From the Editor — October 2025

According to the well-known adage, the Reformed church is always reforming. Such has been our experience too. We remember this month the great Reformation of the sixteenth century. Through his chosen means, particularly Martin Luther, the Lord delivered his church from a long and terrible Babylonian captivity. When one reads the medieval theologians of the Roman Catholic Church, it is hard to imagine where the church even was in the Middle Ages. Of course, there was a Wycliffe and a Hus and a Gottschalk who came to light from time to time, and the truth must have been heard in a valley here and in a village there. But the Roman Catholic Church was both institutionally and doctrinally corrupt for the entirety of the Middle Ages. Her popes were antichrists, and her priests were false prophets. Her worship was the cursed idolatry of the mass, and her doctrine was straight out of hell. Yet God preserved his church, and at long last according to his sovereign counsel, he delivered his church from the bondage of the pope, priesthood, and profane doctrine of Rome.

For this work of God, we give our most hearty thanksgiving to him, for we are the children of the Reformation.

And yet we also remember that reformation for the church is ever advancing. Reformation is not a mere event but an ongoing reality as we come under the preaching of the truth. We are being transformed according to the image of Jesus Christ.

We ourselves have been the objects of the grace and mercy of the Lord Jesus Christ in the work of reforming the church. The Protestant Reformed Churches were at one time the Lord’s churches, and those churches preached the truth. But for a long time—I have argued on the pages of this magazine that it was decades—the Protestant Reformed Churches have been ashamed of the gospel, and her ministers have not been preaching the gospel in truth. There was a famine of the word, and we were dying from lack of spiritual food. And the Lord saw our misery and heard our crying and led us out. That was not our intention. We had a mind to stay. But we were cast out with great vigor and with rejoicing on the part of those who cast us out. And what for them was an act of malice toward the gospel and toward the Christ of the gospel became for us the occasion of our reformation and liberty. And this we celebrate every day but especially as we remember a similar work of Christ from long ago. We give him thanksgiving for his wonderful grace to us and to our children to deliver us from the bondage of the profane doctrine of the Protestant Reformed Churches that there is that which man must do to be saved, that man’s good works are part of the way to the Father and his fellowship, that good works are not to be slighted in assuring souls of justification, and that man is in a certain sense first in his repentance before God can or will forgive him. The Lord in his reformation restored to us the pure preaching that God is the God who justifies the ungodly by faith alone and that those ungodly whom God justifies have peace with God through their Lord Jesus Christ. Only that doctrine gives assurance, hope, and joy and frees our consciences from terror in coming to God.

In our magazine this month, there is the usual meditation and editorial. The editorial remembers the sixteenth-century Reformation by remembering that the Reformation began in the Lord’s transformation of a man’s heart. God justified Martin Luther and used him for God’s glorious purpose to bring about the Protestant Reformation. The meditation is a reflection on Romans 1:16–17, the text of scripture that the Lord used to justify Martin Luther. These verses are something of a theme text of the whole Reformation.

In this issue Reverend Bomers continues his treatment of the Old Testament sacrifices and concludes his explanation of the meat offering by explaining the meaning of salt that was added to the offering. In this article he does some ground-breaking work to show that the gospel was in that salt, and as it was for Old Testament Israel that they could not worship and were not pleasing to the Lord apart from that salt, so today the church of the new dispensation cannot worship apart from the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. From our brother in the Philippines, Reverend Pascual continues his response to an attack from the disgraceful John Flores regarding the legitimacy of First Orthodox Reformed Protestant Church as an instituted church. And Mr. Michael Vermeer reflects on the Protestant Reformed synod of 2025. The Protestant Reformed Churches are running rapidly down the road of apostasy.

We pray that the Lord will bless the content of the magazine for the advancement of the cause of the truth, the hardening of unbelief, and the edification of his people.