Scott Clark of Westminster Seminary California recently tweeted a link to an older piece of his which contains the following section:

“Through the history of the church there have been two great errors on this question. One is to identify the common realm with the kingdom of God. This was the great error of Constantinianism, in which the civil magistrate was made more than a minister of God (Rom 13:4) authorized to use the sword for the preservation of this-worldly civil peace but in which he was considered to be God’s minister for the advancement of the gospel. There is no evidence in New Testament for such a notion. The advance of the gospel is considered to be a purely spiritual and ecclesiastical matter.” Heidelblog, August 2, 2016

Some observations on 2 highlighted quotes:

1. “…in which he was considered to be God’s minister for the advancement of the gospel. There is no evidence in New Testament for such a notion.”

First of all, note the recurring latent Marcionite hermeneutic used by the R2k sect, which invariably appeals to the New Testament without bringing the Old Testament into view. The O.T. is replete with examples of the magistrate charged with working to advance the Kingdom.

Second, note Clark makes his New Testament appeal with an “argument from silence”, which is fallacious reasoning. By this hermeneutic, one could argue for legalizing bestiality since the New Testament is silent on it. Recall that one R2k WSCAL grad already has made a similar argument.

Rather, Reformed Christians see all of Scripture as useful for instruction and correction, even in the arena of civics/public ethics. The God of the Old Testament is the God of the New Testament.

2. “The advance of the gospel is considered to be a purely spiritual and ecclesiastical matter.”
This recurrent feature of the R2k sectarians is to ignore Belgic Confession Article 36 which states that the magistrate is charged with “removing every obstacle to the preaching of the gospel and to every divine aspect of worship” and does so “in order that the Word of God may have free course, the kingdom of Christ may make progress, and every anti-Christian power may be resisted.” It should be clear that the magistrate, in its designated sphere, has a coordinate protective role around the church, so that through the preaching of the gospel the Kingdom of Christ may advance. The means employed by the church and the magistrate are different, but the God-honoring goal is the same. This should not be hard to see.

The R2k folks have a choice: either write an overture to amend/delete Belgic 36 or submit themselves to the Reformed confession they subscribed to uphold. If they choose neither of these options and continue on their present deconstruction project to segregate Christian principles from the civil realm, then the churches have a choice to make.

———–

McAtee’s Addendum

There is a third option that Van Der Molen failed to mention. The R2K boys could try and pass what is called a “gravamen.” This would be the attempt to write in a permanent exception to the Belgic Confession of Faith — Article 36.

“Many people who become very rich, full of themselves, and powerful are, or rapidly become, morally defective, and remote from anything like empathy or fellow feelings for ‘humanity.’ They simply do not consider the suffering their grandiose plans will inflict on others. This, of course, is characteristic of global predators and, to some extent, all predators — failure to feel concerned for their prey. It is probably impossible to exploit people without crushing your capacity for empathy and caring.”

Breggin & Breggin
C-19 & The Global Predators; We Are the Prey — p. 360

This quote reinforces what I have long said about the Globalists who I call “Lizard people.” They are not like normal people living in the context of Christian categories of thought and behavior.

I have noticed the truth of this quote throughout the years in the ministry with individuals but this is especially true in our whole social order since we are a culture that enshrines manipulation and exploitation. From dodgy salesman of all stripes to ministers who build their “ministry” in order to advance their personal well-being to politicians who only exist by selling themselves like soap thus manipulating and exploiting people into purchasing a product (their election to the office) that is not really in the electors best interests American culture is one grand adventure in manipulating and exploiting. It is ubiquitous. The more someone goes down the manipulation and/or exploitation of others path the more they become non-human as seen in their general lack of compassion, sympathy, empathy, and potential to experience shame or guilt. Living the manipulative and/or the exploitive life is a sure way to harden your soul against any divine commands.

The Lizard People who are the cultural gatekeepers don’t care about people. They care about pleasing and advancing themselves and they will use all means to do just that. They will flood the homogeneous nation with the alien and the stranger just so they can advance and enrich themselves and then will cynically argue the necessity of compassion quite dismissing the question of how much compassion is involved in disinheriting one’s children and grandchildren. The Lizard people are themselves cosmopolitans and have no attachment to a people or place and so the third-worldizing of the West is thought of only in terms of how much it will increase their bottom line of profit.

The Lizard people who are the cultural gatekeepers don’t care about people. If they cared about people they wouldn’t be pushing the normalization of perversity. They wouldn’t be preying upon our children by the policies that Lizard people support. They wouldn’t support Drag Queen Story Hour. They wouldn’t support Critical Race Theory in public schools. They wouldn’t support school libraries stocked with books supporting and advancing sexual perversity.

Sad to say as a minister of the Gospel this Lizard People phenomenon is true in spades in the modern “Conservative Reformed Churches” in America and the West. Odds are your pastor is a Lizard person of one degree or another. They don’t really care about the flock — they are the hirelings Jesus warned about. If they cared about the flock they wouldn’t be repackaging cultural Marxism and then telling you that that repackaged cultural Marxism is really Christianity. They wouldn’t be announcing in Church this grand program to help relocate refugees and illegal immigrants from around the world thus also announcing (though this is never said) that they are aiding in the process of disinheriting and replacing the children of their WASP congregants. They wouldn’t be telling you from Reformed pulpits all across the land that “the Church is silent on moral issues in the broader culture because it would compromise the Church’s mission if it held up God’s moral standard as the canon that measures all behavior.” Their primary passion would not be to climb the Deep Church “Evangelical” ladder of success if their primary passion was tending the flock of Jesus Christ.

As the quote notes above our clergy as well as the other cultural gatekeepers, exceptions notwithstanding, are morally defective, and if they are doing all this and are not morally defective then they are stupid and on that basis also people have no business listening to a ruddy thing they say.

“For when any institution of human character or composition trespasses or exceeds the limits of God-given authority, then we are not under obligation to obey. (The violation of a law humanly imposed, and not the legitimate exercise of God-given authority, does not involve sin.) Nothing is sin except that which involves the violation of a divine obligation. There is only one Lawgiver. If the ordinances of men require us to violate the law of God, then we must obey God rather than men and must violate the human ordinance. If human ordinances do not require us to sin but are in excess of divinely authorized prerogative, then compliance is to be determined by expediency in relation to all the circumstances of the situation.”

Dr. John Murray
“The Nature of Sin”
Collected Writings of John Murray. Vol. #2.
The Banner of Truth Trust, 1977, p. 79

“The State does not have the authority to regulate your gender.”

Created by the Libertarian Party of Washington

1.) It’s true that the State does not have the authority to do what only God has the ability to do. It’s also true that the individual does not have the authority to regulate their gender since it is not possible to regulate gender. Any idea of anybody or any institution having the ability or authority to regulate gender is just an absurdity.

2.) However the State while not having the authority to regulate gender (since it is not possible to do so) the State does that the authority and responsibility to recognize gender. For example, for decades the State properly-recognized gender by not allowing women to be drafted into the military. The State also once properly-recognized gender by issuing passports that labeled the recipient as “male” or “female.”

3.) This proves again that Libertarianism is not an answer to Marxism. Libertarianism is merely Marxism as applied to the sovereign individual. Libertarianism does for the individual what Marx did for the State. Some of Karl Marx’s most vile words were directed at Max Sterner who convincingly demonstrated that Marx’s principles should apply to the individual as sovereign as opposed to the State as sovereign.

4.) While the State does not have the authority to regulate gender (because it is not possible to regulate on that which is not regulatable) the State does have the authority and responsibility to regulate those who are seeking to regulate against those who are seeking themselves to individually regulate that which is not regulatable. In other words, the State has the authority and responsibility to keep insane people, no matter how high functioning they are in their insanity, off the streets. No social-order can possibly function for very long when insane people in significant numbers are allowed to dictate their own reality and then gaslight their fellow citizens into respecting their gaslighting.

“So teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom”

Psalm 90:12

I am old enough to remember my Great-Grandpa Plumbeck’s funeral. He died in 1971 when I was 12 and at least as I recall his funeral was the first funeral I ever attended and so my first introduction to death as up close and personal. His daughter — my Grandmother Laura Jacobs — died 23 years later in 1994. A generation having turned since her father’s death I was now of the age to be officiating funerals having been called to the ministry and I officiated her funeral and that of her husband’s (my grandfather) who died eight days after her.

Now another generation has slipped away since 1994 and now Walter Plumbeck’s grandchildren and Laura Jacobs’ children — one in the same — are shedding this mortal coil and are being summoned into eternity by the only God who is — the Christian God. In 2021, 27 years after we buried their Mother and 50 years after we buried their grandfather Plumbeck we buried two of Laura’s children (Uncles Ralph & Jim).

None of them — not Walter Plumbeck, not Laura Jacobs, not Ralph Jacobs, nor his brother Jim lived anything but full lives. Walter was 85, Laura 75, Ralph was 80 and his brother Jim was 76 when they each respectively received their summons from God. They all exceeded the promised “three score and ten” of which God’s word speaks.

Of course, this means, by necessity, that Walter Plumbeck’s great-grandchildren and Laura Jacob’s grandchildren (one and the same) will be the next generation to follow Walter, Laura, Ralph, and Jim in the way all men must go. That would be the generation of my siblings, cousins and myself. Our great-Grandparents have gone. Our grandparents have gone. Our Parents and Uncles and Aunts are now slipping into eternity and with the turning of another generation (20-25 years) we too will follow. It will come and go in the blink of an eye. Then, the worst of all to contemplate will come — it will come after we are gone — our own children will experience the ultimate consequence of sin and will die. Our children will meet what the Scripture calls “the last enemy,” and will traverse the shadow of the valley of death.

So, goes the march of God’s providence. One generation rises up while the previous passes from the scene and yet it all happens so suddenly and so quickly despite the fact of our knowing that it is coming and is inescapable. For example, as to the suddenness and quickness of it all, my Uncle Jim who we buried Saturday (27 November 2021)just two or three weeks prior to his death and only shortly prior to getting ill himself he attended the funeral of someone who died from the Deep State Virus. There he was, comparatively healthy, attending a funeral with no way of realizing that in a very short time his kith and kin would be attending his funeral.

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. (James 4:14)

It seems — this whole death thing — at one and the same time, so odd and yet so natural. At the end of it all, when this life ends it will matter most if you will continue to live after death.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in Me will live, even though he dies.  26 And everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die. (John 11:25-26)

Given that reality — given the absolute certainty of your looming death — why be so unconcerned with the claims and death work of the Lord Jesus Christ upon the Cross? Why be so listless in thinking through what comes next after this life? This is not necessarily a plea to attend Church. I wish it was. More often than not you will not find the claims and the work of the Lord Jesus Christ set forth for you in the modern Church in the West. This means you will have to turn to the Scriptures with the aid and assistance of great men who have gone before and left their testimony in their catechisms and confessions and in their writings. They being though dead still speak and they will tell you why it is that the Lord Jesus Christ is the way the truth and the life and that no man can come to the Father except through Jesus Christ. They will tell you why it is that we can only have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. They will tell you why that there is a way that seemeth right unto man but apart from Christ the ends thereof lead to eternal death after temporal death.

Only upon knowing the Lord Jesus Christ and His Cross work does death have the potential to be not only a unwelcome and hated enemy but also, paradoxically enough, a potential frienemy.

Prayer

Lord Christ thank you for being merciful to me a sinner. By thy grace awaken people to think about the end before the end is upon them. Grant them grace to be conversant with their sin and grant them grace crowned to be conversant with the only answer to their own sin that stands between your just wrath that appoints men to eternal death — grant them grace to know the Jesus Christ of the Bible.

Be pleased to open men’s eyes to the Good News of Christ for sinners that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ as that Good News is properly understood in a Biblical and Reformed context. This is a boon that we beg of thee.