his kingdom of our Lord Jesus Christ, and then another flash on the screen, and there is the priest bringing his sacrifice. There is Aaron on the day of atonement. There is the liturgy. There are these two goats, the one that is executed, the other that is driven out into the wilderness. We begin to understand that here in this mediator, we have such a need for salvation that only sacrifice can provide that salvation, but this king and this priest, they are inadequate for us. And there is this prophet to whom, as Amos says, the Lord has revealed his secrets, and he has mediated those secrets to the people. But we are conscious that we get the secrets of God on the second hand, and now in Jesus Christ, that prophetic ministry comes to its fulfillment. And there is the Son of Man in Daniel, this mysterious figure, ascending to the throne of God, sharing his kingdom with the saints of the Most High. What can this mean? Daniel must have wondered that, scratched his head, reached for his headache pills if he had them and said, "Oh, if I could only understand this mystery." And there is Isaiah peering into the future and seeing in the blurs this figure, emerging of the servant of the Lord, who is submissive to the Lord, and yet finds himself rejected, isolated, alienated under the judgment of God. And it all makes sense when we see that the covenant of God has to come to us through a mediator, and these various figures and others who appear in the Old Testament as mediators of God's covenant in its Old Testament farms, pointing us forward to the great prophet, the great priest, the great king, the great servant of the Lord, the true Son of Man. And principle number five is that along with covenantal structure, covenantal grammar, covenantal framework, covenantal progress, there is a glorious covenantal unity. Interestingly, all, as Hebrews says, things are shadowy. In the new, we see the reality that has cast those shadows back into the days of the Old Testament. But we see that there is a unity. We see when we read our new testaments, that when Paul says, "Do you want to know what it means to be saved by faith?" He doesn't say, "You ever met my friend Timothy or Barnabas or Silas Noises? Do you not remember Abraham and David?" These men were justified by faith. They held on to the promise that we have seen fulfilled in Jesus Christ, but in holding on to that promise of grace in Jesus Christ. They too, of being justified by faith in Christ's promise just as we are justified by faith in Christ manifested. One way of salvation, one pattern of grace. And yes, also one ministry of the Spirit. There is, it seems to me in many of the characters of the Old Testament, what I call and excuse the clumsiness of the expression. A pro-leptic participation in the cross of Jesus Christ. What do I mean by that? I mean this. That you read your Old Testament and the ways in which those who have been holding on to this thin red line of covenant promise and fulfillment, you begin to see it as almost as though the electricity that has come backwards has so done something to the way in which they have held on to the promise. But in amazing and sometimes surprising ways you begin to see in their lives something that looks like the shadow of the pattern of the cross and the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. It isn't because we are to look in the Bible and find all these different kinds of quotes, types of Jesus. It's simply that anybody who belongs to Jesus Christ in a very informal sense by necessity becomes a type of Jesus. An individual upon whom Jesus leaves the indelible mark of fellowship, union with him and his death and his resurrection. So you read the life of Joseph and you're not surprised that from the life of Joseph you're able to draw lines to the glorious ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ because Joseph holds on to the covenant promise of God that's going to be fulfilled in the death and resurrection of Jesus. And backwards through history as it were in miniature form because all these hand is the promise, the story of Joseph is down, down, down, down, down, down, in death and humiliation. And then up, up, up, up, in new life conquest of temptation and provision. And so you turn to the end of the Joseph story where Joseph says you meant it to harm me because you purpose this for evil, but God meant it for good for the salvation of many. And you see, of course, this isn't just unique to Joseph. This is true of all those who belong to the company of the promise, either in the old or in the new. And when we begin to see that, we begin to see that Joseph and Genesis are Moses and Exodus or David in the Psalms. They all belong to the covenant community. And whether in old or in new, they all belong to Jesus Christ. And if they all belong to Jesus Christ, they all belong to us. The whole Bible that gives us the whole Christ for the whole people of God in every age. Such a helpful message from Sinclair Ferguson on this Friday edition of giving your mind and a message I wish I had heard when I first started reading the Bible. Another study tool I wish I had all those years ago is the Reformation study Bible. Our C. Sproul served as the general editor. And it's filled with theological notes from him. It contains over 1.1 million words of verse by verse and topical explanations, including over 20,000 study notes. And along with that, historical creeds and confessions from 2,000 years of church history. And until midnight, you can request a hardcover edition for yourself when you give a donation of any amount at renewingyourmind.org. When you call us at 800-435-4343. If you already own a copy, who will you share this offer with today so they can pick up a copy to help them rightly divide the word? Visit renewingyourmind.org or click the link in the podcast show notes while there's still time as this offer ends at midnight. Thank you for your generosity. Do you understand the world in which you live? We need to if we're to identify when worldly thinking is encroaching upon a Christian worldview. And we'll hear from R.C. Sproul all next week on various isms out there in the modern world, including secularism and humanism. It's beginning Monday, here on Renewing Your Mind. [Music] [MUSIC PLAYING]
