Saving Faith

Pastor Martin gives the simple statement of the biblical doctrine of Christ's person from the Shorter Catechism (truly God, truly man, two distinct natures united in one person forever), traces how the Athanasian Creed and Chalcedon articulated this confession in response to heresy, and then begins the biblical basis by expounding the first category of texts — those that explicitly designate Christ as God. He handles John 1:1, John 20:28, and Romans 9:5, pressing the conclusion that only one clear witness is needed to prove Christ's deity and calling hearers to fall with Thomas before their Lord and God.

Pastor Martin transitions from the mystery of Christ's person to the majesty of His offices, introducing the threefold office of Prophet, Priest, and King. He shows that these offices are biblically rooted, that their success depends on the constitution of Christ's God-man person, that they are indivisible and must never be separated, and that they answer directly to the sinner's threefold need: ignorance, guilt, and rebellion.

Pastor Martin addresses the first major error concerning propitiation — paganizing it. He distinguishes the heresy of the enemies of the gospel (who caricature propitiation as capricious appeasement of an angry deity and thus deny God's wrath altogether, holding God is nothing but love) from the error of the friends of the gospel (who pit a loving Christ against an angry Father, missing the Trinitarian unity and failing to see the Father's love as the very source of propitiation). He grounds his answers in Romans 3:21-26, 1 John 1:5, and 1 John 4:9-10.

Entering the 'period of explanation and confirmation' (the Epistles), Pastor Martin expounds Romans 14:9 as one of the clearest New Testament assertions of Christ's present kingship. He shows Paul resolving the conflict between the 'weak' and 'strong' in Rome by assuming that both have been received by God in grace and both are now under the government of Christ the King, for Christ died and rose again that He might be Lord of both the dead and the living. From this he draws four principles: Christ's rule is a present reality to Him as Savior, a practical reality in every recipient of salvation, a matter of Christian growth in its working out, and a matter of life and death in its initial embrace.

Concluding eleven weeks on justification by faith alone, Pastor Martin turns to the second front of the devil's attack: the error that justifying faith can stand alone, devoid of works. He expounds James 2:14-26 as a carefully developed argument that saving faith is never a dead or merely notional faith but a living principle that produces self-denying obedience, using Robert Johnstone's illustration of Paul and James as two armies firing from opposite flanks at a common enemy. He closes by pressing searching questions on both the antinomian and the legalist, urging hearers to embrace Paul with one arm and James with the other.