When I behold the visible and tangible realm, I intuit the existence of a Supreme Being from whom all other existence proceeds. This transcendent reality is the basis for objective moral goodness and a real reality. He is the first cause of all secondary causes, while Himself being uncaused, lest all existence itself would be nonsensical. If God had not revealed himself in the Scriptures, I would still be without excuse because I have perceived His perfections in the things that He has made.

However, God has revealed Himself most fully and salvifically in the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments. They are a united canon fully authoritative in everything that they say, and their substance is Christ. They are a most sure, infallible, and inerrant Word from God, whereby all other valid authorities are supported, or suspect authorities are determined to be invalid.

In this revelation of God, I also behold His nature beyond what is possible from general revelation in the created order. He is a most holy, simple, good, righteous, just, powerful, sovereign, omniscient, perfect, and gracious God.

I understand from God’s revelation that He is one in essence and three in person. However, divine persons are not univocal to human persons. Rather, the persons are distinguished by their eternal relations of origin. The Father generates the Son from all eternity, and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son in all eternity. Each divine person is equal to the others in every measure of Godhood and they indeed are one and the same God. Ultimately, however, I am content to say that the Trinity is a mystery while at the same time not irrational because God is most rational and the foundation of all rationality.

I believe, on account of God’s revelation in the Bible, that He created Adam as the first human being, and that Adam and Eve were both very good. I believe that they were created in covenant with God as his children and regents upon the earth. Their task was to heed His warnings and fill the earth with His glory in perfect and perpetual obedience. They were created as able to sin or to obey, and by their own free choice, they disobeyed the law of God and became liable to death.
I do not believe that God’s law is an arbitrary standard. God could not have commanded evil to be good or good to be evil, because all divine commandments are derived from the unchanging character of God Himself. Therefore, every covenantal dispensation reveals the divine character and applies itself to those people in their particular time and place in redemptive history. Likewise, natural law is simply the revelation of the proscriptive will of God that is accessible to mankind in the revelation of creation by man’s intuition.

Therefore, Adam and Eve’s first transgression was utterly unreasonable, and searching out a sufficient cause for the first sin in their uncorrupted nature is impossible. They believed the unbelievable lie of Satan and truly deserved death and damnation.

Furthermore, since Adam was in a covenantal relationship with God, he stood as our covenant head. When he fell, he fell not only in himself but also as our representative. Therefore, all creation (he being the head of it), and all his descendants (he being their representative) also fell. On account of generation, we receive his corruption, and on account of imputation, we receive his guilt. Therefore, every human is conceived with the imputation of Adam’s guilt and condemnation as well as an inclination of the heart away from God and toward moral evil.

Because I believe that all mankind is born with an inclination to moral evil, I must distinguish how God holds all mankind - who are unable to keep His Law - to account. Man’s inability is a moral and evil inability, not an impossibility. It is possible, according to our human faculties of reason, speech, and movement to obey God, but our hearts are totally depraved. Even our apprehension of the divine will in natural law is corrupted by our moral rebellion. Therefore, God does not condemn a person on account of a physical handicap, but condemnation is always based upon moral rebellion.

In this way, I distance myself from both the Pelagian, Antinomian, and Hypercalvinist understandings of determinism and the judgment of God. Because we are at heart sinners at our inception, and the creation cannot obligate the Creator, Pelagianism must fall. Because God’s law proceeds from His perfectly excellent character, and requiring less would make God lesser, Antinomianism must fall. Because all mankind is duty-bound to obey God, and are held accountable for their denial of His revelation of Himself, Hypercalvinsism must fall.

Because I hold to a wholly independent God, and utterly depraved mankind, I must necessarily also believe in the most free election of God of whosoever will be saved. The creature contributes nothing to cause their salvation except the sin that made it necessary. To me, it is most obvious that the eternal God has chosen from all eternity the precise number and persons who will be saved. He has also foreordained all necessary second causes in order to secure their redemption. Namely, the atonement of their sins, the regeneration of their hearts, and the necessary warnings and encouragements made effective by the indwelling Spirit to ensure their perseverance. God’s relationship to the reprobate is somewhat asymmetrical in that he has passed them over, thereby preparing them as vessels set aside for destruction.

Furthermore, I believe that the fall of Man was no surprise for God. But in order to display His glory and gracious character, God planned the fall. Attempting to create an order in God’s decrees, however, I believe is speculative and likely an erroneous endeavor because God does not deliberate. The divine decree is rather a singular and simple act whereby God decreed everything including the fall. This eternal plan has been called many names. The divine economy, the covenant of redemption, or the divine decree are all to my judgment emphasizing human apprehensions of God’s ad extra eternal action. I, however, am content to simply say that God has an eternal plan.

I believe that God’s eternal plan has been progressively revealed to us through an administration of several covenants. Firstly, when the covenant with creation was broken, God promised through the seed of the woman to bring a rescuer. Then, in the promise of the seed of Abraham, this rescuer would bring a new creation, a new people, and eschatological blessing. Subsequently, the mosaic covenant fulfilled these expectations in a typological fashion. The land of Israel, the genealogical line of circumcision, and the covenantal blessing enjoyed by Israel typified the ultimate redemption to come. However, as Israel failed to remain in good standing with God, the Davidic covenant becomes the central hope and expectation of the Old Testament canon. The Abrahamic and Mosaic covenants’ promises and obligations find their ultimate fulfillment in a Davidic King. I believe this expectation is the central theme of the Psalter and post-exilic Israelite literature - chiefly 1st and 2nd Chronicles which ended the Jewish ordering of the Old Testament. Therefore, the story of the Old Testament and its covenantal structure is like an incomplete jigsaw puzzle of various types and shadows that demand a very precise fulfillment that was humanly inconceivable.

But Scripture attests to that perfect fulfillment in the first advent of our Lord Jesus, from whom the New Testament and New Covenant proceed. In His first coming, he was the perfect covenant partner with God who satisfied God’s standard of perfect and perpetual obedience. He then died on our behalf and as our wickedness was imputed to Him, His perfection was imputed to us. Thereby, we are in Him and He is in us covenantally through the instrument of faith. After his resurrection, He ascended into heaven and sits at God’s right hand. He intercedes for the saints, and the surety of his second coming is ratified by the fact that the angels have said at his ascension, “Why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”

I believe that seminal questions about how to put the Bible together ultimately boil down to errors in the discipline of typology. Jesus is the antitype, and when the antitype is revealed, the type is obsolete. He is the circumcised son of Abraham, Israel, and David; therefore, the inclusion of children in the covenant is obsolete. He is the Sabbath rest; therefore, the commemoration of a Sabbath day is obsolete. He is the bringer of a New Creation; therefore, the expectation of renewing Israelite borders is obsolete. This does not “spiritualize” fulfillments of divine prophecy, rather I seek to follow the biblical pattern of regarding Christ as the antitypical fulfillment of all of these institutions. Therefore, I see fulfillment as a multifaceted category. We can speak of pre-Christ typological fulfillments, inaugurated fulfillments, and consummated fulfillments.

In light of this good news of the fulfillment of the divine promises in the life, death, burial, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ, I believe that all mankind is commanded to repent and believe the gospel. Initial repentance and faith are inseparable graces and neither should be construed as a work. Rather, they are the gift of God and faith is the instrument whereby God applies the work of redemption to His elect. Therefore, I conclude that faith does not save, Jesus does, while at the same time, anyone who will be saved must have faith. The same can be said of repentance which is a presupposition of faith in that one gives up one's way and trusts in the Savior who has made a way. True faith is firstly a knowledge of facts about Jesus, but it must be more than that. The believer also accepts these facts to be true. Finally, they personally trust in Jesus to save them to the uttermost. Anyone who possesses this faith will certainly be saved.

Although the providence of God may restrain the evil of men in various ways, the final enemy of faith, namely unbelief, is only conquerable by the Spirit of God. Man, left to himself, is unable to believe, and I believe that an effectual and irresistible work of regeneration is necessary in the sinner in order for them to exercise true faith. This is also called the new birth or the circumcision of the heart. Across all covenantal relationships in Scripture, this reality is the same: Regeneration precedes faith.

Therefore, I deny the system known as Arminianism which believes that God grants a prevenient grace to all mankind who may choose to work together with that grace or oppose it. Arminians are in error in their supposition that faith precedes regeneration, and their system suggests an inherent legalism where some men are better disposed toward God and the ultimate distinction between men lies not in the electing love of God but rather in the free action of man. Scripture does not know this kind of boastful self-salvation.

To summarize the work of God in the salvation of sinners, I believe in two different kinds of working God. Firstly, God imputes forensic righteousness to us by way of justification. At the same time, but logically consequentially God initiates a process of progressive sanctification. The matter of our justification includes none of our sanctification. Rather, that necessary righteousness is imputed to us wholly from the perfect righteousness of Christ. It is not from us but reckoned to us. Anyone who experiences this forensic justification will necessarily also experience the sanctifying work of God by the Holy Spirit. Especially due to the blessing of the New Covenant, all believers have the law of God written upon their hearts, and all believers experience a zeal to perform it. In this way, we who were formerly enemies of God are now called sons of God - declared righteous so that we might become righteous.

One day, our forensic justification will culminate in a final judgment. There, our works will merely testify to the fact of our receipt of Christ’s alien righteousness. The only works that form the basis of God’s final judgment are Christ’s. The second coming of Christ will also complete our progressive sanctification when we are glorified and our very natures are purified of all sin and any inclination thereunto.

Therefore, I judge so-called New Perspective approaches to justification and faith as re-Romanizations of the Protestant faith. In the most extreme forms, this is an abominable heresy, and it minimally confuses a most essential doctrine of the Christian faith.

I believe that God’s purpose in redemption is an unbreakable chain. Beginning with God’s free choice in election, the people of God will certainly and without fail hear the gospel, repent and believe, be justified, adopted, indwelt by the Spirit, persevere, be glorified, and enter into God’s eternal rest. They will by no means fall away.

To achieve this perseverance, God has also ordered His providence through warnings, encouragements, exhortations, corrections, and instructions of His Word through His people - the Church.

So that God’s glorious salvation in Christ by the New Covenant might be manifest in the world, I believe that God has established an ordered institution for that end. Namely, the church. The Church is the bride of Christ, and as such is ultimately an eschatological reality, but it is present in our time in an inaugurated sense through local churches. Local churches must be structured according to the New Covenant. Therefore, I believe that a church is comprised only of believers. Although some may fall away from the formal auspices of church membership, I believe that the true membership of the church is spiritual and those who depart from were never of us or they would have remained with us.

I believe that the glory of God and obedience to His Word is at stake in how we practice membership and discipline. The standard of membership is not that we no longer sin, but the standard is that no one would remain in heinous and unrepentant sin. In such cases, the evil person must be purged from the membership, the one formerly known as a brother must be called merely a friend, and they must be banned from participation in the Lord’s Table until they repent. The motive for church discipline is both a zeal for the purity of God’s church as well as a desperate desire for the sinner to repent. Such repentance is always cause for rejoicing.

I believe, furthermore, that the keys of the Kingdom are chiefly visualized through the local church’s practice of the ordinances or sacraments. By sacrament, I affirm the idea that they are sacramentum or oath signs. By ordinance, I mean that they are commanded by the Lord Jesus until His return in glory.

Baptism is the initiatory oath sign of the New Covenant whereby the credibly confessing believer's spiritual reality of Union with Christ and His eschatological Bride is visualized in his being added to the local church through baptism. I believe that the proper subject of Christian baptism is only a credibly professing believer in the Lord Jesus Christ.

The Lord’s Supper is consequently the ongoing sign of the New Covenant. I believe that participation in this covenantal meal is restricted to those who have been baptized and are currently in regular communion with a local gospel-preaching church. Failure to guard the practice of the Table in this regard is a grievous sin.

I am convinced that the Lord Jesus intends his church to be ruled by the full number of her members but also led by its duly installed elders. I believe that elders are a gift of God to the church and that their authority proceeds from their teaching. Elders bind consciences according to the Word of God, primarily through the joint interpretation of the church as summarized in her confession and covenant. I, therefore, believe it most prudent that this should be summarized in writing. Elders also have a ministerial authority to counsel and teach. The teaching of elders should be the primary teaching of the Word of God in the life of the believer. Even private interpretation should not be carried out without the safety of the community through friendships in the church and oversight of the elders.

Therefore, I distinguish myself from the magisterial role of bishops as conceived by some forms of Episcopalianism and Papism, as well as what some have called elder-rule churches where the congregation is relegated to the role of a regular audience. At the same time, raw democracy in every regard neglects the teaching authority of elders. Neglecting these matters can facilitate a disconnected congregation, unorthodox private interpretation, congregational mutiny, unteachability, or members voting by leaving.

I believe that death is a certain reality for all mortals before the return of our Lord. For believers, however, I believe it is also clear that they will go to be with the Lord Jesus spiritually until the redemption of their bodies at the end of the age.

I believe that the Kingdom of God has been truly inaugurated in the Lord’s first coming. His life, death, burial, and resurrection has begun a new age. The prophets spoke of all of time as a period of two ages: the former time and the time to come. We live in the overlap of the ages where Christ has bound the strong man’s power of the nations such that the gospel may advance into them. I believe that Satan will eventually be fully loosed again to deceive the nations.
I also believe that the task of the church is not to build the Kingdom but rather to receive it. State building is the task of civil government which Christians may be involved in, but it is not the task of the church to christianize the city of man.
I also believe in the good news that the Lord Jesus will come again to consummate the Kingdom, carry out the final judgment, raising the redeemed to eternal life, and condemning the unrepentant to everlasting torment. God will vindicate His name on the last day, and every tongue will confess with tears of joy or tears of fear that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God. It is our solemn joy to pray for the hastening of this day, and await the return of our Lord with eager expectation.